It is at once crass and colloquial. Roman also, but not quite. Spondulix is street slang for money, specifically old coins – pecuniary knick-knacks that burn holes in pockets or bric-a-brac change paid by gumshoes to bribe snitches. It is from the Greek spondulos, shells used as currency. It is the gold in the infernal “guns, goons, and gold” inherent in local politics. It is bribe money.
The phrase appropriately describes what Roman-originated politics has become. More now than in previously less sardonic administrations combined.
When the Ang Kapatiran Party (AKP) broke into the political scene in 2007 one of its advocacies was debunking money as necessary for political office. With Php 2.0 million, AKP fielded three senatorial candidates against parties with machinery and mullah.
As expected, none won save for a district counselor. If money was a factor, it was not apparent. What was apparent was his name. He was the nephew of an influential politician in the town where he ran. It is difficult to erase from any analyses relational factors, specifically how those would not have been a variable in his winning.
Unfortunately, David did not slay Goliath. Notwithstanding his victory in insignificant street-corner polls, the win failed to discredit money’s exigencies.
In 2010’s senatorial run, desperate needs might have awakened some to the utility of money. Of its 2007 senatorial candidates, two jumped the AKP ark along with AKP’s former executive director. Perhaps realizing few can walk on water, they’ve crossed the portside plank. It’s not all about money, but the money can’t hurt either.
Admittedly, there are other more principled reasons for the pragmatism. The cause Benigno Aquino III carries is indeed one that attracts the best of men.
But the cost of campaigning cannot be denied. Poll rankings and the Commission on Election’s criteria on campaigning wherewithal reemphasize money’s utility as ugly as that may be.
For another front-runner, presidential candidate Manuel Villar, estimates of pre-campaigning expenditures reached Php 1.2 billion. Few can deny the media exposures do not fuel his momentum. At a minimum of 10 million votes to qualify as a contender, that’s Php 120 a vote.
AKP’s Php 2.0 million in 2007 divided three ways is Php 666 thousand per senatorial candidate. The number of the beast is ominous. More with a peso sign as a prefix. Where the most successful AKP candidate ranked in the mid-thirties garnering fewer than 80,000 votes, that’s a sunk and unredeemable cost of Php 8.33 per voter.
AKP’s sunk costs versus another’s investments indicate the indispensability of funding. Because AKP’s senatorial candidates lost, it is impossible to now raise similar amounts when rankings are saturated by memories of written-off losses. Even among good causes, some are better than others and Aquino’s candidacy presents a similarly-principled but more viable option.
Last polled by the Social Weather Stations in February, of AKP’s three now with the Liberal Party (LP), its former executive director ranks 18th, another, 35th, and the last, 44th. Only one, still with the AKP, ranks 43rd. The rest are off the charts. At that level, he is statistically tied with a former AKP candidate now running with Aquino.
Opposite the morality spectrum political vulgarity transforms the money requisite comical and reminiscent of ridicule and embarrassment inflicted on game show contestants. One candidate drafted as a last choice after a cabinet secretary and an actor-senator declined recently found himself denied timely financial support.
There are precedents. The installation of a celebrity, crowd-drawing, albeit controversially-qualified vice president buys safeguards against sudden unseating following the patented threat of greater-evils that protected Gloria Arroyo.
But is a spare tire needed in Arroyo’s post-Malacanang agenda? In the tasteless airing of stinginess and parsimonious betrayals in public, the lack of a well-thought out roster and impromptu candidacies expose a hollow political agenda.
These money-bickerings ignite latent doubts that a serious presidency and vice-presidency sought by the state-endorsed party are among its primary agenda. More so, considering substantial expenditures re-channeled and focused to ensure a portentous mandate at the Lower House where creeping cabal support seems to be Plan A.
Apparently some candidacies are nothing but matters of money doled from the start and profit gained at the end. In pidgin Pilipino-Latin, pera-pera ab initio et quaestus ultimus.
Popularity: 1% [?]
You csnnot win the Presidency without having a Billion Pesos. This is
from the mouth of Mr. Villar, a candidate for President. He was only
telling the truth. And he has more than a Billion Pesos from our
taxpayers fund. “Gisahing tayo sa sariling mantika”.
Time to reform electoral process. [click here]
Indeed.
Intentions to run for public office should be expressed very early on. Forget the prescribed ‘official campaign period’ (it’s a joke anyway)) and allow candidates fundraise whenever they want to start with a cap on the maximum amount of donations per person (no more than P100,000 total to multiple candidates perhaps).
Also, the longer campaign will allow for more scrutiny of the candidates until the only one left standing will be the one on whom no mud sticks. (Admittedly, this may also produce thick-skinned megalomaniacal candidates rather than Howard Deans and John Edwards who gracefully surrender losing causes)
Yet, the problem of auditing and policing the books rears its ugly head again. The Ombudsman can’t even compile accurate SALNs.
