Visions that made a book.

At various times, I have been a journalist; a broadcaster; a writer; a foreign correspondent; a speechwriter; a press secretary; a magazine editor; and a corporate communications manager. Now, in my eighth decade, I can add ‘author’ to the list. It sits there, isolated, the last entry on my ‘occupations’ list separated by years of retirement.

 

It’s a career highlight I never expected, planned for, or even envisioned. Karma? Maybe. Visions? Definitely. I became an author when I became sick and had visions.

 

Over the years, on many occasions, for many weeks, I had been hospitalised for numerous ailments, but this time it was different. In September 2021, a routine operation that normally requires an overnight stay in hospital, became a complicated procedure requiring a 22-day hospital stay. For five days, I was a Nil-by-Mouth patient with a feeding tube and a drip until the doctors could agree on the best way to keep me alive on the operating table.

 

I was in a stupor and that’s when the visions began. Not dreams. Not hallucinations. Semi-conscious visions, both day and night. Visions with a clarity I never believed possible. Snapshot visions. Visions with no sound. Visions of faces…many, many faces. And visions of places and events I recognised to be in the Philippines where I had lived for a decade. But that was more than 40 years ago! Why visions of the Philippines now? For what reason?

 

It's true that in my retirement I had followed closely events in the Philippines, particularly in recent years. A systematic social media disinformation campaign had been unleashed. Its aim was to change the country’s historical narrative, and the task of social media manipulators was to rehabilitate the Marcos name. But rehabilitate means to ‘restore’. How could Marcos be restored to something he never was? So what these social media manipulators did was to imagine a Marcos who met their propaganda needs. They reinvented Marcos.

 

For years, history deniers have questioned the truthfulness of long accepted historical facts, and unashamedly proffered alternative facts which they believed validated their fantastical reimagining of Marcos and his place in Philippine history. To them, there was no fact that could not be challenged, no event that could not be denied, or positively reinterpreted in this single-focused social media campaign to reinvent Marcos. In their phantasmagorical world, new ‘truths’ could be invented. Denialism was the stock response to hitherto unquestioned facts. They played on the gullibility of Filipinos who had not lived through the Marcos years.

 

I was incensed. Angry. Frustrated. This deliberate, relentless assault on historical orthodoxy seemed unchallengeable. But was it unstoppable? I was one voice, a journalist who once enjoyed front row access to pivotal events in the Philippines which led to the toppling of Marcos and changed the Philippines national identity and the country’s political trajectory. The events I reported on all those years ago, had returned as visions. What did these visions portend? A subliminal call to action? It dawned on me: my journalist days were behind me, but my author days lay ahead.  The significance of the hospital visions was obvious: they were niggling subconscious prods for me to tell of my time as a foreign correspondent in the Philippines, to rebut the lies, the superficial gloss and dross of pro-Marcos propagandists intent on whitewashing the brutality and authoritarianism of the Marcos regime.

 

I am not religious or spiritual in any way, but these visions were gnawing on my conscience like an omen, a subliminal go-ahead to start writing while I still could. My experiences in the Philippines and life under Marcos needed telling. Long ago, I had brushed aside my wife’s suggestions that I write about my ‘Philippine days’. Back then I thought: who would be interested? Today, it’s different. Today, I believe many Filipinos – especially the young – would be interested in my account of events under the Marcos dictatorship.

 

Most Filipinos have grown up in a post-Marcos counterfactual world where social media disinformation has repeatedly and relentlessly chipped away at history, poisoned impressionable minds, and instilled the lie that Marcos was the Philippines best-ever president who presided over a ‘golden age’.

 

Thankfully, there are doubters to this pro-Marcos propaganda, enquiring minds seeking answers. So maybe these hospital bed visions had a purpose: to prick at my conscience, to tell what I saw and experienced during the Marcos years to countless Filipinos robbed of the truth. My reluctance to write became a need to write. I asked the nurse for a pen and some paper, pulled the hospital bedside table in front of me and began to write in shaky longhand. Characters floated by and incidents flickered to life. The barely readable handwritten notes became the first chapters of this book.