Fun elections – where’d they go?

It’s election time again. I earnestly hope, as perhaps many others do, that this pandemic edition of our electoral process would be tension-free unlike its immediate past model. I mean, we should be done with the hateful heaping of vulgar words, curses, references to intimate body parts, and such other crudities that were on offer during the last elections.

It would be nice if we could go back to the ways of gentlemen politicians of the past. They wrangled, and how, but they dueled with logic and wit, and not traded barbs about each other’s mother’s real calling or alleged profession.

One such politician easy to cite as the epitome of a gentleman political warrior was Arsenio H. Lacson, the legendary Manila mayor in the ’50s. Dubbed Arsenic, he was ever in the thick of one fight or another, but he never uttered any four-letter word in battling his objects of displeasure, annoyance, or whatever. He jabbed them with his pointed wit and way with words (he was a former journalist).

One time, Arsenic found himself being pushed by admirers into a crowded race for the vice presidential nomination. City Hall reporters, who loved to needle Arsenic for peppery quotes, fed him an enticing campaign morsel from one of the nomination aspirants: “Mayor, according to Senator G (a ranking Visayan politician distinguished by his ebony complexion and passion for Visayan poetry called balak—hence, he was playfully dubbed “Black Beauty” by the press), he is the dark horse in this nomination race. What’s your take on this assertion?”

“What’s my take? Of course, I agree with him. Tell him I agree with him 100 percent. He is dark and he is a horse,” Lacson riposted.

It is one big source of regret that our elections today are, in addition to being tainted with fake news and disinformation, no longer the fun but also serious business as we knew it. Our standards for uprightness, integrity, good manners, and civility have clearly gone out the window. It’s a normal thing today for a politician who has achieved, in his own mind, considerable power to pepper his speech, whether before a formal gathering or a mass rally, with stomach-churning gutter words and phrases, and narratives passed on as jokes that are more odious than funny.

A young mother once complained to a TV talk-show host why he had to repeat on air a joke made by President Duterte: “It’s not funny, it’s disgusting! I have small children who watch television with the family.”

“Well ma’am,” advised the TV host, “don’t get disturbed or offended by political jokes. Too often they get elected.”

Speaking of political jokes, I am all for them—as long as they are varieties that touch off good, hearty chuckles, not malicious hoots and lewd sniggers offensive to sensibilities. I truly pray that this coming election would not only be clean but also truly fun, with candidates jabbing at each other with unpolluted rhetoric and eliciting hearty laughs from their campaign crowds with clean jokes.

It can be done—drawing laughs and winning votes with good-natured humor. Please, no more of Mr. Duterte’s style. He reputedly owns a stratospheric popularity rating of 97 percent, so perhaps he should retire the prurient asides from his speeches.

Nice, clean jokes there are aplenty. Here is one: A declared vice presidential candidate, wanting to be sure he’s mentally fit for the job, got his head examined. “So what’s the result of my brain scan?” he asked his trusted aide of many years. “Amazing!” said the aide. “Your brain is amazing because it has a right side and a left side. Your brain in the left side, there isn’t anything right; the brain in the right side, there isn’t anything left.”

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Mart del Rosario ([email protected]) is a retired advertising-PR consultant.