Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No. 197: Cultural Lobotomy

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 11, 2026

OUR FRIEND Toym Imao, among our most talented and productive sculptors, also serves as dean of the UP College of Fine Arts where my wife Beng teaches art conservation. Lately, like many academic administrators, Toym’s been feeling embattled because of the lack of resources given to his college, whose buildings may look new and good on the outside but whose roofs leak, among other ailments and deficiencies. (At least they have a building; my home College of Arts and Letters is still a vagrant in Diliman, more than ten years after the Faculty Center burned down.) Beng—who envisions the creation of a formal art conservation program and center in UP to serve the country’s longstanding needs in this area—sometimes has to teach in the garage of our campus home for lack of table space in their department. 

Let me quote a few salient lines from Toym’s self-described “rant,” which he published online:

“When students are treated as customers (rather than our future), when education becomes a service (than a mission), and when institutions are driven by metrics, compliance, and efficiency, we lose something essential.

“We lose the art school as a space of imagination. As a space of critique and discourse. As a space where we form not just skills, but ways of thinking. A space of engagement and confrontation. A space to take risks and make mistakes in a nurturing environment.

“An art school is not a diploma factory, it is a well of souls, it is a spirit house. If we lose these purposes, we do not just weaken education. We weaken our culture, we lose our spirit as a nation.”

But now Toym & Co. are up against an even bigger enemy, beyond leaking roofs and bureaucratic indifference: a government-sponsored initiative to gut the humanities and to bleed it out of the college curriculum so young Filipinos could enter the workforce sooner. 

The comeuppance of certain pseudo-journalists aside, no issue stood out in our FB feeds over this past week as much as the widespread outrage over the Commission on Higher Education’s proposed “Reframed General Education” program, cutting required GE units from 36 down to 18. They’ll do this by shoehorning the old (and already much-compressed) arts and humanities courses into such brainy-sounding but essentially hollow subjects as “Data, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge Society” (which sounds to me like a puffed-up way of saying “Don’t use AI to plagiarize and write your homework,” which I’ll bet is how it’s going to be taught).

It isn’t hard to imagine how this act of cultural lobotomy came about: the CHED people were given marching orders from the start to find a way of cramming some GE subjects into a three-year curriculum. Never mind what kind of chop suey recipe they would come up with—like mixing a smattering of Philippine history into a sludge of Rizal; just fit everything in three years, and all will be well. 

I’m not even going to discuss in detail how and why the CHED proposal is such a sad, silly, an even stupid solution to a problem that, to begin with, is ill-defined. You can look up the analyses of people more attuned to the theory of education than I am—aside from Toym Imao, experts like Profs. Antonio P. Contreras, Mark Joseph Calano, and Jose Wendell Capili have already written extensively about this, and about the necessity of the humanities in our formation as humans and citizens. 

I will, however, raise a few points and questions for further thought:

Is the problem employability, of not teaching our young the skills our workplaces require? Are the arts and humanities–including language and history—therefore excess baggage that workers don’t need to do their jobs well?

General education isn’t about creating unemployable artists. It’s about helping ordinary people think like artists do—creatively, intuitively, critically, out of the box, to find better viewpoints and solutions than numbers alone can provide. And speaking of unemployed artists, why not build up and support creative industries like South Korea and other countries do, to channel our natural abilities in design, performance, and expression into globally competitive endeavors?

And who and where are the synoptic geniuses who are going to teach these massively integrated courses? Instructors who have a hard time teaching even basic English, and whose own grasp of history and philosophy is tenuous at best?

There’s a lot of the “digital” in the “reframed” GE program, a nod to the pervasiveness of the Internet and AI in education. But the real challenge is not how to detect and use AI, but to be naturally intelligent: to think and reason for yourself without reaching for your phone.

Bad education isn’t going to fix a bad economy and bad governance. But a good education that teaches young people the difference between right and wrong and between good and bad—and only the humanities can do that—will help them elect good leaders who can then make the best decisions for our economic well-being. 

