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.