Category Archives: history

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.

Qwertyman No. 185: A Joke for World Peace

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 16, 2026

U.S. President Donald Trump places a note in the Western Wall in Jerusalem May 22. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters) See TRUMP-JERUSALEM-HOLY-SEPULCHER May 22, 2017.

I JUST love it when a piece of mine about the goings-on in the US gets a rise out of some MAGA expat—and you’ll be surprised how many of them have chosen to reside here, forsaking what I would have thought would have been the sweet comforts of life in Fortress America. 

A message from a guy we’ll call “Bob” reacted to my recent column on “What I Told the Fil-Ams” by suggesting that I had imbibed too much “Cali water,” referring to that state’s trenchant liberalism. I responded by sending him a joke about an American President in the Holy Land, which I hope he appreciated. (I’ve resolved that this is how I’ll deal with my critics from now on, as long as they remain friendly enough—which to his credit Bob was—kill them with kindness, or at least with corny jokes, of which I have a barrelful. I’ll save a special section for MAGA Pinoys, who keep telling me to butt out of their business but who can’t help doling out prescriptions for their ex-countrymen to find their way to the light.)

I’ve often wondered if our world can get much worse than it already is, knowing all the while that the answer can only be yes, yes, emphatically yes. Still, it comes as a rude shock every time fresh confirmation arrives of a new Marianas Trench in human greed, crassness, and stupidity. 

All by himself, Donald J. Trump accounts for more than half of every week’s lows, and I’d like to think that I’ve become immune to further aggravation by this man, only to be roundly disabused. Last week, Trump outdid himself in crudity by putting out a meme on his social network depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys. 

When called out by even his own, usually docile partymates for the patently racist post, Trump passed it off to some unnamed “assistant” who supposedly made the mistake, which Trump claimed to have been too occupied to pay close attention to. Why the President of the United States would leave his personal account open to some junior flunky is ludicrous enough; that he would expect anyone to believe his lame excuse is beyond laughable. His spokesperson derided the ensuing protest as “fake outrage” and called for renewed attention to “the things that truly matter to the American people,” as though racism, decency, and honesty no longer mattered.

But Trump isn’t even the issue here any longer; the man is irredeemably vain, vile, and vicious. (Let’s not even mention—but heck, let’s—his offensiveness to beauty and good taste, with his insistence on gilding the White House, plastering his name all over the place, and picking Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.) Like our own Rodrigo Duterte, he has long cast his lot with Darth Vader & Co., not even pretending to be good, or to be aiming for such banalities as truth, freedom, and justice. In the words of one of his chief lieutenants, Stephen Miller, the age of “international niceties” is over; the only things that count today are “strength, force, and power,” which Trump & Co. have liberally deployed—not against global bullies like Vladimir Putin, but chiefly against the American people themselves. 

But again, let’s put the Orange Man aside for a minute. The real danger is that there are tens of millions of people who think the way he does, and who probably thought that way even before he gave Trumpism a face, a voice, and a name. These are people for whom daily doses of falsehood have become the norm, and I really couldn’t care less if they believe that Satanic Democrats drink the blood of kidnapped children, except that their weirdness creeps up to the White House and into the kind of domestic and foreign policy that makes life difficult for us 8,000 miles away, and emboldens other despots.

I’m not saying here that we don’t have our own version of Trumpers to deal with (and I’m adding this paragraph for the MAGAs who’ll remind me to stick to the local, a description I expect them to extend, in MAGA logic, to Greenland). Our DDS, in many ways, offer a parallel constituency; like many MAGA members, their grievances are rooted in historical neglect and a sense of displacement in rapidly changing times. They pinned their hopes on a man who was supposed to improve their lives—but who didn’t, distracted by a megalomaniacal drive to reshape society to his grim vision. 

This is why I haven’t given up on Digong’s faithful; there’s a valid cultural dimension to their disaffection in terms of Mindanao and Manila-centrism, but their issues can be addressed by attentive and equitable governance. The corruption issues that have gutted the country have devastated them as well. Except for the shrillest and most invested in a Sara succession, I feel that many can yet be persuaded to choose responsible leadership. 

In this respect—and this may not be shared by many, given the lows to which our own politicos have fallen, with some in need of growing a spine and others a brain or at least a heart—I feel more hopeful for the Philippines in the medium term than I do for America, and I think that’s saying a lot.

Now let’s wait for the MAGA backlash; I have lots of Trump jokes lined up to brighten their day, restore their sense of humor, and maybe help bring about world peace. 

