Category Archives: America

Qwertyman No. 44: Again, America

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 5, 2023

I HAVE a good friend whom we’ll call Ted, a Fil-Am who retired a few years ago as a ranking officer in the US Navy. He was in town recently on some family business, and like we always do when circumstances permit, we had dinner and a good chat just before he and his wife flew back home.

Most of us have friends if not relatives in America, and all of this would be pretty routine except for one fact: I’m a flaming liberal, and Ted is a Trump Republican. Over the fifteen years or so that we’ve known each other—well before Donald Trump entered the picture—we’ve been aware of those political differences, but rather than politely skirt them in our conversation like many sane people would, we feel comfortable enough with each other to talk at length about them, and even exchange some friendly barbs.

Much of that level of comfort comes from my belief that, in his own way, Ted sincerely and deeply loves his country—and his ancestral home, the Philippines. He’s smart, curious, eager to learn and understand. In his former naval job and as a private citizen, Ted—who was born in the US but spent some of his formative years in his family’s hometown in Bicol, and speaks some of the local language aside from Filipino—has visited the Philippines as often as he can, trying his best to improve relations between the two countries on a personal level. (On this last visit, for example, he also took part in a ceremony to celebrate the commissioning of the USS Telesforo Trinidad, named after an Aklan-born Filipino petty officer who was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravely rescuing his shipmates from an explosion aboard their ship in 1915.)

Given his naval background—his dad joined the Navy in the 1970s—I’m not surprised that Ted is a Republican, like many military Fil-Ams are. (One notable exception is a mutual friend of ours, the former West Pointer, Army Ranger, and diplomat Sonny Busa, as staunch a Democrat as they come, and a key figure behind Filipino veterans’ causes in Washington.) His support for Trump despite the man’s many failings continues to mystify me, but I’m guessing that in his calculations, Ted chose to cast his lot with the man best positioned to thwart the liberal agenda. That includes items that Ted and other Republicans feel extremely uncomfortable with, such as what he calls the “celebration, beyond just acceptance” of transgender rights, and their judicial enforcement.

Perhaps with any other person, my liberal hair-trigger would have fired away at such comments with a fusillade of counter-arguments, but with Ted I find more value in listening and trying to understand a certain mindset, as different as some of its premises may be from mine. In our last conversation, what Ted had to say was profoundly disturbing. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially it was this: “America is a mess. People can’t talk civilly to each other anymore. When I say I’m a Republican, people instantly assume I’m a racist.” To which I said that people at the top like Trump (and our own version of him here) greenlighted that kind of boorish discourse, with additional pressure brought on by right-wing militias armed with AR-15s. We talked about January 6 (which he opined was not an insurrection) and the Second Amendment (which I said seemed sacrosanct in American politics). “You have cancel culture,” he sighed, “to which the other guy responds by going bam bam bam!” He was deploring, not endorsing it, trying to get a fix on his own society’s ailments. “It’s in our DNA,” he said glumly about guns.

Thankfully Ted and I always have other things to talk about—like the Philippines, in which Ted said he feels much more relaxed than his own country. He knows how worked up I can get about politics and our own leadership (or the lack thereof), but as far as he could see on this trip, I and my fellow Filipinos (including those he met in Bicol) were just chugging along. “We’re survivors,” I said, “and we’ll do what it takes to get by from day to day.”

That brings me to another friend, “Tony,” who messaged me out of the blue the other day, obviously distraught by the Senate vote on the Maharlika Fund bill and asking if it was time for him and his family to leave the country, given how we seem to be back on the road to political plunder and economic ruin. It wasn’t just a rhetorical question; he was really thinking about it. Here’s what I said:

“Hi, Tony—If it’s a realistic option, I don’t think anyone can or should blame you for leaving or wanting to leave. We have only one life and we have to make the most of it in all ways. Politics is important, but it’s only one of many other factors that define who we are—love, art, family, and faith, among others. That said, it can have a way of complicating our lives and life choices. 

“Moving to the US has also been an option for me for some time now. Our only daughter lives in California and has been wanting to petition us. But my wife and I have been strongly reluctant to move there, although we visit almost every year and are familiar and comfortable with living in the US, where I spent five years as a grad student. We are artists, and our work is culture-bound. We feel appreciated here, within our small circle of friends. However good we may be, in America we would be marginalized; we don’t want to become an American minority and deal with all the issues that will come with it. And America has become much less inviting now, with all the intolerance and racial violence provoked by Trumpism. 

“So unless it were a matter of life and death, we’ll stay here, despite the present dispensation and many more aggravations like the Maharlika Fund to come in the years ahead, because I feel that my continued survival and success will be my best way of fighting back. Having survived martial law, we can survive this as well. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and again you should feel free to find your place where you can best live with your family and secure their future. Nothing is ever final anyway, and you can always come back. Follow your heart and conscience, and you should be all right, wherever you may go. All best!”

(Image from bu.edu)

Qwertyman No. 41: Living up to “Honorable”

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 15, 2023

I’VE BEEN following the saga of the Hon. George Santos, the freshman Republican congressman from New York, who’s been caught in a tangle of lies he made about his education and employment on his résumé, and who’s now been charged in federal court on 13 counts from wire fraud and money laundering to theft of public funds and making materially false statements to the House of Representatives. So brazen have been this young politico’s prevarications that even his fellow Republicans—many of whom had forced themselves to swallow Donald Trump’s gargantuan lies about the 2020 election—have called on Santos to resign, if only to spare their party from the prolonged embarrassment of nursing a self-confessed falsifier in their ranks.

Now this is what gets me: Santos had earlier admitted to having fabricated about four-fifths of his CV, an act he called “résumé embellishment” which involved a “poor choice of words.” He said he was sorry—but then just as quickly insisted that he was no criminal and intended to serve the rest of his term, and even run for re-election. He boldly reappeared in Congress—still dressed like the preppy he never was—and acted like nothing happened. Despite the ostracism, he stood his ground, knowing that under its rules, the US Congress couldn’t kick out one of its own—even someone convicted of a crime, unless that crime was treason.

The story fascinates me because it illustrates the utter shamelessness and disregard for the truth that now seems par for the course in politics, and not just in America. The fact that many of his colleagues found Santos’ behavior reprehensible offers hope that some people still know right from wrong. The other fact, that Santos refuses to take responsibility for his actions and resign—and that some people continue to support him nonetheless—reminds us of how degraded the idea of “honor” has become in contemporary society. 

