The Palace
In the Philippines, the Palace refers to Malacañang, the official residence of the president. It also refers both to the president himself and to the presidency. As a matter of practice, there can be no ambiguation in its use. In all of my nearly 40 years as a professional journalist, when you say the Palace, you mean no one else but the president. Period.
Sometimes, it is not always the president talking when something is attributed to the Palace. Oftentimes, it is his official spokesman or someone duly authorized to speak on his behalf. When the spokesman talks, it is presumed he talks with prior or implied clearance from the president. Somebody else talks for the president and it must be made expressly clear that he does.
But the main story in the Philippine Star of last Wednesday got me all confused. The story led off with President Duterte appointing a new chief of the controversy-laden Bureau of Corrections. Nothing wrong with that. The facts all appeared in order. But then along came a subsequent paragraph attributed to and quoting presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo.
In that paragraph, Panelo supposedly said the Palace welcomed the new appointment. Put another way, and if I understood it correctly in the context of this discussion, what Panelo is saying is that President Duterte welcomes his own appointment of a new BuCor chief. Now, I don't know about you, but it all sounds pretty screwy to me --- this business of Duterte appointing somebody and then standing up to applaud what he just did.
If the Star got its quotes right, then it must have been Panelo who got his breakfast cereals all mixed up with his lunch. He must have succumbed to one of the most common pitfalls of speaking for someone. And that is to confuse one's self with the principal. Since no one else but Duterte can make the appointment, everybody else is reduced to reacting in favor or against.
As presidential spokesman, Panelo cannot go against the president. He can only applaud. So it must have been he who was actually applauding. But what happened was that, so used had Panelo become in speaking for the president that when this time he was applauding in his personal capacity, he still automatically sent the attribution down Malacañang way.
This reminds me of a poem quoted by John F. Kennedy in his Profiles in Courage: "There was a dachshund once so long/who hadn't any notion how long/it took to notify his tail of his emotion/And so one day it happened/that while his eyes were filled with sadness/his little tail went wagging on/because of previous gladness."
Having spokesmen can be a very useful thing, especially when the principal is notorious for blurting out utterances best left to the solitary confines of a john. It is the spokesmen who clean up the mess when the shit hits the fan. But spokesmen cannot get carried away by their own emotions. Though they be mouthpieces, they need to maintain the stoic dignity of owls. They cannot get carried away like tumultuous macaques.
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