Penman No. 482: Love in Ink: The Lost Art of the Love Letter

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Penman for Sunday, February 8, 2026

HAVING NO idea how Gen Z people write love letters (and if they even do), I asked AI, and this is what it told me:

“Gen Z love letters are characterized by digital-native, emotionally fluent, and, often, casual expressions that prioritize vulnerability, mental health, and boundary-setting. They frequently use lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats, and ‘ily’ (informal) or ‘love ya’ to avoid excessive intensity. Common themes include a rejection of traditional, performative romance in favor of ‘soft launching’ relationships (gradually revealing a partner online) and a focus on authenticity over aesthetics.”

I have to confess that the answer left me feeling much relieved to be 72 years old and increasingly irrelevant. If I were young and seventeen today but with the mind and heart that I had back in 1971, I seriously doubt that I could make a significant connection to the Gen Z girl of my dreams, from whom I would have drawn derisive laughter for a long, convoluted, meandering letter asking for a first date (I will neither confirm nor deny that this actually happened). I may have lacked in “emotional fluency,” but certainly not for words, which were all I had when, in 1973, I met a pretty girl named Beng and pounded her with prose, in my crabbed, ungainly penmanship using a technical pen; within months we were married (and still are, 52 years later).

Time was when love needed to be declared in big, bold, wet letters—and I don’t mean letters as in ABC, but letters as in pages of paper filled with scribbled and impassioned professions of affection, sometimes of hurt, sometimes of longing, but always of desire for the addressee. Setting everything else aside, overtaken and overwhelmed by this most urgent need, a man or a woman sat at a desk—or kitchen table, or any hard surface on a beach or a moving vehicle—and put pen to paper to release a flood of pent-up emotion. 

It all came down to the same three-word idea: “I love you” (sometimes, or more often, with a fourth word, “but”). As with love poems, some letters were better, more unique, more persuasive than others; most, in hindsight, were likely mawkish or mediocre. But rarely—except perhaps to writers keen on grammar and style—did literary merit matter, neither to sender nor receiver; the profession of love alone was monumental enough. Because it was handwritten and signed, it was personal and deliberate, a statement of commitment impossible to deny. 

Indeed what was thought to be intimate and ephemeral sometimes became history. Little did lovers realize or perhaps care they would become famous, and that their private correspondence would become known—thankfully not to their peers but to posterity and the critical judgment of strangers. 

In one of the books I treasure most in my library titled The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Correa de Lago Collection (Taschen, 2018), two envelopes offer proof of love affairs—illicit in this case, as all the parties concerned were married to someone else—between Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton, and between the revolutionary Leon Trotsky and artist Frida Kahlo (who had given the outcast Trotskys refuge in her home). 

This was the same free-spirited Frida who would write her husband Diego Rivera that “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.” (To be fair to Frida, Diego was far more liberal with his vagrant attentions.)

In one of literary history’s worst-kept secrets, Vita Sackville-West would write to Virginia Woolf that “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia… I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality…. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.” 

Jose Rizal’s letters to Leonor Rivera were reportedly all burned, but as Ambeth Ocampo notes, two of her letters to Rizal survive, in which she uses the pseudonym “Taimis” and tells him that “I was very much surprised that you had a letter for Papa and none for me; but at first when they told me about it I did not believe it, because he did not expect that a person like you would do such a thing. But later I was convinced that you are like a newly opened rose, very flushed and fragrant at the beginning, but afterwards it begins to wither…. Truly I tell you that I’m very resentful for what you have done and for another thing that I’ll tell you later when you come.” We know how that story ended, with the both of them going their separate ways and marrying another, although Leonor was said to have pined for Pepe to the end.

Again thanks to Ambeth, I can quote Manuel L. Quezon’s 1937 letter to his wife Doña Aurora, where he engages in what today might be called “gaslighting”: 

“Darling, I am still wondering if you really think that I love you less. Please don’t doubt me, my love has never changed from the first day I have realized that I was in love with you. I have my weakness as you know, but, dear, it’s all superficial and you know also, that, except for the case of that bailarina, my weaknesses in this respect have not been serious. When you married me, you were frankly informed by me of my shortcomings. I did not want to deceive you by promising something that I could not fulfill. After we have been married you have placed [me], sometimes, in a position when I thought that it was better that I should not confess to you what I had done that might hurt your feelings, but I want you to know that whenever such a thing took place I have felt very bad about it, because nothing I dislike more than not to tell the truth and I always resented the fact that you should prefer to put me in such a situation, thus making me almost hate myself.”

