Surviving on a joke

The joke going around the Philippines concerns an imaginary series of events that will supposedly take place in America very soon. Filipinos find the joke funny because it hews very closely to the kind of political subterfuges that can only happen in the Philippines.

Okay listen to this: Just before Christmas, George W. Bush will reportedly resign as US president, allowing Vice President Dick Cheney to take over. In so doing, he leaves the vice presidency vacant.

To fill it up, he appoints Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as new vice president. Now you would think everything is all hunky-dory so far. But wait till just before the New Year because Cheney is really going to complicate things.

Just before the New Year, Dick Cheney shoots everybody on the foot by resigning the presidency. The sudden resignation suddenly leaves the presidency vacant, unless, of course, Vice President Rice takes over.

And she does. Rice becomes the first black American president. In so doing, she upstages president-elect Barack Obama, who is not constitutionally mandated to take his oath of office as president until January 20 yet.

Oh ho ho. The Republicans have pulled the rug from under the unsuspecting Democrats. Thankfully, this is all just a joke, made incredibly funny by the fact that this is entirely plausible. And who could have thought of such a joke but Filipinos.

You see, there is probably no political scenario, brilliant or absurd, that has not been probed and weighed by every conceivable political schemer in this politically wind-swept country, and then tried and tested to the limits of its own plausibility.

But believe it or not, the Americans are fast catching on. As this was written, the news coming out of the United States was something about the Senate seat just vacated by Obama being offered to the higest bidder.

Now that is clearly a lowdown gutter scheme one normally does not expect to happen in America, whose nice and shiny political frames only depict such admirable traits as election results getting known in a day and losers wasting no time conceding defeat.

Such pictures are the envy of countries like the Philippines that, to this day, continue to agonize under the heels of traditionally immature and uncivilized political practitioners who fight tooth and nail for every scrap of political spoils.

That the Philippines continues to manage its national life under such unhealthy political circumstances is due in large part only to the capacity of Filipinos to take things in stride, to joke about their lot.

Filipinos have a tremendous sense of humor. Even serious stuff such as the impeachment of a president or the diversion of millions of pesos from agriculture projects to political kitties eventually end up as joking matter.

Maybe it is due to a sense of resignation about the Filipino's inability to correct that which ought to be corrected, about his failure to stick to the straight and narrow and instead follow that which takes him in circles and thus nowhere.

The joke is his pill of life. It enables him to survive, to hover safe above the storm. And if the joke eventually stales, he moves on to other arenas. A joke holds nothing sacred. It is intrinsically irreverent. By this measure, the Filipino is great.