Screamed our banner here Friday last week, in what could be the opening salvo of the 2016 campaign for the Angeles City mayorship. The incumbent, Edgardo Pamintuan, clearly drawing first blood there.
No, Pamintuan did not name anybody – “Nobody” nga eh – as he did not have to. Everybody knows who that nobody was/is the mayor implied in his response to a query from the Inquirer’s Tonette Orejas.
Actually, a somebody to his supporters now enraged by what they deemed as the “rattled” Pamintuan’s insult.
Of course, Pamintuan in effect named him. “Nobody” nga eh. With all the negativism associated to that term – a know-nothing nonentity, foremost.
It’s all name-calling. Just an everyday sport, taken to high intensity in its political application thus meriting a prime spot in political propaganda methodology.
Cognitive bias, it’s written in some shrink’s notepad, defined as “error in thinking that influence how humans make decisions.”
Impacting negative opinion in the minds of some audience about the object of the namecalling is the principal end there. Blocking off any rational or objective examination of the facts at hand.
Suffice is the name tagged on the person and conclusions are readily drawn.
A sampling from campaigns past:
Asenso Pusakal for one pugnacious town mayor and Ferdinand Markurakus for his rival. Jun Balas for the mayor of a sand quarryrich town.
Monkey Tong for a city executive. Advance Santos for his opponent.
Don Pipit for a gubernatorial bet who started rich and ended up last and lost.
Litong-lito for you-know-who.
In the 2010 presidential elections: Giba Teodoro, Money Villar, and ultimate winner, Abnoy Aquino.
And the current leading presidentiable: Nognog.
Name-calling is aimed not only to trivialize its object but moreso to ridicule him/her. Make them so much the laughingstock that they would not merit the least serious consideration in the mind of the audience. Be wary though of libel and slander lurking here.
As happened in 2001 when the journalist Ody Fabian – God bless his soul – found himself slapped with a case of slander for making “Bawal ang pangit sa Mabalacat” the closing spiel in our radio program Alas-4 Na!
The never-winning nay-surrendering perennial also-ran felt alluded to by Fabian’s “personal insult.”
On the other hand, name-calling can backfire.
This is best exampled by the aestheticallychallenged dearly departed Apalit Mayor Tirso G. Lacanilao.
The first time he ran, Lacanilao’s posters were plastered with “PANGIT” by his rivals. No, he did not cry slander.
Instead of being disheartened, Lacanilao found right there the inspiration that propelled him to victory.
He stopped putting up his own posters, reproducing by the tens of thousands the “PANGIT” sheets and plastered the whole town with them. Unwise to the scheme, the electorate found Lacanilao the harassed underdog,
Pushing further, Lacanilao appropriated for himself the moniker “Pogi” and for his middle initial G, “Guapo” – ironies that easily tickled the funny bone of the electorate. Then he made selfdeprecation the high note of his campaign pitch.
On the entablado, Lacanilao in all seriousness: “Sasabyan da pu deng kanakung kalaban ing lupa kung kabayu. Mangalaram la pu ren. Ikayu na ing makapagpatune e ku pu lupang kabayu. Lupa ku pung tsonggo! (My rivals say I look like a horse. They are liars. You, yourselves can see that I don’t look like a horse. I look like a monkey!)” His audience never failed to explode in laughter. The electorate literally guffawed Lacanilao on his way to the Apalit town hall in his two terms as vice mayor and three terms as mayor.
The lesson here is that name-calling, as propaganda technique, should be used most judiciously.
Sans any rational argument leading to predetermined conclusions negative to a person, name-calling assumes the element of that fallacy in logic called argumentum ad hominem, the attack on a person’s character as response to an argument.
Such argument instead of ridiculing the person – as intended – can make an underdog of him with the audience taking pity of, and then sympathizing with him. Hence, another logical fallacy called argumentum ad misericordiam.
This is most specially so in the case of us Filipinos who always fall – with our inherent emotional irrationality – for the underdog.
And nobody but “Nobody” has taken full mastery of that art of underdogship in political practice, parlaying it to victory in every election he entered. Except one.
But then that was a totally different story. Still, be careful with names.
