Mi Ultimo Adios

Charles Derbyshire’s translation: “Still would I give it thee, nor count the cost”—a life sacrificed to motherland—do not do justice to the powerful Jose Rizal non-seditious rhymes and non-treasonous reasons in his celebrated Mi Ultimo Adios (My Last Farewell) before his execution a hundred thirteen years ago.

A tragic figure whose most radical wish was for representation in the Spanish Cortez, Rizal was executed for fomenting a rebellion he did not support. In fact, he was on his way to Cuba as a medical volunteer when, in the sunset of España, friars unabashedly frolicking in this life while promising glory in the afterlife to the masses, had him charged with treason, rebellion and sedition. He was only 34.

Life exits dominated our consciousness these past two weeks. Kim Jong Il’s Ultimo Adios at 69, bewailed by the press for NoKor’s tight orchestration of its memorial service is, well, duh. Given our track record at public affairs, would free press be given access to Pyongyang?

Many Koreans in Dandong by the Yalu River, a few hours by rail from us here in Shenyang, gathered around TVs Wednesday to watch and wail Kim’s funeral, many wearing a familiar button associated with the NoKor leader.

It was widely known that Kim Jong Il was not in the best of health. In fact, he might have gotten too frantic during his last days trying to get third son Kim Yong Un in place for a smooth dynastic succession (Asian face needed stable authority), while strategizing to pacify the belligerent U.S. prairie buffalo, hastening the deterioration of his ailing physique.

It did not help that south Panmunjom baited Kim’s ire, resulting in the ill-advised sinking of a SoKor warship (would we be idle if enemy warships cruised 12 miles off Rhode Island on the pretense of intelligence gathering?) and the knee-jerk bombing of Yeongpyeong Island, geographically only a few miles from NoKor but four times farther from the closest SoKor soil, still technically SoKor being south of the 38th parallel.

In his death, he might actually have moved the peace process forward among Chosun and Hanggul saram (NoKor and SoKor folks). Former SoKor first lady Lee Hee Ho and Hyundai’s Hyun Jeong Eun led delegations to Pyongyang to join in memorializing the completed life of the “revered supreme leader.”

As we demonize NoKor and the Kims, we forget that General Curtis Le May boasted of bombing 20 percent of NoKor’s population into smithereens. In fact, it was a third of Chosun Saram. That would be, statistically, one dead person per family. Pyongyang’s American demons are existential! Meanwhile, U.S. demonization of the new Kim Jong Un is already in full swing.

Nobel Prize awardee SoKor President Kim, human rights activist and dissident, a Roman Catholic, ecumenical enough to marry Lee Hee Ho, a graduate of Methodist-related Ewa Women’s University and the director of the National Council of Churches, was a better representative of what is acceptable by mainstream Americans than any of the Pentagon lackeys that preceded him, yet he was vilified by commercial and military vested interests in the peninsula.  His “sunshine policy” opened direct relationship between the Koreas but it met overt and covert resistance from the U.S. military command and GovUSA, with the State Department characterizing Kim as South Korea’s leftist President.

Now the two Kims are at peace! But not their living relations.

Jose Rizal’s request to face his executioners was denied, but allowed to marry his Mi Retiro common-law wife, HK-born Irish Josephine Bracken, in Fort Santiago an hour before the lead breakfast, after he recanted excommunicable charges against the Church.

Members of the firing squad were native recruits. The regular force had another squad at a distance ready to fire on them if they failed to execute their prey. The category “Filipino” at the time referred to Spanish blood, progenies of Felipe II; the natives were lowly Indios, treated and named like their counterparts, the American Indians.

Just before the first volley, Rizal sprang up from his kneeling position and twisted his body to face his firing squad.  He was a proud man, and it would have been a matter of honor to stand up to one’s executioners. That photo alone, widely circulated later, inflamed the fires of the Philippine revolution that followed.

Yearends are times when we recall our personal resolves and inventory our behavior relative to our social covenants.  Consciousness of last January’s New Year’s resolutions may have lasted with the third empty bottle of beer on its way to the trash bin, so, this yearend comes to jar consciousness to account.

I am six years past Churchill’s timeline of 60 before attempting to write, but I am nowhere near the start of a book. I may not have lived long enough yet, but arthritis wasted no time. Will kiss my Alz, too. I no longer remember my own phone number, and when I straighten up and look down, I no longer see my toes. The girth is no longer a matter of mirth, and the blood pressure now relies on Atenolol.

Rizal had his Mi Ultimo Adios.  For 2011, it is time we scribbled ours. You too, Hanggul and Chosun saram!