 |
| photo from http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/571910/news/specialreports/scenes-from-president-rodrigo-duterte-s-inauguration |
1. On Behalf of Inang Bayan Kuno
Pero teka, teka, teka, mali yata ang
script na binabasa ko. Dapat pala, kung sang-ayon tayo sa script ng pamahalaan
ni Rodrigo Duterte, ang Amerika ang hinihingan natin ng apology saaaa . . .
let’s see . . . ah, alam ko na . . . sa atrocities nito sa Bud Dajo noong taong 1906. So sige, heto na: Amerika, tang-ina
mo ka, padala ka ng padala ng aid pero di ka pa rin nag-aapologize sa
Bud Dajo, tang ina at ama mo rin ka! Go to hell!
Ok na ba yon? Yey! Rak en rol!
2. An "I" Persona
KUNG IHAHAMBING MO ang Rodrigo Duterte
script na ito sa, say, Noynoy Aquino script o kahit sa Fidel Ramos script noon, makikita rin natin na ang Rodrigo Duterte script ay karaniwa’y isang “I”
persona script, as against the former presidents’ conventionally “we” personae
scripts. But of course we can argue that, in effect, all presidential scripts,
whether presented in the ‘I’ mode or in the ‘we’ mode, are all largely
dictatorial products of the dictatorial presidential system, and are thus all
“I” persona scripts at the end of the day (dictating the president’s will upon
the nation through either threat of violence, threat of being denied funding,
or threat of legalist suit).
So one could say that Duterte’s
“I”-based script is simply more honest, or vulgarly forward, if you will, about
it. Or simply more cognizant of the fact that presidential personae are largely
all ultimate products of the big “I” hype manufactured by the star system that
defines the presidential system as the most star system-reliant form of
representative democracy. Duterte’s cognizance and embrace of that privilege
now wallows in the very depth of the hype, or at the summit of it, almost as if
to test its limits.
Thus Rodrigo Duterte is now wont to
utter such lines as "I might break up with America" or "I might
go to China and Russia instead" and "I only want to be at peace with everybody, doing business with everybody, and no quarrels with anybody" in reference to a
desire for "an independent foreign policy” for the Philippines. And as if
to hide the kingly grandiosity in these pronouncements, at one of his speeches
for his police camp audience (as he’s been wont to visit the police camps of
the country since day 1), he recently said, referring to the “insulting” United
States and European governments’ criticism of his war on drugs, "when you
insult the President of the Republic of the Philippines you also insult the
Filipino people." Really?
I am beginning to wonder if all this honesty
from the “I” persona of Duterte’s script also means that Rodrigo Duterte now
regards himself as independent of the Filipino people's opinion, post-election,
so independent in fact as to be able to unilaterally decide on such things as what
happens to the Philippines (which he now seems to consider as his) and the Filipino
people (whose brains he seems to now consider as connected to his, irrespective
of their current individual desires). The thought of referenda on anything
major be damned, and fuck even a bit of decrease on his still-high approval
rating, and a spit of phlegm perhaps on thoughts of a coup that might
subsequently try him for treason. His government has said it not a few times:
he was elected by a large majority of the Filipino people, which by his
understanding gave him the license (given by that large majority), or prior
approval, to do whatever he announced he’d do during the campaign and things he
intends to do now and henceforward, ostensibly all for the betterment of the
Filipino nation that he loves (often completing such a pronouncement of love with
a gesture of touching the flag behind him on a stage in a visited police camp
somewhere). But this should not be a surprising proposition, given that that’s
precisely the attitude that presidential systems and presidentialism expect
presidents to don, post-election.
3. Braggadoccio
Well, unang-una, there's no such
thing as aid na walang kapalit (which kapalit might take the form of export or
import concessions); madalas din ang aid ay synonym for a loan/debt.
My friend Hubert Posadas, a security
consultant, commented on a post of mine on Facebook on this subject and wrote:
“There will be a trade-off, and it will work if we are a country united.
However, he could have done it more smoothly, without creating overt tension
and hostility in a growingly threatening climate. In a country rich with
natural resources, we have become addicted to aid, which has only perpetuated our
being a natural resource-rich country with a poor populace, a country exporting
natural resources without added value and buying it back as finished products
we could have created ourselves (thus a country importing produce we can actually
produce on our own), a country furthermore exporting fathers and mothers to
become slaves abroad and leaving a generation of kids without guidance in
return for material goods that addle our children's brains. . . . We are
addicted to aid to the point that we do not learn to manage what we have for
our collective good, never questioning businesses that perpetuate this cycle
where only the few oligarchs and industrialists prosper. We never question the
control that AID and Borrowing creates for the Lendor, believing in the
institutions that create the machinery that exploit us, how the World Bank
loans us on paper money they never really give as we hire their contractors and
pay their services with siphoned resources. We never understand our complicity
in the deaths of other civilians around the world that suffer a war for
pretended causes just because they have resources our big brother wants. We
have to ween ourselves from these addictions.”
