'Simple'

'Amoy Amerika'

'Nay

Faces, voices

DNA tests and the death penalty

The dinosaur

THE SHORTEST short story ever written -- in Spanish, at least -- reads: "Cuando desperto, el dinosaurio todavia estaba alli," which translates to an intriguing, "Upon waking, the dinosaur was still there."

That short story won its author, Augusto Monterroso, the Premio Cervantes in 2000, the most prestigious award for literature in Spanish, its one line resonating throughout Latin America because it was actually a political tract. Monterroso used a dinosaur to refer to the Partido Revolucionario Institutional (PRI), which had been in power in Mexico for 71 years.

With political parties sprouting and wilting in the Philippines like mushrooms, we don't have an equivalent of a PRI, but we certainly find ourselves waking up to dinosaurs that won't go away or rather that stay because we want them to.

I wanted to relate this dinosaur story to the 30th anniversary of Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law, observed last Saturday. I worry that each time Sept. 21 rolls around we have the usual rituals of remembering the human rights violations under Marcos, and the extravagance of the conjugal dictatorship. All that is important, but if we want to be sure about our slogan, "Never again," then we need to go beyond the memories of the Marcos era and look at the conditions that led to the imposition and acceptance of martial law.

Note that memories of the horrors of martial law often become a counterpoint to what we presume to be a golden pre-Marcos era of a vibrant economy and a flourishing democracy. Supposedly politicians were a nobler lot then, corruption was minor and people were generally good, kind, and gentle.

That nostalgia for that golden era is built on myths. For example, we often read that the Philippines was one of the most developed countries in the region after World War II, but we forget that our "affluence" came because we received 620 million dollars in US rehabilitation assistance, a huge amount at that time.

While Japan and neighboring countries struggled along with austerity, building up their economies, a joint Philippine-American finance commission looking at how we had used rehabilitation assistance noted how our oligarchs were squandering away the assistance with their "conspicuous consumption of luxuries and non-essentials." This pattern was to worsen through the 1950s and 1960s, the elite partying as the nation slid into squalor, chaos and despair.

Today we cling on to myths of a political paradise, a nation governed by good leaders and a law-abiding populace. In reality, what we had was not a disciplined, but a subjugated population. They complied only because they were fearful of those in power.

We forget that many of the political dynasties we have today were established long before Marcos, wielding power through their private armies. Whenever there was a local problem, the solution was to silence the opposition. Other social institutions, particularly those of the Roman Catholic Church, colluded to maintain this set-up. Throughout our history then, before, during and after Marcos, the state has been there, up for grabs by politicians out to concentrate their power and to create more wealth for themselves through graft and corruption.

In the 1970s, as a university student working out in rural areas, I was horrified by the stories peasants told me, of generations upon generations of relatives and neighbors beaten up or killed for the mildest infractions against landlords and officials. In most cases, the peasants suffered in silence, unable to fight back because there were few channels through which they could air their grievances.

Discontent simmered, only to boil over into armed insurrections, many of which were easily crushed. Some rebellions, such as that of Huks, were more formidable, but they were finally put down by Ramon Magsaysay with US help. Corruption and economic exploitation worsened in the 1960s, brought to new heights when Marcos raided the national treasury to get himself reelected in 1969. The nation was in shambles, and there was widespread discontent with massive street demonstrations in cities and armed struggle led by the New People's Army in the countryside.

Marcos offered to save the nation from the oligarchs and the communists, a so-called revolution from the center. The nation jumped at the bait. As Conrado de Quiros wrote in his book "Dead Aim", an excerpt of which appeared last Tuesday in his column, Imelda Marcos was said to have exulted at how easy it was to declare martial law.

It was indeed easy. With authoritarian values in our homes, in religious affairs, in local politics, we wanted to believe the solutions to our national problems would come with tougher laws, tougher penalties, tougher leaders.

Today, we see a nostalgia based on a new set of myths, this time around martial law. I hear people arguing that the only hope left for Filipinos is martial law or an authoritarian leader, that Marcos would have made it worked if it hadn't been for "her". But read De Quiros' book and you will get glimpses into the mind of a power-hungry politician who plotted his way to martial law, getting what he wanted because in a sense, we wanted him to. We wanted to be disciplined by a strongman (or, now, a strongwoman) rather than to discipline ourselves in freedom.

The dinosaur is still with us, and growing.