Denial

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who chronicled the fall of despots such as Haile Selassie of Ethiopia and the Shah of Iran, once wrote, “When is a crisis reached? When questions arise that can’t be answered.”

An insider of the Marcos administration, years after the fact, once told me how Ferdinand Marcos had kept the many factions in his ruling circle on their best behavior by intimating that this or that underling was in the ruling council that would be empowered to rule the country should he ever leave the scene. However, Marcos was, at the same time, always careful never to show the actual document to anyone, thus keeping everyone on their toes in the hope of being put in the council or not being removed from it.

This game was quite likely a delicious one for the great dictator, except when it finally became clear to even the most loyal factotum that the great dictator wouldn’t live forever. Worse, he might quite possibly kick the bucket sooner rather than later, without giving anyone the certainty of knowing who, really, was in the council. Instead, as the health of the dictator declined, he reinaugurated himself, complete with a choir singing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus”—“and He shall reign for ever and ever.” The pious would call it the folly of mocking God, and, thus, tempting fate.

This combination of factors—of a strongman revealed as not-so-strong; of uncertainty, confusion and doubts about the future that accompany the revelation that a strongman is proving not as strong as previously supposed; the rush to plot among factions formerly kept in check by the strongman, but who now fret over their fate as the strongman begins showing weakness; and the effect this inevitably has on invalidating the one thing strongmen can offer in exchange for giving up the autonomy and independence of democracy, which is order—was what inspired Ninoy Aquino to come home.

He wanted to try to drive a last bargain with the dictator: Why not retire, become an elder statesman, and restore freedom to your people? We know of course, how that last mission turned out: the message undelivered, the messenger killed on the tarmac; the dictator, face puffy with ill health, going through the motions of appointing commissions, ordering suspensions, then reinstating those suspended once his commissions reached the only acceptable conclusion, which was to uphold the conclusion the dictator had announced from the start.

Thus, there arose questions that couldn’t be answered: Who would replace the dictator, without the risk of a civil war not just within Philippine society, but between the factions comprising the dictator’s court circle? What hope was there for replacing the tired, old, confused and corrupt regime in time, to ensure that the country wouldn’t become a total economic basket case?

There seemed no way out, since, after all, the most reasonable proposal had been answered with bullets at the airport. Except, of course, the answer came from the very same people who had, to one degree or another, surrendered to circumstance—the public.

They had marked their displeasure five years before, when, in the great noise barrage on the eve of the rigged Interim Batasan elections of 1978, they had dared set fire to tires, bang pots and pans, and hoot on paper trumpets, to demonstrate where their sentiments lay, which wasn’t in what the Comelec said would be a Kilusang Bagong Lipunan landslide.

After Aug. 21, 1983, defiance was simply turning up, at Times Street or Santo Domingo Church, or on the streets to Tarlac or Manila Memorial Park, to condole with Ninoy’s family and accompany his casket to its grave.

Yesterday, I shared online an extract from the late Chitang Nakpil’s autobiography, where she recounted asking Imelda Marcos if she’d watched Ninoy’s funeral. Yes, Imelda replied, she and her husband had done so, and were stunned by what they saw.

Last year, when I’d shared the same extract, the novelist Ninotchka Rosca replied on Facebook that she’d heard something similar from friends who’d been in the service of the conjugal dictatorship at the time. Except that it was Palace courtiers watching the funeral, and that they had cynically wondered how on earth the opposition had been able to pay so many people to turn up—a reflection of the world they lived in, and the only kind of spontaneous outpouring they could comprehend.

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