The
Long Apology of Imee Marcos
Flip, Issue no. 3 Vol. no. 2
By Roby Alampay
THE REPRESENTATIVE
FROM ILOCOS NORTE IS PROTECTED BY A FORCE FIELD OF IRONY AND IRREVERENCE,
SHE NEEDS IT.
APART
FROM THE PROTAGONISTS nobody really knows what went on in Boracay when
commercial model Borgy Manotoc bashed in some punk's sorry face. At this
point, who cares? His mother was quickly contrite, and that was easily
the story. Never mind Borgy, and never mind that the violence never made
it to the police blotter. This last fact merely underscored the surprise
in what was to come: an official and very public apology from Rep. Imee
Marcos-the Marcos of the moment.
When news of the fight made it to the papers, Filipinos in everything from suits to sandos snorted, scoffed, harrumphed or chortled in schadenfreude. Here was the validation of their most superficial judgment of a young man who was being exactly that: a young man. It is his misfortune to be the member of no ordinary family, and a young Marcos getting into trouble...it wasn't exactly to form or type, but it wasn't unexpected, either. Surely, people felt, there was something in the boy that would manifest the traits of his notorious bloodline. More than the hundreds of cases pending before the Presidential Commission on Good Government, the Sandigan-bayan, the US courts, and the Commission on Human Rights, for one day it was the strongman's grandson's run-in with the law-and then the law pleading ignorance about his actions-that reminded people why they found his' heart-throb popularity and commercial endorsements so troubling.
So there. He's a Marcos. It figures.
But just as a bar-brawling Borgy convinced every-one that nothing's changed about the family, a sincerely sorry Imee suddenly gave everyone reason to wonder. By publicly calling him "stupid", Imee not only made him a son like everybody else's, but she made her family and name reasonable like everybody else's.
About the mother and the apology people weren't sure what to say, except that this went against the pistol-whipping, drag racing, film-center-burying, torturing legend of a family so associated with the abuse of power that they've become the embodiment of the adage. Power means never having to say you're sorry. There was a time when nobody could call them wrong, or even pronounce them dead. This is a family so used to never surrendering the upper hand or the high ground, so much so that urban legend has it that
BongBong Marcos isn't even BongBong, remember?
The incumbent governor of Ilocos Norte is supposedly a stand-in for the Ferdinand Marcos Jr. who died/was killed at a time when any hint of vulnerability or even mortality in the First Family was denied and covered up. Long before the dictator denied replacing his kidney, he replaced his son with a dead-ringer nephew. Such is the legend whence the apology springs; consequently, the apology is more remarkable than what survives of the legend.
I had wanted to ask Rep. Marcos about Borgy (I knew better than to ask where her real brother is buried). But she had a 1ot of things on her mind as we began to talk. She started by warning that in less than two hours she would have to dash to Cagayan de Oro to grace some event at some school once named after her lolo-say it with me-Don Mariano. Not only is the school now named something else, but - horrors- Ms. Marcos is genuinely afraid of missing her flight.
Who
would have thought?
They say her mother once ordered a 747 back to Rome midway through its flight to New York to pick up some cheese. In those days, Filipinos couldn't con-firm anything, so they believed everything. On a certain fond level, Imee herself will acknowledge one thing about all those trips.
"Because my parents didn't travel together, either you went with my mom or my dad," she said. "The Cabinet members, the legislators, everybody wanted to go with my mom. My mom was really The Best. Everything would be, like, first class, you're fed so well, and it was so much fun."
And the free shopping sprees? I ask.
"Oh, man, she was so The Bomb. My mom's The Bomb. I mean, it's really so much fun. And you're always singing and dancing because there's always musicians, because they're all her friends, and there's always a great show at night and you get fed so well."
Wait a minute: The entourage is how big?
"It's really so cool," she goes on, and I wonder again if she heard me. "You'd have Placido Domingo and all these groovy people, it was just so cool. And Margot Fontaine was like her best buddy. You'd have these really, really amazing shows. You'd have all these cellists and pianists and everybody was The Best.
"On the other hand you'd go with my daaaad, and it was so paaaiinful! Basically you'd draw dry rations 'coz you'd be starved, right, because he only had this little thermos of lugaw (congee) which he never shared, thank you, and it was just awful, because he was forever masakit ang tiyan (complaining of a stomach ache), which now is happening to me, and I now have this little thermos of lugaw which I, like, guard tooth and nail against anyone who's gonna get it kasi humahapdi rin ang tiyan ko (because now I'm getting stomach pains as well). It was awful. The point is, it was so hard being with him because of all the work, there was so much utos (orders). He thought eating was a waste of time. Sana may tableta raw, parang vitamins, para mabilis lang ang kain. (He wished for tablets, like vitamins, that would take the place of meals.) So with my dad buying food was like this really subversive activity."
