EDITORIAL - Heckling the boss, or the boss heckling

In a speech in Naga City on Independence Day, President Aquino was rudely interrupted by the heckling of a student activist. Unaccustomed by the effrontery toward such an "immensely popular and well-loved" leader, the police did not know how to react.

So they neutralized the heckler, booked him at the station, charged him with everything remotely resembling disturbance of the peace, then threw him in jail. While all this was going on, Aquino never bothered to raise a peep about the incident, pro or con.

So the interpretation was - he approved of every measure the police had taken. The leftist buddies of the activist quickly raised hell in media, whenever the opportunity arose. But other than that, nobody took up the baton from there. Leftists have apparently given activism a bad name.

But whether the activist gained any sympathizers or not, Aquino was put on notice that heckling was par for the course among world leaders, among them George W. Bush who had to deal with something worse, and whose shoe-dodging skills eventually became standard survival protocol for others, including Hillary Clinton.

That is perhaps why, later in Iloilo, the city that Senate President Franklin Drilon offered as refuge for Gloria you-know-who before he switched to Aquino, three hecklers did not suffer the same fate as the Naga City activist.

While it was not clear if Aquino had a hand in the police reaction, the Iloilo hecklers suffered a far less harrowing experience in the hands of the police. They were subdued, of course, but were promptly freed, perhaps to scheme again in the event Aquino returns.

 Unfortunately, the two aftermaths are not instructive. The two contrasting fates of Aquino hecklers do not tell us anything about the president's true disposition toward those who disrupt him at whatever it is he might be doing.

Maybe we need a third heckling incident to really determine the course of Aquino's thought processes on this thing. How Aquino reacts, or more precisely, how the police react in the presence of Aquino, should be enough to tell the nation who between the two is boss.