That would still have been more preferable than receiving this ardent letter from a king, and falling for him: “But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only…. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart. No more, for fear of tiring you.” The recipient, Anne Boleyn, lost her head in more ways than one, and the sender, Henry VIII, went on to court her successor, Jane Seymour, who wisely returned his love letter unopened—sparking his interest in her even more intensely.

The letter I found too coarse and too embarrassing (brimming with scatological detail) to even quote was written by James Joyce to his wife Nora, but the technologically adept will surely find it online.

My own letters to Beng, and hers to me, are stored in a moldering box that occasionally gets lost and then resurfaces in a year or two, and when we go over them we laugh and cringe at their melodramatic prolixity, as though life itself would run out soon (as it did for many of our generation, under the cloud of martial law, and thus the urgency).

So how do the love letters that we—perhaps the last of the art’s practitioners—have written stack up against history’s and literature’s most memorable? But first, who are “we?”

The immediate “we” are members of our Fountain Pen Network-Philippines who still value and use pens for handwritten communication, beyond signing checks and office forms. Old fogeys like me naturally fall into that category, but surprisingly, given the fountain pen’s and handwriting’s resurgence as a form of protest, if you will, against digital homogenization, many younger people, even some Gen Z’ers, have taken up the cause. Ballpoints are all right—but there’s still nothing better than a vintage fountain pen nib, which flexes with pressure and gives the inked line more character, to convey emotion. 

From what I’ve gathered, the best love letters people write go far beyond the often vapid promises and profuse assertions of courtship. They’re unbidden reminders and reassurances of affection, a note quietly written in the morning, a message of congratulations. This, too, is love with a deeper, more hushed voice that comes with maturity and assurance.

I should take my own advice and write Beng more love letters with my hundreds of pens, every single act of which would validate that pen’s existence and probably exorbitant purchase price. I should employ all the colors of ink stored in the dozen bottles that crowd my desk to express love in all its shades and moods, in the same spirit that Robert Graves wrote: “As green commands the variables of green, so love my loves of you.”

But sadly this old man’s fingers have become cramped from being curled too long over keyboards, and can barely finish a page of handwriting before tiring. So instead—though not quite a Gen Z’er accustomed to “lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats”—I write articles like this and stories on Facebook that suggest, ever so obliquely, how central she remains to my life, albeit in Georgia 12 points and .DOCX rather than flowing script. My idle pens, dear Beng, are like the books I’ve yet to write for you, the words still forming in the opaque ink, like the colorful and wide umbrellas I keep buying to shield you with, waiting for rain. So there, and Happy Valentine’s.

Qwertyman No. 181: Another FQS?

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 19, 2026

I’M WRITING this piece on my 72nd birthday, so I hope you’ll indulge me if I revert to the memory of another January 56 years ago. On the afternoon of January 26, 1970, I milled with thousands of other young students on the campus of the University of Sto. Tomas, the staging ground for a large contingent of demonstrators marching to the Legislative Building near the Luneta (now the National Museum). President Ferdinand Marcos was going to deliver his State of the Nation Address, and a mass action had been called to protest a host of issues, from Marcos’ increasingly authoritarian rule to rising prices, militarization, corruption, and Philippine subservience to American interests.

I had just turned 16, and was a senior and an activist at the Philippine Science High School. But I was no radical—not yet; I stood under the banner of the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), among so-called “moderates” led by Edgar Jopson, derided by FM as the “grocer’s son” and later to become a revolutionary martyr. Unlike the far-Left Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK, which I would soon join) who were railing against “imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism,” the NUSP’s cause sounded much more tangible albeit modest: a non-partisan 1971 Constitutional Convention.

What happened next that afternoon, when both groups of protesters converged at the Senate, would change Philippine political history. The moderates had paid for the rental of the protest mikes and loudspeakers, and wanted to pack up early, but the radicals literally seized the paraphernalia—and figuratively seized the day—launching into a verbal offensive that soon turned physical. Then a young journalist covering the event, Jose “Pete” Lacaba provides the reportage:

“Where the demonstration leaders stood, emblems of the enemy were prominently displayed: a cardboard coffin representing the death of democracy at the hands of the goonstabulary in the last elections; a cardboard crocodile, painted green, symbolizing congressmen greedy for allowances; a paper effigy of Ferdinand Marcos. When the President stepped out of Congress, the effigy was set on fire and, according to report, the coffin was pushed toward him, the crocodile hurled at him. From my position down on the street, I saw only the burning of the effigy—a singularly undramatic incident, since it took the effigy so long to catch fire. I could not even see the President and could only deduce the fact of his coming out of Congress from the commotion at the doors, the sudden radiance created by dozens of flashbulbs bursting simultaneously, and the rise in the streets of the cry: “MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet!”

