The month of August in the Philippines has had some ominous history, many of which are most memorable.
Of glorious memory is the Cry of Balintawak, sometimes referred to as the Cry of Pugad Lawin, supposedly on Aug. 23, 1896, when the Katipuneros under Gat Andres Bonifacio tore up their cedulas and started the uprising against the Hispanic colonizers.
The Chinese, or more specifically, the feng shui traditionalists, would say it was a most inauspicious date to start something most important in the life of a nation. Of course, the Revolution failed, torpedoed by the gunboats of Admiral Dewey and later, sold out through the Treaty of Paris.
August normally falls under what is called the “ghost month,” when the Chinese pay their respects to their ancestors, who, their tradition and legend combined say to be the seventh month of the lunar year when the ghosts roam the earth.
It is supposed to be “bad” to start construction of a house, or even renovating it, or starting a business enterprise, opening a store, in fact, starting anything important. Put off all major decisions until after the ghost month, the traditional Chinese say.
So even the stock market is spooked. But young third- or fourth- generation Chinese look at the bargains, and still buy. But that’s another story, which they probably hide from their grandparents.
Of more recent memory for senior citizens is the Aug. 21, 1971 bombing of Plaza Miranda. The Liberal Party was holding its proclamation rally for the November mid-term elections. When almost everyone in the political party was on stage, a bomb placed underneath its platform shattered the political peace. But for Ninoy Aquino, the LP enfant terrible who was late and was scheduled to deliver the last speech, injured seriously in the mayhem were stalwarts like Jovito Salonga, Gerry Roxas, Eva Estrada Kalaw, Ramon Bagatsing, and other notables.
The result of the November elections turned badly against the reelected Ferdinand Marcos, with only one, the redoubtable Ernesto Maceda, spared from the LP senatorial sweep as a result of the backlash against the Plaza Miranda bombing. But just before that, the president declared a suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. And a year and one month later, on Sept. 21, 1972, after the ghost month had expired, Marcos declared martial law, and continued to rule, beyond term expiration and in authoritarian mode, for the next thirteen and a half years.
Until Aug. 21, 1983, when the enfant terrible he reduced to an exile after long imprisonment came back to the country, it seemed like Marcos would rule forever. Apres Ferdie … Meldy. Or so everyone speculated.
A gunshot killed Ninoy Aquino in an instant upon being ferreted out of his China Airlines plane by the military escorts through the service stairs of the Manila International Airport. Until now, who exactly shot Ninoy remains a mystery, but the bullet that entered the back of his head, in the words of the literary giant Alejandro Roces, “shattered an empire.”
The political landscape changed overnight from one of meek submission and resignation to the regime of one man to defiance, and ended in the mutiny of Feb. 22, 1986 which wrote finis to the Marcos rule four days later.
The millennials know little about these portentous events. I was privileged to have been in the thick of the 1983 homecoming and the resistance that followed.
In 1987, while I was in Beijing to attend the annual Asia Pacific Postal Union conference as its secretary-general, sketchy reports from Manila indicated that a military uprising against Cory Aquino was in progress. It was so difficult to get in touch with Manila at the time when cellphones were non-existent and China was rather “primitive.” That too was an uprising in the ghost month, and predictably, it failed.
This year, the ghost month started yesterday. It will last until Sept. 19.
This month of August has been wracked by tensions both on the domestic and international scene. Boy-king Kim Jong Un huffed and puffed about his nuclear toys, and Trump harrumphed about “fire and fury like nothing the world has ever seen.”
Intemperate remarks by the irascible Donald Trump that betrayed a seeming racial bigotry, after a march and shooting in Charlottesville, Virginia sparked a national outrage that haunts the American president till now and likely beyond.
And on the 21st of August (22 here), a total eclipse of the sun was visible in the US of A. Whether the same brings portents of the ominous, as the ancient Mayans believed, remains in the realm of America’s possibilities in the reign of the Donald.
Days before the “ghosts” came marching in, busy La Rambla in lovely Barcelona was shattered by a speeding maniac killing 14 and injuring a hundred more. What is the whole world coming to?
And on the local scene, bullets peppered by the police into the helpless body of 17-year-old Kian de los Santos horrified the nation just as the Maute terrorists held out in the long battle for Marawi.
“Parang pumapatay lang ng manok,” some wags would compare, at a time when DA’s Manny Piñol was “culling” birds in Pampanga supposedly afflicted with some strain of the dreaded avian flu.
The local “tipping point” in the war on drugs, as some called it, was exacerbated by the often callous reaction of a defensive police establishment that preferred to stand by its own, rather than act against its own in the face of overwhelming indications of guilt.
But mercifully, after some politicians and their “allies” thought they could go in for the “kill,” President Duterte, in a meeting with the Malacañang Press Corps late Monday night, declared that he had instructed the NBI to investigate without fear and favor, and let the ax fall where it should, because “overcoming” a suspect was not synonymous to a kill.
Clearly, he said, their “suspect” was overcome by the two policemen, which means the killing was unnecessary. And PAO forensic examination showed, among other glaring pieces of evidence, that Kian did not attempt to escape, or fight back, but was murdered.
The President’s reaction should stay the ghosts of August from spooking the political landscape.
Equally counter-balancing was the pronouncement that he has accepted the resignation of Nicanor Faeldon from the Bureau of Customs and replacing him with PDEA’s Isidro Lapena, in the wake of the smuggling of tons of drugs. It was another ghost that haunted in August, and which was one of the resignations this column predicted forthcoming in my first article for this paper in the month of August (read back “Interesting Times,” Manila Standard, 02 August).
But this space predicted some other interesting events, perhaps some other “sudden” resignations. Not because we have any ringside seat, far as we are, both physically and otherwise, from the palace by the Pasig. Call it gut feel. Call it a “culling” of experience and political reading.
Ah, the ghosts of August.