DERISION and outrage have greeted the distribution of a comic book depicting the administration’s presidential candidate Manuel Roxas II as the savior of Typhoon “Yolanda” survivors.
For those who lived through the killer typhoon and its aftermath in 2013, the graphic retelling of their ordeal to recast Roxas as the hero was a blatant lie and an insult to the thousands that died.
“That is far from the truth and reality that what he did and did not do resulted in the death of thousands of people. This was criminal negligence. He is cleaning his name and washing his hands of the tragedy,” said Yolanda survivor Marissa Cabaljao.
Contrary to the glowing account in the comic book, the administration—and Roxas, who was then Interior and Local Government secretary—came under fierce criticism for their slow response to the typhoon, which killed more than 6,000 people, left 1.9 million homeless and destroyed 90 percent of the structures in Tacloban and other towns and cities in the Visayas. Five days after the typhoon struck, survivors continued to struggle with basic necessities such as food, water and shelter, while remote towns in Leyte and Samar had yet to receive any aid at all—a condition documented at the time by live reporting by CNN. In Tacloban City, corpses were still being found four months after the disaster.
In the face of these harsh realities, there are two ways we can view the Roxas comic book.
The most facile is to believe that the Roxas camp and its Liberal Party allies are cynical liars and are so desperate to win election that they will lie about a human tragedy to claw their way out of the bottom of the polls.
Another possibility is that Roxas actually believes his revision of history, twisted as it might seem to anyone familiar with the administration’s dismal record in Yolanda. This separation from reality might explain how he can claim with a straight face to have performed heroic feats, even though any preparations he might have put in place in his meetings in Tacloban City before the storm were clearly inadequate—leading to more, not fewer deaths.
It is this same disconnect from the lives of ordinary Filipinos that gave one government official the impetus to declare that the country’s economic managers were “happy” about official statistics showing that more than one in four Filipinos is poor, and that there were 26.4 million people living below the poverty line—simply because this was an improvement over the 27.9 percent poverty rate in 2012.
It is the same alternate view of reality that enables a callous President to veto a bill that would have raised pensions to millions of retirees with the shrug of the shoulder, while defending fat bonuses for the administrators of the Social Security System.
In the 1980 film Altered States, American playwright Paddy Chayefsky wrote about a scientist who experimented with sensory deprivation and hallucinogenic drugs to unlock different states of consciousness. While the combination seemed to work at first, the scientist’s grip on reality gradually slipped away as his sensory deprivation increased.
There seems to be a striking parallel here—sans the hallucinogenic drugs, we trust—between the scientist who eventually loses his grip on reality, and Roxas, who thinks of himself as the hero of Yolanda. Long deprived of interaction with real people—perhaps by personal choice or preference—Roxas has achieved an altered state of reality from which there may be no return.