Where does the buck stop?

So goes a Chinese proverb: “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.” Understandably, some follow the narrative framed by the wicked, others the logic of constitutional prescription, the rest drift as fence-sitters. 

The immediate trigger in the Nepal case was the social media ban amid the chronic corruption, struggling economy, and political instability. The regime change in Madagascar was triggered by severe daily power and water outages, quite aside from the longstanding poverty, endemic corruption and mismanagement of state utilities. 

Comparatively, the Philippines is turning up the heat, albeit most unlikely along the lines of the violent “foreign-imposed regime change” which necessitated the use of force. Pray then that ours be not of such type. 

It’s intriguing to hear of Atty. Ferdinand Topacio’s train of thought that the President called out corruption the precise moment before all accusing fingers would point to him as the “author.” If that were so, it made good cover for the President’s media bureau or spin doctors to placate any likely involvement in the floodgate scandal since he was the “messenger” of the message. 

This McLuhan tactic paid off, or why not kill the message rather than the messenger? Not remotely, there’s a movie reminiscent of an occasion when the messenger is in fact the criminal, in The Usual Suspects (1995), that “most famously depicts a character who points to a crime but in reality is the perpetrator.”

  There’s also one classic example from literature (adapted into several films and TV episodes) in Agatha Christie’s novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, “where the narrator and local doctor is ultimately revealed to be the murderer.”

 Or how about the film, Primal Fear, as more graphically demonstrative of Topacio’s cynicism, nay irreverence. Is it that far-fetched that all of us who believe the President could be likened to Atty. Martin Vail, who believes his client is innocent, yet successfully manipulates both him and the court? 

The client, Aaron Stampler, is a young altar boy accused of murdering an archbishop, who faked his stuttering and amnesia the entire time. In an oblique analogy, the exchange of tirades between Sen. Imee Marcos and President FM Jr. is a contest of public perception as to who can turn bad optics into good.  

No doubt, the President has everything in his arsenal that all traditional and social media platforms get on a regular dose with the President’s quite (un)presidential tact to update the public with rather contrived reports. As a consequence, the most trivial matters tend to be micromanaged and magnified in unseen proportions.

The rapid turnover consequent to the resignations of the President’s men with new appointments no longer based on fitness or skill set only tends to weaken his hold on power even more. Losing all his aces at such speed and scale is tantamount to (re)setting the government that is hanging by a thread. 

There’s this notion in public administration called the “Law of Imperfect Control” (Frederickson et al., 2012), which posits that “the larger the organization, the weaker the control of those at the top of the hierarchy over the actions of those in the middle and at the bottom.” Matter-of-factly, it can lead to “for want of a nail, the ship was lost.”  

Keen observers describe the state of affairs as a likely “free fall, scapegoat, witch-hunt, diverting attention, political harassment, rigged hearing, squid tactic, anarchy, destabilization, or inciting to sedition,” to top it all. 

One thing is clear, viz: “Everything that the President says or does not say, does or does not do will have a ‘butterfly effect’ on all spheres of governance, impacting the nation’s stability, economy and public morale.”

The perceived effects on the realms of the economic and social, governance and political, foreign policy are legion, even enormous, to contain and manage. Can the government dial back to zero? Or has the train left the station?