“Things got so confused at this point that I cannot honestly say which came first: the pebbles flying or the cops charging. I remember only the cops rushing down the steps of Congress, pushing aside the demonstration leaders, and jumping down to the streets, straight into the mass of demonstrators. The cops flailed away, the demonstrators scattered. The cops gave chase to anything that moved, clubbed anyone who resisted, and hauled off those they caught up with. The demonstrators who got as far as the sidewalk that led to the Muni golf links started to pick up pebbles and rocks with which they pelted the police. Very soon, placards had turned into missiles, and the sound of broken glass punctuated the yelling: soft-drink bottles were flying, too. The effigy was down on the ground, still burning.”

The January 26 rally and the trouble that erupted would lead to the January 30-31 demos that would prove even more violent, and what would become the First Quarter Storm or the FQS was born. “First quarter” would turn out to describe not only the beginning of 1970 but of the decade itself, as the start of 1971 would prove just as incendiary, with the establishment of the Diliman Commune (and of course, now as a UP freshman, I was there). It seemed that the entire country was politically on fire, with protests mounting by the week, and it would all culminate in what everyone predicted: the declaration of martial law in September 1972. 

It took another 14 years and another “first quarter storm”—the tumultuous months of January and February 1986, following the snap election—to depose Marcos. Fifteen years later in 2001, on another January, yet another president, Joseph Estrada, would be hounded out of office over issues of corruption.

What is it about these first quarters that provoke such firestorms? And do we still have it in us to begin the year on a note of political resolve?

I’ve been worried, like many of us, that the Christmas break, the congressional recess, and intervening issues may have sucked the steam out of the public outrage that boiled over the flood-control scam last year, and lulled the government into thinking that the worst was over and that we could all just settle back into the old routine: let the Ombudsman and the courts do their job, etc. 

What’s worse is if we fall into that mindset, too. The budget deliberations, the Cabral death mystery, the Leviste files, the Barzaga antics, and even a traffic violation episode have all seemed to be distractions from our laser-sharp focus on bringing the crooks to justice. But in fact, they’re all of one piece: demanding better and honest government, the overarching issue we need to press.

And just as the radicals seized the initiative from the moderates 56 years ago, FM’s son, PBBM, can still seize the day by going against all expectations, even against his own nature, and finishing what he may have inadvertently begun: weeding out corruption in government. Never mind the motive—reviving his sagging poll numbers, saving his skin, redeeming the Marcos name, or leaving a worthy legacy behind. He has little choice, if he and his family are to survive. 

There are immediate and concrete steps he can take to achieve this:

1. Activate the Independent People’s Commission. The people are waiting for his next move in this respect; get the enabling law passed and the job done.

2. Impeach VP Sara Duterte. The grounds haven’t changed, and the urgency can only increase as 2028 approaches.

3. Revamp the Cabinet, but replace the non-performers. PBBM knows who they are as well as the public—especially the publicity-seekers whose departments haven’t delivered.

4. Find Atong Ang, Zaldy Co, Harry Roque, etc. and jail the big fish—including political allies. It’s hard to believe that with billions in intelligence funds, the administration can’t track and nail these highly visible fugitives down. Justice is perception.

Do these, and maybe we’ll avoid the generational kind of flare-up and meltdown that followed January 26, 1970.

Qwertyman No. 176: Remembering CAB (1929-2025)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 15, 2025

THE DEATH last week at the age of 95 of Cesar Augusto Buenaventura—known to his friends and associates as CAB—marked the passing of yet another member of that golden generation of Filipinos who lived through the Second World War and almost literally built and shaped Philippine industry and society in its aftermath. An engineer by training, CAB was also a management pioneer, a business leader, a civil libertarian, and a valued adviser to presidents. (As a former member of the UP Board of Regents, CAB would often text me for news about goings-on in Diliman, concerned as ever with the state of Philippine higher education and of UP’s role in it.)

I had the privilege of writing a yet-unpublished biography of the Buenaventura siblings (Cesar was followed by social worker Elisa, lawyer Chito, and banker Paeng). And while Cesar chose to self-publish his own three-volume biography a few years ago (I Have a Story to Tell), the original draft has many interesting anecdotes worth sharing with young Filipinos who barely know their economic history. Let me pull up this except you can keep in mind the next time you gas up at a Shell station, visit the UP Chapel, or see a DMCI building.

