Category Archives: America

Qwertyman No. 223: Lessons from America

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 9, 2026

LIKE MANY liberals—heck, like most people with any sense of sanity and decency left in them—I rejoiced at the total repudiation of Donald Trump and his Republican Party in the November 3 midterms. As one of millions of Filipinos with children, siblings, and other kinfolk in America, and one of the billions of earthlings injured in all kinds of ways by one man’s megalomania, I had been praying hard for this moment, if only to remind myself that divine justice remains possible in this sordid world.

All in a few weeks, we saw Lula push back the fascist right in Brazil, a student-led anti-corruption coalition win in Serbia, and Netanyahu stalemated in Israel. And now this. At this moment of giddiness, can we Filipinos be faulted for imagining that we, too, are due for epic change in the Philippines?

With our presidential elections coming up in two years, are there applicable lessons to be learned from the American experience to ensure the triumph of democracy and the return of accountability and good governance?

We can feel tectonic shifts happening belowground as VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial advances, likely to be resolved before the year ends. Whether she’s shut out of 2028 or somehow qualifies to run, the Dutertes remain a formidable force. And while a bruited Baste Duterte-Robin Padilla ticket seems designed to make us gag, it won’t be a joke if and when it happens, taking note of survey findings that 60 percent of Filipinos remain unconvinced that Sara is guilty of corruption, a mountain of evidence notwithstanding.

It’s no comfort that President Bongbong Marcos, who’s been getting a free pass from middle forces for trumpeting a noisy but sputtering anti-corruption drive, just showed his true colors by looking away while his allies in Congress cooked up a pork-heavy budget and then lately by appointing a baggage-laden Chief Justice whom critics expect to provide the Marcoses with political insurance. We’re definitely not feeling that “reform” vibe that we thought, for a feeble instant back there, PBBM himself was interested in stoking.

What’s a good and smart Pinoy democrat (small D) to do? Herewith, some propositions from this pedestrian kibitzer and his equally non-pundit friends, whom I polled for their ideas. They’re not graven in stone, and I could be somewhat off or dead wrong, but these could be starting points for a longer and deeper conversation among Pinoys sick and tired of seeing Marcoses, Dutertes, and the same old dynastic names in their future.

1. Build a big tent. This will mean sharing platforms and maybe even beds and breakfasts with some people you’d rather not be seen with, but tolerance and cooperation will be key. Those partners could and should include “soft” and persuadable Marcos and DDS supporters whose allegiances are anchored less in any kind of ideology than in unmet needs.

The Democrats didn’t win just because of their registered base. Especially in the red states, they were buoyed up by millions of disaffected Trumpers who felt ignored or betrayed by their marmalade hero, who splurged billions on wars and decorative pet projects while ordinary Americans suffered at the gas pump and the grocery. Here, we can’t win if we can’t pull over some of the 60 percent who still believe the evidence vs. Sara is weak. We need to ask the BBM and DDS faithful: What have they done for you? Are your lives any better now?

A broad alliance will include extremes, but it should be firmly driven by the moderate core, lest it lose its way in infighting, which some progressives are particularly good at. If you’re the kind of activist who’d rather lose at the polls than compromise or concede 1 percent of your preciously inflexible agenda, then we might admire your steadfastness, but electoral, united-front politics clearly isn’t for you. Principles are important, but your insistence on absolute correctness could lose you the whole project, and leave the common enemy rolling on the floor.

2. “It’s the economy, stupid.” This was Bill Clinton’s mantra when he took on and won over George H. W. Bush in 1992, but it clearly remained relevant in the 2026 midterms, and will continue to do so, the worse things get.

For Pinoys, this means prioritizing economic and welfare issues over ideology: food on the table, gas in the tank, education for the children, and affordable drugs and care for the sick. The candidate who can’t promise these and show how they can be delivered will be irrelevant.

We need to tie corruption to poverty, and dynastic politics to corruption—reduce big talk to gut issues, plot the short line from bad politicians to popular hunger and misery, and above all, craft concrete solutions that offer hope.

3. Organize well and communicate well. Translate that big tent to strong, broad, ground-level organization. Involve faith-based groups, which have large, committed constituencies. Connect to the local—Senate hearings get the headlines, but local needs and issues get the votes. Everywhere across the US, and again especially in hostile territory, Democrats made deep inroads through skillful organization and reaching out to the disaffected. (Also take a page from Lula’s super-effective digital blitz in Brazil.)

And of course it helps enormously to have a solid, capable, and personable candidate like Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico, possessed of a sharp mind, a good heart, and a compassionate voice, all indicative of an inner strength. We need someone of his likeable kind to deflate the showy bluster of a Robin Padilla by offering a more attractive and substantial alternative.

Victory in 2028 isn’t the end or the ultimate objective. It should simply be the beginning of expanded opportunities to get the right things done, and to undertake what was near-impossible in a previous administration, like leaving the budget totally pork-free, prosecuting and punishing the corrupt, and putting public money where it’s most needed and where it matters.

All that said, the most outstanding prospect remains the obvious one: Leni Robredo, who exemplifies the best of good governance in both substance and style. If only she could think of the country as a bigger Naga (in a far different way from how Rodrigo Duterte thought he could turn it into a greater Davao), many of these initial concerns would vanish, and we can all focus on getting her and us across the finish line.

(Meme from Threads)

Qwertyman No. 222: SGV: Eight Decades of Excellence

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 1, 2026

I’M NOT an accountant and never took an accounting subject—I couldn’t tell you the difference between “book value” and “equity” if my life depended on it—but as fate would have it, I’ve been privileged to have an inside view of the Philippine accounting profession as an author and even, to some extent, a confidant.

It all began twenty years ago when I was asked to write the biography of the man whose name is synonymous with Philippine accountancy itself—Washington SyCip, or “Wash” as generations of Filipinos knew him. Most of us, myself included, probably grow up thinking that nothing could be more boring than an accountant’s job (but then again, there’s the elevator operator)—all those days and nights poring over ledgers and scribbling notes and figures with a fine-tipped pen.

