SONAs as basic need

There are apparently many good things happening in this country. According to official sources, the growth rates of some urgent concerns like our fast increasing population, unem-ployment, inflation and travel abroad have stabilized. Thus, while the numerate may still anguish over the implied absolute counts for the monitored concerns (for instance, over one and a half million new births still being added yearly to the nation’s prolific population), the sense of stable proportions – ratios that are often mistaken by the inept for the rational — provides immense consolation to most of the citizenry. For the latter, stabilizing percentages — at least once removed from gross counts of often brutal realities — perform the same critical function as the cinema. They serve to blunt life’s razor-sharp cruelties and comfort the most agitated at least for a while.

State-of-the-nation-addresses (SONAs) render a similar public service. They are primarily official attempts to assure the citizenry that a national administration had not been remiss in managing the national condition over a given period of time, normally a year. Whatever the difficulties, however formidable the challenges to national governance, SONAs tell the people that the ruling authorities are in Malacanan and that everything is well with the nation.

In a distressed country where Murphy’s law appears to have more nearly universal application than anywhere else, no SONA has ever acknowledged responsibility for the nation’s laggard economy in a region characterized by impressive dynamism. No SONA in the last four decades has ever attested to any failure of governance — any lack of insight or foresight, any fecklessness in whatever form or dimension – by any administration. Whether the active indicators be for oppressive social injustice, comprehensive corruption, rampant criminality, blatant electoral fraud or costly political instability, SONAs have a poor record for identifying the contributory achievements of any currently ruling dispensation. (One has to wait for a new administration to find out what the previous one had been doing wrong. With the exception of the Ramos group, this practice of demonizing the previous administration appears to have become a nearly catholic obsession among those who govern the country.)

SONAs are for people who are fixated with good news regardless of their credibility. Administrations have a vested interest in projecting their best foot forward even as they might be missing a leg to stand on. Desperate people who time and again must survive desperate situations cannot be blamed for desperately trying to believe that the good news all SONAs ritualistically proclaim might indeed have come to pass in this particular incantation. Hope, it has been said, is most precious for those who are truly hopeless or nearly so.

So it is that SONAs must continue as an annual ritual for most Filipinos, much like the fiestas that use up poor people’s meager savings but give them a fantastically good feeling while the celebration lasts. So it is that our SONAs must continue to be delivered by no less than our most prestigious political personality. Indeed, SONAs must be crafted only by the nation’s finest wordsmiths, in close collaboration with those who most creatively deal with figures and in particular stabilizing proportions. Nothing must be spared in providing Filipinos with their very own world of magic.

At least until such time as this nation learns that while magicians might be good for children and for those who might be much older but professionally engage in billiards, they have no place in real life governance. For effective governance in a time of continuing crisis, only the knowledgeable, experienced and patriotic Filipinos must be considered. The unstable and the childish, much like most professional entertainers and national plunderers, cannot fashion SONAs that go beyond being a quick fix.