Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No. 220: Living with Evil

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 19, 2026

A YOUNGER friend messaged me last week to ask for some advice. Would it be wrong, he said, if he left the country in the event that the Dutertes returned to power? He was neither a political figure nor a tycoon, but just an ordinary middle-class citizen engaged in his own small business.

What revolted him was the thought of sharing space with millions of fellow Filipinos who, regardless of the Senate impeachment trials, still want a Duterte in the Palace.

In another era, until a few years ago, I would have told him, “Don’t. Stay here. Persevere. Endure. Fight on.” Instead, I found myself texting him back, “If that’s an option, why not? Might be time to give yourself a break.”

There’ll be many who’ll be unhappy with that reply, but can you really blame someone who believes that a Duterte restoration will be nothing short of a zombie apocalypse, and who’ll want to escape?

Me? I’ll probably take my own advice, stay put, and find a way to survive. (We do have an option—a daughter living in the States who’ll only be too happy to have us over, but who’s the crazy foreigner who wants to live in Trump’s America?)

I’m no Pollyanna, and maybe it’s just the Boomer stubbornness in me, but I haven’t given up on this country yet, despite all the aggravations we have to live with. Living with evil is what it is—the traffic, the pollution, the floods, the poverty, the injustice, they didn’t just happen; they’re part of the architecture of a State fashioned by morally corrupt and greedy people who couldn’t care less about others.

That’s pretty dismal, I know, and even more reason for my friend to flee. Still, there’s an upside to all this: if only because of the floods and traffic et al, our people seem to be waking up to the existential need to fight corruption, practice good governance, and educate our young so they’ll know and do better than we ever did.

Even the DDS comeback that terrifies my friend might not happen, or come apart with time.

I’ve long argued—and I could be whistling in the wind—that the DDS faithful are not a monolithic bloc. Yes, most of them come from Mindanao and the Visayas, but most are also poor, a more universal and distributed trait. (Don’t count the social media trolls and the hired help.) I suspect—or at least I hope—that many might yet be persuaded to reconsider their loyalties, likely less by any Kakampink logic than by their own harsh realization that they have been betrayed and even stolen from by their patrons.

Sadly, whoever wins in 2028, I think it will take at least two more generations for those learnings to take root. Our present principals have to vanish from the scene to refresh our political stock and spirit, which is why educating our youth today—in school or through the Senate hearings—is crucially important.

If the Dutertes prevail, it will be terrible, but the sky will not fall. We will find ways to keep our heads above the floodwaters; most of us will persevere, and some if not many will fight on.

My own best antidote to despair over our political fortunes is to remind myself that we survived martial law. Having said that, I should add that survival often involves some degree of acceptance, creative adaptation, compromise, and even complicity.

Again I recall Nick Joaquin’s observation that a few weeks after the Japanese marched into Manila, things uncannily returned to normal—not that we embraced the invaders, but had found reasons and ways to persist.

I know that the once much-vaunted word “resilience” has become almost pernicious in our appreciation of it today, but it’s no less true for all the beatings it’s taken.

In a poem about the Second World War, W. H. Auden describes this urge to maintain or feign normalcy amid chaos:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home.

The true danger lies in forgetting the big picture as we fuss over the details of daily routine and struggle. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has this marvelous episode from his novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” where his protagonist—a stonemason banished to the Soviet Gulag—is assigned to build a brick wall, a task he performs with great pride and precision, momentarily oblivious to the fact that he is reinforcing his own prison.

Last week’s tributes for and tirades against the late Cesar Virata again brought to fore the issue of complicity in an oppressive regime. He wasn’t alone. There was—and there remains—a small but vigorous resistance to dictatorship, but at least until EDSA, many of us learned to make our bed with Marcos and to lie in it.

Living with evil is a given part of the human condition, and it’s what we do in relation to it that ultimately defines us. There are those who would try to have as little to do with it as possible, and who would demand the same moral consistency of others, but it’s hard to avoid. It’s not some dark entity out there, or even a stranger across the hallway or in the seat next to you; it’s in you, that part of you that thinks killing drug suspects was a good idea.

What may ultimately bring us all together and move this country forward as a whole is the realization and acceptance of the fact that very few of us will come to the table with pure consciences and clean hands. Living with evil leaves stains, but even the stained come with valuable experience and insight.

