"Today* is the 39th year of the declaration of martial law. It’s a day that ought to have for us the significance of Pearl Harbor for Americans, a day of infamy, a day when someone launched a sneaky attack on this country. It ought to, but it doesn’t. I doubt many of us still remember.
The gap between 1971 and 2011 is the gap between 1921 and 1962. That is not a gap, that is a chasm. That is the difference between foxtrot and the Beatles, that is the difference between the typewriter and the Internet.
I said much the same thing early this year when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Edsa. The difference between 1986 and 2011 is the same difference for my own generation between 1945 and 1970. That is the difference between Liberation and Woodstock. The terrors of the Japanese Occupation we knew only from what we read in books, seen in the movies and heard from the old folks. Veterans of that War we regarded only the way people normally regard veterans: ancients who clung to the past, regaling those willing to listen to them, or have no choice, in drinking places with tales of their exploits.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, for us, Ferdinand Marcos would soon plunge us into a world very much like it.
It’s not easy to remember what happened 25 years ago or, worse, 39 years ago, particularly for a country in the throes of perpetual amnesia. But remember it we must, if only by repeated cajoling, if only by repeated exhortation. Our future rests on it.
At the very least that is so because the Marcoses are back, in case you haven’t noticed. They won three seats in the last elections, an unthinkable thing not so long ago, which is also the clearest sign Edsa has waned in memory. Imelda Marcos is now a representative, Bongbong a senator and Imee the governor of Ilocos Norte. And they want Ferdinand buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
Bongbong is even gearing up to run for president in 2016. Although I’m not worried about this. For reasons that have nothing to do with this country’s forgetfulness. They have to do with the fact that Bongbong does not only lack his father’s relentlessness, or indeed ruthlessness, he lacks his father’s ability to create a mythical stature for himself. Marcos became president long before he ran for it by creating the myth of being the bravest, most decorated soldier, of World War II. It didn’t just make him president twice; it made him dictator afterward, the generals being in awe of him as the quintessential warrior. Bongbong doesn’t have that. He can spend all the ill-gotten wealth they’ve amassed, but he still won’t make it (back) to Malacañang.
What’s more worrisome is their attempt to turn Ferdinand into a hero, by the not very subtle route of his burying place. Of course much of the public is still against it, even if most of the congressmen are not. But that is little comfort. Not too long ago, that suggestion could never even have been made, let alone supported by the majority of Congress. Time is on their side, not against it. The memory of martial law recedes farther and they will put Ferdinand in the Philippine version of Valhalla. Opening the door to the wholesale revision of history, opening the door to making Filipinos love their chains.
But far more than that, we may forget martial law only at the cost of repeating it. That is a truism that happens to be true, and holds the most enormous consequences for us.
We don’t have to look far to see it, it’s not hypothetical: We have repeated that history by forgetting it. That is in the form of Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s rule, or at least the second part of it, an illegitimate rule that produced tyrannical consequences. True enough, history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce, though no one is laughing in the case of the second.
I won’t repeat my arguments about why the Arroyo regime was an echo, though not a very faint one, of the Marcos one. I’ve done it repeatedly in the past. More to the point here, which has enormous implications for the future, is how one party to both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes has escaped notice, or vilification. Indeed, has managed to reap accolade afterward. That is the United States.
It was instrumental in propping up both the Marcos and Arroyo regimes.
The first far more patently in Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger warmly endorsing martial law from the start, an endorsement then Vice President George Bush rammed home when he toasted Marcos’ “adherence to democracy” in 1981. It wasn’t till the mid-1980s when Marcos looked finished that the US changed its tune and helped roll the curtains down. For which pains, it turned from conspirator to liberator, Paul Laxalt being toasted afterward for advising Marcos to “cut, and cut cleanly.” Not unlike MacArthur with his, “I shall return.”
The second was less patent, Kristie Kenney smiling her way into the Filipinos’ hearts. Thanks to WikiLeaks we know now that smile was as real as the “smiling authoritarianism” Marcos wanted martial law to be known by. Kenney in fact would supply the perfect image, or metaphor, for American presence in this country, a smiling face masking the duplicitous one behind it. The US propped up Arroyo just as it propped up Marcos for much the same reason: to keep its military presence in the region. But thanks to WikiLeaks too, the US may not find it so easy to turn from conspirator to liberator this time around, Kenney maligning the true hero, though an unwitting one, of this saga, who was Cory, behind her back.
Truly, those who do not heed their history are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not learn from their past will have no future. Those who do not remember anything will never rise to the cusp of victory.
They will always teeter on the edge of infamy."
*There's the Rub column on The Inquirer by Conrado De Quiros
Cebu Daily News, September 22nd, 2011
Martial Law was declared by the then President Ferdinand E Marcos on 21 September 1972.
