Lest we forget or get confused — especially since we’re getting all the help we don’t need — it was on the 21st, not on the 23rd, of August, 1983, that Benigno Aquino Jr. returned from exile — to his martyrdom.

That was a mere three years after the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, worried that a high-profile political prisoner, his archrival in fact, would die in his hands, had let him out for an emergency heart bypass surgery in the United States. Before that, he had spent seven years in Marcos’s prison, mostly in isolation.

Marcos’ wife, Imelda, had tried to dissuade him from coming home, warning of a plot on his life. Sure enough, upon landing in Manila, he was fetch by soldiers from his plane seat and led down a makeshift planeside stairway concealed from everyone’s view. Before his feet could touch home soil, one of his escorts put a bullet in his head.

The assassination put the nation on a slow steady boil, and on February 22, 1986, when reports leaked out that a coup had been prematurely exposed, the pot boiled over. A million people poured out onto EDSA, the metropolis’s main highway, calling on the dictator to step down. On the fourth day, he was extracted by his American patrons and put on a flight to Hawaii with his family, heavy with loot. Thus finally ended Ferdinand Marcos’ 14-year martial rule, and began the rehabilitation of our bankrupt nation.

Now, his heirs can’t wait to expunge that mass revolt and the murder that had led to it from the nation’s memory.

Deodorizing the bad guys of history has in fact become standard PR practice. And, with a potential clientele constantly enlarged and enriched and helped to flourish in a corrupt political culture, it should be a lucrative one. Moreover, its workings are made easy by an information platform enabled indiscriminately by modern communication technology — social media.

The practice is referred to as “historical revisionism,” falsely and deceptively passed off as such in hopes of giving it a semblance of legitimacy. Actually, as a proper practice, historical revisionism offers new findings or a new plausible interpretation of a historical account in light of new findings. In this case, it is definitely neither; rather, it is falsification of history, pure and simple.

Back in power, the Marcoses, defeated villains who have found themselves victors again, are preoccupied with the self-sanitizing tactic. And here’s what they have done with Ninoy Aquino’s murder and the People Power revolt:

For this year, Ferdinand Jr. used his presidential power to move the date of the murder two days forward to indulge a natural fancy for holiday-making. August 23 being a Friday and the Monday following a normal holiday — National Heroes Day — the forward dating made for a string of four holidays, including the sandwiched non-working weekend days. The sacred 21st, meantime, was demoted to an abnormal non-holiday.

Earlier, Junior had dropped EDSA altogether from the list of national holidays. The mockery did not stop there. He said that, if the occasion had to be observed at all, the observance should be consolidated on its last day. That, he said — and here is the ultimate mockery — was when his father, by his own gracious accommodation, consented to be deposed and driven out of the country. Indeed, what’s there to celebrate when his father’s capitulation marked the end of a “golden age?” he went on to suggest, on what seemed second thought — possibly an initially self-suppressed one, for the thought is so insane that should be obvious even to the simplest mind.

Indeed, what gracious accommodation? Ferdinand Marcos went flying with a boot mark on his behind!

Misrepresentation, distortion, falsification — there may be some sense of factuality in using any of those words to describe what Junior and his family are doing to the nation’s history. But not one of those words captures the big stink it gives off.

Me — I distinctly smell it: the Marcoses have been pissing on our history. And the stink, because it lingers most extensively and sharply and longest there, is most unmistakable around the graveyard for our heroes — the Libingan ng mga Bayani. That neighborhood went once Ferdinand Sr. was laid there to rest.

If you don’t smell what I smell — and I suspect you don’t, since all the pissing doesn’t appear to bother you — you should see a suitable EENT. And, while at it, you should have a keener nose inspect your clothes too. – Rappler.com