I echo Nick’s call in a comment he made there:

Framing the debate is how many political strategists go about highlighting key aspects or what they want the voters to think are the aspects in any issue.

Indeed, frame the debate over an encompassing framework, not on narrow emotionally-appealing lines. People like Conrado de Quiros, for one, are very dangerous people because they propagate a retrospective approach to regarding politicians and their politics rather than one that is prospective (i.e. forward-looking).

This is something I highlight in my article Fixated on the past, or looking to the future? where I pose this challenge:

Are you going to vote on the basis of what a candidate was or what past events he/she is associated with? Or are you going to vote based on what a candidate envisions the future to hold for us?

To put this question in the proper perspective…

De Quiros’s and his ilk’s approach to thinking is the worst kind of deductive thinking — one based on incomplete data or information that is deliberately framed along narrow lines. It is the kind that routinely adds to the ballooning miseries of this world — from the assumptions made based on historic “trends” that resulted in horrific financial crashes to the it-can’t-happen-again attitude that characterises the safety strategy of the Philippines’ passenger shipping industry.

You frame a “debate” on a singular event, achievement, or cause that…

occurred in the past; and/or;

is based on outdated thinking;

… and you set yourself up for a tunnel-visioned approach to the future at best. It’s like reading about how Germany and Japan started World War II and then concluding that World War III will most likely be started by those two countries.

Certainly Filipinos deserve something better than an administration that, (a) derives its mojos from nothing more than poetry forged along the lengths of Edsa in 1986 and (b) likened to a janitorial service, ruling them over the next six years.

Here’s a case in point. It has come to light that Aquino is on a collission course with the Catholic Church on the issue of reproductive health. Simply put he is pro-choices and the Church is sticking with its 2,000-year-old guns. So is it still a good-vs-evil cause, Mr. de Quiros? That’s what you get when you contribute to the dumbing down of an entire society. Another cook has come to add a bit of salt and stir things up in that little pot of tamis-anghang broth you cooked up.

The Philippines is a large country made up of more than 90 million people. The worst one can do is be presumptious about what handful of “issues” are relevant to the “average” Filipino. We need a balanced scorecard approach to evaluating our politicians — specifically one that is prospective (i.e. encourages thinking around what a candidate envisions for the future) rather than one that is retrospective (i.e. focused solely on what he has done in the past, his credentials, or worse, his pedigree). The latter is how primitive societies think and the earlier is how progressive societies think.

Our duty as members of the so-called “intelligentsia” is to propagate the right frame of mind around which our people should regard the coming elections.

Here’s the latest product of our efforts to get more visual and therefore get the message across to a broader audience. The challenge of 2010 is not some kind of “laban” as some old-school pundits, “activists”, and politicians purport it to be. The challenge is maturity in the way we conduct ourselves as an electorate:

Download as a PDF file here!

Download, print, and DISSEMINATE the forces of enlightenment to Da Masa (and all Pinoys with no access to the Net)!

The voters are the final arbiters in this competition of ideas and personalities (mostly personalities). But at the end of the day, the leaders of a country merely reflect the character of their constituents — specially in a democracy.

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For, such moralistic formulations preempt and disparage the need for a careful and reasoned analysis of the problems that confront us as a nation. They tend to focus on the character of the doer than on the origins and consequences of the deed. They ride on unexamined moral prejudices, and simplify the search for political solutions into a quest for heroes. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo may be the most despised president in the nation’s history, but instead of ascribing to her sole authorship of everything that is bad in our government, I find it more arguable to think of her as a reflection of our society’s basic problems, or the street-smart personification of a dysfunctional social order.

Perhaps because I have seen what ‘evil’ professional purveyors of morality can and do perpetrate up close, I share David’s opinion. The Church has called pro-Reproductive Health advocates ‘evil.’ There is no reasoning with anyone who thumps the bible and calls on God as final arbiter on affairs of humankind. There is no room for debate and no room to unpack and balance ideas on what it means to be a mother and what a woman’s rights are vis-à-vis her husband, her family and the State.

