JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

The taxi ride to Bonifacio Global City took less than ten minutes, but in that short span our cabbie managed to cram current events, corruption, religion, and thought police into his spiel.

“There should be a computer that monitors what people are thinking!” he declared while AM radio announcers discussed the search for a replacement for the late Interior and Local Government Secretary Jesse Robredo. (We wondered if he’d seen Minority Report.) “So when a politician accepts a bribe, everyone will know about it, and he will be shamed.”

“If they are capable of shame,” we pointed out. “The corrupt seem pretty proud of themselves.”

“Then they should be assassinated!” the taxi driver said. “We finally get an honest official and he dies.”

“If only he’d taken the bus,” we mused.

“You know what happened?” He proceeded without waiting for an answer. “Robredo was a good man and devoutly religious so he had no fear. He put his life in his god’s hands and accepted his fate. He didn’t recognize danger, he thought he would be protected.” The taxi driver shook his head vehemently. “It’s bad people who worry about their safety. Because they have reason to! That’s why they’re always surrounded by security guards.”

In a snap the cabbie had solved the mystery of why the good die young and the bad live long.

“If they ask me to become President of the Philippines I’d say yes immediately,” he went on. “I would sign a contract. For six years everyone has to do exactly what I say. If at the end of those six years I haven’t fixed the Philippines, they should cut off my head!”

What a radical idea. Then he went on about how only a dictatorship would work in the Philippines because we are an insubordinate, hard-headed people who will break the rules if we can get away with it. We reached our destination before he could tell us how to establish a fascist state. He gave us the exact change, though, unlike many cabbies who claim to be nice.