State of (Another) Nation Address

Published in Mindanao Times 8/23/08

Robert Bly, an American poet, made a disturbing remark that holds true today: "The health of any nation's soul depends on the capacity of adults to face the harsh facts of the time. But the covering up of painful emotions inside us and the blocking out of fearful images coming from outside have become in our country the national and private style. We have established, with awesome verve, the animal of denial as the guiding beast of the nation's life.”

No (in)famous event has forcefully demonstrated the truth of Robert Bly’s remark than Gloria-Macapagal-Arroyo’s recently delivered State of the Nation Address (Sona).

This is a rather belated comment, but I think I should say something after reading and hearing the nice and nasty things people say about the Sona and its messenger—the equally (in)famous Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA). She just delivered her 8th SONA on July 28—though Lingayen-Dagupan Archbishop Oscar V. Cruz, an outspoken critic of GMA, called it “A Day of Mourning”—after surviving a series of scandals that rocked her administration.

Apart from informing the hoi polloi, it has only served to spawn various criticisms. Dr. Walden Bello, a UP sociology professor and president of Freedom From Debt Coalition, branded GMA as Goebbels’ Disciple, saying that in her SONA, she “piled on top of one another half truths, factoids taken out of context, irrelevant detail, distortions, and outright lies to paint a picture of a government laboring to serve the people under conditions of tremendous stress.” (Dr. Joseph Goebbels, by the way, is one of Adolf Hitler’s followers, who said, “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”)

Among other things that GMA said, people were perhaps jubilant to hear this: “Texting is a way of life. I asked the telecoms to cut the cost of messages between networks. They responded. It is now down to 50 centavos.” Many were elated indeed. But it was cut-short after news came out that the decrease was only good up to October this year. It is not, therefore, surprising that the common reaction was that the decrease was only for show.

Another GMA’s antic was this: “Since 2001, new irrigation systems for 146,000 hectares…and the restoration of old systems on another 980,000 hectares have increased our nation’s irrigated land to a historic 1.5 million hectares.” But Dr. Walden Bello pointed out that this is an outright lie because the fact is, “the Marcos regime achieved this figure over 20 years ago.”

On hindsight, her Sona tells us more about her character than the state of the nation. It shows us exactly what a person would do if the seemingly impregnable world she created were threatened: The tendency to resort to a defense mechanism called “denial of reality” to fend off what Robert Bly called “fearful images.” Leonard P. Stocker, in his modest pamphlet, “The Tricky Art of Self-Defense: How to Recognize Defense Mechanisms,” said, “Denial of reality is a defense mechanism in which a person denies that a painful or anxiety-producing situation actually exists.” Illustrating how denial of reality is manifested in different forms, he adds that it “is also seen when people declare or assume, “It can’t possibly happen to me,” in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary…This fairly common tendency to engage in activity for the purpose of avoiding coming to grips with one’s problem is fundamentally a form of self-deception: We manage to persuade ourselves that something unpleasant does not exist, or we perceive it in some highly distorted manner.”

What transpired on July 28 was not a Sona—an event that was supposed to tell the people the true state of the nation, however pleasant or unpleasant it is. Rather, it was a State Of Another Nation Address. Perhaps one commentator was not kidding when he said that the “President delivers an accurate portrayal of another country altogether.”