From people power to paper boats: Uno, Dos, Tres, Ad Infinitum

Some writers and publications share remarkable prescience. Oh so way back in 1976 – a full quarter of a century ago – the young Mario Taguiwalo wrote a personal essay titled "What is EDSA and why is it doing these things to me?" It appeared in the March issue of ERMITA magazine, a flash-in-the-pan, alternative monthly that lasted all of 10 issues.

The blurbs are not beyond recall, featured as they were in large type to highlight each page of psychic text. "There are times when EDSA is a gentle creature, a benevolent mother herding her wayward sons home."

Then too: "EDSA is a great segmented worm inching its way with the dogged effort of a blind man believing in his darkness as vision."

In counterpoint and counterflow to this metaphorical plodder, Taguiwalo waxes elegantly, visionarily, before himself applying the comedown of reality, to wit:

"Myth has it that EDSA reaches out to a world beyond daily routine, but it is common knowledge that EDSA is the world between Baclaran and Monumento."

And finally, the writer apotheosizes, well ahead of his time, our times.

"I am a real member of my generation, and I do not shirk my communal duties like contributing a personal share into the hell that is EDSA. I may have a choice of which road to take, but I know that the trip is the greater part of the destination. I do not know what course others may take, but as for me give me EDSA or give me death."

Twenty-five years since, and we’ve had an unlikely loop of an intriguing, enchanting odyssey courtesy of EDSA. That Epifanio de los Santos Avenue – formerly known as Highway 54 and identified by urban engineers as Circumferential Road 4 – would indulge us with the trivia that epiphanies come in threes seems as remarkable a happenstance as the fact that thrice have we been colonized. Before, that is, we ourselves took over as self-made, self-same clowns.

EDSA keeps sending us, up and down. Indeed, passing strange. Our history is always passing strange, no more so than in this proximate, barely readable, contemporariness.

In February 1986, barely a decade after Mr. Taguiwalo wrote his personal graffito on a Cassandric, Khayyamic wall, the grand whoopee transpired right on EDSA. Where else would we have had it?

Give us EDSA (and beyond!) or give us death, dared a multitude led by priests, nuns, a martyr’s brother and an emotional middle-class. As in metafiction, we rallied to the safety of a small military force that for the grace of a reputed miracle would have been footnoted as misguided mutineers. But what became known as the EDSA People Power Revolution succeeded in ousting the Ferdinand E. Marcos regime. Installed in the "tyrant’s" place was a modern-day heroine as president.

Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Four Days of People Power at EDSA, mythically rhapsodized the title of a book by premier writer Nick Joaquin. A legion of pen-pushers joined the documentation, recollection, and chest-and-shoulder-thumping frenzy in print, hailing the picnic-revolution on the celebrated highway as a measure of manifest approval. The consensual celebration produced other outstanding recollections as PEOPLE POWER: An Eyewitness History: The Philippine Revolution of 1986, published by The James B. Reuter, S.J., Foundation; Nine Letters: The Story of the 1986 Filipino Revolution, by Cynthia S. Baron and Melba M. Suazo, published by Gerardo P. Baron; and The Snap Revolution, authored by British poet-journalist James Fenton, published by Granta in the United Kingdom.

From New York, expatriate Filipino poet Luis Francia exulted with a poem titled "A Fever in February."

Excerpt: "Love broke with memory and leaped,/ A red-blooded warrior from our/ Incandescent brain, and sought not/ Revenge but the/ Healing touch of a country/ Gathered like a tribe of lost friends./ The night grew in reverse/ History bled while you and I fled/ Drowning in a sea of gold/ That we might live, and so living/ Rejuvenate all in whom the/ Old spirits still crept."

Indeed. And since, and since, we’ve crept up and down EDSA.

Weeks after the epiphany, the video documentary Beyond EDSA featured the pre-Probe Cheche Lazaro in a stand-upper on the rooftop of the V.V. Soliven Building that overlooked Camp Crame and Camp Aguinaldo. On TV, she posed rhetorical questions on the upheaval’s afterglow, suggesting that it would soon turn into serial aftermath.