“We have to do something!” cried Beng, as always the more ardent activist between the two of us. “Let’s rally in front of CHED. Let’s show them how strongly we feel about this issue!”

Of course I’ll go march with Beng wherever she goes, but I suspect that in this day and age, rallies don’t work as well as they used to. You’ll shout yourselves hoarse telling your co-marchers things they already know, while the people inside the office go about making coffee and sharing BTS chismis. You might get on the evening news, in between a mugging and a fashion piece.

You have to find the people who can actually change policy, and exert pressure there. They’re in Congress and the Senate, which controls the pursestrings and can make state university presidents and agency heads mumble like marionettes at budget hearings.

The trouble is, even people you’d expect to know better don’t seem to know any better. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Basic Education  Committee while co-chairing the influential Edcom 2, is behind the push to cut college down to three years. His proposed Senate Bill 51 aiming for just that is the wind behind the CHED technical committee’s wings. That leaves us with Higher Education Committee Chair Loren Legarda, a staunch champion of the arts and culture, to bear the burden of our arguments in the arena where it matters.

She’ll have a lot of championing to do, against the likes of Sen. Robinhood Padilla, (mind you, the one in charge of constitutional amendments) who has opined that the job of opposition senators is, well, to oppose anything and everything. Indeed, the fact that we have people like him in the Senate is the best argument for a strong GE program—not just to educate them, but to make sure young Filipinos don’t vote donkeys (I’m using the kinder term here) into the Senate ever again.

Just thinking about it makes me want to put on my marching shoes, and I don’t care if Beng and I end up shouting into the wind. 

Qwertyman No. 196: Caught in the Crossfire

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 4, 2026

THIS IS a piece I dread writing, knowing that I am bound to say something over the next thousand words that will almost certainly offend, dismay, and even enrage some people who might have thought better of me otherwise. But I also feel that it will be a gross dereliction of the duty that comes with the privilege of being published on this page if I avoided commentary on one of the most painful headlines to have sprung up this past week. 

I am not a political scientist, a theorist, or a coffeeshop regular with access to backroom information, so as I often do, I will draw on personal memory and experience—on the distant but insistent past—to reflect on the present.

I refer, of course, to the recent deaths of 19 young Filipinos—two of them American citizens—at the hands of the Philippine military in Toboso, Negros Occidental in what the military described as an “armed encounter,” which a New People’s Army spokesman denounced as a “ruthless massacre” that included civilian students and activists embedded in the community.

It is not difficult for me to see how a bright young college student like Alyssa Alano would find herself in that far-off barangay, living with the locals and studying their way of life. I think she and her comrades knew the risks of being there and getting caught in the crossfire of a long-running war. Whether they believed or not in the armed struggle, they entered its deadly embrace. Even RJ Ledesma’s presence in a combat zone, I could understand. As an 18-year-old reporter at the Philippines Herald, I begged my editors to send me to Isabela, when we heard that a ship called the Karagatan had arrived to deliver arms to the NPA; I was certain it was a government plot (it was not) and wanted to discredit it. The desk sagely ignored me.

But one thing I can assume is that Alyssa & Co. were spurred by a genuine desire to serve the people, in that particular way, in that particular place and time. We may disagree with the methodology and certainly the results, but we can grant them the sincerity if not the nobility of their intentions. 

I recall a summer back in the early 1970s when I joined a cohort of UP Nationalist Corps members—mostly city-bred teenagers—in week-long “learn from the masses” trips to the countryside in Quezon and Bulacan where we lived with the common folk and subsisted on our purposely meager rations and whatever shrimp we could catch in the leech-infested river. There were no NPAs with us, nor did anyone indoctrinate us; we were there to realize our fundamental ignorance of and disconnection from the vast majority of our impoverished people. However, I have to admit that if the purpose of these sorties was to de-romanticize life in the countryside, to steer our perceptions away from Amorsolo’s gilded sunsets, the effect (at least on me) was the exact opposite. I came away even more convinced that struggle and sacrifice in the midst of suffering were heroic. The experience only confirmed what I had read in high school, in William Pomeroy’s The Forest, detailing the arduous treks of the old Huks in the mountains: I was looking at hard reality through a soft lyrical lens.

