Peddling the plastic ‘presidentiable’

It was his best so far. Relatively. 

Even at that, the holes it drilled against the facade it wanted the public to see were gaping and what was left at the end of the day was nothing more than a tattered poster of falsehoods and fakery.

The latest multimillion-peso political advertisement by the Liberal Party presidential candidate, released prematurely before the official campaign period, inadvertently mocks the candidate it espouses as well as exposes him to criticism for violating the tenets of truth and integrity.

When we analyze the kind of thinking, or its apparent absence, in crafting such an ad, we might realize one other violation. It violates sensibilities. Such political ploys indirectly foment upon an audience it obviously considers as stupid, a brazen attempt to foist as real a grand and colossal fake.

There is very little on the local boob tube that can be believed, as even factual news reporting has blurred the difference between fiction and fantasy, on one end, and rant versus reason, on another. Unfortunately, with the advent of political ads – and, indeed, this ad in question is exemplary – where material reflective of crass kitschy conjecture and heresies go, this takes the grand prize.

Since Benigno Aquino III’s Mamasapano zarzuela, nothing as dramatic has taken the voting public for fools as this does.

On the surface it has its upsides. It has three messages. One, the candidate says he has absolutely no “drama” where the colloquial terminology is defined as the melodramatic exaggeration of circumstances painting grand and theatrical imagery around its principals.

Two, the candidate says that he is “all work.”

Three, he delivers his over-arcing coup de grace by stating he will not steal.

The ad’s subliminal themes are basically anti-”drama,” pro-work ethic, and, anti- thievery.

While its objectives may not readily be clear, the ad initially sought to differentiate from those doing far better in the surveys.

That’s understandable. A loser’s default is to topple the table.

Against Mayor Rodrigo Duterte, the imagery conjured up in disparaging the “drama” of others is that of an unstable gun-totting marshal of a tumbleweed town battling horse thieves and rustlers.

Against Grace Poe-Llamanzares, the ad’s unsaid affront disparages the Cinderella fairy tale of an abandoned and adopted foundling battling the odds dealt her and working up to the highest position in the land.

The ad’s most vitriolic venom, however, targets Vice President Jejomar Binay’s narrative of a poor boy orphaned early in life and yet had risen as perhaps the country’s most effective administrator, marshalling the resources of its most prolific local government unit to provide immeasurable social and economic benefits to both the rich and poor far and beyond it’s city limits.

Released just weeks from the Metro Manila Film Festival that had, among its entries, a smattering of sappy stories and melodrama, the ad could very well have won a category or two—one for fantasy, another for comedy.

Allow us to apply the ad’s three-element theme to the candidate himself.

On drama and theatrical fakery, has not this candidate a lengthening portfolio of starring roles ranging from carrying bushels of grain, to riding trains, to conducting traffic under the rain, to screaming bloody invectives at the central business district, to shedding kitschy tears on TV?

On work, simply review his record of ineptitude ranging from ill-maintained trains, decrepit terminals and airports, to the worst telecommunications services on the planet, to the fatally bungled “bahala kayo sa buhay ninyo” Yolanda crisis and Zamboanga siege, and, finally, to institutionalized criminality within the police hierarchy.

On the question of thievery, that one has been delegated. The purveyors of the criminal Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) and the pork-barrel system are ranking officers of the political party he heads.