I WON’T COMMENT on my
friend Hubert’s trust and optimism towards the Duterte thrust towards China
away from the West, if that’s what he meant by his first sentence, nor would I
comment on his preference for a more statesman-like Duterte mouth (especially
as I suspect it is all from a script suggested by the President’s targeted main
creditor and possibly foreign election campaign donor, the AIIB), nor on his
view of foreign aid as motivated by some blind addiction, if I got him
correctly on that. But I definitely agree with much else that he wrote. Not
because I believe that our leaders (national and local) have been treating
foreign aid from a position of blind addiction, but because I believe that foreign
aid (from whichever source) has always been that product peddled by foreign
banking or governmental interests (of whatever nationality) to countries such
as ours, where these in turn are received with warm welcome by these countries’
respective lumpenbourgeoisie-gone-wealthy.
In fact, in the Philippines’ case,
that state of affairs described above by my friend is all due to our having
been through decades of being managed by elements of the lumpenbourgeoisie, a
lumpenbourgeoisie whose instincts are naturally inclined to the enriching of
themselves and the neglect of those they would pretend to serve. Here’s where I have
qualms on any shift from West-based creditors to a China-based credit source: a
pro-American lumpenbourgeoisie replaced by a pro-China lumpenbourgeoisie is not
going to remove us from the shackles of conditions imposed by global banks
(which banks also happen to be attached to governments with their attached
conditions and impositions). And, worse, while you can shame Western banks when
certain details about them are exposed, there's no shaming the AIIB (China's
West Philippine Sea attitude is already an omen of what our relationship with
our new creditors are going to look like).
For as long as we are managed by this
niche, this class, we are never going to be united, precisely because the
elements in this niche (the lumpenbourgeoisie, now also interestingly containing
elements from the Left) are, to repeat, naturally inclined to forever work for
themselves and their factions in the guise of working for the nation. Being
thus predisposed, they are likewise necessarily inclined to divide us, us
who are easily duped into siding with the competing left-right-center factions of
the lumpenbourgeoisie on various issues other
than their lumpenbourgeoisie-ness. That is to say, we are led to debate and
curse each other on distracting issues (or false flags) that hide the bigger
issues that define their being lumpenbourgeois. We are divided the way TV
viewers have been duped into joining either a kapamilya or kapuso or kapatid
kind of TV channel brand loyalism, where we get deeply passionate about these
myriad team affiliations for groupthink while missing what the lumpenbourgeois
man did to our country for his and/or his faction’s enrichment and/or their
personal ideas’ fulfillment.
A LIBERATING VIEW of a truer division has yet to be seen. It is a view within
which we can glimpse and acknowledge how we are actually divided: into two
separate nations, with the mob of the lumpenbourgeois-gone-wealthy on the one
hand and then the rest of us on the other. When the time comes for us to awaken
to the ideals of true democracy, let’s say participatory democracy wherein we
become participants in decision-making, especially on matters pertaining to what
happens to our country, only then can we say that we have attained the first
step to independence, to a true freedom to choose among policy choices and not
merely to be led into obeying the readymade choices of messiahs from the center,
right or now-included-left of the lumpenbourgeois class with their foreign bank and
superpower-big-brother preferences.
4. The problem with us, the people
NOTICE THAT I used
the clause “time for us to awaken . . .” Now, is that day near at all? Hmm. Presently,
there is reason to be pessimistic. For every time we start talking about “we,”
we usually do not examine the we-ness in it or of it.
The "we the people" phrase that
we often use, for instance, is—true—often associated with democracy, more
specifically representative democracy, almost never for an absent demand for
some direct democracy. And there's the rub. The Philippine problem is that
"we the Filipino people" have a political culture of always wanting
to fight not for our personal or collective causes primarily but for
politicians and such personalities, primarily. We would fight wars and die for
these in the name of our politician or celebrity or sports team/athlete or
favored TV channel. In that fact alone we can already say that
"we the Filipino people" are still living in a kind of monarchic system akin to those before the occurrence of the events that led to the French Revolution.