That impression went out the window when I met and got to know Wash—a certified genius who graduated from college at 17, summa cum laude, and soon began teaching students older than he was. He took his master’s and became a CPA at 19—but was too young to legally practice, so he went to the US for his PhD, only to be caught there by the war. Upon hearing the rumor—a false one—that his father Albino had been executed by the Japanese, Wash signed up with the US Army, which promptly realized they had a prodigy on their hands, and assigned him as a codebreaker in Calcutta, where he spent most of the war. At war’s end, on the voyage home, Wash faced a choice: return to the US and take up a job as an accountant for Women’s Wear Daily, or stay and start his own firm. He chose the latter and founded what would become the accounting giant SyCip, Gorres & Velayo, or SGV as we’ve known it since.

Wash died in 2017—characteristically enough, on a flight to America, the other pole of his storied life. The firm that he started has just marked its eightieth year, and again I’ve been fortunate to have been asked to write its commemorative book, published by SGV as SGV 80 Years: Celebrating a Continuing Legacy of Integrity, Excellence, and Purpose. (Last year, I also wrote A Century of Philippine Accountancy for the Philippine Institute of Certified Public Accountants, marking the profession’s centenary in the Philippines.)

SGV’s rise to the top of an industry once dominated by British and American firms and its continuing leadership in a new century is a study in corporate culture—in an organization’s adherence to core beliefs and in how a generation of leaders builds on previous ones to keep the firm not only alive but at the cutting edge of its profession.

With its absorption of Fleming & Williamson’s audit practice in 1958, SGV became the country’s largest firm and completed the Filipinization of the profession. In the 1960s and 1970s, it became the first Asian multinational, with member firms from Taiwan to Singapore. By 1971 SGV it was serving 63 of the country’s top 100 corporations.

A big turning point came in the early 1980s, when the Philippine economy weakened and could no longer support the regional network, so in 1985 Wash and his partners joined Arthur Andersen’s global organization, trading independence for technology, training, and reach.

Arthur Andersen’s implosion in the early 2000s led to another crisis, resulting in SGV’s tying up with Ernst & Young, a productive global association that continues to this day. Then Country Managing Partner Cesar Purisima steered the firm through that period deftly and later reorganized SGV into market circles, which later evolved into market groups, to make the firm more responsive to its clients’ needs. Its emergence from crisis also brought to the fore the concept of stewardship—of the firm as something held in trust—first enunciated by CMP Dave Balangue and developed by CMP Vic Noel, as a “reminder to the Partners that we are not owners of the Firm but rather its stewards…. We had to think of SGV as more than a business, but as an institution that it was our duty to perpetuate.”

It was CMP Itos Cruz who pushed that further into one of SGV’s central tenets—what it calls “purpose,” by which SGVeans aim “to leave the Firm stronger than we came in, so we could help the Filipino people better. Whatever increase we bring to the value of SGV, we leave it to the next generation to build upon. We clarified our corporate purpose accordingly: to nurture leaders and enable businesses for a better Philippines.”

When the pandemic hit, SGV was prepared, because CMP Wilson Tan had providentially just refreshed the firm’s business continuity plan. As a result, SGV was able to shift to remote work almost overnight, to pay salaries early, to get its partners to take a temporary cut, and to lay off no one. Today, under Rosing Fajardo—the firm’s second female CMP—SGV employs nearly 6,000 across four service lines, adapting to a business and political environment marked by rapid technological change, the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence, and the issues of sustainability, demographic change, and geopolitics.

Key to SGV’s longevity and success has been its adherence to integrity, a principle laid down by Wash SyCip from the very beginning, when he said of SGV’s predecessors that “One group practices discrimination by color of skin, the other practices discrimination by blood. So I sought to get the best people to join me. I told them that even when I get married, I’m not going to have my children in the Firm. There should be complete meritocracy.” (Indeed, all of Wash’s three children have pursued other careers.) SGV has been known to drop major clients over issues of misreporting.

One way SGV has maintained that integrity has been to draw a clear, sharp line between its business and its ties to government. While many ex-SGVeans have joined government in high positions from Cabinet secretaries to House Speaker and Prime Minister, they’ve done so knowing they were taking a one-way road. Wash SyCip himself laid down that rule: “We don’t want people to think that we are putting somebody in government so that he would have influence when he rejoins us, because that would affect our integrity… If we lose them to government, then that is one of our contributions to our developing nation.” Cesar Purisima recalls Wash telling him that he should “look at government the way a moth looks at light.” (It certainly deserves to be noted, to be fair, that some of SGV’s contributions to government could have served and performed far better had they kept “integrity, excellence, and purpose” at heart after the transition.)

At a time when there seems to be a dire shortage of these qualities in public life, SGV’s history reminds us how the private sector can help bring out the best in us—with exemplary leadership and good corporate citizenship.

Qwertyman No. 221: The Fil-Am Midterm Vote

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 26, 2026

NEXT WEDNESDAY (Tuesday, November 3 in the US), Americans will troop to the polling stations to cast their votes in what promises to be a historic midterm election, by all accounts a referendum on the tempestuous first half of President Donald Trump’s renewed White House lease. Millions of Filipino-Americans will take part in that exercise, and how they vote could very well affect everything from how much the Pinoy jeepney driver will be paying for diesel to how China will behave in the West Philippine Sea—not to mention outcomes in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, and other global hotspots.

According to US immigration sources, over 4 million Filipinos or people of Filipino ancestry now live in the US, of whom almost 400,000 are undocumented. About 2.5 million of these Filipino-Americans are eligible voters. With the US population currently standing at about 350 million—of whom 210 million have registered to vote in 2026—we can see that Fil-Ams roughly represent 1 percent of both the total US and voting population. That may not look like much on the national scale, but their concentration in several states—mostly in California, Hawaii, Texas, New York, and Washington, in that order—amplifies their political importance, particularly in key battleground areas. California alone accounts for over 1.5 million Fil-Ams.

A number of Filipino-American candidates are on the ballot. Running for reelection to the New York State Legislature is Steven Raga, who became the first Fil-Am to sit in that body in 2022. If successful, they will be joining many other political leaders of Filipino ancestry, some serving in the state legislatures of California, Wisconsin, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Bobby Scott, a Democrat representing Virginia, is the only Member of Congress with Filipino roots, serving in Washington since 1993. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria is also a Fil-Am, and the first openly gay person in that capacity. Many other Fil-Ams serve on city councils.

But it will be more than ethnic representation at stake for Fil-Ams—and indeed, all Americans if not the world at large—on November 3.

Why does any of this matter to us? Because millions of Filipinos have relatives in America—I have a daughter in California and a niece in Michigan (both Democrats but independently minded women who married into Republican families, to give you an idea of how complex these relationships can get)—and also because any flatulence from Washington impacts our noses here in Manila.