If I had not been arrested and imprisoned here in Manila in 1973, I would very possibly have gone on to the countryside, like many of my comrades did, and been killed within two weeks because of my sheer incompetence and ineptitude at guerrilla warfare, which most college boys and girls are simply not trained to do (and then again, quite a few learned and survived). 

And that perhaps was the most traumatic part of those times—receiving and viewing the horribly mangled bodies of our fallen friends, hearing the screaming at the UP Chapel over someone whose skull had been blown open: “That’s not him, that’s not him!” There was much criticism last week of someone’s use of “corned beef” to describe the Toboso dead as crassly inhuman, but I can confirm that it was a term we ourselves used—carne norte—for the bodies that came back shredded not even in hermetic body bags but in rice sacks.

Now we, too, have been caught in the crossfire, horrified by the wanton slaughter of our young but unsure of whom and what to believe in. An independent inquiry is absolutely called for, yes, to establish what happened, determine accountability, and define the rules of engagement in these circumstances. The brutality of that assault was barbaric in its execution. But exactly who are accountable, and what for?

I worry that these remarks could create more confusion than clarity. But sometimes we need to be unsettled or unmoored from our stoutest presumptions to begin to understand ourselves, and what we believe in, and why. One thing I’ve noticed about both extremes on the Left and Right is how certain they seem to be about everything, as if they had the whole universe and its rights and wrongs all figured out, and expect nothing less than absolute belief and compliance from their recruits and adherents. At one point in my life this was true of me; I could quote from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” chapter and verse, and lived by its tenets (or at least tried to, inevitably failing in matters of personal discipline).

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the value of doubt, and even of skepticism. Mao may have been a brilliant revolutionary, but he also became a fat and filthy sexual predator (whose tomb I even visited twice in Beijing). The organ that generations of idealistic young people venerated turned out to be as murderous and as cynical as its professed enemies. 

If I were asked to advise a granddaughter or a nephew in college how to fight for justice and freedom, and if that girl or boy seemed intent on joining the armed struggle, whether as an observer or combatant (note that the military does not distinguish between them), this is what I will probably say: “I cannot stop you from doing what you so fervently believe in, because I would have done the same thing in my time. But think about this, before you go: your time is different, and many things have changed. I know that poverty and injustice have not gone away, and may even have worsened. 

“But if there is something that half a century of struggle has taught us, it is that violence, however justified, never really works; it will only be met with even greater violence, with tragic results for all. The harder battles to fight are right here—in the communities you know and can influence, for the issues that matter to them. You do not need to go far to reach the suffering and the underserved: they are around you, wherever you turn. 

“Fifty years ago we may have had little choice but to go underground; today we have civil society to embrace your causes. Call me defeatist, cowardly, or myopic, or even a comfort to the enemy; but I remain alive and fighting for truth, justice, and freedom the best ways I can, which include what I’m telling you now—the strongest weapons are in your hearts and minds, not in your hands.”

Penman No. 485: Forever Young—in Yearbooks

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Penman for Sunday, May 3, 2026

THERE’S SOMETHING terribly sad and yet also strangely soothing about thumbing through the pages of college and high school yearbooks from decades past. As a diehard UP alum and collector of UP memorabilia, I’ve accumulated a stack of yearbooks from the University of the Philippines called the Philippinensian (a name likely inspired by that from one of UP’s formative models, the University of Michigan’s Michiganensian). 

Going through them inevitably fills me with what I know to be a naïve longing for seemingly simpler times; the past gets rosier the farther we move away from it. But these images, imbued with innocence, still offer relief from today’s sordid realities. When I look at the youthful visages of such figures as Juan Ponce Enrile and Jose Ma. Sison, I am reminded that we had choices, and that, while indicative, college could be too soon to plot the full trajectory of our lives. Yearbooks are also, of course, an intellectual and social history of the university itself, balancing the frilly fun of a Cadena de Amor with the sonorous seriousness of editorial commentary.

