A Nation of Old Farts

Okay, finally a topic you can give me credit for understanding. I live each day, an old fart. You cannot challenge my perspective or upbringing because I got upbrought this far and aim to be a crusty curmudgeon for a while longer. It is an honor we, the arthritic class, gain by surpassing some 95 percent of the youngsters who infest the planet with their overbearing lack of experience and know-how. Allow me to apply some skilled curmudgeoning here.

The ruling class of the Philippines is swarming with old farts who cement the power structure with ancient ways and means, stubbornly insisting that they are more important than the nation and refusing to move forward at any price. Humble is not a word these old guy's know. Ego is their game.

The old farts who anchor the Philippine establishment - mostly they are guys; generals, legislators, businessmen, mayors, priests and judges – seem always to be hunched over the podium orating. I don't know why they all hunch like that; maybe it's curvature of the spine that afflicts the aged. Their faces furl in a frown as if humor or compassion were venom of the soul. Call their wisdom into question and they arch into a bitter diatribe that is meant to destroy, nothing less; when they get back to their desks, they are likely to phone in a hit man.

Which is why journalism is such a risky business in the Philippines.

You see, what happens as you age is that the synapses in the brain that connect logic with perception calcify. This physiological phenomenon is known as caustic encrustation of the inner humility lobe. So old farts can no longer play witness to their own shortcomings. Can't even see them. All they have is memories that they keep reliving like a scratched CD reliving like a scratched CD reliving like a scratched CD circling again and again back to the same data. Nothing new can enter the brain. Like solutions to problems; they are blocked by the calcified synapses. Like proactive forward thinking; brain dead.

I have quite regularly recommended legislative acts that I think would do the Philippines good. One is a Judicial Empowerment Act that doubles the budget of Judiciary to free up the courts to rule that breaking the law is actually wrong. Today some 300,000 cases are backlogged with witnesses dying daily and evidence rotting away. Another measure I've shrilly cited is a Fair Employment Law that bans the hiring of friends, family and favorites. Incestuous hiring is the main cause of mediocrity in the Philippines as skill and ambition are supplanted by uncles, cousins and classmates.

But not one soul, not one, has echoed this call. No one evidently sees that a society and economy built on rotten wood MUST collapse. From this I conclude that most bloggers in the Philippines are well on their way to calcification, too. I don't know if that is only because old farts can afford computers, so all the bloggers are decrepit, of if calcification is genetically advanced in the Philippines and sets in about age 18. Certainly, one would look at the universities and say there is not much innovation or push for progressive society coming from those ivied halls. Is it ivy? Maybe it's not ivy. Perhaps it's those horrid jungle vines that grow about a foot a day with thorns up and down that latch onto your clothes or eyeballs with barbed stingers that ensure several days of pain.

Yes, probably that's why not much goes on in the vine-enshrouded halls. Students are on the defensive.

It seems to me the rigidly quiet and obedient students wouldn't know how to protest FOR anything if their lives and careers depended on it. Which they do. They are cemented into place and the place is singing and dancing. Evidently they suffer from severe caustic encrustation of the inner ambition lobe.

The youth of the Philippines are synaptically challenged, locked in a perpetual do-loop of no useful function and no “end” command, unable to see how to build a progressive society.

The Philippines is a nation of old farts bopping around in young bodies, and old farts shuffling along in ancient bodies. Some might conclude that the whole country is senile.* I would never do that, of course.

Too many parties going on . . .

Doctor Joe, O.F.E.

*Standard apology offered to those who do not deserve to be so painted with this generalized brush, said brush being slopped against the canvas to make a stinging intellectual point, not insult anyone personally. Said differently I would merely beg that younger people do all they can do to get the calcified old farts out of the way and work to build a modern, fair, productive nation. And for the love of God, DO SOMETHING specific and constructive. Get a goal on the national table and work for it. Fair Employment, for example. Stop allowing those narrow minded, compassion deficient, crusty old farts to place incompetent friends, family and favorites smack dab in the middle of YOUR career path.