Promises, misses, and compromises

It’s election season once again. By this time, we know the routine. Candidates, new faces as well as incumbents, suddenly make their presence felt in our localities, feigning to listen to our woes, while making rosy promises to bring change and solve our problems, always using words that voters like to hear.

Voters buy their promises, electing them without thinking. Then promises get forgotten: floods continue to happen, roads never get constructed, community hospitals never get built, corruption stays rampant. As election time nears, a little ayuda here and there, and come election time, the routine is repeated.

For the longest time, this has been the sad, dismaying pattern in most places in our country. “Promises, promises, why do I believe” is from a Broadway hit song. But it seems to be the refrain of our voting history. We even coined a phrase for this type of politics: ”puro pangako na napako.”

Just imagine, if only half of those bright, hopeful promises made by our politicians through almost nine decades of our democratic system were fulfilled, the Philippines would be a highly developed society by this time.

It’s a record of regretful “missed” opportunities. There were times when we really had good deserving worthy candidates but preferred to be cajoled by popular, recognizable scions of political families or “envelopmental” promises.

Alas, the Filipino voters are like the battered housewife who says she’s had enough and yet keeps accepting back her undeserving husband who, using honeyed words, promises to change and provide her with a better life. Is it in our human nature to always succumb to the pleasing words of the suitor or a person who uses flattery to win favor?

Every politician pays lip service to the principle that “public service is a public trust,” but even though it is nice to hear, government service in reality is just a cover for public betrayal in the form of unmet promises. Many have employed such words as “maaasahan” or ”mapagkakatiwalaan” in election banners and paraphernalia of countless candidates.

An oldie like me can still remember that we used to get taken by young new faces in Congress and the Senate. We had “Young Turks,” “The Spice Boys, “The Young Guns,” and so on. Promising young leaders, oozing with idealism. But in time, they became stained and “adulterated” as the usual “tradpols,” who we have come to disdain. Same collar?

They all looked promising at first but eventually, they had all been “compromised” once they had tasted power. The government seems to be the great insidious corruptor. A few apples no matter how fresh eventually become rotten in a festering barrel.

One time I overheard a driver telling his fellow driver while waiting for their respective employers in a supermarket parking lot: “Alam ko corrupt siya pero namimigay naman.” He was referring to one of the members of the so-called “Spice Boys.” The other driver retorted: “Oo nga, lahat naman nagiging corrupt, pare-pareho lang sila.”

Lacking substance and bereft of principles, our politicians have become masters of performative politics. He who appears to be performing and seen often in the news or social media platforms, gets the vote. The keywords are “appears to be.” We have normalized this style, it is now the standard in governance and public service. In advertising, it’s called “selling the sizzle, not the steak.”

I used to be in theater and films and I know what a performance is. Is this the reason why we’re voting for more and more people from the showbiz world? Is this the reason why more and more actors have the bold-faced audacity to run? No offense to my colleagues in film, theater, and TV. Maybe a few have been proven worthy but we need to put back competence into public governance and public service.

But cynical as I have become, I want us to try again to make our politics right. I know it’s a hit-or-miss type of choice. So let’s be more informed about the candidates. Who are the “pro-missers,” the professional politicians who have been missing in action in times of need, as well as the politicians who have missed their commitments to us, time and again?

As we go to the polls this May, let’s cancel the usual politicians who sing (again from the Broadway hit song):

You made me promises, promises

Knowing I’d believe

Promises, promises

You knew you’d never keep.

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Arsenio “Nick” Lizaso is a veteran theater and movie director. He is former president of the Cultural Center of the Philippines and chair of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.