Filipino-Americans are voting primarily for their own national and local concerns, as they should, but inevitably they’re also voting for the kind of global order their leaders will seek to forge. The old order based on rules and respect has been effectively dismantled by Trump, replaced by military power and a disdain for human rights domestically and around the world. So the Fil-Am voting in Kalamazoo for lower prices at their gas pump isn’t doing that just for Michigan but for the world as well.

Fil-Ams have historically leaned and voted Democratic (68 percent blue vs. 31 percent red among self-identified registered voters in 2024, according to a Pew poll), but there’s been a recent rightward shift noted in the polls, which has been true as well of other ethnic groups like Latinos, especially in 2024. However, this shift will be tested in these coming midterms, with issues like affordability, inflation, health care, jobs, and social security ranking topmost among voter and particularly Filipino-American concerns.

Fil-Am voters do need to come out more to the polling booths to make themselves heard. Overall, 90 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI, the rubric under which Fil-Ams are usually grouped) have signified that they will vote in these midterms, but only 54 percent and 63 percent of eligible Fil-Am voters actually cast their ballots in 2020 and 2024, respectively. (In 2024, 54 percent went for Kamala Harris and 44 percent for Donald Trump among Fil-Ams nationwide.)

This is why both parties have been actively wooing Fil-Am voters to support them in the midterms, because their votes could mean victory or defeat in key races like Nevada’s, where Filipinos are the largest AAPI ethnic group at 44 percent.

Nevada is a particularly interesting story. The state doesn’t figure in our migration maps as much as California, Hawaii, or New York do, but Filipinos moved to Nevada in droves in the 1990s and 2000s, attracted by its lower cost of living and jobs in the gaming and health care industries. Today about 200,000 Fil-Ams live there, representing 60,000 votes being courted by Democrats and Republicans with karaoke and kamayan parties.

How did it go in Nevada the last time? A report from the Washington Post dated October 30, 2024—just a week before the election that put Trump back in power—shows how pliable the Fil-Am voter’s mind could be:

“While headlining a Las Vegas rally advertised as a celebration of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Trump told the crowd that he would build an economy that supports the Asian American community. ‘So many amazing Nevada Filipinos, right?’ Trump told the crowd, earning boisterous cheers. ‘… You all are the greatest people, hardworking people, and we’re going to take care of you.’

“Harry Cheng, 57, arrived at the rally an undecided voter. ‘I just wanted to hear what people had to say,’ said Cheng, who immigrated from the Philippines to the United States in 1989.

“By the end, he was convinced.

He knew Trump had made anti-Asian comments—including referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus,’ ‘Wuhan virus’ and ‘kung flu’—in the past. But the former president and fellow Republican speakers made a strong case for closing the border and improving the economy, he said.

‘The number of migrants crossing the border has turned into a crisis, Cheng said. Meanwhile, he had immigrated ‘the right way.’

“Besides, he said, ‘Trump also made statements that were pro-Asian. I just heard it firsthand.’

“He stood near a lifelike cutout of the former president as the crowd filtered out of the rally and glanced at campaign T-shirts for sale. He planned to register as a Republican when he got home, Cheng said.”

Thanks to voters like him, Trump won Nevada by a sliver of a margin, at 49.8 percent against Harris’ 48.3 percent. I wonder what Harry Cheng is thinking now, and how he’ll vote on November 3rd.

(Image from Bilyonaryo News Channel)

Qwertyman No. 218: A Dead Man’s Voice

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 5, 2026

TODAY I’M going to turn over this column to the voice of a long-dead man, and all because—when last week I picked up a book he had published in 1957—I thought he might as well have been writing in the present, so uncannily familiar were the vignettes he recounted from this country’s political life seven decades and more ago.

The man was George A. Malcolm (1881-1961), the first full-time dean of the University of the Philippines College of Law whose building now bears his name, and later an Associate Justice of the prewar Philippine Supreme Court. The book he authored was American Colonial Careerist (Boston: The Chrisopher Publishing House, 1957), a collection of his memoirs and impressions as a civil servant under the American colonial regime over most of that period.

I was drawn to the Malcolm book because I collect antiquarian Filipiniana, for one, and of course because of the UP connection, but also because Malcolm graduated from the University of Michigan (where I and many other Filipino scholars took their graduate degrees) and had long been intrigued by Ann Arbor’s contributions (positive and surely some negative ones as well) to Philippine education and government. Michigan also produced Dean Worcester, who would defend America’s paternalistic rule, and lawyer Clyde De Witt, who would practice in the Philippines and later set up an endowment for Filipino student-lawyers in Michigan that would support such legal luminaries as Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Raphael Lotilla.

Because of his positions, Malcolm came to know and befriend nearly all the major Filipino and American politicians and leaders of the prewar period, and his book gives intimate and sometimes saucy sketches of them. Manuel L. Quezon, not surprisingly, dominates his memoirs. “The Filipino is a natural and consummate politician,” he writes. “The great Jefe of them all for three decades was Manuel L. Quezon. He was the spectacular figure who gave color to the scene. A close second to Quezon in astuteness, but lacking his dynamic personality, was Sergio Osmeña.” But he also adds that “Quezon dearly loved the trappings of office. He relished the glittering appellation, ‘Your Excellency.’… An added Quezonian touch was a red shoulder-sash and three foreign decorations—a medal attached to his left lapel and two blazing badges pinned on the right side of his coat above the hip.”

Further, Malcolm notes, “Quezon gave an early demonstration of a desire to see the world at the expense of the taxpayers. In the role of official delegate of the Philippines to the International Congress of Navigation, held in czarist Russia in 1908, the young Assemblyman arrived in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) after the Congress had already adjourned. The P34,000 set aside for this trip was trivial compared to the fabulous expense accounts entailed in paying for other pilgrimages all over the globe with a large entourage. Curiously, the Filipino people were rather proud of the impression their effulgent leader was making in foreign lands and rarely complained of his prodigality.” (One who did complain was a young UP student named Ferdinand Marcos, who railed against MLQ’s “extravagance.”)

But Quezon was hardly alone. Malcolm goes on to say that “Quirino filled the expensive shoes of Quezon, and even added frills of his own concoction. A P5,000 bed to case the President’s slumbers became the prize reference in political campaigns. An investigation conducted by an inquisitive Senate purported to reveal that Quirino had spent about a million pesos on four trips abroad. Journalist Teodoro M. Locsin cynically observed: ‘This is living.’”

