In a weak riposte to critics of her rich pre-debut pictorial in Malacañang that was accented by eyebrow-raising use of symbols of our republic, presidential granddaughter Isabelle Duterte tried to deflect attention from herself.
“I hope you do something useful with the freedom you’re given, other than making hateful comments and carry[ing] so much unnecessary weight on your shoulders,” Isabelle wrote.
“I hope you will find the maturity to focus on more [alarming] issues and not [on] a 17-year-old girl. Try to be useful.”
The comment, posted on Isabelle’s Twitter handle grossly misunderstands the spirit behind the smackdown.
Objectors do not begrudge Isabelle’s exercise of prerogative, as a birthday celebrator, to have pictures by which to remember her attainment of the age of majority.
What vexes us about the loud glamour is how it crushes any hope of substance to her grandfather’s demonstrations of simplicity, particularly his near-iconic use of checkered work clothes for which crowds acclaim him as the most modest among our heads of state.
Clearly now, all that, together with his rants against opulent public servants is mere posturing.
Isabelle’s fashion show signifies President Rodrigo Duterte’s willingness to give his family free rein to promote a lifestyle of using access to a public venue to advance personal interest.
Her use in supposedly private photographs of presidential and republican symbols reserved by the law to the President and Vice President signals a blurring at the Palace of the boundaries between the personal and the official.
This is worrying because similar situations have a history of predisposing otherwise legitimate leadership towards nepotism.
Note, too, that Isabelle’s unfortunate pictorial became current when the country is suffering the deadly and devastating aftermath of the storm Urduja.
We hope she is willing to learn a thing or two from at least one celebrity debutante. Liza Soberano’s 2015 debut was celebrated with abandoned kids, with the elderly in a home and with breast cancer patients and survivors.
Otherwise, Isabelle can stick to her retort, forget that Malacañang was not built to be her catwalk and echo her grandfather’s words to protesters from the transport sector: “Suffer in poverty and hunger. I do not care.”
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