Passionate Revolutions. Talitha Espiritu

rebels in a manner that would suit his political interests. The mob that attacked Malacañang, he said, was not a mob of students. Performing an allegorical reading of the media spectacles of the night before, he identified the key visual and auditory cues indicating that the perpetrators of the palace bombings were communist subversives. These mysterious men, he said, waved red banners, carried the Philippine flag with the red field up,²⁹ called the streets they occupied “liberated areas,” and chanted “Dante for president.” These cues proved that the perpetrators were not a group of rowdy youths but a highly organized army acting with the clear intent of seizing state power. Marcos statement was tantamount to a public erasure of the student demonstrators from the January 30 revolt. The spontaneous eruption of mob violence, which was captured by the news media, was thus transformed into a carefully orchestrated attack by urban guerrillas.

      Marcos proceeded to defend the brutal actions of the police and the military: “The nonparticipants of that tragic night (read: spectators) could easily accuse the military and the police of ‘fascist’ and ‘repressive’ methods, but what was apparent to the participants was the beginning of a ‘revolutionary’ confrontation stage-managed by a determined minority.”³⁰ Likening the night’s events to a stage play, Marcos would describe the melodramatic logic of its mise-en-scène:

      The cries of “revolution” . . . indicated that [the demonstrations] were experiments in . . . overthrowing a duly constituted regime. . . . The strategy of the nihilist radicals and leftists should . . . be clear. By provoking the military and police authorities into acts of violence, they hoped to show before society—before all people—that the government is “fascistic” and undemocratic. This is the reason behind the repetitious charges of “fascism” against the duly constituted authority: to deprive it of its legitimacy.³¹

      The president’s public statements produced a true transfer of power, as responsibility for the public drama of January 30 shifted from the student demonstrators—whose presence was vividly captured by the media—to the backstage “Maoist Communists” who had presumably masterminded the conflict. This mystification, which relied on red-scare tactics to conjure an invisible threat to society, paradoxically played a critical role in Marcos’s efforts to demystify the spectacle of January 30. In effect warning the public not to believe its own eyes, Marcos would deflate the spectacle of the January 30 by asking his public to believe in what it could not see. And, keenly aware of the surprisingly sophisticated use the demonstrators had made of the media during the First Quarter Storm, Marcos would launch his own “revolution” by playing a role—that of the heroic leader—for the national audience.

       Heroic Leadership and Political-Image Building

      Marcos’s self-presentation as heroic leader necessitated the recuperation of his political image, which had since been tarnished by the 1969 elections. I shall analyze the stigma of the 1969 elections in greater detail in chapter 3, but for now, it behooves us to note that no other president before Marcos—and none since—had as commanding a presence before the camera. In fact, Marcos’s overwhelming popularity during his first presidential run, in 1965, was a part of the melodramatic theatricality of his political career, which was closely followed by the print, film, and broadcast media.

      Ferdinand Marcos first entered the public consciousness as a defendant charged with murdering his father’s rival in their home province of Ilocos Norte just after the 1935 legislative elections. He had turned eighteen nine days before the proclaimed winner, Julio Nalundasan, was shot dead by an unknown assailant on the night of September 20, 1935. In December 1938 authorities arrested Ferdinand, who at the time was a law student at the University of the Philippines, about to graduate as class valedictorian. After a much-publicized trial, the twenty-one-year-old Marcos was found guilty and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. He managed to top the bar exams while under state custody and later served as his own counsel when his case went to the Supreme Court. Displaying the oratorical skills that would come to define his political style, he persuaded the court to reverse the conviction. The stunning reversal led the Philippines Free Press to put his photo on the cover and declare him a public hero.³²

      If Marcos’s charisma and oratorical style had saved him from a crisis at the beginning of his career, there was no reason to suspect that they would fail him now. Particularly in crises, the media-savvy Marcos had proven himself time and again to be adept at political-image building. His polished public image, which combined equal parts glamour and crisis mongering, seemed to have been carefully modeled after the U.S. president who had singularly captured the symbiotic relationship between the two—John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy before him, Marcos was most in his element in front of the camera. Like Kennedy, he had a beautiful “aristocratic” wife who would charm the public and function as the essential ornament to his political career. But above all, like Kennedy, he was a political leader much of whose power derived from being both seen and heard.

      Marcos’s inauguration, on December 30, 1965, was reported as the “coming of Camelot to the Philippines.” His inaugural speech, “A Mandate for Greatness,” made representatives of the U.S. media experience a “[flash back] to JFK’s inaugural a few years earlier.”³³ Interrupted nineteen times by applause (the loudest when he declared that he had been given a “mandate of greatness”), Marcos’s speech so impressed Jack Valenti, future president of the Motion Picture Association of America, that his memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson described Marcos as “one of the most magnetic speakers you have ever heard.” The speech, Valenti wrote, was “perfectly timed, ingeniously shaped, in a voice that must tritely be compared only to an organ.” Aside from being “enormously intelligent,” Marcos was “tough,” and “had guts,” Valenti wrote.³⁴

      Valenti’s comments cast Marcos as a composite of the Hollywood leading man—one who combined the civility of the cosmopolitan easterner with the rugged individualism of the western hero. Such observations meshed with the U.S. endorsement of “heroic leadership” in the Third World during this period. As formulated by Kennedy adviser Arthur Schlesinger in his essay “On Heroic Leadership and the Dilemma of Strong Men and Weak People,” the doctrine of heroic leadership postulated that the political grooming of strong leaders in the Third World was the “most effective means of charging semi-literate people with a sense of national and social purpose.”³⁵ Thus hitched to the Cold War project of inculcating Third World peoples with the culture and values of the United States, heroic leadership, as Hoberman points out, was defined in particular by the culture and values disseminated by Hollywood.³⁶

      Marcos’s transfiguration as heroic leader was experienced as a national ceremony—a feat made all the more remarkable by the absence of the necessary communications infrastructure for “wiring the nation.” With approximately 600,000 radio receivers (at 19 sets per 1,000 people), 120,000 television sets (3.8 sets per 1,000 people) and 776 cinema screens (2.6 seats per 100 people), the Philippines in 1965 was not nearly as internally colonized by the media as the United States was.³⁷ Indeed, Marcos would hold the “modernization” of the media to be among the New Society’s top priorities. The dictator would ostensibly make good this promise with the importation of satellite and computer-based technologies by the late 1970s.³⁸ In anticipation of this dramatic media expansion, however, Marcos had enlisted the country’s available media resources, however modest, to mold himself as the “Philippine JFK.” The Kennedy campaign was a tough act to follow. But follow Marcos did, releasing a biography, inspiring a feature film, and having his every move on the campaign trail followed by the press.

      That Marcos’s role as heroic leader could piggyback on the one created a few years earlier by Kennedy points to the global spread of what Daniel Boorstin, in 1962, termed the pseudo-event: a mass-mediated public drama that functions as a “press release writ large.”³⁹ In the U.S. context, the pseudo-event was characterized by a tendency to proliferate, becoming increasingly self-reflexive and self-conscious. In Boorstin’s words, “One interview comments on another; one television show spoofs another; novel, television show, radio program, movie, comic book, and the way we think of ourselves, all become merged into mutual reflections.”⁴⁰

      Boorstin’s