Laurels at all costs

Come Sept. 21, it will be 39 years since Ferdinand Marcos clamped on rule by bayonets. Martial law would save the republic from collapse, he perorated without blinking. A 14-year dictatorship followed.

Filipinos will get a voice in shaping policies, asserted Presidential Decree 557 of 1974. How? Barrios were renamed barangays. Filipinos should mark every Sept. 21 thereafter as “National Thanksgiving Day.”

People Power shredded this “thanksgiving” charade in February 1986. But Imelda and Marcos’ cronies have insisted, for over four decades now, that we fall on our knees for “the most democratic period in our history.”

The Marcoses and their allies badger President Aquino to authorize the burial of Marcos in Libingan ng mga Bayani. Sub rosa work on a Libingan mausoleum had been aborted. Protests  erupted that it fractured a pledge, given to then President Fidel Ramos, that Marcos’ remains would be buried days after arrival from Hawaii.

The resistance of families, many with kin in Libingan graves, hasn’t subsided. The Marcoses now accept the “Jejomar” formula for an Ilocos Norte tomb, Vice President Binay told media in an August visit to Laoag City.

What Binay calls, without blushing, his “Solomonic” formula stipulates laurels at all costs. Whether in Libingan or Ilocos, there must be military honors. Bogus war medals, extrajudicial murders and massive human rights infractions to governance rot will be glossed over.

Marcos’ children “want to foist their father on us as a hero,” Inquirer columnist Conrado de Quiros groused. “It is not a matter of geography, it is a matter of principle…. Ilocos Norte has not yet become a ‘substate’ of the Republic, free to make its own rules, its own laws, its own interpretation of history.”

There is, however, the more  pernicious “substate” of the subservient mindset. It would not recognize truth anywhere. Under Marcos, what was theft in Manila morphed into a financial bonanza in Batac. Suppression of dissent on  college campuses was seen by folk in Sarrat as trouncing  communists. “The  will is deaf and hears no heedful friends,” Shakespeare rued.

Today’s squabble for pre-burial laurels is best summarized in these two concise paragraphs:

“There may be some who… consider it necessary that we should praise to one another the dead… [We see] the kind of posthumous deification sometimes accorded to those who die in the possession of public power….

“This is the tawdry privilege of the despot to be given at burial, as a pure formality with tongue-in-cheek, ‘the honors of a god.’ It cannot bring anything but shame … to (those) devoted to the democratic way of life…”

These lines were, in fact, written 41 years before Marcos’ demise in 1989. These paragraphs come from the April 24, 1948 homily delivered by Filipino historian Horacio de la Costa, SJ, in Washington, D.C. Father De la Costa  concelebrated a requiem Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral for the late President Manuel Roxas.

Unplanned, Father De la Costa’s discourse provides  criteria for today’s Ilocos controversy. “He stands now, this man to whom a sovereign people entrusted the high exercise of sovereignty,” he wrote then. “He stands alone. No one avails to speak for him or against him. He is beyond our praise or blame. He is alone with God.

“[His] record stands for every citizen to scrutinize, to weigh, and as he deems it good, to approve or to condemn. Let it stand, then, without embellishment or diminution. Let it stand as he had left it, the record of a man who had served them well or ill.

“There let us leave him, bathed in the serene and shadowless light of Truth. The final reckoning of what he was and did belongs to keener eyes than ours—far keener eyes, yet also beyond measure kindlier, for they are the eyes of Him in whom justice and mercy are not only inseparable but one.”

Will the principles that Father De la Costa sketched in broad strokes be equally relevant for future interments? Like all of us, Joseph Estrada and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will one day return to the dust from which we all came. Open Libingan’s gates to heroes to include, without exception, former presidents, suggests former Sen. Rene Saguisag. That will head off future quarrels.

Father De la Costa died in 1977. He didn’t see how Corazon Aquino would ensure a peaceful transfer of power. His 1948 homily provides an apt preview:

“Civil authority is not personal but public. It belongs to no one either by right of birth or by virtue of some real or imagined excellence over other men, whether it be wealth, intelligence or power.

“It belongs to the people, who may entrust it to whomsoever they freely choose. Neither does it endow the man to whom it is entrusted with any special gift of impeccability or infallibility. He may not claim thereby ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king.’

“His is a burden, not a privilege. He must spend himself in the public interests as though they were his own. Yet he may not derive any personal profit from his position. He is held accountable always for the authority he holds in trust.

“When his mandate is revoked, he must be willing to relinquish that authority and return, a private citizen, to the ranks from which he came. Let him not expect any reward but the consciousness of having done his duty and served his people and his God.

“Often he will get no reward but this. Nay, he may find in the end his name vilified, his motive misrepresented, his deeds misjudged. Austere are the laurels of the republic.”

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