SPEECH THAT IS PRESIDENTIAL

Yesterday (July 24, 2012) I watched through the internet President Aquino delivered his third SONA before Congress. I am still to figure out why only three days after full media coverage the SONA seemed to have become dead old news. Instead of gloating over or criticizing it, media and the people must have wisely, had moved on to grapple with life’s necessities setting aside less important cerebral pursuits.
Grading this SONA against promised criteria, dreamed of or politically crafted to win votes during the 2010 presidential campaign, a grade of A+ or in the higher 90s can be objectively given by a professor who is not interested in patronage or political largesse doled out by politicians. The high grade given is only SUBJECTIVE in the sense that the message contained in the SONA is understood partly emotionally in its ethnocentric (patriotic) and nationalistic (Filipino masses first) content.
The SONA can be graded C- as inept, untruthful, insufficient, biased, and therefore almost unacceptable to politicians or non politicians who has in the past have lived by their own tenets of the good life. These people may not have directly or indirectly stolen or embezzled the peoples’ money like ordinary criminals. A common thief can ransack a house and empty it of its valuables but a high government official or top notch politician can be entrusted one trillion (one million millions of) pesos and by sheer political power spend only one thousand million for the country and its people. and still retained the respect and adulation of their beneficiaries.
Just imagine the awesome human power in our country for a single person to finally approve the expenditures of more than two trillion pesos by merely affixing his signature to a lawful but compromised document.
The SONA I just watched is about both the message and the messenger. Both faces a mirror. You look at the messenger and you see the quality of the message and vice versa. If it is a magic mirror and can be manipulated then what might be seen are illusions which are macabre or surreal.
To be real, ask a true sycophant of former President Gloria Arroyo to choose the best SONA delivered by her. Now watch it, then compare it with the latest SONA of President Aquino and see how messenger and the message are inextricably welded to each other in unmistakable integrity. One can not be the opposite of the other. This can not be conjectured without hindsight. BUT the plot gets thicker when towards the end President Aquino asserted with conviction that the SONA he just delivered is not his. It is actually the Filipino people his bosses who made the SONA. He did not deny though that the messenger had a hand in fleshing out the message.
Having been an observer in the years prior to and during Martial Law (1972) I had the tingling feeling that 40 years later what is being dished out and hammered tooth and nail by President Aquino smacks of activists’ rhetoric on good governance minus the human rights gospel. It was as if some student activists of yore had inputed their thoughts and style to the 2012 speech. Not bad for a serendipity.
In this space twice previously in Tagalog I wrote about Noynoy’s pre-presidential manifesto. as bases of his SONA. Certainly never in the light of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital or Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. Noynoy’s was more capitalist than communist, more corporatist and more business-like BUT VERY POLITICAL in sound and fury. A truly liberal party platform. More over, if the country and the people were not in such a horrible bad shape at the time, Noynoy’s platform will all just be a pack of opportunistic lies.
Anyway, before getting elected he had spelled out his vision, his mission and strategies. He was clear where he wants to go (vision) and how (mission) to get there using gigantic steps (strategies). He chose the straight path(Tuwid na Daan ) to reach his vision not realizing that the straight path is so full of obstacles that he must meander to open and blaze new trails to get to where he is going.
This I think in a nutshell is what the third SONA is all about. Media and its pundits may enumerate and comment in detail his failings and accomplishments in his Cabinet’s various fields of governance like health and education, infrastructure, etc. Etc. And I choose not to repeat them here.
The third SONA (four more to go) exudes modest confidence to have included optimal and stark statistics that will be accomplished by the end of his presidential term in 2016. Like not being First World or World class in 2020. Just simple number of school houses, kms in highways, insurance coverage. etc.
Micro-management (a finger in every pie) it is obvious IS NOT the style of President Aquino’s governance as he singled out and thanked particular cabinet members and other bureaucrats for jobs well-done. Implicit with those appreciative words are his serious expectations of completion of programs in 2016.
Noticeable too, from the audience of elite power are the blank faces, the silence or hesitant applause when the President castigated the abhorrent abuse of power by those in government.
I think it was wholly to the credit of Congress (not an iota from the Executive and Judicial Branches) that the SONA was completely transformed into a Hollywoodish fashion show spectacle of pomposity and wealth.
There were short and sporadic applauses, which gave the President moments to wet lips and throat for what might be the longish SONA– the most candid presidential peroration in Congress history. An irony of ironies among the candidates then Noynoy was acclaimed to be the one and only 100% UNPRESIDENTIAL.
Fittingly, there was no standing ovation. The august audience stood up only during the singing of the National Anthem and to disperse at the conclusion of the speech. Figuratively and long overdue, the audience received a spanking SONA.