State of Alertness

There’s something much more chilling than the grim images of the eight dead and 70 injured casualties in the early afternoon bombing at Glorietta Shopping Mall 2 in Makati City today. What scares me more is not another round of “terrorist” blast but the anticipated response from a highly insecure government nearing the tipping point of regime change. Already, authorities have raised police alert levels to the maximum and have instituted checkpoints in key entry and exit points to and from the metropolis. As usual, everyone from all sides of the political fence is calling for calm and sobriety, for facts not speculations, for data not imaginations. The narrative is all too familiar: this is not the time for politics. Rehabilitation, nation-building and national unity must order the day.

Clearly, politics together with the dead shoppers is the real victim of this tragedy.

Police Chief Avelino Razon claims they are on top of things and has called on everyone to go back to the normal course of daily life, albeit without Glorietta 2 for the time being. What Razon and other government officials are saying is this: there’s really nothing to be alert under this state of alertness.

Slavoj Zizek is surprisingly lucid on accounts of such kind and he warns: “when a state institution proclaims a state of emergency, it does so by definition as part of a desperate strategy to avoid the true state of emergency and return to the normal course of things.” States of emergency, then are not ad hoc responses or suspensions of the rule of law as Mark Neocleous notes. On the contrary, they are preemptive strikes to curb the full manifestation of crisis situations. Rather than suspension of the rule of law, states of emergencies constitute and allow the very operation of the law itself. And because the law has always been separated from politics in the liberal conception of things, states of emergency are uncontestable legal orders supported by the austere dichotomization between emergency and normalcy. At the end of the day, there is nothing problematic at all with the normal course of things.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo who embodies class convergence at the apex of state power stands to benefit the most. And why not? So far, Arroyo has not only been the queen of fraud and bribes, she has also been the empress of distraction – innovating all sorts of theatrical fireworks to reroute the energies of an already jaundiced citizenry.

The way the bombing is being treated by those claiming to be critical of her administration is equally myopic, however. If at all, sobriety and objectivity is the last response that should greet it. In fact, it is the one thing Arroyo and her entire class would have wanted to achieve: to drug the population with utter sentimentality to disarm them of the ability to judge what has happened with carefully formed individual judgments.

The Glorietta 2 bombing shook the political landscape violently. It exposed the cracks and heightened the contradictions of our increasingly mall-like structured State. Because it claimed the lives of potential citizens it must be condemned. But because it served to highlight the futility of life-as-it-is and offered an opportunity to understand the great irony of state-declared states of emergency by highlighting that a state of emergency and the normal course of things are not really different, it must be celebrated.

Bringing Politics Back In

If there’s one great danger the Philippines faces now, it’s not that too much politics is going on but that too little of it is actually present. From the President, her opponents, political commentators, down to the average citizen and the working classes everyone seems to be afflicted with an infectious itch to scratch politics away the moment it makes its presence felt. It is a fatal allergy – one that numbs the senses and inhibits one’s capacity for judgment, although, even this has become an undesired endeavor as well, it seems. The symptoms are difficult to recognize because the endless, at times irritating appeals to objective facts and accurate, unopinionated observations provide easy and quick medication. Interestingly, death certificates are also fact-obsessed: time of death up to the last second, cause of death in the most accurate prognosis. This is the danger of too little politics: the elevation to the highest pedestal of life and death in their barest, naked fact.

But it is a widely unrecognized danger because danger itself has become endangered. The dangerous does not have any hold on our imagination anymore because even it has become safe. Come to think of it, there are no more genuinely dangerous spaces nowadays really. Even the mountains and the oceans have lost their capacity to make us tremble in danger. That’s why politics because it is dangerous to life-itself has come to be tamed; is seen to be in need of taming. But politics, because it is unencumbered action has a propensity to be tragic and to result in tragedy. What is happening in the Philippines (and elsewhere) is how one political philosopher beautifully put – a tragedy of tragedy. We have become beings no longer fascinated by the spontaneity of action. In fact, i think there is a spreading (and alarming) desire for numbness. No longer laziness, but numbness. We want everything planned, collectivized, organized and compartmentalized. Like the laws of the market, we want everything predictable, governed by the invisible hand which will manage, harmonize and govern our self-interests. And because we have demonized tragedy, we no longer recognize its spectral presence among us.

Why are we afraid of politics? This I guess is the most important question crying out for an answer. And the question behind it is a more fundamental human question: why are we afraid of fear? Two years ago, during a Simbang Gabi Mass Fr. Luis David, SJ lamented after reading the Christmas story of the angels coming to the shepherds that we modern men have forgotten what it feels like to shudder, to tremble, to fear. I don’t think he meant that the human experience of God and the economy of salvation be situated in a scheme of fear. Fr. David is no Sister Mary Thomas. What he meant was that the experience of trembling is an experience that makes us aware of our own bodies – joints clacking, skin tightening, jaws crackling, goosebumps erupting. Fear/danger jolts us from merely existing. It heightens us, arouses us, and discombobulates us. Modern man – certain and comfortable in the methodology of his rationality – finds it difficult to tremble.

Ironically, the demise of politics in the Philippines is being heralded not just by those who overtly loathe it. In fact, those who claim to be political messiahs and political know-it-alls (the “development” trinity of NGOs-POs, the academe, and utopian journalists) are equally guilty of purging politics by locking it up and suffocating it in holocaust like proportions using the language of reform, which can only mean the eradication of everything that is unique to politics.

Up until the Florentine Renaissance writer, Niccolo Machiavelli, politics was conceived as a unique sphere whose boundaries are set by the laws and conventions of a community. The rise of totalitarian movements in the wake of modernity’s birth wrecked havoc on these boundaries in its quest for life where nothing is impossible. But as the philosopher Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, once the impossible became possible “it became the unpunishable, unforgivable absolute evil which could no longer be understood and explained by the evil motives of self-interest, greed, covetousness, resentment, lust for power, and cowardice; and which therefore anger could not revenge, love could not endure, friendship could not forgive.– politicizing everything with the rise of totalitarian movements.” The language of political reform has this at its logical end.

Ruth Grant, a scholar on Machiavelli who wrote on the politics of hypocrisy captured it wonderfully when she claimed that to demand a politics that is pure and honest is no different from to wish for the annihilation of politics altogether. Politics – because it comes out in between human individuality and action – cannot be the stark, naked figure of man in the social contractual state of nature; as Arendt points out: man is apolitical by nature; politics is the relational space of men talking and acting. Politics , as such, is embedded in human passion and is by nature, violent. The so-called politics of reform suppresses violence and silences human passion, denying it of being included in the most human of all activities – political life. On the other hand, Grant’s (and Machiavelli’s) politics of hypocrisy gives politics a chance while at the same time recognizing the limits of what it can do. Pure truth is anti-political because it closes itself to contestation. Even Plato knew this.

The present administration is guilty of bastardizing this Machiavellian concept. Political commentators on the other hand are equally myopic by not reading Machiavelli and yet having the gall to call the Arroyo regime Machiavellian. Machiavelli was the most politically obsessed writer in the history of political thought. Arroyo is guilty of locking politics in the gas chamber. But so are those who claim to be the defenders of the country's national interest.


We must find a new word to describe what the (un)elected leaders of this country are doing, for surely, it is not politics.