The first issue of the Philippinensian came out in 1915, seven years after UP opened in 1908—occasioned, argued its editors, by the realization that “There has heretofore been little consolidation of interests on the part of students of the University and the so-called University spirit, which should be stronger here because of the maturer quality of the students enrolled, was subordinated to the college spirit.” (I was fortunate to find a copy of this maiden volume, once owned and signed by Guillermo Tolentino.) 

In 1928, the Philippinensian apparently assumed the name of UP Alpha. If you studied then at the College of Liberal Arts your professors would have been people like Maximo Kalaw, Conrado Benitez, H. Otley Beyer, Vidal Tan, Carlos P. Romulo, Maria Agoncillo, Paz Marquez Benitez, Manuel Bernabe, Jose P. Laurel, Marcial Lichauco, Mauro and Mendez, and Pura Santillan. The college’s editorialist expressed the tenuous hope that education would resolve the class struggle: “Far out in the villages away from cities reign ignorance, selfishness, suspicion, all things that a life of isolation and narrow-mindedness afford. We recognize the need for light in those nooks, that light which will add strength of vision to the eyes of the unlearned, which will make them see the invisible ties that unite hearts the world over. We are aware of the selfish exploitation of the poor by those who have greater cunning, and higher intelligence; but we believe that the broadening of the sympathies of the latter and the opening of their closed, hard hearts will banish away all suspicion and hatred that rend souls asunder.”

A decade later, the 1938 Philippinensian opened with a dedication to that year’s commencement speaker, Field Marshal Douglas A. MacArthur, followed by postcard-worthy shots of UP’s Manila campus, carefully curated to show off its best facets. The staging creates ironic if not tragic overtones, especially when taken with the photographs at book’s end of UP’s cadets in smart formation, many of whom would march into the maw of war in a few years. Padre Faura itself would be bombed to ruins, albeit with the Oblation statue still standing defiantly.

After the war, with school having been closed for a while and the whereabouts of hundreds of students and graduates unknown, the Philippinensian resumed in 1946 under the temporary banner of the UP Phoenix 1942-1946, to cover the lost years. The yearbook staff could only note that “Some letters [of invitation to the yearbook] were received postmarked ‘return to sender’ for various reasons: “addressee unknown,” “no such address,” “moved.” In many cases, the addresses were among those burned or shelled during the war. In a few cases, the graduates were already dead. But so long as there was a clue, no matter how unreliable, the staff did not fail to track it down, sending letters, again and again, to the same person, at different addresses.”

Among those who fortunately responded were Narita Manuel of San Andres, Manila, BSE 1942 (soon to marry a writer named NVM Gonzalez); Damiana Ligon Eugenio of Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, BSE 1942, cum laude(long before assuming the deanship of Philippine folkloric studies); and Renato Constantino of Manila, PhB 1946, cum laude, then already working for the Malacañang PR Office. (There were no privacy issues then, and one’s full address could be published at will.)

The closer we get to the present, the more familiar the names become, although their juvenile faces always come as a surprise. My mother Emy—who turns 98 next Sunday—was among those who first made the move from Padre Faura to Diliman. She appears as Emilia A. Yap, BSE, from Guinbirayan, Sta. Fe, Romblon, in the 1953 Philippinensian, a volume in which also appear such luminaries as Rafael M. Salas, Rony V. Diaz, Amelia Lapeña, Andrez Cristobal Cruz, Jose T. Joya, and Napoleon V. Abueva. For many alums, the ‘50s were UP’s golden age, and the yearbook reflects that; with the war over, it could claim that “The UP spirit is of beauty…. The tradition of looking for beauty everywhere, even where none is supposed to exist, is born… to temper an otherwise skeptical, cynical mind.”

