Marcos enabler

The spectacle being played out on media against Toni Gonzaga, actress, celebrity endorser and faux show host, for her disastrous decision to interview the losing vice presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos is actually a good object lesson, not just for her future endeavors, but for other wannabe social media personalities who may want to take blood money.

It probably is a good idea to take a step back and figure out what exactly was objectionable about the whole snafu. It wasn’t the concept of an interview, as such, that was the issue. That seems to be the focus of Ms. Gonzaga’s defenders in their attempts to exonerate her and come out swinging in her defense. They’re all right, by the way; nothing wrong with just an interview. It was more about what she did with the interview that made it contentious.

More precisely, Toni Gonzaga’s detractors are braying for her blood because of the contents of her interview, and how she decided to conduct it. As the pundits have observed, it was because Toni Gonzaga became an enabler.

What was the topic of her show? “The greatest lesson I learned from my father” was the chosen topic. How do we suppose that is to be taken by the general public? Just her decision to pursue this concept was sufficient to cast Ms. Gonzaga into the role of a villainess. She enabled Marcos Jr. to put some sexy media gloss, some feel-good burnish, on his tarnished father. A patina of acceptance, so to speak.

Normally, we want to hear the lessons from the elder generation because they have, by living their storied lives, become wise. They have marvelous nuggets of wisdom to bequeath to the next generation, so that their own journey isn’t mired by the same mistakes. Senior statesmen, award-winning novelists and philosophers, even world-class achievers, would fall into this category.

However, by framing this interview as lessons to be imparted by the disgraced President Ferdinand Marcos, Ms. Gonzaga has consciously cast him as someone whose lessons would be valuable for her million-strong audience. It is as if she said; here is someone you can learn from, here is someone you should look up to. Of course, she doesn’t need to say those exact words --just her providing her platform to the dictator and his son would be enough to send these subconscious meanings to her followers.

Perhaps, if Ms. Gonzaga had extracted some incendiary pearls of wisdom from Bongbong Marcos like - “I learned that I should never steal from my constituents” or “I learned to return all the wealth stolen by my parents” or “I learned to atone for and apologize to all the murder victims killed at the orders of my father’s government” - that may have been a different matter.

Indeed, if she had used this opportunity to ask hard-hitting questions like: “why are you still pursuing your claims that you won the vice presidency?” we would not be having this discussion now. She could also have asked him, perhaps, how he has thus far supported that special Philippine law (one that still exists in the books) that compensates Marcos’ martial law victims. If she had asked any of those questions we have come to expect from “legitimate” press, there would now be songs of praise being sung in her honor.

But that is not what she did. She made the choice to host an amiable, comfortable session with the son of whom the Guinness Book of World Records has put on record as the greatest robber of governments in the world, and oh-so-cheerfully chatted with him about that robber with nary a hint of discomfort.

It’s funny that Ms. Gonzaga’s damage control specialists have gone into overdrive, and have even published pieces about how she has a “perfect response” against her “bashers” (the supposed perfect response being, “she no longer has anything to defend or to prove”).

No, dear. We are defined by the choices we make, and each new day, we make new decisions. Each new decision, therefore, must be defended, as you now must with this particular one. More importantly, we must live with each of those decisions, as you must with this one.

Unfortunately, as they say in common parlance, crap sticks.