recent wave of student agitation and the underground insurgency—appeared to overlap. The mythological quality of the resulting spectacle hinged on the instantaneous collapsibility of the two phenomena, a substitution that suddenly appeared natural and irrefutable. Buried in that spectacle was the seemingly irrelevant detail that authorities were shooting at unarmed civilians, most of whom were just teenagers.
Many spectators found they could no longer passively watch the volatile turn of events. As Lacaba points out, students “found doors being opened to them, or people at second-floor windows warning them with gestures about the presence of soldiers in alleys.”27 The lines separating spectacle and spectator had effectively collapsed. The phenomenon was a microcosm of the revolutionary feeling gripping the nation at large. In Lacaba’s words:
In many a middle-class home, parents could only shake their heads in sorrow and bewilderment, no my child was not a part of it, my child was an innocent bystander, my child was never an activist. But that night of January 30 no one who did not belong to the camp of the enemy could remain a bystander; anyone who was not a minion of the state became instantly an activist, even if only for a moment. Every soul who had ever experienced poverty and oppression found himself linked to his neighbor in those hours of turmoil, welded tightly by a shared fate. . . . A spirit was abroad that night, and the streets spoke of it in whispers: the revolution has arrived. . . . And indeed, the revolution was on everybody’s mind, before everybody’s eyes. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and friends sat by the radio throughout that sleepless night, all on edge, thinking of the revolution.28
Media coverage of the revolt allowed spectators to see themselves as actors in a public drama. Their lack of political indoctrination notwithstanding, subaltern groups, who rose to the occasion by aiding dissidents, became temporary “activists.” Meanwhile, Manila’s most powerful families, certain that their homes would be “set afire by an avenging people,” made ghost towns of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. The next day, the nation took stock of the night’s events. Four students were reported killed. Untold numbers sustained injuries. Almost 300 were arrested and detained at Camp Crame. As it turned out, the revolution had not yet arrived. The public drama of the January 30 revolt was nonetheless a foretaste of that crucial threshold where spectacle ends, and where the revolution might begin. It was an object lesson for Marcos, who would appropriate that spectacle in order to begin foisting a revolution of his own.
In the aftermath of the January 30 “revolt,” Marcos appeared on national television to mythologize the identities of the so-called rebels in a manner that would suit his political interests. The mob that attacked Malacañang, he said, was not a mob of students. Performing an allegorical reading of the media spectacles of the night before, he identified the key visual and auditory cues indicating that the perpetrators of the palace bombings were communist subversives. These mysterious men, he said, waved red banners, carried the Philippine flag with the red field up,29 called the streets they occupied “liberated areas,” and chanted “Dante for president.” These cues proved that the perpetrators were not a group of rowdy youths but a highly organized army acting with the clear intent of seizing state power. Marcos statement was tantamount to a public erasure of the student demonstrators from the January 30 revolt. The spontaneous eruption of mob violence, which was captured by the news media, was thus transformed into a carefully orchestrated attack by urban guerrillas.
Marcos proceeded to defend the brutal actions of the police and the military: “The nonparticipants of that tragic night (read: spectators) could easily accuse the military and the police of ‘fascist’ and ‘repressive’ methods, but what was apparent to the participants was the beginning of a ‘revolutionary’ confrontation stage-managed by a determined minority.”30 Likening the night’s events to a stage play, Marcos would describe the melodramatic logic of its mise-en-scène:
The cries of “revolution” . . . indicated that [the demonstrations] were experiments in . . . overthrowing a duly constituted regime. . . . The strategy of the nihilist radicals and leftists should . . . be clear. By provoking the military and police authorities into acts of violence, they hoped to show before society—before all people—that the government is “fascistic” and undemocratic. This is the reason behind the repetitious charges of “fascism” against the duly constituted authority: to deprive it of its legitimacy.31
The president’s public statements produced a true transfer of power, as responsibility for the public drama of January 30 shifted from the student demonstrators—whose presence was vividly captured by the media—to the backstage “Maoist Communists” who had presumably masterminded the conflict. This mystification, which relied on red-scare tactics to conjure an invisible threat to society, paradoxically played a critical role in Marcos’s efforts to demystify the spectacle of January 30. In effect warning the public not to believe its own eyes, Marcos would deflate the spectacle of the January 30 by asking his public to believe in what it could not see. And, keenly aware of the surprisingly sophisticated use the demonstrators had made of the media during the First Quarter Storm, Marcos would launch his own “revolution” by playing a role—that of the heroic leader—for the national audience.
Heroic Leadership and Political-Image Building
Marcos’s self-presentation as heroic leader necessitated the recuperation of his political image, which had since been tarnished by the 1969 elections. I shall analyze the stigma of the 1969 elections in greater detail in chapter 3, but for now, it behooves us to note that no other president before Marcos—and none since—had as commanding a presence before the camera. In fact, Marcos’s overwhelming popularity during his first presidential run, in 1965, was a part of the melodramatic theatricality of his political career, which was closely followed by the print, film, and broadcast media.
Ferdinand Marcos first entered the public consciousness as a defendant charged with murdering his father’s rival in their home province of Ilocos Norte just after the 1935 legislative elections. He had turned eighteen nine days before the proclaimed winner, Julio Nalundasan, was shot dead by an unknown assailant on the night of September 20, 1935. In December 1938 authorities arrested Ferdinand, who at the time was a law student at the University of the Philippines, about to graduate as class valedictorian. After a much-publicized trial, the twenty-one-year-old Marcos was found guilty and was sentenced to seventeen years in prison. He managed to top the bar exams while under state custody and later served as his own counsel when his case went to the Supreme Court. Displaying the oratorical skills that would come to define his political style, he persuaded the court to reverse the conviction. The stunning reversal led the Philippines Free Press to put his photo on the cover and declare him a public hero.32
If Marcos’s charisma and oratorical style had saved him from a crisis at the beginning of his career, there was no reason to suspect that they would fail him now. Particularly in crises, the media-savvy Marcos had proven himself time and again to be adept at political-image building. His polished public image, which combined equal parts glamour and crisis mongering, seemed to have been carefully modeled after the U.S. president who had singularly captured the symbiotic relationship between the two—John F. Kennedy. Like Kennedy before him, Marcos was most in his element in front of the camera. Like Kennedy, he had a beautiful “aristocratic” wife who would charm the public and function as the essential ornament to his political career. But above all, like Kennedy, he was a political leader much of whose power derived from being both seen and heard.
Marcos’s inauguration, on December 30, 1965, was reported as the “coming of Camelot to the Philippines.” His inaugural speech, “A Mandate for Greatness,” made representatives of the U.S. media experience a “[flash back] to JFK’s inaugural a few years earlier.”33 Interrupted nineteen times by applause (the loudest when he declared that he had been given a “mandate of greatness”), Marcos’s speech so impressed Jack Valenti, future president of the Motion Picture Association
