The Body Politic

The Philippine political scene is a mess. 
Crazy, dirty, skanky, embarrassing, corrupt politicians lord it over a people who couldn’t care less, except those very few who have access to the internet—those very few who show their concern by assiduously posting their inane and idiotic observations about their inane and idiotic politicians on any website that has a comments section.
 And the politicians are actors/famous athletes/famous for whatever reasons--and their spouses and relatives and their spawns, legitimate or not. 
…and let’s not forget the political clans. No self-respecting village, town, city, province or entire island/region is without a clan to rule over them—the Philippines’ own version of royalty, plus their rival clans.
Yes, they have rival clans. They make every elections very exciting, especially in the provinces. 
(Note: image is from here)

The current President—who incidentally is from such a clan—is a former senator who got elected to the top position despite a career in Congress (both Houses!) that is as impressive as the dunking prowess of John Stockton.  
Pictured: John Stockton not dunking

He is busy going after his immediate predecessor, whom he blames for the current hellhole the country is in. His predecessor had also blamed her predecessor, and her predecessor, in turn, blamed his…well, you probably know where this is going.
Politicians in the Philippines have mastered the art of the blame game. 
Here, the buck never stops.

To be fair, politics in most countries is the same. (Oddly comforting in a "hey-its-not-just-us kind of way) Just look at US politics.

Donald Trump is accusing Jon Stewart of being racist, which is pretty ironic.

Meanwhile, Ann Coulter, whose political clout is as puzzling and unfathomable to me as Kim Kardashian’s fame, is saying that “Our blacks are so much better than their blacks.” (she was comparing blacks from the Republican Party with blacks from the Democratic Party)

This strikes me as incredibly condescending, and very, very wrong.  
A WTF?! moment, to be sure.
Add to that Michelle Bachmann, who famously defended carbon dioxide (''Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.'').
 And Sarah Palin’s Department of Law ("I think on a national level your Department of Law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out.")
That just goes to show you, politics attracts the wrong kind of people.
Or maybe the right one.


Comments

Post a Comment

So, what do you think? Post it here:

Popular posts from this blog

The Square Cube Law and How It Killed Giants

Image
We are so used to the idea of giants that we take it for granted that they exist, or must have existed at one point in our history.  You know, those very large and very tall human-like creatures, carrying a humongous club, and being very nasty. Like this: And if you are a typical, god-fearing Catholic Pinoy, you would swear that not only are they true, you even saw one beside that big-ass, scary-looking tree not far from your home, one night when you were going home after an evening of binge-drinking with your buddies. And the bastard’s smoking a cigar as long and as big as your leg! Or you know someone who saw one of those cigar-smoking monsters. This creature is called a kapre —a cigar-smoking giant wearing a loincloth. Or maybe a tikbalang —a half-man, half-horse creature about as tall as a kapre. Unlike a centaur, however, a tikbalang is a giant with the torso and arms of a man, and the head and legs of a horse.  Scary creatures, these—and, if I may add
Read more

Vincent

Image
Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings are valued today at hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the world’s greatest painters, he is also one of the most influential figures in Post-Impressionism art. Ironic, because nobody wanted his paintings when he was alive.  He was a “weirdo” and nobody really understood him. Except for the few friends he had with other struggling, unsuccessful painters, one of whom he quarreled with, a quarrel that resulted in Van Gogh cutting off his ear with  a razor.  He also suffered from delusions and had psychotic breaks. He seldom ate and drank heavily. He was one of those tortured souls who had so much to give but was largely ignored. His genius and artistry nobody really got while he was alive. He was an idealist, a sensitive soul who had too much empathy. Imagine somebody like that living today.  At age 37, Vincent Van Gogh - struggling with depression, mental illness, and thinking that he was a failure - killed himself.  You know, maybe Don McLean
Read more

Typhoons and Earthquakes in the Philippines

Image
The Philippines has more than its fair share of disasters, and not because the country is particularly cursed or anything, but because the entire archipelago—purportedly composed of 7,100 islands—lies on a region in the Pacific Ocean called the “Ring of Fire” (actually, the area is shaped more like a horseshoe, although to be fair, “The Horseshoe of Fire” doesn’t have the same impact as the “Ring of Fire”). About 40,000 kilometers long, the “ring” runs from the southern tip of South America, up along the coast of North America, across the Bering Strait, down through Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia (the Ring of Fire’s western edge extends into the Indian Ocean), and to New Zealand.  The “Fire” part of the Ring of Fire is because a string of 452 volcanoes dot this line, like a malevolent game of connect-the-dots. The regions along this line experience volcanic eruptions and periodic earthquakes—majority of them small, hardly-felt tremors, and the few devastating ones that kil
Read more

The Queen of Heaven

Image
Inanna, “The Queen of Heaven,” is a goddess of Sumerian origin: goddess of warfare, fertility, and sexual love. The Akkadians called her Ishtar , a name from which Easter was derived. Yes, the Christian holiday. Inanna is the most popular and important female deity in ancient Mesopotamia. She is also known as a healer, life giver, composer of songs, and possessing a wide range of emotions—passionate, ambitious, jealous, grieving, joyful, timid, and generous. In later cultures, she went by different names: Astarte, Isis, Aphrodite—she was the Goddess. She is the original femme fatale , the embodiment of the woman every man dreams about; the female that devours men, the female that attracts/scares men; the virgin harlot. Every man knows at least one. The goddess makes an appearance in Neil Gaiman’s “American Gods.”  Throughout Sumer’s existence, her powers and deeds were glorified and extolled in myth, epic, and hymn. No one dared oppose her, neither god nor man. She was
Read more