Two very prominent Filipino leaders remembered history recently.
They appealed to the ethos and example of the GreaT Plebian, Andres Bonifacio
The two leaders , described so in the ordinary sense of the word, unlike the hero they extolled, are the president and the vice president who are at “war” , figuratively. Erstwhile, they were the best of friends, politically speaking. Not anymore.
Both recalled history incompletely and, therefore. not truthfully.
The English novelist Samuel Butler would have understood why. God, he said ,cannot alter the past, but historians can. And politicians, too, apparently.
The other half of the untold story is that Bonifacio was assassinated by other Filipino leaders on the imprimatur of a high official who is blamed for the assassination of another Filipino revolutionary general.
Apolinario Mabini, known as the brain of the Philippine revolution, noted in a memoir that the redemption of the official who is blamed for the death of two Filipino revolutionaries requires one thing: he must die in a battle. It did not happen and , therefore, there could have been no redemption.
The president and the vice president conveniently glossed over Mabini’s recommendation. It is probably not politically correct to do so, given history and its implications.
Remembering history and its redemption would require , at the very least, apologizing for why and how things went wrong. In a word, repentance, or a 180 degrees turn toward a correct posture and direction.
The president is the only son of a discredited dictator who was thrown out of power into an exile in the aftermath of a peaceful people uprising. The dictator had overstayed the people’s welcome, in addition to human rights issues, among others, hidden wealth included.
The vice president is the daughter of another tyrant who is now the front and center of a criminal probe by an international court for the crime against humanity brutally inflicted in the infamous war against drugs. She is also somehow linked to the crime,
The president, who came back to power after decades of cobbling back history in a myth, is rewriting the past as Butler figured it out. Politicians and historians are not exactly unbiased authors of the forgettable narratives. Victims die, victors edit.
The president is still eerily silent about the billions in estate tax due government as ruled by the Supreme Court, In fact, he is still fighting the order, in the interest of fairness, justice and due process otherwise known as delay. It worked in another case dismissed by another court which lost valuable witnesses on account of tte delay.
The president and his vice president seem to agree on the idea of opposing the criminal probe on the latter’s father issue of crime against humanity by invoking sovereignty as a defense. Patrotism has been invoked repeatedly ad nauseam for the kllling of no less than 30,000 people because of the drug problem.
There are other voices that whisper or shout the same slogan as modus vivendi or modu operandi.
There is honor even among thieves.
History and politics are not so neat and nice as Mabini wrote about. After all, they are about imperfect people in an imperfect world. Sin pecado cosa vida, a borrowed prayer from a colonizer that hid people in the dark for centuries in feudal bondage.
Politics here is mostly that: feudal. That’s why votes are chattel. Each election is always an auction for the people to sell their votes, sometimes pricing themselves out of the market. It’s a sellers’ market but buyers are smarter. The vice president, who has an axe to grind, says vote buying has been made legal l through other means in the present economy. Guess who wins in the process?
The latest news, which is really old news, an impeachment case has been filed in the House of Representatives against the vice president. The president has made it known through a leak from sympathetic or sycophantic lawmakers – what did he expect? – he does not support it. The president forgot about feudal and thought, authentically, he is Machiavellian. Ideology can be as confusing as economics, and loyalty is as volatile as the law of supply and demand and the stock market.
The president has vowed to ensure that the rule of law, not the law of rule, reigns. His revelation that he is not for it is sending mixed signals, which is a Machiavellian recipe for deception. There are three more years left to his presidential term and he doesn’t want those who voted for him to lose heart.
The vice president has told everyone and sundry who was responsible for his winning after a long exile and gaining the Palace at Pasig handsomely. She apologized profusely to the monolithic ascent of Apollo Quiboloy’s flock to her call, the shepherd with a wolf garment now at sick bay while in jail while waiting for a miracle of sort to happen.
The president may be the expected miracle worker. The vice president has cut and cut cleanly from the short-lived political conjugal partnership. She has left no doubt in the public mind – forget about the rabble rousing former president of a father—that she wants nothing from the one on top of her, politically. Not when she quit her being part of his Cabinet. Not when she showed in public how she imagined decapitating him. Not when she threatened to dig the late dictator from his grave and dumped it/him—pronoun is a matter of choice–in the West Philippine Sea. Not when she bared her sinister plan of a meditated plot to eliminate him, his wife and his first cousin from what she later described as revenge from the grave.
How did Bonifacio inspire or motivate her and the president with their contrasting ethos? Heroes are not for the ordinary men and women alone but for leaders like them?
It’s a shameless disservice for these leaders to even mention the hero’s name vain.