Social scientists tell us that “honor” has evolved over the centuries from the chivalric, even aristocratic notion of responsibility to a community—think of a hero undertaking a noble sacrifice, even at the cost of one’s life, for the common good—to something much more individualized and internalized, to one’s own sense of respect, dignity, and integrity. 

I’d argue even further that for most people today, “honor” has become a much more elastic term, one that allows for a range of justifiable behaviors. I’ll give you an example: would you rat on an officemate, perhaps even your best friend, who’s also your chief competitor for that AVP position? You could, and you would—if you convince yourself that becoming that AVP is a more important honor, something your family and circle of friends would appreciate. This is the difference, as one scholar noted, between “internal” and “external” honor, between integrity and reputation. If we equate, as many might, “reputation” with popularity, with a positive public perception of your image, then it’s easy to see how and why many people find integrity expedient and expendable.

These thoughts ran through my mind when I learned of the recent passing of former Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario, and read the many eulogies and encomiums following his death. All of them spoke of him as a man of honor, someone who fought for his country, stood by his word, and conducted himself with dignity. I had only occasional brushes with him, but can agree from those encounters with what was said. Some people communicate their integrity instantly, even wordlessly, just by their very manner. 

On the other hand, there are people who, by their swagger and arrogance (often a cover for some deeply felt inferiority), immediately invite mistrust if not repugnance. I’m reminded of a man who, from his lofty perch, drenched the good secretary with vitriol, accusing him of being “not a Filipino, you don’t look like a Filipino,” and threatening to “pour coffee on your face.” To which the diplomat merely reiterated the need to defend the country’s interests and to beware of the duplicity of our aggressive neighbor. 

The sad thing is how many Pinoys laughed along with that sneering man and thought that he was doing and saying the right thing. For years, he had fed them a diet of vulgarity, as if to reinforce the idea that that was the Filipino’s natural state and that he was one of them and spoke their language. In fact, he was cultivating and normalizing their basest instincts, an easier thing to do than the nobler alternative: appealing to their better selves, to what they could yet be. I see this innate goodness and decency, this desire for self-betterment, in Filipinos every day, even among the poorest of us. Overwhelmingly, this is still who and what we are. Those who believe otherwise debase only themselves.

But we are short on exemplary leadership—on leaders who value honor and integrity, on leaders who can feel shame, on leaders who can curb their profligacy out of respect for the poverty of the many, on leaders who will be genuinely missed and mourned by the masses when they depart. Our role models have become so few—and our expectations of our officials have become so low—that many of us have forgotten what honor truly means, assuming simply and tragically that it comes with wealth and power. The word “Honorable” is too easily affixed to certain high offices. Are they truly so?

I may be aghast at Rep. George Santos’ behavior in New York, but who knows how many lies are buried in our politicians’ CV’s, how many “résumé embellishments” and “poor choices of words” we have had to swallow?

And then again there’s a part of me that says, forget the résumé; it’s never been a trustworthy predictor of moral intelligence. Ability is the most basic we should expect of our “honorables.” Living up to their titles lies at the other extreme. But still I have to wonder: if a George Santos happened here, would he resign? 

Qwertyman No: 40: Teaching History

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 8, 2023

I HAVE a subscription to the New York Times, which I enjoy for its features and commentary as much as its news coverage, and the other day my attention was piqued by a small headline: “It’s Not Just Math and Reading: US History Scores for 8th Graders Plunge.”

According to the article, recent test scores reveal that young Americans (about 13-14 years old for eighth-graders) have become much less knowledgeable about their history and civics over the past decade—with 40 percent scoring “below basic” and only 13 percent ranked as “proficient.” 

I immediately wondered how our students would score given similar tests. Would they be able to answer even simple questions about why Ferdinand Magellan sailed to the Philippines, what prompted Filipinos to revolt against Spain, why the Americans occupied us, what led to our involvement in the Second World War, and what martial law and EDSA were all about? I’ll probably be safe in my prediction that they would score dismally, from what I’ve seen in my own classes in UP (yes, in UP), where I’ve been dismayed to find a yawning ignorance of history and literature among my students, supposedly among the best in the country. 

Don’t get me wrong: these are bright, idealistic kids, desirous of all things good for their people and their families. They perform well in class and will likely succeed in whatever career lies ahead of them. But when I ask a roomful of English majors if they know or have read NVM Gonzalez and only a couple of hands go up, I get worried. When I ask when or what year the Americans arrived to conquer us and I get strange answers like “1945,” I get worried. 

However shocked we may profess to be, we can’t blame the students. In 2014, following the passage of the Enhanced Education Act of 2013 or the K-12 Law, the Department of Education issued Order No. 20, Series of 2014, effectively removing Philippine History as a high school subject and subsuming it as an “integrated subtopic” under “Asian Studies,” supposedly to provide students with a wider global perspective. The idea sounds nifty, but as many educators have since pointed out, its practical effect has been to dilute the teaching of Philippine history to the point of oblivion. The result is that we have young Filipinos with no knowledge of the most basic facts and issues of their past, and no appreciation of how that past brought us to where we are today.

That vacuum has been an open invitation to misinformation and historical distortion, the stock-in-trade of political propagandists, trolls, and spinmeisters. It’s become much easier to sell myths like a golden age under martial law to impressionable youngsters who were never told or taught the truth. Not surprisingly, Order No. 20 has been attacked by its critics as a means to lobotomize the youth and to render them more susceptible to alternative narratives (aka fake news) concerning our history. 

And yes, I have to acknowledge that all this began under the late President Noynoy Aquino, a champion of K-12, whom I prefer to believe had no such nefarious motives in mind, as he and his family would have had little to gain by erasing history. But the policy was upheld and sustained by the following administration, with DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones arguing strenuously that History (including our martial-law experience) was being taught in Grade 6 under Araling Panlipunan, and again in high school as a component of Asian and World History.

Given the current DepEd’s expressed desire to review K-12, it might be a good time to test how effective that policy has been: just how much Philippine History are our high school students learning and retaining? How much should they know by the time they get to college, where thornier issues such as nationalism, agrarian reform, and foreign policy will be threshed out in all their nuances?

