The amazing Bongbong Marcos

The media have of late been replete with accounts that detail the ignominy and suffering that Filipinos went through under the martial rule of President Ferdinand Marcos. The abuse and looting and skullduggery perpetrated by that conscienceless regime are well-documented and etched forever on the national memory.

Yet Sen. Bongbong Marcos thunders that he is not aware of nor can he recall anything that his father had done during the latter’s years in power for which he and his family should feel sorry or apologize. What does that tell us? Simply, it tells us that two years before he hits 60, Bongbong is already showing an unfortunate telltale sign of stage-four dementia.

I can let pass Bongbong’s clear avoidance of any mention of unsavory things that happened during the dictatorship of his father. Inexcusable, but the guy is after all out to inveigle voters to put him within a heartbeat to the throne his father occupied, which, as I see it, he intends to use as his launching pad for his stab at the primary plum itself, the presidency six-seven years hence.

But I do mind and cannot accept his taking us for morons by telling us, and expecting us to believe, his hilarious version of what transpired during the dark days of his father’s one-man rule. The gall of Bongbong telling us that the bad things ascribed to Marcos didn’t really happen and that on the contrary, his father created for us a heaven-like nation with the countryside laced with ribbons of roads, the streets free of hooligans, the people well-fed, drugs and drug lords nonexistent—a cornucopia of goodies—and ignoring the fact that millions who endured the harshness of life during the Marcos regime are still living and can testify to the contrary of what he is saying.

What the dictator’s son is actually telling us is this: Forget the recorded figure of 3,257 extrajudicial killings and over 2,520 “salvaged” victims during the Marcos years; forget the $10 billion estimated by the Presidential Commission on Good Government as the total booty looted by Marcos during his reign; forget that Marcos redrew the Philippines’ political and economic map by instituting crony capitalism and creating a superduper political machine called the KBL (Kilusang Bagong Lipunan), which made political parties, the supposed breeding grounds for new generation of national leaders, unmitigated jokes; and forget that the Marcoses were chased out of Malacañang by People Power mounted by an angry citizenry that could and would no longer stomach the despot’s rule. Forget them, Bongbong is telling us, they did not happen.

Truly and honestly, does Bongbong really have no recollection whatsoever of the awful things that happened during the dictatorship of his father? Of course he does. Only a person suffering from cerebral constipation would say that he or she can’t recall anything bad occurring during the dictatorship of which he was very much a part, and certainly gloried in.

So why is Bongbong telling us he can’t recall a bit of the past, particularly the long years that his father was the Philippines’ dictator, the supremo, the supposed summum bonum, the omnipotent, the capo de tutti capi? Why? Because precisely he DOES remember—every bit of it, the good life, the shindigs on the presidential yacht, the perks, the pomp and circumstance that he and his pals reveled in, BUT NOT the pain, the suffering, the tears inflicted upon the nation by the yoke of martial law.

Bongbong is telling us to move on, to forget the past, and not because it is the right thing to do for us to achieve a better tomorrow. Bongbong is urging us to erase from our collective memory the vestiges of the past because his ambition is to become vice president, and he knows that no way would he pull it off, no way, with the ghost of the Marcos dictatorship still lingering in the collective mind. It’s amazing of Bongbong to think that the people will heed his call.

All I can say is: Nice try, Jose, but I ain’t buying. Nor is anyone else among those who still remember how difficult and uncertain life was during the suffocating reign of Marcos the dictator.

Mart del Rosario ([email protected]) is a retired advertising-PR consultant.