Tales from the Dark Side

September is not just the time when, to paraphrase a song, you will see me after summer is gone. September also marks those dark years in recent Philippine history when a man from Batac, Ilocos Norte proclaimed that he was destined by Divine Providence to rule and control our society.

I was not exactly a toddler when the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on 21 September 1972. I was actually a high school student then. One thing I vividly remember about the first years of Marcos’ martial law reign was the Bagong Lipunan (New Society) hymn, which, as we sang it with gusto, would reverberate in our barrio high school prefab building.

The Bagong Lipunan hymn almost replaced the Pambansang Awit (National Anthem). We would sing it quite over and over – maybe at least six times a day. The first stanza goes: May bagong silang/ May bagong nabuhay/ Bagong bansa, bagong galaw/ Sa bagong lipunan/ Nagbabago ang lahat/ Tungo sa pag-unlad/ Kaya ating itanghal/ Bagong Lipunan. You can easily note that the common key word in almost every line is the word bago (new). The song talks about renewal – a new birth, a new nation, a new society, a new way of behaving, and new forms of action.

I was no longer fond of singing the Bagong Lipunan hymn in the early 1980s when, during a human rights public forum, the late lawyer Arthur Galace shared a story about that hymn. One day soldiers of Marcos came to a village somewhere in northern Philippines. To welcome the arriving soldiers, the villagers sang what the soldiers thought was a spoof of the Bagong Lipunan hymn. The villagers sang: May gagong silang/ May gagong nabuhay/ Gagong bansa, gagong galaw/ Sa Gagong Lipunan… The soldiers were not pleased so their commander reprimanded the village chieftain, warning him that the whole community could be arrested and thrown into military stockades. So the chieftain asked the military commander, “Gakit?”

The villagers, the commander finally learned, didn’t have a “b” in their dialect. Their “b” was “g.”

True or not, the story was one of the likes of Galace’s way of actually coping with the pains and fears during the martial law regime. Humor was actually one way by which many Filipinos coped with the excesses and abuses of that regime, which was ruled by the barrels of guns. It was a regime, which jailed and tortured critics. Many others were summarily killed while others were abducted and disappeared without a trace.

Close to home, it was during the martial law regime when politicians, accompanied by M-16 rifle-welding soldiers, practically grabbed the lands of poor villagers in Taloy, Tuba. It was the martial law regime which snuffed out the life of Macliing Dulag, a Kalinga tribal chief opposed to a series of World Bank-funded mega-dam projects along the Chico River.

Despite the pains the martial law regime brought about, Filipinos kept their sanity through their humor.

One slogan of Marcos’ dictatorship was “isang bansa, isang diwa (one nation, one thought).” But some wag spoofed this into “isang ganso, isang hiwa (one goose, one slice).”

The state-controlled airwaves during those years would also repetitiously hammer into listeners the mailed-fist regime’s slogan, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (Discipline is needed for the country to move forward).” But a naughty radio commentator parodied the slogan, saying, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisekleta ang kailangan (We need bicycles for the country to move forward).” The radio commentator was reportedly punished. He was made to bike around an oval until he got exhausted.

And there were those agitating chants from the militants. One famous chant sang to the tune of the “London Bridge” nursery rhyme was, “US-Marcos falling down, falling down, falling down/ US-Marcos falling down, with First Lady.” This was quite famous after the 21 August 1983 assassination of Sen. Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino.

At that time all media outfits – from broadcast to print – were state-controlled. So everything the public heard or read were, as Imelda Marcos would push, only “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

Many Filipinos would buy the newspapers but they just read the cartoons and answered the crossword puzzles. One time human rights lawyer Rene Saguisag commented that no one could believe the state-controlled newspapers because they couldn’t even be accurate with their dates.

Some Filipinos came out with alternative means to disseminate information. One alternative small paper was called Sick of the Times, which printed humor-wrapped critiques of the Marcos regime. In its first issue, it announced that it was “Volume One, Only One.” After some time, another issue appeared, and it was “Volume One, Another One.” Both issues were sold out. It was too bad I didn’t keep copies of the two volumes, which should have been a highly priced memento of that period. But keeping something like these could cost your life because Marcos’ military intelligence agents even considered as “subversive” the tapes of the Asin folk-rock band.

There were other stories, both painful and humorous, from those dark years of Marcos’ martial law dictatorship. Many of those who were born not just yesterday helped battle the dictatorship. Four regimes after the Marcoses’ downfall in February 1986, however, the country still has to get out of the rut. Given the current state of things, we note with sadness that tyranny still reigns, threatening to resurrect those tales from one of the dark sides of the country’s history, which was Marcos’ regime.