Wednesday, July 02, 2008 Sula: Pity the pure in heart By Jun Sula Commentary
EXACTLY a year after in office, Governor Ed Panlilio has begrudgingly acknowledged that politics, like hell -- to borrow someone else's apocalyptic view -- is other people.
In Panlilio's case, "hell" could well be the Provincial Board, a fire-breathing dragon in the hallway of the Capitol that has spewed nothing but myriad difficulties on his path since day one in office as the first priest-governor of Pampanga.
It's the Board, he said in no uncertain terms, that's to blame for the hardships and belt-tightening and the stalling of programs and projects that his administration has gone through.
His good intentions and good values have not failed him, he might as well have said, but his colleagues in the Provincial Government have.
Panlilio's egregious lamentations are the familiar grumblings of a purist, one who is determined to remain bullheaded against the rigors and dynamics of give-and-take realities in politics, to which he has been contemptuously unyielding.
The priest-governor, his arms akimbo and a variegated face defiantly staring at an imaginary protagonist, aptly projects an arrogant, stoic persona.
"Purity is an idea for fakir or a monk," the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre echoed in his play "Dirty Hands."
Paraphrasing him, priesthood is an anomaly, if not an anathema, in politics.
The dialogue between Sartre's two protagonists, Hoederer, the politician and Hugo, the ideologue, is insightful of the dilemma that Panlilio finds himself uncomfortably and damningly in.
Hoederer: "You are afraid to dirty your hands. Well, stay pure...You don't love men. You only love principles... If you don't love men, you can't fight for them."
Hugo: "Why should I love them... As for men, what interests me is not what they are but what they may become."
Hoederer: "And I love them as they are... For me, one man more or less counts in the world."
Uncannily, a well-known businessman echoed the same sentiment about Panlilio's apparent frame of mind.
This businessman's comment: The governor is selfish... He unnecessarily antagonizes Malacañang and other politicians at the expense of the people of Pampanga. He gets the limelight, boosts his image and becomes a bigger-than-life icon. In return, the province loses the opportunity of a lifetime to get more projects and other funds that could very well benefit his people.
Panlilio may or may not concede this point but only because, in his own words, there are core values, integrity, transparency and accountability to reckon with. Juxtaposing his admitted shortcomings, if not failures, in the last 365 days in office with this narrowly exclusive paradigm of values in governance, there's a sense that in Max Weber's book, Panlilio may have the passion but not the perspective.
That perspective is understanding what politics is really like as opposed to what priesthood, the next closest to a purist, is not. For politics is a human endeavor unlike many others.
"If you want to make the world more tolerable," Todd Gitlin wrote in his book "Letters to a Young Activist," you really have no choice but to discipline yourself to collaborate with imperfect allies, not angels."
For Panlilio, those imperfect allies, whose numbers and colors seem to grow day by day, start with the members of the Provincial Board and the mayors, most of whom have been less generous, to put it mildly, in rating his performance. No doubt, the conservative lowball is mutual, if not mutually destructive.
Panlilio may rant and rave about the kind of cooperation he's been getting from these two nemesis until he's blue in the face, it's not within his powers to transform them into angels that he also is not in the first place.
To be sure, his anniversary message wasn't couched in angelic texts, more in the language of a born-again-surprise-politician that he doesn't want or dream to be. But the purist in him always seems to get the better of him, rightly or wrongly.
If he stays consistent, there's really not much to expect from the governor as a politician. Nor can he expect more from the board members and mayors who, by now, have clearly already made up their minds about the possibility or impossibility of working with him along a common agenda.
The new caveat is that the province's community has ungainly weighed in on the issue of Panlilio's performance, or lack of it.
Perhaps Weber can be of help. "Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he shall not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or too base for what he wants to offer."
The call of Candaba Mayor Jerry Pelayo and Vice Governor Yeng Guiao may not be a bad idea to seriously consider.
