[Newspoint] What’s the mood looking like for 2022?

A mere two years into the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte, I published an essay here warning of “A horrific cleanup job” awaiting his successor. It provoked criticisms of which the more reasonable, and printable, were that it was premature, thus unfair, given that Duterte had four years yet remaining of his six-year term.

In any case, by then, I thought, he had made enough mess to warrant a warning being raised:

• Duterte had begun his slavish pivot to China.
• He also had begun to move on his critics – Leila de Lima had been arrested on concocted charges and denied bail, and began a life in solitary detention that has continued to this day; and Ma. Lourdes Sereno, the independent-minded chief justice, had been set up for a coup by the Duterte-friendly majority of her own court.
• Duterte had given Ferdinand Marcos, the dictator on whose altar he worships, a hero’s burial.
• Marawi, a thriving self-contained city in the south, had been turned into a wasteland by a ground and air war waged with a brutality out of all proportion to its target – a small, mixed band of drug dealers, sundry brigands, and rebels turned terrorists, supposedly.
• And, in what Duterte may have considered the crowning glory of his first year, being his centerpiece campaign promise, his war on drugs, racked up 20,000 kills (I got the count from a yearend report from the Office of the President itself; however, in an apparent effort to protect the police – “my police,” as Duterte proprietarily refers to them – the report puts three-quarters of the responsibility – 16,000 kills – on vigilantes, as if their inspiration had come from someone else).

I confess that I had hoped Duterte might be stopped before his term ended – but let me make it quickly clear that I had meant removal by constitutional means, lest an excuse be found to tag me under an anti-terrorism law that, although unable to even define the crime it punishes, is allowed to operate before the Supreme Court can rule on its constitutionality. If I had thought that anyone at all shared my feeling of disquiet and that my warning would make an impression, soon enough I would be proved kidding myself. Early the following year, Duterte’s team would grab all 12 Senate seats contested in the midterms, thus sealing the deal for him in the traditional bastion of oversight on executive power. The lower House itself, in a spectacle of turncoatism never seen in our politics, had been co-opted almost to a man (90-plus percent) from the very start, and the Supreme Court had proved agreeable in every case Duterte was interested in. His power further consolidated, the nation’s descent into authoritarianism, with its component militarization, proceeded apace.

And, most significantly economically, so did the Chinese entrenchment in the West Philippine Sea, our territorial waters Duterte had let go, in spite of all the mineral wealth that lies in their bowels. To be sure, Chinese entrenchment has not been limited offshore. The Chinese have landed in droves and been welcomed on such obsequious terms as might only be extended by a vassal state – usurious loans; contracts made lopsided not only by prohibitive straight costs but by the supply of Chinese workers, materials, and equipment even where we ourselves could provide them; gaming operations, with their criminal complements (loan sharking and prostitution); instant visas; tax breaks, if not outright write-offs of tax obligations. If, to some of us, China is the elephant in the room, it would appear only one of a herd, or not appear at all, to others.

Such relative perceptions tend to be betrayed by the vote itself. Our elections are decided emotionally – that is, by popular mood, rather than rationally – by an understanding of the issues. The anomaly is rooted in a long-standing, criminally disproportionate distribution of wealth and opportunities, which has built up among the masses an anger for being trapped in poverty for generations. Desperate for quick fixes, they have become easy prey to false prophets, of whom Marcos and Duterte are the most dramatic examples.

It seems to me that the poor, precisely because of the desperate commonality and cause that bind them, are easier to bring together for a vote that holds even the most implausible promise of instant redemption, while the non-poor can afford to break with the crowd and vote their individual consciences.

The situation has grown worse in recent years; it has lent itself to a new technology that is weaponized both for expressions of earnest and valid protest and for malevolent advocacies built and run on fake news and other like concoctions. As a result, the perceptions of truth have become even more confused.

But I rather hopefully wonder if this pandemic, the worst managed in our parts, is not working as a blessing in disguise. I wonder if the truth the pandemic causes to be revealed still allows for relative perceptions of the elephant in the room. I don’t quite see the Duterte regime – a “czarist” regime, by its own unashamed self-naming – able to continue disguising its fraudulence, not from the masses, not in a pandemic. The misfortunes the pandemic brings are personal: joblessness, hunger, death, or at least a very real, daily risk of it. These misfortunes could have been minimized, if not prevented, but the regime is simply too inept, too arbitrary, too corrupt, and too hard-hearted to make a redeeming difference.

I don’t know that the historic mess Duterte will have left will provoke enough awakened reaction for a competent and right-minded leadership to be elected in 2022, and, subsequently, for the previous regime to be held to account. Surely, anyone who has lived through contemporary history need not be told that everyone from the war collaborationists to the Marcoses to Estrada to Arroyo has gotten away.

True, we’ve had spells of prospectively, if not actually, good governance across those years, but spells were precisely all they were, too fleeting to allow for reform, or even any serious beginnings of it. The inherent and persistent social inequity has never allowed for democratic institutions to take root, and that’s why it has been easy to coopt what passes for them, and establish a regime of dynasticism and cronyism.

But then what do we do? We do with what we’re dealt, especially in a moral fight. – Rappler.com