Tergiversation seems to be the name of his game, allowing plausible deniability in case his devil-may-care utterances backfire. Nothing is categorical. Everything is subject to everyone’s spin. His gofers’ favorite mantra is, he’s being “taken out of context” whenever they sense a public outrage! Thus is how President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has remained an incalculable enigma.
Which is good and bad.
Good because criminals are made to keep guessing: Will he really come down hard on them or is he just all bluster? And that kind of uncertainty keeps them wondering, hesitating and waiting for the coast to clear. As they count the odds, we enjoy a little breather.
Bad because the entire nation doesn’t know either if he’s coming or going! The title of Oscar Tan’s June 6 column, “Does Duterte mean all the crazy things he says?” said it all.
But at bottom line, since more than 16 million voters thought they have no problem with it, such gigantic leap of faith has become unchallengeable. In other words, we are all stuck with Duterte, willy-nilly. But it’s really too early to despair over what this home-grown version of Attila the Hun will do. Who knows? He might yet turn out to be another Lee Kuan Yew whose iron-fisted rule transformed Singapore into one of the most disciplined and prosperous nations in the world. So, let’s just keep our fingers crossed.
—JAN VINCENT L. MARTINEZ, jvlopez_mart@yahoo.com