Category: history

Gossip as history

By Luis H. Francia

NEW YORK CITY — Imelda Romualdez Marcos leads a charmed life. So far able to dodge the bullet of criminal liability and seemingly inured to the regular impugning of her past and her character, she’s living proof that lives can have third acts.

Ooh’d and ahh’d over in public, the congresswoman now has her own “Evita,” the musical based on Evita Peron’s life with whom she was often compared, a comparison she didn’t like one bit. But she has never raised objections, at least publicly, to the rock musician, he-of-Talking-Heads-fame, David Byrne’s poperetta “Here Lies Love,” reviewed last year in this column.

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Paradoxes

The paradox of National Heroes Day: It rightly remembers the heroes who fought in Asia’s first anticolonial revolution, but it does not commemorate an exact date. Rather, it refers to a notional period: sometime in August. Since the mid-1980s, the holiday has been celebrated as a moveable feast (the last Sunday of the month, until it was changed in the mid-2000s to the last Monday of August) in part to skirt the contentious issue that historians continue to debate until today. When did the revolution against Spain actually start?

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The Extraordinary Cosmic Vibes of February 1986

Excerpts from “Deconstructing EDSA,” the closing chapter of the book  EDSA Uno, A Narrative and Analysis with Notes on Dos & Tres (2013) 

February 1986 was a rare time for the Philippines and the planet. From February 3 to 7, six solar flares were observed that gave rise, February 7 through 9, to a very intense magnetic storm, said to be the largest observed in 26 years.[i] Also on the 9th, Halley’s Comet, hurtling through our solar system on its 76-year orbit, reached its closest point to the Sun, this as Moon and Sun, seen from planet Earth, exactly aligned.[ii] A rare confluence of cosmic events that wreaked havoc on Earth’ magnetic fields, instruments rendering off-scale variations said to set off weather and atmospheric disturbances, affecting even electric power grids,[iii] and, no doubt, our bodies and psyches, too.[iv] And as Halley’s Comet swang away from the Sun toward Earth’s orbit, it grew brighter and seemed to change structure around the nucleus, this as Cory’s protest campaign took off and Enrile et al coup-plotted; by the 22nd of February the comet was sporting not just one or two but a phenomenal seven tails![v] It was also, in the 12-year cycle of Chinese astrology, a time for revolutionary change.

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Surrender, Oblivion, Survival

On Red Beach, America will soon rumble onto Leyte’s shores with its ships, returning, like MacArthur, to Tacloban’s rescue, on the heels of a planetary emergency for which it feels no guilt or will to fix.

History is our tsunami, and in our seaside shelters, we keep watching the tide return, waiting for our cleansing as bodies drown.

— Gina Apostol