A carpenter, not a saint
Credit to Author: JOJO ROBLES| Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2019 18:30:45 +0000
A friend of mine, Darwin, has, for the past couple of years, been trying to make people who are scandalized by the behavior and language of President Rodrigo Duterte understand why the chief executive’s supporters don’t seem to care about this “earth-shaking” problem as much as they themselves do.
According to Darwin, “shaming Duterte followers for believing in him, in spite of his vices and flaws, only makes sense if you think we give a hoot about his virtues.”
Unfortunately, Duterte’s backers did not elect him because of such qualities such as being prim and proper, well-spoken and “disente,” Darwin explains. Especially so because they have become fully aware of the havoc this crowd of nice guys (the same crowd of easily-offended virtue-signalers of today) wrought on the country during the six years before Duterte was elected, they have gotten tired of the elitists who came before him.
“If I hire a carpenter to build me a cabinet, I ask if he can build it the way I want it, if he can finish it within the time allotted and at what price,” Darwin illustrates further. “I do not ask if he goes to church, curses all day or is faithful to his wife, nor do I care if he spends his earnings buying liquor; I just want him to build the cabinet.”
Furthermore, Darwin says the majority of Filipinos who chose and still overwhelmingly support Duterte did not go blindly into the deal. “They knew about his potty mouth and about his being an old-school kanto boy from the get-go, things he never hid from anyone,” he said.
But they decided to give this roughneck mayor from Davao City a chance at running the entire country, anyway, because they sensed an authenticity in him that they could identify with. And after decades of being ruled by various members of the political and economic elite, with their proxies pretending to have come from the masses, that realness that Duterte tapped into was sorely needed.
Of course, if you listen only to Duterte’s critics, you’d think he was just a foul-mouthed provincial nobody, who is as incompetent and worthless as, say, former president Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino 3rd. But they keep conveniently forgetting that he keeps on building Darwin’s metaphorical cabinet, even as he indulges in cuss words and makes revelations from more than half a century ago about how, as a boy, he once groped a housemaid.
Vital infrastructure that never left the drawing board in the previous government is being completed at a feverish pace. Wide-ranging reforms are benefiting millions in and out of government as salaries and benefits are substantially increased, while tuition fees and now important life-saving medicines are being made more affordable and accessible.
And the people are appreciating all of it, more than the scandalized hand-wringing of what passes for the political opposition these days. This is why Duterte’s popularity ratings continue to be stratospheric, two full years after a barking dog in the Senate cooly predicted that they would sink below 50 percent by year-end.
As for me, I’ve always believed that the President should be judged by what he gets done, and not by his theological musings on the Holy Trinity or by his kissing the next pretty overseas worker that he sees. Ideally, of course, a President should have the morals of a Pink Sister, the language of Shakespeare, the incorruptibility of Job and the industry of a small-town mayor with nothing but the good of the entire country in mind.
But you can’t have all of that in one candidate, especially considering the interchangeable, usual suspects paraded before us during every presidential election. I think the people chose extremely well, given the choices offered to them in 2016.
And that is my final beef with all of the lamentations, the weeping and gnashing of teeth among Duterte’s critics about his routinely foul language, his occasional foul actions and his invariably foul recollections: It’s all fake, because it doesn’t come from any real sense of outrage, but is always motivated by a desire to supplant the legitimately-elected President with someone more to the elite’s liking, a Noynoy-like marionette like Leni Robredo, perhaps.
The problem is, the elite — which still run the politics, the bureaucracy, the media, the Church and various other corrupted institutions in this country — are no longer blindly followed by a sheep-like people. And this is ultimately what angers those who used to think that while this is supposed to be a democracy, the people only get to choose who the elites want them to choose.
But hope springs eternal for those who want Duterte out and replaced by some puppet who will do their bidding. Yes, this late in the day, the President’s critics take inspiration from the fall of the last president elected by the people, Joseph Estrada.
Of course, there are key differences between Estrada and Duterte that even those who want the current President out feel could be well-nigh insurmountable. Estrada was a little too fond of money, the good life and of living out his personal fantasy of what being a president is; there are no such fatal weaknesses in Duterte’s armor.
We can only expect the noise, based on facts or not, about Duterte’s supposed sins to escalate as the elections this May approach. But if you ask me, given the steady, solid support the majority has lodged in this president, that may just be political suicide.
And because you never interrupt your opponent while he is making a mistake, I intend to make no further comment on what clearly seems like a train wreck happening in slow motion. But, they’ve been warned: I admire the very few politicians who continue to do battle with Duterte, if just for their determination and refusal to buckle down to what is only the will of the people — but they will fail.
It’s still going to be a train wreck.
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