Demo-crazy

Another entry into the Onli in the Pilipins almanac: We have the slowest national canvass in all of humanity.

We might as well make the most of this tragic carnival by having it officially registered with the Guinness Book of World Records.

The appearance at the Batasan gallery of a delegation of electoral observers from Austria confirms that this sad spectacle has become a tourist attraction of sorts. The observers, polite as they may have wanted to be, were aghast at the nitpicking and filibustering going on – all at great public expense.

I talked with a few foreign diplomats the past days and they all uniformly complained about the difficulty they are having explaining this phenomenon to their home offices. One diplomat was being badgered daily by his home office about the progress of the canvass because his government was considering sending a senior official to attend the inaugural.

Needless to say, all preparations for an inaugural are on hold – or at least could not be done formally and officially. No invitations could be sent out. Foreign governments who want to send congratulatory messages and extend our support to our government are caught in a lurch.

The peso has suffered from the unwarranted suspense inflicted by an irresponsible cabal of irrelevant politicians who have guised themselves as the "opposition". The peso’s decline magnifies the adverse impact of high oil prices in the world market and makes life miserable for all Filipinos.

If life seems a bit more challenging these days and the future little dimmer, blame Angara, Sotto and Oreta, along with their mouthpiece Escudero. Blame Eddie Villanueva, who in this election unveiled his smallness, along with his publicity-crazed lawyer Sal Panelo. Blame the communist cadres who are frantically maneuvering to help deepen the "contradictions" of this time in the hope of opening an opportunity for this fossilized movement to step in during a moment of chaos and become a player in our politics. This after their own doctrinaire inclinations caused them to miss out on the democratic risings of the last two decades.

Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales could not hide his exasperation with the orgy of delay playing out before our eyes. He described this national embarrassment as "demo-crazy".

The international media dutifully carried that comment to all sections of the globe.

The Philippines has become the subject of derisive commentary in the editorials of the most respected newspapers. This is not the time to walk proudly as Filipino before the global audience.

The other day, I decided to beg off from a talk in Singapore on the post-election situation here – in part because I will not dare risk scuffling with a Singaporean taxi driver who will, as usual, have no inhibition about speaking his mind about how inefficient, wasteful and inane Filipinos are.

Some time ago, a friend on a short business trip to Singapore experienced exactly that torture in the hands of a taxi driver. When the Singaporean confirmed his suspicion that my friend was Filipino, he burst into laughter, saying: "So another actor wants to be your president?"

Thoroughly inconvenienced, my friend deftly shifted the taxicab conversation to the matter about SARS and bird flu. It was the only way he could shift the burden of inconvenience.

The past few weeks, I have been extremely inconvenienced by foreign journalists calling in to ask why this orgy of delay was happening at all.

There was no easy answer to that question. It would be completely unfair to brush it aside by saying that this is the way democracy works in the Philippines.

It is unfair because this is not the way democracy usually works in the Philippines. In fact, what we are seeing is democracy not working in the Philippines.

Never before have so few been so vain. Never before have petty personalities been so arrogant. Never before was our sense of belonging to a single political community been so poisoned by malice as it has been the past few weeks, thanks to the insidious ploys of the KNP.

I could not help but shudder each time I see that ugly sticker that reads: Digs Truth. The grammatically atrocious slogan was contrived by KNP partisans supporting this character Didagen Dilangalen, the guy who, in the hallowed halls of Congress, quoted results from two different precincts in Lahug, Cebu and tried to pass that off as "tampered" results from one precinct.

Truth Matters reads another KNP sticker. Let’s hope it matters to KNP lawyer Rufus Rodriguez who wasted precious canvassing time claiming that on one COC, his candidate was a victim of dagdag-bawas. If he had done due diligence and actually added up the numbers in that particular case, as the K4 lawyers eventually did, he would have realized that it was his candidate who benefited from dagdag-bawas.

My generation knows what massive cheating means. We defended ballot boxes with our lives in 1986.

In my own count, all the casualties in the last electoral campaign were candidates of the ruling party. Right behind my parents’ home in Malabon, two days before elections, the K4 campaign manager was shot in cold blood as he slept. The incident paralyzed the entire campaign organization of the administration party opening the way to massive vote-buying on election day and the triumph of the opposition candidates.

And so why is this orgy of delay happening?

Hard as it may be to admit it before the watchful eyes of the rest of the world, this sad spectacle is happening because a vain and greedy gang of power-seekers has been trying to avert a democratic verdict. This gang, along with its newfound communist allies and financed by dirty money, is trying to steal the elections borrowing the means used before by well-meaning Filipinos to prevent an election from being stolen by a tyrant.

But, as they try to pay people to mount an insurrection, these idiots miss out on the essential truths: The EDSA Uprising was undertaken by men of goodwill gifted with moral certainty.

As they frantically scramble to conjure new conspiracies to replace the ones that failed, this gang is struggling against the truth. At each turn, its real motives are unmasked before an intelligent public.

At the right time, its real patrons will be unmasked as well.