41

The tributes that flowed and continue to flow at the passing of former US president George H. W. Bush are mostly heart-warming. And indeed they should be. The man who, as the 41st president of America, was called 41 by pundits to distinguish him from his son, George W, who came to be the 43rd president, was widely regarded as a good and decent man.

In other words, there was a real basis for the nice things said about him. I feel the need to point this out because death almost always erases any strong compulsion among the living to dwell on the bad side of people when they are still alive. There is almost always this desire to let the dead be.

One of the few dead people I know who continue to be reviled in death as they were when alive is Ferdinand Marcos, and I don't know if I can ever learn to appreciate the reasons why the living, almost all of them fellow Filipinos, cannot seem to let him be especially since, as fellow Christians, they in their turn will have to face the ultimate judgment one day.

There is, however, one thing that needs to be said about 41, even in death, in the context of who he was in relation to Marcos as both, in life, crossed paths on more than one occasion. As US vice president at the time Marcos was Philippine president, 41 once toasted the Filipino strongman for his "adherence to freedom and democracy."

This was a very insightful revelation of the American political heart and soul as opposed to the individual character of the American people. It tells us that while Americans can be truly good and decent in their individual persons, they can be a quite different animal in their politics.

It is a difference expressed very succinctly by Gene Hackman’s character in "Crimson Tide" who said, apparently on behalf of the American government, American military, and American politics as a whole, that "we are not here to practice democracy but to preserve it."

And so, did 41 when he was not yet 41 mean it when he toasted Marcos' adherence to freedom and democracy? I am sure he did because he said it as a politician dealing with another one. And while I do not believe you can truly separate the person from his politics, there is also no truly denying the possibility.

I happened to be in America as guest of the US government in 1992 as that country moved toward a presidential election in which George H. W. Bush would be soundly beaten by a certain William Jefferson Clinton. Both would later become very good friends despite the great differences in their persons and their politics. But like 41, in his time 42 will similarly be finely judged.