Sometimes it’s not the obvious enemy, the ones most different from us, who bring the most pain and aggravation, but those closer to us, the ones we agree with on nearly everything—but who disdain and even demonize us for that ten percent we disagree on. Black or white suddenly counts less than shades of red or pink.

As Bertolt Brecht put it in his poem “To Those Born Later”:


Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Evil is more singleminded and less quarrelsome than the good. It is not so easily distracted; it does not forget. It will expand at all costs, seize every advantage, tolerate and even accept tactical differences, take and exploit whatever’s available.

If we can be as adept as evil and pitch as wide a tent, then the good in and among us might yet prevail.

Qwertyman No. 219: Notes on Cesar Virata (1930-2026)

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 12, 2026

FOR A personality so closely associated with the Marcos regime, it was inevitable that the obituaries following the passing last week of former Prime Minister Cesar Virata would reflect a broad range of opinion. 

The gentlest take on the man was that he was an honest, modest, and hardworking academic who found himself with an opportunity to help direct national economic policy, and who did his best, within a profligate bureaucracy, to mitigate economic catastrophe and sustain international support for the Philippines.

At the harshest extreme is his depiction as a complicit enabler of Marcosian martial law, a window-dresser for the regime, and ultimately an ineffectual technocrat—like others of his training and generation—who refused or failed to acknowledge the crimes of the regime he had been serving faithfully.

Those assessments came freely in social media last week, from friends I respect on either side. The variance told me as much about how we choose to remember history as how we choose what to forget, or at least to mediate after half a century, which probably tells more about us than about the other person.

I had several opportunities to meet with and to interview PM Virata, as he most likely would have wanted to be remembered, in the course of completing books to which he had something to contribute from his vast experience. We discussed mainly his life as an academic and as one of SGV’s early pillars, as well as being a member of Cavite’s prominent Aguinaldo and Virata clans. Inevitably—usually after the formal interviews, when he took me out to lunch for a more relaxed chat—he opened up about his life as a Marcos technocrat. He allowed me to take notes, from which I now share some interesting episodes and insights—edited for clarity—that might help complete whatever picture of the man we had in mind.

On martial law: “We didn’t know about the preparations for martial law. The President kept it to himself…. I was in the US when martial law was declared. I was attending a World Bank meeting. I went to my hotel room in DC, where we often stayed, although the actual meeting was at the Hilton. I got a call from one of the more senior Department of State reporters who had covered the negotiations on the Laurel-Langley Agreement. He said, ‘Don’t you know, Mr. Secretary, that martial law has been declared?’ I said no. That was around 4 pm because I had a 5 pm tennis game with Ambassador Suarez, who must also have been surprised, because he didn’t know, either. I thought of calling Joy, but she would have been asleep then, so we played our game and I waited until around 6 am to call her. When I did, the operator said, ‘All calls are suspended to the Philippines.’ Later, Alex Melchor and I were told to go to San Francisco and LA on our way home to tell the Filipinos and the consulate there about martial law. I still didn’t know what we were supposed to say. Eventually, when that same American reporter asked me for my reaction to martial law, what I said was, ‘Well, the Philippines just joined the rest of Asia,’ because everyone else around us had declared martial law—South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.”

On the Aquino assassination: “August 21st, Ninoy was killed. I was at home in Philam that day. Joy was having a show in Makati, so I had lunch with my sister in Kalayaan. I went home and I fell asleep. I was woken up by my military aide, saying that Sen. Aquino had been killed and that the President would be making an announcement soon. We had a TV and a radio in my room and turned both of them on, but the President didn’t appear, just his photo. It turned out that he was about to have an operation. We were called to Malacañang, but when we got there, the guards told us not to approach the President, because he was all bundled up. He was really struggling and had to be helped to the elevator. We learned that he was going to have a kidney transplant! He did instruct us to pay our respects when Ninoy’s body arrived. We went to the house on Times Street but we weren’t allowed in, so I wrote a letter to Butz Aquino, who was the only one I knew then.”

On the Constitution: “I just learned recently that a Cabinet meeting was called right after martial law that I was not present at. The issue presented by the President to the Cabinet was that he had received a summons from the Supreme Court because there were petitions asking for martial law to be declared unconstitutional. There was a group that included the military and I think even Sec. Abad Santos who were in favor of declaring a revolutionary government. But the President did not accept this. He said, ‘How can you assert civilian authority over the military without a Constitution?’ He really believed in Atty. Estelito Mendoza, so he asked Mendoza to respond to the Supreme Court summons, and Mendoza said he’d try to argue that this was a political issue and not within the Court’s jurisdiction.”

