Category Archives: America

Qwertyman No. 173: A Page from 1937

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 24, 2025

I”M NOT a historian, although there are times I wish I were, and at an early crossroads in my youth, I actually had to choose between Literature and History for my major, settling for the former only because I thought I could finish it faster. But I’ve retained a lifelong interest in history, for the treasure trove of stories to be found in the past and for what those stories might foretell of the future. 

I’m particularly fascinated by the prewar period—what Filipinos of the midcentury looked back on as “peacetime” and what Carmen Guerrero Nakpil called our “fifty years in Hollywood,” which were enough to occlude much of the influence of our “three hundred fifty years in a convent” under the Spanish. It was an age of many transitions, from the jota to jazz, from the caruaje to the Chevrolet, from tradition to that liberative and all-embracing buzzword, the “modern.” Much of that went up in smoke during the Second World War, but you can still catch the ghost of this lost world on the Escolta, among other vestiges of our love-hate affair with America. (You might want to visit the Art Deco exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts, ongoing until May 2026; I have some items on display there.)

So entranced have I been by this time that I decided, during the pandemic, to set my third novel in it, at the birth of the Commonwealth and upon Quezon’s assumption of ultimate power, an upstairs-downstairs narrative about the comprador upper class and the world of the Manila Carnival set against the embers of the Sakdal uprising, the fuming and scheming Aguinaldistas, and the netherworld of printing-press Marxists and tranvia pickpockets. Progress has been slow because novels always take the back seat to life’s more pressing needs, but I still hope to get this done if it’s the last thing I do.

The research for the book, however, has brought its own rewards. Among my main sources for the background has been a slim volume—long out of print and now very  hard to find—titled The Radical Left on the Eve of War: A Political Memoir by James S. Allen (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985). Allen (actually a pseudonym for Sol Auerbach) was an American scholar and journalist, an avowed Marxist who traveled to the Philippines in 1936 and 1938 with his wife Isabelle, also a member of the American Communist Party, to meet with local communists and socialists (then headed by Crisanto Evangelista and Pedro Abad Santos, respectively) and to get a sense of the Philippine situation under American rule. 

Even that early, the threat of a Japanese invasion was already looming on the horizon and causing great anxiety in the Philippines; Japan had earlier occupied Manchuria and as much as a quarter of the entirety of China by 1937. It seemed like a confrontation between Japan and the United States was inevitable, although some Filipino nationalists—fiercely anti-American—preferred to ally themselves with their fellow Asians than with prolonged white rule. At the same time, others like Pedro Abad Santos feared that the independence Quezon sought would be granted prematurely to give the US an excuse to abandon the islands and avoid confronting the Japanese. 

This is where I tell you why I’m bringing up James Allen’s memoirs this Monday—because of our present situation vis-à-vis China and (in one of history’s ironic reversals from victim to victimizer) its growing domination of the South China Sea. In Quezon, Filipinos had a leader who was deeply mistrusted and opposed by many; the United States’ willingness to defend the Philippines was in doubt; and the threat of a foreign invasion was clear and imminent. 

Allen actually sat down with Quezon for a long interview at the latter’s invitation, and was impressed by the man’s grasp of politics and his singular ambition. But the article that came out of that encounter displeased MLQ; Allen, after all, was still a communist at heart, which makes the following quotation—from a letter Allen would compose and send to his American colleagues in October 1937—even more interesting. I’ll leave it to you to observe the parallels, and to cast them against the Marcos-Duterte issues of our time.

“Filipino Marxists and radicals need to relate independence from the United States to the world crisis created by fascism. The immediate concern in the struggle for an independent and democratic Philippines is to safeguard the country against the threat of Japanese aggression. The objectives of complete independence from the United States and the internal democratic transformation must be obtained without endangering such gains as have been made or subjecting the country to new masters. The people must be awakened to the prime and pressing danger to their national existence. The United States is moving toward alignment with the democratic powers against the fascist bloc, albeit slowly and indecisively.


“Roosevelt is shifting somewhat toward the Left of Center to keep pace with his mass support from the surging labor movement and anti-fascist and anti-war popular sentiment. The national interests of the Philippines call for vigilance and precautions against Japanese aggression. This coincides with the interests of the United States in the Pacific area, and it would be folly not to take full advantage of this concurrence. In the broader perspective, the outcome of the struggle in China will be crucial for all the peoples of the Far East, and if the United States were to withdraw from the Philippines this would be a serious blow against China and encouragement to Japan’s designs upon Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The cause of Philippine independence at this time can best be served by cooperation with the United States.


“The situation also requires a change in the attitude toward Quezon, from frontal attack to critical support. Unprincipled opposition for the sake of opposition-as with some leading participants in the Popular Alliance is dangerous, for it plays into the hand of pro-Japanese elements and sentiments. Quezon certainly is not an anti-fascist, but he is not intriguing behind the scenes with Japan. The greatest opposition to his early independence plan comes from the landed proprietors, particularly the sugar barons, while it enjoys support among the people. The Popular Alliance should also support the plan, including provisions for mutually satisfactory economic, military and diplomatic collaboration after independence. Though Quezon is far from being a Cardenas or Roosevelt in his domestic policies, every effort should be made to move him away from his pro-fascist and land baron support by providing him with mass backing for such pro-labor and progressive measures as are included in his social justice program. In sum, the Popular Alliance should encourage a national democratic front devoted to the preservation of peace in the Pacific, the safeguarding of Philippine independence, and defense and extension of democracy in the country.”

Qwertyman No. 151: For Don, a Meditation

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 23, 2025

(Photo of Los Cabos by Kurt Nichols)

I WAS looking for a topic for this column last week when it occurred to me that I had been staring it in the face, in the news and in the Facebook feed that, like for many, my days begin and end with. It was the omnipresence of death, in its many forms and guises, swift and slow, painless and agonizing, arriving on whispery feet and crashing through one’s roof or window. 

“A screaming comes across the sky,” the line with which Thomas Pynchon famously begins his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, was how death and destruction came last week to hundreds in Kiev, Tehran, and Tel Aviv, in missiles and drones designed and manufactured for but one purpose: to deliver death by inexact algorithm to place-names plotted on digital maps. 

In India we marveled at the horror and the mystery of one survivor escaping a catastrophic plane crash barely a minute after take-off: a moment when most of us would have just begun to fidget with the entertainment controls, wondering whether to take in a comedy or a thriller for the next two hours and what the meal choices will be. 

