Monthly Archives: October 2021

The President We Deserve

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I GREW up a Marcos believer.

He was the guest of honor at my grade school graduation in 1966. Newly elected, he looked every inch the hero he said he was—handsome, dashing, gifted with a golden tongue. Watching him I thought that a President was a great man, greater than all of us.

Just seven years later, I spent most of my 19th year in martial-law prison. I was there because the President I admired as a child had lied to me. He said he wanted to make the Philippines great again. Instead he acquired more power and more wealth, for which he stole from both the rich and poor, and punished those who opposed him. 

That included young students like me. They called us “radicals” and put many of us in prison, and many of my friends suffered horrible deaths. Sadly, many more Filipinos didn’t care. Happy to see new roads, they did not know that billions that should have gone to their food, housing, and education went to secret bank accounts abroad.

I was at EDSA when Marcos left, and I was overjoyed that a good and honest woman would now bring change. But even Cory couldn’t do it alone. The system was too strong. Many Presidents followed Cory, some better than others, but the lust for wealth and power did not leave with Marcos. And instead of being remembered as the man who destroyed Philippine democracy, Marcos became a model for some of his successors, who not only buried him as a hero but who now want to resurrect him in his son.

When VP Leni Robredo offered herself for the presidency and said “Mas radikal ang magmahal,” I had to think long and hard about what she meant, and what kind of difference she would make in our lives and futures. Was she asking us, like Jesus, to love our enemies? After all the evil—the corruption, the oppression, and the despotism—we have been through, could we find it in ourselves to love those who clearly do not love us?

And then I remembered what another visionary, Martin Luther King, preached on the same subject. He said: “In the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems.”

And that’s when it struck me that the real enemy is not people, but the “evil systems” that have created and supported the Marcoses among us. It is not one man or family we must vote against, but what they represent.

The easy temptation is to focus on personalities and their shortcomings. The harder option is to fight for the good and the positive.

These are the values and ideals that many of our national leaders, by their speech and behavior, have forsaken over the past five years. These are what VP Leni reminds us are worth loving and living for. And in today’s environment of violence, fear, and falsehood, to love them is to be radical indeed:

God. Country. Freedom. Justice. Peace. Truth. Life. Beauty.

Big words, they take big hearts and minds to accommodate. If I can find that largeness in me, then I can be a radical again, and instead of imprisoning us, our new President will free us from our past to become the nation we aspire to be. And that President—the President we deserve—can only be as great as we ourselves can be.

(Photos from ph.news and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.)

Penman No. 426: A Provinciano Comes Home

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Penman for Monday, October 25, 2021

THIS THURSDAY, October 28, a small and socially-distanced book launch will be held at the Development Bank of the Philippines in Makati to honor one of the DBP’s guiding lights, and one of the most distinguished and accomplished economists and diplomats of his time. I was privileged to have been asked to write this book, titled O, Ilaw: The Life and Legacy of Leonides S. Virata, by the late Leo’s son Luis Juan or Buboy, himself a highly successful businessman.

Few people below 65 will remember Leo Virata now, which was one reason why the book, published by the Cavite Historical Society, was written. For Buboy, it was to make sure that his children and grandchildren will know his father the way he did, and to introduce Leo to a new generation of Filipinos now sadly too used to seeing government officials and businessmen as crooks. 

Leo Virata was, in various phases of his life, both a public servant and a pillar of the business community. Born in Imus, Cavite in 1918 to the family that bred his eldest brother Enrique and Enrique’s son Cesar, Leo was an academic standout from grade school to college, graduating cum laude in Business Administration from the University of the Philippines before being sent on to Harvard, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University for graduate studies. Caught by the war in the US, Leo then became Gen. Carlos P. Romulo’s indispensable aide, all the way to the United Nations. 

He returned to the Philippines after the war to set up the research department at the new Central Bank, a convergence point for the best and brightest young economic minds of the time, including Horacio Lava, Benito Legarda Jr., and Sixto K. Roxas. He then moved to Philam Life in 1952 as financial vice-president and vice-chairman of its investment committee, spearheading the company’s support for vital economic projects, including Filoil, Far East Bank, Bacnotan Cement, and Manila Doctors Hospital, among others. 

After almost two decades in the private sector, Leo was taken in by President Marcos in 1969 as Secretary of Commerce and Industry, before being appointed chairman of the DBP in 1970. The bank was then saddled by bad loans, but Leo cleaned up the mess as best he could and reoriented the bank to support countryside development. Tragically, he died in 1976 aged only 58 of lung cancer, and was universally mourned for his brilliance, his dedication to public service, and his integrity (when he took over the DBP, he explicitly ordered his relatives not to visit him at his office).

When Buboy asked me to write his father’s biography a few years ago, I had heard of the name but knew very little of the man himself, and immediately I realized how difficult it would be to reanimate the character of a subject who had been gone for over 40 years. Almost always, in my previous assignments, I had had the luxury of working with subjects who were still very much alive and blessed with elephantine memories (as Wash SyCip was) or had roomfuls of catalogued materials gathered over the decades waiting to be sorted out (as Ed Angara did). Family members are a great resource, and Buboy and his wife Libet gave me all the help they could, but sadly Leo’s wife Bebe Lammoglia Virata—a renowned art collector—and Buboy’s sister Vanna had passed on. 

Thankfully, some luminaries whom Leo mentored or influenced were still around—among them, the journalist Jake Macasaet, and businessmen and public officials such as Manny Zamora, Louie Villafuerte, Cesar Zalamea, Titoy Pardo, and Johnny Litton—from whom I was able to get the most interesting vignettes about Leo and his times. (Among other things, Leo did not let his relationship with Marcos intrude into his decisions, and could say no to the man; the Viratas had lost land to the Marcoses, recovered only after EDSA.)

