SONA, Rhetoric, and the Invention of Truth

The report on the Pulse Asia survey on people’s perception of the SONA (“Public skeptical over Arroyo speech in Congress”, Philippine Daily Inquirer, 24 July 2008) brings to mind proverbial notions of rhetoric as “mere” embellishment or concealment of “truth”, as “deception”. The SONA, being a rhetorical act, has often been treated by those who oppose or are critical of the administration as a superfluous verbal activity that is far removed from reality. (Manuel Martinez, in his book A Political History of Our Times: Presidential Policies from Aquino to Ramos to Estrada (MFM Enterprises, 1999), comments that “all SONAs, regardless of which President was mouthing them, by their very nature, have suffered in many parts from banality, turgidity, superfluity and insipidity.”)

While it is important to examine and understand whether the rhetoric of the SONA corresponds with the material reality experienced by Filipinos in their everyday struggle, it is also worthy to look into how rhetoric actually constitutes reality.

Arguably, the SONA has been used to justify and legitimize (controversial) government policies pursued not only during the years before the annual delivery of the congressional speech but also in the years that come after. Before the passage of the contested Human Securities Act of 2007, for instance, the president, through her SONAs, had been flagging various articulations that tend to legitimize and rally public support for the passing of the law. She had, of course, made explicit calls for Congress to pass an anti-terrorism law in her SONAs from 2002 to 2004. But curiously her articulations also include the employment of more sophisticated rhetorical devices such as the metaphor of “war on terror” as a curative to the “nation’s ills”. Thus, we heard her speak of the “global war on terror” as “a historical watershed” and of ensuring that criminals “of the common kind and the kind that kills in the name of political advocacies” “feel the full brunt of the arsenal of democracy.”  Later, we realized through the Alston Report that the war on terror frame had been used to target not just these lumped “criminals” or “enemies of the state”, but even members of legal organizations, journalists, and human rights advocates that the military considered as “fronts” of the armed rebels.

Whether we listen to it delivered from the presidential podium via television, radio or the Internet, or read its full text published in major dailies or on the web, or completely ignore it, the SONA – including the metaphors and frames it privileges – will find its way in other contexts and domains as it has been strategically designed to carry sound-bites ready to be embedded or alluded to in journalistic texts, news broadcasts, classroom discussions, political commentaries, and even in everyday small talks or conversations. More importantly, the speech carries passages apportioned to be recontextualized or reformulated into more “authoritative, non-negotiable materialities” like the Human Securities Act and other statutes.

A considerable number of people may not be aware of the SONA (the report on the recent Pulse Asia survey indicates that 40% of the respondents are not aware of the past editions of the congressional speech), and a considerable number of those who are aware of it may find it “untruthful”, but these “facts” do not erase nor reduce the truth that the SONAs like all policy speeches are implicated in our socio-political reality. 

Politics, according to rhetoric scholar Bruce Gronbeck, can be understood as “a symbolic action” and this demands “that we analyze systematically the discourses of political ideology and valuation, of political visions and the places citizens occupy in such visions; of the means by which self-interests are converted into communal interests – into public policies.” It may  therefore, be helpful for us to regard the SONA – including the spectacle that comes with it – with our critical minds.  And it may do us good if we listen to it carefully, study it, write about it, and perhaps, investigate, challenge or negotiate the representations it offers us before they get reformulated by our legislators into authoritative texts and become non-negotiable.