In Minnesota, a MAGA gunman stalked Democratic lawmakers and their families, shooting four and killing two on a long list of intended targets—murders that a Republican senator reflexively attributed to “Marxists not getting what they want.”

Most appalling was the report of Israeli tanks firing into a crowd of Palestinians lining up for food in Gaza, an incident that led to about 60 deaths and more than 200 wounded, for which the Israelis apologized with this statement: “The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”

As if the news isn’t enough, every time we scroll through our social media accounts, more deaths emerge, in the now-familiar solitary-candle meme and in the garlanded portraits of the recently departed. Facebook has become our new obituary page, our book of condolences, our virtual wake. The friend or the kinsman in us takes the loss with the requisite pain and grief; the enemy with muttered thankfulness, or more rarely forgiveness; the human with relief, that we are reading and not being read about.

Death in the news is meant to outrage us, and it still does, at least for a while, especially senseless and preventable death, willful murder, and patent genocide. But sadly we can only take so much, even with the keenest of consciences; there is something in our brains, a control or shut-off valve, that says “Enough” and leads us back into the immediate and comprehensible present, back to chocolate cupcakes, Torx screwdrivers, tomorrow’s court hearing, and Lola’s birthday. This, we remind ourselves, is life, the only one we have, our chief responsibility above all others to live and to give meaning to. 

We try to make sense of death as much as we do of life, and for those of us of a certain age, that means the acceptance of its inevitability. I suspect that those of my generation who came of age under martial law and fought it, who saw dozens of our comrades die, can do that with more equanimity than most, never having expected to live beyond twenty-five; every year and decade since has been a grace note, a blessing we have been careful not to waste. We are lucky to have come this far, and can leave without regret.

The Buddhists have what they call maranasati, the practice (says Google, meat-eating me being decidedly non-tantric) of contemplating one’s own mortality to cultivate mindfulness, reduce fear of death, and appreciate the present moment. The practical Swedes have döstädning, celebrated in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson, a Nordic Marie Kondo who advises us to downsize and clean up our mess before we croak to save some grumpy nephew the trouble of sorting out which things go to the trash and which go to the resale shop. 

Speaking of which, my devotion to Japan-surplus stores and their wonderful bargains is tempered by the knowledge that most of these items were likely made available by the peculiarly Japanese practices of hikikomori, or withdrawing from society and living alone, and the even sadder kodokushi or “lonely death,” where the bodies and belongings of the forgotten might be found days after their passing. But then, as a collector of vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books, I am well aware that these precious objects have passed through many lives and survived their owners, and will certainly survive me, which is strangely reassuring. They offer proof of an afterlife—maybe not paradise, but the life of the people and things you leave behind.

In a way, death’s predictability (or the illusion thereof) is comforting, because we think we can therefore prepare for it, as for the coming of a friend who will lead us away by the hand, down to the smallest detail. Despite her surprisingly good health, my 97-year-old mother has written out her DNR instructions, and a year ago we made a light-hearted trip to the mall to pick out her funeral dress, in a deep, pacific blue. Well before my father died of an aneurysm almost thirty years ago—he was a chain-smoker and a candidate for early passage—I had written out a scene in my first novel where the protagonist comes home to his father’s wake, which was my way, the privilege of imaginative writers, of cushioning the real pain when it struck; when it did, I still wept like my father’s child.

I’m writing this because I’m actually not very good at dealing with death and processing grief, as detached or as flippant as I may sound about it. I avoid or don’t stay long at the wakes of friends because I tend to say the lamest things. 

Last week I lost good friend—a high-school classmate named Don Rodis, brother to lawyer Rodel and producer Girlie, whom more people know—our Philippine Science High School batch’s livewire and indefatigably perfect host, to those visiting him in San Francisco. On vacation with his family in Los Cabos in Mexico, Don was strolling on the beach when a rogue wave known by the locals as the mar de fondo caught and swept him out to sea. Despite a massive search, his body has yet to be found. We are all stunned and awash with grief, but what struck me was how pretty that beach was from all the pictures, how blue and inviting its waters. And now I’ll say a stupid thing, for Don: rather than dying from a rocket to your head, or rotting from within, or freezing alone in Yamagata, sometimes we die in beauty’s arms. 

(Don Rodis, 1954-2025, with his wife Jocelyn)

Qwertyman No. 149: American Idiocracy

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 9, 2025

IN HIS controversial but surprisingly popular 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, the philosopher Allan Bloom lamented what he saw to be the decline of intellectual inquiry in America, indicting its universities for failing their students by promoting “relativism” over the time-honored values embodied by the “Great Books” of Western thought. “The consequences of the abandonment of the quest for the best are far-reaching and destructive,” Bloom intoned. 

Bloom was no flaming liberal; in fact, he was anything but—a true conservative who disdained rock music for its overtly sexual messages and its narcotic effects on the young (imagine what he would have said about TikTok). But his book and its arguments struck a responsive chord in many Americans—half a million of them bought hardcover copies—who were worried that the counterculture that had crept across American society since the tumultuous 196os had weakened it from within and had dulled the blade of American exceptionalism—the rock-solid article of faith that America was, or had to be, No. 1 in everything, because of its unique history and attributes.

That sounds a lot like “Make America Great Again,” although MAGA wasn’t driven by a longing to study Plato, but by deep-seated, grassroots-level grievances and prejudices. One wonders how Allan Bloom, who died in 1992, would respond to the political situation today, which on the surface mirrors some of his concerns, but only just so: a conservative President has declared war on America’s liberal universities, for all the wrong reasons, leading up to the “far-reaching and destructive consequences” that Bloom bewailed. 

Of course, Donald Trump is no Bloomian or even Reaganite conservative; all he seems to be about is unbridled power and money, and testing the limits to where they can go. “Trumpism” has been described as a mash of nationalism, populism, and industrialism, with a generous dollop of pettiness and egotism. 

Sometime last April, messaging on Truth Social (with a shift key typically gone berserk), Trump attacked Harvard University, claiming that “Harvard is an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution, as are numerous others, with students being accepted from all over the World that want to rip our Country apart. The place is a Liberal mess, allowing a certain group of crazed lunatics to enter and exit the classroom and spew fake ANGER AND HATE.” 