On becoming Prime Minister: “The President kept me concurrently as Finance Minister, but my weakness really was that I wasn’t a politician, so I wanted Jose Roño, the Minister for Interior and Local Government, to be my deputy because he knew the local governments and politicians. At that time, Foreign Minister Romulo wanted to be the deputy PM. CPR said, ‘Look at Singapore, Rajaratnam serves as both deputy PM and foreign minister.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m not a politician and you’re away most of the time, so how will I operate? If there was more than one deputy prime minister, I’d probably nominate you, but there’s only one vacancy!’”

There was a lot more I learned from PM Virata, both about and outside of martial law, but there are some stories you realize are being told to you in confidence that are best kept that way. It’s a sad thing that the general tendency these days—especially in social media—is to reduce people to their politically posterized worst, discarding the innate complexity in every person. Maybe I’m too naïve and tolerant, but the fictionist in me looks for those complexities and ambiguities rather than bottomlines better left to accountants and scholars. 

One detail I do remember about Cesar Virata was that he was already dean of the UP School of Business Administration (which now bears his name) when his father Enrique, a professor of mathematics, was named Acting President of UP. Cesar resigned and joined SGV rather than put both of them in an awkward situation. I know his detractors might say that he could and should have exercised the same delicacy in his later positions in government, but that’s a longer argument for another time.

Qwertyman No. 218: A Dead Man’s Voice

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 5, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 217: The Edjop Effect

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 28, 2026

I’LL GET right to the point: my wife Beng and I, along with a younger couple, caught one of the last few screenings of the movie “Edjop”—and we all emerged so moved, albeit in different ways, that we had to spend another hour-plus over coffee just to process what we saw. 

It wasn’t even a matter of “liking” or “not liking” the movie or director Katski Flores’ and scriptwriter Jade Castro’s treatment of the life of the martyred activist Edgar “Edjop” Jopson. Grappling with the broader contours of the story, we were in no mood to quibble over details gotten wrong (and yes, there were a few) or political lines blurred, as many subsequent reviews and critiques seem to have focused on, for their own good reasons.

For Beng and me, the impact was personal, having been activists ourselves who came of age during that tumultuous First Quarter Storm that Edjop—perhaps inadvertently—helped launch. We saw “Edjop” for what it likely set out to be—the story of a young middle-class idealist’s radicalization in an environment of gross injustice, poverty, and oppression. What made it particularly poignant—and this for me represented the film’s true strength, although others may have seen it as a needless diversion—was its framing as a father-daughter story, of a younger generation’s belated understanding and acceptance of their elders’ actions and even excesses. I found it well acted, especially the major roles.

Full disclosure: director Katski had interviewed me, among many others, even while the film project was just getting started, to get my views on Edjop. (She had, of course, other excellent sources, including Bing Pimentel’s books on the man and the period and Joe Cuaresma’s documentary.) I told Katski that I could contribute very little beyond impressions gained from one brief encounter with Edjop.

That encounter happened a few days before January 26, 1970—the date of Ferdinand Marcos’ State of the Nation Address at the old Senate building (now the National Museum), for which the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), which Edjop headed, was planning a massive protest rally. An organizational meeting for that rally was held somewhere in Quezon City, and for reasons I can no longer remember except possibly that I was already an activist at the Philippine Science High School, I was there, more of a kibitzer than anything.

I had just turned 16 a few days earlier. We had rallied in high school for local demands such as a new and larger building, but January 26 was going to be our first big exposure to national issues, and we took the lead from the NUSP, the so-called “moderates,” being then deeply mistrustful of the radical Left under the Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (KM-SDK). I recall that meeting of senior NUSP leaders and their allies, and Edjop in a white shirt or barong. What struck me was his earnestness, his passionate belief in his cause, conveyed in an even voice and manner. 

We joined the January 26 rally, assembling on the grounds of the University of Sto. Tomas, bearing “J26M” armbands. We marched to the Senate where Marcos was speaking. I was too far from the entrance to follow everything, but I could see that the KM-SDK were also there in front, and I would later learn (though this account might yet be corrected) that Edjop had decided to terminate the rally early because things were turning ugly, but then SDK firebrand Gary Olivar, a formidable speaker, grabbed the microphone to agitate the crowd. Marcos emerged, a black cardboard coffin was thrown his way from somewhere, the security forces moved, and a melee ensued. We ran for our lives. The FQS had formally begun. 

