Like it or not, the past is past. In the practical sense, it’s just another day in the calendar , holiday or not, and can be moved to another convenient date, if it is, a moveable feast. Eventually, it will fade in memory, and so will its meaning. There. Someone guessed in a popular noontime TV show once that Apolinario Mabini was a former president. The subliminal hardly mattered. Who cares?
“ I thought that all generations were lost by something , had always been and would always be” the American writer Ernest Hemingway wrote in his book “ A Moveable Feast”.
This year, the yearly commemoration of the People Power Revolution in February 1986 has been taken out of the official list of holidays. In other words, there was no official celebration of an historic event that shocked the world and celebrated it. Out of mind, out of context.
It was a psychic moment for the Filipino nation that, to a man, kicked out a dictator and his family into decades-long exile. It took exactly a generation for the family to come back with a vengeance and claimed the presidency back. Hemingway was right: something was lost somewhere.
The exuberant victors, they say, rewrite history. The fiction has begun with a distorted narrative of a mythical past. But Hemingway warns that even a fiction would somehow throw light into what really happened in the past. Except that the light seems to dim over time.
Unfortunately, the victors strongly insist on a new script. This time, another day in history is moved to another date to give way to the mundane at the expense of the meaningful. The Ninoy Aquino Day, marking the assassination of the former opposition senator at the Manila airport tarmac in 1983 is officially marked, if not mocked, as a moveable feast.
There was a time ante, when the euphoria of the victors inspired others to call for the abolition of the airport named after Ninoy Aquino to revert back to its old name. Of course, there’s a time for every thing under a new dispensation. It is now.
In time, this holiday would be lost to another generation. But an apparent transition in history is hardly unmistakable, if subtly obtrusive. An opposition lawmaker has tagged it for what it was: a violation of the law that created the holiday. Maybe it’s not crime. On the other hand, maybe the motive is, in the largest, profound sense.
Only a few seems to mind the trend, though . “ They say the seeds of what we will do are all in us “ Hemingway adds, “ but the seeds of those who make jokes in life have better soil and covered with manure”. Or muck.
The comeback kid and his family probably had neve r had it so good. The Supreme Court remains has been silent on a previous ruling that a humungous estate tax of those in power should be paid. In the meantime, the current administration continues its borrowing mode to stop the poor from further sinking into the mire. Hunger, Hemingway wrote, is a good discipline. The ayudas must be kept flowing; politics has never been as bliss.
The opposition is virtually non-existent,if not obliterated in the political landscape that is fast forgetting the past and conveniently immersing itself in a truncated vision of que sera , sera. We are told dutifully that we are on the road to Damascus and are momentary blinded to see a better light.
But there’s a light blinking on the other side of the road.
Vice P resident Sara Duterte has warned us against self-serving moves by those in power to perpetuate themselves in power, a caveat to political redundancy that poses a real threat to democracy that was previously exorcised from it. The moveable feast is a poisoned drink. r
There has been a recent charge that the old opposition is now being co-opted by the Marcos regime to thwart the Dutertes attempt to act as the real opposition. The issue of an impending arrest by the International Criminal Court (ICC} of the former president and others for the crime against humanity in the so-called war on drug is belabored.
The common cause is labeled as political rather than legal because the end in view is political . The co-mingling of past history with present fear undergirds a nervous feeling of how things could possibly be , given the internal and external threats, especially with China waiting on the seashore with an impure motive.
President Bongbong Marcos’ efforts to shore up the country’s external security vis-à-vis China’s aggression by aligning militarily with the United States and other Western countries grants an ambivalent sense of peace and uncertainty. No less than the President’s sister-senator has verbalized the logical fear.
In the meantime, the real sense of patriotism and nationalism is not exactly given the right (correct) time and place to flourish with the slow but sure degrading of rightful historical events with the rewriting of history as a moveable pragmatic date on the calendar.
But don’t despair, according to Hemingway. There’s chance that this book of fiction will throw light that there were facts about it.