She mentions all this because apart from her commitments in Cagayan de Oro, she also has the groceries at the back of her mind. Unlike her dad, she needs food, and "'neeeeds" even more to go get it herself.
"I really need to go and buy food. I really need to go and buy school supplies and office equipment. It makes me feel normal when I run my own errands. When I take my clothes to the cleaner and get the kosturera to do stuff. I'll do really stupid stuff that I can get other people to do, but it's a real crying need. I need to go to a palengke. I need to buy my own ballpens."
Such is her way of "getting to normal," she says.
I look at her on this one afternoon. Prior to our interview, in the middle of rushing to the airport, she had come from her regular morning radio program with Manongs Ernie Maceda and Juan Flavier, and squeezed in some time at the gym. Now she is in blue jogging pants, a red Mao T-shirt, and less than Imeldific hair. Picking up the laundry, keeping a son in line, running to the gym, showing up bedraggled and unescorted for an interview. Not perhaps the best, I say, but is this, in fact, as normal as it gets?
"I don't know that presidential children even know what a 'normal life' means," she says.
True. But then again, not so fast. It would be too easy and too wrong to put her down there with a teenage Kris, a full-blown Jinggoy, or, for that matter, the truly ordinary Jo, Ballsy, Noynoy, Mikey, Dato, and Luli. They-and a handful of other presidential siblings not even possible to remember-were never really children in the Palace. Kris herself was a bud-ding teener when Cory was in Malacañang, and even then she was less the youngest daughter of the President than the orphaned baby of a man martyred in opposition to Marcos. Gloria, maybe. Then again, the little girl was in and out of the Palace in four years.
But Imee. But BongBong and Irene.
Face it: Before and after the Marcos kids, nobody really grew up in Malacañang.
Ma. Imelda Romualdez Marcos was ten when she first walked into the Palace next to her father, and she was 31 by the time her family was run out of the country. Note that by family, we also mean her own immediate family. She had taken on a different surname, had become Mrs. Manotoc, mother of two, educated in London, Princeton, and Morocco, a lawyer, highly articulate in more than seven languages including Ilocano and co/7o, a television and film producer, and herself a national leader-the head of a whole new youth-oriented level of government tailor-made for the presidential daughter. When it was all over, she was her own person, complete with her own corruption and human rights abuse cases. Her bodyguards, it was said, once tortured a heckler of the Kabataang Barangay Chairman. More than her nurturing years, her whole person was shaped by an assured permanence in power. Even if GMA-all grown up now-were to have nine years as president under a Constitution that only allows six, she will still have spent less time in the abnormal environs of Malacañang than the eldest daughter of the deposed dictator.
Normal? One wonders if Imee Marcos-in whose name it is said the Beatles were beaten up at the Manila International Airport- even has any idea what being a normal presidential child means.
Now
she has three kids, is 48, though she apparently inherited something of
the notorious ageless glow of her mother. Nicotine-stained teeth notwithstanding,
she is unblemished, much younger-looking than her years. She's obviously
bright, personable, and funny, traits she attributes to both parents,
and that has served her well in a Congress teeming with people who have
long called the Marcoses enemies, even evil. On the cover of this magazine,
for instance, are fellow congressmen who call themselves martial law victims.
Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin Jr.'s father, Philippines Free Press publisher
and editor Teodoro Locsin Sr. was one of the first to be arrested on the
night of September 21, 1972. Bayan Muna Rep. Satur Ocampo, leader of the
communist National Democratic Front, was jailed and tortured for years.
Finding some modus vivendi with such members of the House of Representatives was awkward at first, but-another irony- Imee and her enemies can thank God for the United States. When Ms. Marcos became the first to stand on the floor to take the Arroyo administration to task for its "all-out support for the US war against international terrorists", and when she questioned the direction of "allowing the US to use Subic and dark for such purpose", Ocampo stood up to acknowledge the "fresh and surprising wind from the North". Imee Marcos assured "the gentleman from Bayan Muna that we will not always find ourselves on opposite sides of issues" or words to that effect. Later on, she deferred to Manong Satur to take on the cudgels of the anti-US troops campaign. He would be more effective and credible, she conceded. On another day, in a break during a committee hearing, Imee approached the former rebel leader: "Did you know, sir, that you have a namesake in my province?" she said. "One of our city hall officials is named Saturnine Ocampo Jr." The congressman said it "broke the ice" without necessarily melting the past beyond recognition.
"We're all like anti-war, anti-American troops, anti-American basing and all that stuff, and we've worked on things together," Rep. Marcos assures me. "I think it's good that Manang Etta (Resales) and Satur, who were obviously on the wrong side of me in many of the Sandigan-bayan cases, were nevertheless able to work together with me. Now Noynoy Aquino and I, for some reason, we've landed on the wrong side of Angelo Reyes together as well. I'd like to think I have a good working relationship with everyone."