Showing posts with label Conrado de Quiros. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conrado de Quiros. Show all posts
Monday, October 24, 2011
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Footnote to a false note
Theres The Rub [A column] By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 05/11/2009
Filed Under: Music, Entertainment (general), history, Customs & Traditions
I beg to disagree with some friends on this. “This” is the way Martin Nievera sang “Lupang Hinirang” in the Pacquiao-Hatton fight, which has brought him into a brawl with preservers of Filipino tradition. The fight has so far been lopsided, with many authority figures, from congressmen to historians, knocking him down with a chorus of irate voices.
I myself have no problems with it. In fact I have a couple of reasons for liking it.
The first has to do with the barb that Nievera went the route of show biz by aping the American singers (mostly black) who make the “Star-Spangled Banner” sound like Motown each time an American boxer takes to the ring. Which, as the nastier remarks go, is probably because Nievera is an American at heart and on paper. I leave others to argue where Nievera’s loyalties lie, though given all the open and closet “statehooders” here—Filipinos who long for the country to become a state of the United States—not least among the congressmen, I wouldn’t advise pressing this point too loudly.
But even if Nievera went show biz, what of it? Boxing is pretty much show biz, of the loud and glittery type. And though Nievera did not sing “Lupang Hinirang” traditionally, he did not disrespect it either, to use a word much favored by African-Americans.
The reason Americans do not mind their National Anthem sung like gospel (or its modern reincarnations; I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes hip-hop one day) is that they are secure in their patriotism. They are secure in their sense of country. They are secure in their loyalty to flag and country. Enough to withstand Jimi Hendrix’s “sacrilegious” interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he did in Woodstock, his awesome guitar blaring out the din of discord in protest against the Vietnam War. That version has since been elevated to iconic status by baby boomers.
Our prissiness with orthodoxy is in fact a symptom of an affliction as worrisome as swine flu. We like revering tradition because we prefer form over content, because we like showing our love of country in ritual rather than in practice. We like to build busts and monuments to the heroes without liking to follow their ideals and actions, which is really the best tribute to them. The religious equivalent of this is that we like to hear Mass and receive the sacraments without liking to live lives that are not given to lying, cheating, stealing and murdering.
It’s like that line in “Lupang Hinirang:” “Ang mamatay nang dahil say iyo” (“to die for you”). I’ve always said that was a perfect, if ironic, commentary on us. We’ve never had problems dying for country, we’ve always had problems living for it. I’ve always suggested—utter sacrilege!—changing it to, “Ang mabuhay ng dahil sa iyo” (“to live for you”).
My second point is: Why on earth should we regard tradition as intractable or unchangeable?
Even the Rock, or the Church, changes. I still remember the time when the Mass, which used to unfold with Latin incantations, gave way to idiomatic English. Or indeed, horror of horrors, when the Gregorian chant gave way to the “Guitar Mass.” Once things that threatened to make the faithful faithless, plain language and (middle-of-the-road) pop (if not rock) are rock-solid orthodoxy in Masses now.
In the case of historical tradition, I should think changes should not just be acceptable to us, they should be welcome to us. I say this because our lack of sense of history—truly notorious in that we can’t even remember the recent past—owes in great part to our tendency to embalm history. To treat it as something dead and gone and remembered only on the historical equivalents of All Saints’ Day. One natural consequence of this is to turn history into sacred text and the heroes into untouchable objects of worship.
I still remember how we used to look at Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini and the other heroes that way, courtesy of high school and college. Something the new wave of historians led by Renato Constantino corrected, turning them into ordinary folk who did extraordinary things in their time and place. No less, or more, than the activists did in their time and place. The process of demystification, or “humanization,” would culminate in historians like Ambeth Ocampo who would make Rizal et al. as contemporary as, well, Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem.
Which makes me wonder why Ambeth in particular should disapprove of that rendition. I recall that when he was pilloried by purists for “watering down” history with his “pop” version of it, I wrote a column saying that far from detracting from the worth of history, he added to it. Specifically by making the past present, by making the dead living, by making history not history in the idiomatic sense of “we’re outta here” but history in the sense of current events. The power of history lies precisely in its being living history, or a “continuing past,” as Constantino put it. One would imagine that a continuing past uses the idioms or idiosyncrasies of the flowing present. That’s what makes the past worth remembering. That’s what makes the past worth living.
It’s not just that I don’t think Nievera has done any harm by his version, it is that I think he has done much good with it. Anything that hooks the youth in particular of this amnesiac country to their past, even if it feels like a right hook to those who take that past reverentially, is fine by me. History has been known to rock, history has been known to roll. Sometimes, history has even been known to OPM.
In any case, I have a lot of friends who’ve always thought the National Anthem wasn’t “Lupang Hinirang” but Juan de la Cruz’s “Ang Himig Natin.”
---------------------
Thanks to Bernadette for bringing this to my attention. FB is great!
