Accents
Honesty: a lonely word
Two Rangers, retirees from Range (bureaucracy’s acronym for Regional Association of National Government Executives), met at the airport and compared notes. No comparing of data on one’s progress report vis-a-vis his slice of the regional domain. None of the hurried, harried type to sweeten the statistics. No more last minute make-up to make nice. Enough of the bureaucratic race against time and the insufferable complaints of one’s staff. Only leisurely, small talk on the rise and fall of the blood sugar and the sphygmomanometer, the balding pate, the right shade of tint, etc., etc. Not to forget the achievements of the grandkids. How many do you have now?
Conversation was refreshing until politics came into the picture. One of ‘em Rangers happens, or rather, was destined to be my roommate of 40 odd years, and he asked: Is your brother going to run again? (It seemed the brother being referred to, lost in the last elections.) The reply was confounding: “Magtu-on siya anay mangawat.” (He should learn first how to steal.) The subtext: Once he has amassed millions, then he can run again. The millions stashed away in his private coffers is, you guessed right, for vote-buying. Ah, politics! How can a term carry with it all the obnoxious connotations?
Magtu-on mangawat. How garapagal can you get? That is about the Filipino equivalent of the word coarse I could think of. Better to express this line of thinking in a foreign language. The thief. The Biggest Thief. Unsurpassed thievery in the annals of Philippine history. He/she is merely a runner-up. Second-placer only. How about that? The English language provides a certain detachment from the raw meaning. Oh, well, in the entablado, we can yell, revile and condemn all we can. In the most scathing lambasts yet.
Remember when “Titser” made us memorize Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. That was so long ago. Methinks honesty was in vogue then. And remember how the appellation Honest Abe was made to stick in our hard shells. Lincoln the honest school boy. Lincoln the father figure. Of our presidents, what label shall we pin? What designation? I lack words for something positive, except in the case of Cory Aquino: simple housewife, humble, uncorrupted. Mark Twain said, “An honest man [or woman] shines in politics than anywhere else.” Impervious to temptations, Cory proved Mark Twain right. Let’s hope the 2010 presidential winner will earn an indelible, inspiring, exemplary tag like Honest Abe, possessed of admirable honesty.
What is honesty? This meaning from the dictionary: the quality, condition, or characteristic of being fair, truthful, and morally upright. The thesaurus gives these synonyms: sincerity, truthfulness, integrity, openness, frankness, candor. Aye, truthfulness! How many transgressions have been committed in thy name?
The huge billboard beside the Molo church and another similarly worded billboard just as huge beside the Tanza church exhort right in the gut: BE HONEST... Even If Others Are Not. Even If Others Will Not. Even If Others Cannot. It seems the pulpit and the classroom and the home are not enough to instill honesty in our minds. Nor the folk wisdom the old delight to lecture the young: Honesty is the best policy. Neither did the biblical maxim, “The Truth shall make you free!” that has been inculcated in mankind for ages. “Magtu-on siya anay mangawat.” Omigosh!
I searched in the Internet as to the author of the billboard advice that sounded more like a command. It is not attributed to any particular person, not to Lincoln the Honest Abe, but to BCBP (Brotherhood of Christian Businessmen and Professionals) whose “main advocacy can be summed up in two elementary—yet difficult to follow—words: Be Honest. In posters hung in walls and in placards sitting on the desks of the thousands of BCBP members nationwide, the “Be Honest” campaign is further expanded in three lines: BE HONEST... Even If Others Are Not. Even If Others Will Not. Even If Others Cannot.” Hence, the proliferation of the Be Honest billboards in the country.
Does/Did the billboard reminder make a dent in the national consciousness? How goes the honesty index of candidates and voters? The BCBP itself concedes that its “main advocacy” is “difficult to follow.” Relevant to ask at this point how the businessmen themselves observe the honesty dictum in their businesses. How strict is their adherence to Truth in Packaging? Almost always, businessmen advertise in stunning superlatives that the poor end-users swallow hook, line and sinker, ditto almost always.
I like the advice of my friend Bill S. (who else but Shakespeare): “This above all: to thine own self be true,/And it must follow, as the night the day,/Thou cans’t not be false to any man “ That was Polonius to his son Laertes in the play Hamlet. Following Shakespeare may change Billy Joel’s mind as he sings Honesty is such a lonely word/Everyone is so untrue/ Honesty is hardly ever heard/And mostly what I need from you… I don’t want some pretty face/To tell me pretty lies/All I want is someone to believe...
Will the politicians and their ilk—and you and I for that matter—please make Billy Joel sing Honesty is alive and well?
(Email: lagoc@hargray.com)