Long before these questions arose, it was a common complaint among students and even teachers that our problem with History was how badly it was taught, often as a collection of names and dates rather than a coherent narrative (which I must say I sometimes wonder about, fact often being stranger and messier than fiction). We generally agree that History should involve more reasoning than rote memorization. But as the New York Times reports, “That emphasis can contribute to a troubling lack of background knowledge,” with experts observing a “rapid and very significant decline in what students know about history and geography—like the fact that Africa is a continent, not a country.” So the basics of names, dates, and places remain important—getting the facts straight before getting into more complicated arguments.

It’s even more troubling to note that on top of this decline in historical knowledge and awareness among young Americans, there’s now a ham-fisted effort from conservative politicians to purge school curricula of what they see as “woke” content—subjects that have challenged the longstanding impression of America as a nation forged by whites. Governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis—eager to present themselves as the flag-bearers of political and moral rectitude—have supported moves to eliminate African-American and LGBTQ studies from the curriculum. Others have called for banning books that threaten their view of traditional America, including books titled “The Infinite Moment of Us” (a young adult novel about love and sex) and “How to Be an Antiracist” (a nonfiction book about racism and ethnicity). This reminded me of how some Philippine state universities, not too long ago, went on their own book-banning spree, on some silly suspicion that books by such authors as National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera were “subversive.”

The New York Times piece came with an irresistible teaser: a brief five-question, multiple-choice history quiz for readers to test themselves on how well they know American history. I scored four out of five (failing a question about post-Civil War reconstruction)—not too bad, I thought, for a guy living seven thousand miles away. But then I come from a generation schooled on American textbooks, who know American history and geography better than many Americans. That’s a topic for another column.

In the meanwhile, let’s ask ourselves: how well do we know our history, and how important is that knowledge to understanding our present and shaping our future? Is “Maria Clara and Ibarra” pointing the way forward?

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Qwertyman No. 35: The Ultimate Casualty

Qwertyman for Monday, April 3, 2023

I’M SURE I wasn’t the only one who looked up from his breakfast coffee last week to see, on the morning news, that another mass shooting had ripped through the heart of America—in Nashville, a city that usually brings to mind the twangy plaints of country music, in mournful songs about prison life and cheating hearts. This time the pain was much more brutal and direct, devoid of all poetry: six people were killed, including three nine-year-olds, their bodies savaged by bullets from AR-15-style assault rifles.

According to the Gun Violence Archive—whose very existence should be disturbing—it was the 130th mass shooting in the US in the first three months of 2023 alone. Last year, 647 such events were recorded; overall, more than 44,000 Americans died from gun violence in 2022. At this rate, 2023 will almost certainly be a much bloodier year for America. There will be hundreds more Nashvilles, thousands more families ambushed by unspeakable tragedy, choruses of angry wails to heaven asking God to explain why.

Like any other parent who witnessed that carnage, my wife Beng raised the question on every sensible person’s mind: “How could they let this happen?” 

“This” here would mean not only the mass killing itself, but the means to do it. Two AR-15-style assault rifles were used by the 28-year-old shooter. The AR-15 has been the mass shooter’s weapon of choice. It can rip people to shreds. According to the Washington Post, “The AR-15 fires bullets at such a high velocity — often in a barrage of 30 or even 100 in rapid succession — that it can eviscerate multiple people in seconds. A single bullet lands with a shock wave intense enough to blow apart a skull and demolish vital organs. The impact is even more acute on the compact body of a small child.”


The mere thought of children being mowed down like carnival toys is horrific, but apparently not enough for America’s powerful and richly funded gun lobby, which has insisted on looking the other way, sanctifying the Americans’ Second-Amendment right to bear arms above all other human considerations. 

In Tennessee, where the shootings took place, it is legal for anyone over 21 to carry handguns without a permit; that holds true for 24 other states, making fully half of America gun-friendly. And despite the mounting deaths from mass shootings, politicians in many predominantly Republican states—including Tennessee—are sponsoring even more permissive gun laws, to do away with background checks and facilitate the sale and transport of lethal weapons.

President Biden has rightly said that he has done all he could to help stop the violence by calling for a ban on assault rifles, but the opposition to such gun-control measures has been stubbornly successful. The National Rifle Association (NRA), which has been bankrolled by the gun industry for generations, has lost some of its luster and bluster following the public outcry over the mass shootings, but it still wields enormous political power by supporting gun-supportive candidates in elections.


The gun lobby argues speciously that guns don’t kill—people do; and further, that the problem isn’t that there are too many guns on the streets (there can never be too many), but that mass shooters are certified lunatics who in no way represent the millions more of responsible gun owners who keep their guns for target practice, for the joy of collecting, and for the End of Days, when hordes of zombie-like strangers will come over the hill to invade their homes, steal their food, and rape their wives. Mass shootings, they insist, are a mental-health problem, not something to be blamed on the proliferation and easy availability of weaponry.

Why does this concern us in faraway Philippines? First, because millions of us have relatives in America—who, as minority citizens, are prone to racial violence, as the recent spate of maulings of Filipino-Americans has shown. Many mass shootings have been racially motivated, and it will be only a matter of time before some teenage White Aryan barges into a Pinoy wedding or fiesta to prove his superiority through the barrel of an assault rifle. I fear for our daughter in California, who could be enjoying a night out with friends or shopping for groceries when the shooting begins. (Much to Beng’s and my surprise, our daughter Demi joined the UP Rifle and Pistol Team and became a sharpshooter, but has never felt the need to own and carry.)

Of course, in truth, we knew about America’s bloody history a long time ago, if only from The Untouchables, The Godfather, and America’s Most Wanted. What was a cowboy, a frontiersman, or soldier without a gun? And let’s not forget that it was the Krag-Jorgensen rifle with which US Army troopers “pacified” Filipino “insurgents” from 1898 onwards.

The second connection is our own gun culture—which, though not as pronounced and as strident as America’s, nevertheless exists, with the gun seen less as a means of self-defense than as a symbol and enforcer of power. With no need for a Second Amendment, our politicians and other bigwigs assemble arsenals for their private armies, such as the cache of arms and ammunition recently uncovered on the property of the Teveses in Negros Oriental. 