Yes, tons of text have been devoted to the unique affair that had held the world spellbound, thanks to satellite technology and television. Much was eventually made of the inspiration it provided similar occurrences of the People Power phenomenon all over the globe, from the so-called Velvet Revolution in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the Soviet empire. A duplication seemed imminent in Beijing. Unfortunately, that last led to what is now recorded in history books as the Tiananmen Massacre of June 1991.

Everywhere, it seemed, citizens felt suddenly empowered and emboldened, mounting mammoth expressions of solidarity in dramatic, and highly telegenic, struggles for emancipation.

What had EDSA wrought? No sooner had all those deconstructed corncobs and peanut shells clogged up the sewers alongside the military and police camps – where the reputedly million-strong Pinoy People Power force had congregated with upraised fists, flowers, guitars, songs, rumors and transistor radios – than the cynics declared that a revolution eats up its own children.

True enough, Corazon Cojuangco Aquino’s reign was disturbed by serial attempts at a coup d’etat, or more accurately, failed putsches that lent a severe air of surrealism over how Filipinos sought to claim power.

These ranged from a tragicomic takeover of the legendary Manila Hotel – by a ragtag band of Marcos loyalists led by a co-terminously ousted Vice President, and now doubtful claimant to succession – to a couple of serious instances of hyperactive mutiny among elements of the Armed Forces.

Oh, there was a lot of shooting between the new rebels and the Cory loyalists. Teodoro Locsin Jr.’s coinage of "acoustic warfare" was cheerily welcomed as American Phantom jets streaked across Manila’s often-errant sky. Uziseros whooped it up in the streets, like empathetic spectators vicariously enjoying the sibling rivalry between the San Miguel Beer and Ginebra San Miguel basketball teams.

So which was the legit instance of foregrounding – the shadow play between brothers-in-arms following commanders with contrapuntal agendas, or the Jaworski play-alikes for whom flagrant fouls were but a brotherly nudge for attention?

What had EDSA wrought? Toward the close of the ’80s, it would bring the state of the nation under Aquino into a near-imminent boom cycle. Alas, the hopes of economic revival would be dashed by that peskiest of putsches in December of ’89. Ironically, the near-fatal blow would also eventually install the enigmatic anti-hero Col. Gregorio "Gringo" Honasan into the Philippine Senate.

Cory’s staunchest defender, Gen. Fidel V. Ramos, who had figured prominently in the initial EDSA to-do, democratically succeeded the transition lady as president, and for a while there, managed to put in place some semblance of stability.

But the same quality of charisma that apparently dictated the masa’s obsession with bemoustached he-men, as rakish as they looked and lived, also installed a former movie actor, small-town mayor, and once-and-future token senator as vice president. And no, this one didn’t have to take over the lobby of a grand hotel to attempt assumption.

All Joseph Ejercito Estrada had to do was sit pretty for six years, occasionaly ask his men to wait till he got to a rub-out scene for the proper photo-op, and he’d eventually draw the votes of 11 million Filipinos seduced by a popular name with a roguish-looking pogi mug to go with it.

A little over 30 months into his scandal-wracked term, however, the desperate, inchoate notion of "Erap para sa mahirap" bit the dust right on EDSA. It was barely 15 years since the precedent-setting orig. And thanks to People Power II, another macho chief executive was summarily ousted, extra-constitutionallly if you will, no matter how the highest court of the land would validate this necessity.

"EDSA Dos," trumpeted ABS-CBN. And the chroniclers took up the streetsmart billing to formalize the sequel. Authors raced to press for obligatory laudation or cavil. Of the latter, the rightwing biographer Cecilio Arillo beat everyone to the draw. No one minded his text except a beaming Senator-elect Dr. Loi, the first and only wife of the rogue now exiled in a hospital with their son. Close on its heels were Anvil Publishing’s photo-documentation EDSA 2: A Nation in Revolt, and the lowdown-ish Hot Money, Warm Bodies, co-authored by Ellen Tordesillas and Greg Hutchinson.