There is no question that the Church played a significant party in the first People Power. Then, they also framed the Marcos regime as the evil empire to be toppled. Here, let me say I understand where Conrado de Quiros is coming from when he says the battle is that between good and evil:

The people who criticize Good and Evil presume completely unsophisticatedly and plain ignorantly that we think only with our conscious abstract mind, not with our unconscious image-making mind. They’re so busy looking at logistics, figures, organizational charts, they cannot appreciate the power of myth, symbol and archetype. Or the power of the storyline the ad agencies of the “presidentiables” are so desperate to find and mine for their candidates. The phrase “Good vs Evil” is merely a symbolic, mythical, archetypal, shorthand for a situation where the choice has become so stark, so life-and-death, it cannot be captured by trite and sullen articulations.

It was linguist George Lakoff who said our brains are structured to process information and to find meaning in metaphors. The human mind organizes thought by creating categories. For political purposes, Lakoff, a democrat, has written literature on how Republicans have successfully used language to frame many policy issues. It is understandable, then, that De Quiros is hammering the Good versus Evil frame. On the surface, this is a metaphor that has rung true among homo sapiens since they started walking upright. We categorize things as ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ if they harm us and ‘good’ if they don’t. In discerning the difference, we act accordingly.

Let me suggest then that David and De Quiros’ seemingly opposing views need not be irreconcilable. For the purposes of elections in these extraordinary times – the good versus evil frame will be useful. But for the purposes of governance, the day-to-day nitty-gritty of running a country, we might want to heed David’s appeal to careful reasoning.

And since history has shown we have no problem fighting the battle of Good verus Evil, then we might want to shore up our collective capacities to fight the more protracted battle of figuring out how we can function as a just and prosperous nation.

Come on now, dude. Grow a couple.

Lalaki naman tayong lahat dito, di ba? On the basketball court when the ball is passed to you and your team mates on cue carve out an opening for you to take a shot, what do you do? One thing’s for sure, I’d think twice about passing the ball to someone here, more so considering that Conrado de Quiros in his infinite wisdom had this to say about what the race for the top executive position in the land is really all about:

One e-mail I got put it this way: If you’re applying to become CEO of a company, you have to submit a résumé. What commends Noynoy to become CEO of this country?

I’ve written about this in past columns, but a couple more things need pointing out.

First off, the question, “Will Noynoy be a good CEO?” is a wrong one. The job at hand is not CEO of a company, it is janitor of a building. What this country needs today is not someone to manage things, it is someone to clean up things. What we need today is not someone to make a business flourish, it is someone to make a dwelling place habitable, one whose previous tenant left it in a condition only cockroaches, rats, and real-estate speculators, in ascending order of predation, can appreciate. Who better to do this than Noynoy? [my boldface]

Nice try, gramps. Not only do you push the bar of presidentiability so low one could trip over it, you simply further highlight that beyond being a “cleaner”, your cock does not possess a single iota of substance that the Intelligent Voter (which I presume most Pinoys aspire to be) can sink their teeth into.

You can raise and pump your yellow pom-poms all you like — or as far as your arthritic elbows can take it, dude. But the REAL challenge remains:

Platform, plez™

Why is it that some “columnist” can write a 3,000-word piece (or whatever the hell number of words it takes) to try to convince us that some bozo “can”, while it takes only two words to bring the whole fiesta down back to the ground where it belongs?

Perhaps some world-class perspective would help us in answering the above question:

In the 1960′s a NASA official said when asked why Americans were aiming for the moon:

Great nations do great things.

For his part, General Patton said this while pepping up the troops for an assault (pardon some minor literal/technical inaccuracies relative to the original quote):

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other dumb bastard die for his.

There is so much futile poetry written that so excrutiatingly attempts to prop up Pinoy pride. But when achievement robustly underpins one’s sense of nationhood, you only need a handful of irreverent words to say it all.

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Addendum:

Congratulations to Noynoy for taking the shot! Let’s just set the record straight on the subject of where that “winnability” is really coming from:

Courtesy: Utak ng Tilapia

Good luck, but don’t forget: Platform, plez™.

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