Disjointed appraisal
APRESIDENT’S state of the Nation Address (sona) ritual can be a study in contrast, even confusion. Groups and personalities with their own perspectives and interests to advance listen to the speech not to be informed but to dissect it, looking for parts that would advance their goals and views. The result is something discordant and confusing.
President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III delivered his last sona yesterday, painting an overly sunny picture of how his administration ran the country in the past year or in the past five years of his term. Earlier, Vice President Jejomar Binay promised to deliver his own sona, expectedly a negative view of the nation’s state, after PNoy’s speech.
If the annual sona is a ritual, this positive vs. negative appraisal of the national situation is also a ritual of its own. The problem is that these views are using different parameters. These seem like the proverbial blind men who defined an elephant by the animal’s part each of them touched. Perhaps there should be unity in the appraisal.
The President’s sona was largely about perspective. The parameter of his report to his “bosses” was to compare the achievements of the past five years of his term with the setup the country was in when he assumed the presidency in the middle of 2010. Naturally the Aquino administration smells roses considering how bad the national situation was in 2010.
But a simple shift in parameter can change that view. The Makabayan bloc of congressmen, for example, waved placards claiming the Aquino government is “palpak” and alluding to the President being a haciendero. This is not surprising because their appraisal of the Aquino years uses another parameter, which is to advance their class-based struggle.
Other sectors, meanwhile, didn’t dwell on what was said but on what wasn’t said, which is a reminder that even if the President spoke for more than two hours, speeches like this can never be complete because some information is either intentionally glossed over because it does not make the government look good or merely overlooked.
What this proves is that this ritual—the sona and the reactions to it—can only provide us with a disjointed view of the real state of the nation. In the end, appraisals of the state of the nation are subjective. We only believe what we want to believe.