INQUIRER Global Nation

NEW YORK, United States?They came to bury Cory, and to praise her. Former president Corazon C. Aquino?s death on August 1 occasioned an outpouring of national grief similar to the paroxysms the country experienced when Ninoy, her husband, was assassinated in 1983, by a murderous, dictatorial regime.

Both shuffled off their mortal coil in the month of August, though 23 years apart. And just as the massive crowds that lined the streets to pay tribute to a man who believed the Filipino ?worth dying for? were a collective middle finger in the face of the conjugal dictatorship, so too did the hundreds of thousands of mourners, lining the route of the funeral cortege, signal their intense displeasure with the current dispensation. They flashed the Laban sign, held aloft Cory portraits, and wished in their hearts that the plainspoken lady were still with them.

The comparison between the departed and the sitting president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did nothing to elevate the stature of the latter; quite the contrary, it diminished her. As imperfect as Cory?s administration was, everyone acknowledges that she restored democratic rule, attempted to bridge ideological divides early on (though resisted mightily by the right, with seven coup attempts that kept shattering both the economy and civil governance), ordered the drafting of the 1987 Constitution to replace the Marcos-era one, and, perhaps most tellingly, resisted the sordid tradition of public office: to pickpocket the public purse?though the same was never said of certain of her

family members.

The public display of mourning has been double-edged, as it was in 1983: grief at the demise of the first female leader of an Asian nation who never wished to stay in power one day more than necessary, and rage mixed in with a sense of betrayal, that President Macapagal-Arroyo, for all her rhetoric, remains oblivious to the substantial erosion of civil liberties and seems intent of remaining in Malacañang beyond the constitutional limits. By now, GMA has been president of the Philippines longer than any other chief executive, except, of course, for Ferdinand Marcos. There but for the grace of Marcos goes Marcos.



There is a difference, however, between the tears shed in 1983 and in 2009. To paraphrase the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, it isn?t just Cory but ourselves we mourn for. In more than two decades, where have we gone as a nation? What have we learned? We have moved much but not, it seems to me, forward. We may have learned that history repeats itself; yet, having learned that, we repeat ourselves, again and again. The ghosts that we fooled ourselves into believing we had exorcised in those heady days of People Power are still a presence, not just haunting us but living among us, laughing at, nay, mocking us. Has anyone of the Marcos cronies, who stole on a heroic scale, ever spent a day behind bars? These flesh-and-blood ghosts keep crowding out the angels of our better

nature.

Cory?s demise made me remember late February 1986 in New York, how the bitter cold of winter was relieved by the indescribable warmth of a hope long held and now made real, that the pretend-monarch and his pretend-queen be banished from the magical isles. It was a feeling of expurgation, a tumor (or two) excised from the body politic. And here was a middle-aged martyr?s widow, clad in yellow, a neophyte in politics, embodying the possibility that a nation could redeem itself. Every Filipino I knew who hadn?t been part of the loyalist gang released a long-held breath in a massed cry of exultation; we were amazed as we watched via TV the historic drama that unfolded in the streets of Manila and witnessed the raw emotions and courage of citizens triumph against the armed minions of the state?an unrivalled feat that inspired similar moments in Berlin, Moscow, Tiananmen, and Prague.

The nation put on a display worthy of the world?s applause. Beggarman and matron, taxi dancer and taxi driver, the proles and the burgis, took to the streets, shouted defiant, humorous slogans, braved tanks and soldiers, reveled in devil-may-care attitudes, and unseated a dictator. Great, terrific, wonderful: the lyrical, unscripted moment, the defiant dance on the edge of the abyss?this is what we cherish and what we have since tried to re-create. As any poet will tell you, however, lyrical moments, precisely because of their fleeting nature, are evanescent.

Getting rid of megalomaniacs is the easy part. The difficulty comes, always, the morning after?an after we shy away from. Constructing a solid democracy is a difficult, painful, laborious, never-ending process?not poetry but plain, structured prose, though when completed successfully may attain the level of poetry. In a recent New York Times article by Seth Mydans, ?Filipinos Lament How Far They Haven?t Come,? he quotes Teresita Barcelo, the Philippine Nurses Association president talking about 1986: ?We thought all we needed to do was remove the dictator and do nothing about it. We thought the problem was the dictator. I say the problem is us. We did not change.? Indeed. As glorious as People Power was, it was simply a beginning, a fresh start, not a magic wand that would rid us of accumulated bad karma.



Cory?s death has prompted a sense of déjà vu, not all of it somber. One of the more hilarious but also infuriating sideshows has been the $20,000 dinner President Arroyo and her entourage had at Le Cirque, one of the most expensive restaurants in this city, the night after Cory had died. One goes to Le Cirque not so much for the food but to see and be seen (or to sin and be sinned against). Not surprisingly, pretend-queen Imelda Marcos waded into the fray, and took the media to task for raising such a fuss, most likely prompted by the fact that the president?s press office claimed Imelda?s kinsman Congressman Martin Romualdez picked up the tab. In her view the sum involved was nothing out of the ordinary. The lady can?t help it: In her days of lavish spending in this borough, what would $20,000 have meant?

Nothing. Peanuts (albeit sacks and sacks?and sacks--of them) compared to purchasing whole buildings or shutting down the likes of Saks, Cartier, or Bloomingdale?s so she and her big-haired ladies could shop to their hearts? content. By such offhand remarks, La Imelda gives the impression that New Yorkers live the high life, a site-specific variation on the clichéd image of America as every consumer?s wet dream.



I thought of that the other day as a friend and I consumed a good lunch at a Japanese restaurant in the East Village, for the royal total of $20, tip and tax included. At that rate, it would take three years worth of lunches to equal $20,000. The truth is, so many of us here, of all stripes, struggle to stay afloat; $20,000 to most New Yorkers is a princely sum, to many, a year?s wages.

And to the impoverished masa, $20,000 is a cold abstraction, and being admonished not to take offense at the president splurging that in one night is the equivalent of being asked to eat cake. Not too difficult, I suppose. As a nation we?ve been accustomed to eating humble pie for so long, I don?t see that changing anytime soon, despite all the sound and fury.