Laurels at all cost

Come Sept.  21, it  will  be  39   years  since Ferdinand Marcos clamped  on rule-by-bayonets. Martial law  would  save  the Republic from collapse, he perorated  without  blinking. A 14-year dictatorship  followed.

Filipinos will get a voice in shaping policies, asserted Presidential Decree 557 of 1974. How? Barrios were renamed  barangays. Filipinos  should mark every Sept. 21  thereafter as “National Thanksgiving Day.”

People Power shredded  this “thanksgiving”  charade  in February 1986. But Imelda, and cronies, insist, for over four decades now, that  we fall on our knees  for  “the most democratic period in our history.”

Marcoses and allies badger President Beningo Aquino III to authorize the burial of  Marcos’ corpse in Libingan ng mga Bayani. S              ub-rosa work on a Libingan masoleum had been aborted. Protests  erupted  that it fractured  a pledge,  given to then President Fidel Ramos, that Marcos remains would be buried, days after arrival of  the coffin  from Hawaii.

The  resistance of  families, many with kin in Libingan graves, hasn’t  subsided. The Marcoses now  accept  the “Jejomar” formula, for an Ilocos Norte tomb, Vice President Binay told  media  in an  August  visit to  Laoag City.

What Binay calls, without blushing, his “Solomonic”  formula stipulates  laurels at all cost. Whether in Libingan or Ilocos, there must  be military honors.  Bogus war medals, extrajudicial murders and massive human rights infractions to  governance rot will be smudged over.

Marcos’ children “want to foist their father on us as a hero,” Inquirer’s Conrad de Quiros groused. “It is not a matter of geography, it is a matter of principle…. Ilocos Norte has not yet become a ‘sub-state’ of the Republic, free to make its own rules, its own laws, its own interpretation of history.”

There is, however, the more pernicious  “sub-state” of the subservient mind-set. It  would not  recognize truth anywhere. Under Marcos  what  was  theft in Manila morphed into  a financial bonanza in Batac. Suppression of dissent, on college campuses, was seen, by folk in Sarat, as trouncing  communists. “The  will is deaf and  hears no heedful  friends,” Shakespeare rued.

Today’s squabble for preburial laurels is best summarized in these two concise paragraphs: “There may be some who… consider it necessary  that we should praise to one another the dead… (We see )   the kind of posthumous  deification, sometimes accorded to those who die in the possession of public power….

“This is the tawdry privilege of the despot,  to be given at burial, as a pure formality, with tongue in cheek, ‘the honors of a god.’ It cannot bring anything but shame… to  (those) devoted  to the democratic  way of life.”

These lines were, in fact, written 41 years before Marcos’ demise in 1989. These  paragraphs come from  the April 24, 1948,  homily, delivered by  Filipino historian Horacio de la Costa, SJ, in Washington DC.  .Fr.  De La Costa  concelebrated a requiem Mass at St.  Matthew’s Cathedral, for the late President  Manuel  Roxas.

Unplanned, Fr. De La  Costa’s discourse provides  criteria for today’s Ilocos  controversy. “He stands now, this man to whom a sovereign people entrusted the high exercise of sovereignty,”   he wrote then. “He stands alone. No one avails to speak for him or against him. He is beyond our praise or blame. He is alone with God.

“(His ) record stands for every citizen to scrutinize, to weigh, and as he deems it good, to approve or to condemn. Let it stand, then, without embellishment or diminution. Let it stand as he had left it, the record of a man who had served them well or  ill.

“There let us leave him, bathed in the serene and shadowless light of Truth. The  final reckoning of what he was and did belongs to keener eyes than ours; far keener eyes, yet also beyond measure kindlier, for they are the eyes of Him in whom justice and mercy are not only inseparable, but one.”

Will  the principles that De La Costa sketched, in broad strokes, be equally relevant  for future  interments? Like all of us,  Joseph  Estrada and  Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will  one  day  return to the  dust from which we all  came. Open  Libingan’s gates, from heroes to include, without exception,  former presidents, suggests former Rene Saguisag. That’d  head off future quarrels.

F.r De La Costa died in 1977. He didn’t see how  Corazon Aquino  would  ensure peaceful transfer of  power. His 1948  homily provides an  apt  preview.

“Civil authority is not personal but public. It belongs to no one, either by right of birth, or in virtue of some real or  imagined excellence, over other men, whether it be wealth, intelligence or power .

“It belongs to the people, who may entrust it to whomsoever they freely choose. Neither does it endow the man, to whom it is entrusted, with any special gift of impeccability or infallibility. He may not claim thereby ‘the divinity that doth hedge a king.’

“His is a burden, not a privilege. He must spend himself in the public interests as though they were his own.  Yet he may not derive any personal profit from his position. He is held accountable always for the authority  he holds in trust.

“When his  mandate is revoked,  he must be willing to relinquish that authority and return, a private citizen, to the ranks from which he came. Let him not expect any reward but the consciousness of having done his duty and served his people and his God.

“Often he will get no reward but this. Nay, he may find in the end his name vilified, his motive misrepresented, his deeds misjudged.    Austere are the laurels of the republic.”