Shortly after, he ordered the federal government to withdraw more than $2 billion in funding for research grants to Harvard, and sought to cancel its ability to enroll international students. Trump wasn’t alone in declaring war on American academia. Years earlier, his VP-to-be JD Vance had told the National Conservatism Convention that “Universities in our country are fundamentally corrupt and dedicated to deceit and lies, not to the truth…. We have to honestly and aggressively attack (them).”

Not surprisingly, Harvard and a cohort of other leading universities have fought back, taking the administration’s tack as a frontal assault on academic freedom—and, more strategically, on America’s albeit waning intellectual leadership.

MAGAworld’s anti-intellectualism is interesting, because it draws on a long and dark tradition of tyrants from Franco’s Spain to Pol Pot’s Cambodia waging war on scholars—to cite only the most visibly horrifying examples under which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals were massacred. Mass murder makes the withdrawal of grants and visas seem benign, but they come from the same deep mistrust of critical thinking, contrary opinion, and the alien element. Dictatorships thrive on herd mentality and unquestioning obedience, both anathema to academia.

It’s not as if Trump and Vance never went to good schools. Trump went to Wharton and Vance to Yale Law; whether they learned something worth their tuition is another matter. Political instinct, not intellect, drives these men. 

Right now, that instinct is telling them that culture (or its reversal) is more important than anything else—specifically “woke” culture, the greatest threat to the hegemony of straight white men: civil rights, women’s empowerment, abortion rights, gay and gender rights, minority representation, affirmative action, Black heritage, environmental protection, and internationalism, among other values espoused by the liberal Establishment and its bastions like Harvard. 

The collateral damage of this insane and reckless urge to reshape America in Trump’s own image has included truthfulness, justice, accountability, sound science, and, ironically, America’s own long-term economic and academic well-being. MAGA’s success will be America’s diminution from the intellectual powerhouse that has accounted for more than 70 percent of all Nobel Prize winners (about 30 percent of them immigrants to the US) to the fools’ paradise contemplated in the 2006 movie Idiocracy—a comedy that won’t be so funny when it materializes.

Trump’s insistence on characterizing foreign students as potential terrorists and troublemakers will be particularly counterproductive, as it will banish many of the world’s best young minds to more receptive climates, and erode America’s influence on global thinking. 

That may not necessarily be a bad thing, as it reminds everyone that the US has no monopoly on excellence, and never really did. But as a two-time Fulbrighter who, like thousands of other pensionados to America, look back with gratitude and not a little pride on that opportunity to imbibe not just new knowledge but America at its welcoming best, I cannot imagine anything stupider than this willful squandering of American goodwill and soft power for the price of a few missiles. 

It will not even be Donald Trump & Co. who will pay that price, but generations of Americans down the road who will recall this period of infectious lunacy with bewilderment and regret. They will have no one to blame but their red-capped grandparents, who thought that trusting a despotic dunce with all that power was a bright idea. (And I know how much that statement smacks of the elitism that Trumpers hate, but tell me it isn’t true.)

Penman No. 473: Taking Care of Emy

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Penman for Friday, May 9, 2025

MY MOM Emy turns 97 today, May 9. Some years, her birthday coincides with Mothers’ Day, saving us a celebration. But that’s a bit deceptive, because when you have a parent this old living with you, every day is a blessing worth celebrating. 

It’s hard to believe that Mommy Emy is a lot healthier than she was a quarter-century ago, when we all feared that we were about to lose her, just a few years after our dad Joe Sr. passed away in 1996 from a ruptured aneurysm. After all, the stories usually went that way—one spouse dies, the other follows soon after, out of grief or a sense of life suddenly losing its purpose and meaning. Whatever caused it, Mom fell ill with tuberculosis, with the disease progressing so devastatingly that she was coughing blood and feeling terribly weak. Luckily, her doctor put her on a menu of cutting-edge pills that, over two years, miraculously banished the TB, well enough for her to secure a US visa to join my sister Elaine in California.

Over the next decade, she regained her strength, and even as she sorely missed our dad, indulged in a newfound zest for life—traveling with my sisters in the US, Canada, and Europe, visiting glaciers, going up the Tower of Pisa, and settling into in the quiet suburbs of Virginia just outside of DC with Elaine and her husband Eddie. She stayed there long enough to gain a green card, and we would visit her every now and then, sensing that, despite Elaine’s and Eddie’s loving care, she was pining for home. Eventually she did return to Manila, giving up her green card. “I want to die here,” she stated with finality, and that was that. 

One thing I love about my mom is her eminently practical sense. Since at least five years ago, she has written out clear instructions about what to do in case she was dying—no intubation, no extraordinary efforts to prolong her life, just as quiet and as painless a departure as could be managed. Last year we went out with her to the department store to pick out her funeral dress—a macabre chore to some, but for us, and especially for her, a cheerful excursion, with much discussion about this cut or that shade of blue (yes, she’s going in blue). 

She was born in Romblon a landlord’s youngest daughter, the apple of his eye, the only one to go to UP in Manila, from where she graduated with an Education degree. Growing up, she rode a horse on the farm and accompanied my Lolo Cosme on his trips to Manila. She remembers how easy and provident life was back then: “We would go to the beach and Papa would throw a net into the water, not far from shore, and it would come up teeming with fish, and the fish were everywhere, jumping in the air.” 

My father was a sharecropper’s grandson, too poor to finish college but with a sharp mind and a gift for words that must have swept Emy off her feet. Like many couples of their time and place, they decided to seek their fortune in Manila a few years after I was born. Their love was deep but often tested, given that there were five of us to raise. There was even a time when Dad was a barker for jeepneys, and Mom worked as postal clerk for minimum wage. Life sometimes felt like a soap opera, but we all pulled through, and often it was Emy’s internal toughness that made sure we were fed and ready for school.

Since her return from Virginia, my mom has been staying with us in UP Diliman, occasionally spending time with my three other siblings (Elaine is now in Canada). Still figure-conscious despite her age, she watches what she eats, but we indulge her every whim. It doesn’t take much to make her happy—almost daily Facetime calls from Elaine in Canada and our daughter Demi in the US, a weekly manicure, visits from her brood, and Tuesday Circle get-togethers with her group of neighborhood friends, among whom she is now most senior. 

