Meaningless

Maleta (suitcase), the Duterte camp’s go-to sarcastic catchphrase for systemic political corruption, ironically ricocheted and caused severe distress last week to the camp itself.

Reeling from yet unproven allegations from a former policeman that he delivered boxes or maletas of cash allegedly to the Veep, the Duterte camp is now obviously scrambling to contain the damaging revelations.

While it’s too early to assess whatever damages the Duterte camp sustained, it’s clear the revelations practically emptied maleta of political clout, enough for it to be thrown into the dustbin of other politically meaningless catchphrases.

By now, you can guess that recent meaningless coinages punctuating our polarized politics is the subject of today’s reflections; reflections largely inspired by English writer George Orwell and his famous essay “Politics and the English Language.”

Anyway, I believe that besides maleta some other current catchy Pilipino expressions emptied of political clout are adik (addict), bangag (stoned), bobo (stupid), lutang (high), and tae (excrement).

There are, of course, many other contemptible coinages out there just as there many ways to insult, degrade and libel anyone strongly disliked or hated.

But, the fact remains, as Orwell points out, out there “there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors (in our case words) which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.”

So, if easily reaching out for stale catchphrases saves much mental effort in finding out what a word really involves, it shows many “are not interested in the details of what they are saying” or writing.

A good example of this is the habitual commenting using adik. While adik generally describes a person’s addiction to illegal drugs, its hidden darker meanings also show it’s a disturbing shortcut for quickly classifying a fellow human being as less than human, an animal.

And, such habitual less-than-human classifying often leads to the gruesome conclusion that there’s absolutely nothing wrong about killing or murdering an adik.As we know by now, there’s been a thundering pushback against such state of mind which are classifiably crimes against humanity, especially from human rights groups.

Nonetheless, adik is still a favored catchphrase, especially in careless emotion-laden social media comments. In any political Facebook post, for instance, trolls and automated bots freely comment it too, even if it’s otherwise empty of effect or clout.

Machine-like trolls and computer-generated automated bots, however, have a sinister political intent in repeating adik and the other catchphrases.

“They,” as Orwell said in his essay, want to “construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear.”

Debasing political language, in short, is to keep people in line. And worse, even turn people into ignorant brainwashed drooling idiots.

“The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity,” as Orwell puts it.