Category: martial law

marcos redux

no surprise that marcos jr. is running not for the presidency but for veep.  testing the waters muna siyempre, kahit pa naniniwala silang the marcos regime 1965 to 1986 were good years, better than cory’s, fvr’s, erap’s, gloria’s, and noynoy’s put together.  in fact, say ni bongbong, kung di nag-EDSA, we would be advanced and first-world like singapore.  LOL.  yeah, those were good years, the best years, even, of THEIR lives, i.e, the marcoses’ and their cronies’, in particular, no doubt about it, but of nation?

please naman, itigil na ang pagbibilog sa ulo ng taongbayan.  the marcos regime was more bad than good for nation, the promised revolution from the center did not materialize, we’re still paying for foreign debts that went into failed (looted) industries and white elephants like the bataan nuclear power plant.  and let me not get started on how oppressive, repressive, suppressive that strong-arm rule was, thanks to how marcos the dictator and brilliant lawyer crafted proclamations, executive orders, decrees, and amendments not only to buttress, solidify his (and his heirs’ and cronies’ heirs’) hold on, and everlasting entitlement to, political power (overt and covert), but to preserve and promote forevermore the interests of the ruling class, from the protection of landholdings to control of the nation’s monetary policies — laws and policies that continue/d to be invoked by, and to serve, post-EDSA administrations, from aquino to aquino, mother and son.  how’s that for irony.

I am very happy that I was born into the Marcos family. I congratulate myself for picking my parents very well. I have never felt it to be a burden. I have only felt it to be an advantage, a blessing and I am very thankful that I am a Marcos,” he said in a press conference in Quezon City.

faced as we are with the prospect of a marcos to marcos, from father to son, the line  “I congratulate myself for picking my parents very well” is worthy of note.  it would seem that bongbong believes in past lives and reincarnation  – only in occult/mystical thought is there a notion of the unborn soul choosing one’s parents and the circumstances to be born to in the present life.  but the concept of reincarnation is all about evolving, growing in wisdom, leveling up, as in a spiral of evolution.  for bongbong, since he chooses to follow in the footsteps, and avail of the attendant advantages of the legacy, of his father, then to evolve,  that is, to level up, to save the country from perdition, to fulfill the promise of a national revolution sa puso, sa isip, at sa gawa  would demand that he acknowledge and learn, first, from the mistakes, the failures, the sins of the conjugal dictatorship.  otherwise he is fated to repeat the patterns of corruption and violence set, established, during the rule of his parents, and we should be very very afraid.

meanwhile, on social media, the question still is, should  we visit the sins of the father on the children?  i’ve always said, yes, in the sense that, if bongbong is sincere about moving the country forward, then he should acknowledge such sins, and do what he can to make amends.  only then can we have a conversation about marcos times not being all bad.  only then can the nation truly move forward.  but, no, i can’t see any of that happening soon, as the imeldific one seems still to be calling the shots, and she could live forever.

escudero, marcos, libingan ng mga bayani

last year, september 22 2014, to be exact, senator chiz escudero urged president aquino to allow the burial of marcos in libingan ng mga bayani to heal the wounds of the past.

Escudero said the fact that Marcos was a former president and soldier cannot be denied and based on these two things alone, he deserves to be buried at the Libingan. 

“… sa ganang akin (nararapat ito) para matuldukan na natin… yung 40-year rebellion nga sa Mindanao matutuldukan na, apatnapung taon na yun. Ito magtatatlumpung taon na,” he said.

“Wala namang debate na naging head of state sya. Wala namang debate na sundalo siya. If only because of those two facts, siguro marapat na bigyan natin siya ng karampatang paglilibing dahil anuman ang reklamo, ano man ang diumano ay ginawa o hindi niya ginawa bilang pangulo, o ginawa o hindi ginawa bilang sundalo, nanatili pa ring tutuong naging head of state siya at naging dating sundalo siya,” Escudero said.

exactly a year later, the vp wanna-be alleges that some twisting of his statement(s) happened, even if i don’t see any twisting, just an attempt by the good senator to sort of elaborate on the matter, not to deny anything he said.

“Of course people have been twisting that statement to simply mean to bury him at Libingan ng mga Bayani. But what I actually said was that issue is 30 years old. Can we finally address or settle it one way or the other, and not simply ignore it, brush it aside, and sweep it under the rug?”

… “He must be given a final resting place, wherever that may be,” said Escudero. “Government should address it and government should decide on it, of course in consultation with the family.” 

seems to me that the good senator is barking up the wrong tree.  the government has always said no to a marcos burial in libingan ng mga bayani.  it’s the marcoses who refuse to bury the patriarch anywhere else.  it”s the marcoses who refuse to concede, insisting that their patriarch deserves nothing less than a hero’s burial.  who knows, maybe it was a dying wish, and maybe imelda and the kids are willing to wait as long as it takes for a president who will say yes.

i wonder what grace poe thinks.  may i suggest that the prez wanna-be read of the damage marcos inflicted on nation: alfred mccoy’s notes on the Dark Legacy: Human rights under the Marcos regime.  and ninotchka rosca’s The day Manila fell silent.  and susan quimpo’s I saw martial law up close and personal.  and leloy claudio in The Marcos years were not the PHL’s golden era.  and monica feria’s Sept 22-23: Our lives changed overnight.  and kris lanot lacaba’s The torture of my father and other stories.  for starters.

