“Charity for the Love of God, good gentlemen and ladies!”
These are words I recited as a character of an operetta our school presented way back in the 1960s. I played the role of a pauper and the scene was a site of squalor—a city street corner where I and a host of other beggarly people posted ourselves begging for alms from passersby. Up and about the street were street urchins who could be identified by their catcalls as they acted their rowdy roles.
The subsequent actions in the street scene projected certain daintily dressed gentleman and lady accompanied by a coterie of pretty attendants bringing with them goodies for the street dwellers’ excitement and short-lived satisfaction, even as they merrily sang ”We Are at Heaven’s Door”.
The play ended with the same squalid street scene, but this time it was peopled by a new generation of paupers and another younger generation of street urchins in the usual beggarly trade, singing the finale song “Waves of Fate”.
The acts of politicians now vying for top positions in the presidential elections next year are no different from the daintily dressed gentleman and lady in the play, coming into the site of squalor in the city, exhibiting their gentlest looks of commiseration in their eyes, the most sympathetic words of comfort on their lips, beating even the most melodious psalm from the bible.
It’s campaign period, minus the announcement by the Comelec. And there’s no way you can distinguish between a social worker from a religious institution of charity and a staff officer from the DSWD. But with the usual cunning of a salamangkero, the campaign expense could not have been detected if extracted from government coffers, because the campaign sorties are made to appear as part of their respective government projects and programs as bureaucrats.
The common vocabulary mumbled by the political marketing stunts is “may malasakit”— in Cebuano, “mabination… maunongon”. To the pitch of a priest’s homily, these politicos now on rampa under the TV center lights would sing the same jingles in still other elections in the future. And there’s no end to the paeans of “Charity for the Love of God!”— a vicious cycle in a an operetta of grand deception and foolery until the threshold of hell masquerading as paradise.
