I had to take a breather yesterday because this book keeps pissing me off. 😭

First of all, the white saviorism and colonial mentality. Admiring the USA's treatment of Watergate, hoping the Filipino people can replicate their determinism and sense of justice to perserve the democracy of the USA, Primitivo shrugs off their neocolonial hold on the Philippines because at least, the great USA let justice prevail..... "ultra nationalists call this colonial mentality" IT IS! And then, after waxing poetic about the wonderful democracy of the imperial USA, Primitivo details the things he enabled and allowed himself to be used for, because he was afraid of Philippines falling under "communism".... Well... Thank God, his desire for truth is greater than his distaste for communism! 🙄

This is an important read because he does detail exactly how corrupt, conniving, and egotistical the Marcoses were/are. But man..... this is hard to read.

I'm curious why the author decided some memories are not worth writing about. I'm thinking each chapter is a memory Istvan looks back on when he's older, freer and wiser to understand life. What does that say about Istvan that these chapters are what he's choosing to remember? Chapter 2 in particular comes to mind.

Istvan reminds me of Meursault, the protagonist in Albert Camus' The Stranger but Istvan is more curious about the world. He wants to care but he never had the same rule book, never learned the same social cues everybody expects him to just know. What he does learn and internalize about society damages and isolates him, further estranging from the world he wants to belong to.

The clipped and strained style of narration does mirror Istvan's thought process so in this chapter, when Istvan finally allows himself to remember, the sentences go on and on. No quotation marks, no breaks---a full page of narration. This is would be the third? time the author allowed us into Istvan's interiority, which seems to be the only times as well where Istvan allows himself to process his own emotions. This is the chapter that separates him from Mersault in my mind. Istvan wants to survive but he does not know how to live. Meursault does neither.

The sense of urgency in finishing this work was also goaded by the thought that Marcos does not have eternal life and that the Filipino people are of unimaginable forgiving posture. I thought that, if I did not perpetuate this work for posterity, Marcos might unduly benefit from a Laurelian statement that, when a man dies, the virtues of his past are magnified and his faults are reduced to molehills.

Primitivo Mijares was last seen on January 1977. 9 years later, Marcos would be exiled to Hawaii by the People Power Revolution. 3 years after that, Marcos would die. The next administrations would do nothing in the mean time, allowing Marcos' son to win a seat in congress in 1992, a senate seat in 2010, and the presidency in 2022. Yesterday (Nov. 13), Juan Ponce Enrile died peacefully, surrounded by his loved ones, fully escaping justice.

Before the internet takes this quote and use it to fit their classist narratives, it was not the Filipino masses' "forgiving" nature that enabled this happen, but the billion peso industry that is the Philippine government. Because it is most profitable to keep the Filipinos docile and misinformed.