IT TOOK A KOREAN TO DIAGNOSE OUR National problem correctly: our country has not progressed as much as it should, given our vast national resources and talented human capital, because we do not love our country enough. A popular Korean telenovela—“Queen Seon Deok”—has the queen giving up her natural human desire to marry the man she loved, because that may detract from her will and resolve to fulfill her vision and dreams for her nation. And in the financial crisis of the 1990s, many Koreans donated their gold to the government to help it pay its national debt. That indicates how much they love their country, and the ideals they expect from a national leader.

Comes now Noynoy Aguino, whom we have elected president on the basis of his campaign against corruption (which a World Bank study estimates to result in a loss of around P40 billion a year to the government) and his being the son of heroic parents. This corruption runs dark and deep from the lowest to the highest echelons of the bureaucracy, as everybody who has dealt with government will tell you. It will take a lot of resolve, political will, wisdom and focus to excise this deeply ingrained national malaise from our country.

Can Noynoy do it? We all hope and pray that he can. But if he cannot even have the personal resolve and will to quit smoking—which is a form of corruption creeping over his physical body that he subjects to around 2,000 carcinogens every time he smokes—can we reasonably expect him to have this focus and will to excise corruption from the national corpus, as it were? If he does not have the will and resolve to expunge the corruption of smoking from his own person, over which he has total control, can we expect him to have the much stronger will and resolve to expurgate the malaise of corruption from the nation, over which he does not have that total control?

And look at the message he is giving our people from his refusal to