Don’t look now, but Mar Roxas just made himself into a comic-book super-typhoon hero. If “Sa Gitna ng Unos, The Movie” is coming soon, I wouldn’t be surprised.
My chief complaint about the adventures of SuperMar, the comic, is that it assumes that Filipinos are stupid. This illustrated hack job, which purports (according to the spokesman of the Liberal Party, anyway) to tell the truth about what happened in Tacloban City during the onslaught of Super Typhoon “Yolanda,” is clearly the product of a conviction that many voters will believe anything as long as it is in comic-book form.
Those voters, obviously, are poor and cannot afford to get information anywhere else. And that, in this age of wall-to-wall media, both traditional and social, and mobile Internet (yes, even among the poor), is a very dangerous presumption to make.
Now, I understand that adequate proof can also be produced to show that it is equally perilous to assume that Filipino voters are intelligent, as a rule. A quick look at the survey leaders in the race for the Senate, for instance, will surely make you wonder what the respondents are looking for when they consider the people who should represent them in that supposedly august chamber.
But my problem with Roxas’ transmogrification into a comic-book hero is that it comes from the candidate who claims that he is against all drama and has a monopoly on decency. The LP says the comic book is a “dramatization,” something that it echoes in a disclaimer on the cover, to the effect that it is “based on real events”; and it certainly isn’t a decent thing to insult people by assuming that they are idiots who can be swayed by a badly inked comic book.
And it doesn’t help Mar’s case that his party’s spokesman can only point to anonymous supporters as the creators and financiers of the Roxas comic book. If the LP can proclaim that the comic sets things straight about what Mar did in Tacloban when Yolanda hit, why can’t it even own up to being the author and funder of the project, instead of pointing to unknown people as its source?
And I wonder how the real victims of Yolanda would react to the colorful panels in the comic book portraying Mar as their savior during the calamity. After all, the propaganda materials (because that’s what they really are) were only distributed in Cavite during a birthday party for a local political ally last Sunday night; if Mar and his gang are really peddling the truth, they should have no problem distributing their comic books in Tacloban City next time they visit.
The only thing true in the entire comic book is that Roxas was in Tacloban when Yolanda hit. The rest is condescending propaganda of the most unimaginative, egregious kind.
Oh and yes, Roxas fell off the motorcycle he was riding without a helmet, the better to identify him. Remember, Superman has kryptonite to deal with, too.
Before I forget, Roxas and his running mate Rep. Leni Robredo last week proudly proclaimed that they were being supported by Pampanga Gov. Lilia “Baby” Pineda in the coming elections. Now, unless I am very much mistaken, Roxas and his former boss, President Noynoy Aquino, used to identify Pineda as a close associate of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, the better to tar the latter with guilt by association, since Pineda is married to a certain Bong Pineda, the alleged Lord of All Jueteng in Central Luzon.
Both Aquino and Roxas supported the candidacy of Pineda’s political nemesis, the suspended priest ex-governor Eduardo Panlilio, in the elections in 2010 and 2013. Aquino, Roxas and the rest of the anti-Arroyo opposition once hailed Panlilio as the epitome of good governance, until it became clear that the people of Pampanga had no use for him.
If Roxas once again made the mistake of backing Panlilio against Pineda, he and Robredo would certainly lose the Pampanga vote. And that, if you’re Roxas and the LP, is clearly unacceptable.
It is so much easier for the administration party to play nice with the powerful Pinedas. As for Panlilio, who cares what happens to him, right?
Now, I’m not going to blame Roxas—who will do anything to get votes, after all—for going to bed politically with the Pinedas. But I’m really saddened by Robredo’s going along with the charade, because I honestly believe that she is made of more idealistic stuff.
Then I see the Facebook photographs of Robredo in her trademark tsinelas walking through a shallow canal, with an expensive Louis Vuitton bag slung over her shoulder. And I think maybe she’s not who she wants us to believe she is, either.