Indeed, presidential or not, the corruption we seem so upset about these days was already widespread. Malcolm observes that “Certain phases of the electoral process in the Philippines merit special attention. Aspirants for office have flagrantly and repeatedly flaunted the provision of the Electoral Code which specifies that no candidate shall spend for his campaign more than the total amount of the candidate. Yet, it is common information that a candidate for a seat in Congress, whose annual salary is P7,200, has been required to deposit P25,000 with party chieftains and has had to part with many more pesos in addition to have a fighting chance. In the 1953 presidential election, such sums as P2,000,000 were openly mentioned as needed by each of the three contending parties to finance their campaigns.

“Where did this money come from? The money came from candidates who bankrupted their patrimony and from the ‘big shots,’ in particular the sugar tycoons. Moreover, millions of pesos of the people’s money was drained out of the public treasury, generally for local ‘public works,’ to influence the people’s will…. Many phrases descriptive of Philippine politics have been scattered about. Merely as examples, I quote the words of an American publisher and a Filipino educator. Wrote Roy W. Howard, Philippine politics is ‘a great national pastime,’ with politicians “ten centavos a dozen.” Declared Mariano V. de los Santos, President of the University of Manila: ‘There is no activity in which we can engage where partisan politics does not seep in. Business, industry, agriculture, all are permeated by bad politics. Under such a climate, naturally politicians of all sorts thrive. But they thrive at the expense of the general welfare.’”

And where did many of these politicians come from? We go back to the UP College of Law and its poorer cousins which seem to have mushroomed all over the place:

“One potent reason why politics has come to play such a large part in the life of the people is the preference on the part of the youth for academic education. The result is a bumper crop of lawyers with no place to go except into the government service or into politics. It would inure to good government to have legally-trained and disciplined men and women in public life, if such exaggerated importance was not attached to the title of abogado in the Philippines.

“The College of Law, University of the Philippines, was organized to supply quality, not quantity, leaders. All to no avail. Law schools mushroomed all over the Islands. The Bar examinations became great sporting events, with candidates ready to mortgage their patrimony and sell their souls if only they could get passing grades. Yet when the six long years of study were passed and the Bar examination was hurdled, no clients awaited the embryo lawyers. Droves of half-baked parasites were superimposed on an already top-heavy governmental structure and a lean economy.”

Perhaps we need to bring the spirit of Justice Malcolm back in a séance as amicus curiae in the Senate impeachment trial.

Qwertyman No. 194: Holier Than the Pope

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 20, 2026

LIKE MANY people in the world today, I don’t consider myself particularly religious, in the sense of Mass-going, living by the Bible, and toeing Church doctrine. My wife and I do believe in a Supreme Being to whom we are all ultimately responsible, and pray every day and night to God for thanks and guidance in our daily life, but mistrust organized religion while continuing to admire and support such brave and progressive clerics like Fr. Flavie Villanueva in their pastoral work.

I grew up in the Catholic tradition, but l soon began to question and to argue with the Church’s positions on such flashpoints as the role of women, sexuality and reproductive rights, and its ties to authoritarian regimes, not to mention its untaxed wealth and the horrifying cases of sexual abuse.

I’m sure my estrangement is hardly an isolated case, but this isn’t about me as much as it is about the moral authority that, despite all our misgivings, the Catholic Church—and yes, other religions as well—can exert on our deeply troubled world, and how it can provide a welcome and more embracing alternative to the exclusionary politics of neofascist despots like Donald Trump.

The world woke up last week to a series of posts from the American president threatening to destroy Iran’s 6,000-year-old civilization for good, warning Pope Leo XIV to stay out of politics, and posing in an AI-generated picture as Jesus Christ himself. The posts were so atrocious and deranged that even Trump’s faithful MAGA followers were revolted by them, and said so. His erstwhile media ally and drumbeater Tucker Carlson called him the “Antichrist.” Others expressed disbelief, confusion, and dismay over the posts, finally realizing what the rest of us already knew: the man is mad, megalomaniac, and cares for no one and nothing but himself. 

This is a man who, after decimating Iran’s leadership (which quickly bounced back) and killing 170 schoolchildren, declares the war “won,” says that gas prices are “not very high,” and—in the middle of the global economic shock he’s initiated—insists that the tacky ballroom he’s demolished a whole historic wing of the White House for is needed for “national security reasons,” aside from contemplating a monstrous “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capital. Trump’s growing lunacy is obvious. He has become such a caricature of himself that he will be hard put to outdo his latest acts to keep hogging the headlines, which seems to be his chief preoccupation. 

But what fascinates and appalls me even more is the servile indifference to the truth with which his closest allies continue to defend him, torturing logic and common sense to make Trump seem like some kind of genius who understands something the rest of us don’t, praising the Emperor profusely for his new clothes. His Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, acknowledges that while gas and other prices are going through the roof, American consumers “feel good in their heart of hearts.” (Like many in Trump’s orbit, Bessent is a centimillionaire who doesn’t have to line up at the gas station or buy groceries at Walmart.)

More egregious was the defense of the boss by Vice President JD Vance, who cautioned Pope Leo against speaking out on Iran, saying that “I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.” For someone who only recently converted to Roman Catholicism, Vance sounds precociously learned to lecture the Pope on the theology of just war—a tenet first advanced by St. Augustine and later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. (Pope Leo just happens to have headed the Augustinian order before becoming Pope, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Augustinian concept of authority.) Trump’s posing as Jesus, Vance said, was “a joke.”

Trump, of course, is hardly alone in his dislike of the Pope and papal power. Monarchs and politicians have argued with the Vatican for centuries, from Henry VIII to Josef Stalin. (To be fair, many popes—especially during what was called the “pornocracy” early on—were notoriously lustful and corrupt.) All this reminds us of another president—Rodrigo Duterte—who called Pope Francis a “son of a whore” for causing a traffic problem during his visit to Manila in 2015. And why stop at the Pope? In June 2018, in a speech, Duterte called God a “stupid SOB.” Later that year, annoyed by the church’s opposition to his drug war, Duterte told a group of local leaders that their bishops were “useless fools… kill them!” His spokesmen Sal Panelo and Harry Roque tripped over themselves to emphasize that the President was speaking in “hyperbole”—a distinction that was lost to the cops who to0k his orders to kill thousands of drug suspects literally.

