Category Archive for: komentaryo

komentaryo

Ponder propaganda: Fueling the Duterte machine

If there’s anything that one has consistently been reminded about throughout 2023, it is that we still do not know how to deal with the propaganda landscape that the Duterte leadership had established for six years, and which, regardless of the Dutertes’s “lesser” position politically, is the game we are all stuck playing.

I speak of 2023 because in 2022, we were all just in a post-election haze, regardless of where we were / are on the political spectrum. If you were on the side of Marcos-Duterte, you were just on a high, doing the parties, enjoying the perks that come with having campaigned for the winner. If you were on the side of Robredo-Pangilinan, then you would fall under either of two groups: the ones who disengaged completely from politics and governance, maybe in disgust, probably as a by-product of despair; or the ones who tried to keep the anger going by carrying on as if nothing had changed — after all, a Duterte is still in power, and Duterte himself seemed to have set the stage for a Marcos win.

Presidential sister Imee has said it in so many words: President Duterte had eradicated their enemies.

But also, and this seems important to realize for all of us, Duterte had set the stage for this present, where the opposition, at best, has completely lost its footing, regardless of where we are on that spectrum that spans the Liberals and the Left. (more…)

kultura

Beauty and gold #CulturalCrisis

I watched with amusement the way that the controversy over Beauty Gonzales’s jewelry at the GMA Ball unraveled, with the call-out coming from a member of the academe, Marian Pastor Roces, angry and seemingly shooting-from-the-hip, done via a Facebook status. On the one hand, understandable, if one were living in the bubble of one’s algorithm, where such righteous indignation would get the expected likes and shares and comments of support. On the other, a real missed opportunity to engage in what could be a teaching moment, on a public platform, where a call-out could be phrased in a way that is calm and collected, an opening to a discussion instead of a door slammed shut on one.

Were there less anger about the gold Beauty was wearing, we could’ve started a discussion about the manner in which artefacts from our dead are excavated and brought into private hands. How does that even happen? Is it always about greed outweighing respect for collective heritage? Is it greed and the wilful disregard of the law? Or could it be an utter lack of knowledge about what exactly to do with artefacts of our past?

This was of course layered with the non-discussion on those artefacts being ear and eye covers for the dead. But at a time when we have been culturally changed by six years of a leadership that thought nothing of dead bodies, at a present where everyone with a modicum of power (including those in the arts and culture and heritage sectors) can be seen “flaunting excess”, don’t we know of more grotesque — “odious” — things? (more…)

komentaryo

(Middle Class) Crisis: Why rising from May 2022 has been difficult

It would be silly to talk about the present of politics in this country without acknowledging two, maybe three, things.

First, that we are at a standstill. From the ranks of our specific educated, middle to elite classes, generally woke and politicized, that campaigned hard for a Marcos-Duterte loss in May 2022 — there is little movement happening. Sure we went back to our old lives since May, we went back to the daily grind, but that is a movement that is about survival for majority of us — we have no choice given skyrocketing prices and the multifarious crises nation faces. We have no choice, and know no other way, but to go back to the lives we had pre-elections, no matter how frustrated, angry, sad we are. No matter how little we understand (or how much) of why things turned out the way it did.

Which brings us to two: here, where we are, a year after the 2022 elections, we have to admit the possibility that we have stood still all along — because that is what happens to movement when all it does is go around in circles, or repeat its own mistakes, or deny how big the enemy is and how the battlefield has changed.

It is what happens when we cannot get over ourselves, when we only listen to what we have to say, when we insist that we are the only ones who know what’s happening, who know what should be done, who have the answer to questions — because we lived through a past that was similar, because we are older, we are the fourth estate, which is replaceable with what’s unsaid: we are the gatekeepers, we are the bearers of truth, we are sacred cows, not to be questioned, not to be critiqued.

It is what happens when we refuse to see the possibility that maybe we should start with first asking the right questions, so that we get the productive answers, in dialogue with as large a group of people as possible, open to the probability that the ways we know, the perspectives we take, might not apply to the present anymore. (more…)

komentaryo

Four cases, one justice system

It would’ve been silly to be surprised by the acquittal of the son of Justice Secretary Boying Remulla on charges of illegal drug possession. That this sentence even exists is its own absurdity: at any other time, and at any other place, a government official, especially of an agency that has to do with Justice, would be the first to step down given a case of this magnitude, if only to be able to say that his position should not be reason for the wheels of justice to turn any differently for his son Juanito Jose Diaz Remulla III.

But we know by now that Secretary Remulla staying on as Justice Secretary is a symptom of what has ailed governance since the Duterte years: a lack of shame from our government officials, which is to say their ability to take on and keep jobs regardless of whether they deserve it, or have credentials or credibility, and really, their predisposition to keep political power on sheer kapal-ng-mukha.

And so it seems more productive to see these moments as an opportunity to talk about Justice in this country and highlight how it applies only to a few, how due process and speedy trials only work for those who have connections to those in power. The best way to prove it would be through the experience of our political prisoners, grown exponentially during Duterte years.  (more…)

komentaryo

PH airspace shut down, overseas dev’t assistance projects, and asking better questions

It’s become normalized since the 2022 election results that at least on the shamelessly middle/upper class echo chamber of Twitter and Facebook, little is done to flesh out issues. After all, it is easier to just pin the blame on Duterte-Marcos. After all, we are angry and exhausted, and would want nothing more than to draw that line between ourselves and the 31 million that voted Marcos-Duterte into power.

While the impulse is understandable, anyone would be hard put to prove that this is the right way to deal with issues at this point. Not when issues are important and critical, and especially when we are so easily distracted by noise, both deliberately manufactured and inadvertently skewed away from asking the right, more difficult, questions.

The mess at our airports on January 1 is one such instance. Because the noise has been primarily about pinning the blame on Duterte—he who inaugurated the Communication, Navigation, Surveillance and Air Traffic Management (CNS/ATM) project—and on Marcos, who has generally fallen quiet as he is wont to do, what we’ve evaded are actual questions about Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) projects, the delays that this particular CNS/ATM project faced, and the three (count that!) presidents under whom this particular project fell—Marcos excluded.

(more…)