The Revolution’s Long Christmas Break

First, I want to thank everyone who expressed concern about my well-being. I’m safe as houses, in an art & media oriented household whose original builder was a newsreel cameraman from the days when newsreel cameras had hand-cranks. In short, there is a long history of frontline work during violent demonstrations, peaceful revolutions, coup attempts and, sometimes most dangerous of all, elections. I’m 70yrs old and definitely off the street, but my landlady is in the crime-scene trenches with the international media several nights a week. Knowing what’s going on has survival value.

Also, Monday has passed into Tuesday and there is presently no revolution in sight. The loose leadership behind the anti-Marcos burial movement has called for major demos on the 25th & 30th, with the latter being perhaps more fraught than the earlier — I have more to say about that below as I continue the Duterte-Trump comparison. Though there are many differences in the men and their respective countries, I find the similarities as instructive as they are uncanny. I’m going to talk about that more, but first:

We need to talk to ourselves. That there even is such a thing as a President Duterte or a president-elect Trump speaks of grievous error. Metaphors can be slippery, especially if they run on past their use-by date, but here’s one that struck me. Leaving the mall with a shopping bag full of fresh-bought sustenance, I stopped for coffee, but dammit, all the outdoor tables were taken. I’ve grown more patient with age and, since I have a novel in progress, there’s always productive mental work to be done. I can get bored, but it takes a long time.

While I was mentally buffin’ my McGuffin, my eyes fell on other people like myself, trapped into waiting and saw that every one of them had their eyes glued to some sort of handheld digital device. Isn’t it wonderful that we no longer get stuck with nothing to do! Yay for devices. However, looking around the colorful holiday displays, installed with professional skill on every building and bit of landscape, I realized that my concern about a coming revolution was pretty foolish. Because Christmas.

Filipinos are perhaps the most Christmas-celebrating people in the world. Its décor, music, consumer promotion, food trip and much else is in evidence here five full months — start of September till the end of January. The ghost of Christmas is only fully exorcized by Valentines Day — which vies with Easter for second place. The simple truth of my observation of my surroundings and the people in them made it seem very unlikely that anyone would start a revolution before Christmas. Holiday preps are just too far along. It’s much the same thing we used to gripe about in the anti-Vietnam War, anti-Nixon days. Revolution might lead to a bullet hole in the flat-screen TV or the dishwasher.

As my attention drifted back to my fellows, I realized that many of them were glued to their devices to see if this spontaneous demonstration was going to turn into an actual revolution. They were, in short, deprived of an important insight that could be had through their physical and social environment — nor were they thinking — because they were in the habit of using their smart-phones to escape the banality, frustration, in some cases grubbiness of their surroundings. In this case, simultaneously overloading the worry centers of their brains with the kind of hype that inevitably results from media people having to spend hours on-scene in case the big something happens.

That Friday demonstration was, by the way, spontaneous. No one knew how long it would last. It was the regular shift of cops who were called out for crowd control. However, around midnight, there was an improvised shift change — off-duty day-shift cops from offices and other non-patrol functions — to relieve the original cops. This was not to give the regulars a break or time off. It was because the night’s killing was yet to be done. They were needed elsewhere, lest their stations fall behind.

The demo remained peaceful because bulk of the crowd the cops faced were students from the nation’s most exclusive schools. I mean, Bravo the kids! The Marcos revisionists have particularly targeted students and their demonstrating is an encouraging sign that the propaganda blitz aimed at them didn’t work very well. Still, they were of a class that could march to the demo and have their drivers pick them up in expensive European cars packed with bottled water and snacks. Scions of the business, political and military elite. But God bless ‘em!

Any way you look at it, this is a hard time to be an elite. Though “elite” means a lot of things, for now, anybody with an intelligent idea in their head or a coherent word to say about what’s wrong with the courses plotted by these two demagogues is easily slapped down with the stereotype. “Thinkin’,” is, quite simply, “stinkin’.” To the people who put these yahoos in power, we are the problem, we are the oppressors responsible for the sorry state of their lives. Of course that’s counter factual, but facts are the demagogues’ enemy.

Thing is, “elite” is not a meaningless term. Definitely, at the intellectual level, it is something we — as readers and writers — all are. I grew up the only child of small business owners in a small Texas town trapped in typical boom-bust cycles well into the neoliberal age. A working class world, topped off by a hand-full of lawyers and bankers who actually ran the show. As part of my education, my parents would send me off to live with relatives who were unspeakably poor; with other relatives who were well-to-do and well-connected; other relatives who were glad to work my ass off at farming. They were not educated people, but I’m grateful they were wise enough to think of ways to acquaint me with the realities of my “station in life.”

