“1-4-Du30”

I DARE say that May 9 will turn out to be the ultimate “hugot (love)” fest for Rodrigo Duterte.

Love is a strange partner for the Davao City mayor, whose trademark symbol is a bare-knuckled clenched fist, an image in consonance with his most outstanding campaign promise: to wipe out crime within three to six months if he becomes the country’s next president.

I make this fearless prediction based on what I have seen and heard. Those who will vote for Duterte do so out of great affection for him.

Charisma is unpredictable but palpable in a politician’s relationship with the public, who reserve nicknames for those they have taken to the bosom like “one of them”: Digong, Leni, Miriam.

Even I, who will vote for Mar Roxas out of a pained sense of social obligation, refer to my candidate by his family name, specially when I’m repeating to myself the reasons why I will vote for a contender weighed down by the Yolanda and Mamasapano debacles and the rest of the public’s frustration with the Aquino administration.

So it is not without a sense of envy that I notice how the public dotes on Duterte. At an uptown Cebu mall, I observed how the crowd waited patiently for an hour and 45 minutes to witness the Visayas leg of the presidential debate.

When the wide outdoor screen finally showed the four contenders (Defensor-Santiago had a medical appointment) standing on the stage of the University of the Philippines Cebu, more mall-goers joined the audience. The delay meant there were three or four levels of diners also witnessing the debate from the terraces.

This well-heeled crowd, pacified by smartphones and tablets during the debate delay, erupted into cheering and clapping whenever Duterte argued or joked. In this age, when social media turns everyone into a journalist or an analyst, digital empowerment means the rise of infotainment.

Having never witnessed the eruditeness and eloquence of Lorenzo M. Tañada Sr., Jose W. Diokno and Jovito R. Salonga, we crowned the “most entertaining” as the winner of the past two debates. When neighbors watching Duterte campaign in our village turned our streets into an unscheduled fiesta, I realized again how the man epitomizes the “change” voters want.

Tañada, Diokno and Salonga served the people; their personal and public lives attested to this. Are we bothered that we now confuse spontaneity with authenticity, humor for sincerity, irreverence for depth? There’s little time to reflect, given the energy we devote to posting, sharing, tweeting.

In Dumaguete City, Duterte is already a winner had a survey been conducted on the most visible politician seen on wristbands. The waiter serving us, the boulevard trinket vendors, the pretty coed taking a selfie in an SUV with a gigantic decal of the clenched fist, the beauty parlor with the Sto. Niño shrine, finger-scrawled graffiti on the dusty bumper of a bus.

One evening, our stroll outside the Dumaguete wharf was interrupted when a man with a backpack was chased and collared near a pier checkpoint. Tourists and residents, we stared at the man protesting his innocence in the harsh crossfire of light. Two cops, with drawn guns, dragged the suspect from the middle of the street.

What will it take for Duterte to clean the streets in six months or 180 days? Will we be sweeping bodies or broken promises? Neither appeals.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s March 27, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Mar

THERE were three of us, having a chat after lunch. The three of us discovered we were voting for Mar Roxas, the Liberal Party presidential contender.

Two of us are not yet ready to let others know that Mar is their man.

Even while I argued that going public about our choice may help swing the undecided in his favor, I realized that this is the burr roughing up a campaign that otherwise marshals impressive munitions: the resources of the administration, the political machinery of the ruling Liberal Party, and the old wealth and extensive influence of the Roxas and Araneta clans.

Everything perfect except for the man.

When I was in a hospital lobby on my way to visiting my mother a couple of weeks ago, I saw a “Sale” sign on an Esquire Philippines copy displayed in the newspaper and magazine stand.
The November 2014 issue featured the Interior and Local Government Secretary, sitting on a pile of lumber, smiling and waving a hand at the person snapping his photo. “Hello from Tacloban… one year later,” read the magazine liner beside Mar, a loopy grin plastered on his bared teeth but not quite reaching the eyes behind the spectacles.