And again the real danger here is not just the catastrophic damage these despots bring to our societies and economies but to our mind and hearts, in the continuing acceptance and propagation of falsehood by the self-deluded, in the replacement of our hope and courage with fear, cynicism, and resignation.

But thanks to Donald Trump’s excesses such as his assault on Pope Leo, our sense of outrage seems to have been revived. Leo has categorically said that he is “not afraid of the Trump administration” and has deplored the world’s being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” Bravo!

There have been many recent reports of the resurgence of the Catholic Church in America and around the world, especially among the young—the result of a growing need for a moral center of authority where other centers like government have failed, the liberal reforms of Pope Francis, and the quiet but capable and inspiring stewardship of Pope Leo. I may not be a steadfast Catholic, but if Leo continues on the path of righteousness and resistance to tyranny, he can count me in his crusade for peace and justice. Donald Trump may yet turn out to be the best recruiter for the Catholic Church.

Qwertyman No. 193: Evil Incarnate

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 13, 2026

BACK IN the early days of martial law, when I went underground, among the books I read in our safehouse in Makati was William Shirer’s monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a comprehensive account of Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ rise to power. While academics have critiqued its journalistic treatment as not being scholarly enough, the 1960 work remains an important contribution to modern political history, if only as an eyewitness account, with Shirer having been stationed in Germany from 1934 to 1940. I was particularly intrigued by his thesis—since much debated—that the German people, from ordinary farmers and workers to the most powerful industrialists, enabled Germany’s descent into totalitarianism, stemming from their Lutheran deference to secular authority. 

That book and its implications for us, then just beginning to confront and comprehend dictatorship, instilled in me, as a playwright and fictionist, a fascination with complicity and collaboration. I also dug deeper into the history and culture of the Third Reich, particularly its propaganda. Even today, YouTube is rich with visual documentation of that dark period, from the burning of the Reichstag to the Nuremberg parades and, in that same city, the trials that laid bare a regime’s methodically murderous mind.

Its parallels to our time cannot be overemphasized. In the 1930s, the so-called “Hitler Myth” was sold by Nazi-leaning newspapers to promote Hitler as the restorer of German pride from the shame of Versailles and the economic ruin that followed the First World War. Germany could be great again. But Hitler also needed scapegoats to  blame for the country’s woes, and so he singled out the Jews and the Communists for that purpose. 

Like today’s American ICE, the Gestapo and the SS conducted raids to round up these enemies of the State, and Hitler launched wars to expand German territory and to proclaim the superiority of German arms. (When his troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he proudly announced that “The German Wehrmacht is the strongest in the world!”) To celebrate his early victories and mythologize his legacy, Hitler planned to transform Berlin into Welthauptstadt Germania (World Capital Germany), invoking ancient Rome and Egypt to include a People’s Hall with a dome 16 times larger than St. Peter’s, a 100-meter Triumphal Arch, and a 120-meter-wide Avenue of Splendor for military marches. Donald Trump’s shameless renaming of the Kennedy Center and of a city airport in his own honor, his conversion of the historic East Wing into a ballroom, and his cheesy gilding of the White House furniture seem modest by comparison, but they betray the same Napoleonic grasp for imperial grandeur, though with much shorter reach. 

By the time the last prisoner walked out of the Nazis’ concentration camp, the Second World War had claimed 40 to 50 million lives in Europe alone, causing untold misery and devastation to the many more who survived.

In all these, Hitler was supported by what we would call today the “billionaire elite”—familiar names that included Krupp, Thyssen, Bosch, and even a carmaker named Porsche. (A book should be written about carmakers—hello, Elon—and their politics. Henry Ford was rabidly anti-Semitic, even compiling his articles into a book titled The International Jew, and was admired for it by no less than Hitler, citing him in Mein Kampf as the example of a great anti-Jewish industrialist and awarding him in 1938 with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.) Historian Alan Bullock would later excoriate the German right wing (hello, Republican Party) for forsaking “a true conservatism” and making Hitler their partner in a coalition government. 

If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump is the closest reincarnation we have today of Adolf Hitler (and, to his erstwhile ally Tucker Carlson, the Antichrist), that should have been cast aside by Trump’s recent threat that “A whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran yielded, alongside his earlier statements that Iran deserved to be bombed “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” and that ordinary Iranians would be happy to be bombed to secure their freedom. 

The horror of an American president making these outrageous pronouncements in utter ignorance of everything we value in (yes, let’s use his word) civilization—law, justice, culture, and common decency—is trumped (yes, let’s use that word) only by the continuing acceptance and magnification of his thoughts by a base on whose shoulders he rode to power. While some on the right finally denounced him as a “genocidal lunatic,” many others did not. Asked about the “civilization” quote, a Republican politician shrugged it off as “Trump just being Trump.” “Go into war to win,” said a MAGA supporter on Reddit. “Not drag it out like Vietnam. Y’all may not like the phrasing, but I like that he’s going into this with an ‘in to win at all costs’ perspective.”

The trouble is, the Iranian people whose freedoms Trump claims he champions (while decimating the same freedoms at home) are paying with their lives in bombings that don’t distinguish between Revolutionary Guards and dissidents. And we—7,000 kilometers away from Iran—are paying for those costs, much like the rest of the world that had nothing to do with Trump’s idiocy in launching a war he doesn’t know how to end. The rich will weather this storm like they always do, but mothers feeding their children with scraps of fish and jeepney drivers weeping at the end of a 14-hour workday are paying for a distant despot’s insatiable vanity. 

When I think on these, and look at our world today, I marvel, aghast, at how easily people continue to succumb to a form of mass hypnosis, of enthrallment to a strongman figure like Donald Trump or Rodrigo Duterte, of deluding themselves into believing that their hero’s extremism would save the planet from some imagined social menace (i.e., people unlike themselves, a.k.a. aliens) at all costs. 

What made Hitler and his horrific crimes possible? The assent and consent of his people, the initial indifference of the international community to his misdeeds, and the despot’s ability to weave lies stronger than the truth. Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump may be evil incarnate—but their enablers should be equally accountable to God and humanity.

Qwertyman No. 192: Apple@50 in a World@War

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 6, 2026

A REEL circulated recently online explaining the origins of the ubiquitous Internet symbol @ for “at,” tracing it back to medieval monks seeking a shortcut and to merchants using it to mean “at the rate of,” and then finally to a coding convention adopting it to link a computer user’s name to his or her domain or location.

