A Filipino politician, or any politician for that matter, to paraphrase the sage, is an angel in fiction but a demon in truth. A politician, especially the "trapo" class, is the most dubious character in the animal kingdom, scheming, malicious, and always wearing a mask. A political animal is a deceptive and decieving shallow piece of humanity that has descended or evolved from the lowest baboon or orangutan. He is an abomination to phylum chordata, whose only apparent purpose for existing in the realm of humanity is to vex, annoy and inflict damages to the rest of homo sapiens. It is often spineless, and thus should be reclassified as an element of phylum mollusca, not unlike the squid (with his black tactics) and octopus with deadly tentacles.
Dressed in pretentiously tailored coats and ties (the cost of which were charged to official expenses), he audaciously projects an image of forced respectability pretending to look like an honorable solon worthy of the millions that he robbed from the public coffers. He tries hard to copy the styles of decent members of the august body of wise men and disguises his empty head with high-sounding jargon that he really does not truly understand. He pretends to sound like President JFK when in fact he really belongs to the loud and abrasive class of Donald Trump. He aspires to steal some sparks of wisdom from such icons as Senators Recto, Tañada, Tolentino, Salonga and Manglapus. The truth of the matter is that he is nothing but a hackneyed, babbling trying hard copycat.
The politician's congenital propensity to burden us with cruel vexations to our daily peace and serenity keeps on burdening the people with shallow pretensions via national television. He willfully bombards us with grandiose plans to build bridges even if there are no rivers, to make the world a cleaner, kinder and more honest habitation of decent men. The fact is, the politician's capricious dreams are built on the straws of his perverted imagination. He claims to be the icon of "pagmalasakit," or the savior of the poor unfed and unwashed, who mysteriously survive on garbage leftovers, and sleep almost naked in dirty and hot shacks in the squalor of squatter colonies. The truth of the matter is that the politician is one of the major causes of poverty and social injustice.
A politician can appear like anything anytime. He can be a conservative, pious and devout Christian, not unlike a modern Pharisee to impress the masses. And then, in the next breath, in another assembly, alas, he can be a loudmouthed, vulgar firebrand, trying to sound like a passionate liberal, progressive and socially leftist, with much fire in his belly. The truth of the matter is that he does not really comprehend the difference between veering to right, to the left or the center. He just wanted to be the center of false adulation in aid of reelection. A politician is usually thick-faced like a reptile that sheds skins just to show the best color of his external looks. Inside however he is nothing but a chasm of emptiness.
There is an imperative need to shield us from the evils that the politician and his cohorts keep on spreading among the communities of decent humanity. There is a need to save the nation and our people from inevitable retrogression by rejecting the lies, the deceptions, the schemes and machinations of every political animal. A politician's only redeeming value is his drive, his initiative, his burning desires and ambitions. In fact, if we attempt at a little analogy and some hyperbole, his greed for money and his hunger for power are inversely proportionate to his intellect and integrity. Former Congressman Teddy Locsin once quipped that without Miriam Defensor Santiago, the average IQ in the Senate would be reduced to below zero.
Now, that the political season is about to rise in heightened crescendo, before we are going to be tortured once more with the cacophony of impertinence and outrageous vexations, what matters most is to prepare our defense mechanism, which is to gain some level of wisdom. And that is to imbibe a level of discernment never to be deceived. Let us not waste our votes only to lend an aura of decency to such pitiful piece of human aberration. As the good book admonishes: Let us not throw our pearls to feed the swines.