By HERBERT VEGO
AS the month of August is about to end, I remember my Lola Maria, who died of tuberculosis in this month, circa 1967.
Coincidentally, this month is being commemorated as the “Lung Month” in honor of the late Manuel Luis Molina Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth. It was in this month (August 19) when he breathed his first breath in 1878 and breathed his last (August 1) due to tuberculosis in 1944. TB was an incurable, fatal disease at that time.
Unfortunately, we also remember Quezon at this time when the government is run like hell by “fake reformists,” to quote President Benigno Simeon “Noynoy” Aquino, who is probably one of them. To Quezon is attributed the famous quotation: “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to one run like heaven by the Americans.”
He said that in defiance to the “racist policies” of Leonard Wood, the United States governor-general in the Philippines during the incumbency of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Such open display of bravado against a foreign power made him a folk hero.
In my youth, even if he had died six years before my birth, Quezon was such an idol that, after only one year of college at UP-Iloilo, I went to Manila to take up Journalism at a private school named after him, the Manuel L. Quezon University (MLQU).
So it is not surprising that I have not forgotten what I have learned about Quezon, whether good or bad.
I remember my grade four teacher joking, “Don’t be like Quezon. He was a lazy student who disliked doing his homework.”
But she was quick to add that when the revolutionary forces of Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo declared revolution against the Spanish regime in 1898, “Quezon was among those who bravely took up arms.”
After the Spanish-American war, Quezon resumed his law studies at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila.
In 1903, Quezon passed the bar examination and set up practice in his birthplace at Baler, Tayabas (now Quezon Province).
He gave up private practice to assume the post of provincial fiscal of Mindoro and later of Tayabas. In 1906 he was elected provincial governor.
In 1907, Quezon ran for the Philippine Assembly under the Nacionalista Party and won. In 1916 he was elected to the Senate, and soon became its president.
In 1933, a bill providing for the future independence of the Philippines, the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Bill, passed the US Senate. Quezon opposed the new law because “America would still hold military and naval bases in the Philippines even after the latter’s independence, and, moreover, export duties regulated in the law would destroy both industry and trade.”
Quezon led a mission to the United States to work for a bill that would eventually be passed as the Tydings-McDuffie Law, providing for Philippine independence in 1946.
In September 1935, Quezon was elected first president of the commonwealth, with Sergio Osmeña as vice president.
In November 1941, Quezon was reelected president of the commonwealth. When the Japanese forces occupied Manila in 1942, he and his Cabinet fled from the Philippines and set up an exile government in Washington in May 1942. He died in Australia on Aug. 1, 1944, a year before the liberation of the Philippines.
***
It was also on the 23rd day of this month in 2010 when a terminated Manila policeman demanding to be reinstated, Rolando Mendoza, held 21 Hong Kong nationals hostages in an air-conditioned bus at Rizal Park. Seven of the hostages and the policeman himself died there.
That incident seemed to have blown up in the face of President Aquino as the Hong Kong administration keeps on pressing him to apologize. He has never done so.
Records eventually showed that way back in 1986, Mendoza was declared one of the “10 most outstanding policemen” after intercepting a bag of dollars which the owner had intended to smuggle out of the country./PN
