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TAPANG
O TALINO: NINOY'S LEGACY It comes and passes once every year, that throbbing tell-tale wind rattling on our memory that something very important happened August 21, 1983. No other day remains as vivid in my mind, except perhaps Sept. 21, 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed martial rule. In fact, the two events are inextricably linked. Ninoy Aquino was arrested 30 years ago on the second date, died 19 years ago on the first date. In between, the two men engaged in a stirring historic duel, the memory of which gives me the shivers until now. That duel has seeped into the body politic and continues to haunt our nation like two ghosts from the past wrestling in the national psyche. Marcos of course represented everything that was coarse in our culture, corrupt in our politics, polluted in our social being. In fact, the country has still to recover from his 20-year reign when power was installed as the only demi-god in Malacañang, when money and riches defined the conduct of our politicians and the elite. Look around you everywhere today. Except for the collapse of the dictatorship, nothing much has really changed. The very poor and the very rich constitute the hardscrabble reality of our society. The first occupies the stricken bone marrow of our land, its slums and squalid squatter colonies, spooled as it were by the tens of millions across the length and breath of the archipelago like God’s forgotten children. Our politicians belong to this second group. They are its executors. They are also the men and women who shepherd the elite’s legislation, the core of which is as precious as all the jewels hoarded at Canterbury – the Crown Jewels.This core is called pork barrel – among many other juicy political perks and entitlements of course. Pork barrel enables our politicians to live like titled nobility. Both Marcos and Ninoy Aquino belonged to the latter world. The similarities end there. Marcos was a relentless bloodhound who knew where all the monies and treasures were buried or to be had. He was Lord Acton’s disciple. He believed in power for power’s sake. He collected cronies the way Lucifer selected his two-horned posse for an attack on the temples. He corrupted the army and the police to make sure a Praetorian guard would secure Malacañang at all times. Ninoy on the other hand was an elitist renegade who had everything that Marcos did not have – courage, convictions, principles. Marcos had his Luger, Ninoy had his rosary. Ever since he was a boy in short pants, Ninoy had a dream. He dreamed he would be as wise and as smart as Manuel Quezon, his idol, and he set forth to realize this dream. He joked that while his then chinky eyes resembled Sergio Osmena, his brains were those of the Great Kastila. But along the way as he set forth, Ninoy dreamed another dream. He wanted to be a hero. A hero in the mould of Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio, yes Mahatma Gandhi. That was unusual, startling even. I do not know of anybody else who wanted to be a hero then, the way Ninoy did. He was probably fantasizing, young and impressionable as he was. But when he enlisted as a cub reporter at the Manila Times, then threw all caution to the winds to cover the Korean War as a war correspondent, you somehow felt this 16-year-old strapping kid was different. He later told me why. He said not having made his mark yet as a journalist, young and inexperienced as he was, if he covered the Korean War with spectacular verve, this would make up. And if, perchance he would die in a blaze of journalistic glory, Chino Roces at the Manila Times would embellish the editorial hall with a "Benigno Aquino Jr. Room" in his memory. That was Ninoy, dreaming all the time, living in a fantasy world that was not really fantasy for he would make it real. Well, he did not die in Korea. He saw it and he covered it as Norman Mailer covered war in his classic "The Naked and the Dead." In several battles, dead bodies piled up on him. He had to wade out of the refuse of dismembered limbs and bodies, the deafening roar of battle as mortar, cannon, bomb and napalm rained. Ninoy was right there in the ebb and flow of men doomed to fight, to suffer and die, talking the short, sputtering language of the soldier trudging from foxhole to foxhole. This was Ninoy Aquino’s first lessons in courage, a 16-year-old Filipino war correspondent with his mother’s milk not yet completely dry on his lips. This was to stand him in good stead. After he married Cory Aquino, Ninoy sought the battleground of politics. From the very beginning he sought to make a difference unlike today’s politicians transfixed by the pot of gold at the end of every session. A blueblood, a certified member of the aristocracy, Ninoy was fascinated by the politics of Tarlac. First, there were the Huks. Now there were the guerillas of the New People’s Army almost all in his province grimy patriotic sons of the soil. As governor, he had to live with them, make peace. For this, he earned the ire of the dictator who intemperately branded Ninoy a communist coddler and sympathizer. Coddler and sympathizer he was not. But Ninoy loved all the attention, provoked more attacks from the dictator, until in the end, all the ballyhoo provided him the brass ring to run for senator. Marcos was furious. Ninoy lived it up. In Malacañang Marcos tramped the palace like a Mafia godfather plotting the next kill. In the Senate, Ninoy had a grand time pulling arrows from his quiver and sticking them. In Marcos’ back. And so it came to pass that when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial rule, the first man he kicked into the calaboose was Ninoy Aquino. And it further came to pass that in Fort Bonifacio, the rebel prisoner had a heart seizure and eventually was allowed to leave the country for a heart bypass in Dallas, Texas. As it came to pass that he took over command of all the anti-Marcos Filipino forces in America. Then came the moment of truth. Ninoy made the fateful decision the time had come for him to return to the Philippines after a three-year exile. Although wicked, malevolent and ruthless as ever, Marcos was stricken with lupus erythematosus. He could die – so Ninoy thought – and Ninoy wanted to get to the ground floor before the dictator expired and his generals led by Fabian Ver would take over the country. Before the communist New People’s Army could switch to the offensive and in five years’ time pound at the gates of Manila. That was the time I was visiting in Boston. And we had long talks. The boyish buoyancy, it seemed, had disappeared. Ninoy was all grit. Everything about him was hunched for the return to Manila. It was a mental gun barrel he could not get out of. Would he be killed? Would the dictator at the very least agree to meet him even for just an hour? Would he be imprisoned again, returned to his cell at Fort Bonifacio? Or this time would the dictator be more lenient, confine him to house arrest? Or would he – since he could not trust Ferdinand Marcos – accept the proposal of his Muslim friends that he return through the backdoor and from there renew political war against the man in the Palace? Or would he take a plane to Tokyo? And from the Narita airport stick it out and dare the dictator to come and get him? Ninoy knew the value of media. He imagined the world’s media pouring into the Narita airport riding the drama that was whirling in his mind. But all those words, all those, schemes, all those scenarios eventually came to a dead stop. Ninoy probably sensed he was going to die. He seemed to have a sure sense of what Ferdinand Marcos was – a coldblooded killer. He and Marcos psychologically encapsuled the Filipino better than anybody else. For that was the essence of their duel – a battle for the heart and mind of the Filipino. He, Benigno Aquino Jr., was going to corner Marcos, better still confront him in the ultimate battleground – that of courage. And so when he posed the question, which was more important for the Filipino, intelligence or courage – talino o tapang – he knew that was where the duel would end. Tapang for Ninoy was the ultimate. And he would show Marcos what bravery was, what the inside of the Filipino was all about. What really mattered when the world stopped and time stood still? Tapang. Everywhere it was tapang. It was blood spilled by the nation’s heroes. Ninoy even resorted to cockpit lore. The best fighting cock was the cock that could soar, that was not afraid of death, whose steel spurs were a deadly whir even when wounded. Ninoy told me in Boston he would be that. Courage in the face of danger. Courage in the face of the dictatorship. Courage unflinching and unwavering. It is always through the blood of martyrs that a nation is born and reborn. Probably even at the time, Ninoy was thinking that way. I looked at him with awe, for that is the way I always feel in the presence of those rare human beings who have no fear when conviction is at stake. I did not realize it was the last time I would see him alive.
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