“WAR ON TERROR” IS A CURATIVE: RECONTEXTUALIZATION AND POLITICAL MYTH-MAKING IN GLORIA MACAPAGAL-ARROYO'S 2002–2004 STATE OF THE NATION ADDRESSES

Abstract

The article examines the State of the Nation addresses (SONA) delivered by Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010) from 2002–2004, during which time she actively invoked the need to engage in the U.S. government-led “global war on terror.” It specifically investigates how these presidential speeches recontextualized the war on terror discourse and how this recontextualization worked to legitimize her perennially challenged presidency. Using an analytical framework that draws concepts from conceptual metaphor theory, critical discourse studies, and rhetorical studies, the author argues that the metaphor of war on terror as a curative to the national “ills” had been strategically used in Arroyo's State of the Nation addresses. Through the national addresses, the Arroyo administration was able to work towards sustaining its hold of power on the one hand and showing its commitment to the Bush administration-led global war on terror on the other.

Notes

¹Gloria Macapagal Arroyo was the president of the Philippines from 2001 to 2010. On June 30, 2010, she was replaced by Benigno Simeon Aquino III, who won the presidential election in May of the same year.

This article is based on an independent research project (EL 6660) conducted under the supervision of Dr. Michelle Maria Lazar, associate professor of Linguistics at the National University of Singapore. An abridged version of this article was presented in the 2009 Conference of the International Society for Language Studies in Orlando, Florida, on June 13, 2009.

²Further explanation of ideograph is offered by McGee later in his essay: “An ideograph is an ordinary-language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable. Ideographs are culture-bound, though some terms are used in different signification across cultures. Each member of the community is socialized, conditioned, to the vocabulary of ideographs as a prerequisite for ‘belonging’ to the society” (p. 467).

³This is thoroughly discussed in Roderick Hart's The Sound of Leadership: Presidential Communication in the Modern Age (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).

⁴ Hart (1987) suggests that the mediation of speeches through television, radio and print (and, now, the “new media”) has actually been concerned with “melodramatic imperative needed to make the news interesting, the various strategies used to render news anchorpersons credible and the tonal features required to make televised news suitably memorable.” He views this exercise from a rhetorical perspective that “regards the president as a muse, (her) speeches as a plot to be exploited, and the reporters who cover the president as playwrights” (p. 117).

⁵Although Gronbeck talks of the American presidency in his essay, his descriptions can be made applicable to the Philippine presidency. Considering that the American presidential system has been the model of the Philippine government for more than seven decades, the Philippine presidency can be seen as analogous to that of the United States.

⁶See Fairclough (2003, 2006) and Erjavec and Volčič (2007).

⁷The practice of delivering a SONA is inscribed in section 20 of Article 7 of the 1987 Philippine Constitution, which states: “The President shall address the Congress at the opening of the regular session. He may also appear before it at any other time.” This provision is quite similar to that of the U.S. Constitution, which states that the President “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” A notable difference is the explicitness of the Philippine provision on how the President should give his report on the state of the nation to Congress. That method is public address.

⁸It must be noted that some of the examples of ideographs mentioned by McGee (1980/2000) and other scholars who have adopted McGee's framework (e.g., Cloud, 2004; Condit & Lucaites, 1993) are themselves metaphorical. These include “freedom of speech,” “rule of law” (McGee, 1980; Condit & Lucaites, 1993), and “clash of civilizations” (Cloud, 2004). These examples show that notions such as speech, law, and civilization go through the process of reification or personification (i.e., SPEECH IS AN OBJECT; LAW IS A GOVERNING POWER; CIVILIZATION IS A COMBATANT) which causes semantic tension (Charteris-Black, 2005, p. 20). On the other hand, the constant use or deployment of such terms as freedom of speech, rule of law, and clash of civilizations in public discourse by those who wield it (i.e., politicians, judges, the media, the academia) naturalizes their reproduction, circulation, and consumption. This contributes in making them ideographic.

⁹In this article, I adopt Charteris-Black's (2004) definition of conceptual metaphor as “a statement that resolves the tension of a set of metaphors by showing them to be related” (p. 21). By employing this category, the analyst makes explicit the target and source domains (A is B) that underlie a set of metaphorical expressions spread within or across texts.

The conceptual metaphor TERROR IS AN ENEMY IN COMBAT which I argue underlies the metaphorical expression war on terror is also realized in expressions as “our republic's efforts to fight terror and enforce peace,” “by breaking the back of terrorism and criminality” (Arroyo, 2002), and “we have hit hard on terrorism” (Arroyo, 2003).

¹⁰The catchphrase war on terror, which has been widely circulated after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States (mostly through statements by the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush as well as through major global media networks) has undeniably contributed to the refashioning of political communication in the new century.

