The pain of the privileged

So many things are happening in the political scene that it has become increasingly difficult to connect the dots. But it’s quite obvious that, a few months after the breakup of the Marcos-Duterte political partnership, it is now open season on the key figures associated with the past administration. So far, the investigations and inquiries have focused, among others, on former president Rodrigo Duterte, his daughter Vice President Sara Duterte, his religious adviser and friend, pastor Apollo Quiboloy, his former police chief and now senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, his former special assistant and now senator Christopher “Bong” Go, his son-in-law (Sara’s husband) Manases “Mans” Carpio, son Davao Rep. Paolo “Pulong” Duterte, and his former spokesperson Harry Roque.

Where their activities used to be protected from scrutiny by layers of influence, these days the veil of privilege that had concealed their sordid use of power is gradually being lifted. And what we’re seeing is not just the criminality of a few people but the rottenness of an entire system.

As ordinary people watch this great unraveling in dismay and amusement, one wonders how they are reacting to all this. Are they saying: At last, our institutions are finally working? Or are they thinking: Haven’t we seen this before—the same weaponization of the state’s investigatory and police powers to punish political enemies?

These two reactions proceed from two different ways of looking at things. The first represents these ongoing investigations as necessary to the pursuit of justice and the restoration of faith in government. The second regards these as necessary to the total elimination of the Dutertes as a political force. The first proceeds from a sense of hope, the other feeds on people’s chronic cynicism about politics and government—as in “pana-panahon lang iyan!” As we may note, there’s only a thin line separating these two agendas from one another.

To determine which one is at work at any given instance—whether it is the quest for justice and accountability or the pursuit of political attrition—we need to ask who’s crying political persecution and what sort of questions or issues are being raised.

I cringe each time the treatment of VP Duterte is compared to the treatment of former vice president Leni Robredo under the Duterte presidency. I feel the same way when the investigation of Roque is compared to that of former senator and justice secretary Leila de Lima. There are no equivalences here.

VP Sara was given the privilege of resigning from her post as education secretary at a time of her own choosing. Leni was simply told that her presence at Cabinet meetings was henceforth no longer needed. In short, she was rudely fired from her post as housing secretary. During her six-year term as vice president, Leni always came prepared to defend her office’s budget. Knowing that she was from the opposition, she never grumbled.

In contrast, VP Sara appeared in both the Senate and the House of Representatives expecting, as in previous years, to be given a free pass. In both appearances in 2024, she took a passive-aggressive stance that essentially questioned the legislators’ right to question her about the budget of her office. Year after year, the Commission on Audit (COA) issued Robredo a full clearance of her expenditures. In contrast, the COA disallowed half of VP Duterte’s claimed expenditures of confidential funds in 2022 and demanded the return of these funds. Given how Roque gleefully participated as a party list representative in the slut-shaming of then senator De Lima, asking leading questions about her affair with her driver, he should expect no less from the House. But, so far, the main questions that have been thrown his way have mostly been about his lawyering activities for some Philippine offshore gaming operators even while he was an active member of the Duterte administration. Yet right after he was released from an overnight detention at the House for lying, he brought his suffering to Edsa, calling for another people power revolution.

Lilie Chouliaraki, a professor of media and discourse studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science, writes about “victimhood as a site of struggle in political discourse” in her book, “Wronged: The Weaponization of Victimhood.” Anyone can claim to be a victim of oppression or persecution, she says, but there are two forms of victimhood we must differentiate.

There is, first of all, the victimhood of the vulnerable, or “pain as a systemic condition.” This refers to “our relative openness to violence in its various structural forms (embodied and social) whether poverty, racism, misogyny, homophobia, or physical disability and illness … ” And there is “victimhood as a linguistic claim”—“an act of communication spoken from different positions of openness to violence in a continuum between vulnerability and privilege.”

We must be wary, she says, of the pain of the privileged. This is not the same as the pain of the vulnerable, who, particularly in highly unequal societies, are simply deprived of the means to articulate their grievances. In both Sara Duterte and Harry Roque’s claim to victimhood, we only see the pain of the self-entitled being communicated as the suffering of the powerless.

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