You know that feeling you get watching a suspenseful scene in a movie, where you know for example that the vampire snake is on the other side of a door, a hapless character says something like “gosh, I’m glad that vampire snake went back to Las Vegas,” puts his hand on the door and you just want to yell out STOP to the screen before certain doom commences?
For the non-English majors out there, I’m talking about dramatic irony, defined so on Wikipedia:
Tragic (or dramatic) irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate, as in Sophocles’ play Oedipus the King.
This morning I encountered something much like dramatic irony when reading a 1966 article about the foreign relations of the Philippines. Within the piece were two specific statements that made me wish I could send a telegram back through time warning Mr. Onofre D. Corpuz about the horrible misfortune to come.
First was this one, in his section discussing how an orientation in economic relations towards Southeast Asia would be good for development.
The Philippines is well situated to play a leading role in this process, and economic interests, therefore, promise to lead the nation’s foreign policy closer to Southeast Asia. Barring a sudden deterioration which could result from escalation of hostilities in Vietnam, we are presently on the threshold of a period in which the necessary economic underpinnings of diplomatic projects, such as ASA and Maphilindo, will emerge.
[Note: ASA is Association of Southeast Asia, predecessor to ASEAN]
So, how did that Vietnam thing go after 1966? I forget now. Anyway, I’m sure it couldn’t have destabilized the regional economy or anything.
The second quote mixes retrospective irony with a case of be careful what you wish for.
As a result, political power is widely dispersed and the bases of power are fragmented. No Philippine president has ever been re-elected after a full presidential term of four years. There are no political institutions in the Philippines that have enabled a leader to stay in power as long as have Indonesia’s Sukarno, India’s Nehru, Burma’s Ne Win, and Malaysia’s Tungku Abdul Rahman.
1966 was the second year of Ferdinand Marcos’ first term as president, after which he would in fact be re-elected, just like Mr. Corpuz was hoping. What Corpuz probably was less happy about was when Marcos declared martial law in 1972, and continued his Presidency until 1986, when he was driven from office by mass protests indirectly in response to the assassination of opposition politician Benigno Aquino.