Letter to President Aquino

ENQUIRY
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Letter to President Aquino
Sunday, 07 04, 2010

Dear President Aquino:

Forgive me for not addressing you by the moniker that millions of Filipinos now seem to have embraced in reference to you. I am referring to the hyphenated P-Noy, a term coined when the incontrovertibility of winning was a clear and present blessing and no longer an arguable proposition. You have campaigned as Noynoy, true. And I could bet that somewhere in our archipelago of 7,700 islands inhabited by 94 million Filipinos, there are still quite a good number who do not know that your full name is Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III.

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You are and always will be Noynoy to millions, and now that you are president what could come easier and smoother to the tongue than P-Noy? Admittedly, if one cares to style your initials in the fashion of that which the press and obsequious staffers referred your predecessor, the P-Noy tag is much better. Could you imagine PBSCA III? Horrific! Or BCA, as in the FVR of President Ramos? Not likely. With P-Noy, the assonance is so euphonious that the term becomes at once a contraction of Pinoy, the popular term which we Filipinos now proudly call ourselves here and abroad. So by clever coinage: P-Noy. P(resident) Noy(noy), the current iteration of the proud Pinoy. P-Noy, President of the Philippines.

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It saddens me sometimes that we Pinoys have arrived at a stage in our culture where addressing people by their formal names is taken as a sign of condescension or snobbishness. “Hey, Cruz, could you see me at my office?” would strike an offended chord in one’s self-esteem, so we go: “Hey, Johnny, could you see me at my office?” There — that’s betterer, as my friend Leina de Legazpi would say; it doesn’t smack of any hint of haughtiness that, our ancestors used to think, characterized the speech of our former imperious, patronizing colonists when they addressed the peasantry.
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Oh, we’d like to be known as a race of smiling people whose very pores are oozing with friendliness on every occasion. So we prefer the familiar to the formal. We become so cloyingly familiar and friendly with our public officials that it becomes de rigueur to address our mayors as Jojo, our undersecretaries as Jocjoc, and our senators as Nene even in instances when the form of address or honorific for the official rank demands it. I can almost imagine it: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor and privilege for me to introduce…P-Noy!” Or in news bulletins: “P-Noy yesterday announced that it is the foremost duty of his government to lift the nation from poverty through honest and effective governance.” I wonder how we sound to other nations when they hear, or read, about this reverse condescension!

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Or, is it just me who is uneasy about this widespread usage? After all we saw Dwight Eisenhower in the ’50s referred to as Ike and, of recent memory, Corazon Aquino as, in endearing fashion, Cory.
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But P-Noy? Maybe I’ve grown much too plebeian or too philistine in my tastes, but the appellation simply sticks in my throat. I know I’m swimming against the tide here and would probably lose a handful of friends in my profession and in this vocation that currently finds untrammelled expression in The Daily Tribune, but I find the appellation d’origine controlee, as it were, (if we were talking about wines) too heady and difficult or impossible to accept.

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However, the supposedly endearing term has been unleashed and has become a pervasive idiolect, an accepted coinage among those who voted you into office. It is now my fervent hope that someone in Malacañang would write a nicely worded, fine-tuned circular to the members of the working press that the term sounds too contrived (or too jejemon, as our youngsters would say) and an unceasing repetition of it might eventually become a source of continuing annoyance to those in your official family, if not you yourself, Mr. President.

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Having unloaded that silly baggage off my chest, Mr. President, let me tell you that even people in this part of the world, Kyrgyzstan, where I’m writing from, were properly impressed by your inaugural address, even when I had to grope for the right idiom in English to translate to them your forceful Pilipino. Thanks to the WorldWideWeb we were just a mouse-click away from history being made in the Philippines. Later, we watched you on YouTube gamely singing a melodiously tricky song that was aptly titled “Watch What Happens.” And juxtaposing speech to song, they told me: “This president bears watching.”
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Mr. President, we will watch you from now on. Never mind if the first 100 days of your administration is supposed to be a period of grace, a traditional honeymoon, an initial period of intense approval and goodwill accorded to presidents at the start of their jobs. We, the Filipino nation — your boss as you yourself said so — have scarce time to wait and see. Our watch has begun.

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We will watch you because the Filipino people believe in you and you let them hold your outstretched hand.

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We will watch you because the heart of the nation resonate to your campaign battle cry that there is no poverty if the government is graft-free.

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We will watch you because you have promised the beginning of a regime that is not deaf and dumb to the appeals of the people.
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We will watch you not because our eyes are still bedazzled and bewitched by the Cory Magic, but because we are resolved, as you are perhaps equally determined, not to break our hearts or dash our hopes again.

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Yes, Mr. President, we will watch what happens, and we hope that we will be there — as active participant or thankful beneficiary — when it happens.

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