Oldtimers will remember when people boarded jeeps and buses with .45s tucked into their waists; congressmen used to enter the Session Hall bringing guns. Ironically, it took martial law to mop up most of those vagrant firearms—when someone decided that only he and his henchmen could carry them—but yet even more ironically, it was the military bullet that assassinated Ninoy Aquino that took the regime down.

I’m not so naive as to believe that we’ll see a gunless world in our lifetime and sing “Kumbaya” until we fall asleep. As societies undergo even more wrenching tests of the values that keep them together, our animal instincts—fear, belligerence, and survivalism—will become even more assertive, and the most brutish and inarticulate among us will let their firepower do the speaking. Unless reason prevails, the insanity will continue.

Abetting the murder of children—whether in Nashville or Bakhmut—means condoning the death of our humanity. That will be the ultimate casualty.

(Image from cnn.com)

Qwertyman No. 34: America the Paradox

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 27, 2023

“AMERICA THE Paradox” was the title of an undergraduate paper I wrote on Carlos Bulosan for my class in Philippine literature, in which I observed—as many had done before me—that Bulosan felt deeply conflicted by the two faces that he kept seeing in America. On the one hand, it was the mother with open arms, calling out to the world’s orphans, and accepting of all brave and enterprising spirits. On the other hand, it was the hard fist of racism, viciously averse to all complexions other than white. 

Bulosan arrived in Seattle in 1930, a time of great economic turmoil, and he soon found himself fighting for the exploited poor, becoming a labor organizer and writing radical poetry. He would remain poor for the rest of his short life, despite achieving some degree of literary celebrity following the success of his semi-autobiographical 1946 novel America Is in the Heart. He died of tuberculosis in Seattle in 1956, never having been able to come home. I was so moved by Bulosan’s travails that I gifted our daughter with a signed first edition of his novel as her wedding present, and paid my respects at his grave when I visited Seattle some years ago.

Last Thursday, March 23rd, I joined several hundred other guests for dinner at the Sofitel to celebrate a joyful event: the 75th anniversary of the Fulbright program in the Philippines. Over that period, the Fulbright program, which selects and sends scholars from all over the world to study in the US, has sponsored over 3,000 Filipino scholars and 1,000 American scholars coming to the Philippines. The Philippines—through the Philippine-American Educational Foundation (PAEF)—has the longest-running Fulbright program in the world, dating back to March 23, 1948, hence last week’s big commemoration.

It isn’t hard to see why Sen. J. William Fulbright believed that such a scholarship program was a good idea then, with the Cold War brewing and America projecting itself as the champion of the Free World. For the Philippines, it was a continuation of the prewar practice of sending pensionados to the US, thereby ensuring a cohort of Filipino intellectuals and administrators sympathetic to the American cause.

I myself went out on a Fulbright twice—in 1986, for my MFA at Michigan and then my PhD at Wisconsin, and then in 2014 as a senior scholar at George Washington University. It would be an understatement to say that the Fulbright—especially that first five-year stint—was life-changing for me. The learning was exhilarating, but the living—away from home and family—was fraught with pain.

Still, we Fulbrighters had it much better than Bulosan. Most of our expenses were borne by the American taxpayer (although, because of a budget crunch, I had to teach and also to work part-time as a cook, cashier, and busboy at a Chinese takeout). Our return home was guaranteed (indeed, legally mandated). Most of us enjoyed the hospitality and support of new Fil-Am and American friends. 

Although here and there we had the inevitable brush with racism, we saw America in the best possible light, as a source of knowledge and of the democratic spirit. Arriving in Michigan just after EDSA 1986, I too was seen as living proof of the long and beneficial reach of America’s cultural influence: I could speak English like they did, and (mild boast coming) could write at least as well if not better than they did. 

I recall how, in one Shakespeare class, I was the only one who could explain the difference between “parataxis” and “hypotaxis,” and how, in another class, our professor wrote up a long sentence from one of my stories on the board to demonstrate “Jose’s perfect command of punctuation.” But all that was presumably because of my Americanized education—not even in America, but in the Philippines, where we had seemingly prepared all our lives to come to America, only to find ourselves more indoctrinated than many Americans. (I had memorized all the state capitals in grade school in La Salle, confounding my American friends at Trivial Pursuit.)

Ironically, I also belonged to the First Quarter Storm generation that railed against “American imperialism,” that learned about our colonial exploitation and about the primacy of American self-interest in its transactions with the world. We rallied at the US Embassy against the war in Vietnam and against the US bases in the Philippines. We denounced Ferdinand Marcos as an American puppet, and saw Washington’s hand in every instance of political mayhem around the globe. Where did all that militancy go? Was a scholarship to Hollywood enough to negate these accusations?

Seated at that Fulbright dinner and listening to the speakers extolling our special relationship with America, I thought about Bulosan, the FQS, my Fulbright experience, our daughter in California, my teaching of American literature, and such recent issues as EDCA and the Chinese presence in our territorial waters to sort out my emotions. 

The America that had been such a paradox for Bulosan remains, in many ways, a chimera for us today—speaking with moral authority against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and yet still enamored in many places of Trumpian demagoguery; espousing peace and human rights while allowing assault rifles on its streets; and promoting education and global literacy while hosting the world’s biggest engines of disinformation. We want to believe in the America that believed in us, although the cynical can argue that “believed” should be taken as “invested,” of whose efficacy this column offers ample proof. 

In the end, I reminded myself of what I tell my students: (1) The American government and the American people are not necessarily the same; (2) The American people are many peoples; there is no single, monolithic America; (3) We study America and its literature not to become Americans, but to be better Filipinos; and (4) We often take the terms “America” and “American” in an ideal or idealized sense, a compound of expectations and aspirations shaped by Abraham Lincoln, Hollywood, cable TV, and Spotify.

We went to America not just to study there, but to study America, and that study continues. 

(Image from pacforum.org)

Qwertyman No. 19: The Real Maria Ressa

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 12, 2022

I WAS very honored to speak last Saturday at the launch of Maria Ressa’s new book, How to Stand up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future (Harper, 2022). I’d read an advance copy of it a couple of weeks ago, and to cut to the chase, if you’re thinking of buying a book to read for the holidays or to gift to friends, look no further. This book, for me, is among the year’s best in nonfiction.

