Corazon Aquino is dead, and — especially since I’m writing this in the Philippines — I’m in the midst of a fit of national mourning. It’s all over the place: the funeral procession on TV, people wearing yellow T-shirts, banners on buildings, tweets and Facebook status updates, constant newspaper coverage, the lines of mourners, tributes from world leaders. Even Pope Benedict XVI has lauded Aquino’s “courageous commitment to the freedom of the Filipino people, her firm rejection of violence and intolerance”.

Yet I can’t seem to feel any sorrow over her death. Quite frankly, I’m a little disgusted by all these encomiums and how easily people forget.

This is not to say that I’m some sort of heartless grump — quite the contrary — but I’m hoping that this blog entry may serve as more of an explanation. It really has to do, I think, with where I was twenty-three years ago, about my emotional maturity and my political education. It has to do with what I remember.

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There is no better illustration, I think, of how GMA’s KarlRovean tactic — of equating any sort of dissent with “destabilization” — has been parroted by both (alas) members of the media and the academe, than by the constant repetition of the catchphrase “people power fatigue.” I read it as glib pseudo-sociological shorthand that both legitimates and reproduces acquiescence to GMA’s vision of “order.” Such “fatigue” is clearly contradicted by the mass demonstrations held both in Manila and in the provinces, both now and during the Hello Garci scandal (to name just two instances). The phrase — an easy journalistic entree into understanding Those Wacky Filipinos — (un)wittingly pathologizes opposition as being harmful to the body of the nation; it is “gulo,” after all, and “gulo” apparently must be quelled through preemptive strikes.

Perhaps GMA herself said it best in her radio announcement proclaiming the “lifting” of 1071, when she thanked the Filipino people “who understand that the best way to a bright future is through hard work, not taking to the streets.”

(Actually, Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez has an even better quote in the Philippine Daily Inquirer:

“I think it has some sobering effect,” Gonzalez said when asked whether PP 1017 had been effective when applied to the media.

“Even the most critical media had started to reexamine their policies,” he said, adding that PP 1017, like all laws, had the effect of “sowing fear” among the people.)

Meanwhile, here’s something backchanneled to me, and I’ll let the unnamed person have the last word anyway:

as far as i am concerned, my wish is to see every demonstrator on EDSA arrested for destabilizing the Philippine economy. they have no viable replacement for GMA and they are making the philippines an undesirable place for any sort of investment. what alternative do the demonstrators have in mind? another “free election?” none of the street actions have, in any way, shape, or form brought a solution to the increasing gap between those who have and those who don’t.

randy a martyr? good lord, after his support for Erap? while i am not an admirer of GMA, neither am i a fan of a loose coalition of FVR, Erap and FPJ sycophants, Marcos loyalists, Utrecht puppets, and glib neo-leftists. and that aquino widow should use her time putting some sense into her talentless daughter’s brain before she wastes her energies on EDSA.

also, instead of focusing on that entire Garci incident, maybe those demonstrators should begin by locking up every member of the Marcos family and administration and making them accountable for what the Philippines has become today.

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The conference I attended over the weekend — in particular, UC Santa Cruz scholar Sherwin Mendoza’s comments on Linda Ty-Casper’s Dream Eden (which I haven’t read) — made me think about EDSA and trauma. Mendoza argued that narrative arcs in novels from what he called “the EDSA genre” followed similar structures, from euphoria to disillusion, which he described as a “fall from utopia.”

I like to think of it as an “atopia,” if there is such a word. What happened in February 1986 is constantly characterized as creating a singular, atypical moment of social solidarity, perhaps in the way that Durkheim imagined it: the free sharing of food and water, the seeming obliteration of social differences, the pervading sentiments of oneness with the crowd — in short, a sense of this historical rupture as being outside of time and place. Think of it as the ecstasy of revolution.

Or, in this case, “revolution:” things sour quickly, and in each novel — indeed, every single year — the Filipino public is painfully reminded of this traumatic loss, the government’s attempts to rein in or at least renarrativize such uncontrollable memories notwithstanding.

This is a different structure of the traumatic event as Freud conceived it: here, the loss happens afterwards, in a protracted non-eventful decline quite unlike the swift act we normally associate with trauma. In this respect it is closer to something like melancholy, resulting in a diminution of the melancholic’s ego (or the Filipino ego). As Freud writes:

In melancholia the relation to the object is… complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love-relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved the threat of losing the object.

You say you want a revolution, but — well, you know…

But there is a sense in which EDSA can be seen as precisely reproducing the paradigmatic structure of trauma. By the time “EDSA II” (and the intervening coup attempts both before and after) rolled along, the happy communitas of the original had dissipated, owing, as Courtney Johnson put it, to the difference between the spontaneity of the first and the forced busing of the second (and the “third”). People Power had settled, at this point, into a predictable, reproducible modularity.

One could then understand the EDSA Revolution — and not just the squandering of political opportunities which happened afterwards — as a traumatic event in and of itself. Now the great anxiety of the Filipino public is perhaps the frightening possibility that “EDSA” — now pre-approved, sanitized for one’s protection, and packaged with its own narrative template — could return as an uncontrollably repeating event, forever haunting the nation, infinitely reproducing as EDSA III, IV, V and its sequels thereafter.

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