Bomb Shrapnels
The living time bomb. 1..2..kaput.
Columnist Conrado de Quiros was almost choking on tears when he recounted Monday the righteous combustion that was Edsa 1.
“They were there to end a regime that had ground the country to heel, that had stolen not just the people’s wealth but the people’s lives, the people’s hopes, the people’s future.” De Quiros wrote about the multitudes who, dreaming the impossible dream, rushed to Camp Aguinaldo 24 years ago to become “the battering ram called Edsa.”
What De Quiros forgot to disclose in his reverie was that he had been on the other side of the fence during those years of living dangerously. He was firmly entrenched in the Marcos camp even after the strongman had already fled, polishing propaganda for the hero that he now publicly trashes.
Along with now press freedom fighter Luis Teodoro and Ateneo professor Benito Lim, De Quiros led the Marcos speech-writing collective nurtured by government finances and government housing. De Quiros, to this day, still lives in the Marcos-provided NHA townhouse complex behind SM City North Edsa.
The speech-writing collective was employed by the Presidential Center for Special Studies under the late Adrian Cristobal, first under the Presidential Center for Advanced Studies, in the University of the Philippines and later under the renamed PCSS after PCAS, under fire from the underground opposition within the state university, decamped from Diliman to a rented safehouse in New Manila’s Ilang-Ilang street.
It was there that De Quiros and company had been overtaked by Edsa 1 events.
Despite what he now claims as having been enchanted by “the province of Angelus” when Cory Aquino drew hundreds of thousands to Luneta during the dying days of the Marcos regime, De Quiros chose to stick it out with PCSS, even after Marcos had fled, until the office was abolished, and the De Quiros collective rendered jobless, by Cory Aquino herself.
According to a colleague who asked not to be identified by name, the firing led to a blue period for the Marcos speechwriter, a bitterness that apparently lingered well into the end of the Cory Aquino presidency, calling her the “Queen of Darkness” for her eight-hour brownout legacy during his Philippine Daily Globe days.
The bitterness again burst in the aftermath of the Hacienda Luisita massacre, when De Quiros, in columns after columns in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, skewered in leftwing indignation not only the Cojuangcos but also Benigno Aquino III himself.
—- Victor C. Agustin
published on Cocktales, Manila Standard Today, February 24, 2010