What surprises people who meet her for the first time is how strong and alert she is. She uses a cane and a walker (but only because we insist), but she takes long walks daily around the yard and just outside the house. Her steps are getting slower and harder, but she marched for Leni in 2022, in gratitude for which the VP sent her a video greeting on her 95th birthday. She reads without glasses, and plays word games on her iPad with a passion; she follows Netflix, and watches the news with tart commentary. She’s as prayerful and religious as they come, but is staunchly liberal in her politics. “All my friends are dead” is her frequent complaint, quickly balanced by “But I’m so thankful for my children!” She and Beng share long meals and laughter-filled conversations. We have no doubt that as long as she takes her maintenance meds and doesn’t suffer a bad fall, she’ll live to be a happy hundred. 

Emilia Yap Dalisay’s name will never make it to the society pages, but she’s the biggest star in our small stretch of sky, and taking care of her has been our grandest privilege. Happy birthday, Mommy Emy, and may you have as many more years to come as God’s kindness will allow.

Qwertyman No. 132: A False Horizon

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 10, 2025

I DON’T know why, but like the proverbial bad penny that keeps turning up (English teachers: note the British idiom), every few years, some Filipino school announces its adoption of an “English-only” language policy on its campus, ostensibly in the service of a sublime objective such as “global competitiveness” or “global competence.”

This time around, it’s the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao that’s enforcing the rule. PNC president Librado Dimaunahan has issued a memo declaring that “In line with our vision of developing globally competitive and world class students, the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao (University of Cabuyao) is now an English-speaking campus starting Feb. 03, 2025…. All transactions and engagements with officers, students, employees, and workers should be communicated in English, whether written or otherwise. For strict compliance.” What he wanted to create was no less than “a strong English-speaking environment.” 

A few years ago, it was Cavite State University which required its students, teachers and staff to speak exclusively in English or face punishments like getting your ID confiscated and having to sing the CvSU hymn (in English, of course). Filipino could be used only by maintenance workers—and by others, but only in the restrooms and cafeteria.

I’m not going to add to the brickbats that these ideas have already received, not unreasonably. But I will add my two cents’ worth (my, where do these “brickbats” and “two cents” come from?) to the conversation, as a lifelong user and teacher of the language.

I have a PhD in English—something I don’t often bring up because it sounds so pompous and presumptuous—earned in America where, to my smug satisfaction and my classmates’ consternation, my professor would single out my prose for, among others, its perfect punctuation. I was the only one in our graduate literature class who could explain the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis (no, nothing to do with Yellow Cabs and Uber). Was that global competitiveness? I guess so. Was I proud of my English language skills? Of course. Did it make me or the Philippines any richer? Not a dollar more. Is this what a national language policy should be about? Heck, no.

I’ve done well in English not because I was forced to, but because I love the language, and languages in general. I should have loved Spanish—discovering its beauty too late, when I had to read and translate Federico Garcia Lorca for a grad-school exam—but I didn’t, because we had been forced by our curriculum to take so many units of it (24, in my mother’s time). I started on German and French in high school and college and am picking German up again on Duolingo, in preparation for the forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair. (I write plays and screenplays in Filipino, despite being born in Romblon.)

What I’ve realized from studying these languages and from a lifetime of writing, speaking, and using English is that in our country of over a hundred languages, English can’t be taught and learned well by exclusively using English. I’m learning German on Duolingo using English.

I don’t mind saying that when I teach creative writing or literature in English, I pause when my students can’t seem to understand what the text is saying—and then we pursue the same line of inquiry in Filipino, and everybody goes “Ah!” It makes simple teaching sense. You can’t get more out of a student—in English—if he or she can’t understand or even recognize the problem, in English. 

And just to be clear, these are questions of comprehension and interpretation that even native speakers of English would have a hard time with. (How do I know? I taught the American short story to American undergraduates in Wisconsin.) These are questions like “So what’s John Updike saying about the position of the rebel or nonconformist in society at the end of his story ‘A&P’?” That’s best answerable if you also discuss as we do what America was like in the 1960s, with Vietnam, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, and the moon landing in the background. (I always tell my students that we’re not studying American literature and history to become Americans, but to become better and wiser Filipinos.) 

Boomers like me like to recall that in many private schools of our time, students were fined five centavos for every instance they were caught using Filipino. Some may find that quaint or even charming, but if you think anyone learned and loved English because of these stupid rules, think again. Students learn good English from good teachers who don’t teach English as a grammar rulebook but as a road map or even a cheat sheet to an adventure.

English is best learned along the way of learning something else—like how the world works, in science and literature—as a key to unlocking knowledge and meaning. English proficiency all by itself is a non-goal, a false horizon that can delude people into believing that they’ve arrived. Arrived where? What for?

All the English in the world isn’t going to turn the Philippines into an economic powerhouse—which Japan, China, Russia, and Germany managed to become without a mandatory word of English in their curricula from decades back. Better English could make us become more employable as waiters, domestic helpers, and seamen—and I’m not downplaying this, because the language does give us an advantage in those markets—but these jobs, noble as they are, aren’t what universities were made for.

All the English in the world isn’t going to drive a moral spine up the backs of our leaders. Intolerable as it was, one president’s foul mouth and boorish manners may not be far worse than a General Appropriations Act legitimizing the wholesale thievery of people’s money in perfectly edited English. 

We can speak all we want with an American accent—only to realize that, in Trump’s America, where one of his appointees has declared pointblank that “It takes a competent white man to get things done right,” the color of your skin still matters more than whether you can pronounce “Adirondack” or “tortoise” correctly. Trump’s maniacal edicts and pronouncements—cutting foreign aid, expelling Palestinians so he can turn Gaza into an American beach resort, and turning the FBI and the DOJ into his personal security force and loyalty police—have all been made in his lazy, slurring English, each word delivering chaos and disaster with as much consequence as Hitler’s Nuremberg rants.

More shameful than lack of proficiency in English is lack of proficiency in one’s own language, which I see in the children of parents anxious to “globalize” their kids without mooring them first in their own culture. Those children will be maimed for life, insulated from and unable to communicate with or relate to their common countrymen. We need our own languages to understand ourselves.

Teach good values and good citizenship. Even if that student’s English turns out less than stellar, our country can’t be worse off.

Penman No. 471: A Promise to Keep

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Penman for Sunday, February 9, 2025

Now and then we come across stories of foreigners who fall under the spell of the Philippines so completely that wherever else they go, the Philippines and its panoply of wonders—its mangoes, its waters, its sunsets, and above all its smiling people—stay with them, urging them to return, in spirit if not in person.

