Of course, Ka Leody de Guzman had every right to celebrate Christmas as he and his family saw fit. Had every right to put on merry headgear such as a Santa Claus hat while his near and dear sported reindeer antlers and the family fur babies endured being dressed in holiday costumes. Had every right as paterfamilias to sit at the head of a table adorned with a festive centerpiece of red and gold to match the plates and cutlery, napkins and napkin rings, with painted pine cones to add to the (g)litter.
The scene had the elements of Western-style holiday merrymaking (though it lacked faux snow on glass windows to complete the set)—but what of it? It was a scene replicated everywhere across the class spectrum though in varying degrees of opulence and taste. The labor leader seeking the presidency is not legally precluded from partaking of the season’s trappings, or from posting a greeting card displaying the family happiness on Christmas Day. And surely the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict would have no grounds to Red-tag “bourgeois” behavior.
Yet it’s not as though the chair of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino and his next of kin were wallowing in unthinkable luxury. (The repast had yet to be laid out when the picture was snapped, but it may be safe to imagine that the family did not indulge in excess.) The setting was a surprise for those who expected a man fighting for workers’ welfare and the dignity of labor to live in a crumbling apartment or a squatter shack, but it was hardly as decadent as, say, Manny Pacquiao’s Forbes Park digs where his fashionable wife parks her Hermès bike. (Not to say, of course, that the Pacquiaos and their delightful Brent-schooled children don’t deserve what they have; the street urchin who slept nights on a bench in a public market earned it with every bone-jarring, skull-crunching boxing match, win or lose.)
In his campaign forays, Ka Leody comes across as a man of the people speaking to and for them, fiery but not a firebrand (who makes the wealthy uncomfortable and defensive and therefore a potential enemy), delivering his message in dialectical terms but in a pleasant, down-home manner (unlike, for example, his running mate Walden Bello, whose gruffness channels Clint Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski in “Gran Torino”—but hey, diff’rent strokes, right?).
The observer intrigued by Ka Leody’s dwelling (which the dining room serves to represent in the Christmas card) will agree that it’s a revelation, and a prize on which the perpetually downtrodden can set their eyes: Here is where we can be. In the card he and his family exude a sense of comfort and well-being that his bashers deride—a wrongheaded reaction, to my mind, suggesting that a man who pushes workingmen into an awareness of their rights and stands by and for them in their struggle should necessarily be in constant misery and suffering.
The scene actually shatters stereotypes: the labor activist easy in his own skin and enjoying the season before—if it is not presuming too much—girding for the long slog ahead. (He has much to do if survey numbers, or mere snapshots of a time, are to be taken seriously.) His family was correct to desist from reacting to the backlash and to let friends and allies take up the defense…
Nevertheless, it must be said: How baffling to see a man like Ka Leody lay himself wide open to snipers in an election where image and perception rule the battlefield. This moment of apparent weakness should have been quickly nipped by his strategists (granted they were on the ball). The risk he and his family took in posting their Christmas Day photo was substantial, and taking the risk was so astoundingly unwise even for a longtime risk-taker like himself. Surely someone among those who love him questioned the timing of posting the Christmas card as it was? Other greeting cards posted by people of prominence were not as controversial or so inviting of brickbats, including from those still smarting at his heckling of Vice President Leni Robredo over anemic spaghetti (a cheap shot unworthy of a man supposedly concerned with issues—but maybe he has decided it’s folly to make nice). Here, if it needed to be said, is the unhappy backdrop of Ka Leody’s Christmas card: People in the southern provinces were literally picking up the pieces after taking a savage beating from Supertyphoon “Odette.” They were mourning the dead, searching for the missing, tending to the injured. They were trying mightily to come to terms with homelessness and inconceivable loss. And in the season of supposed plenty, they were beset by hunger and thirst.