Why nobody is smiling

Just as there had been nothing illegal in President Arroyo calling then Comelec commissioner Virgilio Garcillano, so should there be nothing similarly illegal in, as it turns out now, mostly opposition figures also having called Garcillano.

Let us all be very clear about this. All those calls that transpired between Garcillano and politicians were of similar or like nature regardless of whoever is talking now and how the conversations are being made out to be.

It is hypocrisy to say that the call President Arroyo made to Garcillano ( let us not kid ourselves that those caught on tape by an illegal wiretap were somebody else ) involved cheating while those of the others were not.

Come on. Let us stop this already. Life is abloom with idioms of the human condition they must be speaking of a truth that applies to all. What is good for the goose has to be also good for the gander. If not, then the pot has to stop calling the kettle black.

We would have wanted elections in the Philippines to be sparkling clean. But that is an impossible proposition. If everything outside politics is so dirty, how can anyone realistically expect an inherently dirty game like politics to be clean in a setting such as the Philippines?

Go ahead, conduct a reality check. See those enticingly juicy slices of pineapple being sold in the streets? Well, they are being made to look even more enticing by the yellow plastic bags that contain them.

And how about those delectable and juicy red watermelons similarly sold in slices along every sidewalk of the country's major urban centers? They, too, are being helped along to a tempting redness by red plastic bags that wrap the slices.

Are you sure that those dressed chicken being sold in wet markets are of the correct weight and not made any heavier by a healthy dose of water injected into the meat? And what about those eggs dipped into native chocolate to give them the brownish tint of native eggs?

If people can get away with shortcuts, they would, especially in the Philippines where falling in line is never a virtue. Our public markets are spilling out into the streets because vendors always want to be where they can meet buyers first.

We can go on and spend an entire lifetime enumerating all the ills that bug Philippine society as far as honesty, or the lack of it, is concerned. But the real problem is not that we might never finish, but that there might never be any transformation to bring it all to an end.

When President Arroyo called Garcillano, it was clearly not to ask him the time of the day or to check how his wife was doing. But whatever it was, it was also the same reason why all the others picked up their phone in order to strike a conversation with the poll official.

Clearly, all those politicians who called Garcillano did not also call him to ask for the time of day or to ask how his wife was doing. All of the callers were after one and the same thing, so none should now be any more saintly than the rest.

To be sure, some of those now exposed as having made similar calls are either denying to high heavens that they ever made those calls, or are trying their darned best, with little success of course, to explain their unexpected headache away.

Since we all have a fairly good idea of what those calls were for, do we send all packing or do we pause and take stock and see if we can survive the sudden demise of the entire political system if we did.

Remember that Garcillano is not the only poll official with a telephone. It is just that he was the only one caught, and with him his phone pals. But the problem is much wider than the hands caught in the cookie jar. If the rest are not smiling, there must be crumbs in their teeth.