Weekly Brief
Maid in Malacañang versus Katips: The Movie -- a proxy war that nobody really cares about.
In review and in prospect
First it was “history’ now it is film. One could say Philippine politics had been reduced to a quaint proxy war wherein partisan camps, rather than engage in constructive debate, are using these two fields as a battlefield to undermine the other — except there is really only one side that still believes there is a “war” to be fought.
The Opposition remain stuck in a mindset that there is a bogey to be destroyed; which they've been trying to do by slapping labels on historical narratives that, in reality, are really just artefacts in a competitive field. In that field, critical inquiry is normally applied to tease out the most sound of the lot in never-ending cycles of iterations of theses tested by antithesis out of which forward-evolved new theses are the outcomes. Key to make that process constructive, however, is the active ingredient — open critical inquiry — which is evidently sorely lacking in the national discourse.
Scratch that last part. It seems that it is really just the traditional Opposition of Martial Law Crybabies, communists, and Yellowtards that have so far proved to be incapable of sustaining a constructive process of critical inquiry. To this day, they continue to stick to the the very same messaging — the content of which they forge and cultivate within their little echo chambers — that lost them “important” elections no less than three times.
Meanwhile, the rest of the country have moved on. The Yellowtard and communist narratives had been effectively thoroughly scrutinised over the last several days. There was ample empirical evidence to work with and enough academic frameworks applied to test the coherence and consistency of what these camps were subjecting Filipinos to over that period. All that came to a head over the last several years over which the Yellowtards and communists lost ideological ground (measured by their electoral performance over that time).
So now film has been conscripted to the ongoing proxy war the Opposition are trying their darnedest to convince Filipinos is still ongoing. On one side is newly-minted Maid in Malacañang and on the other, Katips: The Movie. The earlier is being pitched as long-overdue entertainment with an alternative perspective and the latter as the one with the “credentials”. Old habits die hard, indeed. The Opposition continue a sad tradition of putting institutions that have come to some ill repute in recent years behind their bets — that cartel of chi chi private schools (“Katips”, right? Go figure), old reliable (not!) Roman Catholic Church, traditional media, and that obsolete cadre of career “activists”.
Politicise all one wants. Today Filipinos make their choices and decide what to think on the back of information institutions no longer are able to control. This is the new reality that all parties in the political “battlefield” just simply need to embrace and adapt their ways to.
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