Class war

At his best, Joseph Estrada mumbles incoherently. At his worst, he indulges in cheap demagoguery.

He was at his worst the other day.

Over radio, he resumed his tirade against what he calls the elitista. As in the past, he uses this term in a Jacobin fashion, referring to anyone with standing in society: the intelligentsia, the men of the cloth, the well-educated, the merchants and others distinguishable in some manner from the otherwise indistinguishable masa.

Jacobinism, we have seen in history, is a particularly dangerous ideology. It compels movements of rage among those with low self-worth and those afflicted with ignorant despair.

He focused specific venom on the continued influence of the prayles in our society, lending himself to the rhetoric of primitive 19th century nationalism. In his mind, the anti-colonial struggle must still be waged – and he is the embodiment of that struggle’s culmination.

Erap, at his worst, was last heard invoking the dangerous combination of primitive nationalism and that other ideology of self-pity – class struggle – to suggest he be restored to the place of power that is legally his. This combination of impaired ideologies has been used by the most desperate movements in the past to pester our nation’s fate.

There was something dark and foreboding in Erap’s radio spiel the other day.

It was as if he was calling on his nameless and faceless followers, that amorphous mob that once before emerged from the dark slums to inflict mindless violence on the political order, to rise up in his name and carry him to the heights from which he was dislodged by the elitista.

This can only be the ranting of a thoroughly disillusioned man.

On his side are old and tired faces, those who have in their own good time inflicted misery on our people. Faces such as those of Kit Tatad and Juan Ponce Enrile.

They are aching for one last hurrah. One last chance to plunder this hapless nation. One last chance to mislead a gullible people.

Abandoned by the main power players, disdained by the enlightened and ignored by the institutions of our civil society, they can only hope for an outbreak of class war, a breakdown of the present order and a rising by the barefoot to change the configuration of power to their favor.

Chaos is their only means of salvation.

It would be tame to call this indulgence naïve political narcissism. Better to call it extreme megalomania – the sort of madness the ancient gods inflict on those they are about to destroy.

They are calling into the dark, hoping the faceless would emerge. They are invoking dead ideologies, hoping that the disaggregated and the marginalized in our society would coalesce and elevate them to underserved glory.

They have low regard for the reservoirs of decency and sanity in our society. They have low regard for the capacity for discernment of the unwashed, those they want to use once more as cannon fodder for the games desperate men play.

In the name of a class war, they are urging the poor to attack the rich, the marginalized to destroy the mainstream. They imagine an army of the downtrodden to mass behind their banner, a horde of the impoverished to rally to the cause of plunderers.

This can only be the laughable antics of a band that has lost its relevance with the passing of the age. This can only be the desperate play initiated by the washouts that have lost a normal path back to the corridors of power.

After Estrada made his radio spiel, the police went on alert, looking out for indications of a riot being fomented. That might be an over-reaction. But policemen are paid to be paranoid.

It is unlikely that the deposed president’s stray utterance will resonate in any significant way beyond his comfortable quarters at the Veterans Memorial.

Estrada is now politically dead.

He confirms that by associating with political zombies from an epoch far removed from where we stand today. Political zombies such as Kit Tatad and Juan Ponce Enrile.

The class war and all the ideologies of hate associated with it are dead.

The modern economy allows each man to be a wealth creator. Those unable to produce wealth are most likely indecently hostile to hard work. They join the CPP-NPA, Bayan Muna or the Partido ng Masang Pilipino – anything that provides them an elaborate theory that excuses them from work and encourages the mendicancy of those demanding public subsidies.

Orthodox nationalism – the sort that flourished during the age of colonialism – is dead.

In the present day – defined alternately as the Knowledge Economy, the Information Age and the Borderless World – autarky, xenophobia and tribalism cease to be functional attitudes. The classical political boundaries are no longer the boundaries of productivity and wealth-creation.

Estrada invokes dead ideas in a frantic effort to bring back to life constituencies that have already dispersed. That will be futile.

For the good of our young, let us hope that Estrada is the last of the quaint populists who managed to dupe enough people to actually take power. There is a new generation coming to its rightful place in the scheme of things. That new generation cannot subsist on dead ideas.

Estrada retrieves political slogans from the grave. These are slogans that urge our people to hate those who thrive, dishonor those who succeed and make of themselves parasites who sap the life of our national economy through extortion, corruption or the quasi-socialist variants of the first two.

Unable to find an audience for his self-serving political agenda, he will tend to become shriller and shriller by the day. Unable to find a candidate who will carry his cause of political exculpation, he now wants to field himself as a candidate in the 2004 elections.

This man is the most pathetic creature on our political landscape today.