But by the end of that decade, on the cusp of the ‘60s, and in the midst of the great debates between secular liberals and sectarian conservatives on campus, UP had to be ever reminded of its unique position as social critic. Introducing the 1958 Philippinensian marking UP’s golden jubilee, E. San Juan intoned that “Ours is an age of rebellion…. Man of the twentieth century… strives for a blessedness yet unbestowed, the blessedness incarnated in him as rebel-artist.” Petronilo Bn. Daroy would warn the following year that “It is at this point that we begin to see the estrangement of the university from the mainsprings of life, from the fact of the national reality. With politics controlling the focus and acting as guidepost from which the university must stand to gain its angle of vision, the reality that is revealed for inspection is necessarily fragmented and false.” 

UP’s vibrant social and cultural life continued, with the fraternities and sororities leading the way. The yearbooks lauded the smartest and the prettiest. But the dark clouds were gathering, and the mood was shifting. Writing in the 1966 Philippinensian, Temario C. Rivera began his essay with a stinging line: “Frivolity has always been the most vicious stigma of youth.” But, he concludes, invoking protests around the world, “The youth have finally come of age.”

In a few more years, the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune would erupt, and the last Philippinensian would come out in 1971; the last Cadena de Amor had taken place in 1968. Many of those street warriors, myself included, would live on to their seventies and eighties, brandishing canes and hostage to metformin.

But in these yearbook pages, full of faces brimming with hope and idealism, we remain forever young and forever free.

Qwertyman No. 195: Why Leni Should Run—Despite Herself

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 27, 2026

THE MOST important news for us Filipinos last week was the news that wasn’t: former Vice President and now Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo’s announcement that she was not going to run for president in 2028, and that she would be happy to seek another term in Naga’s city hall. 

She went on to provide a list of alternative contenders for the presidency—younger and also progressive political leaders whose principles and vision aligned with hers. The names included the usual suspects—chiefly Senators Risa Hontiveros, Kiko Pangilinan, and Bam Aquino, as well as, down the road, Mayors Joy Belmonte and Vico Sotto (when he comes of constitutional age). They’re all worthy and credible candidates, of course, all of whom I hold in high esteem; their only problem is, well, they’re not named Leni Robredo. 

Leni’s announcement was predictably met with profound dismay by her supporters, none louder than her former running mate Kiko Pangilinan, who said that “I believe Leni is in the best position to build the broadest and strongest unity.” Both Kiko and Liberal Party stalwart Leila de Lima voiced the hope that Leni would change her mind between now and 2028.

It’s a hope and a prayer that I—among many millions of others—certainly share. While I’d met her only a couple of times during the 2022 campaign, I came away much impressed by her leadership qualities and her sincerity. I was deeply disappointed when she lost the election, feeling that, once again, our people had voted against their own best interests, manipulated by falsehood, fear, and desperation. 

Leni’s midterm decision to run for mayor instead of senator also seemed a letdown for many. But now it clearly was, in hindsight, a brilliant one, insulating her from the toxicity of national politics while building up her credibility at and with the grassroots. National figures—including no less than her chief adversary, President Bongbong Marcos—have made pilgrimages to Naga to seek her out. She has lost nothing in terms of visibility and appeal.

This is why—watching this drama play out in what could be the third of five acts—I remain convinced that despite her pronouncements, Leni Robredo cannot and should not shut the door for good on another presidential campaign, because as Kiko Pangilinan himself emphasizes, literally no one is in a better position to unify and to lead the country out of the moral and economic morass we find ourselves in today. Her abilities are established, her reputation unsullied. Our nation and people need her more than she needs the presidency, which is probably the most persuasive argument that can be raised in favor of her candidacy that even she cannot deny.

The corrupt acts for which her successor and likely opponent, VP Sara Duterte, now faces impeachment are the best subsidiary reasons for her running. There can be no sharper contrast in terms of personal morality and executive capability than the performance of these two vice presidents, one just after the other, under similar circumstances, including virtual isolation within an antagonistic bureaucracy. 

