Dead serious
This is the age of visual politics. If it cannot fit in a ten-second clip, it might as well not have happened.
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This is the age of visual politics. If it cannot fit in a ten-second clip, it might as well not have happened.
Mention China among Filipinos and the conversation quickly turns to counterfeit goods, artificial islands in the West Philippine Sea, and Beijing’s increasingly combative foreign policy.
Apparently, it has now inspired guerrilla funeral planning in Metro Manila, where five caskets appeared overnight.
One almost has to admire the logistics. Somebody rented — or borrowed — vans, acquired five coffins, recruited masked men, synchronized deliveries across Metro Manila, and disappeared before breakfast. A case of Filipino activists discovering supply-chain management?
The Department of Foreign Affairs, understandably, was not amused, and reminded everyone that this is no way for civilized nations to conduct diplomacy. Fair enough. But the more interesting question isn’t whether the stunt was diplomatically appropriate. It’s why so many Filipinos have concluded that ordinary protest no longer works.
Part of the answer is genuine frustration: years of protest notes, tribunal rulings, and joint statements have not moved a single feature out of the water. If persuasion hasn’t worked, provocation starts to look like the only tool left.
But part of the rationale is simpler and more cynical. Ordinary protest doesn’t trend. A picket line gets ignored. A press conference competes with celebrity gossip. A coffin, however, practically guarantees drone footage.
This is the age of visual politics. If it cannot fit in a ten-second clip, it might as well not have happened. Politics now follows the same rules as advertising: be louder, stranger and more memorable than yesterday. Today’s prop is a coffin. Tomorrow, perhaps, something stranger still. Once politics becomes theater, every production must outdo the last.
Here is the irony worth sitting with. The organizers wanted to condemn China and communism, yet they reached for one of communism’s oldest instincts: grand symbolism deployed for maximum spectacle.
Authoritarian systems have always loved mass parades, giant banners, and choreographed demonstrations precisely because such displays make dissent look unnecessary and consensus look total.
Democracies aren’t supposed to need that kind of theater — we have arguments, elections, and courts instead of pageantry.
Yet here we are, discovering that democracies aren’t immune to the temptation either. We simply outsource the choreography — to activists instead of the state, to virality instead of decree.
The impulse is the same: make the spectacle so large that nobody has to examine the argument underneath it. That should trouble anyone who thinks democratic politics is supposed to run on persuasion rather than performance.
China will most certainly just shrug. Beijing has weathered sanctions, freedom of navigation operations, international tribunals, and relentless criticism. Five caskets in Manila are unlikely to alter policy in Zhongnanhai.
But the Chinese government was never the real audience. We Filipinos were.
Every coffin was a reminder that modern politics increasingly competes for attention rather than persuasion. The headline matters more than the argument. The photograph matters more than the position paper.
And once that becomes the standard, the actual substance of the West Philippine Sea dispute — the law, the history, the stakes — risks becoming background noise to whatever image trends hardest this week.
Perhaps that is the saddest part. The caskets were empty. One hopes our public discourse is not becoming the same.
