When 2010 opened, I was filled to the brim with optimism. At the very first waking hours of the year, I took my erpats and my six-year-old niece to the beach. On that breezy stretch, there was just the three of us, cozy until a slight argument ensued. The lolo wanted the little lady to eat her baon first before swimming. The niece said no, and I said let her go, she’d be hungry in a while. After a few minutes of battling with the waves, she returned to the table and said she was starving. I was right.
In the succeeding months, the great divide. The two of them became solid Gibo supporters. My niece had since stopped eating the yolk in her sunny side up because it was “yellow.” To demonstrate her loyalty, she tried eating pichay because it was green, but it was something her taste buds rejected. Green reminded her of goats, she said. Unable to ingest “green,” she suggested we should buy green plates instead. She isn’t one who easily gets conned by campaign ads that sounds like nursery rhymes, which was why Villar’s ads were beyond her. She hates nursery rhymes, in fact. You can understand. She has a problem with hitting the right notes and she’s given to insisting her own lyrics. Anyway, the dinner wares stayed white.
The old man was most dogmatic. The intensity was familiar, and he had the same firm resolve when he wagered for Oscar De La Hoya against Manny Pacquiao in 2008. When “The Dream Match” took place, while I screamed at the top of my lungs as Pacman beat De La Hoya to a pulp, I was wishing the old man’s pride and prejudice have gone black and blue, ka-blam on the canvas. He had all the tasteless arguments against my candidate, and the irony was I could trace them all to a radio program he listened to in the mornings, the one with Bert Empaces, verbal contortionist par excellence. My blood boiled each time, not because Bert attacked my candidate, but because unwittingly he put asunder a supposed father-son tactical alliance. Certainly, the niece would have been an easy swing vote. But the household had since become a tense zone, and nowhere was the line “Hindi ako tinanong ng survey” became so right than in our house. Had the SWS came, the surveys would have shown a different picture. Gibo was a sure winner in our dining room.
The old man said I was grossly crazy for using sentimentality or emotions in my choice. I told him that emotion is not necessarily an independent fact from intelligence. A family who lives by P80 a day will find news about a president eating P1M for a Le Cirque dinner very emotional. When you heave heaven and earth to be as honest as you can with your SAL, while you have a president who spends her time trying to get around with her own, certainly you’re not autistic if you become emotional. The rather loftier term is “social injustice,” so tell me if in the face of it you don’t discover fury that is a classic hybrid of the emotional and the intellectual.
But here are the more pragmatic facts, I told the old man. A politician who dismisses the emotional quotient in a campaign is a living blunder. I wrote in my earlier column about a study entitled, “The dynamics of emotions in political game theory.” A group of academics from the disciplines of psychology, mathematics, anthropology and political science have merged their theories to quantify emotion so they can gauge its contagiousness in a political phenomenon. Another study by the Democrats in the US inspired a different tack in Obama’s campaign, setting aside the cold policy arguments in more formal fora.
Emotion, issuing from Edsa and Cory’s death, did my niece’s leafy vegetables in. When I arrived home yesterday, she jumped and screamed, with all of her missing front teeth, that she was no longer for Gibo and that she will now eat the yellow in her sunny side up. I was sorry for the old man eating crow. Again, I was right.
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