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If brain trafficking is allowed under
globalization, we should hurry up and scribble a note to the
president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and make an urgent plea.
We should ask that the slivers of
brain to be spliced off from the French intellectuals under
France’s “think less and work more” current mood should be
sold or donated to the Philippines under preferential terms. There
is no country that needs it more than the Philippines, we should
tell the French, which is exactly the truth.
Instead of stockpiling somebody
else’s trash, we should go for the French brain—tons upon tons
of it—to enrich the intellectual wasteland, Asia’s Sahara of the
Bozart, which our country has become.
The benefits from such bold act
of importing brains from the land of Descartes will more than offset
the initially pathetic condition of having to draw from somebody’s
else’s brain to prop up the barely functioning local ones.
We will definitely suffer from
the initial embarrassment but the dividends we will reap later will
be awesome.
I will give you a case in point.
Propping up the vice president of
the republic with brain power will enable him to represent his
president in global trips, international investment road shows,
invitations for Philippine dignitaries and the like.
He can speak before the United
Nations, go to Davos and exchange views with the world’s most
powerful and influential people, discuss anything—from global
terror to global warming—in the world’s most prestigious forums.
Such proxy work for his president
will give the president more time to do whatever she intends to do
to turn the country around in the last three years of her term.
Right now the
vice-president—which in previous regimes had the role of being the
public face of the Philippine republic—is mostly photographed
along railroad tracks and newly cleared slum colonies, giving out
land titles, pandering to the great mass like a town councilor.
We have never seen a vice
president playing out a more miserable, less-dignified role than the
present one. Barely educated Erap was in his days as vice-president
the anticrime czar.
The brains imported from France
will also enrich the discourses in the two chambers of Congress,
which have failed to produce a single fresh and bold public policy
advocacy in a long, long while.
With ample brain power in the two
chambers, there is this big chance that much of its deliberations
will shift from the three Ps—payola, pork and perks—to issues of
substance and reforms.
It will definitely raise the
level of discourse among the presidential contenders in 2010, which
level of talk has all but validated George Orwell’s take that
political language is either bad language or mediocre language.
Just look at the reality at
ground level.
A top presidential contender has
anchored his presidential dream (and his attendant political talks)
on cheap medicines, as if it were the cure all for his prostrate
nation. This is not even a whole program but a mere fragment of the
broader and loftier policy of health care but the candidate is not
bothered by this.
He is, after all, in pursuit of a
campaign gimmick that he and his handlers could market in a
presidential run and not after a true program of national
reconstruction.
The other top contender is busy
building alliances with all sorts of political scum. The careless
words spewed to justify the alliances have further demeaned
political discussion and discourse.
At this point, we do not even
care on whether the brain imports from France will arrive as CKD or
CBU. We just want them in.
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