AND there it was, the State of the Nation Address (Sona), which one guy said made him cry at the rehearsal, and another guy claimed would be cinematic in effect. It did not make anyone cry.
And its only effect was to show that cinema should stay in the movie house and away from Congress. True, a woman in native costume sang the national anthem, but that about summed up the endeavor to turn an occasion of state into a reality show.
But what was not a Sona in the old sense turned out to be something new and better. It was the self-rescue of an elected candidate, for whom a despairing majority had voted as the dangerous alternative to a bunch of safe bets. He had rescued himself from a vile attempt to domesticate him and turn him into something big business can live with, and under whom politicians
can steal again.
This cussing, rough and tumble candidate, shot from the hip, spoke off the cuff, and talked out of turn deep and disturbing truths about our fundamentally violent society and politics (because what the poor suffer is violence—the violence of want, of shame, of penury) and of the necessity—indeed, the imperative—to force change on them.
Sure, everyone wants change. The poor want a change for the better. The rich want a change from getting a lot, to getting a lot more. And so President Duterte set aside a plodding, tedious and pedestrian text. He told the teleprompter operator time and again to freeze the frame or speed up the paragraphs, which he just mumbled, so he could speak—not from the heart, which is for fools—but from a head whose eyes have seen the suffering, whose ears have heard the cries and whose mouth had given a new lease of hope to those who had all, but lost it.
Mr. Duterte did away with the scripted Sona because he could not think of a better time to tell the people what they need to know more than his program of government. And that is that they…had not…lost…him.
They had not lost him to vested interests, to the officials in their pockets, and the politicians at their beck and call.
So, no, he will not tone down his rhetoric. No, he will not water down his promises or downsize the expectations he gave the electorate of a safe, a prosperous, and a just and equitable society—or he will die in the trying.
For in the past three weeks, word had gone out that President Duterte was being domesticated for business as usual, and that change—as he promised the people and threatened the rich—will not happen after all.
Yesterday, he was himself again and more. He took a swipe at the super majority, who did not vote for him anyway, and made it clear that they would get nothing in return for their defection to his side—nothing, but the chance to redeem themselves in the service of the Filipino. He will not tolerate corruption in Congress or in the circle of his Cabinet nor exploitation by the rich or more violence from the violent.
So, was that a Sona? In the ordinary sense, no; in another sense, yes. What he said is the State of the Nation under President Duterte—and it will stay that way while he has breath in him.
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