I have to emphasize that word—nonfiction. As we all know we live in times when fiction has taken over as the most influential form of human discourse, particularly in the political arena. As a practicing fictionist, I should be happy about that, but I’m not and I can’t be, because so much of it is bad fiction, crudely written—and surprisingly, infuriatingly effective, at least with a certain kind of reader. 

Maria’s book cuts through all that. It’s undisguised, old-fashioned, in-your-face truth-telling, told in the same voice and tone we’ve become familiar with over the years of listening to her reportage over CNN. I’m sure that, like me, many of you wondered the first time you heard her: “Who was this little brown-complexioned woman speaking with an American accent?” She looked Filipino, but how come we’d never seen her before?

This was all before she rose to prominence—some would say notoriety—as the moving spirit behind Rappler, and subsequently to global fame as a Nobel Prize winner for Peace. We identified with her travails, shared her anger and sadness at the abuse she has received, and rejoiced in her victories, whether in the courts or in the larger sphere of public opinion. 

But how well do we really know Maria Ressa, and whatever drives her to be who and what she is? This book takes us to the person behind the phenomenon, and answers many questions we may have had about her and her stubborn advocacies.

The book’s title sounds like that of an instruction manual—which it is, and also is not, being part autobiography, part journalism, and part testimonial. As a manual for freedom fighters, it emphasizes the need for collaborative and collective action against seemingly insurmountable forces. Those forces now include the Internet, which, as Maria documents with both precision and profound dismay, has morphed from a medium that once held all kinds of liberative promises into a medium for mass deception and targeted assault. She draws her counsel not from some esoteric guru or academic paradigm, but from some very basic values that have informed her own life—the Honor Code she followed in school, and the Golden Rule.

“That’s what I lay out in this book,” she says, “an exploration into the values and principles not just of journalism and technology but of the collective action we need to take to win this battle for facts. This journey of discovery is intensely personal. That’s why every chapter has a micro and a macro: a personal lesson and the larger picture. You will see the simple ideas I hold on to in order to make what have—over time—become instinctive but thoughtful decisions.”

It’s this constant back-and-forth between the personal and the political—and at some point they become inextricably fused—that forms the fiber of Maria’s narrative and gives it strength. Her convictions are grounded in personal experience; they have not been paid for—as the hacks in the journalistic trade will allege, seeking to bring her down to their own level—except in the coin of personal suffering under the constant threat of imprisonment and violence.

But we learn from this book that trauma is nothing new to Maria. (We also learn that Maria Ressa wasn’t the name she was born into, but to find out her birth name, you’ll have to buy the book.) From her abrupt relocation from Manila to America at the age of ten, to her journalistic immersion in the horrors of conflict and disaster in Indonesia and Ormoc, the book chronicles Maria’s quest for truth, meaning, and purpose in her life, and that of others. She stresses the importance of remembering the past to make sense of the present, quoting TS Eliot’s phrase, “the present moment of the past.”

And so can we, she seems to suggest, even in these times of high anxiety, when we can see the vultures hovering over such once-sacrosanct treasures as our pension funds, while billions more go to feed the dogs of an increasingly untenable counter-insurgent war. The big words we have become used to tossing around—truth, freedom, reason, justice, democracy—they all come down to a personal choice to do the right thing, and the courage to do it. 

Nowhere is this matter of choice more evident than in the fact that Maria is here in the Philippines, having willfully subjected herself to our brand of justice, however imperfect it may be, instead of escaping to the safety of America or another haven, which her dual citizenship if not her celebrity can certainly afford her. She will see her own story through to the end, in the locale where it matters, among the people to whom it matters most.

I’ve often remarked, as a creative writer and professor of literature, that in this country, the writers most in danger of political persecution and retribution are really not fictionists or poets like me. Not since Rizal has a Filipino novelist been shot dead for what he wrote. For sure, we have lost many brilliant writers to the struggle for freedom and democracy—Emman Lacaba, and most recently Lorena Tariman and her husband Ericson Acosta. But they were killed by the State not for what they wrote—the State is illiterate when it comes to metaphor—but for what they allegedly did.

Rather, the most imperiled writers in the Philippines as in many other places are the journalists who speak the language of the people and of their plaints in terms too clear to ignore. They could be radio announcers like Percy Lapid, or the victims of wholesale murder in Maguindanao, or high-profile and exemplary targets such as Maria Ressa. It would have been easy for her to lash back at her critics and tormentors with the same viciousness. But, she says, “I will not become a criminal to fight a criminal. I will not become a monster to fight a monster.”

That, too, is a difficult choice, and one I am sure we are often tempted to cast aside. But Maria’s equanimity in the face of savagery shames us back into our better selves. It will be that kind of quiet resolve that we will need to survive and prevail. After all, we survived martial law. We can survive this regime—with agility, patience, and courage. But don’t take my word for it. Read Maria’s book to know that we can, and why we must.

Penman No. 444: A San Diego Sojourn

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Penman for Sunday, November 6, 2022

A FEW weeks ago, for the first time since the pandemic, my wife Beng and I took a plane out of the country, and I can’t tell you how liberating that felt after three years of being landbound. I’d had few complaints about the long lockdowns, because I’m used to working and writing in isolation, and have become much less sociable as I age. But I did miss the travel, the foreign air, the view from the other side of the ocean. 

Just before the pandemic hit, Beng and I had spent my first year in retirement (and a good chunk of my retirement kitty) gallivanting around seven countries, against the advice of family and friends who thought that we were overdoing it; perhaps we were, but now we know that the world we saw then will never be the same again, and that we ourselves—in or approaching our seventies—will never be able to do that again. And so it was with a huge sigh of relief that we boarded our flight to San Diego, where our daughter Demi has been living with her husband Jerry for the past 15 years. We’d visited San Diego often before, but probably not with this much anticipation, having been away for years. 

Sitting on the Mexican border, San Diego isn’t the first place most Filipinos would choose when they think of visiting America, unless, like us, they have personal reasons to go there. Los Angeles and San Francisco seem to be more exciting places, have large Fil-Am communities, and have long been the ports of entry for Pinoys landing on the West Coast. (Our Japan Airlines flight was that rare straight flight via Tokyo to San Diego.) But San Diego has its own charm and its own attractions, most notably Balboa Park, the San Diego Zoo, and Comic-Con, that annual extravaganza of pop culture that draws about 150,000 fans from around the galaxy. (Much to my young students’ chagrin, I’ve been to Comic-Con twice, happily ignorant of much of what I was looking at.) 

