Rizal, he said, would be horrified and greatly saddened to learn that we are celebrating his centennial precisely by extolling his validity for our times. His zeal as a social reformer, his dedicated efforts to improve his countrymen, all his patriotic labors were directed toward one goal – reforms. If we revere Rizal, if we wish to honor him, if we want to follow in his footsteps, our task is clear. That task is to make Rizal obsolete. To do this, we must eradicate the ills of present-day society so that Rizal’s teachings will become what they were meant to be, a mirror of the past.

To be obsolete is probably every hero’s dream: He dies without seeing a dawn that will bless those who will come after him. A true hero does not sacrifice his life so that monuments may be built in his honor. He dies for others.

As the death of the Lord is redemptive, every hero’s death is a liberating force. The difference is that God is in His heaven but the hero lies in his grave, his name but a memory.

If that’s the case, Rizal, as my friend Jesse, his fellow Atenean, would say, is turning in his grave. Rizal’s name is annually invoked in the rhetoric of politicians and sundry preachers, but what it amounts to is that he has become irrelevant, obsolete in a particularly sad sense. He does not really matter in our collective life except as an icon.

The colonial ills he condemned in his satires, for which he was executed, have become the post-colonial afflictions of a diseased society. Corrupt Padres Damaso and Salvi, Capitan Tiago, pretentious and corrupt High Official, abusive Alferez, ignorant Ben-Zayb, silly Doña Victorina, Pilosopo Tasyo, and many other ridiculous and despicable characters are very much with us in contemporary dress.

It’s probably a blessing that Simoun, the anarchistic revolutionary, is singularly absent.