The war on terror discourse asserts the U.S. responsibility in spreading the values of freedom, liberty, and democracy, which puts it on a high moral plane capable of imposing itself on other sovereign states (see, e.g., articles of Lazar & Lazar, 2007; Cloud, 2004; Erjavec & Volčič, 2007).

¹¹ Erjavec and Volčič (2007) provide an interesting addition to the discourse on ‘war on terror’ when they assert that the discourse is actually appropriated and recontextualized in local settings. Specifically, they analyze how young Serbian intellectuals “employ, borrow and appropriate” G. W. Bush's war on terrorism to understand the impact of G. W. Bush's war on terrorism discourse on the construction of identities in the Balkans, especially on a reconfiguration of Serbian nationalistic discourse (p. 124).

¹²Myth is used here in the sense that Charteris-Black employed it in his book (2004). He adopts Cassirer's (1946) concept of the mythmaking in modern societies. He notes that “mythmaking—accompanied by the use of incantations, slogans, neologisms and semantic distortions—has become an extremely sophisticated, self-conscious activity which makes use of the most advanced techniques available to manufacture and circulate the product” (Charteris-Black, 2004, p. 209). It may be construed then that mythmaking in our times is a form of commodification in the realm of politics, something that is consistent with the idea of a “rhetorical presidency.”

¹³This is largely based on the historical milieu included in the author's article on Gloria Macapacal Arroyo's state of the nation addresses from 2001–2005 (Navera, 2006).

¹⁵All bold and italicized words in extracts throughout this article are not in the original, but are added by the author for emphasis.

¹⁴The analysis entailed identification of the source domains that were used to recontextualize the ideograph war on terror, the central focus of the article. Key targets/tenors (topics or themes such as nation/country, “strong republic,” and presidency) that have emerged from close reading of the texts have also been identified. Their source domains or vehicles were identified based on the terms and lexical-grammatical choices that cluster around them, respectively.

The discussion establishes the relationship of the recontextualized ideograph of war on terror with the key topics/themes and other ideographs present in the texts. Specifically, it examines how these elements configure in the speeches implicated in the social, political, and historical context of the Philippines.

¹⁶That the nation is a living entity whose health condition is critical is also established through words that describe to the nation's economic problems such as the budget deficit as “chronic,” and refer to economic progress as “growth” which can “slow down.” This is most evident in the President's SONA in 2004, which marked the beginning of her term as the newly elected head of state.

The word “paghilom” is especially noteworthy as it often collocates with the word “sugat” (wound) when used in discourses in Filipino. Its use therefore suggests a recuperation of the national body in order for it to function normally and properly.

¹⁷Earlier in the speech, the president characterized “criminal gangs and homegrown terrorists” as spreading “ poisons ” in the nation. She said: “Indeed, criminal gangs and homegrown terrorists have exploited the poisoned political atmosphere to spread poisons of their own: kidnapping, gambling, drug-dealing and rampant smuggling” (2002).

¹⁸The global anti-terror movement had also given the Arroyo government a reason to “enhance our strategic relationship with the United States through continuing training exercises to sharpen our soldiers' capabilities to move and communicate, to fix and finish off their targets.”

¹⁹Some of the expressions consistent with the war rhetoric or rhetoric of combat (but not necessarily within the curative domain) are found in the passages below. Though not the central focus of this article, this rhetoric of combat is worth mentioning in that mixing it with the curative metaphor makes an interesting case of interdiscursive hybridity (see Fairclough, 2006, pp. 32, 155):

I am determined to build a strong republic by breaking the back of terrorism and criminality. (2002)

I have given very clear orders to spare nothing in hunting down kidnappers. (2002)

We are getting a clearer picture of the leadership, membership and area of operations of these syndicates. I now want their linkages and modus operandi. I am overseeing how they are being watched, tracked and infiltrated. (2002)

We beat down crime, we are breaking up the drug and kidnapping syndicates, we are mopping up the stragglers. The people are safer in the streets, in their homes, and in their places of work. (2004)

²⁰The counter-insurgency plan is called Oplan Bantay Laya (Operation Freedom Watch). Its strategic goal is to “decisively defeat insurgents (and) armed groups in order to attain and maintain peace and security for national development” (Oplan Bantay Laya: a Primer, Ecumenical Movement for Justice and Peace, 2006, p. 6).

The primer by EMJP states that the program was “framed after the U.S. war on terror.” The Arroyo administration received $4.6 billion in U.S. military assistance for AFP. Added to this is the $30 million for “counter-terrorism trainings” (p. 7). It also added that the program was “patterned after U.S. military strategy. This included the utilization of propaganda to demonize as ‘terrorists’ those it considers as enemies; the conduct of intensive military operations using heavy weaponry to ‘shock and awe’ its enemies as well as suspected supporters from the civilian populace; the conduct of preemptive strikes and rendition or the abduction, torture, and/or killings of suspected ‘terrorists.’ Groups and individuals proscribed as terrorists are deprived of all their rights” (p. 7).

