Abject abundance
CALL it off-color when it’s offensive. Or when it hits close to home, sounding like a slapin-the-face piece of humor as when a comedian’s spiel smears a purple on the cheeks.
That happens when the chuckle gets complicated with a twist of “truthiness,” which the American Dialect Society chose as Word of the Year (2005) after the host of the political comedy show “The Colbert Report” used it to describe a “gut feel” of what seems right.
Wrong signals are sent to the audience, however, when what sounds like a joke is taken seriously. After a recent study showed that Americans appeared to have learned a lot more from his satire than from the real news about how money played a part in the last presidential election, Stephen Colbert played it poker-faced as usual.
last laugh comes mostly from our so-called public servants in the face of prevalent misery, the President tried to sound upbeat. Despite the doldrums from the latest survey showing his popularity ratings going the way of his receding hairline, he sounded headbanging giddy that the political storm around his administration would blow over soon and leave his legacy bleached into the blaze of a rainbow.
And so it happened that on the same day the dark clouds and the wind went berserk like a red-eyed bull in this perennially tempest-clobbered country, what we heard most from the president was his pitch for yellow. Wearing it, he suggested, would show whose side we’re on.
Off the bat, while he has knocked our complacency about matters of culture and morality as well as consti- tutional conundrums out of the ballpark, President Aquino has gone slick over complex issues and watered it down to spit-coated simplicity.
With his self-righteous audacity—both in upholding his criteria for choosing or nullifying a National Artist and in thumbing down at the decision of the Supreme Court regarding the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP)—he has whittled down the dimension of the debate over the controversies to this suffocating certainty: Either you’re with me, or you’re the enemy!
Attack, assume the better position in relation to the President’s stand. Thus both sides in favor or against him have left friends and perhaps lovers with a cold-shoulder burden of proving our loyalty or lack of it.
Indeed, count on this president to lead the way not only of diverting us from finding the finer points of an introspective civil engagement with the pressing issues but also of driving a deeper wedge where politically- charged fragmentation has been commonplace. Such basic notions as due process and separation of legislative/ judiciary/executive powers be damned!
Take a bow, Sir, for your singlehanded trick in distracting us from the many problems we could have prioritize our focus on. Thank you for dividing us even more!
Less talk, where action would have added more muscle to his leadership, could have provided us a reprieve from the vulgarity of his youngest sister whose shrillness could be no less than a force of nature. At best, desisting the headlong drive of getting his feet into his mouth would have given us the chance to consider some semblance of humility and wisdom we could have guessed around the mystique of the mighty. Stubborn, he left us with little doubt we’re better off deaf.
Hearing all these loose talks about billions of money from DAP would have been enough to make us believe we’re a wealthy country, indeed, despite the deluge of evidence to the contrary. In storm-shattered Leyte, for instance, the Department of Social Welfare and Development is still up to its neck trying to extricate at least 130,000 tent dwellers toward getting a permanent settlement for them after they survived the last storm.
If they and the rest of the nation’s destitute could stay all ears to the excess of noise about DAP and all its appropriations, whether inappropriate or not, nothing would have been more tried and tested than their doubt that they could endure or suffer their fate gladly as it fools them—where their sense of abandonment has been more abundant—with flying colors.