Reverie on/of Quirino

by Manuel L. Quezon III

While waiting, Bocca wandered around the hall of the chandeliers and became fascinated by the portraits of the Presidents. "What kind of a man was this?" he would ask before each portrait... "I must have copies," said Bocca. [So he was provided with] photographs of the portraits, and from these photos came Bocca's very perceptive evaluations of the Presidents of the Philippines.

"What makes them so impressive," he says, "is their immediacy. They are all modern. There are no wigs, no ruffles, no Victorian beards to lend distance to their regard. These Presidents are all men of our time, and they gaze from their paintings like people one knows, a jury of peers deciding the verdict of history on any who would join them. Even General Emilio Aguinaldo is a contemporary."

Quezon, "handsome as a Roman god," his languidly held cigarette only emphasizing his hateur, has a ruthless jaw and a mouth "downturned distastefully at the corners, as though he is expecting his intelligence to be insulted." Osmena "looks you in the eye with confidence and urbanity, handsome even in old age, a scholar elegantly dressed in a suit probably made in London." Laurel has the "face of a good man who has no apologies to make to history." Roxas is an aristocrat: "lean, brilliant, vulpine, so poised and so tautly sprung one feels that if one blinked he would be gone."

Quirino is a "Spanish aristocrat playing his own private, sophisticated joke on society, because this apparent embodiment of the voluptuary and sensualist wore a hair shirt of unremitting grief." Magsaysay is "very much the tough guy: he probably chews glass." Garcia has a smooth regard, "as though his claim to immortality is so modest as to be undeserving of minute examination."
-Quijano de Manila, in his essay, "The Battle of the Books," September, 1965

We are all familiar with the official portraits of our past presidents. Mainly because of National Bookstore, which re-prints them periodically, probably in response to the demands of generations of school children, who are required to buy them for school reports. Beyond the meager information printed on the back of those postcards, we know nothing of them. Nothing, at least, that stir us to the extent that we would echo Macapagal biographer Geoffrey Bocca's comment, that looking at the portraits gives us a "sense of immediacy." They are, simply, pictures of paintings.And while we are known as a people with little or no long-term memory, our ignorance of our past leaders cannot be attributed solely to this national characteristic; another reason for our lack of knowledge of these men can be illustrated by a discovery made after the flight of the Marcoses in the wake of the Edsa revolution.

As eager volunteers cataloged the contents of Malacanang, they discovered that all of the presidential portraits -save one- had been cut down, reduced in size, so that they would all be smaller than the painting of Ferdinand Marcos. Apparently his zeal in magnifying his role in history had extended to this petty detail; and as they say, from this piece of trivia the general may be gleaned from the particular: the martial law regime had embarked on a systematic effort to inflict national amnesia on Filipinos. At least those with minds malleable enough to be made in the image of the New Society. This policy of historical megalomania was accompanied by a seemingly opposite, but actually parallel, effort on the part of those who more often than not, bitterly opposed him, and were against everything he stood for. The professors and writers who dared resist the New Soceity's scheme of things pushed forward their own agenda, socialist in orientation and revisionist in tendency, which sought to re-order the Filipino conception of the past along the lines of historical determinism and dailectical materialism; if not in an outright manner, than at least along lines inspired by it. In many ways this trend has been beneficial, leading to a more critical attitude towards the past. But this exists solely among the minority of the popultion that cares about such things; in the case of vast herd of students who's only encounter with the past has been a fleeting one in the classroom, the effects may not be so good. Emerging from the confines of their classrooms they carry with them the feeling that their history has

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