Over at the Senate recently, Sen Dick Gordon made a wry observation during a hearing on the termination of the Visiting Forces Agreement that the Upper House is taken for a “saling pusa.”
He meant it as a reality, not as mere perception, as an old,scarred combatant in the dog-eats-dog realm of politics.
So what’s a “cat” doing in it? Actually nothing, which basically the term”saling pusa” means. The animal is not really a part of game; it’s just allowed to do the jig for the sufferance of someone higher, just for fun or to fool around with it. Paraphrasing a slogan, it’s in it not to win it.
Gordon is not unfamiliar with the changing landscape in his doggone field. As probably the oldest and, presumably wisest, in the club of wise, if not old, men, he can smell a creeping tyrant miles and miles away, even from as far as Davao. He’s been there, done that. Remember the Marcos dictatorship?
He can readily decipher the handwriting on the wall–in the Senate wall primarily– about the new reality. I’m not sure he can’t say non mea culpa
What he sees is not simply his own impression.Many, here and abroad, particulary in the United States, are madly frothing in the mount, outraged , whether silently or boisterously, about the creeping authoritarianism in the democratic space. The tyrant is out there hiding in plain sight.
A friend called me last week to express his own apprehension as Gordon bit his lips during the hearing. It looked like , he said, that the US has now a mirror image of what’s happening in the Philippines in terms of the unrelenting attacks on democracy. He couldn’t say which is the mirror and which is the image. It’s hard to tell which is the spit and which is the spitoon. The difference with a distinction, I said, is China.
AT least, in the US many, not just one or a few, already notice the evident skid mark on the democratic path. Here, the country appears to be on a slippery slope and those whose job is see to it that it does not happen look the other way, so the momentum has not slackened.
The “saling-pusa” mockery on the Senate is just one. The impending closure of ABS-CBN, is another, raising the sword of Damocles on the media, which is the bulwark of free speech and free press. And, don’t forget Rappler. Nothing can be more blatant and brazen in this attack than the recent petition in the Supreme Court by a presidential lapdog that a gag order be issued on the ABS CBN case.
In the meantime, the Philippines is moving closer and closer to China, or vice versa, without protest to those who are Constitutionally mandated to stop it. In fact, they clearly are abetting it, woing it in a manner that you could say they are sleeping with the enemy. Others who see the danger coming look the other way or turn a blind eye. In the kingdom of the blind, Shakespeare wrote in King Lear, the one-eyed is king.
It’s been validated that the Russians interfered in the 2016 presidential elections that brought the twitting Donald Trump to power and his increasing tendency to disempower other branches of government. It is feared now that the same thing will happen in the forthcoming presidential race which Trump is salivating about with braggadoccio and swagger.
Looking back home, the logical suspicion is China’s invicible hand in the election of Rodrigo Duterte to the presidency in 2016. The greater worry and greater nightmare is that, with Duterte and other “big catches”, especially in the West Philippine Sea, and they’re not galunggong, China will again play a stronger hand in the 2022 presidential choice.
Everything is, so far, falling into place as Mao Tse Tung predicted. You don’t pick a melon, you let it ripen and it naturally falls off the vine. Today, it’s the VFA, the worst may yet to come.
You can connect the dot in this geopolitical strategy, a shared one between Russia and China. Russia takes care of undermining the US. China will do its part in the Philippines. The agenda is clear as day: erase democracy.
Our best hope might just be a virus or something.
NIhao.
