MAY 20 — How does a man who once branded the Pope as a son of a w**** win the presidency in an overwhelmingly Catholic nation?
According to The Star of May 17, Philippine President-elect Rodrigo Duterte vowed during his campaign to kill tens of thousands of criminals, on one occasion saying that 100,000 people would die, and so many bodies would be dumped in Manila Bay that the fish would grow fat from feeding on them.
For those convicted of two major crimes, Duterte said he wanted them hanged twice. “After you are hanged first, there will be another ceremony for the second time till the head is completely severed from the body. I like that because I am mad like that, he said.”
In comparison, US Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump seems almost like a beacon of peace, but he has not hesitated to call Mexican migrants rapists and some, he assumed are good people. He would of course bomb the s*** out of the Islamic State group and bar Muslims en bloc from entering his country.
What gives? Is this what passes for policy prescriptions on crime and international terror? And much more frighteningly, how is this kind of ranting helping these people capture the popular imagination of voters in two democracies on either side of the world?
From the day that control over content was lost by the media to the consumer with the advent of the Internet and multiple screens, this was coming. In an age of the 24/7 news cycle and insistent social media, myth making has become a short-term game of dare.
Political personality cults today need much more outrageous behaviour to establish themselves. From Obama’s “Yes, we can” to Trump’s “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?” is a distance only the smartphone and Twitter could have helped traverse in this short a time.
Even a quick comparison of the Presidential debates in the US now and in the last elections would show that while the time spent debating anything at all has dramatically shrunk, ranting, shouting and the soundbite are seemingly all that matters.
Fact checking was big in the last elections. This time, Trump doesn’t even pretend to care. Every day is a new day where the past is irrelevant and the future open to conjecture. All that matters is what is said now.
In a sense the blame is on us. Where is the time to think, to remember, to see all sides of the story given the pressures of multitasking, Facebooking, commuting, speed dating, crowdsourcing and mini-breaking? To debate issues needs time to get informed, to develop points of view and to refine them through dialogue and finally to re-evaluate them in light of new information. When was the last time that happened?
This is leading to the rise of post-debatism. When attention spans are so attenuated, memories so short and the need for instant solutions so intense, then no nuanced responses are possible and extremist viewpoints reach a crescendo of one-upmanship.
When one side only deals in one liners, and the audience has the attention span of a fly, what choice does the other side have but to up the ante? Whose Twitter feed is more exciting? The Donald or Ms Clinton’s?
In this world view then, the choices are truly binary and it doesn’t matter in the least what the actual positions of the leader are, merely their ability to make us feel better, stronger, less afraid at any given moment.
Extremists are by nature more passionate than moderates. They are more vocal in person, more strident on social media and more likely to vote. Also, in a global environment of extreme insecurity, the radical choice provides an illusion of certainty, because they always have an immediate answer.
Closer to home in the coverage on the Sarawak election, where were the policy debates and prescriptions? Team Adenan vs ABU does not constitute a reasoned choice. All that was really needed was the creation of a personality cult around an individual with only one real talking point. Autonomy. Either you were for Sarawak for Sarawakians, or not.
In the peninsula, the clear demarcation between the mainstream and alternative media has only amplified this binary way of looking at issues. It has helped in allowing voters to see every event from their ever-hardening viewpoints. There is always a way to run down the achievements of the other side while condoning the sins of one’s own.
Economic growth is in spite of the impact of the 1MDB scandal, while the inability to form any kind of coherent response to a simple matter of choosing a candidate for a by-election is just consensus building. Foreign investigations on 1MDB are just the work of busybodies with an agenda while prudent financial management of an opposition-held state could be just creative accounting.
Nuance is increasingly for the armchair intellectual. To win today means a return to the primitive, to answer the call for a saviour in a world full of bad news every moment of every day. Moving on in step with the news cycle is the name of the game.
In a sense, shoot from the hip seems like a strangely apropos way to describe the current zeitgeist. Instinctive, cowboy, machismo, uncensored and perhaps most importantly — act in haste, repent at leisure.
*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