²¹The speech bolsters in various ways the role of the Filipino soldiers in ensuring national security.

²²The Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) comments that the law's definition of terrorism is “vague, ambiguous, and highly susceptible to abuse.” Words and phrases as “widespread and extraordinary fear and panic, populace, and unlawful demand” remain unclear. The FLAG asserts that “with no objective standards to guide our law enforcers, the Human Security Act in effect bestows on our law enforcers the unfettered discretion to decide if a person is engaged in terrorism or conspiracy to commit terrorism. And that is very dangerous indeed” (Diokno, 2007).

²³Somewhere in the speech, the President assured the audience that she had directed the police to “cleanse its own ranks.” It is interesting to note that this assurance is strategically positioned before the reallocation of the budget for crime-fighting is revealed.

²⁴ Fairclough (2006) sees the discourse on war on terror as a consequence of the U.S. military and security strategy's “gradual shift from ‘soft’ power (the capacity to shape opinion, interests, and identities in favor of globalism) to ‘hard’ power (the massive use of economic and military force to compel compliance) in response to the pressure on ‘globalism’ which began to build up from the mid-1990s” (p. 140).

²⁵In his 1961 inaugural address, President Diosdado Macapagal said, “Nation-building is an exacting and endless endeavor. No president can build the whole edifice of a nation. All that he is called upon to do, is to add a fine stone to that edifice, so that those who shall come after him may add other fine stones that will go for a strong and enduring structure” (Malaya & Malaya, 2004, p. 210). The last two lines were quoted in the 2002 state of the nation address of President Arroyo.

²⁶The mapping of conceptual metaphors and their entailments provided below constitute the frame of national health. The following are the conceptual metaphors that run through the speeches:

THE PHILIPPINES (NATION) IS AN AILING LIVING ENTITY

CRIMINALITY IS AN ILLNESS

TERRORISM IS AN ILLNESS

‘WAR ON TERRORxs’ IS A CURATIVE TO THE NATIONAL ILLS

The following are the entailments of the conceptual metaphors:

Criminality and terrorism makes the Philippines an ailing living entity.

Criminality and terrorism block economic growth.

As a curative measure, ‘war on terror’ destroys/eliminates that which blocks economic growth.

The ‘war on terror’ ensures national security and political stability.

National security and political stability are vital in attracting capital inflows and foreign investments.

Capital inflows and foreign investments are needed to spur economic growth.

Economic growth is a sign of a healthy state of the nation.

A healthy state of the nation signaled by economic growth will bring about a ‘strong republic.’

²⁷The year 2005 may be considered the height of the political crisis involving questions on the legitimacy of Arroyo's presidency. This is due to the controversial wiretapped conversations allegedly between the President and an election commissioner during the 2004 elections. This is, however, not covered in this study.

²⁸The representation of Arroyo as a micro-manager came even before she invoked the need to support the global war on terror. I would like to argue, however, that the recontextualization of the war on terror as war against national ills has been used to intensify this image.

³⁰Given emphasis in the extracts are the processes (material, verbal, behavioral), the doer of the processes, and lexical choices such as “konkretong resulta” (concrete results) and “sorpresang pagbisita” (surprise visits) that indicate the kind of role the doer projects in her utterance.

²⁹The various representations of the president I argue contribute to the conceptual metaphor THE PRESIDENCY IS THE PRESIDENT which has several permutations (e.g., GOVERNMENT IS PRESIDENT, ADMINISTRATION IS PRESIDENT). In such conceptualization, the presidency (institution) is embodied by the personality of the president or head of state.

³¹Notice the emphasis on the achievements of the incumbency. This is achieved through various ways: by contrasting the state of the nation in the past and present, showing how targets set by the incumbent in the previous year are gradually and successfully achieved, and showing positive outcomes of previous actions set by the present administration.

³²It should be noted that the study centers on the curative dimensions of the war on terror ideograph. The study may be extended to examine interdiscursive hybridity in the speeches—the mixing of health discourse with those of the military defense (which are very explicit in the speeches) and of the “free market” (or the globalist discourse). For this purpose, it may be interesting to consider the points raised by Fairclough in his chapter “Globalization, war and terrorism” (2006, pp. 140–161).

³³This article, however, does not cover her nine-year presidency and is only limited to her successor term and the early months of her full term. What could have possibly sustained her presidency (in spite of the fact that she is regarded as the most unpopular national leader since Ferdinand Marcos) and the role of political rhetorical strategies in it are explored in another research.