For want of a battle

For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,” is the penultimate phrase of a short nursery rhyme and an old crusted idiomatic expression that illustrates the distorted trade-offs among choices that people make where they effectively surrender greater causes in pursuit of one lesser and more insignificant. The rhyme starts off with, “For want of a nail, a shoe is lost,” clearly depicts how the pursuit of the very petty can quite quickly escalate subsequent trade-offs and end up with far greater and encompassing losses. 

We’ve chosen to employ the simple truths behind this nursery rhyme to critique the choices that many constituencies, both within our shores and far off across the great Pacific, have taken in either choosing or rejecting leaders where such choice might lead to a far greater negativity.

In our own neck of the woods, the previous dispensation, from a bungling hands-off president to his chosen and anointed Cabinet person charged with maintaining peace, order and a society free of illegal drugs now seems to have allowed matters to deteriorate big-time. In response, the public, fearful for their safety, granted then-Davao City Mayor Rodrigo R. Duterte the largest mandate any Philippines president has ever enjoyed. For want of peace and order, consequently, over 3,500 vulnerable lives were summarily snuffed out on our streets and on the global stage, among the decent, we’ve been transformed into a laughable, albeit murderous and pathetic pariah.

Life is a series of trade-offs. Failing to measure consequences, not just in the immediate choices confronting us but far ahead along a complex calculus of unfortunate consequences, such Lemony Snicket trade-off losses can quickly escalate.

Across the Pacific, to forestall and preempt the profoundly damaging consequences of leaked classified correspondences that revealed one presidential candidate’s utter lack of honesty, on one end, and a deep contempt of constituencies, on another, bridged on both extremes by toxic quid-pro-quo wheeling and dealing with government agencies and the parlaying of political influence in exchange for foundation funding; in a televised debate, one candidate adeptly avoided and maneuvered discussions of national issues to one of argumentum ad hominem.

Admittedly, such issues are not quite as colorful as a sex scandal. They require intelligence. The media, in the United States as elsewhere, go for the lowest common denominators. The media love sleaze. Sex sells.

The party currently ahead in the US presidential polls has good reason to aggressively and quite brazenly employ even the most underhanded and disgusting means to bar its strongest contender and deny it the control of the White House. As one candidate had most eloquently described the tactics, the contest has turned existential and one side is battling to protect the style of governance it has long been accustomed to.

Given the unexpected Brexit movement and the latent and unexpected rise of a conservative non-politician in the United States, among a strong and resurgent anti-establishment sentiment that is not only spreading from coast to coast but has lit fires across the Atlantic, such defensive-offensive stances adopted by the American Democratic (DNC) party against even its own, former presidential contender Bernard Sanders, a devout socialist, is understandable.

Allow us to first discuss a few of the DNC’s reasons, if only to appreciate why it does what it does, in effect, inciting a virtual kitschy battle of the sexes as both a smokescreen and a dilatory ploy to protect itself even if that means the eventual loss of the DC Beltway to the utter detriment of the American constituency.

For one, latent email secrets revealed a disturbing “White House for Sale” money-making machine. The corruption involves peddling access to the White House for private corporations, foreign governments, even select government agencies where the transactional quid pro quo involves exchanging huge sums of money flowing to a private foundation swapped for policy statements such as an “open border” policy for south American states, choice appointments for government agencies and its select officers, and special access to sitting presidents by foundation donors.

For another, the secrets now out in the open expose a president who obviously lied about what he knew and when he learned of criminal breaches in security protocols where he himself had communicated sensitive and classified information through un-secure and unofficial media.

From the petty to the grand, such criminality founds a deeply ingrained business model hidden in the existing establishment where officials feel that the laws apply to all but not to them. To protect this bureaucratic lifestyle of the rich and the politically powerful, they’ve thrown the current presidential debate into one that focuses on sexual impropriety and personal attacks.

For want of a media battle of the sexes, the chance for genuine bureaucratic reform is lost.