It was an overcast Thursday morning at the Luneta — now Rizal — Park, in devastated Manila, where, only a year before, 100,000 Filipinos perished during the most horrific urban fighting in the Pacific theater of World War II. (A total of 1 million Filipinos — who fought under the American flag — died in the war.)
On that solemn day nearly 62 years ago, an imperial power voluntarily relinquished a possession for the first time in history. For the Filipinos, it was the culmination of their struggle for nationhood that began in 1896. Hundreds of thousands gathered near the ramshackle grandstand of their ruined capital and watched as the representative of U.S. President Harry Truman, High Commissioner Paul McNutt, slowly lowered the Stars and Stripes while a U.S. Army band played the Star Spangled Banner. When the music ended, Philippine President Manuel Roxas y Acuña pulled at a white cord up the same silver-painted pole, and the Philippine tricolor slowly began to rise. The band played the Philippine national anthem, and as the Filipino flag rose, a breeze from the nearby bay unfurled the emblem’s colors. The crowd cheered and tears rolled down the cheeks of the, by then, rain-soaked Filipinos as American, Australian, Portuguese and Thai naval warships fired a 21-gun salute. Sirens blared and church bells pealed all over the Philippine archipelago.
Now the only teary-eyed kababayans seen in that historic area are those whose visa applications have been rejected by the despicable consuls of the American Embassy.
It was in May 1962 when Gloria Macapagal Arroyo’s old man, President Diosdado Macapagal — 1936 bar topnotcher, doctor of civil law, doctor of economics — signed an executive order proclaiming June 12, which up to that time had been observed as Flag Day, as Independence Day. Why? 1) To curry favor with the noisy pinko nationalists among the intelligentsia; 2) As payback for the U.S. House’s rejection of an additional $73 million war payment to America’s former colony (pro-tobacco U.S. congressmen were not amused by the Philippine government’s refusal to allow the entry of Virginia tobacco); and 3) Members of the diplomatic corps in Manila would rather go the Fourth of July receptions at the American Embassy rather than sample the cocktails prepared by the Philippine government. “We needed a different holiday,” Mac later told an American journalist.
This is not to downplay the significance of June 12, 1898. On that day, Asia’s first republic was born under a democratic constitution, and it marked the first triumph of Asia’s anti-colonial revolutionaries. It has been pretty much downhill for the P.I. since then.
Yes, the P.I. And yes, I, too, was irritated to learn, the first time I arrived on island, that the Pearl of the Orient was known as the “P.I.” here and not “R.P.” for Republic of the Philippines. Calling my country the P.I. is like calling Indonesia “Dutch East Indies,” Malaysia “British Malaya,” or Vietnam, “French Indochina,” I harrumphed in a brash editorial that only a brash 26-year-old leftist was capable of.
I was, of course, wrong. I later realized that my country’s original name was Las Islas Felipinas, in honor of the then-crown prince and later Felipe II de España (1527-1598). We are, whether we like it or not, the Philippine Islands — P.I.
Back home, some believe that a free nation named after a dead king of a former colonizer is not “fully” independent. During the martial law regime, President Marcos’ rubber-stamp parliament considered re-naming the P.I. “Maharlika,” a pre-Hispanic native word that supposedly connoted “nobility.” But the history department of the University of the Philippines found out later that “maharlika” actually meant “vassal” — i.e., “a slave; a subordinate or dependent.” “Maharlika,” experts now say, did not come from the Sanskrit “mahardikka,” which means “noble,” but from another Sanskrit word, “maha lingam,” which means “great phallus.”
Great idea.
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