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Friday, March 29, 2024

Real talk

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I must admit: I used to think that Noynoy Aquino was a great communicator. But even in his finest moments, Aquino was always a gifted but thoroughly obedient reader—he sounds good and polished, but you always suspect that he doesn’t really mean what he says since he’s only reading what some speechwriter shoved in his face.

The most amazing thing about President Rodrigo Duterte’s first State of the Nation Address, which he supposedly wrote, is how often he interrupted himself in order to explain what he really meant. I lost count of the number of times Duterte stopped reading the lines from his TelePrompTer, which he would mostly run through, until he felt he arrived on a line or idea that he felt he just had to elucidate; then he’d slow down, ad lib and just basically Dutertify what he’d just read.

This, I think, is because Duterte feels horribly constricted just reading from a script handed to him. Especially if it is a topic that he feels needs amplification because it is important—illegal drugs, say, or red tape in government—he has no qualms about stopping reading and ad libbing.

Duterte, by his own admission and from our own short experience, has never cared much for protocol or tradition. And if he over-spoke by over an hour (the speech was supposed to take only less than 40 minutes), he apparently doesn’t care, so long as he makes a point.

No, it wasn’t—as the president’s spokesman had promised —a heart-wrenching, cry-inducing speech. But it was not so much a Sona as it was another of those incredibly earnest, heart-to-heart conversations that Duterte feels a need to have with the nation—though not lately, since he imposed his ban on those stream-of-consciousness press conferences he used to conduct in Davao.

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It was honest and often off-tangent. It was Duterte in the raw, reprising the plainspoken role that endeared him to many Filipinos and elected him to the highest office in the land.

If I may continue with the comparison between Duterte and Aquino (and most of Aquino’s predecessors, to be fair), the new president is so different because he is simultaneously so alien and yet so familiar. He may not be speaking like any other president on his most important annual speech, but you just know that this is how actual people—as opposed to the usual politicians like Aquino and the rest—communicate.

It was yet another instance of Duterte doing real talk. No frills, no technocratese, no fancy verbal pyrotechnics or imagery.

At certain points, like when he asked Congress to pass emergency measures to allow him to solve Metro Manila’s traffic problem, it wasn’t even because he wanted to convince anyone to see it his way. There’s just the right way, which he says will get the job done, and some other way, which won’t.

As Duterte long ago admitted, most Filipinos don’t really know him. But if the people who take the trouble to do so are mesmerized, it’s not hard to understand why.

Duterte doesn’t talk slick like any national politician I’ve ever heard of, always careful of staying “on message” and focus-grouped to death. He talks like you and me—and he’s perfectly believable when he does.

* * *

I have another confession to make: Duterte had my immediate attention when I first saw him arrive at the Batasan wearing a flag pin on his chest.

Duterte had not even ascended to the podium at that point. He had just gotten off the helicopter that took him to the joint session of Congress.

And there was the new president of the Philippines, proudly wearing the unifying symbol of his country. It’s no small thing: After six years of watching a president display nothing but the divisive symbol of his political clan and party on his chest, I really look forward to every opportunity when the Chief Executive calls for unity even before he opens his mouth to utter his first words.

I’ve always believed in the talismanic power of the Philippine tricolor to unite us as a nation. It is often, in my view, the only thing anymore that does.

We may have, as Filipinos, different languages, different religions, different customs, different demographic and economic classes and, certainly, different political views. But as long as we honor that same flag, I think there’s hope for us yet.

And one of the chief failings of Duterte’s predecessor is that he refused to wear this symbol of national unity that all previous heads of this tumultuous and contentious state proudly wore. By insisting on displaying what separates his believers from the rest of us, that president became a divisive force to the great majority who did elect him to office.

Because under our three-decade-old political system, every president is elected only by a plurality, never by a majority. The least a new president can do, you’d think, is to rally the rest of the country who didn’t want him elected and ask them to help him going forward.

But that was then. I’m just glad Duterte is the sort of president who understands what the flag really means and how it can bring us all together as a nation.

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