One such visitor was my good friend Julie Hill, who with her late husband Arthur first came to Manila in 1968 on a mission to help improve Philippine education, among other concerns. Almost six decades later, after having traveled the world and settled in America, Julie’s thoughts and affections remain bonded to this country and to its future. In the twilight of her life, she has decided to gift poor but bright young Filipinos with a life-changing opportunity to study at the University of the Philippines, from the forthcoming sale at auction of two paintings by National Artists HR Ocampo and Ang Kiukok.

Born in Alexandria, Egypt to Greek parents, Julie Hill went on to a fulfilling life in the United States and around the world with Arthur, who represented the Ford Foundation in the Philippines. Forced to leave Egypt when Nasser took over, Julie found a scholarship for her master’s degree in chemistry at the University of Minnesota. There she met Arthur, an Australian taking his PhD in Education and Mathematical Statistics. 

The two fell in love, married, and embarked on a lifelong adventure around the world—to Western Samoa, Thailand, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, where Arthur’s expertise in education and agricultural development was much sought after. Arthur passed away in 2002, but Julie went on to her own career as an international marketing executive for Lucent and later AT&T. Since retiring at their home in Rancho Sta. Fe, California, she has written and published five books of travel and memoirs—all of which I edited after being introduced to her by our mutual friend Jimmy Laya, turning our business connection into a long and dear friendship.

From the first of those books, A Promise to Keep (2003), come many vivid impressions of a country and society transitioning to modernity, troubled but brimming with energy and promise. Arthur got busy working with UP and the International Rice Research Institute, among others, and the Hills became good friends with the rising technocrats of the time—Cesar Virata, Gerry Sicat, and Jimmy Laya. It was Laya—who remains close to Julie—who introduced her to the local art community.

“The art scene was vibrant,” Julie would write. “Manila, a centuries-old entrepot, was rich in art and culture, and we were privileged to visit many private art collections….

“Art galleries flourished. A self-exiled painter stormed into town and set new price ceilings. The audience increased. So did the column inches devoted to art in the newspapers and magazines….

“The Luz Gallery in Makati was run by Arturo Luz, a leading painter, known for his high standards of professionalism. His gallery gained the trust of the public and the artists. The Solidaridad gallery and bookshop was located in Ermita, run by novelist Frankie Sionil Jose. Solidaridad was the middle ground between the established artists exhibiting at Luz and smaller galleries where new talent was championed. You could find superb examples of prints, drawings, miniatures, relief metal sculptures, collage, photographs, and paintings all over Manila.

“We were interested in meeting the artists and visiting their studios, but were reluctant to pay the gallery prices. If we liked the work of a particular artist, why not buy directly from him or her? This was how we searched for and found the home of Hernando Ocampo.”

“Hernando Ocampo was a pure abstract expressionist with a daring originality in his paintings. His work was unmistakably Filipino, ascribing this national character to his unique, tropical colors. A typical Ocampo painting is not unlike a honeycomb, a complex weave of color and tone with each individual cell suggesting a large, more real life form. His work is tropical and warm and suggestive of symmetry. The colors and shapes seem to dance before the eyes. His home in Maypajo was a mecca for friends, admirers, and collectors. He had an open house on Sundays. Good food and hard and soft drinks were ready for guests. Visiting Ocampo, we felt welcomed not only by the artist but also by his family. We commissioned a painting. Sketches were drawn; we followed the progress of our painting with our weekly Sunday visits, and sampled the wonderful pancit, that ubiquitous Filipino noodle dish, that was offered. We photographed the progress of his work. He completed the ‘Song of Summer’, a mastery of color in 17 different shades of red. It would hang proudly in our home in California, and continue to provide intense, pleasurable excitement, another reminder of our times in the Philippines.” (Note: Ocampo’s sketch and color guide for the painting will go with the artwork at auction.)

The Hills left Manila for Indonesia shortly after martial law, but on a return visit in the early 1980s, their old friends at the Ford Foundation presented them with another painting by another Filipino master, Ang Kiukok.Julie recalls seeing several works by accomplished Filipino painters in the foundation office, purchased back when they were far more affordable, and this may have been one of them. Like the Ocampo, it traveled with the Hills around the world all the way to Rancho Sta. Fe, where I have been visiting Julie over the years (our daughter Demi conveniently lives nearby in San Diego).

It was during our most recent visit there that Julie brought up the idea of donating her two paintings for the benefit of poor UP students. A lifelong but quiet supporter of students as far away as Mindanao and a staunch believer in the transformative power of education, Julie also honored me by anonymously (but no more) endowing the Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. Professorial Chair in Creative Writing at UP, over my embarrassed pleas to put it in her name.

This time, she wants the money to go to UP’s poorest—specifically, those exceptionally bright and mainly provincial students who, against all odds, pass the UPCAT but fail to enroll, lacking the means to afford the cost of living on a UP campus. We’ll need to work out the mechanics, but this will go much farther than professorial chairs in changing Filipino lives.

“I had a privileged education in Alexandria and was fortunate to receive a scholarship for my graduate education in America,” Julie says. “During our years in Manila, Arthur and I developed a deep affection for the people of the Philippines, and I am hoping that this donation will contribute to creating a generation of talented and hopeful Filipinos who will serve their country well.”

The Ocampo and Ang Kiukok paintings will be sold at auction by Leon Gallery on February 22. I pray that generous buyers will help Julie keep her promise to the Filipino people.

Qwertyman No. 130: A Family Business

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 27, 2025

“The Senate is not a family business,” posted my friend R. on Facebook, and I found myself nodding at what sounded like the patently obvious truth, which somehow seems to still elude our family-oriented countrymen.

Among the loudest alarms raised by the forthcoming midterm election is the likelihood that, once again, Filipino voters will be choosing people with the same surnames to add to what has become, over the decades, a cozy nest of clans. 

It isn’t just the Senate, of course, which is infected with dynastisis. From Congress down to the Sangguniang Kabataan where fledgling politicos learn to tweet, our entire political system has been one big and long-running Family Feud. Husbands, wives, and their kids serve as senator, congressman, governor, mayor, and councilor with utter shamelessness, claiming a form of manifest destiny contestable only by another family.

