Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu

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      Passionate Revolutions

       Ohio University Research in International Studies

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      Executive editor:

      Gillian Berchowitz

      Southeast Asia Series consultants:

      Elizabeth F. Collins and William H. Frederick

      Passionate Revolutions

       The Media and the Rise and Fall of the Marcos Regime

       Talitha Espiritu

      OHIO UNIVERSITY RESEARCH IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

      SOUTHEAST ASIA SERIES NO. 132

      OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

      ATHENS

      © 2017 by the Center for International Studies

      Ohio University

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       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Espiritu, Talitha, author.

      Title: Passionate revolutions : the media and the rise and fall of the Marcos regime / Talitha Espiritu.

      Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, [2017] | Series: Ohio University research in international studies. Southeast Asia series ; no. 132 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017000722| ISBN 9780896803121 (pb : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780896803114 (hc : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780896804982 (pdf)

      Subjects: LCSH: Philippines—Politics and government—1973–1986. | Philippines—History—Revolution, 1986. | Mass media—Political aspects—Philippines. | Politics and culture—Philippines. | Mass media and culture—Philippines.

      Classification: LCC DS686.5 .E87 2017 | DDC 959.904/6—dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000722

      To my parents,

      Christian and Gliceria Espiritu,

      and to my husband,

       Kevin Durr

      Contents

       INTRODUCTION. The Power of Political Emotions

       ONE. The First Quarter Storm

       TWO. Social Conduct and the New Society

       THREE. National Discipline and the Cinema

       FOUR. Popular Struggles and Elite Politics

       FIVE. The Media and the Second Coming of the First Quarter Storm

       SIX. The New Politics, Lino Brocka, and People Power

       CONCLUSION. The Force of National Allegory

       Abbreviations

       Notes

       Glossary

       Bibliography

       Index

      Introduction

      THE POWER OF POLITICAL EMOTIONS

      The dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos came to an ignominious end on February 25, 1986. After twenty-one years in power, Marcos fled the Philippines following a four-day popular revolt dubbed people power. The euphoria in the streets was televised live around the globe. With the force of national allegory, these televised images conveyed a seemingly incontrovertible message: here is visible evidence that a people’s democratic aspirations can triumph over authoritarianism; here is proof of the utopian possibilities of political emotions.

      The political spectacle of people power conjoins two stories, each one pivoting on the activation of emotion in the political sphere. On the one hand, there is the melodramatic story of how Marcos rose to power by creating a national family, a political fantasy that was both seductive and treacherous in its claims to transform the nation into a postcolonial utopia via a dictatorship of love. On the other hand, there is the story of how a sentimental culture of protest grew in close proximity to the “official” political sphere, an intimate public laboriously channeling the moral outrage of a people pained by the egregious excesses of the Marcos regime. The media figured prominently in both these stories. Marcos, after all, was a master of the political spectacle, and melodrama was both the mode and modus operandi of his statecraft. After the assassination of Marcos’s arch political rival, Benigno Aquino, Jr., in August 1983, however, the “freest press in Asia” came alive after a decade of state repression, galvanizing a “new politics” premised on affective displays of collective grief and concomitant demands for social justice. Meanwhile, the politicized auteurs of the so-called New Philippine Cinema engaged in unprecedented cultural activism both onscreen and in the streets. Combining melodrama’s proclivities for hyperemotionality with sentimentality’s faith in emotion as a direct conduit to affective truth, these forms of publicity were vital supports to the drama of emotional contestation that climaxed in people power.¹

      Marcos’s rise to power and the 1986 popular revolt bring into relief a problem perennially addressed in the “affective turn” in the field of social movement studies: the deeply entrenched fear of mass action as the irrational exercise of mob psychology.² This fear turns on the normative split between the private and public spheres and the corollary pitting of feeling against thought. Emotions, according to this classic paradigm, belong in the intimate sphere. Their containment therein guarantees that the rule of reason will remain inviolate in the public sphere, understood as a scene of abstract