I found it fascinating because I’m something of a geek, a failed scientist who had to switch from Engineering to English because I couldn’t hack the math, who ended up channeling his digital side (as opposed to the analog, which collects vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books) into a decades-long devotion to Apple computers and to nearly everything Apple produced. I even chaired the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (PhilMUG) back in the mid-1990s when the handful of us felt like early Christians in a pagan universe. We had monthly get-togethers in small restaurants to unbox the latest SCSI peripherals and discuss the newest features of System 8.0. I prided myself in the fact that I could strip and reassemble a PowerBook Duo practically blindfolded. 

I mention this because Apple has just marked its 50th anniversary, having been founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne with a machine cobbled together in a garage. After slogging through its first decades as a distant competitor to the more popular Windows PC, Apple finally achieved global domination after coming out with such game-changers as the colorful iMac, the iPod that made you smile the minute you put your earphones on, the ultraportable iPad, and of course the indispensable iPhone. 

As industry observers noted early on, the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t just in its products, but in creating the need for them; you didn’t know how irresistible the iPhone was until you held one. Apple and its passion for personal computing—not just the hardware but an entire lifestyle ecology that integrated communication and writing with music and photography—arguably changed the world, or at least hastened its evolution.

But enough of the proselytization. I’m not writing this piece to sell you another Mac, which God knows Apple doesn’t need another endorser for. Instead, that half-century of Apple that just went by gave me pause to wonder where all that early joy of tech has gone, and indeed where technology has led us and will yet take us. 

Like many early adopters, as we were called then, I recall the inimitable thrill of trying out a new machine, an operating system, or a program—something to make life and work easier and faster than before, another bold step into the future, a declaration of faith in the power of technology to transform life and indeed the world itself. New technology arrived with the presumption of goodness and optimism—that it would bring relief to global poverty and hunger, find a cure for cancer and other human ailments, improve education, and generate jobs for billions; it would draw more people into the circle of development, empower the oppressed, and induce social equity. With the advent of the Internet, more doors and barriers came crashing down. We could express ourselves publicly, bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information, challenge authority, build communities of common interest, expose falsehood and spread the truth, and create a truly transparent, interconnected, and progressive global society.

The kind of tools that Apple and its competitors produced were supposed to assist that project. They did—and again they did not. Instead of tearing down walls between people, the Internet raised new ones, behind the anonymity of which we could tear each other down. Computers and smartphones now facilitate disinformation, human trafficking, money laundering, and all manner of scamming.

Worst of all, technology has made it easier to wage war and kill people (like it always has). From Desert Storm back in the early 1990s to the present Iran War, military assaults and even mass slaughter have assumed the sanitizing cloak of an e-sport, a posture Trump and his war gamers have actively adopted, reducing casualties to memes. Indeed the US-Israeli attack on Iran has now been called “the first AI war,” as an article by Michael Brown on Forbes.com substantiates:

“When I became the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon in 2018, Project Maven was already underway. Long before LLMs, DIU was supporting Project Maven with several vendors to improve computer vision, an AI capability to distinguish among objects in satellite imagery to save analysts studying pixels…. That legacy led to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, today’s cornerstone of the U.S. military’s AI-powered operation. Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone video feeds, radar data, and signals intelligence into a single interface, allowing operators to classify targets, recommend weapons, and generate strike packages in near real time. The results have been staggering: more than 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, a tempo that would have been unthinkable with purely human targeting processes. That tempo has been maintained with only 10% of the human analysts that would have previously been required to strike 1,000 targets daily.

“Yet the system’s limitations are equally revealing. Maven’s overall accuracy hovers around 60 percent, compared to 84 percent for human analysts. Palantir’s CTO nonetheless declared it ‘the first large-scale combat operation driven by AI,’ a characterization that raises questions about the ethics of AI-driven targeting and the adequacy of civilian protection safeguards.”

Of course it would be unfair to lay responsibility for this on the doorstep of Apple or other tech giants today—barring those who, unlike Anthropic, have actively lent their resources to Trump’s war machine. The companies known to have supported Israel’s military capabilities include Palantir, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and G42 (and yes, that’s according to AI). While the biblical prophets called for swords to be beaten into plowshares, somebody found a way to turn high tech’s plowshares into guns and missiles. 

And then again, as the gun rights advocates always say, “Guns don’t kill—people do.” With some people being so stupid and devoid of conscience, why should we even wonder if and when AI will work better than the human brain? That already happened, more than fifty years ago.

Email me at jdalisay@mac.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

Qwertyman No. 191: A Letter to Julie

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 30, 2026

I HAVE a dear friend in America named Julie Hill whom I have written about before, an old friend of our country and people. She turned ninety this past week, amid a host of personal challenges that come with age and with living alone. A prolific and published author whose books I edited, Julie was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and moved to the US for graduate school. She traveled and lived around the world, including Manila, with her late husband Arthur, and served as a multinational executive before retiring to Southern California. She has returned to the Philippines many times to visit with her old friends and quietly supports some private charities. 

When I last came to see her last year, despite her own mounting needs, she graciously donated a substantial amount to the University of the Philippines in aid of UP’s poorest students. Despite the entreaties of concerned friends, she refuses to be confined to a nursing home, preferring the company of her memories to the chatter of strangers. She can sometimes be lonely and fearful, but she is proud and brave, and the horizon she gazes at stretches far longer than we can imagine. I thought of writing her this birthday letter to cheer her on.

Dear Julie,

With your ninetieth birthday coming up in a few days, a lot must be going through your mind. I don’t know if your roses are blooming and your oranges fruiting outside your window, but I hope they are, because they always bring you joy and delight, of which our world is desperately short these days.

You have been around that world and have seen both the best and the worst of it. Over the five travel books and memoirs I have edited for you, you found kindness and humanity in the earth’s farthest reaches, and you singled out the Philippines for your warmest affections. Even before we met, you established lifelong friendships with many Filipinos, and continued to visit them and to maintain a special relationship with this place.

And thus you would have seen that the Philippines you knew half a century ago is far different today in many ways, yet unchanged in others. You came here with your husband Arthur, when the Ford Foundation sought to help Philippine education and rural development—priorities which remain unmet. Our population and our cities have grown far beyond their capacity to sustain a decent living. Manila now teems with tall buildings and sleek condominiums, at the literal feet of which the hovels of the poor abound, a cliche we’ve become inured to, and accept as God’s design. We breed children we can barely feed, who can’t read, who seemed doomed to servitude.