Certainly any one of those named by Leni as capable alternatives will be better at managing the country than Sara, and will deserve our support. But this unfolding scenario calls for a head-to-head confrontation and comparison between the two leading protagonists—not just for the theatrics of it, but so that the paying audience—our people—can see and appreciate the difference with stark clarity: two women, two former VPs, two lawyers, two local executives, to which we can add two moral and ethical frameworks, two leadership and management styles, two visions of what makes for a just and progressive society. Can you just imagine the presidential debates? What could be more educational for the Filipino?

The cynics among us could opine that Leni just might be playing it coy, waiting for an inexorable tsunami of support to build up and raise her beyond all protestations. Hele hele bago quiere, as we often put it, or in a word, pakipot.

In the history of performative and traditional politics, that would of course be entirely possible. There is, in fact, something we can learn from the ancient Romans in this respect. There was a Roman political practice of recusatio—of an expressed reluctance to assume high office, which made its professor seem worthier in the public eye than one with the self-explanatory ambitio, an obvious lust for power. Recusatio could have been a show of genuine modesty (George Washington and Pope Francis famously did not expect or want to lead, but accepted the high responsibilities thrust upon them) or political theater (Julius Caesar had Mark Antony offer him the crown three times, refusing it to rising applause). 

The difference is that Leni Robredo is no traditional politician—or is very good at acting at not being one. She speaks sincerely—which, in this case of her rejection of national office, we wish for once that she would not. In her statement, Leni also warned against the Filipino’s tendency to find and repose their faith in a “savior” to cure the nation’s ills—a clear and instructive reference to our experience with strongman rule. We can understand that, and it’s a reminder worth keeping in mind. Leni’s election alone will not guarantee a better Filipino future.

But there again is why Leni should run, despite herself. Beyond her abounding individual qualifications and experience, beyond her as a person, Leni Robredo has become the embodiment of what we want to see in government: ability, yes, but also  integrity, accountability, selflessness, and devotion to public duty and the national interest. We will be voting not just for her but for the best versions of ourselves that we can yet become. She and younger examples like Vico make us believe that goodness and hope can yet win over evil and despair—and translate them into tangible and sustainable progress, beyond airy abstractions.

I believe myself that the Leni wave will happen—but not too soon; it should grow and crest at the right time, closer to 2028, perhaps both by design and desperation. The longer that the Sara saga plays out, amid our mounting economic woes and the apparent ineffectuality of the Marcos administration in dealing with the corruption issues it released from the Pandora’s box it opened, the stronger the need for Leni will become. 

The classic Roman model of the reluctant leader was Cincinnatus (519–430 BC), said to be a gentleman farmer whom the Senate called upon to leave his plow and to save the Roman army from a tribal assault—which he did, before returning to his farm after serving for fifteen days as dictator. Leni Robredo might well consider giving us those two weeks (all right, those six years); her farm in Naga will always be there.

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

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. 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)

Qwertyman No. 186: Countering the Sara Saga

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 23, 2026

TO NO one’s great surprise—except perhaps for the “why now”—Vice President Sara Duterte publicly announced last week her plan to run for president in 2028. 

I’ll leave the more informed and more nuanced readings of this event to the professional analysts, but from my pedestrian point of view, the timing’s the thing. By throwing down the gauntlet so early, more than two years before the actual election, VP Sara is leaving no doubt as to her intentions (which we all knew, already). 

It doesn’t take a PhD in Political Science to see that, more importantly, with her impeachment being revived in the House, presumably to be raised to the Senate, she is serving notice to our notoriously opportunistic politicos that they better fall in step now—or else. The Dutertes still hold sway over vast swaths of political territory especially in the south, where pro-impeachment legislators can be easily picked off and punished in a Duterte restoration. When it comes down to a vote, the math will tell the story of who’s afraid of Sara Duterte.

The question really is, what are we progressive-minded citizens and our leaders supposed to do? 

