The eminent Inquirer columnist Cielito Habito in a recent piece wrote about the “self-destruction” of the Philippine Senate. Habito laments the plight of an institution the integrity of which took “decades to build” only for a majority bloc of 13 senators led by Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano to “ruin it” in “just three days”.
Even more interesting (and very likely a story many are familiar with), Habito writes…
The Philippine Senate had traditionally been known for respected, well-credentialed, experienced, and principled statesmen/women. “Statesmanship” connotes integrity (ethics, honesty), wisdom (deep understanding of the common good), and diplomacy (bridging divides, building consensus). Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Diokno, Jovito Salonga, and Miriam Defensor Santiago were among our most prominent senator-statesmen, all known for firm principles and untarnished reputations. Senates dominated by such high-caliber individuals are now history.
…but that, today, “we now have a Senate not of statesmen but of showmen, where each pursues his/her own self-serving agenda (more on this below), in defiance of their solemn duty to uphold the interests of the people they represent.”
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Well now, gee whiz, how did that come about one might ask? Perhaps it is time to revisit what the Senate actually is — a chamber of people elected to office by popular vote. And what does this suggest? The confronting truth: that it mirrors the character of the electorate that put these “clowns” there.
As to why the Raul Manglapuses of yore have since been replaced by the Robinhood Padillas and Bato dela Rosas of today as Habito wistfully laments — that “Senate not of statesmen but of showmen”? Dude, that’s a no-brainer. Many of us are familiar with those memes and reels we see on Facebook and Instagram of what Manila looked like back in the good ol’ days of elegant buildings and broad tree-lined avenues consistent with the well-planned colonial blueprint of the capital city serving as a stark contrast to what it looks like today after Filipinos, armed with their “independence”, turned all of that into shit. Those are just one of many illustrative examples of things going well for the Philippines at the start that turned turdic after Filipinos lay hands on them — the economy, the collective intellect, culture, basic manners, even.
The Philippine Senate is just another one of these victims of Filipinos’ world-renowned Reverse-Midas-Touch — a story of why Filipinos do not deserve nice things. The interesting thing about the Senate example is that it stands out as having a direct and measurable cause-and-effect relationship with the collective quality of the Filipino people who determine its membership. What better way to illustrate this than to use pictures.
Behold…
…and this:
I know, I know, correlation does not necessarily imply causation and all that. But you gotta admit; there is much to say about the stark visual difference between voting-age Filipinos in the time of Tañada and Manglapus and voting-age Filipinos in the time of Padilla and Bato, right? Of course, proving causation does require a bit of research work along with doing the maths to link the deterioration of Filipinos’ intellectual faculties over the period from the 1950s to the present, how this is applied to their voting behaviour, and how these behaviours and thinking-applied translates to the winnables in one Senate race or the other over those decades. Perhaps that’s our challenge to the armchair analysts out there.
For now, perhaps put all this “shock” over what the Philippine Senate has become in the right perspective. There truth behind the story of how that has come to be is confronting. Filipinos and their “thought leaders” only need to face that truth to come to appreciate what the obvious solutions are to change that.
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