Noblesse prestige Manuel L. Quezon III InquirerINQ7.net
November 07, 2006
I WATCHED THE MOVIE THE PRESTIGE” and found it engrossing, though there was something about its ending that bothered me.
The aristocrat-turned-prestidigitator finds his nemesis in a former friend from the working class. They take turns trying to sabotage each other’s performances. The aristocrat ends up murdered, the working class rival ends up charged with the crime. But at the end of the movie, there is a confrontation from beyond the grave. The aristocrat wins not only because he knows how to play the game, but also because he understands its purpose—to amaze, delight and inspire applause.
I am not alone in recognizing the class war element in the film; if magic, as the movie says, requires showmanship, politics requires strategy, practice, showmanship and –the movie keeps emphasizing - “getting your hands dirty.” But to what end and extent? Means and ends are highly moveable, according to the film, just as politician after politician must have realized.
To this day one of the pieces that perhaps most influence my political thinking was a Free Press editorial in 1953. It stressed something like a wound rubbed raw over the years: “The need to establish a regime above personalities, a government of law instead of men, cannot be exaggerated. In a rule of law alone lies social stability. Those who are for chaos may welcome a personal regime; those who are for order know the need for an impersonal government.” President Ramon Magsaysay revealed his sense of this when he asked, “Can we defend it in Plaza Miranda?” He did not ask, “Where are the police to disperse the rallyists?”
Society has become too complex, composed of too many competing—and empowered—interests that need to be managed according to the private conscience of its leaders. Education and culture—which should serve as a kind of leash on both the leaders’ and their followers’ basic selfishness—have broken down and thus lost their capacity to control, or at least limit, excesses in political behavior.
As I’ve often written in the past, the bedrock of our civic culture is church, club and school. The Catholic Church—the ranks of its clergy decimated in the wake of Vatican II, when priests and nuns abandoned their calling and vocations plummeted—preaches to emptying pews (and has to depend on groups like El Shaddai to maintain its clout in society). But it isn’t alone in wrestling with an inability to maintain and mobilize the faithful. The civic organizations’ usual sources of membership have been eroded by potential recruits moving overseas; and there is a growing indifference among their constituencies still at home, especially those in their 30s and below. The clubs that have maintained their influence have done so in purely negative terms, as shown, for example, by the Mafia-like dominance of some fraternities in the legal field.
To boost the official statistics for education and literacy, Ferdinand Marcos decreed that children should be allowed to move from one grade to the next even if unprepared to do so; the limitations inevitably imposed by the dictatorship stifled creative thinking and led to an exodus of intellectuals. But too many intellectuals also signed into the New Society and thus became complicit in its failures, leading to the further disrepute of the professions and all that they stood for—planning, preparation, study, etc. The “mistah mentality” among graduates of the Philippine Military Academy is another sign of the collapse of a sense of larger purpose among the products of the schools.
H.G. Wells wrote that when Queen Victoria died, it was as if a paperweight was lifted, leaving a stack of papers to blow about in the breeze. The end of the dictatorship led to two decades of everything being blown about—which is what naturally happens when freedom is taken away and then regained. This country can be compared to someone who has a hangover after a drinking spree and is confronted with choices: drink some more, take medicine, check into rehab, or make the vow “never again” to God.
Put another way, the country has been on a drinking spree—and is spending like a drunken sailor—and the debate is whether to shackle the sailor or to counsel him and help him come to grips with his drinking problem. How did you view “Mutiny on the Bounty”? Tell me you would have supported Captain Bligh or Fletcher Christian, and I’ll tell you which side you are in the present political divide—and yes, there is room for those of the opinion that neither Bligh nor Christian behaved correctly.
Take the Good Citizenship Movement that aims to accomplish what Mike Defensor’s Madyaas Confederacy spectacularly failed to do: provide a moral spine to a disgraced administration by molding young people, as the organization puts it to have “respect for law and government,” among its many objectives. It presumes the clock can be turned back to a time when people instinctively obeyed, and where respect for authority was assumed without having to be earned.
This is not to say Bro. Rolly Dizon, Evelyn Kilayko, Jose Abueva and Teresita Baltazar, among the convenors of this movement, aren’t sincere or don’t mean well; or that engaging the cooperation of other convenors from both sides of the political aisle isn’t an achievement. But it does suggest that their efforts will be hampered—and justifiably so, to my mind—by their attempting a moralistic endeavor while fiercely opposing those against the administration they publicly support. They cannot see the opposition to the administration as morally valid as their rationalizations for supporting it. Thus they will perpetuate the divide. Sadly, this is one more proof that they are out of touch, and that sincerity is no obstacle to being naive.
