Duterte fever came from the masa

Who said the masa are ignorant about elections and politics? This is the main defect of the presidential system with a “one man, one vote” when 80% do not understand issues of government. The intelligent vote will always be overwhelmed by the numbers of the masa it was said.  So elections became a futile exercise for setting up good governance. The fault is in this uneven proportion of voters. We will have to educate the 80 percent first it was said.

As the years went by, the election of government after government followed this pattern going from bad to worse until we reached the impossible situation we are in now. Elections became a farce. It became easy to set up an election system that would use machines instead of voters. It sounds technologically savvy and many fell for it until we realized it was set up to frustrate the people’s sovereignty. That is the main argument against the  Smartmatic-PCOS system. Machines vote and whoever is in power can manipulate the results as it did in 2010 and 2013.

It was the masa that came to the rescue.  I was at a ladies lunch in a posh restaurant. After coffee was served I decided to do a vote test. Among the ladies, about half were for Duterte and were willing to say they were. The women were upper middle class, convent bred and well-educated. Some were quiet but nodded their heads in approval except one who said President Noynoy was doing very well so I will vote for Roxas, his candidate.  Good grief.

I said, let’s include the waiter. “Para kanino ka boboto”? At first he did answer as he cleared the plates. He did not want to reveal anything to a group of ladies lunching in a posh restaurant. We might laugh at him. But he came close enough to me to whisper, “Duterte po ako. Lahat po kami dito  Duterte.” The Duterte fever has caught on and the masa is flexing its muscle for May.

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Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that a revolution cannot be facebooked or tweeted has proved wrong in the Philippines. Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted. If BayanKo did not continue with this enterprise following the Icelandic template we might never have known how we could use technology to start a “revolution.” It can happen and it will happen.

Leo Mirani was written a reply to Malcolm Gladwell’s popular article “Small Change” in New Yorker that argued  revolutions cannot be facebooked or tweeted. He debunked that a physical connection is needed between those who take part in it. 

“For a man who has devoted a significant part of his life to documenting how little things can make a big difference,” Mirani said.

 “Malcolm Gladwell is surprisingly dismissive of the power of social networking to effect change. In the latest issue of the New Yorker, he writes that the role played by Facebook and Twitter in recent protests and revolutions has been greatly exaggerated.

Gladwell’s argument is that social networks encourage a lazy activism that will only extend as far as “liking” a cause but not actually doing anything about it. This is because social networks are built around weak ties, where real activism needs strong bonds.“

“Gladwell is right to be skeptical of social media’s rah-rah brigade. Before the famous ‘Facebook revolution,’ Iran was regularly said to be in the middle of a blogging revolution. Protests everywhere from Iceland to Egypt are attributed to the organizational abilities afforded by social networking sites. Universities across the west offer modules on new media and social conflict. The fact that a Facebook group is only an updated version of nailing your thesis to a church door is conveniently ignored as the world hails the power of technology.

“But in claiming that all social networks are good for is “helping Wall Streeters get phones back from teenage girls,” Gladwell ignores the true significance of social media, which lies in their ability to rapidly spread information about alternative points of view that might otherwise never reach a large audience. Gladwell quotes Golnaz Esfandiari in Foreign Policy as asking why “no one seemed to wonder why people trying to co-ordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.” The answer, as supplied by a friend from Tehran in June last year, is simple: “We need to be seen and heard by the world, we need all the support we can get. If the governments [of the west] refuse to accept the new government, it’s gonna be meaningful for the movement, somehow.”

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A more recent example is Kashmir, where this summer’s protests gained widespread media coverage both in India and internationally. But Kashmir has been protesting for 20 years, with some of the biggest demonstrations occurring in 2008. What changed this year is that urban, middle-class India, traditionally uninterested in news from Kashmir except when we’re at war with Pakistan, was for the first time able to see and hear the other side of the story. Facebook users in India rose from 0.7 million in summer 2008, to 3 million in 2009, to 13 million today.

On Twitter, it is possible to follow journalists tweeting live from Srinagar. On Facebook, it is hard to avoid mentions of Kashmir or links to articles on websites you wouldn’t otherwise have heard of. YouTube is littered with videos of protests in Kashmir. And when clips of human rights violations are taken down, Facebook is where you find new links.”

“We seem to have forgotten what activism is,” writes Gladwell. We have not forgotten. Activism is not defined only as taking direct action and protesting on the streets.

Activism extends to changing the minds of people, to making populations aware of what their governments are doing in their name, to influencing opinion across the world, then the revolution will be indeed be tweeted.

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There is now a page in Facebook for Duterte Organization. “Like it” to be in touch with developments in his campaign.  It may be that with the Comelec refusing to comply with returning the safety measures for the Smartmatic PCOS system, the only way Duterte will be defeated is through cheating. Comelec is pussyfooting doing it slowly so that by the time it is done it will be too late. Will we be ready for that or will 2016 be a repeat of 2010 and 2013? We can be ahead of them by facebooking.