History and Heroes
In honor of National Heroes Day and History Month, a look back on the post-Edsa presidencies. Because sometimes, the only question left to ask is, How the fuck did we get here?
A friend who taught a business class in graduate school once told me that one of this Nation’s greatest frustrations is realizing that the past thirty years have gone to waste, all because we have spent it clinging to a narrative held by a single family: The Aquinos.
That gave me pause. If, like me, you were born in the ’80s, maybe a couple or so years shy of the 1986 Edsa Revolution, you likely landed right smack in the middle of the post-Benigno Aquino Jr. assassination era — and that makes you part of quite an interesting generation.
As a child, you had no appreciation about the emotions of the time, but you lived with the consequences these emotionally-charged decisions anyway. You did not know “Ninoy,” apart from being that guy who was gunned down while getting off a plane (33 years this month, by the way), by a Bad Dictator who was ousted in a four-day bloodless protest that later catapulted his widow to the presidency.
You spent your elementary days memorizing Cabinet secretaries of said widow’s administration, and drawing your expectations about “Philippines 2000” during the power outages of the succeeding Ramos administration.
You came of age by the time Ramos’s vice president and successor Joseph Estrada came into power. You watched in riveted horror as Estrada got less and less popular until finally, in November 2000, he got impeached, becoming the first Philippine President to ever undergo such a procedure. There’s a vote, and while it was somewhat apparent to you that the President had done something wrong, his friends in the Senate still ridiculously debated the opening of an envelope. When the “no” votes won, the people took to the streets, and just like that, you’re watching the second Edsa on TV.
So this is what that’s like, you told yourself, watching as Estrada’s vice president, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, was sworn in at the Edsa Shrine near Megamall.
People say we’re harder on female leaders because we always want them to fix what male leaders have fucked up. I don’t know about you, but we’ve had two female presidents and both of them were results of Edsas. Let’s chew on that for a moment.
As expected, history has been rough on Arroyo. Next to Marcos, she was the second longest-serving President, having served the rest of Estrada’s term and one full term of her own — despite having promised, in front of the National Hero no less, that she would not run for the sake of national unity.
You spent maybe half of Arroyo’s term picketing her support for the US war on Iraq, and the other half trying to make sense of the annual impeachment attempts they brought against her after her re-election in 2004. You probably even voted for her, because you were afraid that her closest rival, an action star that was too close to Estrada’s likeness for comfort, would land in Malacanang.
Arroyo was an economist and a seasoned legislator, daughter of a president even. No stranger to national office, definitely. But her nine-year rule was marred with electoral fraud controversies, and allegations of massive corruption involving, most notably, a national broadband network. Aside from that, it was also interrupted by not one, but two coup attempts, both spearheaded by a guy who later ran for the Senate and won. From prison. Despite staging televised coups in two separate Makati hotels.
Knowing very well that corruption was the Big Deal That Needed Fixing, the after-Gloria administration decided to run on an anticorruption platform, which found a rather timely emotional push when former President Corazon Aquino died months ahead of the elections, thereby cementing her son Sen. Benigno Aquino III’s win when he finally decided to run for President under the Liberal Party. Aquino won by a landslide with more than 15 million votes.
Truth be told, the second Aquino administration tried. The atmosphere elevated by “Daang Matuwid” to the national level inspired a crackdown on corruption, and at some point — at some point — three senators were actually in jail for corruption-related cases at the Sandiganbayan.
Elsewhere, Arroyo sat as elected congresswoman for her district. However, with the administration bent on pinning her down for corruption while in office, she ended up spending much of her term in hospital detention on the strength of plunder cases filed against her. They have since been dismissed, and now she is out donating dialysis machines, still Pampanga representative. And deputy speaker.
By this time, members of your generation — by now full-fledged taxpayers who spend their days clocking in and out of work — have developed some sort of restlessness. With electoral fraud controversies and corruption accusations linking the president to illegal activities now off the “menu” of daily crises, what were we to do?
We turned to traffic. We counted the lost hours we spent riding in defective trains and sitting in jeepneys stuck in gutter-deep floods. We bemoaned an administration’s heartless ineptness at solving day-to-day inconveniences — after all, what’s the use of record-breaking gross domestic product growth rates if the general taxpaying populace was constantly exhausted from their daily commutes? The administration has been worthless.
TLDR: So what if the war on corruption seems to be working? It has done nothing to improve day-to-day life, going by how the trains were so inefficient and how prone the city streets were to flooding and traffic. On this level, it has failed massively.
In his last State of the Nation Address, Mr. Aquino said the 2016 elections would be a referendum on his six years. Going by that, one could only guess that the verdict has not been too kind.
I needed to go through all five presidents to explain to myself how the fuck we got to this point: We went from “walang wang-wang” to “my god, I hate drugs” — the most polarized we have ever been, or at least to our collective post-Edsa eyes.
Winning with a plurality of votes last May, President Duterte has so far divided the country along controversial lines. One divides supporters and nonsupporters of his massive antidrug campaign that has led to thousands of deaths among suspected drug personalities; another divides supporters and nonsupporters of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, under whose 20-year-rule thousands also suffered human rights abuses due to martial law, and whose preserved remains President Duterte had ordered to be buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
That last point raises some sharp questions, the chief of them being: Have we learned nothing?
Save for the late strongman and his trusted aide Fabian Ver, most of the Martial Law personalities are still alive and very much still part of the current shifting political terrain. The Marcoses are still in power even — Imelda and Imee, in particular. While Ferdinand Jr. has ended his Senate term, he very nearly won the vice presidential race.
And now, the current president is bent on honoring the dead dictator as a hero, just by virtue of being soldier and president.
Is that what heroism is, then — an ideal reserved for the dead? Is this all history amounts to, in the end — a collection of stories about dead people?
When we write about heroes, their lives are inevitably intertwined with the history of their nations and peoples.
Given this, a harder question: What sort of history are we writing right now, anyway?
