Apples and durian

One of the most commonly superficial, if not crassly stupid analyses going around, is the hip-shooting blanket comparison between two very different presidents (one is a president-elect) from two very different constituencies confronting two profoundly different agenda – all these made mostly by the mainstream media and cavalierly imagined by the intellectually challenged.

People loosely compare Philippine President Duterte with United States President-elect Donald J. Trump, interchanging the terms American Duterte with Filipino Trump. Their basis, when viewed from the Philippines, are mostly sound bytes and abbreviated foreign wires that reach our shores and, indeed, one largely discredited, albeit unapologetic, foreign cable news network that had unabashedly and continuously infected its reporting and analysis with political bias, imbalances and just downright unfairness.

The loose comparison, when taken from the perspective of Fil-Ams, are also based on conversational private e-mail as much as they are from predigested wires from Philippine cable channel feeds. Here, media depth is not a priority; discernment, even less. The resultant comparisons follow the computer term, garbage-in, garbage out.

On both sides of the vast Pacific, the loudest abettor was a once-credible media machine that blatantly disregarded reality, picking sides and obviously, picking the far side on the opposite of intelligence.

These hollow comparisons evoke misconceptions, reveal profound analytical challenges and, to be specific, array political correctness with decency, and political incorrectness or candor with expletives and invectives, thus, simplistically lumping the latter in one garbage bin labeled “acerbic.” Anyone discerning enough knows that these terminologies are neither synonyms nor are they interchangeable. It’s pigeonholing. Saying that someone facing integrity charges lies is not the same as calling someone son of a whore.

And yet the loose comparisons continue. For those insisting on the similarities and then extrapolates prospective consequences, there is either something lost in the translation or the limitations of vocabulary are even more severe than we might think.

For instance, when Duterte labels a diplomat “gay,” despite the absence of any evidence to even suggest that the expletive might be remotely descriptive, is not the same as Trump calling Hillary R. Clinton a “crook,” where she is actually facing at least two on-going criminal investigations, one involving state security and another involving millions of public and private funds re-channeled to enrich personal fortunes.

Allow us a second example of stupid comparisons, this time one that arrays the classic “Forgotten Man” paradigm against both Trump and Duterte claiming both as beneficiaries.

Briefly, the purist paradigm is when A and B decide to alleviate X’s suffering by taxing C to subsidize X. While this explains Trump’s triumph and the impetus behind his white working-class mandate, it does not apply to the Duterte mandate. Duterte was elected because the previous administration had no balls. The impetus was weakness, not an anti-establishment sentiment.

On social issues, Duterte had openly claimed that he has taken the lives of others in the past, and even now intends to continue taking them under the powerful office he now wields. On the opposite end, Trump’s mandate is partially due to his strong stance against late-stage abortion. Nothing can be more profoundly far apart where precious human life is valued.

On the electorate’s concerns, Duterte’s mandate is based on personality politics – the caricature bully-pulpit machismo leader, with brass balls drawn against the failed administration of bungling, weakling, limp-wristed eunuchs struggling to perpetuate themselves. There is no rejection of the establishment as represented by Malacanang and Congress. The impetus was simply a fear of lawless violence and the dread of narco-politics, which the former administration had, through its weaknesses, neglected to the point of catalyzing its spread.

This is not what founds Trump’s constituencies and his overwhelming electoral mandate. Americans rejected Clinton’s largely ad hominem assaults, parted the weeds, cut through the thorny bush grown from years of neglect and focused on economic issues that afflicted them and around which Trump designed his platform.

The arithmetic cannot be denied. Quod erat demonstrandum. The Duterte versus Trump comparisons are valid equations only where democratic philosophical populism is the X variable. Otherwise, against all other factors, they are false equations. Trump is not the American Duterte.

In imposing conjured similarities between characteristics that we think are incomparable, recklessly, the media create false fears. Those fears on the American side fuel un-American anarchy where reactionary mindless rioting, car-burning, property-torching militants, absent evidence of massive cheating in the elections, violently reject the electoral vote, effectively rejecting their own US constitutional and legal processes. Ironically only 30 percent of these bloodthirsty anarchists voted.

On the Philippine side, the apples and durian are loose comparisons, focusing as they have on negativity more than anything positive, and actually revealing a secret and subliminal contempt for both presidents and unthinking disrespect for democratic rule.

Try chewing on that.