Your generous donation to the University of the Philippines, meant to help the poorest of UP students complete their studies, will provide some much-needed hope and relief. While intervention at the college level is often too late for these children, your support, and that of others, gives them a fighting chance. Beyond external assistance, we need massive educational reform, which will require a singular and strategic will on the part of our government to invest in our natural intelligence, before we even speak of AI and other shortcuts. Sometimes I think we need to love ourselves enough.

And so is America changed as well—no longer the welcoming sanctuary you found when you fled Nasser’s Egypt to study in Minnesota, but a paranoid society, hostile to foreign faces, accents, and ideas. You know this yourself, living in an affluent community whose manicured lawns are dotted with MAGA flags. I’ve met some of your neighbors over lunches in your home, and they’re very nice people, except for their politics, now explainable only in terms of mass hypnosis or idolatry. 

For how else could otherwise well-educated and upright citizens condone and even applaud a mad megalomaniac who starts a war without knowing why, delivering death and suffering the world over? What does it say of people happy to be led by a man utterly without morals, without conscience, and without compassion? Not long ago, with appalling but typical coarseness of spirit, this draft dodger publicly celebrated the passing of a combat veteran he saw as his enemy—an act of crass cowardice to which his followers turned a blind eye.

I’m reminded of those science-fiction movies from the 1950s, where your smiling, all-American neighbors turn out to be aliens beneath the skin, except that, ironically, today we are the aliens, to be excluded and exterminated by ICE, the American Gestapo.

I told you that I’ve sworn not to revisit the US until after Trump and his kind are banished from office, which makes me feel sorry that Beng and I might not see you again for some time, if ever again. The fare situation seems to have made that moot. The way things are going, we can’t even afford a flight down south, let alone across the Pacific. To all those MAGAs and Fil-Ams who tell us to butt out of US politics because it’s none of our business, well, here’s the g—d—n proof: never mind my bellyaching about plane tickets and all the nice beaches I’m missing out on; our jeepney drivers are plying the streets for 12 hours a day with tears in their eyes because they can’t even make enough to cover the gas they’re consuming, let alone pay their operator their “boundary” or daily minimum. When our oil supplies drain out in a few weeks, the agony will worsen. Beng and I will get past this—we’ve been through worse—but the suffering for many poor Filipinos will be incalculable.

I know that you, too, are suffering the aches and pains of old age, and that my periodic bouts with sciatica are nothing compared to yours. Twenty years ago when we first met we were still flush with energy and optimism, full of ideas about books to write and places to go. We wrote most of those books and followed our respective itineraries. When you come to think of it, we’ve led far fuller lives than most people can even dream of.

We can be thankful for the past and for the life partners we have been blessed to share this journey with. We could not have been more fortunate than for you to have had Arthur for half your life and  for me to have Beng for most of mine. But we are not quite done yet. 

We cannot let the bastards win. Our mission is to survive—and to survive them. If only for that, you have to live to 95, or even beyond that, and I have to do the same, so that we might, before finally exiting, regain our cheer, enjoy humor without irony, feel unmitigated joy. Be strong, be safe, and bask in the afternoon sun.

Affectionately,

B.

Qwertyman No. 190: Beyond Survival

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 23, 2026


PARDON ME for this rambling piece this week, which I’m writing in a stupor, blindsided by the sudden, heartbreaking loss of a friend. I’m guessing I’m not alone in this state of disorientation, of looking for a center or an anchor to stabilize at least our view of the horizon. Every day we come across so many deaths on Facebook, amid hundreds of faceless thousands more around the world—much too many to mourn, even counting just your friends.

It’s been a tough time for many, with a war halfway across the planet casting a dark red shadow on us and our pedestrian lives, far out of sight and out of mind of Washington, Jerusalem, and Tehran, but ever vulnerable to the subterranean tremors of politics and economics snaking around the globe.

A viral post tried to make the best of that by reminding us that at least we’re not dodging missiles. That’s true, but it doesn’t remove the cloud of fear and uncertainty we’re living under—not to mention the pain of brutal price increases, which is what Donald Trump’s war comes down to for 98 percent of the world.

I’ve heard many friends and even strangers saying that despite all the aggravations we face today as Filipinos—the corruption, the inefficiency, the pollution, the noise both physical and political—they’re relieved to be where they are, instead of being somewhere out there under constant threat of death falling out of the sky. I’ll admit to feeling the same way, and that I even feel safer to be here today than in America, which I have no intention of revisiting until after the Trumpian nightmare is over.

No, this isn’t another piece about “resiliency,” although there’s certainly that, at least as a way of putting a good face on a bad experience. Rather I’m thinking about how we survive at all, beyond meeting economic needs, about prevailing meaningfully as humans with purpose and dignity and even hope in this horribly oppressive and degrading environment.

The fact is, people learn to adjust soon enough to adversity and privation, excepting such extremes as Stalingrad and Gaza, where sheer survival may have been heroic enough.

Nick Joaquin recalls in Manila, My Manila how quickly the city’s inhabitants fell back on their old routines after the first bombs exploded and the Japanese marched in. The shows reopened, the restaurants thrived, pedestrians bowed to the sentries, and life continued. Certainly there was terror and suffering aplenty, but until famine hit them, followed yet later by the horrors of the Japanese withdrawal, many Manileños apparently coped with the war.

Even closer to the present, we seniors well know what it was like in the early years of martial law, when, as if domestic turmoil weren’t enough, we were hit by a global oil crisis triggered by another Mideast war. The buzzwords then were “austerity,” “alcogas” and “Asiong Aksaya.” We mixed corn with our rice. We complained, we resisted, we struggled, we suffered—but we survived.

I have to remember these when I think of how confused and depressing the present can be, and how pointless it may seem to persevere, especially when we turn on the news or go online. We seem surrounded by hostility and indifference, by death and sorrow—and yet, just as insistently, goodness, creativity, and courage abide, our handmaidens and henchmen, the torchbearers of our humanity.

Last week, on one particularly busy day, my wife Beng and I attended two consecutive book launches.

