Tag Archives: Bongbong

Hindsight No. 19: Plot and Character

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Hindsight for Monday, May 23, 2022

(Photo from philtstar.com)

WITH THE counting all but over—setting aside some issues not likely to change the outcome—it’s clear that our people have spoken, and that, by a 2-to-1 majority, they have chosen Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to lead this country for the next six years. 

It’s no huge secret that I, among many others, voted for somebody else. Of course I’m unhappy, but what I feel doesn’t really matter much in the scheme of things. Given that the life expectancy of the Filipino male is 67.26 years, I’m already on borrowed time at 68 and would be lucky to see the end of this next administration, let alone the one after that. I’ve told my mom Emy—who voted at age 94 and who shed tears of dismay and disbelief when the results rolled in—that living for six more years to vote one more time should now be her goal. Just surviving will be her best revenge.

I wonder how it is, however, for the young people who took to the streets for Leni and Kiko, believing that they would make a difference. They did, although not in the way they expected, to ride a pink wave all the way to Malacañang. They realized, as we ourselves did ages ago, that money and machinery are always heavy favorites over hope and idealism, and that issues, ideas, and the truth itself can be made to look far less important than image and message, if you can buy the right PR consultant.

They will also have learned, as has been pointed out by other commentators from both sides, that it wasn’t all disinformation—that Marcos Jr. appealed to the genuine desperation of the poor with a promise of relief, however illusory. Since most of Leni’s young supporters were visibly middle-class, first-time voters, it was a rude but necessary awakening to the realities of class politics in this country, which politicians of all kinds—none of whom have to worry about where their next litson baka is coming from—have learned to negotiate and manipulate. 

Defeat, it’s been said, can offer more lessons than victory, and while we may have metaphorically won in some significant respects—chiefly the aggregation of “middle” forces not tied to any traditional political party into a burgeoning progressive movement—there will be much to review and refine in the years ahead. This very dissociation of the Kakampinks from the old parties and their command structures, for example, was a blast of fresh air for many volunteers, but also a liability for operators used to the old ways.

Understandably there’s been much wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth in the trenches, in the desire to meld seething resistance with grudging acceptance. I see it in both young and old activists—the young, because they’re heartbroken for the first time, and the old, because they didn’t expect to find themselves facing a Marcos all over again. The bashing and taunting they’re getting online from galleries of screeching monkeys doesn’t help. 

Being one of those old fogeys, I tend to be more subdued in my reaction to Marcos Jr.’s victory, and advise my young friends to cool down, ignore the bashers, and steel themselves for a complicated and challenging future. As someone who went through and survived martial law—I was eighteen when I was arrested and imprisoned for alleged subversion (although I was never charged or tried in court, just locked up for the state’s peace of mind)—I can offer them living proof that we can survive dictators and despots, with faith, resourcefulness, and courage. My parents survived the Second World War, and many other people have gone through worse.

I’m neither predicting nor wishing that a Marcos presidency will be bound to fail. I’d hate for the country to suffer just to prove a point. Besides, whatever I think today won’t matter one bit to what will happen. Whatever Marcos does, he will do so of his own will, by his own nature, out of his own character. What that character really is will emerge in the crucible of crisis—and crisis is the only thing the future guarantees, whoever the president happens to be. Beyond and regardless of the propaganda for and against him, Mr. Marcos Jr. will have ample opportunity to display what he would not have us glimpse in a public debate, and that revelation will do more than a million tweets calling him a thief or praising his acumen.

Speaking of character, I had an interesting discussion last week with an old friend, a renowned professor of Business Administration, who brought up the possibility of “luck or destiny” to account for the Marcos victory. He added that luck was an important factor in business, and that he would flunk a student who thought otherwise. 

I disagreed; as a teacher of creative writing, I said that I wouldn’t accept “luck or destiny” as a resolution for a student story. We’d call it deus ex machina—a helping hand—which thwarts the logic of the narrative with an artificial and improbable ending. I know: it happens in real life, but not in good fiction. As Mark Twain says in one of my favorite quotations, “Of course fact is stranger than fiction. Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” 

Whether factual or fictional, stories are really less about events—the plot—than character. The plot is simply there to enable character development. Things happen for a reason: to test and reveal our character, to show ourselves and others what kind of people we really are, with dramatic clarity and inevitability.

If you’re wondering why I strayed from the May 9 election to a mini-lecture on writing, it’s because we can look at that election and its aftermath as a long and continuing narrative that will establish our character as citizens, and as leaders. The next crises—the post-pandemic economy, China’s ambitions, a crackdown on civil liberties, getting deeper in debt—will come to try us. That’s the plot. And when that happens, Bongbong will be Bongbong, and all Filipinos—31 million of them, especially—will see exactly what they bargained for.

So if you’re still smarting, just chill, recuperate, get back to something you enjoy doing, and let this drama take its course. Like my mom Emy, endure and survive. Give Marcos Jr. a chance to achieve his “destiny,” which could yet be everyone’s best education.