It’s gotten so bad that—surprise, surprise—Sen. Robinhood Padilla, last accused of doing little on the job but preening his mustache, filed SB 2730 last July against political dynasties (already in our Constitution, but lacking an enabling law). Citing a Harvard study (which always seems to bear more weight than common sense), Padilla said that political dynasties “persist and reproduce their power over time, undermining the effectiveness of institutional reforms in the process.” 

More informatively, Padilla noted that “A dataset of Philippine local elections from 1988 to 2019 showed the number of governors with at least one relative in office (dynasty) increased by almost 39 percentage points, from 41% in 1988 to 80% in 2019. The dynasty proportion of vice governors rose from 18% in 1988 to 68% in 2019. The percentage of mayors in the dynasty increased gradually from 26% in 1988 to 53% in 2019…. Political dynasties, in effect, have exhausted resources to attain economic and political dominance while at the same time compromising political competition and undermining accountability…. It is time to break the barriers preventing the best and the brightest from serving the Filipino people.”

Tell that to the Philippine Senate which, because it has only 24 members, magnifies the prevalence and persistence of dynastisis even more. 

One of the ways the US Senate differs from ours is the way it’s composed, with two senators from each of the 50 US states, which, in their federal system, gives equal weight to giant Texas and tiny Vermont. That should make it highly unlikely for two related people to be in the Senate at the same time, right? Well, sort of. As it turns out, in US history, two pairs of brothers actually served in the Senate together. One pair I’m pretty sure you never heard of—Theodore and Dwight Foster, who simultaneously represented Rhode Island and Massachusetts at the start of the 1800s. The next pairing didn’t happen until more than 150 years later—with Edward and Robert Kennedy representing Massachusetts and New York in the 1960s. 

Our Senate puts America’s to shame in that department. 

It helps, of course, to be related to a President, or to prepare oneself to be one. By my count, there have been five Aquinos in the Senate—Ninoy, Butz, Tessie, Noynoy, and Bam; four Marcoses—Ferdinand, Imelda, Bongbong, and Imee; four Estradas—Joseph, Loi, JV, and Jinggoy; three Roxases—Manuel, Gerry, and Mar; three Osmeñas—Serging, John, and Serge; three Laurels—Jose, Sotero, and Doy; and two Magsaysays—Gene and Jun. “Cong Dadong” Macapagal never became a senator, but his daughter Gloria did. Fidel Ramos’ contribution to the Senate was his sister Letty.

To these presidential surnames we have to add those of other political families such as the Dioknos, Tañadas, Kalaws, Angaras, Guingonas, Antoninos, Rectos, Pimentels, Revillas, Villars, Cayetanos, and possibly Tulfos. The Cebu Osmeñas—John and Sergio, Jr.—once served together in the Seventh Congress in the early 1970s; the Cayetanos—Pia and Alan—followed suit in the Fourteenth, in the late 2000s, and the Villars—Cynthia and Mark—in the current Nineteenth. 

That’s not to say that some members of these political clans were not deserving or distinguished. Many certainly were—in the right hands, a family tradition of public service sets high standards and expectations. Never mind the ancient Fosters, but I don’t think America minded having Ted and Bobby Kennedy in the Senate, with Ted serving continuously for an astounding 47 years until he died.

They have no term limits in America. We imposed ours in the 1987 Constitution—a well-meaning gesture meant to democratize our legislature, but which backfired and produced exactly what it wanted to avoid. Our political families quickly learned to adjust and do a merry-go-round, ensuring further that one member or other would occupy all spots in the wheel. What developed over the years was less a revitalization of the institution with bright new talents than a pooling and coagulation of old blood. 

So rather than an anti-dynasty law which seems to have little chance of passing a House full of dynasties anyway, perhaps we should revisit term limits, so we can retain the services of truly outstanding senators (like Franklin Drilon, for example) for life, rather than punish ourselves by replacing them with inferior siblings and cousins. 

There are and have been high-performing senators whom we don’t and shouldn’t mind serving over and over again, politicians with genuine and critical advocacies they have devoted their lives to. Our political history has been fortunate to have seen the likes of such men and women as Senators Claro M. Recto, Jose Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada, Raul Manglapus, Emmanuel Pelaez, Helena Benitez, Eva Estrada Kalaw, Juan Flavier, Rene Saguisag, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Edgardo Angara, just to speak of the departed.

Sadly our political realities preclude the truly poor from winning a Senate seat, and only extraordinary circumstances like EDSA can lift up capable and virtuous candidates of modest means such as Dr. Juan Flavier and Atty. Rene Saguisag to that exalted position. But their interests can be articulated and defended by men and women with the capacity and quality of mind and spirit to see beyond themselves. These are senators whom we expect to make laws that build a nation, rather than empower and enrich themselves and their progeny even further.

Qwertyman No. 129: The Punishment Theory

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 20, 2025

LOS ANGELES is burning as we speak, with raging fires consuming an area larger than the whole of San Francisco—or, in our terms, about seven times the size of Makati. I’m sure you’ve been just as horrified—and, let’s admit it, mesmerized—by the TV coverage showing huge swaths of what used to be thriving California communities crumbling in flames. 

Particularly compelling for onlookers is the awareness that many of those homes belong to Hollywood’s elite—people with millions of followers on social media but who, in their moments of personal distress (as in their divorces and run-ins with the law), often find it difficult to generate genuine sympathy. Not necessarily meaning to be unkind, pedestrians like us like to see the mighty (or their houses) falling; misery is a great democratizer. Even as the mansions of the rich go up in smoke, our first urge is to think that (a) they can always afford to build a new one, followed by (b) they’re just being punished for something they did wrong.

Indeed the “punishment theory” for the Great LA Fire has gained a lot of traction in social media, both within and outside the US. In Middle Eastern media, the fire was quickly seen as divine retribution for America’s support to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. As one Qatari journalist wrote, “The American aid squandered by the occupation [i.e., by Israel] in its Gaza war amounted to about $60 billion. The damage caused by the recent US fires has reached about $150 billion. Trump said a few days ago that he will bring hell upon the region, yet hell has arrived in the heart of the US, with hundreds of thousands of Americans displaced and thousands of homes and mansions lost. I trust in the vengeance and in the victory of the One and Only Almighty God.”

