Gil the nation

The Commission on Elections reclassified presidential aspirant Eddie Gil as a "nuisance candidate".

The "revolution" that the candidate promised did not materialize – at least up until press time. Instead, the man who promised to pay down our foreign debt out of his own pocket meekly announced he is bringing his case to the Supreme Court.

Surely, if he is as wealthy as he advertises himself to be, he would be hiring half our population of lawyers to bring a powerful battery of legal brilliance before the highest court of the land. We await the filing of this landmark case against the poll body with bated breath.

If there should be any anxiety about this development it should be about the fact that this nation seems to be quickly losing its sense of humor.

On the same day that the Comelec decided to disqualify Gil, the DENR announced that 15 of our river systems are biologically dead. Our economic planners announced that the unemployment rate has gone up – as it usually does at the end of each school year. Economists have finally figured out that our foreign debt is now larger than our GDP.

How dare the Comelec, at a time like this, deny our people a compelling source of comic relief?

Eddie Gil has promised to pay down the debt. He has committed to hand out P1 million to every Filipino to start an enterprise. This man has presented to our people the most dazzling picture of the immediate future.

How dare the Comelec deny the people their opium?

Eddie Gil has promised to "Gil the nation." Why foreclose that possibility?

Okay, so the man is not sure about his birth date. He refuses to name his father. He cannot describe his businesses and could provide no detail about the source of the vast personal wealth he claims. He paid his hotel bills with bouncing checks. He made a big fuss about buying a helicopter for his campaign but could not produce the craft. He promised to subsidize his senatorial candidates at P200 million apiece but failed to deliver.

Okay, so the man, if he is indeed wealthy, has failed to pay taxes on that wealth. But he is rather impressive in his choice of headgear. His fashion sense is truly revolutionary.

Why deny the people the entertainment value this man brings to our dreary lives?

So it might be too late to plead with the Comelec to let this man run. And there is little reason for me to shed tears for the loss of a candidate who might redeem this hapless land.

But let me say a few things on behalf of the beleaguered Eddie Gil.

At least this man is running under his own name and not under a cinematic alias. What you see is what you get. There is no indecent effort here to present a hero in place of a bum. But his pompous promises might be indecent in themselves.

At least this man has no record of ever threatening anyone with physical harm. At least this candidate has offered our people a clear and quantifiable platform – albeit fantastic. At least there is no evidence that this man is a mere puppet of unaccountable political manipulators. At least this man has not gone so far overboard as to claim God is on the side of his campaign in this contest.

Compare that with the record of the other charlatans on the political stage.

I suppose we will just have to live with the loss of Eddie Gil as an option in this presidential contest. True, he has so far managed to attract only the most gullible voters. But in a democracy, those voters deserve to have an option, too, just as those slightly less gullible enjoy their respective options among those allowed to remain in the race.

I would hesitate to call Gil’s disqualification a calamity. If he continued to run and managed to win, that would be the real calamity. And in that calamitous event, we would not even deserve the sympathy of the rest of humanity.

We were given the gift of a democratic option and we chose badly. There is not excuse for that.

Gil’s greatest vulnerability is the fact that he so obviously out of it. That was obvious to well over 99 percent of our voters before it became obvious to the Comelec.

The decision to disqualify Gil was therefore not a painful one for the poll body to make. It was a decision that, in fact, should have been made the first time the poll body began weeding out unfit presidential candidates. What is painful is that he was qualified the first time around, necessitating this mess of disqualifying him after allowing him to go through his merry act the first few weeks of the campaign.

It will not be as easy to weed out the remaining charlatans in the presidential race.

The Constitution does not allow us to perform a test for emotional stability, intellectual competence or work ethic before we allow anyone to seek the highest post of the land. The Comelec can only strike out the blatantly bizarre but not the discretely insane.

By disqualifying Eddie Gil, the Comelec spares us the agony of having to listen to this man during the presidential debates. The PPCVR tells us that the disqualification of Gil frees up 15 minutes of debating time for the remaining candidates. That is the upside to this event.

But while the Comelec can disqualify candidates, the poll body cannot compel them to attend the debates, to stand before the cruel glare of television cameras and think on their feet. That is just too bad. It would have been an opportunity for the people to examine the other candidates for instabilities or incapacities that should have merited disqualification as well.

All is not lost, however.

Having been excluded from the presidential race, Eddie Gil might try his hand at making movies. True, he may not be an appealing sight. But he has fabulous stories to tell.

What he has promised and could not deliver in real life, he could easily do in reel life. Nothing is impossible in the movies. We can make heroes out of duds. We can make the universe bend to the will of the scriptwriter. Ask Spielberg.

But real life is real life. It is harsh, unyielding and complex. It is an arena where the good sense of people could demolish edifices of fiction.