on reading The Descartes Highlands

i loved eric gamalinda’s My Sad Republic (2000), but i can’t say the same for The Descartes Highlands (2014).  nothing to do with how different the english is, even if it’s far from the latin american baroque, filipino-english style, of Republic, rather, in the author’s own words, “something completely new, stripped down, and more in-your-face.”

na okay naman, except that the style is new only of him, or maybe of filipino writers in general; otherwise it just sounds and feels, well, american.  and that multiple first-person narrative is gratingly self-indulgent three times over.  where is the tension when all three personalities — american father and two fil-am sons born of different mothers — are similarly flawed and dysfunctional in their separate existences.  sure, there’s the tension in their relationships with the women, who start out fine, but who only get messed up by these self-centered mates in quite depressing ways.  life is just one closed and vicious karmic cycle of sex and drugs, violence (torture, abortion, suicide) and ennui, no recourse, no redemption.

much is made of the moon and mankind’s marks on it, and of the synchronicity (year-wise) of the apollo 16 landing with the birth of the boys and martial law in the philippines, pushing the notion of a shared immortality, but to what end.  in occult thought the moon is a powerful symbol of change and transformation as it waxes and wanes in a 28-day cycle synchronous with a woman’s menses, every new moon offering a new life, a fresh beginning.  instead, “ideas, emotions, themes, characters, and episodes swirl in a cloud of cosmic dust” that fail to coalesce into separate beings, dissipating into nothingness of the mortal kind.

and i get naman the sense of marcos-style martial law’s endless grip.  we’ve been getting the story kasi in drips and drops, or, from recent voluminous memoirs, in floods of whitewash. propaganda posing as truth.  hagiography as history.  almost three decades later, we have yet to get the full unvarnished story of the conjugal dictatorship’s reign of greed and terror.  no post-marcos administration — not cory or fvr or erap or gloria or noynoy — has cared or dared to undertake a documented research study for public consumption (guess why).  so, yes, martial law stories, fictionalized and not, continue to appeal.

however, there are aspects of that grim period that have been told and re-told, in particular, the torture and killing of political prisoners.  and no fiction, even by the greatest writer, could hold a candle to these first-person and eyewitness accounts.

this is not to say that gamalinda’s prose does not impress, and stun, but the story is dated, never moving forward, almost as if to say that martial law hasn’t ended, marcos is still around.  which is true, in a manner of thinking, but certainly not true, historically speaking.

i suppose it is gamalinda’s way of saying that he doesn’t think much of the EDSA revolt of 1986 that saw the marcoses fleeing the palace for paoay and being hijacked by the americans into exile.  even if, as he reveals in an asia society interview (45:37), he was here, among the crowd, in the vicinity of channel 4 on the very day marcos fled.

granted that cory messed up when she enjoined the country post-EDSA to forgive and forget, as gamalinda’s friend lino brocka is said to have lamented (46:47); still, to treat that wondrous event as unmentionable is quite sad for nation, and for the novel, where the people power phenomenon that has gone global, if transitorily and in fits and spurts, could have given the author something current and complicated — like the problematique of non-violent change — to wrestle with, in the process taking the philosophical eklat and existential angst to a higher plane.

writing in a “climate of fear”

Speech delivered by National Artist Nick Joaquin at the Philippine PEN Conference, July 1983.

Let me show you fear in a handful of dust—or rather of press releases.

A PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Essayists, Novelists) member took a handful of press releases to the newspaper offices. The press releases were about this conference we’re having today. But one look at the press releases and the editors froze. They had read the title of this conference.

Another look and the editors shuddered. They had read the list of speakers at this conference: names like professor Gonzales and Senator Diokno and Letty Magsanoc.

Needless to say, it was hard work distributing those press releases. They had generated fear in the offices of the principal newspapers of this country.

But why should such a fear be strongest and most prevalent among those who are, so to put it, on the side of the angels? Those on the opposite side, you would think, have more reasons to be afraid.

But it’s the oppositionists who display a most enjoyable recklessness. Ah, but even if they do not share that fear, they too must live in the climate of fear created by those who have to be oh so careful about what they write and what they publish.

Nervous is the word

This is the climate being created today by the press in the Philippines—not the press of the opposition but the conformist press. The conforming press is so powerful it should be fearless—and yet it doesn’t even sound comfortable.

Nervous would be the word for the principal newspapers today. They’re nervous about what they print and they’re nervous about what they don’t print. They’re nervous about what their columnists may say and they’re nervous about what their columnists don’t say.

And this general nervousness communicates itself to you when you try to visit any of the big newspaper offices: It’s like trying to break into an armed camp.

Now the so-called creative writer may ask what had he got to do with the conditions under which the newspaper writer must perform.

But if it’s the press that creates the cultural climate today, and that climate is one of fear, then even the creative writer, however independent he may think himself to be, is actually also suffering from the conditions that make the newspaper writer so nervous.

Neither safe nor free

The proposition that literature is automatically free, because written in the light of eternity, while journalism is necessarily enslaved to the concerns of the moment—that proposition is false. And even if not false, still indefensible.

No more than other republics can the Republic of Letters exist half-slave and half-free. While his brothers in journalism are in thrall, the creative writer is himself not whole, not safe and not free.