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 02:22:00 05/11/2009
Filed Under: Music, Entertainment (general), history, Customs & Traditions
I beg to disagree with some friends on this. “This” is the way Martin Nievera sang “Lupang Hinirang” in the Pacquiao-Hatton fight, which has brought him into a brawl with preservers of Filipino tradition. The fight has so far been lopsided, with many authority figures, from congressmen to historians, knocking him down with a chorus of irate voices.
I myself have no problems with it. In fact I have a couple of reasons for liking it.
The first has to do with the barb that Nievera went the route of show biz by aping the American singers (mostly black) who make the “Star-Spangled Banner” sound like Motown each time an American boxer takes to the ring. Which, as the nastier remarks go, is probably because Nievera is an American at heart and on paper. I leave others to argue where Nievera’s loyalties lie, though given all the open and closet “statehooders” here—Filipinos who long for the country to become a state of the United States—not least among the congressmen, I wouldn’t advise pressing this point too loudly.
But even if Nievera went show biz, what of it? Boxing is pretty much show biz, of the loud and glittery type. And though Nievera did not sing “Lupang Hinirang” traditionally, he did not disrespect it either, to use a word much favored by African-Americans.
The reason Americans do not mind their National Anthem sung like gospel (or its modern reincarnations; I wouldn’t be surprised if it becomes hip-hop one day) is that they are secure in their patriotism. They are secure in their sense of country. They are secure in their loyalty to flag and country. Enough to withstand Jimi Hendrix’s “sacrilegious” interpretation of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” which he did in Woodstock, his awesome guitar blaring out the din of discord in protest against the Vietnam War. That version has since been elevated to iconic status by baby boomers.
Our prissiness with orthodoxy is in fact a symptom of an affliction as worrisome as swine flu. We like revering tradition because we prefer form over content, because we like showing our love of country in ritual rather than in practice. We like to build busts and monuments to the heroes without liking to follow their ideals and actions, which is really the best tribute to them. The religious equivalent of this is that we like to hear Mass and receive the sacraments without liking to live lives that are not given to lying, cheating, stealing and murdering.
It’s like that line in “Lupang Hinirang:” “Ang mamatay nang dahil say iyo” (“to die for you”). I’ve always said that was a perfect, if ironic, commentary on us. We’ve never had problems dying for country, we’ve always had problems living for it. I’ve always suggested—utter sacrilege!—changing it to, “Ang mabuhay ng dahil sa iyo” (“to live for you”).
My second point is: Why on earth should we regard tradition as intractable or unchangeable?
Even the Rock, or the Church, changes. I still remember the time when the Mass, which used to unfold with Latin incantations, gave way to idiomatic English. Or indeed, horror of horrors, when the Gregorian chant gave way to the “Guitar Mass.” Once things that threatened to make the faithful faithless, plain language and (middle-of-the-road) pop (if not rock) are rock-solid orthodoxy in Masses now.
In the case of historical tradition, I should think changes should not just be acceptable to us, they should be welcome to us. I say this because our lack of sense of history—truly notorious in that we can’t even remember the recent past—owes in great part to our tendency to embalm history. To treat it as something dead and gone and remembered only on the historical equivalents of All Saints’ Day. One natural consequence of this is to turn history into sacred text and the heroes into untouchable objects of worship.
I still remember how we used to look at Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio, Apolinario Mabini and the other heroes that way, courtesy of high school and college. Something the new wave of historians led by Renato Constantino corrected, turning them into ordinary folk who did extraordinary things in their time and place. No less, or more, than the activists did in their time and place. The process of demystification, or “humanization,” would culminate in historians like Ambeth Ocampo who would make Rizal et al. as contemporary as, well, Nievera’s rendition of the National Anthem.
Which makes me wonder why Ambeth in particular should disapprove of that rendition. I recall that when he was pilloried by purists for “watering down” history with his “pop” version of it, I wrote a column saying that far from detracting from the worth of history, he added to it. Specifically by making the past present, by making the dead living, by making history not history in the idiomatic sense of “we’re outta here” but history in the sense of current events. The power of history lies precisely in its being living history, or a “continuing past,” as Constantino put it. One would imagine that a continuing past uses the idioms or idiosyncrasies of the flowing present. That’s what makes the past worth remembering. That’s what makes the past worth living.
It’s not just that I don’t think Nievera has done any harm by his version, it is that I think he has done much good with it. Anything that hooks the youth in particular of this amnesiac country to their past, even if it feels like a right hook to those who take that past reverentially, is fine by me. History has been known to rock, history has been known to roll. Sometimes, history has even been known to OPM.
In any case, I have a lot of friends who’ve always thought the National Anthem wasn’t “Lupang Hinirang” but Juan de la Cruz’s “Ang Himig Natin.”
---------------------
Thanks to Bernadette for bringing this to my attention. FB is great!
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