And whether you’ve lived there for decades or are just passing through, San Diego will always give you a taste of home, with dozens of Pinoy foods stores and restaurants, especially in National City and Chula Vista where you can shop at Seafood City for daing na bangus and Chocnut and at Goldilocks for your party cake while dropping packages off at LBC—or you can run to Mira Mesa for your Jollibee fix. (For me, an American sojourn would be incomplete without a trip to Arby’s and Red Lobster.)

Inevitably San Diego also has its own spotted history of East-West relations, in which Filipinos have figured; the better part of that history was celebrated last month as Filipino-American Heritage Month in the city. The worst part remains in the archives, in the memories of early immigrants such as Emeterio Reyes, who recalls that “I asked the driver if he could take me to a Catholic church. As soon as we got there, I told him to wait for me because I had a funny feeling I might not be welcome at this church. As I entered the door, a priest approached me and told me that the church was only for white people. That moment, I wanted to cry and die!” 

When Sebastian Vizcaino sailed into what he would name San Diego Bay on November 10, 1602, he found that he had “arrived at a port which must be the best to be found in all the South Sea, for, besides being protected on all sides and having good anchorage, it is in latitude 33½o. It has very good wood and water, many fish of all kinds, many of which we caught with seine and hooks. On the land there is much game, such as rabbits, hares, deer, very large quail, royal ducks, thrushes, and many other birds. On the 12th of the said month, which was the day of the glorious San Diego, the general, admiral, religious, captains, ensigns, and almost all the men went ashore. A hut was built and mass was said in celebration of the feast of Señor San Diego.”

As a major port facing the Pacific, San Diego has long been home to the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, its base harboring over 50 ships. The naval presence defines much of San Diego’s character, and provides a good part of the reason why about 200,000 Filipino-Americans live there today. Since early in the American occupation, Filipinos have signed up with the US Navy as their passport to what they hoped would be a better life and to a bit of adventure. 

I just learned, for example, that the first Filipino to have joined the US Navy, back in 1903, was a seminarian in Manila named Potenciano Parel who snuck out of his vows to be a sailor, but not having the right papers, he used those of a friend and assumed his identity, Tomas Dolopo; the Dolopos continue to be San Diegans. Demi’s late father-in-law, Ric Ricario, joined in 1957; his eldest son, Ray, followed him into the Navy; Ray’s brother Jerry met and married Demi. And so we find ourselves now tied by blood to that long tradition, as did many thousands of others before us.

Despite having visited San Diego many times before, and having enjoyed its more popular attractions, we felt more acutely aware of history this time around. We finally stepped into the city’s Maritime Museum, a complex of many ships from various centuries that allows visitors a hands-on experience at traveling the world on water. The ships on display range from a full-size and fully functional replica of a Spanish galleon ca. 1542, the San Salvador, to the world’s oldest sailing ship, the grand, mid-1800s Star of India, to a ca. 1970s submarine that still holds the record for the deepest dive, the USS Dolphin. For just $15 for seniors and just slightly more for others, you can hop from one ship to another, and imagine what it was like to cross a tempestuous ocean with only the stars to light the way and nothing to eat but stale bread and salted pork. 

We enjoyed history of another kind by having dinner with our in-laws in a National City dive that our son-in-law Jerry chose for its unique ambience, which you can either call seedy or loaded with character. (There was a famous sailor’s bar in the area called the Trophy Lounge, Jerry told us, that used to be run by ladies from Olongapo…. But that’s another story, and San Diego has books of them, yet to be told.) La Maze is the kind of leatherbound ‘50s restaurant that the Rat Pack and other Hollywood celebrities frequented when in San Diego, and you can still order the same great steaks they had. A local band played dance music, and to the tune of “Solamente Una Vez,” I took the pretty silver-haired fox next to me to the floor and slow-dragged the night away. 

Qwertyman No. 12: The Changing of the Colors

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 24, 2022

(Image from esquiremag.ph)

PITONG STARED out the window of his Chicago apartment to the shoreline of Lake Michigan, and watched the usual Sunday crowd of families with small children in colorful tracksuits and seniors plodding nowhere at half a mile per hour on their adjustable canes. It was getting later into the fall, and the colors were exploding all over the city from Lincoln Park to Promontory Point; at the Botanic Garden in Glencoe the Japanese maples blazed a vivid red. Pitong remembered that it was at a time like this, almost twenty years earlier, when he and Marietta had arrived in the United States, and they could not believe what a transformation the seasons induced in the chlorophyll and carotenoids of leaves. 

He felt intensely drawn to his postgraduate studies, which was what they came to America for—“To explore,” as he wrote in his application, “new ideas for the energization of the Philippine economy, particularly through the deregulation of key industries, including power and telecommunications.” 

With a US-minted PhD, Pitong thought he could return to a professorship if not a deanship at a top university, or a directorship at NEDA or Foreign Affairs. So immersed did Pitong become in his anticipated future that he forgot about Marietta, who had given up a promising career in pharmaceuticals to join him as his bedmate and cook, until he began to doze off after interminable arguments online about the American capacity for policy reform. 

She snuggled up to him in the deep of winter, and he was colder than ice. In their second spring she volunteered to usher with the local symphony; by that summer she had fallen for a clarinetist, and by the fall she had found her happiness, while Pitong continued to stew in his darkening pot of theory and counter-theory, of the sticky explanations how, in the post-9/11 world, security and economic concerns were inextricably intertwined and indeed congealed in the individual consciousness.

Pitong returned home alone when he failed his dissertation defense, while Marietta began a family in California, to where her clarinetist had moved to join a new orchestra. Almost immediately, through an old friend on the Left—yes, he had had more than a passing dalliance with that crowd, although he now denied it—Pitong found himself a job in the Palace, drafting speeches for Madame President and getting close enough to hold up an umbrella for her at the slightest drizzle. He began to project some political weight and smiled at whispers to the effect that he would soon become her spokesman. When he brushed his teeth in the morning, he ended by frowning at the mirror, as if the republic were about to collapse, and elocuting in his whiny voice, trying to sound as gruff as he could, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen of the media.” 

