Of sedatives and sleeping pills

For Filipinos who are losing much sleep over the country’s economic recovery, its polity’s effective governance and its citizenry’s public safety, the Arroyo administration might give the same advice its spokesman reportedly offered a Japanese diplomat recently: Try to get more sleep.

This is probably good advice if the country’s objective conditions are nowhere near critical or, assuming a crisis to be around, those in charge of managing the country are – as politicians, the military and the police are wont to say – on top of the situation or have the situation under control.

A laggard economy fully dependent for its survival on foreign assistance and the remittances of Filipinos doing foreign service in alien homes and companies abroad, the numerous scandals pointing to rampant graft and corruption in government and the frequency of crimes like murder, robbery and rape - all of these give the lie to those who claim that the Philippine condition has been overly dramatized or that the authorities are in full control of any conceivably negative situation here.

People must learn to see that a glass is really half full instead of being half empty. This is a standard spiel the authorities give when the citizenry express their growing apprehension and, at times, unusual for an overly patient and exceedingly liberal people, their outright discontent.

In reality, the authorities insist that Filipinos see a half-full glass where little or no water may be there at all. Their operational assumption is that the citizenry could be easily tricked – and tricked indefinitely – into believing an illusion to be their truthful condition. Rhetoric and statistics are generously employed by the nation’s authorities. Doublespeak is their universal language. Consider how regulatory agencies supposed to serve the public good regularly serve private ends and in no time become regulated by the very interests they are supposed to regulate and protect the public against.

Statistics is a respectable science and the science’s figures actually do not lie. Yet, as often pointed out by concerned, technically-proficient citizens, liars in this country’s public service figure practically all the time. The authorities’ use of statistical data regarding the state of the economy and the nation’s finances is often most creative, indeed most imaginative, and that is the reason why most people are hard put to reconcile the rosy world outlined by official statistics with the dark realities of their everyday life. The same quandary is experienced by those who try to understand their sense of personal and public insecurity with official statistics on crime, or their knowledge of the extravagant lifestyle led by their public officials and the modest figures gracing the latter’s sworn and publicly-filed statements of assets and liabilities.

There are few among the nation’s authorities who are not certifiable magicians. As such, most of the breed serve their constituency comfortable illusions rather than disconcerting truths most of the time. The illusionists’ craft is much facilitated if their target audience is at the very borderland between worrisome wakefulness and seductive sleep. Hypnotized, mesmerized, drugged, a nation becomes more vulnerable to the illusions that feckless administrations foist on it.

Sedatives and sleeping pills have always been fashionable prescriptions by non-performing authorities. More so during the season of elections, when a nation might struggle to wake up and somehow kick out their incompetent officials.

2003 is a most critical period for those in the Arroyo administration who manage by illusion. Just about a year from E-Day – sometime in May 2004 – they cannot afford to have a wakeful Japanese ambassador articulating and further substantiating what many Filipinos already perceive to be daunting realities. He must be reminded about diplomatic protocols and the imperatives of tactfulness while in his host country. If his formal apology appears inadequate and he does not retract his wakeful assessments of the government and its authorities, a final formal offer to put him to sleep may be made. SARS or no SARS, a permanent quarantine awaits diplomats who are declared non grata by their offended hosts.

To a great extent, this damage-limitation line has already been tried by administration officials. Even after apologizing, the non grata declaration continues to be poised against the Japanese ambassador.

What can administration illusionists do about the rest of the country if they are going to make it to E-Day and survive? At this point, the options are remarkably few and the most probable one will rely on massive dosages of sedatives and soporifics to keep the nation in vulnerable stupor.

It will be to try to get more Filipinos to sleep much longer; at the very least, to have them sedated for at least one more year. Get them to fantasize on being America’s publicly-acknowledged "major, non-NATO ally". Let them dream of an endless convoy of American ships and planes wending their way towards us, loaded with everything the nation needs, from properly supportive American senators and congressmen to presumably bullish American investors and definitely macho-looking American soldiers.

Sometime in October of this year, the dream could peak as an American president - a deeply appreciative one, one might add - descends from Air Force One and walks the tarmac of NAIA towards our own waiting and understandably equally deeply appreciative little president.

What a sight that would be! David Copperfield himself would not be able to improve much on this fantasy where East meets West and thereafter the twain continue to meet again and again and yet again. (Kipling, however, would insist on viewing this fantasy in terms of the "white man’s burden" - the phrase being his lasting contribution to the highly-quotable language of imperialism.)

The administration’s fighting slogan from now until Election Day can not be Bawal magkasakit! It would have to be Bawal magising!