There will be no state funeral for former President Corazon Aquino because, according to a newspaper report, her youngest daughter Kris announced on television that Malacañang’s offer was turned down by her siblings because of differences arising from the Arroyo administration’s decision to recall two soldiers serving as the former president’s security detail after she joined the calls for Arroyo’s resignation back in 2005. That Cory herself, had she been in a position to make the decision, would have shunned the circus that comes with a state funeral would have been understandable. She was a woman who did not feel at home with the privileges that, in our twisted culture, are considered inherent in high public office. She was the first president, and will probably be the last, to refuse to take up residence in Malacañang Palace, opting to occupy the guest house in Arlegui instead. In a 1999 Time Asia article, Sandra Burton wrote: To the dismay of the soldier who was driving Corazon Aquino to her swearing-in ceremony in 1986, the housewife who would be President insisted on stopping at red lights to let civilian traffic pass. Eager to signal a break from the past, she chose to abandon the imperial-style motorcades of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos… Aquino was still at it on the day in 1992 when she rode away from the inauguration of her successor, Fidel Ramos, not in a government-issue Mercedes, but in the simple white Toyota Crown she had purchased to make the point that she was once again an ordinary citizen. Once again an ordinary citizen. That she would consider a security detail consisting of members of the armed forces the natural entitlement of an ordinary citizen would be rather ironic. She did not feel entitled to reside in a palace when she was the president (and rightly so because Malacañang remains a symbol of ostentatious display as well as our feudal roots), how could she feel it was her right, as an ordinary citizen, to have taxpayer-salaried military guards? If Cory would object to a state funeral, it would be for deeper and more serious reasons. If the objection were based on not wanting any favors and good graces from the Arroyo administration which she felt no affection for, she would have said so with a polite refusal and not hidden behind inane reasons like the pullout of bodyguards. Despite the insistence of her family that they do not want Cory’s death to be tainted with political color, Kris had been very eloquent in her praises for another former president, Joseph Estrada, when he visited Cory in the hospital after accepting the family’s condition that the visit remain a secret. I doubt if her death will be entirely free from political color. Even on her deathbed, the realignment of political forces were already in full swing. And it will go on and on. Even in death, Cory Aquino’s name still holds magic for many and there will always be people who will seek to capitalize on it. Some will claim friendship where there was only a casual acquaintance while others will claim political affiliation where there was a mere passing encounter, all hoping that somehow the Cory magic will rub off on them. Cory, after all, continues to inspire because, in life and death, she epitomizes the dream that even the most ordinary person can be catapulted to great power and not be a total failure at it. Cory Aquino did not seek a position of power but she rose to the occasion when no one else could have led the country in a period of political turmoil. To borrow the words of Tim Rice, she was “stuck in the right place at the perfect time.” After her husband’s murder, she was the perfect person to stand as a symbol for unity at a time when the country needed one most badly. I loathed Marcos and his administration but I held no admiration for Ninoy Aquino either and not even his death could make me go around tying yellow ribbons around the U.P. College of Law. But when Cory called for civil disobedience and a boycott of businesses controlled by Marcos cronies following the infamous 1986 snap presidential elections, I saw history turning. If she couldn’t topple Marcos from power, no one else could. There was an undeniable immediacy that I couldn’t turn my back on. Despite my misgivings about the people who have surrounded Cory who, quite obviously, were capitalizing on her popularity and the massive sympathy she was enjoying to push their own political ambitions, and despite my reservations about what she could achieve considering the political and social class that she belonged to, I joined the boycott and mass actions that culminated in the EDSA Revolution. I regret none of it although I’d be happier if the EDSA Revolution could have achieved more than what eventually turned out to be a mere changing of the guards sans real and substantial political and economic change. In the midst of of the national outpouring of grief for former President Cory Aquino, I feel nothing. No, I don’t hate her. I don’t even dislike her. In many ways, I respect her and she will forever be a part of my political education. But I cannot, in conscience, make her out to be some kind of saint and martyr that many paint her to be in death. She was an extraordinary woman, no doubt, in more ways than one but an unblemished leader she was not. No one is, really, and the critical voices, silent now, rang loud and clear during Mrs. Aquino’s administration especially in view of how the family-owned Hacienda Luisita escaped physical expropriation under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Law. It’s very Filipino and very Catholic, I must admit. We have this penchant for elevating the dead to a pedestal as though to forget his or her human faults and frailties. It’s disrespectful, really, the way people try to belittle the dead by painting an image that is less than the totality of what he or she was in life. Disrespectful to the dead and disrespectful to all those left behind. In Cory Aquino’s case, all of us, who have the right to remember her and her administration for what they truly were.

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