On November 29, 2023, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger passed away at the age of 100.  There lies a man known worldwide, which is odd given despite being the topmost position in the executive department behind the president in history’s biggest empire, secretaries of state don’t often get to the fame, or infamy rather, of Kissinger.   Here in the Philippines, the sins of the Nobel Peace Prize winner echo throughout Southeast Asia and very little time goes by in our social media feeds wherein Anthony Bourdain’s quote on how you’ll “never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands” doesn’t pop up.  It really did seem that as time went by, Henry Kissinger became the embodiment of the adage that the good die young simply due to his incapability of both being good and of dying.  Unless you’re part of the richest of the rich, we have all wondered why some people get to live as long as they have and for many there was no better face to place this attitude than the man who bombed Cambodia and propped up a Chilean dictator, among other things.  And when the day actually did come where he died, well we all know how that first song in Wicked goes.

     Writing this, 101 year old Juan Ponce Enrile, who witnessed the invention of penicillin in his lifetime, has succumbed to pneumonia and died.  I’ve always disliked celebrating a death, which is a very Catholic characteristic for someone who has been raised anti-Catholic, mostly due to all the moral and ethical qualms I guess but I’ve always said it’s because ultimately what comes out of it?  I won’t temper anyone’s emotions especially if the deceased was a truly malignant force, your free will entails freedom to enjoy the passing of a person and I won’t stop that nor do I blame you.  But I can’t help but see it as deeply unnecessary and futile.  A contention which I’ve grappled far too many times in these past few years than I’d like.

      We are made to find meanings in things, and to our current knowledge we are special among the animal kingdom in that distinction.  To be human is simply to find meaning.  Religion and mythology emerge from this desire to explain what we don’t understand, and the pursuit of science is our way of doing that again but with justifications.  History is far from immune in this, and granted why shouldn’t we assign meaning to what happens to us?  It HAS to mean SOMETHING, right?  For the more pious than I, God must have a reason for this doesn’t he?  This obsession with placing meaning on everything is the reason why I’m a literature student, because like everything else stories are just meanings we put ourselves.  And who doesn’t love a good story?  Narratives with a clear-cut moral good and bad, right and wrong, just and unjust, are just as comforting as they were when we first opened a fairytale picture book in preschool.  Something happens when we always try to look for that happy satisfying ending, especially when it isn’t all clear-cut.  The goalpost is moved again and again until the bare minimum tinge of satisfaction is all we need.  The notions of “at least the protest art is gonna be good” when an unjust war happens, and “those survivors will live to tell the tale and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger after all” about a genocide.  And yes, the most primal sense of a silver lining ever, singing “ding dong the witch is dead” when one of history’s monsters die.

   I do not mourn Juan Ponce Enrile, the more I’ve learned about him the more I hate him.  In fact, in my own sense of arbitrary meaning, he embodies all that I consider wrong with my country.  The fact that through switching political sides in line with personal interest and his omnipresent chokehold on Filipino media and society as a result, he has managed to simultaneously be the cause and architect of martial law, one of the most powerful and wealthy crony of Marcos, the instigator of EDSA, the coup-happy cabinet official of Cory, the loudest proponent of Marcos revisionism for decades, the third in line for being head of the country, and the chief legal counsel of the current president, is insane.  That previous sentence is all I’m giving as far as a biography, this isn’t an obituary do your own research.  I hold so much contempt at how for the last half-century, the name ENRILE has scarcely been absent from newspaper headlines across the country.  I detest how when he passes, my feed will be littered with memes with his face and articles doing a biography more thorough and exalting than my seven Oxford commas.  I am livid that the first title mentioned in these obits will not be that of a Cold War-era aide to a dictator that’s since become a  recluse pariah and instead be a high-level position that he gained at the age of 98.  I loathe how he played an integral role in the resignation of Vic Rodriguez proving that to this day he still somehow politically matters.  I abhor how he supported the ICC arrest of Rodrigo Duterte showing how to the very end he never stopped switching sides.  And I hate how despite all the hate I have for him, I can not join in celebrating his death.

      One famous quote from him is in 1986 when he approached Manila Archbishop Cardinal Sin after Ferdinand Marcos Sr. learned of his attempted coup.

    “I will be dead within one hour. I don’t want to die… If it is possible, do something. I’d still like to live.” 

   And I’m sure that if he didn’t already that he believes in God just from that alone.  Perhaps the promise of divine reckoning is the meaning prescribed by some.  The tribunal of God can not be brushed off in service of a cabinet position after all.

   I have some meanings myself I’ve placed upon his coming death.  How of all the figures complicit in martial law, we couldn’t even indict the one that self-confessed faking the ambush that led to it and how as a result he is the failure of the Philippines incarnate.  How due to his passing, for the first time in my life the upcoming Valentine’s Day will not coincide with another year to his life’s tally.  How his death as a cabinet member in the administration of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. really becomes the last nail in the coffin to show we failed the spirit of People’s Power.  And finally how his demise marks yet another old evil bastard gone where the concept of outliving them I, and many mentally ill progressives, have been using as motivation to keep going.

     If I got to choose, then yeah I’d probably make the choice that him being dead is better than him being alive, but even then what am I satiating?  Juan Ponce Enrile tests the limits of schadenfreude or the joy gained from another’s misery, because by the end is “misery” the right word to describe his situation?  A powerful man rich and famous, and who’s gotten off scott-free from all the illegal and immoral actions he did that got him to be rich and famous, surrounded by loved ones as the entire nation is captivated one last time by Juan Ponce Enrile.  What happened still happened, and no rejoicing can ever cancel that, and what’s worse what’s currently going seems to still be going on without any stop.  If I throw my cap in the air and cheer that Enrile died, I’ll still have to read his name in textbooks.  The same way no party will rid the fact that Salvador Allende killed himself as Augosto Pinochet took over Chile, no festivity will ever make it so that the Philippines had fair democratic elections in 1973 upon which Ferdinand Marcos peacefully transferred power.  Juan Ponce Enrile got to live to 101, we have long moved from his passing giving any sort of justice only to be met with the realization, the final salt crystal on the everlasting wound, that actually he may have been 104.

     1 year and 9 months ago today, I wrote a student article that was published for Juan Ponce Enrile’s 100th birthday.  Detailing all the events that occurred in the vast life of the centenarian, I concluded it by saying of his age “a number is prescribed to a man, undeserving in terms of years lived and severely lacking in terms of sins committed in said life.”  Since then, Donald Trump won re-election to be the 47th president of the United States, Pope Leo XVI became the first Pope born after WWII, and Spanish tennis player Rafael Nadal retired from his almost 30 year career.  I’m sure there were other big events that took place, but you get the idea by now.   I don’t mourn for Juan Ponce Enrile, but I do mourn for whatever meaning I and everyone else have placed upon him.