Cruel month

April is the cruelest month.
—TS Eliot

SEPTEMBER’S THE first of those  months of the year that end in “ber” (September, October, November, December)—its onset signaling, so local wags say, the beginning of the Philippine Christmas season.

Sure enough, your favorite mall usually makes it a point to pipe “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” or even “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas” through the house sound system starting  the whole day of September 1, while your idiot neighbor seizes the opportunity to inflict his version of  “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa Claus” via Karaoke on the entire neighborhood.

It’s not only to remind everyone of the reasons for Karaoke bar shootings and to start shopping for Christmas, however. It’s also in keeping with the  four-month Filipino focus on the holidays, which incidentally used to end only after January 6 of the new year during the now non-existent feast of the three kings.

Filipinos need all the holidays they can celebrate. Not only does the country of their sorrows sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, which makes it prone to earthquakes; it’s also visited by an average of 20 typhoons from July to November, when, in the wake of  floods of Biblical proportions, dengue and leptospirosis are not far behind.

But together with natural disasters, Filipinos also have to cope with such man-made ones such as those in Congress, among them those congressmen and senators who define abortion as the prevention of conception, or who proclaim without choking that anyone can pass off a blog entry as one’s own.

But these atrocities are nothing  compared to that one September 40 years ago when the Marcos administration threw the entire country into confusion, fear and anger by placing it under martial law.

The immediate, public justification was to “save the Republic” from “the Leftist-Rightist conspiracy” and “to reform Philippine society.”

The “Leftist- Rightist conspiracy” was Marcos’ term for the unanimity among even groups of different political persuasions about the character of his administration as oppressive, corrupt and subservient to foreign interests. If that unanimity indicated anything, it was how valid that perception of the  Marcos administration was.

As for reforming Philippine society, the events of the next 14 years during which Marcos was in power would eventually reveal that that was farthest from his mind.

What was nearest his mind was to stay in power, for which purpose he had to suspend the Constitutional ban on a third four-year term as well as the basic law’s human rights provisions.

But staying in power required not only the suspension of that ban, but the suspension as well of the Bill of Rights, of which provisions those on press freedom and the freedom from arbitrary arrest and detention among others were crucial to the suppression of the movement for democratization and social change that was sweeping the country.

Far from intending the reform of Philippine society, the declaration of martial law sought to keep it forever the way it was and how it has since been. When Marcos declared martial law, virtually every sector of Philippine society was on the move, demanding its  political, economic, and social reform and even radical transformation whether while demonstrating in street and factory, or attending teach-ins in countryside and city.

It was that movement the Marcos administration sought to stifle, not only because it directly demanded broader participation in government, but also because if allowed to prosper it would have put an end to a political system that for too long had been the monopoly of a handful of families. To put an end to that movement the Marcos regime arrested and detained, tortured and murdered thousands, many of them the brightest and the best sons and daughters of the Filipino people.

The declaration of martial law was  for this reason—for its cost in the most precious of lives as well as for its cost on all of  Philippine society—the most damaging period in 20th century Philippine history in that it arrested a process that could have so expanded citizen participation in politics and governance it would have ushered in an era of change and development. Martial law was fundamental to keeping the Philippines the  development laggard among the Southeast Asian countries, for unlike the regimes in Malaysia and Singapore, it promised development at the expense of rights, but did not deliver. Marcos was no Lee Kuan Yew or Mahathir. What he was was a quintessential Filipino politician.

April the cruelest month? Not in the Philippines, where September’s at least in contention for that place of dishonor.