Happy Marcos day, everybody. The house recently passed a bill to declare September 11 as Marcos Day in Ilocos Norte, the date being the late dictators birthday, Of course, people got worked up about it, made angry tweets and all that ineffectual nonsense. How nice of congress to find the time to focus on the really important issues during this global pandemic. Why are these people in charge of anything?
Even if the holiday is limited to Ilocos Norte, Marcos' old stomping grounds, this is yet another blow to the people power cinematic universe infesting the national psyche. They allowed Marcos to be buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani but now there's a holiday in his name too. How will the yellows ever recover? What's next? Marcos ice cream bars?
History is not a bland statement of facts. History is ultimately a narrative. History is story. We're wired to learn through stories. Stories supply the who, where, when, what, and why. The "story" of the Filipino people frames how we see ourselves and what we ought to be.
As I have written here before, the people power revolution was a bad movie. The people rose up and overthrew the tyrant but the expected utopia never came. Instead of one asshole, we now have a multitude. You know how when you watch a movie or play with an awful third act, you begin to think about the previous acts and then slowly find out how lousy they also were in retrospect? Well, our story has collapsed and people now find themselves questioning the script. What if Ninoy Aquino wasn't a hero? What if Marcos wasn't so bad? Was the revolution really that widespread? Who wrote this crap?
Now the "upstanding" straight-laced people are shaking their heads at the historical revisionists - those hecklers throwing garbage on the stage and ruining the show. They shouldn't blame the revisionists. If anything, it's a collective failure. It doesn't matter now. The narrative will continue to erode until, perhaps, that fateful day in EDSA will be reduced to a footnote.
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