How tempting to say that all hell has broken loose, when we associate hell with fire and all we get is water. Like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, the scene continues to be horrific in its freakishness. The final touch: More than 200 corpses floating out of their coffins and tombs in the cemetery, and out to sea in Botolan, Zambales.

The surrealism is magnified by the uncharacteristic silence of political candidates who, in a flash, realized that since there was little they could do, they might as well not talk about it. If there is one politically good thing to come out of this epic calamity, it would have to be candidates rethinking their ambitions to “serve” the country.

Consider. A large part of Luzon, including NCR, still under water. More than R10 billion in property destroyed, not counting the damage to crops, lost business, and the unimaginable scale of human misery. Who wants to lead or serve a country so badly damaged, so poor, so helpless?

And yet typhoon Ondoy presented an opportunity for voters to see what “their” candidates did during the crisis. Did they disappear? If they did, was it to hide from the glare of publicity showing them as good Samaritans, or to hide from their constituents at an inconvenient time? Did they hide because the sight of the devastation overcame their usually loquacious tongues and stunned them into inaction? Did they stay home because anyway the job was the National Disaster Coordinating Council’s?

The NDCC chairman, who happens to be a presidential candidate, now knows, better than any of the others, the full import and weight of the work that awaits the winner in 2010 – for Secretary Gilbert Teodoro a baptism not by fire but by immersion.

And the more detractors complain that government was slow in providing rescue and relief, the more he stands out as a highly focused, more than competent public official on whom has fallen the onerous task of handling a monumental problem despite a paucity of materials, machines and money. Which of his rivals would’ve wished to be in his shoes?