IT WAS the sight of the "huge umbrellas" hoisted above their heads by barong-clad men that brought home the point that they are back. The Philippine’s version of the royalty were there to bury their king while the troops outside kept a divided citizenry at bay.
The dissonance is strong for the feudal set. Amid the just clamor for the Marcoses to come to terms with their sins, they respond in apparent honest confusion about what is it that they need to apologize for.
In their minds, they are also victims of vindictive political processes but have been gung ho about its consequences. At some point, they even identify the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) as the secret power behind their ouster and they could be right actually. Here they are now, asking for a private burial for their father and their family. Must we crash and disrupt their solemn moment?
The oft-repeated argument is that Marcos did not know what the constabulary, military, and his generals were doing. To which the public replied with an uprising. Remember that the arrests, disappearances, and torture were all undertaken to quell resistance and keep him and his family in power.
The thing is Marcos and his family are hardly the innocent politicians that they imagine themselves to be. For some strange reason, no doubt aided by an embedded and enduring patronage system, there remains a great sense of entitlement over the billions of public funds they plundered, earning them the sole accolade as the world’s greatest thieves. It does not help that succeeding administrations were also poor copycats of the Marcoses in terms of appropriating public money for private gain. They must have chuckled over the small amounts of the pork and DAP (Disbursement Acceleration Program) scandal of the previous administration.
The dictatorship also had the sole distinction of corrupting to the core our public institutions in his two-decade rule. The military will forever be burdened by their complicity to the designs of the strongman. Then and now, they remain the designated storm troopers of whoever sits in Malacañang.
The corruption that still infests our bureaucracy was institutionalized during his time. For Marcos, it was about securing the largest cut of the pie, while keeping the generals and the politicians happy with their share.
All these sound strangely contemporary, doesn’t it? Because the Marcoses and their kind have never really left. It is a system that we are confronting and not personalities. But the interesting thing is that the motives of the semi-feudal semi-colonial order manifest themselves in families and the Marcoses played their role as overlords of Philippine society to the hilt.
In a society that has allowed such barbarism to exist and continue to exist, everyone is complicit. But the Marcoses have blood on their hands for displaying no conscience about their abuse of power then and even now.
That is why the image of umbrellas hoisted by barong-clad men was a poignant and disturbing sight. They are still being raised to keep shade for new and different principals. The servility and patronage for feudal masters are enduring in these parts; the reason why the condemnation of a sector that had the same proclivity for entitlement and social privilege sound grating to the ears especially now post burial.
There are different gradients to the social anger that has been unleashed on our streets and on the interwebs after the hurried burial of the dictator at the National Heroes Cemetery. There are those who are angered by the memory of all the abuses and excesses that the Marcoses represent and look at subsequent administrations as the anti-thesis to all that was wrong with the dictatorship. They lament the defeat of their principals and fear the return of a dictatorial rule with the present disposition.
And yet, there are those who see Marcos and the subsequent administrations after him as recurring symptoms of a moribund system, the latest iteration of which is the Duterte presidency. Because let us be honest. Has political patronage really left us? This whole brouhaha was precipitated by a political debt after all. But in the whole, we also have to ask: have we rid ourselves of corrupt practices in our bureaucracy both public and private? Have we seen the end of the military sowing terror in rural communities? Have we seen the end of a rapacious kind of political entitlement that trammels upon civil rights?
The specter of Marcos is very much alive and present because we have not exorcised him and the system he represents. Only a revolution can do that.