And then the republic did collapse, or rather Madame President did, in a scandal that whittled down her stature even more severely, and rather than desert her like those scoundrels did, Pitong made noisy pledges of allegiance to her—while secretly negotiating, on the side and through the same old comrades (the Left had influence in any government, he would realize), an accommodation with the new regime. When they laughed him out of the place, he fled the country in humiliation, hooked up with his alumni network, got a job handling loan applications in a small bank, and prayed every night that a sinkhole would devour the Palace he left behind and all of its cursed occupants.

For his own entertainment, he opened a blog under the title of “Batang Recto,” a play on the Manila street where he picked up cheap textbooks and on all the connotations of “right,” which he embraced. He took every opportunity to lambast anything that had to do with Family “A,” communists, female empowerment, abortionists (he was convinced that Marietta had purposely lost their baby, not that he wanted to care for one), drug users, hippies, Barbra Streisand, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama (and 95% of his race), hip-hop, gun control, and climate change. 

He now proudly identified himself as an American citizen—he felt deeply insulted when someone asked if he was a “Pacific Islander,” like he paddled a dugout in his three-piece suit—and bristled when Pinoys from Pateros or Pagadian questioned his opinions on American issues like “birtherism,” as if they knew anything about American politics. But at the same time he felt perfectly free to dispense political wisdom to the islanders, because they seemed hopelessly lost in their fantasy of a liberal democratic paradise, which they failed to realize had been cooked up by a cabal in Washington since the days of Quezon and Cordell Hull to protect American economic and military interests in the Philippines for the next half-century. 

Pitong no longer relied on or believed in scholarly research to establish the truth; so much of it was produced and propagated by an academic elite intent on perpetuating its hegemony, against the challenge of intuitive thinkers like himself and a few other brave souls he had come into contact with. Together, on private networks, they reviewed and reconstructed history, and plotted a chart for human survival and development. The plan recognized the existential threats posed by liberal retardates still tied to obsolete notions like racial and gender equality, which accounted for their weakness at the core.

When a Pinoy strongman and his American counterpart became presidents of their countries, Pitong heard his angels sing. The world was clearly waking up to what he had known for many years—that there was genius latent in resentment, prejudice, and suspicion, in the politics of self-interest, the purest of human motivations. One stalwart was cheated out of re-election, but another was replaced by an even more reliable autocrat. When Russian bombs fell on Ukraine, he felt his logic justified—having denied Russia’s destiny and gone to bed with the West, Ukraine had no one else to blame for its misery but itself. Batang Recto was always right.

Pitong slept soundly on the pillow of these beliefs. He felt most virile after savaging some pink fool on his blog, and sometimes he woke up with a woman next to him, with whom he did not care to exchange names, mindful of security. When he looked out the window at the changing of the colors and at the people on the lakefront, he felt no irony, no loneliness, no remorse. He was never stronger, never surer. He tingled with anticipation at the coming of The Storm that would sweep all the liberals, tree-huggers, and Mariettas of the world away. It was the closest thing he felt to happiness.

Hindsight No. 20: Mindfulness and Memory

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Hindsight for May 30, 2022

(Photo from toolshero.com)

WHEN I I unexpectedly slipped into a black pool of anxiety and depression a couple of years ago—another unwitting casualty of the pandemic—I learned a new word from my psychiatrist: “mindfulness,” defined as “the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us.” 

It’s a therapeutic technique to keep your mind from straying into dark forests and crevices, focusing instead on the pen in your hand or the chunk of melon you’re about to swallow. Accompanied by meditation and measured breathing, it slows and calms you down just long enough for you to understand that you’re alive, you’re safe, and you will be well. It puts you back in control of your runaway thoughts and emotions, giving you back the composure you need to face your problems for the day.

It works. Of course I still take my nightly dose of sertraline (your doctor might prescribe something else; don’t take my word for it), but even just the awareness that you can, on your own, stake out a little zone of peace and quiet around yourself is liberating. Paradoxically, it allows you to deal with the stress of the moment by putting you in the moment. It’s the anticipation of terrible things about to happen—especially bad for imaginative minds—that brings on the fear and anxiety. Mindfulness snaps you back from that bungee jump to despair.

I thought about this last week as I encountered many friends online still in shock and grief over their electoral loss, brimming with agitation over what political atrocities could be forthcoming, and eager to begin the campaign for 2028 pronto. The trolls are gleefully feeding this anguish: one prayed that VP Leni’s plane would crash, another declared all Kakampinks “enemies of the state” who deserve to be hunted down, and yet another—despite doing it herself—faulted the Robredos for the crime of taking graduation pictures. 

When I realize that this is the world we now live in, roiling with nastiness, idiocy, and barbarity, I feel like reaching for something stronger than Zoloft to ward off the bad vibes (I also have a prescription for Xanor, but haven’t touched it for a year). But then I remember the old Jedi mindfulness trick, take a few deep abdominal breaths, think about places the ogres can’t reach, and soon enough I’m functional again, capable of absorbing the absurdities and ironies of the hour.

One more thing about mindfulness: it works well with daydreaming of the positive and wishful kind. The writer Sam Brinson quotes the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman: “A wandering mind is more creative, better at future planning and goal-driven thought, and helps with memory consolidation.” Kaufman argues for a balance between focusing your thoughts and letting them stray, which is relaxing, and a relaxed mind is better at making creative connections.

I don’t know if you could call it daydreaming, but lately my mind has drifted back to my own “golden era”—a time when things felt good and I felt good, when the country was in a bouncy mood and seemed to be going in the right direction: the mid- to late 1990s, the FVR years. We had a lot of problems—a rash of brownouts among them—but you could sniff the optimism in the air. (Full disclosure: I was one of FVR’s speechwriters, so it’s possible that I drank the Kool-Aid and fell for my own prose.) 

Beng and I got ourselves a decidedly downscale apartment close to West Avenue where huge rats scurried overhead at night, and we bought our food from the talipapa down the street. Having brought up that memory, I realize that we like thinking and talking about the past mainly for the fact that it’s over, it already happened, which means that whatever it was, we survived, presumably for the better. I’m sure it wasn’t as rosy as I now make it out to be, and that I’m blocking out the less pleasant parts. But that’s the way the memory works, the way it protects us from pain and provides us with some sense of certainty, some clear point of reference, in these nebulous times.

