Ridon’s rib-tickling farce

I was filled with a strange mix of hilarity and disgust upon reading the news article titled “Drilon bullied me, Ridon charges” (Second Front Page, 9/15/14).

Who would have thought that the irascible Terry Ridon of the Kabataan party list, which takes great pride in its mastery of the art of rabble-rousing and general hell-raising, would go pull off the bullying card?

It’s hard to sympathize with Ridon’s rather shallow interpretation of Drilon’s hissy fit as unwarranted “bullying,” when it was Ridon who had issued invective press statements left and right, dragging Drilon’s name to a new controversy. Did he really expect to share a cordial and hearty evening of champagne and cocktails with a man he was slinging mud at? If he thought so, then for a young radical lawmaker, he seems to have picked up that political skill known as “plastikan” so disappointingly early.

What makes Ridon’s claim of victimhood particularly asinine is the fact that he is hardly a paragon of calm and measured behavior. He represents a political group that has no qualms about heckling presidential speeches, mauling cops, and trashing the political events of people they don’t like. Like so many typical stalwarts of the local radical left, angry behavior is Ridon’s bread and butter, which they often excuse with shallow pseudo-intellectual calisthenics. Why would Ridon raise the flag of social etiquette and prim and proper norms when people he has thrown barbs at growl back at him in response?

Ridon is not the first leftist youth figure to get in the face of an angry politician. The venerated Ed Jopson, who stood his ground and threw questions at a fuming Ferdinand Marcos during the First Quarter Storm, comes to mind. But instead of channeling Jopson or Lean Alejandro, Ridon just might be the first one to pull a Kris Aquino-type of pleading for public sympathy. In the Manichaean politics of the local national democratic movement and its perpetually hopping-mad activists, this is a rib-tickling and farcical downturn.

—ORLY JAVIER MANOLO, student,

University of the Philippines Diliman,

[email protected]