Dean:
Very perceptive analysis on AKP, which now is personally relevant to the hometown. One of its senatorial candidates is a respected elder here, having been born and raised under the quiet tutelage of the local Jesuit community. Having known him for life as both friend and neighbor, he certainly deserves the position. But ….
I suppose money is still the ugly beast to do battle with.
It is happening here locally, where we are supporting the Noy/Mar local LP counterparts. Minus financial backing, the battle is very uphill. Hopefully going through the money-free routes like the Internet through social networking tools like FaceBook, YouTube, and even Twitter, and other grassroots methods, some traction can be made. We hope to duplicate what Massachusetts’ Scott Brown did, making real the unthinkable by making liberal and aggressive use of such tools.
59 days left!
Running for office just for the FUND of it.
Utang na loob na lang ng mga pobreng Pilipino kung maglilingkod sila sakaling ganap na mauuto ang mga botante, :(
Dean,
I enjoy your vocabulary. And Latin is such a wonderful language, especially considering that it is dead, yet always able to put exclamation thoughts to ordinary speech, and fun to figure out.
Now if Filipinos just get their 114 dialects to migrate in that direction, dead but endlessly amusing and hauled out now and then to make a point, the country will take a giant step toward unity.
Your commentary drives me back to my earlier theme that we live in a distorted world where truth is irrelevant and gain is everything. Money is both the means and motive for legislator behavior, for sure. That so few representatives actually show up for work in the hallowed halls is consistent with the view that public service is really not much of a motive.
I have come to realize of late that even my own education was a distortion, for what was left out of teachings in American history. I was not taught that President McKinley was a racist. I had to move to the Philippines to learn that slap-in-the-face.
Trust . . . the bond of honor . . . these currencies appear to mean less and less in real life. Only in the foxhole, where reality is stark and cannot be shaped by a sound bite, do those qualities rise. I suppose that is why Americans are so supportive of their soldiers. They know that the troops do what their representatives, and maybe they themselves, fail to do. I don’t know if Filipinos have the same sense of appreciation for their soldiers.
End of random babble. QED, not.
Joe
Sarah Vowell, in her book, “Assassination Vacation”, mentions that McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, found disparaging the fact that the Philippine-American war erupted over U.S. occupation of the Philippines, saying “It does not harmonize with the teaching in our schools about our flag”.
macapili,
Fascinating. Maybe it is the rage of finding out one has been played for a fool.
Thanks.
Joe
Dean, your title reminds me of the first filipino student activist, Felipe Buencamino (M.B., any relations?), who was jailed for shouting inside the Santo Tomas classroom, “down with the dead languages.”
Joe Am and Macapili,
Latin is no longer taught at the Ateneo save for special classess offered for the Honor sections. It was still offered when I was there in High School back in the seventies but again, only to the Honor sections. The professor was Onofre Pagsanghan who is now in his late seventies, and, I might add, still at the old school teaching drama.
Because Latin is a dead language it cannot be practiced by speaking. But the two years that we had taught us another discipline while learning it. Latin, because of its complexity, is close to learning mathematics, or as, my class described it, its verbal calculus.
One politician who reads my columns says that the occassional Latin I throw in gets him to exercise. At least, it gets an 80 years old plus Joker Arroyo to stand up and walk to a dictionary just to understand what I had just written.
Nice to know that we can still get senators to do some things on their own.
Quod erat demonstratum (an expression used by mathematicians more than old Jesuits)
Dean
Dean,
I learned more about English in two years of Latin than in 12 of English. Alas, my brain does not hold onto as much as yours, so I mainly go around muttering hic haec hoc . .
Regards,
Joe
Were we luckier because we had 4 years of it in HS?
For me personally, Latin continues to have close relevance especially in English since in learning new English words, I first try to find it if they have Latin roots or radicals. And in most instances they do, so from there I get my initial understanding of the new words.
Here’s a funny anecdote regarding the word “eleemosynary”.
In a bid to stump me, somebody asked me the meaning of that word. Of course, I did not know it then. But making a wild guess from its root “leemos” and thinking it was related to our local word of “limus”, I said it must be “relating to alms”.
And I got it right. And it indeed comes from Medieval Latin.
Amadeo,
And I guess because of that the opposite applies to “limousine”.
Dean
BTW, the reason we didn’t have the requisite four years is because when they saw we were getting failing QPIs by the second year, they gave us a choice among Latin, German and Japanese. Since my homeroom teacher was a Jesuit, Fr. Francis Sazaki, SJ, who was Japanese, we took Nihongo instead.
Thus, watashi wa gakusei no nihonjin arimasu.
Dean
Dean:
Your Japanese of course sounds Greek to me.
And also BTW, our 3rd year moderator, Fr. T. Green (You probably know him or of him, he died quite recently in ADMU)having finished his Latin lessons early in the year, started us on Greek for a few sessions.
Great, a Latin quoting Japanese speaking Filipino who understands energy and writes like Mr. Pulitzer hisself.
Seems a lot like character to me . . .
Joe