'Sara na, naging Bato pa,' for now

YOU just have to turn it into a joke, which is typical of our Filipino predisposition to turn stressful, sometimes tragic events into moments for laughter. We use parody as a form of resistance. We are living and breathing exhibits of what James Scott has theorized as everyday forms of resistance. Mikhail Bakhtin was probably thinking of us when he theorized about the carnivalesque, where court jesters use humor as a way to criticize tyrants and escape their wrath, for in the end who would take clowns seriously.

The problem is this. It seems that it is not us who are becoming clowns, but our politicians, or at least that is what they have become. They seem not to take seriously the rituals of democracy, such as the electoral process. And here, I am not just referring to people we have officially labeled as nuisance candidates, like the one who promised to electrocute Covid-19 out of existence by making those infected sit in a chair charged with 12,000 volts of electricity. We might as well take that remedy, actually, for us to be spared the spectacle of how a president and his allies have now turned our 2022 elections into, at best, a comedy show, at worst, a farce.