The Aquino Avenue

Mr. Rene Lopez Relampagos is a friendly man. His website offers a variety of options for the inquiring citizen seeking to contact the honorable representative of the first district of Bohol. He makes available an e-mail address, two Facebook pages, and videos of himself addressing his constituents and dictating the address of his personal website. He appeals for civility from the cynical public now flooding his personal wall with opinions as to his mental state. The congressman hopes to learn from “numerous human perspectives apart from my own,” and encourages other humans to limit their criticism to the constructive and polite.

In the biography section of his personal website, the good congressman opts to describe himself by reproducing a glowing feature written by one Loy M. Palapos of the Bohol Chronicle. Representative Relampagos sees himself as “our modern-day Phoenix rising from his ashes, ready to soar again.” Although it is uncertain as to which fire necessitated the rebirth of Bohol’s “boy next door,” his newest proposal, House Bill 5422, may perhaps demand another sort of about-face for the one-time seminarian.

HB 5422 was filed in honor of former President Corazon C. Aquino. Relampagos proposes the renaming of the 24-kilometer highway Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (Edsa) to Cory Aquino Avenue.

“It would be but a fitting tribute to former President Corazon C. Aquino, a woman of courage and valor, that Edsa — an avenue that became testament to the country’s love of democracy — be named after her.”

Relampagos is not the first to make the attempt. In 2009, vice-presidential candidate Mar Roxas proposed the same renaming, claiming that it was appropriate, given that Mrs. Aquino’s first heroic act of leadership occurred on the highway.

“Whenever we hear of Edsa, one thing always comes to the mind of Filipinos: the People Power led by President Cory. It is but fit to offer in her memory the road that had made her famous all over the world.”

Then Senator Roxas believed that the former president’s legacy “cannot be overstated.” Her acts that “demonstrated in the clearest terms that steep moral values and strength of character are what our nation needs in times of unabated corruption and political and social decay,” for him, “deserve no less than the highest admiration, respect and gratitude of all generations.”

Five hours after his office put out the press release, the senator, then a candidate for the presidency, withdrew his proposal. Sources claim the withdrawal was due to “historical concerns.”

The Roxas debacle appears to have become an inspiration for Representative Relampagos. His measure intends to repeal Republic Act 2140, a 1959 decree that changed what was once Highway 54 to Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, named after a renowned Filipino patriot, scholar and historian.

“Indeed, one cannot think of the 1986 Edsa Revolution without thinking of Corazon C. Aquino. Even after her term as President of the Republic, she lived her life fighting for democracy, as she goes out of her way to fight for justice and truth, for peace and democracy,” Relampagos said in filing HB 5422.

His proposal has been subject to the ridicule of the online universe and the exasperation of many legislators. On the surface, the proposal is a tempest in a teapot, the work of an ill-advised legislator with far too much time in his hands providing many equally bored citizens fodder for a surprisingly long series of witticisms involving sweaty roads, clogged tunnels and hairy trips. And yet at the center is an issue that needs to be addressed, and addressed every time a legislator hopes to curry public and presidential favor by way of the national imagination.

Naming is an act of power. It as an assignment of values; a determination of character. It was naming that disappeared and killed hundreds during the last savage administration, it was what tortured dozens of Arabs in Guantanamo Bay and what made a girl from Olongapo named Nicole a slut instead of a victim. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was first an intellectual, then a mother, then a strongman, and will be, if Ferdinand Topacio and his balls are successful, the hapless victim of political interests. Terrorist, leftist, rebel, virgin, hero, whore. To name is to identify an object, to remove it from the unknown, and to assign to it a set of characteristics, motives, values and behaviors.

It is why young men named Benigno can suddenly become presidents, children named Revilla are suddenly superstars, and an Ampatuan born of any mother is suddenly a butcher. To name what stands for revolution for one woman, no matter how saintly, no matter how generous and spirited and brave, is to accord decades of sacrifice by hundreds of unnamed heroes to a single person, when the same yellow-clad woman herself announced that her revolution was not hers, it is her people’s.

Relampagos is correct about the importance of Edsa. It is not a road. It is a mythology, the single proof that there is a limit to cruelty and savagery, and that limit is determined not by the tyrants, but by the men who will not walk in chains. Edsa is not only Aquino, it is confetti on a hot afternoon, a birthday cake for soldiers, a nun on her knees, a father before a tank, a flower hanging off the barrel of a gun. It is the 25 years of dead activists and crusading lawyers. It is courage and dignity and sacrifice, an image so powerful that even loyalists of the dictatorship became national heroes by pure association. Fidel Ramos became president. Juan Ponce Enrile is a senator, and may remain a senator until the Second Coming. Arroyo, Binay, Saguisag, German, Paredes, Aguilar, Keithley — each of these names have become part and parcel of Edsa and its narrative, but if they fail, the story will not. An Aquino now sits in power, whose mandate was inherited from his mother. He is neither particularly brave nor particularly strong, but he is only one man, and by the single narrative that drives the Filipino to hope, one man cannot destroy a united nation.

This is not to say that uprising should be the way of the Filipino, or that the entirety of the People Power Revolution of 1986 deserves its weight in the national imagination. It is not even to say to change a name can destroy a mythology, at least not immediately. What the gentleman from Bohol does not understand is this: to rename Edsa is to spit in the face of the men and women who built its legacy. People Power and its story belong to the people, not to a woman, not to a President, and certainly not to a man who believes honor can be legislated.

* * *

Send email to pat.evangelista@gmail.com. Many thanks to Nicole Revita and Carla Mendoza for the assistance.