I don't know if anyone remembers the 1988 made-for-television film A Dangerous Life, but it was, I think, an Australian production employing Filipino, Australian, and some American actors made to dramatize the then-recent EDSA Revolution which saw the Philippines oust a dictator who had been in power for nearly two decades, Ferdinand Marcos, and install as their President the widow of one of Marcos' slain political rivals.
Time passed, and people gradually fell out of love with the Aquino administration, blaming it for the admittedly several problems that beset the country at the time, not the least of which were the widespread and frequent power outages that hit the entire countryside at varying times. They were a little happier to have her hand-picked successor (and former Marcos right hand, ironically enough) Fidel V. Ramos as president for six years, but by and large Cory remained a highly respected figure, especially for having been at the forefront of the restoration of the democratic process to our country.
Things started getting a little strange after Joseph "Erap" Estrada was elected President in 1998. One of the first things he seemed determined to do was to restore the Marcoses to their old glory, starting with the burial of former strongman Ferdie Marcos himself in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, which basically opened a lot of wounds that had only just healed, with some still in the process of healing. He was a marked man after that, and when he basically handed over the reins to his then-VP Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001 one of the people presiding over "EDSA Dos" was Cory Aquino.
After the much-debated elections in 2004 in which GMA was proclaimed President at the expense of previous favorite, the late movie star Fernando Poe, Jr., things started to get a little crazy, particularly when the "Hello Garci" scandal broke out.
Cory Aquino knew or had a good idea of what it was like to have been cheated out of an election considering that was what is widely believed to have happened during the "Snap Elections" of 1986 and so she joined the growing clamor against GMA, the first time she ever stood against a sitting President she effectively helped install three years ago.
But that was just part of the craziness.
Suddenly, the Presidential Commission for Good Governance, the PCGG which had been formed under the aegis of the Aquino administration for the purpose of recovering the billions of pesos of allegedly ill-gotten wealth from the Marcos family and their cronies and for prosecuting the people responsible for gorging themselves on the national treasury for years, was attempting all kinds of kooky ex-deals designed to get the Marcoses off the hook in exchange for what was believed by some to be a token amount of the sequestered fortunes. Having worked there for over a year I wasn't too happy to read about these developments.
The next thing that appalled me was that in the bout between GMA and Cory Aquino, it was the latter who was, in several eyes anyway, apparently coming off worse. A lot of people were starting to say that Cory had become irrelevant and some insinuations as well as outright pronouncements were made that she was a hindrance to progress. That the palace would make these remarks was, of course, understandable, but that some writers picked up on it was downright confounding. Here we had an icon of democracy up against a person who had apparently engaged in massive fraud to attain the Presidency, and yet the general sentiment was the ignore the former and support the latter.
In truth, I could actually understand the general sentiment of weariness with "People Power," especially considering the opportunistic scumbags who were, from 2004 to sometime last year when they all started going their separate ways in preparation for their respective bids for the presidency, joining the bandwagon. Heck, it was widely whispered that Ramos used the "equity of the incumbent" to triumph over Miriam Defensor-Santiago back in 1992 but no one was nailing him to the cross for it (though admittedly FVR never had a "Hello Garci" recording to try to explain).
What I couldn't understand was how it happened that brickbats were suddenly being flung at Cory for trying to call for some accountability.
Now, though I was just a kid when EDSA happened, as I got older I had a better perspective of things, and I can honestly say I was never so high on the Cory Kool-Aid to be blinded to some of her poorer judgment calls while she was in power. A Mendiola massacre occurred on her watch, for one thing, and of course the controversy of family-owned Hacienda Luisita never quite left the public consciousness, not to mention the infamous Kamag-Anak, Inc. that made the proverbial hay while the sun was shining.
But for goodness' sake, the extent to which she was actually villified was really rather flabbergasting. I just didn't get it at all.
And then, somewhere in the middle of all this, people were talking about someone making a movie about the Marcoses starring Hollywood stars like Brad Pitt as Ferdinand Marcos and Julia Roberts or some other Hollywood it-girl as Imelda (granted, it could easily have been a rumor started by the member of the Marcos family itself or one of their sycophants)! Fortunately a not-quite-flattering portrayal of Imelda hit theaters a few years ago in a documentary about her, but I just couldn't contain the WTF impulses that possessed me then.
When Cory died, though, although it was sad to see her go, I was genuinely glad to see things suddenly turning right again.
Suddenly people remembered that the Marcoses had plundered the country and murdered people, crimes for which they have yet to be held fully accountable (at least Imelda anyway, considering that Ferdie could well be paying for it all already where he's gone). Suddenly GMA properly started looking like pond scum again, especially after she and some of her select lackeys, during this period of widespread mourning, were found to have gorged themselves on a million pesos worth of food in some restaurant in New York (where the food isn't even reportedly that good). Suddenly it's Cory whose life story will be made into a movie, albeit with local talent, though who would really want white boys and girls to play Filipinos anyway?
At least in some ways, the world is again as it should be.
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