ON the flight back from Japan, President Rodrigo Duterte says he heard the voice of God admonishing him to stop cursing.
“Everybody was asleep, snoring, but a voice said that, you know, if you don’t stop epithets, I will bring down this plane now,” Duterte said in his arrival speech at the Davao International Airport on Friday, after an official three-day visit to Japan.
He said he even asked the voice who he was, and only later realized that it was God.
“So, I promise God to—not to express slang, cuss words and everything,” he said.
He said that a promise to God is also a promise to the Filipino people, the reason he must be careful not to use curse words.
For those who have been following Mr. Duterte’s pronouncement with some trepidation, this promise isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Profanity has become a Duterte trademark, particularly when he is threatening to kill drug dealers as part of his war on illegal drugs, a campaign that has left thousands dead since he took office on June 30.
The President, who once called the Pope a “son of a bitch,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon a “fool,” and told US President Barack Obama to “go to hell,” has certainly earned for himself and the country for which he speaks some international notoriety for which we might eventually have to pay.
A promise to stop the cursing—if not the killing—would certainly provide the nation with some welcome respite from our newfound bellicose voice, particularly in foreign relations.
Still, the revelation that our President has conversations with God is a legitimate cause of concern, given that the world largely associates hearing voices with mental instability.
We wonder, too, if the disembodied voice on the plane was not just that of a gifted ventriloquist, who seized the opportunity to have some fun and temper the President’s rhetoric.
Of course, Mr. Duterte isn’t the first leader to claim that he received orders from God.
Joan of Arc, who led the French army to many important victories against England in the Hundred Years’ War, said she heard the voices of angels and saints, through whom God spoke to her.
More recently, US President George W. Bush said he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq because God told him to do so.
A Palestinian foreign minister at the time quoted Bush as telling them: “I am driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”
It might be useful to note, however, that neither of these cases of divine guidance worked out very well.
Bush’s military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq did little to bring peace and stability to those two countries, which are in the throes of even worse sectarian violence that they had before the US intervention. And Joan of Arc—she was burned at the stake for heresy.
