As it was, President Rodrigo Duterte’s speech turned out to be not so bad. For showing the human side of him, it might have been brilliant. That he affirmed: there will be no demolition (of squatters) without relocation was, for me, important. Otherwise, the whole speech seemed reassuring, almost placating, loaded as it were with promise such as political promises go. And one can hardly expect him to explain exactly how he was going to implement each and all these. But that’s okay. SONAs have always been a political side show, a play of words. And we all know it.
And so the more astute among us will certainly go beyond the words and look at the whole thing in a wider perspective. And then look at the gallery itself, the halls of Congress. There were the usual pomp and ritualistic pageantry — Bayan was there, as usual, if this time more collaborative than confrontational. They were not going to embarrass the new president by getting into a fight with security forces who were there, as usual, if hidden away from the cameras. This fact would be crucial to the script of such a narrative as we were going to view.
But inside the Halls of Congress itself, we saw something of a mix: a veritable rogue’s gallery giving salt to a cast of characters from over a century of Philippine history. There were the Macapagals, the Marcoses, Sotto, Ramos, Estrada, sitting next to old school politicians, Drillon, Pimentel, etc.; within the vicinity, new ones: scions of old political dynasties, and a spatter of the unexpected, Manny Pacquiao, and the so-far-anonymous. This, for all intents and purposes, is the political oligarchy of our country. Or at least the oligarchy who won in the last elections and are now back in power.
And they are ready to take on the next 6 years of our lives. And would we even wonder what will transpire?
Not the words themselves tell the whole story, nor show the real picture.
As Duterte himself explained in reference to the drug problem — but perhaps this is only metaphor for everything else — “The problem is enormous.”
Then he shakes his head and suggests, the problem is even more than can be contained in that limp sounding word — enormous. The big enemies are not even in our country. And so therefore out of reach of “death squads.” As with our other enemies: and I suggest here a reference to our other problems including the Spratly Islands, over which islands, the whole Pacific Rim nations including China and the US are at odds, to coin a euphemism.
Will a little war do us a little good? After today’s intonation of our beloved president’s best intentions, the national oligarchy will still be doing battle with each other, the world will still be at war. And we will still be in the middle of it. And yet, through the whole affair, I seemed to perceive a sense of tragedy in the man, a vulnerability, a feeling of love forlorn that he now sees exactly well after everything, and through the dark cloud of pathos that engulfs him.
Perhaps now he sees the pointlessness of it, the whole pointlessness of putting to death in anonymous street corners and hovels all over our nation so many thousands of poor addicted lives, at worse, street peddlers for our real enemies who are still out there and out of reach. All this, just to convince the gullible how change is really here. Even when what our eyes see is only the return to power of just the other half of our country’s real problems, which by inexorable twisting fate, by the inertia of ordinary politics, is now returned to us somewhat exactly like a Trojan gift.
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