A recently uploaded video showing a spat between former Commission on Elections (Comelec) commissioner Rowena Guanzon and an unidentified couple went viral and netizens are feasting in bashing the feisty lawyer from Cadiz. She has only herself to blame. According to reports, the squabble began when the fellow mall goer told her, “You are coughing. You should leave the mall.” The man allegedly may have added, “Don’t you have money to buy mask?”
It was then that the septuagenarian lawyer tried to be insulting in her reply, saying that the man has no Rolex and no Gucci, implying that person with no such expensive accessories does not have the right to complain about her coughing. That was a total absence of class. It would have been equally bitchy but more classy to retort, “The virus from my mouth is choosy and infects only the rich and the famous.”
From then on, it was downhill for Guanzon.
Without naming the female lawyer, political analyst Ronald Llamas commented in social media, “Bumaba na naman ang self-esteem ko. Wala kasi akong Rolex o Gucci.” To which Guanzon replied with another less than classy remark, “It is normal for him to experience low self-esteem because he is ugly.” She then referred to an alleged past love affair involving the political analyst, as if it has any relevance to the issue at hand.
In an interview, Llamas said he will just let Guanzon be, and cited Napoleon’s advice that if an adversary is committing mistakes, then (s)he should not be stopped. It was obvious that in this game of repartee, Guanzon was no match to Llamas.
This brings me to the art of verbal aggression. This art, never a prevalent feature in Philippine political discourse, is almost completely absent in Duterte the patriarch and his children. The family’s limited vocabulary and poor sense of imagination confine their intended insults to comments about the overactive genitals of the adversary’s mothers.
Even in the United States, the insults coming from Donald Trump are often one adjective but repeated often, like Sleeping Joe.
Gone are the days when insults were hilarious but no less savage. And one who has mastered such art was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Once, parliamentarian Nancy Astor tried to be on the offensive, saying, “If I were married to you, I would poison your tea.” To which Churchill replied, “if you were my wife, I would drink it.”
But Churchill himself was sometimes the object of witty insults like the one coming from French President Charles de Gaulle, “When I am right, I get angry. Churchill gets angry when he is wrong. We are angry at each other much of the time.”
More often, the insults are directed to the politicians themselves. Mark Twain once said, “Suppose, you were an idiot. Suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
Do you think it is unbecoming for me to write about insults? I am laughing right now as I urge you to read the Bible. There, our Lord Jesus was an example of wit and creativity in his use of metaphors in dealing with his adversaries, calling them whitened sepulchers, the blind leading the blind. In a masterful use of analogies, Jesus compared the temple establishment to stewards who behave as if they own Israel. And Jesus was effective, for it is written that the priests and scribes realized that “he had told this parable against them.”
But one classic example of parabolic anecdotes is from the prophet Nathan in the presence of King David. The king had previously been responsible for the death of Uriah, whose wife Bathsheba had an illicit affair with David. Nathan then narrated an oracle about a rich man who had everything and a poor man who had nothing but a precious ewe lamb. The rich man had a visitor. Unwilling to slay any of his flock to serve the visitor, the rich man took the poor man’s lamb. David’s anger was seething and he said the rich man deserves to die. It was then that Nathan said, “You are the man.”
The examples above are all from historical figures that I come to know only through my reading. The last example comes from a person I once worked with, Msgr. Rudy Villanueva. There were times when his mastery of the art of insulting came to the fore when he was furious. In class, a seminarian failed to answer a simple question. It was during such time when Rudy’s pet Doberman came to enter the classroom. He gently fondled the dog, and said aloud, “You have better chances to get ordained a priest.”
Masterful, isn’t it? The lady attorney can learn from them and not from the classless tirades of Digong.