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Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Malilong: Relevant questions
By Frank Malilong, Jr.
The Other Side
Are you not being a trifle naďve, Screwtape asked in his letter to his nephew Wormwood in “The Screwtape Letters.” You would have been able to keep someone to your side through argument, he said, if he had lived a few centuries earlier when humans “still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it.”
I wonder if Vice Gov. John Gregory Osmena or whoever it was who crafted the privilege speech that he delivered before the Cebu Provincial Board the other day drew inspiration from C.S. Lewis. But after reading through the newspaper accounts of John-john’s explanation of his role in the Perdido Lex caper, I was tempted to go back to Chapter 1 of the satiric classic where the fictional assistant to “Our Father Below” mused about the days when humans “still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.”
We have largely altered that, Screwtape said. Humans no longer think of doctrines as primarily true or false but as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, conventional or ruthless. “Jargon, not argument, is your best ally,” Screwtape advised the novice demon.
John-john admits that he “could have been more diligent” in dealing with Perdido Lex but denies any wrongdoing. He instead accuses an unnamed woman, whom he said he once held in high regard but whom he now describes as cold and calculating, of framing him up to sabotage his gubernatorial ambitions. I approved Perdido’s proposal, allocated my discretionary funds to it and instructed my employees to help it withdraw the money but I did not steal the money, said John-john. Perdido did or so it appears.
“The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle on to the Enemy’s own ground,” Screwtape told his nephew. “Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favor, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.”
Nobody ever said John-john stole the money (P4.5 million) or, for that matter, any money. All that has been stated, as far as I can recall, is that Perdido Lex received government fund, most of it coming from allocations for the vice governor’s office, with the help of some of the vice-governor’s men.
If Perdido Lex had not disappeared with the money, there wouldn’t have been any question on the propriety of the participation of John-john’s men. But it did and the vice governor now says he has been framed into allowing his people to lend a helping hard.
True or false? It does not matter. The weekly press and other such weapons, wrote Screwtape, have accustomed modern man “to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.” Is John-john’s story credible or outrageous? Ruinous or helpful to a candidacy? These are the relevant questions.
****
Who cares about the campaign period officially starting yesterday? Certainly not the candidates who have been campaigning since the day after the last elections. This thing called the official campaign period is one of the silliest I have ever seen.
Basically, it says that a candidate cannot campaign except within 90 days before election day.
Since you do not become a candidate until you file your candidacy and since you do not file your certificate of candidacy until a few months before the elections, you can do just anything you want to promote yourself for much of the three years between elections. Can anything be sillier?
If there are electoral reforms that we should immediately push, they are, not necessarily in their order of importance, the abolition of the campaign period, the repeal of the provision on nuisance candidates and the deletion of the anti-dynasty provision in the constitution. These provisions are uselessp; their supposed benefits hallucinatory.
Why don’t we just work on the more practical assumptions that: 1) every politician wants to be the early bird who catches the worm; b) all candidates are nuisance; and c) we are doomed to a life of political dynasties? Let’s get real, ladies and gentlemen.
(February 11, 2004 issue)
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