Invicted

When I teach speechwriting – like I’ll be doing again this semester as part of my course in Professional Writing – I tell my students to avoid using quotations from obscure philosophers, great writers like Shakespeare and even the Bible if it’s highly unlikely that the speaker they’re writing for would have read them in his or her real life and understood what they were saying.

Few people are truly that learned – not that they have to be to render good public service – and the last thing you want to see and hear is your client squinting at and struggling with a sonorous phrase he or she never saw before. Especially if they’re politicians, I’d much rather that they poach “hugot” lines from pop culture that their listeners can relate to, with disarming and self-deprecating humor rather than malice aforethought.

A lot’s been said about VP Sara Duterte’s obvious reference to William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem “Invictus” at the abbreviated “press conference” she held on the second day of her impeachment trial at the Senate. “In this bloodbath and bludgeoning,” she intoned, “I will be bloodied but unbowed.” Lit-savvy netizens quickly jumped on “bloodied” being a misquote, the actual word in the verse being “bloody,” but in the context of her premise about being bludgeoned in a bloodbath (never mind how cheesy that alliteration sounds), “bloodied” makes better dramatic sense, positioning her as the unfortunate receiver of an injurious action, perhaps even more victim than victor.

I wouldn’t put it past VP Sara to have known the Henley poem, which many Filipinos of a certain age would have encountered at some point, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Indeed, it’s the very popularity of the poem – plus again that awful alliteration that’s the hallmark of a speechwriter reaching for cheap effect (also note: “bloodied” sounds ridiculously inevitable after “bloodbath,” yes?) – that accounts for its hokeyness.

Did a PR consultant put her up to it? (“Go in there, say these lines, then exit forthwith.”) We can’t say. But something tells me that’s the way VP Sara herself wanted it. The speech and the action were entirely in character with someone who sees and represents politics as theater, where broad gestures visible from across the room and the archipelago – the punching of sheriffs, for example – matter. With the Dutertes, everything has to be punchy, dramatic, theatrical, staged. DENR giving you problems? Dump truckloads of trash right in front of their office. That’s the kind of gesture the DDS faithful lap up as creative, courageous and even inspired.

So when Sara sneaks into the Senate (the lions’ den!) to give her little speech but quickly departs before she can even be called to the witness stand, let alone bludgeoned, we’re supposed to take that for both bravery and cunning – or at least her supporters are.

On Feb. 18, 2026, when she declared her intention to run for the presidency, she used a series of statements ostensibly begging forgiveness for once having allied herself with her tormentor.

Mga kababayan, humihingi ako ng paumanhin sa inyong lahat. Patawad kung tinulungan kong mahalal si BBM bilang Pangulo ng ating bansa.

Patawad kung hanggang ngayon ay marami pa ring Pilipino ang nalulunod sa baha nang dahil sa malawakang korapsyon.

Patawad kung lantaran ang pang-aabuso sa ating mga institusyon para sa pansariling interes ng mga pulitiko.

Rhetorically, this usually works. She (or her speechwriter) is employing a device called anaphora, which repeats key words or phrases with incremental changes. It’s effective because it establishes a certain cadence, a regularity of structure that implies you’re in command of your material and know and mean what you’re talking about. The best-known example from modern history comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who declared in 1963 that “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up… I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin…”

Now, Sara Duterte is no MLK, but she was saying things her own people needed to hear. It wasn’t a speech to persuade BBM’s followers much less Kakampinks to seriously consider her as the better alternative. It was a speech to malign the enemy, a litany of grievances to justify her turnaround and to pass some moral ammunition for her troops to shoot with. Never mind that “malawakang korapsyon” and “pang-aabuso ng institusyon” are precisely the issues that have now landed her in impeachment court. As with Donald Trump, she’s learned that the best way to deal with political mud is to throw it right back at the accuser.

She has no problem working up her minions with these verbal broadsides. But beyond the home crowd, the problem with VP Sara is that she can’t seem to sustain an extended, rational and unemotional argument. If I were her handler, I would worry that, on her own, she might prove incapable of discussing specifics, of fleshing out policy, of speaking beyond platitudes and generalities. You can imagine how she would respond to the cool but relentless questioning of an Atty. Ligutan or an Atty. Diokno. She would sputter and explode, and walk off the stand.

I’ve gone through her speeches on her OVP website, and they betray little of whatever originality she may be capable of. The major pieces – an education keynote in South Korea, for example – are competent, but pedestrian and undistinguished, patently outsourced. Her talks to grade schoolers focus on the “4 Be’s” – “be kind, be humble, be happy and be careful” – which is all well and good if you can inspire them by personal example.

It’s not that she’s unintelligent; her feral brain knows what it needs to do to survive.

In her mind she has already dismissed the Senate trial as a fruitless exercise. She’s confident she has the votes to be acquitted, and they can rail at her as much as they want and work themselves blind trying to prove her a crook, but in the end the votes will break her way, her misdeeds will be deemed expunged and best of all, she will emerge triumphant – bloodied but unbowed – and even more powerful, which is all that will matter leading up to 2028.

That’s why she can afford to ignore whatever summons they send her way, and deprive her prosecutors and the public of the spectacle of her appearance at the witness stand. Her absence, heavy with mystery, is within her control. Her testimony, fraught with danger, will not be. That is cold calculation, intelligence of the hardest kind.

And that’s why she can’t give a damn what Lit profs like me say about her spouting “Invictus” in lieu of testifying – she’s boxed herself into that character, which makes her sound like she’s fighting when she’s not.

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