Now that President Duterte has apparently apologized to God for calling Him stupid, maybe we can look at this from another
viewpoint.
There is a concept for the stage theater called the “fourth wall.” It is a performance idea that an invisible wall separates actors from the audience. The players on the stage can see but ignore the people. The audience sees the players but cannot interact with them. And the audience sees what the actors want them to see. The champagne is actually Sprite, and the murderer’s knife is a rubber prop.
Until a decade or so ago, there was a fourth wall separating people and celebrities of all types, and of course the politicians.
Former French President François Mitterrand had a “secret” 30-year relationship with his mistress, which produced a daughter—Mazarine Pingeot. Ms. Pingeot was born seven months after the 1974 election, which Mitterrand lost. Had he won, his mistress would have given birth while he was in office.
Everyone “knew’” of his relationship, but no one talked about it.
President John F. Kennedy said to a number of people, including British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, that “if I don’t have a woman every three days or so I get a terrible headache.” According to published reports ranging from former Secret Service agents to the letters sent by JFK, he gained relief from his headaches from ladies other than his wife. No one talked much about it in public.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted Guillain-Barré syndrome—thought to be polio at the time—in 1921 and was paralyzed from the waist down. Using a wheelchair, he could stand and walk short distances, and his condition was publicly known. However, the press never photographed Roosevelt with his wheelchair visible. The fourth wall held firm.
In December 1950 then-President Harry Truman read in the Washington Post a review of his daughter Margaret’s concert performance as a professional singer. Until that time, Margaret had been behind the fourth-wall. In this case Paul Hume, the Post’s music critic, wrote: “Miss Truman cannot sing very well.” Her father—the President—broke the wall by writing to Mr. Hume, “Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens you’ll need a new nose.” Both the review and the response were shocking.
In 2018 the fourth wall of separation seems to have disappeared. Social media has changed that. The list of world leaders active on Twitter—from Pope Francis to impeached Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff—has brought the audience on to the stage and the actors into the audience.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has over 10 million followers, as does Indonesian President Joko Widodo. Donald J. Trump took his campaign message, and now his presidential thoughts directly to his 50 million followers in real time, with spelling errors and video links.
President Duterte is an exception by not using Twitter. Yet, in the Philippines, the fourth wall between the public and politicians has been dropped for a long time. Who can forget President Cory Aquino showing reporters that there was no space under her bed as she sued columnist Luis Beltran for writing that “the president hid under her bed while the firing was going on” during the 1989 coup attempt.
With the constant public appearances of the President, we see almost daily the unfiltered opinions and thoughts of Mr. Duterte. We want transparency, but to misquote from the movie A Few Good Men, maybe “You can’t—or don’t want to—live with the transparency.”