EDITORIAL ‘Nakaka-proud’
AFilipina in Paris joined the crowd who waited outside the Palais Garnier in Paris, while guests filed in for the biggest wedding party of the year. As the celebrities sauntered past in their finery and word spread of how opulent Dr. Victoria Belo and Hayden Kho’s reception would be, the Filipina told a TV crew, “Nakaka-proud (This makes me proud).”
Her pride found its echoes on social media, where fans of the couple and their guests gushed over the lavishness of the proceedings. They compared it with the weddings of the pop star Beyonce and reality TV regular Kim Kardashian, and found it “waaaaay better.”
Belo and Kho know the power of a beautiful image. They have made it their business to know. So it was fitting, really, that the social media accounts of Belo’s beauty empire shared photos of the grand event. And some of mainstream media’s society writers responded by pointing out the obvious: how expensive it all was, from the suite at The Ritz that probably cost at least P1.5 million a night, to the wedding gown so baroque it took embroiderers a thousand hours to sew on the pearls, Swarovski crystals, and other embellishments.
What made that Filipina proud? How many of us share her pride? How do we reconcile the pride we feel at seeing such wealth displayed (and displayed so flagrantly) with the fact that one in every five Filipino families does not know where their next meal might come from? Or whether it might come at all. Of course, the happy couple are free to spend their wealth as they please. They have earned it, which is not something we can say about another couple with a fondness for living large.
Forty-five years ago this month, that other couple—Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos—led this country down a journey so disastrous that we continue to suffer its ill effects. And the stories of how they lived it up in Paris, among other capitals, will make last weekend’s celebrity wedding seem humble, in comparison.
Quoting the World Bank in January 2014, Foreign Policy magazine reported that the Marcoses amassed wealth “by using their political power to take over large private companies, creating state-owned monopolies, skimming off international aid, and directly raiding the public treasury. They then laundered their ill-gotten gains through shell corporations, eventually investing it in real estate and depositing it into offshore accounts.” Part of their legacy is the skepticism that surfaces whenever we hear of ostentatious displays of wealth by Filipinos.