[Newspoint] Vox Duterti, vox Dei

Now, Rodrigo Duterte is hearing things.

Flying home last week from his state visit to Japan, he heard the voice of God warning him, on pain of death by plane crash, about his habitual cussing. He promised to stop it. 

But, once landed, thus feeling safe again, with feet planted on his native Davao ground, he told a reporter who was pressing (presumably recalling him saying no one, “not even God, if He exists,” tells him what to do), that there’s actually a proper time for cussing – whenever that is.

At any rate, his epiphany makes him harder yet to categorize, especially normally. But we will always try – if only for our own sense of consolation and security. He is, after all, our president; he holds the greatest power that could be concentrated in one pair of hands. Why, he has even shown some power over life and death!

A mere 4 months since he took office, his war on drugs has already left just fewer than 3,000 drug dealers and addicts dead (that’s the police count – other counts put the number closer to 4,000), and he has promised yet (he does not merely threaten) to add 20,000 to 30,000 to that in presumably as short a time as possible. 

He’s gunning for 3 million, and, realizing he’s running late on his promise to eliminate the scourge of drugs in his first 6 months as president, has given himself another 6 months. He has also discounted the kinder alternative of rehabilitation after the math of it, he says, revealed a cost of P1 trillion, a third of the state budget.

Didn’t you wish the voice he’d heard had enjoined him for those killings instead? 

In any case, in its strange, unfathomable sense of priorities, never mind wisdom, the voice picked on his profane language. I’m afraid that it has so complicated matters it may have served to only reinforce the idolatry of Duterte’s legions of believers and, on the other hand, further confuse his doubters, hard put as it is to find some rational mold in which to cast him.

But there are voices and there are voices, and so far Duterte has told us of only one sort, although, by his unique aural sense, it is no less than the Almighty’s voice itself. The question is, what of the things he has said and done were thus inspired?

If you could believe his communications secretary, Martin Andanar, Duterte, by virtue of being a messiah himself, speaks, and acts out, the voice of God (a little bit much, really, although surely the apostle Martin can explain the godliness in all the cussing and murderous exhortations that spew out of his messianic master’s mouth).

Messiah cases are always interesting, but Freudian ones, having been validated by clinical tests, are the more credible naturally. And Duterte’s case would seem tested enough, having qualified as a basis for the court decision that freed his wife from her marriage to him.

As fairly known by now (if still largely ignored or fanatically disputed), Duterte has been, clinically, pronounced “narcissistic”, a condition that apparently – as evidenced by his self-proclaimed ability to converse with God – has progressed to “messianic”.

It is actually a new height on his fancied flight. Only the week before Japan, on his state visit to China, he equated himself with its premier and Russia’s, too, in a communist threesome “against the world.” Moreover, in an attempt to ensure his memorialization, indeed ensure posthumous control over us, he has been making the rounds of military camps and exhorting his soldiers to carry on as he wished even when he’s gone: “’Pag nawala ako, kayo ang bahalang magpatuloy nito.” (When I am gone, it’s up to you to continue this.)

In aspects of character most critical to national leadership, Duterte’s progression has been worrisomely aggressive indeed. Politically, he has leaped from small-city mayor to president; ideologically, he has swung to extreme leftist, proclaiming himself communist, and one yet with a fascist streak (remember, his self-comparison with Hitler?); and psychologically, he has advanced from humanly self-centered to divinely self-centered.

If a recession in his condition is where our only hopes lie, we’re certainly in for far greater trouble than we think. – Rappler.com