An SOS to Mr. Sarkozy

An SOS to Mr. Sarkozy from SUNDAY STORIES  By Marlen V. Ronquillo  

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.

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.