Who won the pissing contest?

IRREVERENT IF you will, but elegantly written was the Inquirer editorial last Saturday on the “foul mess” that trailed the ego-sparring of two presidential candidates (“Pissing contest”).

In a classic case of “he said, he said,” Rodrigo Duterte and Mar Roxas laid bare instead their naked inadequacies before the Filipino people. It should not be farfetched to hope that soon after the shouting matches have died down, both will show a marked decrease in the popularity surveys currently running for the last quarter of 2015.

All it took was a simple cursory surfing of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania website. It should have not taken a rocket scientist in the staff of Duterte to find out that Wharton offers two academic programs, an undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Economics (with 20+ concentrations), and a graduate program offering the Masters in Business Administration (with 18 major fields of study). Part of the graduate unit is a doctoral offering with nine programs of study. One who graduates from any one of these three academic programs is a bona fide Wharton graduate.

We seemed to have forgotten so soon the common denominator among dictators—all bark and no substance. Duterte and all local self-proclaimed autocrats are simply artifacts of all that is wrong about our Manila-centric political system.

It is a system where the center of power is trapped in the four corners of Manila. It does not see what lies beyond. It is more than indifference. It simply ignores the realities beyond the squalid urban mess that is Manila. For Manila is nothing but a dignified chaos. Potentates easily arise out of mayors and governors, many of whom are as inclined to go into ego-sparring—like Duterte and Roxas.

But the system that breeds political patronage requires only that local dictators deliver votes for them during elections. To be sure, there are many Rodrigo Dutertes in our towns, cities and provinces. We have even bred Duterte clones in many of our barangays.

It is a warped political system that has been symptomatic of something grossly wrong, for so long that we have grown accustomed to it. And we think it is good. But real political will does not ignore the time-honored, moral-ethical principle that the end never justifies the means.

Simplifying the Wharton ruckus that should have happened only among the gladiators of ancient Rome, one who does not know how to Google does not deserve to be president of 21st-century Philippines. Neither automatically does a Wharton graduate.

For all that Negros sugar money that Judy Araneta Roxas paid for her son’s education (the doctoral program fellowship alone today costs $34,520 per academic year), all we get is a man who does not have the capacity to behave with grace under pressure.

Mar has already proven himself in the most critical hour of his political career—in Tacloban during Supertyphoon “Yolanda,” where he failed more than miserably. If he still wonders why his numbers in the surveys do not rise, he with the Wharton undergraduate degree must be the most ignorant man in the whole country. Sorry, Wharton.

Mar is done. He will never become president, except only by crooked means. He has, in fact, already written his own epitaph. Remember the now infamous line: “Remember that the president is an Aquino, and you are a Romualdez.”

The word war with Duterte that escalated almost into a gun duel only served to expose Mar as a whimsical man who cannot rise above his ego, and what he thinks is his vaunted birthright. But we are done with the Roxases of this nation. The presidency is not a game of musical chairs for the scions of past presidents. It is time to repudiate that.

For Mar to invite his equally fickle counterpart to come and get him at 157 P. Tuazon Street in Cubao speaks volumes about his own little world, eager only to regain the whim of what he perceives is a Roxas honor, not the hour of greatness that this republic so richly deserves in a leader.

One claims it is God’s gift to him to cuss p—– i—, while the other is not wanting in foul manners and good conduct, not to mention a clear vision in the hour of greatest need. Either way, we indeed have two maleducados gunning for the presidency of the republic. Erase wealth and braggadocio as criteria for those wanting to become president.

Sound bytes are not the way to choose our next president. The fundamental standards remain: Who is untainted by corruption, who exemplifies the possibility for real change after the insipid second Aquino presidency, who has the goodwill to address the issues of the destitute masses, who has the political will to call a spade a spade without the hubris to break the law?

The world, it goes without saying, lies beyond the four walls of Bahay na Puti mansion or the confines of Davao City. To not see what lies beyond is not only being “barrio-tic.” It means one does not deserve the global world the next occupant of the Palace by the Pasig must venture into.

So who won the pissing contest? Obviously, the Filipino people if they can now better judge who to lead them.