Author: ANDREA MALAYA M. RAGRAGIO

There is a GIF cartoon I recently saw on the internet of PNP Chief Ronald “Bato” de la Rosa and Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana Jr feverishly licking a phallic bullet until it climaxes. Racy and graphic as it is, it captures the overall fixation of the Duterte administration upon guns and arms, and the unabashed resorting to militaristic solutions to current social problems: Bato and the so-called “War on Drugs” and Lorenzana with the declaration and upholding of Martial Law.

Why has the President’s own top economic officials written to him to veto the granting of universal free clean air? In a similar vein, why have economists been against the granting of free tertiary education as they were adamantly so (and still are) in a previous epoch? Are economists such an insensitive lot who care more about saving taxpayer money than helping others to breathe?

So-called Dutertards are often accused of drinking the Kool-Aid, the idiomatic expression used to mean the absolute internalization of a doctrine or complete fixation upon something or someone to the point that no possible flaw or fallibility can be attributed to it.

The venue that Sense8 provided for discussion of these liberal-democratic themes is needed, and indeed is probably the apparent take-away for many of its viewers. But there is another important thematic direction this series opens that offers a more radical imagining of present society beyond the limits of typical liberal-democratic discourse.