Lemonade-serving car dealers

If you want to buy a brand new vehicle, you might consider getting it from the Isuzu dealer at Commonwealth Avenue, Quezon City. This is a company that delivers a brand new Isuzu Crosswind to a client with a clearly badly-chipped, brand new door, a brand new steering wheel with too much play – increasing the probability of an exciting life-threatening situation as one drives on our high-speed highways – and a brand new diesel engine that idles incredibly roughly on the smoothest roads. (Those who favor a therapeutic, spine-shaking massage while in an automobile at rest must appreciate this special feature – a genuinely rough idle – best of all. )

This is also a dealer that offers to register your brand new vehicle as a come-on service and then makes you wait for its license plates indefinitely. The dealer repeatedly alludes to the inability of the Land Transportation Office to furnish such plates as an excuse for procrastinating on its promised service. However, even where a law-abiding client is himself forced to make a call to LTO Assistant Secretary Roberto Lastimoso and the latter commendably authorizes an immediate pick-up of the legally-required plates, this Isuzu dealer chooses to ignore the facilitative information, does not pick up the client’s now available vehicular plates and forces the latter either to drive his brand new Isuzu Crosswind with legal impediments or to keep it indefinitely mothballed in his garage.

The most exquisite thing about this Isuzu dealership and its sales people is that, having given you a fantastic lemon, you are supposed to succumb to their hallucinogenic rhetoric and believe that you are being served a most refreshing lemonade. They actually expect their mesmerized clients to be thankful for their presumably classy service!

There is much similarity, if not outright identity, between most car dealers and most politicians in this country. Most of these two subspecies are clearly descended from an even lower life form – much, much lower than the corona virus responsible for SARS. The ancestral entity must have a remarkable talent for dissemblance, misrepresentation and self-serving illusions, all genetic traits passed on to most of our contemporary politicians and car dealers. (The few exceptions that happen to be truthful and honest are excellent mutations that must not be mistaken for the species’ normal forms.)

Thus, even as they sucker their trusting preys – a liberally-minded and generous-to-a-fault constituency one might say – they foist the myth that what they provide is a vitally-needed, must-be-appreciated public service. They actually make their constituency suck on the bitterest lemon and yet would enjoin the latter to be grateful for an illusory lemonade. Car dealers of the Commonwealth Isuzu type and most of this commonwealth’s traditional politicians are wont to speak of the great "sacrifices" they make in behalf of their target public. Properly scrutinized, these trumpeted ‘sacrifices" almost always sacrifice the public and their legitimate interests.

For quite sometime now, people everywhere have recognized the need for protecting themselves against these predatory creatures. There have been attempts in many societies to activate consumer protection movements and similar strategies that would exact public accountability from pernicious politicians as well as unscrupulous merchants.

Except in a few cases, however, such efforts have not been very successful. Most of the time, corrupt politicians and unabashedly exploitative businessmen have taken their public constituency or clients for a ride, robbing them blind as the horrible ride goes on and throwing them out as they – the ride managers – please.

Consumer protection movements have to be better organized, whether the beneficiaries one has in mind be simple purchasers of material goods and ordinary services or stakeholders in a fragile political enterprise called democratization. To effectively neutralize unscrupulous car dealers as well as plundering politicians, the public has to be more knowledgeable about the nature and dynamics of their operations. There has to be a continuing, up-to-date public education regarding the natural lairs, the preferred lifestyle and the extortionist practices of these creatures.

Beyond education is organized, collective action. People have to learn techniques of focused fumigation, effective quarantining and permanent extermination applying to these public menaces. History shows that compassion, gentleness and vacillation cannot stamp them out as the species appears to be highly recedivist and beyond rehabilitation.

Public exposure is a sine qua non for dealing with these pernicious elements. Like other creatures spawned by darkness, forcing them to come out in the light irrevocably destroys them. Whether they be constitution-undermining or plundering presidents or doubletalking, mercenary car dealers, there is a good chance that publicly-enforced transparency will flush them out of their lairs and then – in the full light of day – they can try to run but they can no longer hide.

Functional democracies and decent car dealerships are not strange or even casual bedfellows. They are both deeply embedded in the well-deserved confidence of an empowered citizenry, a people that has learned to exact accountability from themselves, their institutions and the very authorities that are necessary for any society to be effectively governed.

Such a people can make refreshing lemonades, but they will not take kindly to those who have nothing to offer but lemons, whether these be presidents or car dealers.