Just recalling how it was ten, eleven years ago fills me with a combination of wistfulness and regret. It was a time when despots around the world—Egypt’s Mubarak, Libya’s Khaddafi, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il—were being toppled or dying; Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions were still something of a joke; China was being rocked by pro-democracy protests; and a new platform called Friendster made waves on the Internet, where there were still pockets of innocence and honesty to be found.

It was a time when people and politics still retained a modicum of civility and intelligence, when the truth was nothing but the truth, when human rights were not to be cursed or spat upon, when bad leaders got their due, and when God seemed to be awake most of the time, sending a bolt of lightning here and a swath of sunshine there. It was the world before Covid, when all our friends and loved ones were still alive and laughing over their beer and sisig, when face masks were for the sick, when people danced and even kissed and made love without fear. The future sounded like it would be a wonderful place; technology and human genius would make sure of it.

When I woke up last week to the news that 19 schoolchildren and two teachers had been massacred in Texas, I tried to imagine what a mother there must have felt, how she would have given her own life to turn back the clock just one day. I was only beginning to be inured to the savagery in Ukraine, and now I saw that it was always possible for evil to become even crueller. For a minute, the aches left by May 9 felt dull and trivial.

There are things that Zoloft will not banish, but I know that mindfulness and the memory of a saner past can give me the cool head and steady heart that I will need for the long fight. Bring it on; we will survive, if not prevail.

Hindsight No. 7: Disinformation and Democracy

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Hindsight for Monday, February 28, 2022

(Image from designtaxi.com)

LAST FRIDAY—the 36th anniversary of EDSA 1—I spoke to a group of university students who wanted to know what I thought of Filipino democracy. 

I told them that at EDSA, along with millions of other Filipinos, I jumped for joy at the news that Ferdinand Marcos had fled with his family. We did not know—and might not have cared too much then—that they had brought two planeloads of gold and cash with them to Hawaii. All we wanted to hear was that they were gone, presumably for good, and that we were off to a fresh start at peace, freedom, justice, and prosperity. The darkness of the past twenty years would lift, and a new Philippines would emerge, truly democratic and firmly opposed to any form of despotism.

Today we realize what a fantasy that was, what a temporary reprieve. Under Rodrigo Duterte, if the polls are right, most of our people have once again embraced authoritarian rule, implicitly accepting its attendant excesses. The dictator’s son is back, and may even become our next President—to the delight of his supporters for whom martial law never happened; or if it did, then it was a golden age to which we will soon be returning, an age of new roads and bridges, clean streets, industrial peace, Miss Universe pageants, and eternal sunshine. 

Indeed it would be as if the past half-century between 1972 and 2022 were a confused and hazy dream, and now we were waking up where we had left off yesterday, when Ferdinand E. Marcos was poised to “save the Republic and build a New Society.” His son is making sure that we don’t miss the connection by heralding his entrance at his campaign rallies with the anthem of martial law, “May Bagong Silang.” Most of his followers today have never heard that song, or understand its chilling context, or the price we paid—in blood and in billion-dollar loans—for that “new dawn.” To them, it is a catchy jingle, in marching tempo. It comes with the smell of money and power in the air, the promise of a shower of gold for the hopeful masses. 

This, of course, is also a fantasy, but a powerful one—and I think I will be correct to surmise that many of the students I addressed, and even their teachers, fully believe it. And why not? They were never taught in school about the horrors of martial law. Instead, they were told that those were good times, that the Marcoses were good leaders who were deposed by their enemies and the CIA, that rich people don’t steal, and that the Marcos billions came from the gods, Yamashita, and anywhere but the Philippine treasury. That diet of lies has now become a catered banquet. 

The biggest enemy of democracy today—more than at any other time in our or even the world’s history—is disinformation: the willful distortion or fabrication of information to create false beliefs or impressions in the minds of people, turning bad to good, wrong to right, and vice versa. 

This is happening not only here in the Philippines, but in many other places around the world—including America, where Donald Trump has been pushing the “Big Lie” of a stolen election, despite the lack of any credible evidence. Even earlier, in what has by now become a cliché, Josef Goebbels thundered that if you repeat a lie a thousand times, it becomes the truth. 

During and after WWII, military experts engaged in what was called “psywar” or psychological warfare to weaken the enemy’s mental defenses, lower morale, and make people switch sides. This was done through radio, leaflets, newspapers, and other media available at the time.

Today the prevalence of the Internet and social media has magnified the means for disinformation by a magnitude of millions. And this is scary, because according to a recent survey, every other Pinoy can’t tell real news from fake. How can a society so prone to disinformation—to fake news—function well as a democracy?

Last month, the Akademyang Filipino (on whose Board of Trustees I serve) sponsored a forum on the topic of “Can Democracy Win in May 2022?” Most such questions are meant to be rhetorical, with obvious answers. But this time, the more I thought about it, the more I was bothered by its actual complexity. The problem, I realized, is that we no longer have a clear and common idea of what “democracy” means.

There are as many definitions of democracy as there are politicians eager to appropriate it. “Democracy” has to have been one of the most ambiguous and most abused words of the 20th century, going into the 21st. When a brutal totalitarian state like North Korea styles itself as the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” you know something somewhere has gone awfully wrong. Dictators will call their actions democratic—as Ferdinand Marcos and Muammar Ghaddafi did—by asserting that they are acting on behalf of the people, a responsibility that presumably entitles them to extraordinary powers and compensations.

In my layman’s understanding, democracy is the rule and exercise of power by the people through representatives they choose by a free and fair election. It seems simple, but immediately we can see how vulnerable this definition of democracy is to interpretation and manipulation. What is a “free and fair” election? Does it simply mean an election free of vote-buying, coercion, and fraud?

If a candidate wins more than 51% of the vote without obvious coercion or cheating, then will that candidate have won a democratic election? But what if those voters had been fed provably false information? What if they willingly believed that information to be true, and voted on the basis of it? Would this still be democracy at work? 

Arguably, yes, because democracy never promised only intelligent outcomes. Elections are emotional, not rational, exercises. This disturbs me deeply, but again I have to ask myself, am I idealizing democracy as something that can be perfected? Or should I just accept that democracy, like society itself, is inherently messy, mercurial, and manipulable? 

What kind of democracy do we Filipinos have, and what kind of democracy do we want? The vote this May will help provide the answer.