“We wish former president Rodrigo Roa Duterte a very happy birthday, despite all the trials and tribulations he faces in the sunset of his life”
I COULD not await developments between Monday and Wednesday in the fast-paced events happening in the country, so I filed this article early Monday, just before leaving on a quick trip.
Last week, we had another dose of the inquisitorial proceedings in the HoR where McCarthy look-alikes bamboozled social media purveyors of “fake” news by their own narrow definition of what is fake, what is true, and what is conjecture as against opinion.
How I wish these inquisitors would no longer be in the HoR, or anywhere else in our political firmament after June 30 this year. They make your blood curl at the outlandish brow-beating they give resource persons. A pox on their political houses.
They use “branding” irons to charge citizens whose taxes support their lavish lifestyles, calling them “liars” who must simplify their responses to a “yes or no” under pain of contempt and detention.
It makes you wish the bad old days of martial law were back. At least you need not suffer congressional investigations, and only a few “enemies of the State” were subjected to military interrogation far from the public eye.
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But branding iron aside, this article is about another kind of “branding,” the national kind. Whether it is about “LOVE the Philippines” as national brand or having more “fun” in our islands, or whether ours is a “broke-down” place, as one visiting movie actor once commented, branding is such an important matter, be it about a product like Jollibee or a country called the Philippines.
Marshall McLuhan once famously wrote about the medium being the message, where people “tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content…but as society’s values, norms and ways of doing things change because of technology…we realize the social implications of the medium.”
As much as societal norms and values have changed through generations, how we pine for those good old days when there was no cellphone, no internet, and no social media, where news purveyors were confined to what are now referred to as “legacy media”— newspapers, radio and TV.
Then we need not bother to “fact-check” because we presumed that the media would print or broadcast what was true, not necessarily the good and the beautiful.
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Which brings me to the innards of the current corridors of power, where those who are in charge of palace communications have had four changes in charge within less than half of the president’s term.
Let’s talk about the latest.
Apparently, the president was in a huddle with an old hand in advertising and political marketing, when he confided that he indeed had problems about his communications.
Unfortunately, it was not a one-on-one huddle, as is the rote in Malacanang, where some people are always in attendance as witnesses, or, more succinctly, as needed by the president for instructions or guidance.
But an undersecretary recorded the conversation in her cellphone, and later sent it around, thus getting the attention of her immediate boss, who was downcast at the president’s observation about his “communications.”
Sensitive to the president’s remark before the marketing guru, the secretary resigned forthwith. That is of course in character, as looking back at his government career, he flits in and out from one superior to another. Still, how relieved he must feel these days.
Moving on, whispers in the corridors of power are now speculating on the actions of another undersecretary, a female Harry Roque 2.0 who has appointed herself spokesperson sans official designation, with her superior hardly seen or heard.
Another changing of the battalion head, rather, the division, because the agency is overloaded with so many in its employ (Musk would have chopped it off to a 10th or mercifully a 5th of its personnel compliment) in the offing?
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Though Pampanga’s cuisine has its undoubted merits, naming it the country’s culinary capital is unfair branding, and the president himself said so in vetoing legislation that gives it primus and not even inter pares.
I prefer Bulakeno and Malabon cuisine as it is less oily and less sweet than Pampango food, just as the incarcerated Digong would prefer his “inun-unan” and fried saba to be so elevated in the pantheon of Filipino cuisine.
To each his own, the president is actually saying, just as Timor Leste has shown the Philippines in an “up yours” judicial action that it understands sovereignty better.
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On his 80th milestone tomorrow, though in a far-away land where the sun hardly peeps and the air is damp and cold, we wish former president Rodrigo Roa Duterte a very happy birthday, despite all the trials and tribulations he faces in the sunset of his life.