When is a killing not worth getting worked up about? For some people, the answer seems to be: When it cannot be somehow blamed on the Duterte administration.
When a bomb ripped across a market in Davao City last Friday night, killing more than a dozen local residents and injuring several dozens more, most people reacted reasonably—calling for calm, sympathizing with the victims and their families and joining in demands to bring the perpetrators to justice. Others of a more politically partisan bent decided to gloat, to sow fear and to spread disinformation.
I really wonder how some of our countrymen, especially those who like to label themselves “decent,” can sound so callous and insensitive. Maybe it’s some kind of tradition, this horrible lack of empathy, that they feel they must uphold.
You can’t tell me that it’s just online trolls of a certain political persuasion who are engaging in this un-Filipino activity. How can it be limited to social media when the Archbishop of Lingayen-Dagupan calls for responding to violence with peace and when the most prominent defender of the previous regime in the Senate worries if a “Wag The Dog” scenario is not actually in effect?
In the case of Archbishop Socrates Villegas, who is also the president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (apart from being a dyed-in-the-wool Yellow), I think he is just adding to the confusion in his own, uniquely clerical way. How Villegas wants us, an angry nation seeking justice, to respond with peace to the Abu Sayyaf bandits—the main suspects in the Davao bombings—would test even the patience of the new Saint Teresa of Kolkata.
And when Senator Leila de Lima warns that a “Wag The Dog” scenario may be in effect, isn’t she accusing President Rodrigo Duterte of staging the bombing himself, in order to divert attention from her Senate investigation of so-called extra-judicial killings? Shouldn’t De Lima, not Duterte, wag the dog, since she’s the one who should be covering up reports of her very active sex life?
(This is why politicians should be careful about making cinematic allusions. The 1997 black comedy “Wag The Dog,” based loosely on the Clinton administration, has a fictional US president starting a war on the advice of his propagandists, in order to divert public attention away from a sex scandal plaguing his government.)
As far as I know, the gloating and the trolling did begin on social media, from misguided Yellow orphans who could not help but point out that the bombing belied Duterte’s claims of Davao being “the safest city in the Philippines.” But their so-called betters and more enlightened fellow travelers on the old Daang Matuwid like Villegas and De Lima should have just shut up, since they aren’t online trolls and really have nothing to add to the national conversation.
These include those who, without little or no understanding of the legal issues, immediately raised the specter of a return to Martial Law with Duterte’s declaration of a “state of lawless violence” throughout the country in the aftermath of the bombing. If only they asked impartial legal luminaries like UE law dean Amado Valdez and San Beda graduate school of law dean Father Rannie Aquino first, they would not be making such ignorant statements.
But for the most part, I think the Davao explosion did not elicit strident protests from the Yellows because they were the wrong kind of deaths. And remember, the Yellow faction of Philippine politics has long mastered the art of exploiting a cadaver to further its objectives.
I remain convinced that because the deaths in Davao could not be used to hit at Duterte, most of the Yellows just exercised prudence and refused to make public asses of themselves. (De Lima, whose misinformed movie reference was really a feeble attempt to pin the attack on Duterte, is an exception; but then, she’s always been exceptionally dense in matters political.)
Those Yellows with more political smarts than Villegas and De Lima knew that the bombing was not something you could blame on Duterte. Besides, the political mood of the majority was one of sympathy for Davaoeños and unity against terror groups like the Abu Sayyaf; prudence dictated that this was not the time to push the anti-Duterte agenda.
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And so, Duterte’s opponents will continue to act as if the Davao bombing never happened. Or they will only mention it dismissively, in order to point out that the deaths there were not gory or numerous enough to give Duterte Martial Law-like powers.
In effect, the President’s critics seem to think that killing a suspected addict or pusher is more alarming than killing a productive, law-abiding member of society who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. All deaths are political to these people—have been since Plaza Miranda in 1971 and the tarmac of the Manila airport in 1983, in fact.
It’s just that some deaths are more exploitable for political purposes than others. To these empathy-free people, the Davao bombing won’t bring Duterte down and may even make him stronger, so the lives lost there don’t really matter.