I have never been that interested in politics. The last time I exercised this sacred right was in 1974. I also remember Joema Sison visiting Zamboanga in the later Sixties, and asking me if I was interested in heading a Kabataang Makabayan chapter in my hometown. I declined, saying I was a poor, pure aesthete, something to that effect.
I was at UP in the mid-Sixties, and Sison, a poet, would occasionally invite us to read poems in Lyceum where he taught.
Where I was at most at least a lukewarm voter, I was a passionate chess player.
Chess?
Here’s explaining my mentioning these two disparate things, politics and chess, in one breath:
Being a chess player, I am sensitive to cheating. I’ve been cheated at least three times in competitive chess, and the feeling it left me with was distressing, more metaphysical than physical.
The game of chess is a grail-intense quest for truth. There have been great exceptions though, so exceptional as to be freakish, the great example being Kasparov apparently (camera couldn’t have lied) taking back a move in his game against Judith Polgar in the Eighties.
Everybody hurts, the song goes. In politics, one can, with justification, adjust that to read Everybody lies. In politics (life in general), I guess one can’t win a race on gusts of altruism, eh?
So much lying it’s hard to follow the thread of truth if you can even get to a start.
But enter the ballot, last bastion of truth, at least if we trust the genius of democracy.
(I confess to not being completely at peace with the idea of rule by majority but since I have nothing better to offer by way of alternative, I might as well keep my IQ shut.)
Not that he will get my vote — I can’t vote because I did not register — but this appears to be the truth at the moment:
Duterte looks the certain winner.
Vox populi, etc.
In chess, you resign when you lose. In politics, you concede.
To me the question is, Will the losers concede?
Not at this point, but at the point when the lead is, as the adjective goes, ‘insurmountable’.
Doesn’t look like. Already there’s talk of him not lasting long as president of the Republic, of people power.
What about the will of the people? Wouldn’t that break their hearts?
Here’s turning to the dreamer in me. I threw the I-Ching coins and asked:
What happens after the counting of ballots is done?
This what I got:
Hexagram 40 Deliverance (Hsieh)
Which says:
“The obstacle has been removed, the difficulties are being resolved. Deliverance is not yet achieved; it is just in its beginning, and the hexagram represents its various stages.”
Oracular being oracular we don’t really get what that means, do we?
But my throw gave me a changing line, the one at the top, the sixth, and thus, also a second, new hexagram:
Hexagram 64 Before Completion (Wei Chi)
“This hexagram indicates a time when the transition from disorder to order is not yet completed. The change is indeed prepared for, since all the lines in the upper trigram are in relation to those in the lower. However, they are not yet in their places. While the preceding hexagram offers an analogy to autumn, which forms the transition from summer to winter, this hexagram presents a parallel to spring, which leads out of winter’s stagnation into the fruitful time of summer. With this hopeful outlook the Book of Changes comes to its close.”
Hmm…
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