What machinery | Sun.Star Cebu | Oct. 30, 2009

I REMEMBER the late Raul Roco say that in the coming years, which is to say now, the old guards of politics would be, well, old, and there’d be a terrible need for fresh supply. You look around now, and you often wonder if “fresh supply” automatically means novel minds or new politics.

I ended up in a table with a young man ranting against Noynoy Aquino. It was such an impassioned assault, and I don’t need to tell you, reader, the usual points people like him would hurl against Aquino. Which are so not unlike the low-blows those cheap hacks churn out on AM radio or some gossip columns.

I knew where the young man was coming from. Ambitious and, well, maybe well-meaning in some ways, he finds himself, in this rowdy season, feeling his way up the political ladder.

I should have called it “compromise,” but that word assumes that he had something to give up.

No, I didn’t catch a glimmer of principled politics or anything to begin with. What does the young man stand for anyway, I asked myself. It was pointless to argue with someone whose arguments really just boil down to self-preservation or promotion. I’d rather spend my time with loftier things, like MJ’s “This Is It.”

So when the young man’s attacks drove to the point on “political machinery,” I wanted to do a moon-walk and strut MJ’s vintage “Oww!” and hurl a finger into the air.

Many are still stuck with the Jurassic notion of “political machinery.” All it can ever do these days is bring truckloads of voters into the right places or plant an autistic mouthpiece in a radio booth. You’d have a whole assembly of local officials saying one thing when you’re around, but doesn’t really care when you’re out.

When, among themselves, the local officials can not really pin down the choices into one, the whole terrain practically becomes free zone. Time and again, political machinery has been proven to do only so much and by the end of the day it leaves you with a tab that looks like the defense budget.

Why did this happen? Simple, because the LGU’s have been empowered by laws to the point that it almost leaves the national positions irrelevant. That turned things around.

By the end of the day, the locals will only spend their efforts in saving their own skin.

Who cares about who will be president or senator just as long as the turfs are well and secure? When the smoke clears, whoever will be in power up there will, just the same, seek the good graces of local officials for practical reasons. Or, the other way around.

So where’s the machinery these days? It has become literal—the TV and the internet, the 21st century’s most powerful tools.

A visiting politician can only spend a few minutes, or if lucky a few hours, in a barangay, and flash the widest grimace of his life and leaves a chip of the kitty, but the television stays in the living room the entire day.

The “machinery” does its best work on a primetime when everyone’s stuck like zombies. This is old news, actually, and the communications theorist and cultural critic Marshall MacLuhan said this in the ‘70s yet.

So each time I hear someone gloat about “political machinery,” it will make my day to have spotted yet again another deluded creature bound to the fate of a male praying mantis in a sexual act. The better half will eat him up.

A cultural critic said, “The mark of our time is the revulsion against imposed patterns.” That pretty much leaves us with fair game.