Meanwhile, back at the global ranch, the international press would be far from impressed. Hooting down the democratic reprise with casual sophistry was Time magazine’s Anthony Spaeth, whose "Oops, we did it again!" take from Britney Spears drew a sharp response from no less than everyone’s hero of the Erap impeachment trial, Chief Justice Hilario Davide.

Now what has EDSA wrought? A professor from Chicago has posted a universal question by e-mail: who was the Pinoy academic who said that "text messaging is the whisper of the post-modern age"?

Were we really that pithy, that clever? A hundred days was all it took before the crowd manqué took over for its version of yet another, harder-pressed sequel. It was a mob with mayhem in its mind, or lack of one. On May Day, 2001, the Palace gates shook, and so did the doors and windows to our collective incredulity.

EDSA Tres? Yes. No. Maybe. There’ll be a fourth, said every barber and cab driver in town. There can only be a fourth, and so forth.

Where Edsa II was said to have been fueled irrepressibly by cell phones the middle and upper classes wielded to perfection, the components of the putative EDSA III were the slippered urban poor, trucked in as they may have been, along with sectarian blessings, bottles of gin, and perhaps even shabu.

Rage was what the combustible ingredients all added up to. And it was rage we needed to march down from EDSA for yet another wake-up call. Our voices still dispute, however, what time we should rouse everyone else to take stock of our "damaged culture."

The Babel has turned horizontal. Word mavens play at an academic reckoning of "jologspeak," since what happened on the First of May – again spawned by an activist throng‚s unruly emotions at EDSA – had been the jologs‚ revolt.

Prithee, what means jologs? The downtrodden, the former bakya, the lumpen, the hoy polloi. Yes, all these and more.

As advanced by fashion victim observers, jologs referred to those who claimed baggy shorts and pants for their own, in malls, streets, even historic avenues like EDSA. As propounded by cultural researchers, jologs meant teen star Jolina Magdangal fans, in fact came from "Jolina orgs."

A jolly good time we’re having, Jollibee gone global like the first EDSA. But from sequel to three-peat, something happened on the hothoused way to proper chronology. The empire of the masa it was that tried to strike back for Version Three, while the return of the Jedi master named Cardinal Sin seemed all too precipitate.

How now do we reckon cause and effect, as traffic still slogs along on a now mass transit-beribboned EDSA? Perhaps we can export the anarchy of odyssey, reap the providence eventually. The scenario has been posited that with 75,000 Filipinos fleeing EDSA and its sundry spin-offs each month for greener fields and autobahns abroad, we can soon dominate the world’s workforce, let alone population. Never mind the Chinese; they stay together, wherever. We however are masters at random assimilation; kindly observe the pavements alongside EDSA et al.

And perhaps someday, as the hopeful scheme goes, this international force of Pinoy expats can get together the way the homebound natives never could, and plan a powerful homecoming that will qualify as a successful invasion.

Pinoy immigrants, unite! You have nothing to lose but the Kennedy-Camelot memory of a Bay of Pigs. You’ll retake the country, EDSA and all, and re-fashion governance of the entire problematic archipelago the best way you learned to manage affairs as not-so-innocents abroad.

You’ll be our own Trojan horses, and when you finally make it back to save our Pinay Penelope from multinational suitors, kidnappers, bank robbers, the Abu Sayyaf, and all the politicians and cronies for whom our devoted Bantay/Argus has always been an old dog with a vanished master, the rescue and re-invention will be indigenously sweet.

Meanwhile, the odyssey continues. And no one and nothing will be the worse for wear and tear but the asphalt and concrete mix-match patches that is EDSA, as fittingly askew as our historical chronology.

Under the highway flows, sluggishly, the Pasig River of our ancestors. If you look closely down at the waterlily-clogged waters, you might see some paper boats headed for Malacañang. Oh, some urchins from a dumpsite are at it again, wishing to be noticed by yet another lady president who’s been punished with the presidency of a country that often can’t tell which is a river and which is a highway.

From Baclaran to Monumento, and beyond, our world expands beyond all topography of wishes or reason.

The myth, the fable, the moral of the story live on, like the epic tale of the benevolent mother herding her wayward sons home.