BY SIMPLE definition, a dilemma is a choice between a rock and a hard place, or a choice between two bad options. In other words, pick your own poison.
Presidential aspirant Bongbong Marcos, famously the only son of an infamous president/dictator, finds himself in this difficult place. He may not be in a deus ex machine plot where the author has to invent an escape plan for a would-be hero trapped by his own devices. It’s something close and more serious because he is both the preposterous author and the incredulous fiction.
If the American actor Woody Allen is correct, Bongbong has a man-size problem , with emphasis on the ‘man’. Presence, says Allen, is 50 percent of success. Before the Jessica Soho presidential interviews, from which he begged off because he felt, or his horse-whisperers did , that the award-winning journalist was biased against him, he was comfortably towing the pack by 53 percent, according to a survey. But before TV sets nationwide could be turned off on that fateful day, his numbers were heard tumbling down.
It could be his undoing. Humpty Dumpty , so the nursery rhyme goes, fell off the wall and nothing could be done to bring Humpty Dumpty back together again. Rhymes are there to provide a moral lesson not only to poets and politicians but even to the simplistic.
The general presumption was that, with BBM out of the interview, the Soho show will just be a ho-hum marginal discussion of issues. As it turned out, BBM’s “chickening out”, transformed it into a radical distinction of the aspirants. The purported guest who made himself scarce gave the 2022 election conversation a serious , healthy agenda for the nation more than it has ever been in the public mind.
Is he for real? There are several take-aways from BBM’s no-show at Soho’s show.
First off, he’s afraid of her. He had faced her once and he was burned. No way it would happen again. He doesn’t deserve her; she’s biased.
Second off, he’s a terrible spoiled brat. Why not? Well, he’s the son of a once powerful man, dictator, if you will. What the son wanted, the son go, like having his own golf course. He is used to having his cake and eating it, too. He preferred talk shows like the one where he was invited by an” inaanak” and it was fun revising history from his arm chair.
Third off, he’s spooked by the nation’s dark past under his father’s dictatorship or martial regime. He’s more comfortable at telling the lie, that it was the country’s golden age and he’s destined to rein again in another in his own, sweet time. That’s his fantasy.
Fourth off, he’s not comfortable with tough questions from a tough truth-chaser like Soho. His chief of staff, lawyer Vic Rodriguez is in denial. They don’t tolerate negavity, he says, the alibi, which he knows is the weakest defense. Unfortunately, journalism is adversarial becauses it opposes the powerful and the false prophets. The presidency is a tough job, says Soho’s station, so Rodriguez’s client must be ready to face tough questions.
At least seven, his namesake’s favorite number. Actually, there’s a laundry list, ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
“If you have run with the footmen and have wearied you,” the Lord told Jeremiah,” then how can you contend with horses”. “And if in the land of peace in which you trusted they wearied you, then how will you do in the flooding of the Jordan?”
Axiomatically, a president is there to solve problems. How can he do that if he cannot, will not, face honest, hard, tough questions?
Like a boxer who’s well ahead of points into the last rounds, BBM’s would rather coast along rather than mix it up, especially with Robredo. He knows a haymaker that would send him off to dreamland is always a possibility. In other words, he and his camp believed in the soundness of the strategy. There is more to lose than to gain in engaging Soho. Because truths hurt. Better leave them alone, him unscarred, unscathed, rather than stoke the flame they will certainly create.
Accountability of public servants is one of three solutions eagerly offered by Robredo to end corruption in the land where the North and the South meet. BBM’s convenient snobbing of Soho’s invite, and her potential questions that would demand accountability no less from him, is the anti-thesis to Robredo’s proposal. She made it clear in the interview that BBM is one factor, arguably the biggest, behind her decision to run for president. What can be the better argument against her case without missing the point?
Of course, he’s must have been fairly warned by his lawyers that answering Soho’s questions may unwittingly provide supporting evidence to the disqualification cases pending against him in the COMELEC which may go all the way up to the Supreme Court. A slip before the fall. A former Supreme Court justice, after reviewing the recent poll body’s dismissal of one petition, saw a legal loophole but stopped short, for legal reason. Arms length but encouraging.
Robredo might have smelled blood with the public’s widely unfavorable reaction to BBM’s deliberate absence from the interview. She hasn’t showed her “killer” instinct yet. She will need it this time. She may ask her fellow aspirant,Manny Pacquiao, to whom she professes admiration for his sincerity, for a few tips on how to do it. BBM has shown his fragile chin. That should be her target. Forget about Ping Lacson, who’s in the outer space . or Yorme, who has discovered the bounty of politics to his heart content.
Sooner than later, BBM will not be let off the hook from the many questions that he runs away from. There will be another time and place for that. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. Soho may not be there. The same questions will dog him. It’s his fault, he’s whetted the appetite of a nation that has, for so long, bought into the myth. His.
By refusing to face the music, BBM has stripped his own myth to the core. The would-be emperor with new clothes? Bets are now off.
