I NEARLY FELL OFF MY SEAT LAST WEEK when I read about a Malacańang official agreeing with the Villar camp, saying Noynoy Aquino ought to submit himself to a psychiatric evaluation. That should be so, he said, for anyone contemplating becoming president of the Philippines.
I did fall off it when I next read about Erap saying the same thing. ?The public has the right to information especially if you are seeking the number one position. You must be physically and mentally fit. I think I don?t need to (undergo a psychiatric evaluation) as my wife is a psychiatrist. But if there?s basis, I?m still willing to submit (to it).?
Monthy Python meets Wonderland. The part about Erap not needing a psychiatric test because he is a married to a psychiatrist is just too rich to resist. But I will, and just say that now I understand why they forbid intimate relations between psychiatrist and patient: The cure doesn?t work.
Some years ago, a friend of mine actually told me there was a psychiatric evaluation of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo that was truly scary. It showed a profile of someone who harbored all sorts of delusions, not least of them delusions of persecution and grandeur. Well, maybe the part about persecution was not a delusion at all. As they say, paranoid doesn?t mean you?re not being followed.
I laughed it off, however, but not because I didn?t believe it. I laughed it off because I figured that if anyone was seeking therapy for delusions, he?or she?can?t be so batty after all. Psychiatric profiles have never really figured in elections in the United States, not just because the levels of confidentiality between doctor and patient there are high, but because it?s not uncommon to be in therapy. Which raises another kind of insanity, as Erich Fromm argues: Therapy is there to enable people to adjust to their society. But what if the society itself?characterized by consumerism, conformism, hedonism, among others?is insane? But that?s another story.
The thing to be scared about is not the psychiatric profile of leaders, it is their rule. That is where the true madness lies. The most insane rules come from the coldest logic. I figure that if George W. Bush submitted to a psychiatric test, he would probably pass it. I don?t know that the same thing could be said for the majority of Americans who voted for him twice. You look at the regimes of GMA and Erap, and that?s where you?ll see insanity, not in their psychiatric profiles. And that is where Noynoy Aquino?s sanity will be truly tested.
That?s yet another supreme irony in an election full of supreme ironies. President Noynoy Aquino (is there any doubt he will be so barring a sabotaging of the elections?), the one person Manny Villar has tried to depict as mentally challenged, will be the one person who will be challenged to undo the insanity of the past two rules.
I agree with those who say the next president will have an unenviable task. And nothing more epically proves Noynoy?s sanity (and that of his sisters) than that he (and they) thought twice about running (and making him run) for president. You?ve got to be insane to want to become the president after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo?which all the other ?presidentiables? were, chief of them Villar. You?ve got to be even more insane to want to become president after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Joseph Estrada, Villar even being perfectly willing to spend billions to be so. The last couple of regimes haven?t just bankrupted this country financially, they?ve bankrupted this country spiritually.
Or since that is an antiseptic way of putting it, these last two regimes haven?t just carted off everything that wasn?t nailed to the floor, they?ve carted off the floor itself.
Erap?s rule wasn?t as murderous as GMA?s?it had only two casualties on record, Bubby Dacer and Emmanuel Corbito?but it was just as corrupt. And by corrupt, I do not just mean the theft of this country?s money, I mean the theft of this country?s soul. I mean the theft of this country?s hope, this country?s future, this country?s sense of right and wrong. By corrupt, I mean the kind of corruption that happens to a body after it is dead, while it is being feasted upon by the worms. The Ramos government was corrupt, too, in the theft-of-money sense, but it was never corrupt in this sense. Then there were still rules. You looked at the midnight Cabinet, at the goons and clowns (you did not really know which was which, if indeed the one couldn?t as well be the other) deciding the fate of the nation with Blue Label and sundry escorts, and you knew Erap?s movies had been inverted in life, the villains had finally inherited the earth.
If there are rules in the GMA regime, only Mike Arroyo knows about it. There aren?t even any rules about electing a president.
That is what President Noynoy will inherit. I did say before, at the beginning of the campaign, that what we needed was not a CEO, what we needed was a janitor. What we needed was someone who would clean up the debris and rubble brought on by Typhoons Erap and Gloria, which make ?Ondoy? and ?Pepeng? look like mild tantrums. I can only hope President Noynoy will have the insanity to dare do it, prosecuting the people who ought to be prosecuted, jailing the people who ought to be jailed. I can only hope President Noynoy will have the insanity to dream big, living up to the expectations that unleashed his candidacy, bringing this country closer to realizing the dream of Edsa. I can only hope President Noynoy will have the insanity to defy the limitations his enemies, not all of them outside his camp, have imposed on him, and showing wisdom beyond his years or former life bring us at last after a long and bedraggled trek through the desert to a place called:
Sanity.