As for what they think of working with her, "You'll have to ask them. I'm cool. I don't care. I think they're fine with me, but you'll have to ask them, too."
What she insists she does care about is nurturing the current representation in the legislature. "I think it's cool that Congress has so many personalities, that we're not so cookie-cutter, we don't all have one face," she says. "It's cool. There will be no point in having Congress if we're all going to be the same on every single issue. You need to have a really lively debate going and all these dissenting opinions. It's dangerous when government men begin to look alike, all from the same school, you know. We simply can't have that."
That's what everybody else said, of course, when her father dissolved both Houses of Congress and put in their place a rubber-stamp Batasan monopolized by their party, the Kilusang Bagong Lipunan. But Imee Marcos is only happy to be ironic, even perceived to be deliberately naive about The Marcos Years.
Fact is, everything she does can too easily be mocked. When she questioned the legality of military checkpoints just about everywhere, she railed against what she saw as "shades of martial law". Oops. She filed House Bill 04057: An Act Defining Organized Crime. Haw! Ms. Marcos has filed and sponsored countless resolutions on women, student rights, OFWs, and the empowerment of the every sector, and in every case, there is no escaping the irony. Indeed, in same cases, she's asking for it.
In a Malaya article last 9/11-her father's birthday, that is-Imee called for an "objective" appreciation of The Marcos Era. "As a member of the succeeding generation who knows too little about our past," she said, "the time has come to study intently, intensely, dispassionately, completely, the Marcos era, before, during and following the martial law period, applying intellectual rigor over emotion, scholarship, not partisanship."
Knows too little about our past?
Critics were quick to pounce. The looting! they screamed. The beatings, the killings, the terror, the muzzling of the press, the infection of a culture, the aggravated poverty... She didn 't know?
Imee doesn't deny that all of that went on. But officially she still pleads to see the evidence directly tying her father to, say, specific "salvaging" cases. "We are willing to apologize provided we know what we are supposed to say sorry for," she was recently quoted as saying. She urged Filipinos to "look at us with an open mind and give us a chance."
You
can believe them or not. Either way you laugh. With, at, or against them.
"Unfortunately, we have this whole palace-palace-thing, martial law, tararararat," she says. "But if you speak to any one of us, it's a hugely irreverent family," which is to say they can handle any questions now, if not necessarily answer them. They're aware of how they're perceived, she acknowledges, but that's not the stuff that can hold them back. "My mom gives shoe scarves as gifts-scarves that have shoes printed on them, neckties full of shoes," for example. "She thinks it's a farce, very tongue in cheek."
And her? Can she even say "Imeldific"? "Oh I use the word all the time! Nonstop. I always check out clothes and bags and shoes and I always accuse people of being Imeldific." She qualifies though that she doesn't know how other Filipinos would use the word.
Oh, I don't know, I volunteer... to mean insensitively ostentatious? Callously flamboyant?
"I just basically use it to say bongga," Imee says. "Sometimes the congresswomen are so matching to death, I go, 'You are sooooo Imeldific!' They're matching within an inch of their lives and I think it's so cool, they look so good. But I don't know that my mom would say it."
In that sense, Imee is Imeldific. She is so cool. She looks so good. But I don't know that our moms would say it.
A Marcos, after all, is still a Marcos. When I ask if she thinks any of the third generation of their family-everyone from Borgy in Manila to Irene's kids in Makati and BongBong's in Ilocos, and for that matter. Little Aimee in London who's studying to be a lawyer-would ever enter politics, when I ask if she thinks there will ever be another President Marcos, she laughs. "Aren't these types supposed to be wiped out for three generations to keep the world safe?"
I'm not sure exactly what she means, but I guess she's being irreverent.
"The truth is, I myself never wanted to enter politics. It's my second term. That probably says it all. I'm a very reluctant politician but also a dutiful child. Basically my brother bludgeoned me into it, and my deal with the family was, OK, two terms. Three terms is useless, one term is too short to do any good. But that's it. I'm the type that reads a lousy book to the very end all because I started it. So now nandyan na ako so kailangan panindigan na. (I'm here, I might as well finish it.)"
BongBong, she says for the record, is not a reluctant politician, and Irene, "is simply the smartest" for not being one by any definition. As for Borgy and the next generation: "I don't know if any-one of them likes politics, but of course neither did we. Unfortunately, I think there's no escaping the family name. So they're doomed," Imee says.
Or maybe not.
"On the other hand," the mother suddenly realizes, "the only ones still carrying the family name are Bong's."
Whew.