Commemorating the first year after Super Typhoon Yolanda, this Esquire PH magazine cover stirred a furor on social media. Many netizens were insulted and furious that the magazine chose Mar for its cover. What did the man do after all? Just bungled the relief and rehabilitation efforts, bringing on more suffering for Yolanda survivors.

I read the magazine from cover to cover. I read thrice the cover story by Boo Chanco, each time more slowly. It wasn’t just because I’m a fan of the writing found inside this magazine’s pages. I kept looking for an article about the man on the cover.

The man didn’t exist in the inside text, the soul and heart and sinew of storytelling. It was as if by using only Mar’s image—the incongruity of that smile in a place where at least 6,000 died and 4 million were displaced—the editors chose photojournalism to express all that had to be said.

Like my two colleagues, I’m made uneasy by my choice for president on May 9. Aside from Yolanda, there is the Mamasapano debacle, which exposed that Mar didn’t enjoy the confidence of his commander-in-chief and was bypassed for other men.

Yet, after he refused to abandon a beleaguered President Aquino, facing calls for impeachment and public shaming, Mar showed that his inability to make waves applied even when he could have otherwise acted for self-preservation and political survival.

Unlike supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, who hold on to his promises of action and radical change, I vote for Mar because I think what the country needs most is the status quo.
Voting for Mar means risking a leadership that is vulnerable to reprising another Yolanda or Mamasapano scale of mishandling.

Balancing this risk is the near certainty that the gains earned during the Aquino administration are consolidated and sustained: accountability, the fight against corruption.

The political future of running mate Leni Robredo is hinged on Mar’s victory on May 9. Leni, with her track record of working with the poor, women and other marginalized sectors, will infuse inclusiveness in an economic agenda that benefits the middle class and the elite.
For his better half, I vote for Mar.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 322 6131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s March 20, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Voting by brand

ON bank business for two successive afternoons, I overheard a common thread among clients waiting for their number and the employees serving them at the new accounts section.

The talk turned to “Probinsyano,” the soap opera anticipated after the evening news.

In the format that’s the trademark of Filipino soaps, the “serye” is about the exploits of an upright cop who, in the time-honored tradition of melodrama, triumphs against evil and is unaware of the universe of admirers he is collecting.

Cardo, the hero, is currenty played by Coco Martin, who doesn’t possess an awkward angle, even when he goes undercover as a heavily made-up street walker out to rescue his sister-in-law from human traffickers.

Martin only makes me fidget in discomfort when he appears in a leather jacket, an instrument of torture in our sweltering weather. I forgive this lapse in sanity because Martin is staying in character.

In 1997, Cardo was played by another jacket-lover, the late Fernando Poe Jr. or FPJ. In this nickname-loving country, box-office kings and action stars are branded by their famous initials, the same treatment the news media gives to presidents and politicians.

In today’s political heat, few even split distinctions: that, unlike FVR and GMA, FPJ was never a president nor even a barangay captain. FPJ aspired to become a president and, according to those who followed the true-to-life “serye” in 2004, was emerging as the most likely next occupant of that residence beside the Pasig River when the Pretender-We-Will-Not-Name stole the election from him.

Life imitates art, even the low-brow. Just as the mini-plots of “Probinsyano” end happily ever after in the land protected by its leather-jacketed guardian, the country might still even be led by the late FPJ’s daughter, Grace.

Frontrunner of the 2016 electoral race, foundling who spectacularly won a disqualification case in the Supreme Court on International Women’s Day, and champion of all the right buttons of political correctness, including the freedom of information bill, beloved cause of journalists, Grace shares her father’s taste for sartorial branding: a well-fitting long-sleeved polo as pure as the driven snow.

