yellow friday

(article written and published days before Cory died)

RESTING PLACE Cory giving one last look at her husband

There really is no use faking it: former President Corazon C. Aquino is dying.

This is a sort of reckoning that is much more closer to home, much more disheartening than all of Jacko’s dysfunctional tragedy combined. This is a summation that makes angels of us all if you disregard completely any news of allegedly hiding under the bed and the failure of litigating those ill-gotten wealth of that infamous conjugality. But, by and large, the former president has done her job well; we simply could not ask for more other than thanking her in saving us from the fires of hell and leading the country away from further burning.

Cory Aquino was not a clever president. Ask Juan Ponce Enrile and he will tell you in gruesome detail how he wanted to establish a government of his own, after Cory dug him out of Marcos, by brainwashing a bunch of deluded soldiers and attacking unmindfully the administration that saved him.

Cory Aguino was not a talented president. Ask Imelda Marcos and she will tell you in dramatic fashion that had the people been patient with them, the country would still relish what is “good, true and beautiful,” and that it would turn all the Filipino people eventually into “angels”, green with prosperity.

Cory Aquino was not an adept president. Ask Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and she will tell you covertly how she proficiently turned the constitution into a sunny-side up so she could relish the very next morning the possibility of a parliamentary form of breakfast.

There has been so many bad vibes circulating around the presidency of Corazon Aquino. Some of these criticisms were simply too much, considering the shift she has gone through from a relatively plain housewife of a particularly high-strung senator to an instantly revered political figure, perceived then to be the savior of a fragmented nation. Cory’s faults has their own excuse for being, her sudden hands-on training on big time politics simply outweighing her desire to save the nation eventually in the end from its corrupt predecessor. And no amount of analysis would question Cory’s place in the history of Philippine politics; she will be ultimately remembered as the country’s quintessential transitional president.

For all her contributions to the restoration of democracy immediately after the revolution, Cory Aquino, despite being perceived to be laid-back and lenient about her governance, was probably the only president in the nation’s diverse political turf to have governed the country without even actually trying to. Hers was a government that tried to test the bounds of its newly-installed democracy with a new sense of innocence and the prospect of unlimited possibilities. Most of her provisions as well as her projection of how that new-found freedom would be saddled were in the form trying to accommodate constantly her constituents, giving her the image of a self-sacrificing medium to that all-important electorate who gave her that equally all-important scepter to wield against corruption and greed. Like a funnel that channels the flow of water to the bottle, Cory simply funneled the dregs of that bottled dictatorship, and let the flow of democracy spill over to those who haven’t tasted it.

We owe a lot to Cory what we now take for granted most of the time. Lest we forget that immediately after Cory was sworn in as the new chief executive of the land at the social hall of the Club Filipino, the entire nation was already on the heels of unleashing an unbridled form of freedom only a hooligan can probably empathize, not to mention the famous “Yellow Friday” confetti that can only be perceived as a celebration (not as an extension of dictatorship) of a new, unassuming leader. Some of these unbridled passions, however, of expressing a new faith in government were quite bizarre at that time such as in the explosion of graphic sex, sentiment and style in various media outlets, such strong statements that have been repressed over a span of twenty dictatorial years. Cory, despite her motherly approach to the revolution, was quite liberal in giving those post-martial law babies a flow of that milk.

So liberal that, at one point, most of those who were seeking for a seat in the government must first ask an endorsement from a Namfrel chairman. Practically all of those sitting in the government were basically appointees, and the new politics was enforced in the assumption of whether you have supported the revolution or not. Back issues of newspapers and footages on TV went out of the repressive tunnel, indirectly strengthening the assertions of Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel Ramos. All these, and many more, we owe a lot to Cory, or at least, in theory, since she became the focal point of that new lease of political life.

If and when Cory goes home to her husband, which, in all probability, will happen, probably the last citadel of innocent democracy, which we all felt after Apo left the country, will slowly crumble in our ears and will eventually remain a profound refuge to the lost and the loud alike.

Despite her frailness, her soft-spoken anger, her being a woman incapable of asserting herself through a generation of “male-dominated” governance, Cory was able to wade through, not only in a series of coups, but in laying plainly the foundation of restraining political assertiveness in exchange for sobriety, sincerity and self-sacrificing attitude we desperately need nowadays.

Of course, the failure of the PCGG in sequestering all those ill-gotten wealth of the Marcoses would forever mar her administration and those involved in it, but certainly Cory, with all her intentions, good or bad, could not, by force of will alone, reposess the entire goods. Her transitional capacity can only do so much, it simply can’t cover more than that.

In the end, we should all be grateful to Cory for what she was and is, without minding the bad publicity that her hysterical daughter has made and those alleged political squabbles of her relatives, which somehow cast, at one point, a resounding concern on her part. But Cory remains to this day a kind of an enlightened crusader, not in a Mother Theresa sort of spirituality, but in embracing constantly the agonies of Philippine society and treating it like a son, kept away from any brutality, trafficking and exploitation.

Let us all pray for Cory. Let us all, in unison, agree that whoever goes down, which we all must, soon, that we can, at least, cut the ropes that entangle us to each other like a tourniquet. Let us all hope that if and when she goes back to dust from whence she came from, that part of those pains she longs to have some peace from, including the death of her husband, will finally take some long, deserved rest, along with the ills of the society she reinstated indirectly and a nation she led almost three decades ago.

(photo, wofflings.wofflehouse.com)