Not at all, said others—the fire had nothing to do with Israel but with Los Angeles, indeed California, itself. Again invoking the Almighty, Christian evangelicals rushed to proclaim the disaster “God’s punishment” for liberal licentiousness and its adherence to the false religion of “wokeness.” For being the land of hippies, Democrats, legalized marijuana, and Hollywood, California was now being chastised by an angry God. (Don’t believe it? Check Genesis 19:24-25, Amos 4:6-11—sayeth the FB and Reddit faithful. I myself suspect that if God was fair and a keen follower of American politics, he would’ve swept Mar-a-Lago away in a tsunami or a hurricane. But then I believe in an indifferent God who doesn’t take sides in wars or football games.)

Whatever, there seems to be a palpable compulsion here to go and punish the wicked, who have only themselves to blame for their calamities. Never mind that the fire has ravaged both Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, Christians and Muslims, Asians and Europeans, rich and poor. To those outside looking in, it’s the “other” whose tragedy we celebrate, with the innocents as collateral damage.

The word often trotted out in these situations is that old German standby, “Schadenfreude,” meaning the delight we take in the misfortunes of others. It’s all over social media when you read about the LA fires, almost to the point of gleefulness over a kind of divine justice befalling the deserving (most notably, that of a fellow named Keith Wasserman—an Elon Musk fan and Cybertruck owner who had railed against paying higher taxes, and was now begging for private firemen to save his home). 

Of course, there’s nothing like crisis to bring out both the best and the worst in people, from heroes to heels. Harder to read and more difficult to assess than these extremes is the slow and steady burn—rather than the raging inferno—in our societies.

All this talk of retribution leads me to an odd and totally unscientific theory about people. I wonder if, in fact, there’s a more proactive form of Schadenfreude that goes well beyond a smug snicker at the missteps of the perceived elite to an active courtship of their downfall.

I’m speaking not as a political scientist or sociologist, neither of which I am, but as a sometime playwright who likes to look into the darkest and strangest of human motivations. That’s normally the job of psychologists, for whom I have a healthy respect, but if psychologists could put all their patients together in a room and find a way to make sense of their nightlong chatter, then we playwrights and fictionists would be out of business.

Here’s how it goes: 

We get bad laws like the pork-laden GAA because we elect bad lawmakers. And we elect bad lawmakers because we fancy that voting for people we think we know (like entertainers and dynasts) makes us matter. With the vote being the only utterance left to the voiceless citizen, choosing the familiar becomes an act of assertion, of participation in national affairs. “He may be a lousy leader, but I put him there.” Call it the revenge of the bobotante, a term we Pinoys coined for supposedly ignorant or forgetful voters. My theory is, they’re more cunning and deliberate than we think.

Many MAGA voters didn’t so much vote for Trump the man as for the grievances they bore that he had the smarts to amplify and articulate. A convicted felon, habitual liar, bully, and egomaniac, Trump was after all the very antithesis of the righteous and virtuous leadership that evangelicals especially like to uphold (not that they don’t have their own crooks and pervs in their uppermost echelons). If they were true to themselves, even his most ardent supporters would have acknowledged—and looked past—his monstrously obvious character flaws.

They voted for him nonetheless, because—on top of the price of gas and groceries—he embraced and legitimized their consternation and disgust with a world gone far beyond their comfort zone, peopled by neighbors who don’t speak English, who have sex with the same pronouns, who kill their babies, and who run races against runners with different genitals (and go to their bathrooms). How could Donald J. Trump be worse than these? 

Today DJT takes his oath as America’s 47th, as Los Angeles continues to burn. I wonder who is being punished for what.

Qwertyman No. 128: Been There, Done That

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 13, 2025

I WAS trying my best to sound sober and diplomatic in last week’s column about Donald Trump’s impending return to the presidency of the world’s most powerful country, the United States of America, due to happen next Monday. I was still vacationing with family in California then, and didn’t want to get into an argument with some Americans (and Fil-Ams) who would’ve sent me packing home the moment they heard me raising a stink about their Chosen One.

The fact is—whether out of deference to my liberalism or just because of fatigue—few people I spoke with, whether from the left or right, seemed eager to talk about Trump, and it’s something I fully understand, and even appreciate. You can only hear and make so much commentary, most or all of which, at day’s end, will amount to nothing, except for more bruised or broken friendships.

Typical was a friend’s reaction from San Francisco: “Shrinking my world in the next four years to just my family and like-minded friends. (Just text me when the war has started!)”

I remembered what it was like in 2022 when our presidential candidate—who seemed (and was) superior to the alternative on all counts except financial capability—lost, and how distraught and upset we were, convinced that, surely, massive fraud accounted for her defeat. Even then, I opined—unpopularly, for sure—that despite the ever-present likelihood as in all Philippine elections that some electoral sleight-of-hand had taken place, more Filipino voters preferred the winner for their own reasons, disinformation and all. 

We’ve been living with and under that winner for almost three years now—and, perhaps surprisingly, we’ve all survived so far; the sky hasn’t fallen—yet. I did say then, like many other observers, that BBM was facing a fork in the road: to continue down the path to perdition that his parents took, or to boldly go up the hill of redemption. “Redemption” might not necessarily mean a full-blown admission of guilt in exchange for forgiveness of sins, or even the restitution of ill-gotten wealth, although all of the above would have been ideal if well-nigh impossible. I think most of us would have been pleasantly surprised if he simply led an honest, just, and competent administration, which is what all of us have been praying for.

Almost halfway through his term, has any of that happened? Which path did BBM choose? Is it possible that he has been straddling both, or hopping from one to the other? Very interestingly, both in the US and here at home, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about BBM, and what I’ve told people is this: 

He’s made some very popular decisions, which has raised his acceptance if not approval among many; but he continues to run fast and loose with the way public money is used, seriously undermining whatever credibility he’s been building up. His positions on tokhang, China, and POGOs have generally gone over well (although criticisms persist that extrajudicial killings and political imprisonment have continued). Perhaps above all, he has politically profited immensely from his war with the Dutertes, deftly positioning himself as sober and presidential versus the theatrics and the crudity of the Dutertes, who have done themselves no favors. 

On the other hand, neither has the Marcos administration endeared itself to the people by brazenly abusing its fiscal authority with the problematic Maharlika Fund and its diversion of key departmental budgets into an election-year pork barrel for lawmakers. Just when you thought it had miraculously gotten its ethical notions right, the old wolf bares a greedy fang or two and reminds us that old habits die hard.

