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Thursday, April 03, 2003
Famador: Ignorance can’t be bliss
By Joel Famador
Ping Lacson had a point when he asked, “After voting 13-0 ten months ago, how can the Supreme Court now reverse itself?”
It is hard to believe that a unanimous court would reverse itself when all the factual and legal issues remained the same. It would have been understandable if the court was split almost evenly, but it wasn’t. So now everybody speculates. What caused the “about-face”? Politics?
But I am sure Ping Lacson is tickled pink of this supreme about-face by the high court. Since he is running for president in 2004, Ping Lacson would gain some votes from naïve voters who would usually go for the martyred underdog.”
Remember Erap? He gained so many sympathy votes from the guileless masses for “showing off” his being uneducated (kuno), like his carabao” English and his being a dropout. The uninformed are usually suckers for this kind of story.
That is why it would be pointless to have a democratic system in a place where most of the people are uneducated, uninformed, poor and cannot afford to buy/read newspapers, poor and cannot afford to have television sets and watch relevant programs, and the like.
How can they participate intelligently in the “democratic processes” if they are ignorant or incapable of understanding the relevant issues? That’s why the uninformed voter often goes for the personality instead of the issues espoused by the candidate. See the showbiz stars in the Senate?
Even in the United States, people have a hard time grasping the real issues of the times given their higher IQ and educational background. You will be surprised to know that most Americans believe that the war in Iraq is about liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein when it is obviously the contrary.
It is about subjugation of another state for one strategic commodity. It is about unleashing the weapon of mass distraction – create war to distract the citizens from their economic woes. It is about politics in 2004, when Dubya is going to run for reelection. It is about helping big business make more money by making war – what with the juicy defense contracts, or the huge contracts to rehab Iraq, or the contracts to exploit the vast oilfields of Iraq, and the list goes on.
So to the few people who can afford to buy newspapers or to the few who can afford to have television sets, I offer a toast: Here’s to a boring year of watching the invasion and subjugation of Saddam’s Iraq in super-slow motion by incompetent, imperialist war freaks.
FLASH NEWS! “Wala ng giyera! Nakakuha si Saddam ng temporary restraining order (TRO) sa isang bagong judge sa Las Cuevas! (From the text brigade.)
(April 3, 2003 issue)
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