Hindsight No. 5: The Dropout Factor

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Hindsight for Monday, February 14, 2022

(Image from thetimes.co.uk)

HOW MUCH of a factor is Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.’s being a college dropout in making people decide whether he’s worthy of being voted President or not? The anti-Marcos forces seem to think it’s a viable issue, on two counts: first, that Junior failed to complete his studies at Oxford and subsequently at Wharton, despite the extravagant resources put at his disposal; and second, that Junior and his people have repeatedly asserted that he graduated from both institutions, despite clear evidence to the contrary. 

One would think that, in a country where higher education is widely seen to be the only ticket out of poverty, Junior’s profligate ways should have turned off if not outraged large swaths of the CDE electorate that everyone now acknowledges will effectively choose our next leader.

The picture of him posing as a top-hatted dandy in front of a Rolls Royce when he should have been sticking his nose into a book in the library should be sickeningly ridiculous to anyone who has had to take three sweaty and dusty jeepney rides to school. That he or his cohorts would insist that he has a BA and an MBA from the world’s top universities without proof of an actual diploma should offend anyone who failed to finish college, despite a bright mind and high grades, for lack of money—like my father did.

But sadly I suspect that for many of Junior’s supporters, the dropout factor is a non-issue, for a number of reasons. To begin with, going by the statistics, ours is a nation of dropouts. Even well before the pandemic, according to one study, the graduation rate from college was only 61%, which means that two out of every five students fell off the rails. So Junior should be in good company. 

I myself dropped out of UP in my freshman year because I was becoming increasingly more involved with student activism, and I was also itching to get a job and earn some money. Like many dropouts who managed well enough on their own, I wore my undergraduate status for many years like a badge of honor. But there came a point when I simply longed to learn in a more structured way, so I went back to school, and graduated with my AB at age 30.

To Junior’s defenders, dropping out of Oxford is understandable. “Oxford is even harder to get into than UP!” said one online. And besides, said another, he did get a special diploma, which “is already equivalent to having a degree. UK educ system is different from PH system. Between him showing certification vs emailing Oxford, I would believe him.”

As I noted in last week’s column on “Denial and Dissonance,” the politically captive mind will fashion creative explanations for everything from the “fake” landing on the moon to Donald Trump’s “stolen victory” over Joe Biden.

A Reddit thread on the topic overwhelmingly agreed that being a dropout wasn’t the problem; rather, lying about it was. “At least Erap admitted to being a dropout, and he still became President,” said one poster.

Publicly exposed, Junior back-pedaled. His official Senate resume in 2014—digitally preserved for all time on archive.org—clearly showed him claiming a master’s degree in Business Administration from Wharton and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Philosophy, and Economics from Oxford. This has since been amended to “graduate coursework” for Wharton and a “special diploma” for Oxford.

(Image from rappler.com)

But there’s another side to this college-dropout issue that’s worth thinking about: what’s a diploma really worth, anyway, and what exactly have we done with ours?

We have many thousands of college graduates working well beneath their professional capabilities as domestic helpers overseas, or in jobs that require more use of their hands than their brains. So a diploma has never guaranteed success (and as Junior’s example shows, you can get very far in life without one). 

But also, since when was a college degree a measure of intellectual ability and, even more importantly, of moral probity? What has our incumbent Palace dweller done with his law degree, beyond assuring the tokhang brigade of his full protection and threatening to defy the Supreme Court? At least Ferdinand Sr. used his to cloak his every ploy with a veneer of legality. 

In terms of intellectual caliber, Marcos had probably the most illustrious Cabinet members in our history, with PhDs from the world’s foremost universities, but even they could not rein in his regime’s excesses, and some even abetted them. The good ones left early; a few tried to draw a line; others became willing accomplices to dictatorship and plunder. As idealistic and upright as they may have been or started out, Marcos suborned many of these technocrats and forever compromised the edukado in Philippine society, turning that respected figure into a minister at the foot of a despot, his wife, and their whimsy.

Our incumbent burnished anti-intellectualism into a virtue to curry favor with the crowds, and got flunkies with LLB’s to explain away his bad behavior like auditioning comedians. You listen to their tortured spiels and you ask, was this what they went to college for?

Wealth and power hold far more charm for many of us than schooling, because we see education as but a means to those ends. To be rich is to be smart and praiseworthy enough. If the rich behave imperially, impudently, irresponsibly—well, they earned it, didn’t they? We can forgive and excuse them no end; we still think like tenants thrilled to be invited into the big house for a cup of chocolate. 

We seem surprised and suspicious when a well-educated person with an honest heart claims to love and understand us, and promises to improve our lives, because we no longer recognize real goodness and ability when we see them. So we go with the devil we know, and who cares how he fared in History or Philosophy? As Ping Lacson puts it, logic was never our strong suit: “Ayaw mong manakawan, tapos, boboto ka ng magnanakaw?” I have a PhD, and I can’t figure that one out.