I was gonna comment on Patricio’s last blog entry “Evolution of contempt…” and took a bit of time to go through some of the history behind the views he expressed there; specifically the high priest of smokes’s (HPS’s) blog article “Blasting Voices” which Ding — being the reporter that he is — reported on FV here.

Apparently, it was what HPS said here that ruffled some (pardon the pun) cocky feathers:

Come November, we will get what we want and people will just follow us. These ordinary people do not have the strength nor the will to oppose us. We know it from experience and from surveys. If the likes of the Black and White Movement and those minions of this dreamer named Mar Roxas think they can muster enough numbers to oust Madame from power, they’re dreaming.

To which the response was voluminous but, in my opinion, rather underwhelming given the supposed illustrious nature of the characters who inhabit FV. Though Danilo gushed that “what an achievement when FV becomes a choir” (referring to how some FV authors have united against HPS) I expressed to the contrary in an earlier and admittedly under-researched comment in Ding’s post my initial observation that one “[...] thing HPS managed to achieve here is galvanise FV authors into some kind of mob”. This harks back to my own experience being an outsider in Ellenville, a hotbed of inbred thinking where my own views were regarded with quaint outrage by Ellen’s like-minded disciples.

Patricio summarised their mob’s charter with this interesting comment on his own post:

we don’t hate highpriest. we just want to defeat his ideas. because that’s the most harmful.

First stop in my journey of understanding was the comments section of the FV community on Ding’s report. Across the first five comments one could find nothing that directly addressed the message. Instead we have the following cherry-picked gems:

:D High Priest is the mole on our funny bone.
Like most fascists, his bark is worse than his bite.
I can’t wait for more of his ululations. Awoooooh!

:D Let’s see how this plays out and how far this supposed ‘High Priest’ can go before he/she is unmasked or blown out of the water.

:D We should rejoice when we find bloggers either worth emulating or “blowing out of the water.” Both kinds worth spending any time on are actually few and far between, as the sparseness of the A-List proves.

The third and last one kind of spelt out a rationale behind giving HPS the time of day given that the commenter made the following comment on HPS’s blog itself:

Hmmm…another dark, juvenile blog that won’t last but a few weeks for lack of moral stamina. You’re outta ideas already, aren’t you?

Kinda reminds me of that scene in Schindler’s List where the evil Nazi commander Amon Goeth found himself in the excrutiating situation of coming to terms with the lust he felt for a young Jewish girl given his indoctrinated hatred for Jews.

Had (a) Cocoy not provided a break in the Ellen-esque exchange of cyber high-fives between Ding and DJB with the sanity check: “Sometimes the bad guys can co-opt a really good idea. Cha-cha per se isn’t evil. I really think this republic needs to take a hard look at itself[...]“, (b)Danilo not reminded us that we “don’t have the monopoly of excellent and time-tested views, others [do] too”, and (c) HPS himself not jumped in to say “If FV is what it tells the people it is, that it is a site that welcomes dissent, then, it’s time to prove it”, the mob mentality would have gone on straight across several more comments riddled with ad hominems and speculation on personal circumstances, notably:

i don’t know, but i have a gut feeling this highpriest is not what he says he is but is actually an anti-gma having some laughs while pulling your leg

We can’t help the juvenile delinquents very much, except by example

Tell us something new. Give us something clever. Be creative and not just pusillanimous. I know anonymity is a comfortable hiding hole for cowards and scoundrels, but I doubt you are a soundrel…

Will have to think about that while I puke.

Atenista pala si highpriest. That explains a lot.

BTW, I’ve found out the true identity of you know who. Abangan.

To our credit, one of us — HPS’s ironic namesake, smoke — did the right thing and afforded HPS a more dignified and rigourously-crafted, well-thought-out response. Ironically in smoke’s response comes a bit more clarity around what merit actually lies in HPS’s assertions, specifically to do with what she says here:

This means that while we may have vested an elected official with the power to act on our behalf, we are not estopped from later on disowning his actions by voting him out of office. We don’t have to trust our elected officials forever; the most these people can expect is that we give them the benefit of the doubt – or come to think of it, that we should give OURSELVES the benefit of the doubt that we didn’t choose the wrong person.

Kind of a circular argument if you ask me. It reads like a monumental struggle to come to terms with the reality that, in a democracy, we elect officials to represent our interests, then trust that they do the right thing while in office. There is that all-too-familiar fixation on the concept that “the power to select a President [...] should always be reserved to the people” under our system of government. Meanwhile a little detail was glossed over in this tirade — that the extension of GMA’s tenure in power will be facilitated by an exercise to amend the Constitution using legal means.

Guess what, folks:

This exercise will be executed using due legitimate process and either approved or rejected by duly elected representatives under our current system of government.

Lest we forget, Gloria won back her right to govern legitimately as a previous bid to impeach her was dismissed in the hands of our duly-elected representatives in September of 2005. Deal with it. That’s what “democracy” is.

It’s ironic what DJB says in this comment:

Let’s everyone remember the motto for FV:

ANG PIKON, TALO!

On second thought, it is quite spot on. In a frenzy of outrage directed against the honourable Congressmen who junked the impeachment bid, a “concerned citizen” commented:

“MAJORITY RULES! who’s the majority you think ha? those trapos in congress who murdered the impeachment? no no my dear. it’s the PEOPLE who elected and put these congressmen in position.”

(NB: capitalisation and grammatical errors quoted as is).

After which in a brilliant burst of insight I wrote:

In a country peppered by souls still heady and giddy about Fiesta Revolutions of past, the rallying cry in response to an impeachment bid against President Gloria Arroyo that catastrophically failed to pass Congress on 06 Sep 2005 was once again — you guessed it — FIESTA REVOLUTION! Led by no less than Madame Ex-President, former Time Woman of the Year, and Ms 1986 “Revolution” herself — Ms Corazon Aquino, what may now be billed Edsa IV (or Commonwealth Avenue I, as the case may be), promised to be another spectacle of sorts. This time there was no particular heir-to-the-throne around which the fete was organised.

Implying that:

[...] in effect, Filipinos would have not accepted their duly constituted institutions and duly elected officials as the official authorities on the “Truth” yet would have easily relied on a street mob in yet another Fiesta Revolution to dictate and uphold said “Truth”. This is tantamount to arbitrarily voiding Congress and allowing street mobs to call the shots from hereon.

Talo nga ang pikon.

Interestingly enough, since 2005 there were a couple more instances where an attempt to do more street “revolutions” fizzled out — most spectacularly the much-touted “Interfaith Rally” organised around the the now chump-like Jun Lozada where among other circus acts we saw Cory Aquino and Erap sharing a stage. As Robin would have been apt to say, holy freakshow, Batman!.

This brings us to that other perceived slight on our sensibilities as a people; that HPS implies that “the governed are to be led like sheep by the governors”.

But then step back and regard the big picture — the many instances of our readyiness to hit the streets in lockstep with “outrage” that, upon careful examination, was engineered and executed by politicians and oligarchs themselves in line with their higher personal agendas. Though we fancy these demonstrations of outrage on Manila’s streets as the “voice” or “will” of “the people”, there is something to be said about how much actual thinking goes into the Average Pinoy Schmoe’s decision to join a rally — specially considering that ours is a society where discussion topics — droll and unintelligent, focused on the trivial or the irrelevant as they are — favour personalities and events rather than ideas.

Pinoys may not come across on the surface as docile sheep, but the way we move and the mentality that underpins said movement is not too different from the dynamics of how a flock of sheep behave.

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