Trapos: Prime conditioner of our politics

Manny Valdehuesa .

OLD-STYLE  politics and its practitioners (trapos) are the prime conditioners of our politics. Quintessentially personified by Dongkoy Emano, his family, and his cronies, they shape the political culture of the grassroots, thus of Philippine society as a whole.

Employing patronage and gimmicks irresistible to the poverty-stricken, the educationally-challenged, and the naïve, they pander to the masses and buy their loyalty. Manipulating the underprivileged, the under-achiever, and the impressionable (who outnumber the community’s sensible sectors), they get to dominate grassroots society.

They’re great at playing the classic game of patronage—dishing out favors, rewarding sycophants, squandering public resources—and turn otherwise honorable people into mendicants and fierce loyalists even as they themselves make a living out of politics.

The techno-savvy among their sycophants are the trolls of today’s social media, ever on the lookout to pounce on their bosses’ critics and, like Hitler’s Brown-shirts and storm troopers, are quick to demolish any hint of dissent. Ruthlessly and relentlessly.

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This carrot and stick style of governance—carrot for sycophants, the whip against dissenters—effectively paints a portrait of an iron will too fierce to disobey, defy, or challenge.

Instant punishment or retribution meted out to the defiant or the dissenter captures the imagination of the masses. It telegraphs a chilling message: either cooperate and play along or lose status, privilege, and advantage. Rodrigo Duterte is today’s incarnate practitioner of this brand of ruthless politics.

Patronage impresses and dazzles the naïve and impressionable. It feeds the belief among the masses that trapos are the source of every benefit or service provided by government. As preposterous as this may seem, a lot of people actually believe so.

Trapos are highly skilled in exploiting human weakness and greed. They even make everyone believe that they owe a “debt of gratitude” to trapos as their benefactors. Thus are projects in the community portrayed as proof of the trapo’s “generosity” and “caring” instead of as compliance with duty and obligation.

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Not least, trapos excel in reminding people that the projects they initiate represent a “debt” of gratitude that people owe them, payable at election time. Endless reminders of this “debt” is manifested in notices and billboards in project sites, in public facilities, and in the commons. It is shameless credit-grabbing, of course, but it is done with impunity.

This is the practice Tagalogs term as “Epal”—showing off (nagpapapel). A word formed by inverting the syllables as in Erap (pare) or yosi (sigarilyo). It’s not only unethical, it’s illegal. But it continues nonetheless.

This brazen propaganda has wreaked untold havoc on the Filipino psyche, keeping the Filipino electorate politically immature. It is glaring proof of how corrupted is our political system.

Among the pernicious effects of this effrontery is the mentality among simple folk that as long as they’re paid, it’s all right to do what amounts to pimping or drug pushing for a candidate. It’s just livelihood, they think.

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As for vote buying and vote-selling, cheating and other rampant forms of corruption: nothing wrong and no problem; it’s just a living one earns only seasonally. Even cowboying a round-up of rent-a-crowds for campaign rallies is par for the course.

There’s no point telling such folks to resist or eschew patronage or bribery because “it’s their taxes that’s being given away, squandered, or stolen.” In the first place, they don’t pay income taxes and own very little. And they know that what’s being squandered is not theirs but loot from political exploiters, economic predators, tax evaders, and money-launderers.

Ultimately, all that matters to such simple-minded voters is what they can get no matter how paltry. It’s what poverty or ignorance does to otherwise decent people.

To such folks, sycophancy is the name of the game; to make Sipsip, to suck up to the rich and powerful. To trapos, it’s the tried and tested technique of siphoning off goodies from the Horn of Plenty (government and corrupt oligarchs).

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It doesn’t concern them if the “horn of plenty” be vice dens, drug lords, or the keepers and dispensers of pork barrel.

To them the end justifies the means. And so corruption merrily goes and on with no end in sight. More next time.

(Manny Valdehuesa Jr. is a former Unesco regional director for Asia-Pacific; secretary-general, Southeast Asia Publishers Association; director, development academy of Philippines; member, Philippine Mission to the UN;  vice chair, Local Government Academy; member, government peace panel during the administration of Corazon Aquino; awardee, PPI-Unicef outstanding columnist. An author of books on governance, he is chairman/convenor of Gising Barangay Movement Inc.. E-mail: valdehuesa@gmail.com)