Bust

September 11 wasn’t just a day of infamy in the United States, it was a day of infamy in the Philippines. It was the day Ferdinand Marcos was born, which the family he left behind celebrated by demanding once again that he be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

I recall that during martial law (a world that must now seem as distant to the post-martial-law babies the way the Japanese Occupation seemed to us in the 1970s), Sept. 11 was something that was marked by much fanfare by government. Most everybody else of course cursed the day, but not so the martial-law custodians. The day became a precursor to Sept. 21, the date when Marcos imposed martial law, which the country was made to celebrate, not without humongous irony or sadism, as “Thanksgiving Day.”

The ways of the father are visited upon the children. They continue to want to foist their father on us as a hero. Not without humongous irony or sadism.

Nothing less than that will do, they say. They reject completely Jojo Binay’s offer of burying their father in Ilocos with full honors. Their father was a soldier, they say, and a true hero. There are his medals to speak for it. It’s Libingan ng mga Bayani or bust. They would rather P-Noy himself decreed which once and for all.

Well, Binay’s compromise solution was a sorry one, proving yet again that when you try to please everyone, you’ll please no one. It hasn’t pleased the public which continues to vilify Marcos’ memory, and it hasn’t pleased the Marcoses who continue to extol it. Why on earth would you want to have Marcos buried with honors in Ilocos? It is not a matter of geography, it is a matter of principle. As far as we know, Ilocos has not yet become a “substate” of the Republic, free to make its own rules, its own laws, its own interpretation of history. That may be so in Hawaii, where there are Filipinos and Ilocanos, but that may not be so in the Philippines.

In fact, it’s what the Marcoses claim as the source of their father’s heroism—his being a soldier—that constitutes his damnation. If Marcos committed his biggest crime against anyone, it was against the soldier. He did not raise the soldier to the pinnacle of glory, though he did raise him a level of power that enabled him to terrorize the citizenry, he plunged him to the depths of shame.

He did so to begin with by trashing soldiering, and the heroism associated with it, with fake medals. It is to Bonifacio Gillego we owe that revelation. Only two out of Marcos’ 33 medals—a sum that made him the most decorated soldier in the world—came in 1945, the rest came much later when he was already in power. And those two medals Marcos’ own superiors debunked: There was never a Maharlika unit during World War II.

The AFP says it had no choice but to include him in the Hall of Heroes which they unveiled early this year because he had gotten the Medal of Valor during his time. But of course they had a choice. They could always have revoked his medal, citing that the highest form of valor was truthfulness, a principle the men in uniform would never think to compromise. And the Medal of Valor recipients, living or dead (the kin in the case of the latter), could always have threatened to return their medals if Marcos wasn’t banished from that Hall—it was an insult to what they had done. Valor isn’t just physical, it is moral. And heroism isn’t just an act that happened at one time, it is an attitude that is demonstrated all the time.

Marcos trashed soldiering moreover with martial law itself. It was during this time that the image of the soldier—and the policeman, who became an object of ridicule, quite apart from dread, with the phrase “Metrocom ini”—became the Armalite-toting thug that at his most benign extorted money from travelers in checkpoints for the military balls (he must have had a ball saying so) and at his most vicious massacring villagers suspected of aiding and abetting the enemy.

It is no small irony that Luis Villafuerte, vice chair of the Governors’ League, says he will petition the governors to stipulate that the only place Marcos may be buried in is the Libingan. If Marcos committed his second biggest crime against anyone, it was against the local officials. The mayors and governors and congressmen had no real power over their districts at the time, the provincial commanders did. Nothing of consequence happened without their permission or blessings. You defied them only at risk of your life.

More than that, Marcos trashed soldiering, and democracy along with it, by giving the man in uniform praetorian ambitions or dreams of taking over the reins of government. Those born after 1990, who are the youth of today, most of them still students, will have no sense, other than from what they read in books or what their parents tell them, of what it meant to live in conditions where you never knew when some batty military, and militarist, groups would try and seize power. Can you imagine if Gringo Honasan had run this country? Or, worse, his idol Juan Ponce Enrile?

It’s just a toss-up which is the greater evil, putting government in the hands of the bishops or putting it in the hands of the generals. Democracy cannot survive either.

Marcos’ current state, which is to lie in a waxen state, preserved for posterity to gaze at, defying nature, defying death, defying life, is probably the fate we should leave him to forever. It best sums up someone who lived the lie, whose stature, whose heroism, whose larger-than-life scale is about as vital as that mummy.

In any case, it’s about time P-Noy himself spoke up and put the issue, or joke, to rest (pun fully intended). The choice is clear and it was made by the Filipino people back in his mother’s time. Libingan ng mga Bayani or bust?

Bust.