Bong, Vhong, and the politics of spectacle in laughter

We may be the only country that laughs when someone slips on the floor, bumps into a chair, or falls from a bicycle. But this laughter does not mean we are cruel or insensitive, since we also know the limits. After all, we do not laugh when we see a bloody, badly-mangled body, or someone with a broken bone. 

 

Our laughter is one of affinity, if not of affection, as a way of assuring those who fell that they would be fine. Whoever just fell might as well join in and laugh, too, if only to ease his shame and embarrassment, becoming part of the community of laughter. 

 

We are a people whose source of sanity lies not in politics as a serious formal process, but in politics seen in the eyes of ordinary people, as spectacle and drama. This is deeply rooted in our healthy sense of humor, and our seeming fascination with scandals and intrigues as sources of entertainment.

 

We are a country that is agitated by high political drama, even as our rage can easily be diverted by a scandal involving celebrities. The rape of our national coffers through the PDAF scandal has now taken a back-seat with the emergence of the alleged rape attempt by an actor-host named Vhong of a model/student/motivational speaker named Deniece.  

 

When memes obscure

 

Our political consciousness enables the conversion of serious events into material for stand-up comedians and fodder for ordinary laughter. After delivering a privilege speech defending himself from accusations of illegally diverting his PDAF allocations to the Napoles gang, Senator Bong Revilla became material for internet memes made by an amused public. 

 

When news of the alleged rape attempt by Vhong Navarro, that led to him being badly mauled, appeared on TV and the social media, an amused public came up with equally amusing internet memes. 

 

One took advantage of the similarity in sound between the names Bong and Vhong. It even appropriated the image of the president himself, who was presumably irked by Bong’s privilege speech attacking his government, as if he was berating a group of soldiers and taking them to task for mishearing his orders: “Ang sabi ko, bugbugin ninyo si Bong, hindi si Vhong!”

 

Our ability to laugh is deeply rooted in our creativity and irreverence, seen in our talent for producing social meanings to provide explanations to things. These meanings are not necessarily valid and may even appear illogical when measured against the conventional and traditional lenses of those not familiar with our ways. But they are nevertheless pregnant with alternative imaginations that are both pure parody and patently resistive of the dominant, ordinary and the usual.

 

I vividly remember a conversation I had with a taxi driver some years ago. 

 

We heard on the car radio about Abu Sabaya, the notorious leader of the Abu Sayaff Group, being killed in a gun fight while in a boat chase with the military. His body was nowhere to be found as it fell into the water. 

 

I was fascinated with the casualness of the taxi driver’s take on the fate of Sabaya who was, for him, a villain par excellence. He said: “Hay naku Sir.  Buhay pa yan maniwala ka.”

 

I asked why he thought so. His reply amazed me even more.  

 

“E kung si Madam Claudia nga, ilang beses na namatay, e nabubuhay pa.” 

 

TV soap opera lovers will know Madam Claudia as a popular villain, played by Jean Garcia. She was so bad that people simply loved to hate her, and so she became the personification of glamorous evil.

 

It simply amused me how an ordinary person can casually use, as template to render his take on a real event, a fictional villain in a popular TV soap opera. It was an example of a classic simulacrum – a concept coined by Jean Baudrillard, who argued that the advent of mass-mediated entertainment has enabled people to lose the ability to distinguish image from reality.

 

To a people whose exposure to politics is now as a representation of mass-mediated medium that is TV – where one also experiences the continuous flow of spectacle and entertainment emanating from game shows, noon-time shows, and soaps – indeed the distinction between image and reality could easily be lost.  
 

 

 

Thinning boundaries in media

 

TV is where entertainment news finds their way into public affairs and news programs. It is also there where the thinning of the boundaries between reality and image lies. The real family drama that haunts the Barretto sisters (all of whom are actresses), for example, is as riveting as a soap opera. It now competes with news about the PDAF scandal. 

 

Part of the real drama that unfolded from this tale of corruption was somewhat distilled in the eyes of the public as a celebrity scandal of international proportion in Jean Napoles’s (Janet Napoles's daughter) parading her excessive lifestyle.

 

The loss of distinction between reality and image is even made more pervasive when people who populate our public spaces are either actors or politicians. Some of them are even politicians because they are actors, thereby forcing some politicians to also become actors, or act like actors in their representations to the viewing and TV-addicted public.

 

The Senate is full of public spectacles taking on the role of senators of the land.

 

Senator Tito Sotto is both a senator and a noon-time show host in “Eat Bulaga.” When he comes out making ridiculous claims about reproductive health, or about his pretentions of being an expert on the medical use of marijuana (or the lack of it, as he alleges), one becomes curious if he is just disoriented by the role-shifting he has to often do from the TV studio to the Senate session hall and back. 

 

Senator Bong Revilla takes his day off on week-ends to become host of “Kap’s Amazing Stories.”  When he delivered his privilege speech, one wonders if the tales of alleged corruption he disclosed, and his revelations about his celebrity driver and breakfast date on the eve of the vote on the Corona impeachment, were actually real. Or were they in fact just some of his “amazing stories.”