I agree, it is our poverty that has
pinned us to this ignorance about the vicious cycle of exploitation by various
actors. And so, perhaps, even in the attainment of true democracy, we might
still need the miracle of being blessed with true leaders of the people, as
against mere actors pretending to be leaders of the people. The French at the
onset of the French Revolution were poor, but a culture of revolt was
propagated by an intelligentsia that realized what was in this intelligentsia’s
minds by making revolt the inevitable through the inculcation of that culture
in the people, making the latter own this culture as if it derived from them, because,
after all, it was for them and not for anyone else or for any political party
seeking one-party rule. Unless, by some Marxist criticism, we propose that that
culture may have actually derived from them, the masses, and was merely
articulated by the intelligentsia.
“When do we really start
comprehending Rousseau and get away being puzzled by Montesquieu?”—wrote my
Facebook friend, the banker and gallerist Remigio David. “For the time being,
it's self destruction, defeat, disaster!”
Expect to see light at the end of
this tunnel of horrors soon, ser David. That's the optimist side of me
speaking. :)
“We shall celebrate when we bump into
our own ‘Age of Reason’,” he wrote. “And when it does, let us hope it will
endure despite the social contention. Little by little, our old world should
crumble! I am an optimist like you, tu vois!”
My friend Hubert P- came back with
this: “Ah, but we are growing. All the institutions are being questioned, all
crumbling. Catharsis begins with these kinds of event, helped by the dawning of
awareness given insight by people like you. Frame the positive outcome and
prescription and we’ll see that the change is already here with people like
you. Know that it is hard to break old habits but easy to create new ones. That
is why the revolution in psychology has been to steer away from talking about
the past and more on reframing the positive outcome one wants to produce.
Conditioned helplessness is the condition one finds oneself in by constantly
complaining without looking for a solution. The mind works by seeing a proof of
concept, not by discussing logics. The ability to train the mind to see a
problem as a situation is the first skill in training the mind to find the
solution. That is why we keep changing our leaders without success, because we
only know what we do not want without knowing what we need to do. Most Filipinos
think that a movement is to find a fault and ask others to join in agreeing to
find fault and rally behind that negative statement. They are actually talking
about a reaction, not a revolution. A revolution is a dynamic of change from
one State to another. But without a clear scalable proof of concept, it never
really becomes a movement. Change begins with a small group with clearly
defined acts that prove a new reality. Everything else is reaction.”
À votre santé! Vive la démocratie
directe!
5. The problem with our intelligentsia
BUT FOR NOW I don’t
see things as brightly as my friend Hubert, despite my desire to continue to
rally people towards direct democratic and participatory democratic directions.
That’s the pessimist side of me speaking.
"I don't blame the Americans for keeping to their interests. Ang problema is how well we fight for ours," Filipino historian Xiao Chua said in a talk show on Net25.
Well, mabuhay ka, ser Xiao. Natumbok mo ang anatomiya ng lumpenbourgeoisie-ness; ang lumpenbourgeoisie-ness na hindi mawawala sa paghahanap ng ibang amo.
And so, if our French Revolution of sorts is
to be provoked by our intelligentsia, we should wonder where our intelligentsia
are.
Recently, this news came out about
Duterte defender and former journalist pundit Teddy Boy Locsin’s engaging Duterte-critical
netizens in a word war as he defended the President, specifically on Twitter:
click here. Locsin has been designated by the new President as the new
Philippine ambassador to the United States.
We do not begrudge Locsin his newly-avowed
opinion and position, as this new position may reflect his utopia of a better
world articulated in his criticism as a journalist. Perhaps his fans’ dismay at
his “having changed” is a mal-appreciation of what he stood for on the whole in the past,
thus their shock at his present behavior.
Nevertheless, it also cannot be
denied that elements of the intelligentsia in this country, like their contemporaries
in government, find it easy to sacrifice old ideals for new pragmatisms, being
armed with the articulateness to justify flip-flops when a flip-flop or
perceived flip-flop occurs.
And whenever that adaptation happens, and I’m not
saying that that’s what happened in Locsin’s case, it’s because that’s
precisely what happens when our intelligentsia elements unwittingly or
subconsciously promise themselves not to fight for their causes of old (or even new causes) but for
a politician, especially when they fight for their selfish enjoyment under the
patronage of those politicians. There are way more “fuck-faces” in this
republic than the number of letters in the name of Teddy Boy Locsin.
Politician-directed loyalism is the national disease in this our disguised monarchic
system, in this our era before the far future occurrence of events that may lead
to our French Revolution of sorts. [S /
-I]
