Weekly Brief

Political circus in the Philippines is both the new and the old normal. Same circus, different clowns.

In review and in prospect

The only bunch of people who are really confused about where their place is in the Philippines’ political landscape are — you guessed it — the Yellowtards. These people are the country’s political parasites. They deliberately do not commit to a stable ideological framework because they need to maintain a high degree of fluidity in their principles to allow them to easily slither into whatever political bloc of the time offers them the highest ground in the next election.

Consider how these crooks have positioned themselves today. From being rabid Martial Law Crybabies in the campaign leadup to (and even over the decades before) the 2022 national elections that saw the ascent to power of Ferdinand ‘Bongbong’ Marcos Jr., the Yellowtards have suddenly gone silent on their tiresome but nonetheless renowned Marcos-is-Evil rhetoric. Indeed, you’d think this would be a long-overdue sensible posture when one considers that the Yellowtard powers-that-be share a lot more basic values with the garden-variety Filipino oligarchs that hold court in the current Marcos government today than with those surrounding the Duterte clan of Mindanao (led by former President Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, current Vice President Sara Duterte). After all, many Yellowtard oligarchs are related both by blood and by marriage to many Marcos cronies and are members of the same chi chi Manila golf and country clubs. Imperial Manila, in short.

Imperial Manila people, after all, fancy themselves as members of the urbane elite cream of society that are antitheses to the Philippines’ deep south probinsyano sub-culture. To be fair, the Dutertes do conduct themselves in ways consistent to that stereotype looking back at the character of the former president’s administration and as made evident more recently in the shrill behaviour the Vice President exhibited under the spotlight in those congressional “inquiries” into her budget.

The interesting thing is that when one steps back far enough from all that and regards Philippine society from an outsider’s perspective, all of these characters come across as the same monolithic picture of crassness. Much as the promdi archetype of the Philippine south attracts the derision of Manila’s sosyal set, there is something to be said about the equally tacky way the Marcoses celebrate their birthdays with an astoundingly tone-deaf grandiosity. That’s not to even mentioning the infantile way First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos herself struts around. At the end of the day, they are all the same, whether we are talking about a Marcos, an Aquino, a Robredo, or a Duterte.

The easy way to sum up this general crassness of Philippine society (which characterises even its most chi chi elite subset) is in how the Philippine entertainment industry portrays them. We did write some time ago about the amusing reality that Filipino actors do not know how to portray rich people because “Filipino script writers are incapable of grasping the nuances of what it means to be a true member of the alta ciudad (high society). To top that with another layer of dysfunction, Filipino actors and actresses are woefully ill-equipped to play such characters.”

Shouting matches, loud monologues, and slapstick chatter pepper stories about “love” between characters from opposite sides of the tracks, one-dimensional infidelity, and infantile youth angst. In short, the cinematic devices haven’t evolved much since Lavinia Arguelles played by the late Cherie Gil issued the words “You’re nothing, but a second-rate trying hard copycat!” to Dorina Pineda played by Sharon Cuneta in the 1985 film Bituing Walang Ningning.

Seems we were being too kind at the time. There is no true alta ciudad in the Philippines because all elite Filipinos really have is money and none of what makes one a truly well-bred member of elite society that exhibits grace as a matter of routine habit. This means Philippine entertainment creatives actually had nothing much to work with to begin with. Indeed, if even the most chi chi of Philippine learning institutions, the Ateneo de Manila, which counts amongst its illustrious products no less than the First Lady, fugitive former Commission on Elections (COMELEC) Chairman Andy Bautista, and default Yellowtard leader Leni Robredo fails to instil that breeding and grace, what hope is there for all the sub A-Listers out there? Then again, breeding and grace are supposedly things one would have learnt in kindergarten, right? That leaves much to be desired in that much-vaunted “strict” Filipino parenting style.

Circling back to the original point, one could forgive the Yellowtards’ confused state. The only real way to escape the dysfunction of Philippine society is to remove one’s self from it. Unfortunately for the Yellowtards, like all the rest of them, their top “thought leaders” routinely fail to think outside of the little square that frames Filipino thinking. The worst outcome of this smallness of thinking that afflicts even the “best and brightest” products of the Philippines education system is in how much of what characterises the Philippine Political “Debate” still hasn’t changed.

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