The first, in Makati, was by our friend Erlinda Panlilio, who had been my student in a graduate writing class more than twenty years ago. Linda was among several women enrolled in Creative Nonfiction—all of them already accomplished in their respective fields—who thought that the time had come to gather and preserve the wealth of their memories in a book. I was less their teacher than their enabler, and many if not most of them subsequently published outstanding memoirs that looked back on lives well lived—not just in privilege as you might expect but in struggle, whether in business, love, conflict, or self-fulfillment.

Aside from many other compilations she’s edited, this was Linda’s third book (and she claims her last as she is now in her eighties, although no one believes her). The book, Saying Goodbye to the House, comes across as a valedictory, a summing-up of a long and fruitful life. At the launch, I said that it was important for senior voices like Linda’s to be heard in today’s frenetic, youth-oriented culture, which barely leaves time to pause, reflect, and rejoice as Linda does.

And then we moved back to Quezon City, where the young Cedric Tan was launching his second novel for young adults, a fantasy titled The Hotel Titania, in which a girl steps into a hotel that turns out to be full of magical beings. You could not imagine a sharper contrast with Linda Panlilio’s domestically grounded universe (which, being Filipino, has its touches of wonder as well). Cedric not only wrote a fantasy; by giving up his job to go full-time into writing, he’s living it, exploring territory at once exciting and fraught with danger.

Stepping into the car homebound after a day full of books and stories, Beng and I felt exhilarated, our confidence in the tenacity and the infinite variety of the human imagination restored. Against dismal reality, our memory and our curiosity would save us.

And then, as I was scrolling on my phone, came the stunning and crushing news that our friend, the veteran journalist and essayist Joel Pablo Salud, had succumbed to a heart attack. A recently professed Christian, Joel had fought hard for truth and justice, and he died a man of faith who knew where he was bound. Even among hard-bitten writers used to seeing the worst of things, the passing of someone so passionate about his craft, his convictions, and his family produced profound grief and consternation. Again we had to ask: why does God take the dearest of his creatures? Why does he bring so much suffering to the world?

And I think Joel knew the answer: so we could assert our humanity while we could, and among the best ways to do that is to employ our talents against surrender and despair. Every book we write does that. We seek survival not just to eat and breathe—but to love, to sing, to endure, to yet become.

Qwertyman No. 189: All of One Piece

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 16, 2026

A FEW weeks ago, soon after the New Year, I wrote to express my worry that the massive tide of protest against corruption that had built up over the second half of the year would drop and weaken over the holidays. That seems to have happened, despite a natural but passing pickup over the EDSA anniversary. 

The Independent Commission for Infrastructure is, for all intents and purposes, finished—or at least it says its job is, although we have no clear idea what its investigations have yielded or will lead to. Zaldy Co remains a fugitive, probably basking in the sun beside Atong Ang in some Club Med in another hemisphere. We don’t know how the cases against the Bulacan engineers, the Discayas, and their cohorts are proceeding. 

Hopefully something is going on, some incremental progress in the prosecution of the accused, but it’s no longer headline material, as if we’ve resigned ourselves to the inevitability of a marathon wait. (At this point I can’t help thinking of our starry-eyed countrymen who insist that Philippine justice would have sufficed to handle Republic of the Philippines v. Rodrigo Roa Duterte within the lifetimes of the accused and his presumptive victims.)

We’ve been distracted aplenty. From out of the blue, Donald Trump’s megalomaniacal warmongering in the Middle East and the crushing gas pump prices in its wake now dominate the news and our head space. 

Domestically, and for good reason, we’ve all been roiled by the emergence of the perverts in our midst. That the characters look utterly shameless and even bizarrely comical—one of them sporting a portrait of Adolf Hitler behind his desk—invites even more attention. 

Meanwhile, the impeachment ship that stalled a few months ago is finally inching its way out of port, but already some rats are deserting what they must be assuming is an ill-fated voyage.

The National Unity Party—which can’t even live up to its name, given the discord among its members—has declared that it won’t support the move to impeach VP Sara Duterte unless it’s presented with “ironclad” proof of her guilt. Instead of approaching it as the political exercise that it is, the NUP or at least its leadership now wants to treat it daintily as if it were a murder case, and as if the original articles the Congress passed a year ago—which the Supreme Court effectively set aside on a technicality—weren’t good enough. The seguristasseem convinced that the impeachment measure won’t pass in the divided Senate, and that VP Sara will then run for president and win, and look kindly on those who took her side (or at least straddled the fence) in her time of need.

All these threads may seem disparate and even at cross-purposes, but look more closely and you’ll see that they’re all of one piece.

The unifier is impunity—the idea that those in power can do anything they please, the consequences be damned. It’s what makes Trumps and Epsteins—and yes, Dutertes—not just possible but powerful and difficult to dislodge, because they intimidate or habituate us into believing that they are part of the natural order, of the givens of life we can do little about. The inflated hubris that drives these maniacs to bomb nations and their peoples off the face of the earth is the same brutish instinct that makes them feel entitled to sexual gratification on demand.

This is why, in the midst of all this turmoil, it’s even more important to focus on and pursue what’s right and doable within our means—as the impeachment is, because it’s about corruption and the abuse of power at its core. Recent issues may seem far removed from the particulars of the impeachment complaint against the VP, but they implicate the same principles.

If we recoil at the economic pain caused by a distant war, so must we recall the billions we lost to corruption that would now have given us relief. If we mourn the death of innocents in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, so must we seek justice for our own victims whose deaths did not even come screaming randomly out of the sky, but from lists and quotas set by a president’s henchmen to please their boss.

That’s the same egotism driving Trump and his billionaire friends—the Epsteins included—to see the planet as their playground, respectful only of their fellow gangsters. We can’t fight Trump & Co. from here, but we can make sure that we hold our own abusers of power to account in our corner of the world. It’s not just to punish the guilty, but to remind ourselves that we still know right from wrong, and can—as the DDS insist—deliver justice within our territory.

Only clean government and good governance can help ensure that however difficult the global situation might become, we can survive together, take care of our poorest and weakest, and weather any economic storm.

Should the impeachment fail, not for lack of merit but because of rank opportunism, and should VP Sara push through with her campaign for the presidency as expected, then we should be even more focused and united. Stop insisting on ideological purity—remember how Bam Aquino was skewered for his seeming equivocation, with that one word “ideal”?—and learn how to build a united front, a coalition of the willing. 

As the American civil rights anthem went, we need to keep our “Eyes on the Prize”—which isn’t even the presidency itself but the just, capable, efficient, and honest government we’ve long wanted and deserved.

(Image from Rappler.com)