Skip to main content

Ahh, the sweet smell of elections

By Mon Casiple


Suddenly, promotion ads by presidentiables (ads, not political ads, they would emphatically remind you) are sprouting (or spouting) all over the media and in posters. One advocate supports our OFWs, another supports national discipline, and still another education of the young. Others are more mundane, only promoting certain commercial products (though one wonders how politicians can draw consumers towards a product rather than away from a product).

Suddenly, parties and coalitions, negotiations and fund-raising started in earnest-–precursors or preliminaries of the 2010 electoral campaigns. We are witness now to what may well go down in history as the longest election campaign yet in our political history–two years to the day of the May 2010 elections.

This is the logical result of a perception (and a conclusion) that president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has at last relinquished her plans to extend her stay in power. No charter change, no martial law, no state of emergency–no supra-constitutional scheme to get around the severe constitutional constraint of one presidential term to end on 12 noon, June 30, 2010.

Ah, presidentiables smell the sweet (or addictive) aroma of the 2010 elections–their arena, their destiny (yearning), and their life’s ambition (where’s the people?). Welcome to the circus.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Five Poems by Danton Remoto

In the Graveyard Danton Remoto The walls round the graveyard Are ancient and cracked. The moss is too thick they look dark. The paint on my grandfather’s tomb Has the color of bone. Two yellow candles we lighted, Then we uttered our prayers. On my left, somebody’s skull Stares back at me: a black Nothingness in the eyes. The graveyard smells of dust Finer than the pore of one’s skin— Dust mixed with milk gone sour. We are about to depart When a black cat darts Across our path, quickly, With a rat still quivering In its mouth. * Immigration Border Crossing (From Sadao, Thailand to Bukit Changloon, Malaysia) Danton Remoto On their faces that betray No emotion You can read the unspoken Questions: Are you really A Filipino? Why is your skin Not the color of padi ? Your eyes, Why are they slanted Like the ones Who eat babi ? And your palms, Why are there no callouses Layered like th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A mansion of many languages

BY DANTON REMOTO, abs-sbnNEWS.com/Newsbreak | 10/16/2008 1:00 AM REMOTE CONTROL In 1977, my mentor, the National Artist for Literature and Theater Rolando S. Tinio, said: “It is too simple-minded to suppose that enthusiasm for Filipino as lingua franca and national language of the country necessarily involves the elimination of English usage or training for it in schools. Proficiency in English provides us with all the advantages that champions of English say it does – access to the vast fund of culture expressed in it, mobility in various spheres of the international scene, especially those dominated by the English-speaking Americans, participation in a quality of modern life of which some features may be assimilated by us with great advantage. Linguistic nationalism does not imply cultural chauvinism. Nobody wants to go back to the mountains. The essential Filipino is not the center of an onion one gets at by peeling off layer after layer of vegetable skin. One’s experience with onio...
1 comment
Read more

Taboan: Philippine Writers' Festival 2009

By John Iremil E. Teodoro, Contributor The Daily Tribune 02/26/2009 A happy and historical gathering of wordsmiths with phallocentric and Manila-centric overtones *** This is from my friend, the excellent poet and critic John Iremil Teodoro, who writes from the magical island of Panay. I wish I have his energy, his passion and his time to write. Writing needs necessary leisure. But this budding, bading politician has shifted his directions. On this day alone, I have to attend not one, not two, but three political meetings. And there goes that new poem out of the window. Sigh. *** According to Ricardo de Ungria, a poet of the first magnitude and the director of Taboan: The Philippine International Writers Festival 2009, “the original idea was for a simple get together of writers from all over the country who have been recipients, directly or indirectly, of grants and awards from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). What happened last Feb. 11 to 13 was far from being ...
2 comments
Read more