133. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Looking for the Hollywood Script for the Presidency

The Duterte election story is a narrative straight out of Hollywood. I told a friend of mine every episode of this Duterte phenomenon follows Joseph Campbell's Hero of Thousand Faces in which Campbell described the template of the monomyth or the hero's journey. From the time Duterte's name was floated around as a possible presidential timber (this is called, "the call to adventure"), to his initial decision to refuse the nomination (there I recognized it immediately as the part called "refusal of the call"), to the seemingly overwhelming clamor for him to heed the call (where the call is heeded and the formal adventure story begins), to the early days of the campaign where he took pot shots at Mar Roxas and his Wharton degree (a sort of the hero slaying the dragon there), and to his climactic ascent to the top of the polls (the recovery of the treasure in the cave). This is Hollywood.  It's the essence of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter,  and yes, Batman. It is why in spite of his crass language, off beat self-deprecating if not idiotic sense of humor, and the limited focus on crime prevention as a campaign platform,  Duterte is a hit. Duterte's handlers sold us an old script and most of us fell for it. Yet,  come June 30, 2016, when the adventure story ends, and Duterte is sworn into office, there is no Hollywood script. As the late comedy king, Dolphy, used to say when he refused to run for public office (in spite of the popular clamor),  "Eh paano kung manalo?" But Duterte brushed it all off during the last debate by saying he'll just copy from the others as he's been copying from others since grade one anyway. Somebody please give him a DVD on the life of Churchill, before somebody sneaks him a video on the Nazi's.