Jack The Scribbler

A Marcos loyalist shows the back of her membership card.

MARCOS loyalists don’t get any respect these days.

Just ask Josefina Mangilit, the 59-year-old Quezon City coordinator of the Friends of Imelda Romualdez Marcos (FIRM 24K), which she says has 13,000 members across the country.

Everytime she goes out to attend the group’s twice-weekly meetings—Saturdays in Quezon City, Sundays at the Luneta—she dons a bright red vest that displays her affiliations (an outfit the group calls its uniform). Read the rest of this entry »

It’s also the title of a Ninotchka Rosca novel.

Except that I haven’t read it yet.

But these two words can also describe what my life is like right now, despite the pressures of meeting rent payments while keeping at least six bottles of beer in the fridge. (Not an easy balancing act, I can tell you that.)

A few years back, for no apparent reason, journalist and writer Frank Cimatu — whom I still have to meet in person — asked me to submit one of my short stories as part of Mondo Marcos, an anthology of short fiction and essays about the experience of a generation to which I am ashamed to belong (and only because it reveals my age): Martial law babies.

And now, that volume, to be published by Anvil, will be launched this year. Or so Frank has told its contributors on Facebook.

If it does get produced, the book will be the second anthology featuring my work.

Another short story of mine — The Man Who Came Home — was included in Nine Supernatural Stories, which was published by the University of the Philippines.

And for these achievements however minor, I deserve an ice-cold beer.

The question now is: how many short stories should I chalk up to entitle myself to a deep and meaningful relationship with a really hot chick?

Just thinking out loud of course.

Estimates vary of course. But when the Marcoses, their close relatives, associates, and assistants left Malacañang in 1986, the amount that they reportedly stole was estimated at $10 billion.

Based on informal calculations I made using wolframalpha.com — no fancy formulas involved, just a logical way of formulating a text-based question (not exactly rocket science) — $10 billion then is worth $19.7 billion now.

Multiply that by the current peso-dollar exchange rate — P46 to a greenback — and you get an estimated P906.2 billion.

How much is P906.2 billion?

More than half of the Philippine national budget of 2010.

Okay, let’s exaggerate a bit. It’s still more than half of the Aquino administration’s proposed budget for 2011, which is P1.7 trillion.

Let’s not even count cash they stole that remains unreported.

And let’s not even think about the “opportunity costs” lost — say, the economic multiplier effect had X amount of money been allotted to land reform — because the government failed to recover the wealth immediately.

In short, if the government isn’t going to do anything about it, or if they do so haphazardly, what Imelda Marcos once said when asked about ger family’s stupendous wealth might be proven true: that some are smarter than others.

I was once more reminded of the enormity — which has two meanings, both appropriate, look them up — of the Marcos’ ill-gotten wealth after I read the first chapter of Imelda and the Clans: A Story of the Philippines.

The 600-plus page book was written by Beatriz Romualdez Francia, who, among others, describes herself as Imelda’s “dissident niece.”

Here are some numbers I derived after reading the first chapter.

Number of the Marcos entourage members — including “hairdressers, gardeners, closest henchmen” — that left Malacañang in February 1986: 89

Height, in feet, of a Malacañang closet that stored Imelda’s nightgowns: 10

Number of gowns stored in said closet: 1,200

Number of shelves that contained unused Gucci handbags: 5

Total number of Gucci handbags stored in said shelves: 1,500

Number of black brassieres stored in the same closet: 500

Number of clothes racks that were empty: 67

Number of mink coats: 15

Number of silver fox stoles: 6

Number of parasols: 65

Number of scarves: 464

Number of handkerchiefs: 664

Number of sunglasses found stuffed in a chest: 71

Number of teddy bears with “loving words from George [presumably Hamilton]: 1

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Thanks to Michael Francis McCarthy for the photo of the book.