Which brings me back to America and its expectations of Trump 2.0. Unlike BBM who can at least claim a generation’s distance from his father, Donald Trump has only himself to be compared with, and anyone hoping to see a more sensible, more contemplative, and more compassionate Trump enter the White House after he won over the truly sensible, contemplative, and compassionate Kamala Harris is in for a rude reminder of the man America spat out in 2020. 

In the weeks before his second inauguration, the President-elect has already threatened to pressure Denmark into selling Greenland to the US, punish its closest neighbors Canada and Mexico with crippling tariffs, rename the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, and repossess the Panama Canal. As a Fil-Am friend of mine in Georgia says, “It’s like hiring a CEO to turn our ailing and cash-strapped business around, and on his first week he tells us his strategy is to buy three companies and rename our firm.” An old Turkish proverb puts it more colorfully: “When a clown moves into the palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”

The lunacy of Trump’s ideas would be hilarious if he weren’t who he is, a man whose every fart is now taken as God’s own wisdom by his retinue of quaking sycophants. As a man incapable of accepting criticism and prone to doubling down on the certifiably wrong, President Trump will run his government as he is ruled by his ego, and for the sake of our relatives and friends in that country, we can only pray that America emerges whole and healthy enough in 2028 to find its way back to sanity and decency.

On Monday next, when the inmates officially take over the asylum in Washington, DC, we Pinoys will be watching with the smugness of people who’ve been there and done that. We have our own pot of troubles to worry about, our own idiots and idiocies to deal with—like our propensity to force people with the same surnames, grade-school diplomas, and missing morals to become Senators of the Republic. So help us God.

(Photo from msn.com)

Qwertyman No. 127: From St. Louis to San Diego

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 6, 2025

I’M WRITING this on New Year’s Day in San Diego, California, where we’ve been visiting our married daughter Demi, who’s been living and working here for the past seventeen years. It was our first Christmas in America in ten years, and our second visit since the pandemic ended. 

Last night, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I watched a long and fascinating documentary on cable TV on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which ran from April to December that year. We Filipinos recall that event for its importation of over 1,000 of our countrymen to demonstrate what “savagery” meant—specifically, through the public butchering and eating of dogs. 

That bloody sideshow raised an outcry even then among both Filipinos and Americans, a pain we still feel more than 120 years after. Lost to many of us as a result of that diversion was the magnificence of the fair in many other respects, especially in terms of advances in science and technology. Many necessities and amenities we associate with the 20th century—electrical lighting, wireless telegraphy, the X-ray machine, baby incubators, and tabletop stoves, among others—were first shown to the public at the fair. 

But the fair, above all, was meant to showcase American ascendancy in politics and culture and in military and industrial might. America had just defeated Spain and had become a global maritime power, and was eager to flex its muscle, so this triumphalism underscored the great urge at St. Louis to introduce the world to America, and America to the world.

Just a few days earlier, we came out to San Diego’s famous waterfront to watch a parade to celebrate the Holiday Bowl, a football game scheduled for the Christmas break, with floats, balloons, marching bands, and military vehicles. It was a moment of pure Americana, brimming with Christmas cheer. I did my best to keep politics out of my mind for that golden hour, but of course it was never far away—especially in San Diego, a border city that could soon find itself caught in the mass-deportation drama promised by the incoming Trump administration, which takes office in less than three weeks.

This morning we woke up to the news of at least ten people being killed and dozens more injured on the street in New Orleans by an ISIS sympathizer plowing into a crowd of New Year revelers. That could very easily have been us at the parade, and again I had to wonder if—despite all the bad press the Philippines gets, with some reason—the US was truly a safer place, given its new realities of normalized and often racist violence. 

It doesn’t even take a bearded terrorist to wreak havoc in American life; as of December 17 last year, 488 mass shootings had been recorded in the US, so often that they’ve become a news staple eliciting just about as much outrage and action as another mugging at Central Park. Anti-Asian violence—to include both physical assaults and verbal or online abuse—has been on the rise, with Southeast Asians reporting the highest number of threats, despite polls showing most Americans believing that anti-Asian-American attitudes are on the wane, post-pandemic. 

That’s not going to deter the hundreds of thousands of Pinoys who, like us, still need or want to visit America each year—mostly as tourists who just want to see Disneyland, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building, aside from picking apples in Michigan, tasting wine in Napa Valley, and skiing in Colorado. The magic of an America we fantasized about—growing up watching Hollywood movies, listening to American songs, reading American books, and following American idols—remains powerfully attractive, enhanced by an image we retain of America as an innocent, benign, and giving place. This might be especially true of us Boomers who learned about snow and white Christmases long before we came across the real thing.

I doubt, of course, that our forebears who stood half-naked in their tribal garb for the delectation of the crowd in St. Louis saw anything so warm and fuzzy about America. Instead they saw curiosity, pity, and revulsion. American “innocence” was always a romantic illusion; America the Beautiful can turn on a dime to become America the Ugly.

When I put all these things together in my mind, I wonder if we 21st-century Filipinos identify more ourselves today with those “savages” on exhibit or with their onlookers, particularly those Pinoys who have crossed over to become Americans—in some cases, even “more American than the Americans,” as I’ve heard it said, proud of their assimilation into a mainstream moving farther than ever to the political right. 

As a teacher of American literature and society—who also studied, taught, and worked in the Midwestern heartland for many years—one thing I always remind my Filipino students is that there’s no such thing as a single, monolithic America, and that, whatever its current majorities might say, American society is diverse and ever more diversifying. To the American right, that’s the “great replacement theory” at work, the horrifying possibility that non-whites—the carnival freaks—are taking over the country, prompting the Trumpist turnaround from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI policies. To me, diversity offers both challenge and hope.

Out of respect for my hosts and friends here in San Diego—some of whom, for their own reasons, voted for Donald Trump—I’ve held my tongue for the time being, telling myself that it’s their country and their choice, although that choice will inevitably affect our lives halfway around the world. 

Among my liberal American friends, I sense an urge to disconnect at least temporarily from political reality and to go into passive resistance while they regroup. It’s a position that I can identify and sympathize with, as we sort out our options in the Philippines of 2025. We survived martial law; you’ll survive Donald Trump, I tell them. To survive may well be our best New Year’s resolution: against the aggravations and vexations of the world we’ve come into, survival is the best revenge.