 

Even the feisty Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago has endeared herself to the public when she became a stand-up comedian, bringing with her a repertoire of pick-up lines to all her public appearances, threatening to out-“pick-up” Boy Pick-up himself. See, the latter is only a role being played by an actor in a gag show while Senator Miriam is for real. 

 

Is that really the real Miriam, or she is just acting?

 

Halili-Kho: A perfect simulacrum

 

This exchange of roles, or rather, the increasing porosity between acting like actors, on one hand, and acting like politicians on the other, was further dramatized at the height of the post-Katrina Halili-Hayden Kho sex video scandal a few years back, when a Senate hearing was called to investigate the controversy, allegedly in aid of legislation.  

 

The coverage of the event, broadcast as TV news, perfectly illustrated a simulacrum at its finest, where one can easily be confused on whether the spectacle on TV was a senate hearing or a scene in a soap opera.

The image presented on TV was complete with soap opera-like representations, exemplified by a split-screen showing the crying Katrina on one side hurling his “kapal ng mukha mo!” diatribe  matched with dagger looks at the forlorn Hayden on another, drenched with water by a scene-stealing former cop and former mayor and whose life was made into a movie; with Senator Jinggoy Estrada, an actor himself, berating Atty. Lorna Kapunan, a well-known lawyer for film stars and celebrities. The hearing was chaired by then Senator Jamby Madrigal, whose election was aided by capitalizing on her being, allegedly, a look-alike of Judy Anne Santos, another actress. 

 

In all of these, I got confused as to who was acting like an actor, who was acting like a politician, and who was not acting at all.

 

One of the implications of this mutualism between politics and show business is that, to the Filipino mind, there now resides a unique logic that we have to address as our reality – that the root of this kindred spirit between politics and showbusiness lies in the fact that both of them are forms of entertainment.

 

Indeed, political events now become spectacles to which people are drawn to watch. This isn't even a recent development, but always have been part of our habitus. 

 

Spectacular, entertaining politics 

 

I remember when I was a PhD student in Hawaii, when the first Aquino government was being challenged by attempted coups. While watching the CNN coverage of one of these military uprisings, one American student commented, in amazement, but also partly in condescension, how irresponsible Filipinos could be when he saw bystanders ogling the fighting at one of the military camps. 

 

He asked me what these people were thinking to be so irresponsibly bold. I casually assured him that they would be fine, as they were simply thinking it was a shooting of a different kind – a scene in a film shooting.

 

Call me an irresponsible political scientist, but I will not lose sleep over a people that don't seem  to care about, and continue to make light of, the violence and the corruption. In the same manner that I will not accuse our people of political immaturity for not taking seriously those events that threaten our nation's stability. 

 

The threat to our national stability is not corruption, nor crime, nor inept leaders. They're not the calamities and disasters that visit us on a regular basis. These tragedies that befall us can hurt us, but we will always overcome them. We manage to rise up again with a vengeance, through the sheer force of community, and our ability to laugh despite the pain. We turn our tragedies into opportunities to bring us together, and we make our pain a template for our laughter.

 

We saw this on the smiling faces of the young survivors of TyphoonYolanda, some of whom even had the time to play basketball. We saw this in the flood victims of Ondoy, who still managed to find ways to celebrate a birthday and wave to passing TV cameras despite the deluge. 

 

These are images which CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper, and former US Ambassador to the country Kristie Kenney, both described as a novelty, if not a revelation of a unique kind of courage, of an enormous strength.  

 

Sense of community, even with looters

 

These strangers to our land saw us through their lenses, as citizens of a country who take pride in being a bastion of freedom and equality in opportunity. A country that is a stronghold of democracy and economic progress and of government efficiency, but whose people are consumed by a divisive debate on the propriety of taxpayers’ money being used to care for their elderly and unemployed. This is in contrast to what they saw in a society that is so unlike theirs, with its overflowing sense of community seen in “pakikipagkapwa” and “damayan” despite its perceived material poverty and government incapacity.

 

It was indeed a novelty for them, who were perhaps used to imagine and paint suffering and pain using as templates those images they saw in countries that maul their fallen corrupt leaders and break into an orgy of looting when social order breaks down, to see how different we are as a people. That we only turn our corrupt leaders into bad jokes, and that even in looting which we saw in Tacloban after Yolanda, that there is still a sense of community, where looters practiced some rules of engagement, with the stronger and bolder sharing their loot to the weaker and more timid.

 

In this context, the real threat to our national stability is when we lose the ability to laugh together as a community at our tragedies. For it is when we laugh as a people, even despite our pain and to spite our failed leaders, that our stability is maintained. It is there that we find our collective sanity, and where our rationality as a nation rests.

 

Mirroring that popular adage that laughter is the best medicine, to us Filipinos it might as well be also the best way to do politics. — KDM, GMA News