The good news is that we stopped hearing those late night sexist jokes and cuss-riddled ramblings you might expect to hear from a court jester but which we instead heard for six long years from our president.
Rody Duterte, the ex-president, at last, has shut his mouth.
We also stopped hearing threats to kill drug addicts you might hear from a madman or from someone who is actually high on drugs but which we heard from the Davao mayor-turned-president, not once but many times over.
To a certain extent, the number of bodies turning up dead in the dark streets of Metro Manila and beyond may have gone down too.
We also stopped hearing those streams of invective hurled against just about everyone, including the pope.
Back then, it was hard to imagine we would ever hear the end of it.
And then came Bongbong Marcos Jr., a long time politician who wasn’t really known for anything so big or so bad except the burden of the Marcos name.
The son of Marcos Sr. is certainly lucky and had impeccable timing. He succeeded an unorthodox leader who ditched all protocols and expectations that go with being a head of state. President Marcos seemed a welcome change after Duterte.
In business, one might call this the low base effect.
And so we’re relieved the president we have now doesn’t embarrass himself on the world stage; he is able to face world leaders and doesn’t walk out from meetings with them. At the very least, he wears the Barong Tagalog quite well.
To put it simply, it’s good optics.
We’re back on the radar screen of investors. President Marcos has reinvigorated Philippine and US ties while carefully dealing with China.
Leading by nostalgia
But beyond good optics, we see vestiges of the Marcos Sr. era – the Maharlika brand, the elite advisers, the parties; even multimillion-peso art pieces from the Martial Law era have resurfaced.
Sure, military rule is gone but to some degree, the old ways are crawling back, including failed programs such as Masagana 99.
We also see the kind of parties the Marcoses were known for. There’s nothing wrong with partying of course, as long as it’s not charged to taxpayers because we’re still struggling to recover from the lingering impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are a lot of foreign trips, too, although at least we haven’t heard of an airplane forced to do a mid-air U-turn as what happened before when former first lady Imelda Marcos, after departing Rome, realized she’d forgotten to buy some cheese.
And while cronyism is not a buzzword these days, Manila’s elites have returned to the Palace, regaining their place in the seat of power from the crass Davao Group. The same elite-driven thread still holds the canvas of our society, same as during and after the Marcos Sr. era.
Against this backdrop, the Philippines is still facing a host of domestic issues – high prices of basic goods, poor social services, worsening road and air traffic, deteriorating quality of education and corruption.
Maharlika
And then there’s the Maharlika Investment Fund which, despite a string of criticisms, managed to pass Congress with minimal due diligence. There’s fear it would be used to launder wealth stashed abroad. We’ll just have to wait and see what good Maharlika would really do for our country.
We’re lucky that outgoing Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Felipe Medalla voiced his concerns against Maharlika in its original form, when nobody dared speak out. He will be remembered for it and his excellent job as the country’s chief monetary official.
Thank you, Gov. Medalla for doing all that and more.
Surviving
Exactly a year ago tomorrow, June 30, President Marcos was inaugurated as the country’s 17th president at the historic National Museum.
The historic building is the ground that stood witness to the return to power of the Marcoses, on the 50th anniversary of Martial Law no less.
It’s the same building where great statesmen of the past fought for our rights; it’s also the home of Juan Luna’s Spoliarium, that life-sized tableau about social injustice.
A year since the inauguration, Filipinos are still busy surviving; perhaps others stopped caring while 31 million and probably more are happy with how things are going. Only a handful of what’s left of the Left still go out to protest.
The old guards of society are gone, too. We now have a Congress infiltrated by unapologetic charlatans. What kind of lawmaker equates combing one’s mustache during a Senate hearing to love for Filipinos? Cringe.
Last year, while watching the inauguration of President Marcos on live TV, I thought about the grieving motherland in Juan Luna’s Spoliarium and our dead patriots who once walked that building.
I wondered then as I wonder now, what would they say about the Philippines of today?
As for me, the way I see it, the Marcos administration has managed to stay in cruise control. There are no earth-shaking issues except for Maharlika, the rumored infighting inside Malacañang and some hilarious appointments. We’re like a vehicle that’s neither moving too slow nor too fast. And normally that’s OK.
But I wonder how long we can afford to stay this way. Do we wait until our unresolved problems like graft & corruption, poverty, our crisis in education, etc. unravel beyond repair? I fervently hope not.
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Email: eyesgonzales@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.