Right now, the DDS side has one advantage over everyone else. It’s fighting for its life, with whatever power and influence it retains. With its patriarch in prison and his successor in peril for her political future, it has to go all-in on Sara’s candidacy or face even greater and perhaps permanent debilitation. That gives it a clarity of purpose that’s easier to translate to specific actions, to a tight script and playbook, than it is for the yet amorphous, once improbable, and still highly hypothetical Pinklawan-administration united front to agree on the most basic terms of coalition.

I can sense the hand of AI in fleshing out the details of the aforementioned script, but as one recent DDS post puts it, here’s the winning scenario:

“…. A story, the kind of story that does not need advertising, does not need media allies, does not need oligarch money, because it tells itself. A father who loved his country enough to die for it in a foreign prison. A daughter who loved her father enough to fly across the world to sit with him in chains. A people who loved them both enough to wait, and watch, and when the moment came.. to roar!!!

“The grandmaster played his greatest game not from the presidential palace. Not from the campaign trail. Not from a position of power and comfort.

“He played it from a cell. With nothing but his mind, his daughter, and his unbroken faith in the Filipino people.

“And when Sara Duterte raises her right hand in 2028 when the Philippines renders its verdict on everything that has happened, everything that was done to them, everything they endured and refused to surrender — Rodrigo Duterte will not be there to see it. Or maybe he will, we do not know.

“But he will have made it happen.”

I commented on this post by saying “I wonder what the AI prompt was,” because it displays the kind of verbal cadence, the dramatic buildup employing sentence fragments, the repetition for emphasis, so common to AI-assisted compositions. 

But AI or not, it does create the kind of simple but spinnable story that appeals to soft-minded and soft-hearted voters, drawing on a long and deep Pinoy tradition of melodrama that sanctifies the api, the unjustly oppressed. The day before Sara’s announcement, Digong had played his part by casting himself in a letter to the International Criminal Court as a man “old, tired, and frail,” prepared to “die in prison” with his “heart and soul (always remaining) in the Philippines.”

Those of us who know better lost no time pointing out the hypocrisy of the old man’s demand for the “respect” he never showed his political enemies and tokhang victims, and we can all go to sleep convinced of his guilt and wishing for his expectation to be realized. But the truth, in a sense, is almost irrelevant now in what will be a war of narratives, which Sara hopes to win. 

From her side of the story, her father is already lost—and therein lies his political value, as sacrificial martyr, which can only rise should he in fact perish in prison or appear even more “old, tired, and frail” closer to 2028. Her impeachment, if it happens, will also amplify her kaapihan. Her disqualification from running for public office will require another step—a separate vote in the Senate, as far as I know (do correct me if I’m wrong)—or at least a separate and possibly concurrent criminal conviction. She could also resign before impeachment, surfacing the unresolved question of whether she can still be impeached and disqualified after. Clearly, if the point is to appear at a constant disadvantage to project persecution, Sara will not want for options.

And she shouldn’t, because if we believe in her guilt as much as we do in her father’s, then the only way forward is forceful prosecution, the awa factor be damned. Criminal convictions for both will provide a definitive conclusion. But on the safe assumption that nothing in this country, including some Supreme Court decisions, is ever truly final, it remains possible that Sara Duterte will be on the ticket in 2028. 

Whatever kind of opposition emerges to contest the DDS will need a powerful counter-narrative to the Sara saga—which, I suspect, will wear thin as the evidence of criminal wrongdoing piles up against the Dutertes at the Hague and in Manila. 

An ascendant story could emerge from someone who has her own underdog story to tell—of being diminished and marginalized in Digong’s regime, but of serving nobly nonetheless—and, more significantly, of keeping herself busy all this time far from messy Manila, improving the lives of her constituents in concrete and tangible ways. 

I think we all know who that person is, and what a compelling and positive comeback story she can offer, against the vengefulness and the sordidness of the successor who turned her office into a junk-food dispensary.