MALACAÑANG just can’t leave well enough alone. It had to answer the young Marcos on the question of his father’s state honors as former president, to which he is clearly entitled and for which there can be no case for disqualification.

Why not let the Marcoses speak their peace, get things off their chest, and get over their disappointment at being misled by the President into thinking he was seriously reconsidering the no-burial policy of the late president? Say nothing back. Doesn’t Malacañang have enough to wipe off its face from the first round of this issue?

Let them have the last word, since anyway, the last word that counts was already spoken by the President. No burial, in any case.

Or so we thought, for now there may be a precondition: that an apology be made.

Now Malacañang says that before considering the funeral honors requested by his children, the father must first say he is sorry.

Sorry for what?

Declaring martial law?

But that was constitutional, according to the Supreme Court.

Canceling democracy?

That was done to effect reforms that the landlord-dominated Congress kept blocking, such as agrarian reform. We are canceling democracy in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM) to effect political reforms.

Canceling elections?

Noynoy just did that, too, to effect political reforms in ARMM. And Marcos never canceled elections. It was the ratification of the 1973 Constitution, widely acclaimed and ratified by the Filipino people that canceled the forthcoming elections for president. I recall photos of monkeys jumping their acclamation.

Changing the Constitution?

We were about to change the 1935 Constitution with an elected convention of delegates for sale. The Free Press published Quintero’s exposé.

The only independent initiative of that Convention of Fools was the “unconstitutional” proposal to disqualify by constitutional amendment the wife of the sitting president from seeking election to his place—an inalienable right to run for public office that no Constitution, however drafted, crafted and ratified, can deny. That was really shit, for which the proponents were rightly jailed by a smart lawyer-dictator for their ignorance of constitutional law.

The disqualification of the first lady partook of the nature of a bill of attainder, like the attempt to disqualify the Catholic brother of Charles II from succeeding to the throne in violation of the monarchic principle that succession is by blood and not by whimsy, that dethronement must be by impeachment but never by disqualification as the Earl of Rochester so tersely and elegantly argued as he rotted with syphilis. “A king is born to be king, not chosen,” the Parliament shouted down the proposition, “one cannot pick and choose.”

Should he apologize for getting an authoritarian Constitution passed around with fried chicken and Chinese noodles? We still do that in every election.

Should he apologize for rigging elections? He never did that. He won the presidency twice, fair and square, and by landslides. He won re-election in 1969 as a war hero against a collaborator jailed by his own father, the last Commonwealth and first postwar president and the most fiscally and intellectually honest man ever in public and private life, bar none.

Under martial law, Marcos never paid for a vote he could get by fear, if not enthusiasm. People really liked martial law, as was frequently shoved by ordinary Filipinos, not to mention foreigners, in the faces of its victims like my father and myself.

Should Marcos apologize for stealing in public office? Puhleese, post-Edsa presidents have made Marcos an amateur by comparison.

Pray then, for what must Marcos apologize?

For the many extrajudicial murders committed during martial law? But there have been many more murders since.

But I do not buy the Mendiola massacre that Jimmy Tadeo invited from the not-yet-retooled police with a lingering martial-law mentality.

And pray tell, how shall a dead man apologize?

Death erases crime, not that any crime or offense or misdeed imputed to Marcos was ever proved, aside from repeated Supreme Court validations of everything he did and the repeatedly popular ratification of all his acts, including the assassination of Ninoy Aquino when the vast majority of the Filipino electorate returned two-thirds of the Batasan to Marcos in an election cleaner than any we have held since.

And, finally, do we now visit the sins of the father on the children, and smear the blood on his hands on their faces? The Marcoses are Ilocanos, not Jews.

By what principle of law or notion of decency do we demand an apology from a dead man we dared not call to account when he lived, until a widow did it on our behalf.

And, finally, are we demanding the unnatural act of demanding that children denounce their father to assuage their grief? What is this, a Greek tragedy? And what are we, communists?

If we cannot have intelligence in the government, let us have good taste.