Of Butterflies and Worms:

A Reaction to the Documentary Imelda

by Marc Lorlin Z. Navisa 2013-38337

I am not in any way amused by the documentary about the steel butterfly that is Imelda Marcos. How could such a lavish woman have the gall to say she sympathizes with the poor? That is like saying Adolf Hitler is a Jew.

For one, she and her late husband were known to have siphoned out a humongous chunk of our national coffers to ghost accounts in Switzerland, US, and other countries. For another, her husband’s regime killed more than 3 200 people, tortured 35 000 and incarcerated 70 000 (Juan L. Mercado, 2012).

Surely, she has to come up with something better than saying she sympathizes with the poor to convince me.

She said she pioneered the construction of edifices that were supposed to promote our culture in the international scene—Manila Film Center to name one. But underneath its pillars lie the corpses of the laborers buried alive while the center was being constructed. Now, the Manila Film Center has become nothing but a haunted derelict.

She said she had somehow put the Philippines on the map with her shoe collection. If I were to own that amount of shoes, my conscience would haunt me with pictures of children in my province going to school without anything to protect their soles against the ragged surface and blistering heat of the earth. If I were Imelda Marcos, I would choke at saying I sympathize with the poor. I might not ever become a billionaire; but surely, I can never be a thief.

However neutral I tried to be as I watched the documentary, I still just couldn’t grasp the enthusiasm in the steel butterfly, much her ramblings about beauty. Those shoes could feed families. I do not care however dazzling she looks in her shoes, in her platinum bracelets embedded with rubies, or in her designer shades. That was the money sucked from the veins of the Filipino people, drop by drop.

She lavished while the Filipino suffered. An act of parasitism—this is not what a butterfly does, this is the doing of a worm.