THIS clear as day.
This is a government in meltdown, and they know it.
Over the weekend, in social media exchanges, not a few diehard supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, responding to criticism of his latest bungles, including calls for his resignation or ouster, appeared to have only one counterargument left in their admittedly sparse arsenal: “Sino ang ipapalit niyo?” (Who will you replace him with?)
This response reminded me of the times when Duterte’s idol Ferdinand Marcos would mount one of his naturally rigged “elections” to showcase what then US Vice President George H.W. Bush would hail in 1981 as the despot’s “adherence to democratic principles and democratic processes.”
Of course, people were under no illusion of how those sham polls would go. But that didn’t stop them from joking that, in a fair contest, they would field their dog and bet on it.
It is sad, though, when people have become so bereft of choices, of hope, that they cannot think of anyone better than this madman who has dragged us down into an abyss of death and despair. And these are the true believers, the ones who’ve been so screwed by the system they eagerly embraced the charlatan whose populist posturing they mistook – and continue to mistake – for empathy and sincerity.
On the other hand, there are those – many of them supposedly intelligent people, a number of them once principled – who chose to sell their souls and now throw out “Sino ang ipapalit niyo?” as a defiant, if desperate, dare as they realize that the dream they bet their souls on is fast crumbling.
It didn’t require rocket science to predict Duterte would take the presidency. However, neither was it so hard to predict from the moment he anchored his platform of governance on killing and venality that he would be transforming the country into a madhouse that was bound to collapse before long.
And he appears to have lit the fuse of self-inflicted implosion through the obsessive – if mindless – vindictiveness he tried to bring brought to bear against Senator Antonio Trillanes IV, ordering the revocation of amnesty and arrest of the former Navy officer through Proclamation 572, signed August 31 but which, in an act of extraordinary courage, became public only on September 4, or two days after he had left for visits to Israel and Jordan, when it was splashed in its full glory as a classified ad in a newspaper considered sympathetic to him.
So high was getting Trillanes among Duterte’s priorities that at a Cabinet meeting in Jordan, the senator remained the main topic of discussion even as the Filipino people got walloped by runaway prices as inflation hit a nine-year high and the peso hit a 13-year low against the U.S. dollar.
Alas for Duterte, it was a move so inept and, according to quite a number of legal experts, illegal ab initio that it should rightfully lead to his impeachment if only Congress were populated by truly honorable people, that even the military, after a few miscues, realized that silence in the face of this fiasco is the wisest option.
I think Duterte realizes the bind he is in.
His mostly incoherent answers at the press conference he gave on arriving home from his recent overseas trip showed a strongman wannabe grasping at straws, raising the specter of an imagined alliance between the “yellows,” Trillanes and the “politburo” – an obvious reference to the communists – and making a thinly veiled plea to the military to save him from impending doom, including through a possible coup.
From here on, I believe Duterte’s grasp on power – and reality – can only steadily erode, though I do not doubt he and his mercenary minions will try their damnedest to fend off the inevitable. And as they say, a rat is most dangerous when cornered.
So, do we let the vermin claw their way back out of the hole they have dug for themselves or do we do ourselves a kindness and rid the land of the madness that has already cost us so many lives and caused us so much pain?
Just one man’s opinion obviously won’t be enough.