A monumental disaster

There is no doubt that the Marcos monument in Tuba, Benguet was inspired by the Mount Rushmore National Memorial of South Dakota. The main difference is that the four American Presidents depicted in the Rushmore Memorial were carved on a granite cliff while the Marcos memorial was just made of cement reinforced with steel. The other difference is that the Rushmore Memorial depicted the faces of four great American Presidents: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. The Marcos monument depicted only himself and was constructed under his dictatorial regime.

The head of Washington in the Rushmore Memorial is 60 feet tall. The head of Marcos is 99 feet high! It was the biggest monument in the Philippines and it was a perfect symbol of Marcos's dictatorial regime because only under dictatorships do heads of states put up monuments to themselves.

The NPA acknowledged itself as the group responsible for dynamiting the gigantic bust of Marcos and now it is a thing of the past.

It is Agesilaus, former king of Sparta, who said: "If I have done any deed worthy of remembrance, that deed will be my monument. If not, no monument can preserve my memory."

Nathaniel Hawthorne phrased it differently. He said, "No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one." William Hazlitt made the same observation: "They only deserve a monument who do not need one; that is,who have raised themselves a monument in the minds and memories of men."

Owen D. Young also saw goodness as the only true monument: "Virtue alone outbuilds the pyramids; her monument shall last when Egypt falls."

If there is anything that Marcos proved, it is that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Since the Spanish period, the Philippines was economically the second most progressive country in Asia.

After two decades of Marcos misrule, we became the second poorest nation in Asia, next only to Bangladesh. And if President Marcos had stayed longer. we would now be even poorer than Bangladesh. The Marcos monument was the height of conceit. And according to the Jewish Talmud, conceit is equivalent to all other sins.

The problem now is what to do with the destroyed monument. We see only three alternatives: rebuild it, destroy it totally or leave it as is. If it is rebuilt, it should not be with people's money. To destroy it will involve great expense.The best is to leave it as it is. That monument is part of history. Its ruins will serve to remind one and all that in the words of Washington Irving, "Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument become a ruin."