Presidential aspirant Rodrigo Duterte is like religion, as Karl Marx described it: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.”

Rather than a sigh, though, Duterte’s is a howl, a rage, his putangina the new version of Heneral Luna’s punyeta. It is a rage against the continued failure of the legal system to protect the oppressed and deliver justice to all, the hypocrisy of organized religion, its nature as the great brainwasher of the oppressed, keeping them at bay without the force of arms.