A movie that I watched when I was in college had the lead character (Dax Xenos?) declaring cynically that a revolution succeeds only in making new tyrants out of old slaves.
Watching the ongoing show in the Senate — the carnival that bears the worn-out title “Investigation in Aid of Legislation” — induces a similarly misanthropic view about our elections: they only make robbers out of former thievery victims.
If their side wins. Just as it is in a revolution, doom awaits the loser: perpetual slavery, if not death, in a revolution; condemnation to continued victimhood — the suffering of being made to watch the plunder, done with wild abandon, of enormous sums of people’s money that you helped raise with your taxes.
You can’t tell me it’s a new phenomenon. It’s an old theme dating back to the era of kings and queens and of plebeians and courtesans. It’s a curse or a blessing, depending on which end of the stick is in your hand, that humanity hasn’t been able to get rid of. It probably never will.
Yet we still grind our teeth reading reports about the fleet of luxury cars, expensive bags and jewelry and frequent first class travels abroad by the lucky ones as if it were our first brush with instances of unabashed luxury. No, dears, this has been going on forever; only the characters have changed.
Make that the winners. Sometimes, I wonder if all this public anguish is nothing but ill-disguised fury over having lost. Is it righteous indignation? Or envy?
They bet on the winning horse. (I am tempted to use a specific part of the beast, the one in the rear underneath its tail, but I so love my GMRC — that’s good manners and right conduct — hello teacher, I do not want her rolling in her grave.)
More than just betting, they invested. P30 million for a candidate’s campaign funds is not a donation but an investment. You just do not pick your horse, you also try to increase its odds of winning.
And when it does, world, here I come. To the victor belongs the spoils. The serpent must have said that for the first time watching Adam and Eve trying to cover their nakedness in the Garden of Eden.
Surely, that must have been long time ago.