Calling all Ninjas

So President Aquino bought a Porsche, and this made you angry. When you saw the news on TV, maybe your blood pressure spiked, or maybe you squirted hot coffee out of your nose as you read about it in the paper, you were so raging furious.

And why shouldn’t you? After all, it’s your coffee, your nose, your life.

So you go, “Ok, we agree on nose-squirting. But what about the poverty? The suffering? Surely, in these lean times, the decision to buy a luxury car can only be made in poor taste, yes?”

No! I, for one, would like to see the President (not just the current one, but any President) become filthy stinking rich and be able to buy all the fancy cars and houses his or her heart desires.

And why not? I mean, being President just seems like such an incredibly difficult job, if not an impossible one. Just think about some of the things that we keep expecting the President to do:

• Make the poor richer (or less poor.) The gov’t does this by giving stuff away. But since the gov’t has no stuff of its own to give, the stuff has to come from somewhere else. Meaning, the taxpaying peasants.
• Develop Philippine culture. How? Again, by giving stuff to people who will do the developing. (What the hell is Philippine culture anyway? I’m Filipino and I use a cellphone. Are Nokia and Samsung part of Philippine culture? Should they be getting subsidies from the gov’t? What about their competitors? Maybe we should create a Bureau for Figuring Out Which Parts of Philippine Culture are Really Really Filipino and Which Ones Aren’t Really Filipino (BFOWPPCRRFWOARRF for short))
• Defend us from ruffians. This is actually doable, and we’re already doing it, though apparently not very well. For starters, I recommend more funds for Level 1 Ninja Training (see Kung Fu Panda starring Jack Black for edutainment.)
• Increase government spending in education. Since the government only has so much stuff to redistribute at any given time, putting more stuff into education means putting less stuff into stopping crime. So basically you can choose between a half-baked education and a half-trained ninja.
• Lower taxes. Since lower taxes means the gov't has less stuff to give away, this conflicts directly with ... ummmm ... all of the above.

That’s a pretty short list, but it’s pretty easy to see how complicated the job can be. The job basically consists of figuring out who gets how much while trying to convince the peons to surrender more stuff for the greater good.

So if we’re going to expect someone to manage the redistribution of stuff in the Philippines, I think it’s only fair to make sure that person gets deliriously rich in the process.

Besides, it’s really not that hard. There are like 100 million people in the country more or less. Would you pay P1 a year to support your president? I would. That’s half a text. Then whenever a President gets criticized for buying something fancy, we'll all just say "Oh you're so KJ naman. He needs to enjoy his money so we can all have better-trained ninjas."