Memory hole 2

Grade school honors for Renato Corona?” snorted  Melody Santos-Drexler from California. “With fact-check as speedy as it is now, I cannot see how anyone can hide any data,” let alone about the Supreme Court chief justice.

Drexler is one of many who’ve reacted to an investigative report by Rappler’s Riziel Ann  Cabreros that challenged  Corona’s self-provided resumes. In them, Corona romps away with medals: gold in grade school,  silver at college graduation, etc.

The Supreme Court’s website even buffed up Corona’s PhD from Santo Tomas. Yes, the one that dodged  dissertation requirements. These “achievements” were paraded as late as March 9.

“Our investigation shows  these are not true,” wrote Cabreros who works with the ABS-CBN News Channel as news writer. She is segment producer of “PIPOL.” Corona did bag a gold—in  Pilipino  spelling. “(But) he was not part of the Ateneo elite who graduated with honors.”

Antonio Carpio and Emmanuel  Lacaba  flanked valedictorian Edgar Jopson. “Pete” Lacaba went on to journalism. Carpio became the best chief justice the Supreme Court never had.

“Edjop” led First Quarter Storm students in asking Marcos: Drop the idea of running for a third term. “You are only the son of a grocer,” President Ferdinand Marcos sneered at Jopson.

“Is he not the son of Joseph the carpenter?” Nazarenes scornfully asked. Dictators and fools often sense irony last. Marcos’ disdain proved the tipping point for Jopson. He joined the underground. In 1992, he was gunned down by martial law troopers in Davao.

Corona graduated March 1974 with a Bachelor of Laws degree—sans  honors. Now Supreme Court  Associate Justice Arturo Brion  topped that class. Today, Brion twists in the wind for flip-flopping in the controversial, again reopened, 14-year-old Philippine Airlines flight attendants case.

“The biggest contortionist (is) Brion,” Inquirer’s Solita Monsod  wrote Saturday. “(He) was the ponente of the Sept. 7 ,2011 resolution that gave the final victory to Fasap. (He) was also the ponente of the recent decision that  gave it to PAL instead. Infamous.”

“Infamous” indeed. That, too, describes how  websites expunged Corona’s “honors” after displaying them for years. “By March 14, the site was sporting a new look” even as the impeachment trial  continued, Rappler writes.

“The site is under reconstruction,” the SC Public Information Office explained, sort of. “Some links may not be working … Public Information Office chief Midas Marquez did not reply to all our requests for comments.”

Is this Orwellian flushing of truth down “memory holes”? asked  Viewpoint in “Did  Our Clocks Strike 13?” That appeared in  Inquirer 02 December eight years back. It had been sparked then by efforts of Imelda  Marcos and family to “rehab” the dictator’s tattered image. “Martial law was the most democratic period in our history,” she said.

The Marcoses pledged they’d  inter the late dictator’s corpse in Ilocos Norte. Within a week, if allowed return, they pledged President Fidel Ramos. Instead, they began a campaign to bury  the embalmed corpse at Libingan ng mga Bayani. Filipinos have short memories.

Marcos’s body today is  displayed in a Batac air-conditioned mausoleum. The setup clones   sepulchers  that  hold  cadavers of Mao Zedong in Tiananmen Square and Vladimir Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square. “Fuchsia, bougainvillea, white sampaguitas and asters ring the Ilocos Norte tomb,” Inquirer notes. “There are no yellow flowers.”

In his novel “1984” George Orwell  sketched “memory holes” as a dictatorship’s ultimate weapon.  Memory disintegrated at the hands of “thought-police.” In “1984,” lies become truth as words lose their meaning. “Slavery is freedom.” Orwell coined “Double Think,” “Newspeak” and “Big Brother.” “Who controls the past, controls the future … Who controls the present controls the past.”

A youth scrubbed of memory will take it for granted that the clock strikes 13. Can a people who tolerate expunged websites,  become a purposeful nation?  Indeed, “the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory,” novelist Milan Hubl wrote.

The Rappler probe into Corona  memory holes, in fact, resembles the July 1985 analysis of 27  bogus Marcos war medals.

Doing research at the US National Archives, University of  South Wales professor Alfred McCoy “came across US Army records that discredited Ferdinand Marcos’ claims to heroism in World War II.” Thereafter, the records anchored a  New York Times series by Syemour Hersh that debunked Marcos war medals.

Follow-up Times reports by Jeff Gerth and Joel Brminkley revealed US Army records stating: Services given by Marcos and 23 others, to the 1st Cavalry Division in 1945, were “of limited military value … At no time did the Army recognize that any unit, designating itself as Maharlika ever existed as a guerrilla force in the years of Japanese occupation 1942 to 1945,” the daily added.

“The immensity of Mr. Marcos’ claim that Maharlika served the entire Luzon was absurd,” reviewing officer Captain Elbert Curtis wrote. The US shredded Marcos’ claims for Maharlika.

Thus, President Benigno Aquino III scuppered House Resolution  1135 for Libingan  burial. That  would send the wrong message for the future,P-Noy said. It’d  “disrespect Filipinos buried there for their contributions to the country.”

Lying and embellishing academic achievements fracture the New Code of Judicial Conduct former senator Rene Saguisag adds. “This should not be allowed to pass.”

Memory Hole 2 reminds  us of   Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s  caution: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle against forgetting.”