As soon as he graduated from UP in 1950, Cesar started looking for a job, and almost immediately found one with a man who would become an important influence in his life and a titan in the Philippine construction industry, David M. Consunji. Right after the war, Consunji began building houses—a skill then in high demand in the war-ravaged city—competing on the principle of “price plus quality.” David also made sure that he got the best people and paid them the best wages. And so a strapping 21-year-old named Cesar Buenaventura, fresh out of college, strode into Consunji’s office and got his first job, as Consunji himself recounts:

“In 1951, I hired my very first engineer, Cesar Buenaventura. He was then a young civil engineering graduate from UP who was waiting for the results of the board exams he had just taken. It was my brother Raul, his classmate in UP, who told him to see me because I was starting my own construction company. I thought he was very capable so I hired Cesar. 

“Soon after, we started doing our own projects, and among Cesar’s first assignments were three houses we were building in Forbes Park. Forbes was not yet a posh village then; land there was selling at just P4.00 to P6.00 per square meter. After that, Cesar and I did some more houses. I made Cesar the cost engineer and field engineer for our various other projects. He also took care of the payroll, which amounted to P15,000 to P20,000 a week.

“It was in the Laguna College project that Cesar took on greater responsibilities. While we were doing the plans, Cesar said, ‘Don’t bother hiring a structural engineer, I’ll do it. I asked him if he was sure he could do it and he said ‘Yes.’ Every time I would see him, long after the building was finished, I would tell him that it was still standing intact, even after several earthquakes, without a single crack on a wall.

“Cesar was my very first assistant, and even then, I could see that he would go far. I wanted him to stay with us, but he decided to go to the United States for graduate studies in 1952.”

(Upon returning from Lehigh University with his MS in Civil Engineering), Cesar rejoined Consunji for some work on the UP Chapel, which had been designed by a young architect named Leandro Locsin. Locsin had impressed Fr. Delaney with a small church he had designed in Victorias, and now he took on what would become one of his signature pieces, the UP Chapel. Fred Juinio served as structural engineer, with Dave Consunji as the builder. 

But armed with his Lehigh degree and eager to make full use of his new learning, Cesar could now consider more options. And the offers came. UP, for one, wanted him to teach, and was willing to pay him P400 a month. But a big petroleum company offered him P300 more, with his salary to be raised upon completing probation as an executive trainee. In 1956, Cesar went with Shell—a decision that would define the rest of his professional life.

In 1975, Cesar Buenaventura achieved what no other Filipino had up to that point by becoming president of Shell Philippines and Chief Executive Officer of the Shell Group of Companies.

Cesar’s rise to the helmsmanship of Shell also got the attention of someone in great need of executive talent: Ferdinand E. Marcos, president of the Philippines and, at that time, the country’s martial-law ruler. With the global oil crisis still hurting the Philippines in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war, Marcos put up the Philippine National Oil Company to explore for oil and develop alternative energy sources, and was scouting for the right man to head it. His eye fell on Cesar, who had just stepped up to the Shell presidency; surely such a man had the skills and the vision to head the new PNOC. Marcos had Buenaventura called to Malacañang. 

While he may have been honored to be offered the position, Cesar remembered his father’s admonition against serving in government. He went to see Marcos in the Palace. Luckily, before Marcos could make his pitch and demand Cesar’s commitment, a phone call from the First Lady, who was in New York, interrupted the conversation. Cesar used that break to gather his wits and to come up with the argument that such a move to government would be premature, coming so soon after his appointment as the first Filipino head of a major multinational company. Cesar suggested that he could serve the country’s interests better if he were able to persuade Shell to search for oil in the Philippines—which they eventually did. Marcos did not press the point, and Cesar was spared.

Yet more of Cesar’s friends would join Marcos’s Cabinet: David Consunji, as Secretary and later Minister of Public Works, Transportation, and Communication, then by Dean Fred Juinio in the same post, followed much later by Totoy Dans, when the Cabinet post was divided into two departments—Public Works, and Transportation and Communications. Consunji labored mightily to fight corruption in that notoriously graft-ridden department, only to find himself unceremoniously removed for refusing to play along. Dans followed the same straight and narrow path when took on the job in 1979, but he would later be, in Cesar’s eyes, unjustly vilified for his association with Marcos, even if he hadn’t enriched himself. 

So instead of taking what could have been a personally and politically costly detour into the Marcos government, Cesar Buenaventura managed to stay on at his beloved Shell, in a position he would hold with distinction for the next 14 years.