Writing a biography requires more than fleshing out someone’s Wikipedia entry. I always remind my clients that I’m a novelist rather than a professional historian, so my interest lies in capturing a character inside and out, trusting the story to reveal the subject’s strengths and weaknesses without having to editorialize on his or her behalf.

My writing stalled for about a year as I struggled to fill in gaps about Leo’s professional and personal life. Impossible as it seemed, I wanted to hear the man himself; Leo was a prodigious speaker and crowd-pleaser (the title of the book adverts to his favorite kundiman, which he would sing at the drop of a hat). I got a terrific break when Buboy unearthed two scrapbooks bulging with Leo’s memorabilia and notes from his years in the US, as a student and as CPR’s right-hand man. Finally, in this collection of postcards, concert tickets, restaurant menus, and such ephemera—alongside his correspondence with CPR—the person emerged, standing on the verge of an outstanding career, finding his footing in a world wracked by war, thousands of miles away from the groves of Imus.

Despite having traveled the world and having married an Italian mestiza, Leo remained a provinciano at heart. When Leo died, hundreds of townsfolk and schoolchildren lined the road leading to his grave in his hometown, which considered him a hero. I wonder how many of our leaders today will deserve that kind of farewell.

Penman No. 425: Red Light, Green Light

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Penman for Monday, October 11, 2021

THOSE OF you who smiled when you read the title know what I’m talking about: none other than Squid Game, which is set to become the most viewed Netflix production of all time.

I’m still groggy from two nights of binge-watching, after making sure that my wife Beng was already asleep. She’s a Korea-novela fan—and I guess you can call me a reluctant convert, having little choice but to follow the travails of star-crossed lovers getting wet in the rain, slurping ramyeon, or running slow-motion into each other’s arms on a beach at sunset. But for some reason, Beng likes romance, not gore, and she steadfastly refused to reciprocate my constancy by watching Squid Game with me. 

She can’t understand it when I explain that violence relaxes me, releases the lion in my pussycat, exhausts my latent desire to pulverize my enemies and split a few skulls, and leaves me refreshed for another day of, well, typing. Beng’s favorite expression—which she uses several times a day, usually when watching the news or some TV drama, or when we’re driving past a mangy dog—is “Kawawa naman!” If she were a street in UP Village, it would be “Mahabagin.” 

That’s why, you see, she couldn’t possibly get through even one episode of Squid Game. The violence hadn’t even begun—Gi-Hun was just getting warmed up as the quintessential loser, trying to play good dad to his 10-year-old daughter—when I heard Beng mutter her first “Kawawa naman!” Rather than subject myself to a night-long litany of laments for pitiful souls, I agreed to switch channels and watch contestants try to outdo each other in applying hideous makeup onto hapless models. Beng couldn’t see me wincing in the dark, my tender aesthetics feeling the vicious assault of mascara wands and lipstick applicators.

But let’s get back to the show. After its release less than a month ago, Squid Game became a global sensation in no time at all, and it’s easy to see why. Even the venerable Washington Post intones that “Squid Game (is) much more than a gory dystopian thriller. It’s a haunting microcosm of real life, unpacking the many implications of inequality, which has in some way drawn each of the players to this battle for their lives.” 

Parents will be horrified to find that their kids can buy Squid Game soldier outfits online, complete with black masks and pink track suits, submachine guns optional. (When I clicked the link, I got a message saying “Sorry! This product is no longer available.” That can mean only one of two things: first, that the seller developed a conscience and pulled the item out, or second, that stocks were sold out—you win a prize of a trip to Busan if you guess the correct answer.)

So let’s get this clear, especially if you’re thinking of gathering the family around the TV for some quality time watching people’s shirts turn a splotchy red: Squid Game isn’t for kids, okay? The whole point of it is that it wants people to think they’ll be playing kids’ games—which is true, except that (this is hardly a spoiler now, after all the publicity), the losers die.

I’m not going to go into the kind of sociological soul-searching that will be the stuff of dissertations over the next five years, with titles like “Competition Theory: Neoliberalism, the State, and Squid Game in the Philippines, 2016-2022.” (If you want an honest-to-goodness, semi-academic chat about the show, the UP Korea Research Center will be hosting an online forum on Squid Game on Friday, October 15, at 3:30 pm.) 

I’m tempted more by the idea of staging our version of the game here, with life’s “winners” instead of losers as players, for a change. The reward will be—let’s see, what might the rich and powerful still want that they don’t already have? More money? Too easy; they have enough stashed away in the British Virgin Islands (legally, mind you—they did nothing wrong) to last three lifetimes. More happiness? Which means what—more likes on Instagram, more cover shots in the glossies, Ivy League placements for the kids, one mistress more, a new Lamborghini Huracan, another Patek Philippe, a new calling card saying “Senator of the Republic,” or something even loftier? Eternal life? Some families already have that—35 years after EDSA, you-know-who are still around.

How about this: the prize will be absolution for one’s sins, which technically will qualify one for entry into heaven, no matter what terrible things one may have done in life—stolen billions, murdered thousands, lied 90 percent of the time, cursed God and half the saints, you supply the rest. 

It could be voluntary, of course, because most of the players we’d like to nominate will never admit to sinning nor to needing forgiveness; they have willfully accepted damnation, and their choice must be respected. But I think it will be more fun if, in the 2022 elections, we took a special poll to vote for 456 politicians, public officials, generals, bigtime drug lords, profiteers, car-loving pharmaceutical executives, troll masters, and other crooks to constitute the players. 

How thrilling it would then be to put on a black mask, look over the track-suited multitude, appreciate the anxiety in their puzzled faces, and announce: “Green light!… Red light!” Boom. Boom. Boom. Sorry, Beng, hindi sila kawawa, and I could watch this all day.