I’ve lived 50 of my 70yrs as a racial minority — a white man amongst people of color. I’m an uncredentialed autodidact. I’ve had at least five careers that I dropped like hot potatoes whenever my level of “success” started drawing too much time and energy away from what I continue to foolishly value as “my art.” Most of my life I’ve been statistically poor — sometimes food-and-shelter poor. Beyond white male privilege — a blessing and a curse for someone who’s lived my particular life — what makes me an elite is that I chose these things. Most of the people who put Duterte in power and some of the people who put Trump where he is today had no choice.

It’s not that we nominal elites failed to address their problems. Many of us have worked very hard to break the chains of socioeconomic stagnation, inequality and generational poverty at the core of populist anger. No, where we failed was communication. We know capacity building solutions take a lot of time to bear fruit. We didn’t see the anger, so we didn’t address it. We accomplished things like providing housing for 200,000 of Manila’s 1,000,000 squatters (informal settlers, in PC). It was an exhausting effort and a real accomplishment. Unfortunately, we failed to deal with the anger and disaffection of the 800,000 who continued to live under bridges, on sidewalks and such. Those people, naturally, voted for Duterte.

Obama did well domestically — arguably saved the economy, generated jobs under near-impossible neoliberal race-to-the-bottom circumstances — but he too failed to address the growing anger. Wealth inequality — probably the biggest problem — just kept getting worse, income inequality fluctuated without ever going anywhere, even though it’s a relatively small matter and the very thing that could have quelled some of the anger. We too were angry; but we were too busy being angry at corporate avariciousness and regulatory capture to see that a whole segment of the population lumped us in with the same people we were angry with. We didn’t relate. We didn’t communicate. We lost to popular anger. We, the elite, tilled the field and planted the seeds that Duterte and Trump used their demagoguery to harvest. We need to do better than that. Fast. For real — not superficially. Personally. We need some “woke” liberal elites real bad right now.

The good news is that even after losing our respective elections, our majority is still there. The “continuity vote” in the Philippines was split by typical political foolishness. The two candidates committed to continued capacity building policies got 9 million votes each — that’s 18 million against the 16 million Duterte’s return to patronage politics pitch managed to ride to victory. In the US, Clinton won the popular vote. In other words, in both countries more people voted against the demagogue than for.

Here’s what my six-months-down-the-road view reveals: Duterte is more popular now than at the time of the election — despite all the shit he’s pulling. Trump can probably do the same. If he’s allowed to.

Treating what we call “the masa” here as a great demographic sea whose tide can be turned by some consumer-marketing type pitch is exactly what won’t work. What will work is genuine inclusiveness. Both demagogues have made promises they have no intention of keeping. They are the avariciously corrupt exploiters they spent their campaigns demonizing. Of course we must try to protect our freedoms from authoritarian assault. Of course we cannot embrace the sociopathic bigots and corrupt exploiters now being enabled and empowered. But what we can do is reach out to include righteously frustrated people — regardless of race or station in life. Genuinely. Personally. If we’d done a better job of that in the first place, neither the US nor the Philippines would be in the mess we’re in right now. As anyone who owns the latest iPhone can tell you, gullible isn’t the same thing as stupid. And above all, this sorry state of affairs must not be allowed to normalize — as the never-ending street killings are beginning to do here now.

Meanwhile, revolution update: More major demos on the 25th & 30th — with the one on the 30th likely to be bad. The Friday demos were “elites,” but Nov. 30 is Bonifacio Day, which honors an actual national hero during the unrest caused by the faux hero’s burial just given Marcos. Worse, Bonifacio led the proletariat faction of the revolution and is honored second only to Rizal himself by the often less-well-off and far more violent left-wing student groups that are sure to be out in force on the 30th.

Going by past performance, the cops are likely to arrive at those demonstrations with their clubs already swinging. The last such demo was in front of the US Embassy, where a “rogue” cop drove a police van into the crowd of demonstrators, running over several. Back and forth. Several times.

Duterte himself is returning from the APEC Summit — where he’s behaved in his usual gauche manner — any day now and there is a certain “Daddy’s coming home and he’s gonna whup your ass” feeling in the air. He’s recently threatened to suspend habeas corpus and some worry that anti-Marcos burial demonstrations might provide the excuse.

Meanwhile, Manila police commanders — the officers who run the stations and districts were all the killings are taking place — are being reassigned to similar positions all over the country, giving the president life-and-death control all over the country rather than mainly in Manila or his home bailiwick of Davao.

In the US, Obama has allowed a shameful thing to happen at Standing Rock. We can only guess what Trump will be up to in six months. Next time, I’ll write about some things that might mitigate that. The tough news is that we all need to change if we want to have much influence during that time.