Never since the loud Hawaiian shirts of the late Raul Roco has a piece of clothing fixed a politician’s image so indelibly in this voter’s imagination. The man of the masses thumbed his nose at the snob values of the elite; the fool of an emperor pretended to take pride in his invisible new clothes; and Grace, cool in voice and temperament but steely in her campaign promise to bring back “heart” in governance, wears an absence of color, which we associate, in this intrigue-loving land, with lack of taint, of shadows, of the usual political baggage.

While Mar Roxas, my candidate, languishes in survey after survey, thousands of us sit down with the Poe family on weekday nights: Coco Martin as FPJ’s reincarnation, minus the sideburns but still wrapped in the signature jacket; FPJ’s widow, Susan Roces, as Cardo’s wisdom-spouting Lola Kap; and, during the commercial breaks peppering “Probinsyano,” Grace and her white promise.

More than anything, this election will test voters, not just the voted. The academics urge us to research our choices. The church wants us to contemplate and discern.

Judging by the survey trends, many of us want to be entertained.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 322 6131)


*First published in the March 13, 2016 issue of the Sun.Star Cebu Sunday opinion-editorial Sunday column, “Matamata”

Happy ending

EBULLIENCE doesn’t come to mind when I think of Filipino voters.

The word comes from the Latin word “ebullientem,” which means “spilling over”. A website has even a stronger translation: “boiling over”.

The closest to capturing the spirit of being “very happy and excited” is the small yellow-throated bird that flits among the budding branches of the “tambis” tree growing outside our bedroom window.

As it moves among the fruits and the flowers—many of which are even bigger than itself—the bird is the very picture of ecstasy. Its color is a radiant flash among the ivory-hued blossoms. Unlike the big black bees hovering like uninspired drones above the blooms, the bird chirps and chirps away, even in the presence of the cats, sleeping nearby with a twitching tail.

With May 9 drawing close, I wish I had an eighth of the optimism in the tiny feathered body.

Elections come with a predictability that leave many Filipinos prematurely cynical and pessimistic. I was born in 1965, when Ferdinand Marcos began his first term as the 10th president of the country.

Fifty-one years later, as the nation is deluged by surveys that predict who may win the race to become the country’s 16th president, I wonder how to summon the energy to draw up a mental list of candidates I will cast my ballot for. Unlike the bird in our tambis, the choices facing voters are thin.

The most prescient assessment of this horse race does not come from journalists and scholars. It comes from the social media influencers who upload the creative, entertaining, irreverent memes parodying every political pretender, antic or gambit.

Policy and issues were the focus of the organizers, as well as the five presidential candidates, of the first presidential debate held in Cagayan de Oro City last Feb. 21.

Yet, gauging from the comments and memes proliferating on the Net, the Mindanao leg of the “PiliPinas Debates 2016” might as well have been every soap opera, romantic comedy or Star Wars installment captivating watchers with a fixation for personalities, drama and entertainment.

What cerebral discourse can hold up to the “kilig” power of DuRiam (seconds after they clinched before the debate, the embrace of Sen. Miriam Defensor-Santiago and Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte went “sticky” online and inspired unforgettable memes)?

Granted: Filipino humor can soften any blow the fates will deal us. Will we still be laughing when the electoral results will trickle in after May 9?

Last Feb. 25, the 30th anniversary of the EDSA People Power Revolution, Martial Law survivors launched a campaign to oppose the vice-presidential candidacy of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. Aside from opposing the distortion of history, the anti-Marcos activists urge millennials to remember the lessons of EDSA.

Passing the half-century mark, I recall EDSA as a mixed success. Look what we brought in after the People Power Revolution: an Estrada and an Arroyo. Or, if you belong to the opposing camp, two Aquinos.

On the other hand, Feb. 25, 1986 demarcated the past, when elections meant killing fields, and the present, when a campaign tragedy is a meme that bombs. Thirty years should make us realize where hope lies: in an informed citizenry casting their votes only for those who love the country.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in the February 28, 2016 issue of the Sun.Star Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”