Picking On The Color Yellow

BIMBO CABIDOG

There is something to the new ruling coalition of the Duterte, Arroyo and Marcos cliques that shaped up shortly after the 2016 elections. It is the picking up of the color yellow as enemy.

Branded yellow for adopting the color symbol in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Liberal Party has absorbed a lot of vitriol, targeted disinformation and distortions hurled by the Duterte camp to paint it as the most dastardly villain Philippine politics has ever had. 

Even if most of its member politicos have already sashayed to the embrace of the now dominant Partido Demokratiko ng Pilipinas (PDP), and it is more of a spent force than a potent challenge, the LP to the coalition and Duterte supporters aka DDS remains the arch nemesis to demolish.

The yellow warriors or Dilawans may now be more imagined than real. But they yet figure in the daily barrage of labeling, derogatory propaganda, trolls and fake news being churned out by the tentacles of the Arroyo, Marcos and Duterte political machines.

Former President Noynoy Aquino was once head and coordinator in some capacity of the LP. But he has chosen to hibernate for a full year right after he stepped down from office. He has continued to distance himself from the political fray even after the self-assigned sabbatical.

Mar Roxas, standard bearer of the ill-fated LP campaign to recapture the presidency, has mostly withdrawn from public attention and socio-political chitchat. He had been more of a recluse taking to his personal journeys and development of new hobbies.

The remaining LP stalwarts that cared not to join the diaspora of opportunists to the ruling PDP-Laban party, except for less than a handful of recalcitrant oppositionists in the Lower House, have chosen to play footsies with the victors in power.

So, why would Digong’s coalition dominantly played out by the Arroyo and Marcos cliques still bother with them? Why pick an enemy in an already marginalized and innocuous political entity?

The only reasonable point about it has something to do with the past rather than the present. Yellow as a political color freshens the torment and agony combined with mortal fear that the Marcoses and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo went through in their fall from power.

The yellow force cannot be forgotten whether by the people that gained from it or by the defeated villains that suffered from it. The obsession to see it crushed traces to the historical role the two iconic origins of the dilawan movement, Ninoy and Cory Aquino, played.

The full-blown alliance in rule that emerged from Duterte’s 2016 electoral victory at once exhibited its abhorrence of the memory as well as legacy of the struggle that overthrew the Marcos dictatorship and restored significant democratic space in the country.

The vestiges of Ferdinand Marcos wanted everything of that past revised in the telling of history and its glorious triumph against the forces of darkness, epitomized by his fascist rule, obliterated from the nation’s collective consciousness. In some way, Duterte’s open admiration of the dictator and his strongman tendencies favor them.

The dilawans give a Marcos comeback in the person of the dictator’s scion and heir a bad name. They have to be eliminated to retouch the dictator’s lost face. Their demise will move him to a place of honor and facilitate his son and namesake Bongbong junior’s return to Malacanang.

The main line of attack is to make the LP and the yellows out as bitter losers and power-hungry destabilizers intending to remove Duterte from office. It also strives to debunk the legacy, heroism and contribution to liberal-democratic resurgence of Ninoy.

In the end, the blitz may collaterally put down the emblematic widow of Ninoy, who emerged from political aloofness after his assassination to join the anti-dictatorship struggle up to the termination of the Marcos era.

During the waning days of the dictatorship, Cory was thrust into the center of the political currents that were driving the country to a major change. The belittled housewife suddenly found herself at the lead of the converging protest streams.

The parliament of the streets where she marched relentlessly would become the political touchstones to her providential rise to the presidency in the ouster of the dictatorship in 1986.

If Cory is also demolished post-humus, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo stands to relish more than Imelda, Bongbong and Imee. Always championing democracy and good governance, Cory’s continued crusade in the latter part of the post-dictatorship years hit the graft-ridden Arroyo regime very hard.

In some way providing moral leadership along with Cardinal Sin to the massive street protests that ousted 13^th President Joseph Estrada, the former President Cory helped usher Vice President Gloria Arroyo to the presidency by shortcut.

But Cory’s steadfast involvement in scoring electoral fraud and cheating and unbridled corruption, after Estrada, negatively impacted on Arroyo. The fact that Cory also joined the voices calling for her resignation exacerbated this.

The death of Cory near the end of GMA’s rule and the public sentiment that poured out for her proved fatal to Arroyo’s prospects for succession as safety net against cases that may rain on her later.

On the same fateful month Ninoy was killed 26 years ago, the people watched Cory’s funeral carriage slowly wound through her final journey along the thoroughfares of Metro Manila. The moving scene awakened again a nation to the crusade for good governance versus shenanigans in office.

Cory’s life dedicated to country sharply etched in contrast Gloria’s stint in the highest office dedicated to corruption and political compromises to stay in power.

The final act before the curtain totally fell on the Cory drama fiercely stigmatized PGMA who was battling forces against the evils of her reign. As yellow ribbons were once again tied around the country, Cory’s remembered life and much followed death framed Arroyo in a very bad light.

The massive funeral outpouring of yellows was another magical phenomenon in the country’s political history that paved the way to the assumption of Cory’s son Noynoy Aquino to the highest office. Noynoy won by landslide for being the diametrical opposite of Arroyo.

The rest, to the lady in Malacanang’s detriment was history.

The yellows are thus being targeted, not for the formidable challenge they pose to the ruling coalition, but for the Ninoy-Cory legacy that must be destroyed, history that must be revised, and Marcos and Arroyo who must be recast in the mold of saints.

One more thing, Bongbong missed the chance to be in arm’s length of the highest seat of the land by losing the 2010 vice presidential race to another unassuming widow and adopted LP who like Cory wore yellow, Leni Robredo. What painful and bitter memories the political color yellow evoke!