The first Millennial President

The Millennial generation has no real leaders. Presidents and popes are not safe from the scrutiny of a microblogging culture. Nothing is sacred, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The absurdity of the moment was not lost on me. Perhaps, I thought, this was the first SONA for Millennials?

An hour or so before President Noynoy Aquino delivered his fifth State of the Nation Address (SONA), militant lawmakers made a fashion statement in peach-colored Filipiniana. “In peach for impeach,” was how they explained their SONA outfits, in direct contrast to the P-Noy camp’s yellow.

“The message of the peach Filipiniana gown is simple and clear. We support the people’s clamor for accountability and we support the impeachment complaint filed against President Aquino,” Gabriela Woman’s party-list Rep. Luzviminda Ilagan said in a Philippine STAR report. And while I could sympathize with the sentiment, the idea of lawmakers turning themselves into walking puns baffled me.

The SONA was criticized for its focus on the red carpet-like pre-show. But when political statements and fashion statements collide, as they did in “in peach for impeach,” who could blame media and the tweeting public? We’re at a point where the old divisions and customs may not apply, where the seemingly shallow can be used to deliver a serious message. It’s something Tumblr culture (and our media studies classes) taught us a long time ago — in deconstructing our old sacred cows, new insights can be gained.

Maybe the absurdity of “in peach for impeach” was the only way they could penetrate the meme-obsessed zeitgeist, I thought, later, as I saw the nth Binay-as-air-balloon post on my feed. After all, if the outfits get more play than the President’s address itself, maybe “in peach for impeach” is on to something.

Take Nancy Binay, for example. While the “best dressed” lawmakers and guests were criticized for being too well dressed at a state event (Heart Evangelista in Joey Samson’s cage terno, Grace Poe in clean and classic Rajo Laurel, Lucy Torres in classy Randy Ortiz), Binay was criticized for not dressing well enough. Within minutes of her outfit being flashed on telecasts, she and her dress became a meme, getting frenetic social media play as an air balloon (or Shrek).

(On a side note, it’s a Catch 22 and an unfair one. When we fashion-police someone like Binay for not looking “good enough” for the SONA, we lose the right to criticize our “best dressed” lawmakers for looking good. We can’t have it both ways. When we participate in red carpet games, we can’t turn around and lambast those who played the game well. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.)

And perhaps symptomatic of an audience that’s increasingly obsessed with facile details like who’s wearing who, the 2014 SONA was a response to that. This go-round, we got Thought Catalog-like visuals to aid P-Noy’s main points, better-than-usual typography (for a government office), and AVPs to send a point home. It was a welcome gesture, a government visibly reaching out to a visuals-driven culture and audibly inviting the youth to be part of the discourse.

Still, it made me wonder: If this was the first SONA targeted at Millennials, how would the first Millennial president’s SONA fly?

Would he just do a live-stream in his pajamas? Would he just tweet the main points? Would he use gifs to drive important issues home? More importantly, would he tell us in advance or just drop a SONA unannounced, like Beyoncé did for her self-titled album, that fateful day of Dec. 13, 2013? Perhaps all of the above.

If there’s anything we know about this blasted generation, for better or worse, we don’t follow convention. We life-hack. We break things apart and try to find more meaningful and efficient ways of doing them “Their great mantra has been: Challenge convention,” broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw once said. “Find new and better ways of doing things. And so that ethos transcends the wooly people who are inventing new apps and embraces the whole economy.”

As the May 20, 2013 Time magazine cover story “The Me Me Me Generation” enumerated: “They’re earnest and optimistic. They embrace the system. They are pragmatic idealists, tinkerers more than dreamers, life hackers. Their world is so flat that they have no leaders, which is why revolutions from Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square have even less chance than previous rebellions.”

How would a Millennial president deliver the SONA? By harnessing all the tricks and trades of social media, for sure, but perhaps also with the full knowledge that leadership is an ongoing negotiation — a truth that’s all the more real in a world where public opinion changes at the drop of a tweet.

The Millennial generation has no real leaders. Presidents and popes are not safe from the scrutiny of a microblogging culture. Nothing is sacred, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. A Millennial president would know this and maybe, his SONA would not just be about an enumeration of achievements — Millennials don’t brag, we humble-brag — and partly be about accountability and mistakes too.

The Millennial might be ambitious and optimistic, bracingly overconfident and often entitled. But this is also a generation that grew up in the age of the Internet confessional. We love nothing more than to revel in each other, flaws and all. A president who grew up on Livejournal and Twitter would know that in an increasingly calculating world like this, there’s nothing rarer than sincerity. And he would know that while his peers love success and achievement, there’s nothing that speaks to this generation more than humanity. Because we don’t have enough of it.