We moderates were almost as indignant about the way the Left had hijacked the event as by the State’s brutal response; I stayed out of the January 30-31 protest rally that proved even more violent, but watched on the news as students were teargassed and truncheoned along Mendiola and Malacañang. I dreaded what lay ahead; I was due to graduate from high school that year. It should have been a time of hope, but I knew only that something was terribly wrong, that the future was going to be harsh, and that I was as confused as anyone about what to do and whom to follow.

As it turned out, history carried a very wry sense of irony—even humor, were the setting not so tragic.

Within that year, I entered UP and almost immediately joined the Nationalist Corps, the Philippine Collegian, and the Alpha Sigma fraternity. The Nationalist Corps became my entry point to the SDK, and now I saw the “clerico-fascist” moderates to be sorely misguided and wanting in revolutionary fervor. In Alpha Sigma, one of my fraternity brothers was none other than the Gary Olivar we blamed for the J26M fiasco; in the Collegian, our editor was another frat brod, Tony Tagamolila. 

As the decade moved on, I would be arrested and imprisoned, and upon my release, I would take on a writing job I needed—with the government. Tony Tagamolila would die in an encounter with the military in Panay. Gary Olivar would move to the US and study at Harvard (and much, much later would become PGMA’s spokesman).

Little did I know that Edjop himself had become radicalized and was performing far more dangerous tasks in Mindanao than most of us ever did even in Manila. His death fell like a rebuke to those who had doubted him. Meanwhile, I had resigned from my NEDA job to go back to UP to study and to teach, and by the time the Ninoy assassination and EDSA happened, I had become convinced—as I still am—that the middle road remains the most viable if not the only one forward. It seems that I’ve returned to Edjop’s NUSP. 

I don’t know what Edjop himself would think of our situation now, of another Marcos in Malacañang trying to face down a possibly even more vicious alternative, of a CPP fractured by internecine warfare, of a people too easily swayed by rumor and shadow. If the effect of Edjop—the movie and the man—is to make us think of where we ourselves stand today, then the effort of making this film will well have been worth it.

Qwertyman No. 216: The Law on Trial

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 21, 2026

LIKE MANY young Filipinos of my postwar generation, I once dreamt of becoming a lawyer. Alongside medicine, it looked to be the most challenging and the most rewarding if not the noblest profession one could get into. Medicine was also a public service, yes, but one basically remained a doctor forever, while a lawyer could go on to business, politics, or the Supreme Court. It occurred to my teenage mind that the only thing a good lawyer needed was a sharp brain—and the gift of gab, which I thought I had, at least the second if not the first.

Indeed my father Jose Sr., reputed to be the smartest boy in our island province, also wanted to be a lawyer, but was too poor to become one. So having the wits and the words but not the degree, he ended up writing speeches and drafting documents for politicians and bosses who were lawyers. 

Much later, it took my younger sister and brother to achieve his dream. Myself, I entered college on the red carpet of the First Quarter Storm, and with the way the country was going, I had decided even in high school that there was no future for the law in a lawless place, and chose Engineering (and, when I failed my Math, eventually English). The imposition of martial law and my subsequent incarceration hardened that perception: the law was for the powerful, but certainly not for me.

EDSA and the restoration of our civil liberties did much to change that. I followed and listened to such luminaries as Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, Jovito Salonga, Joker Arroyo, Rene Saguisag, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, Jose W. Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada, Haydee Yorac, and others of their caliber and character, and I was convinced and relieved that the lamp of truth, reason, and justice would finally shine brightly over our benighted nation.

And then the 2000s came in, and with them the long backslide into the morass of corruption and authoritarianism—much of it enabled and justified by a new generation of lawyers with far fewer scruples than their predecessors. Amidst this transactionalism, my old pessimism has returned, moderated only by my knowledge that many good and honest lawyers remain to carry on the fight.

The Senate’s current impeachment hearings in the case of Vice President Sara Duterte led me to wonder how they might affect young students contemplating a future in the legal profession, and how the general public perceives lawyers and the law itself today, given what they’ve seen.

I posed these questions to some lawyer-friends who have also followed the trial keenly. First, what impression of lawyers has the trial so far left on the general public?

“Negative overall,” says Lawyer A. “Because of the way the Senate is conducting the impeachment trial, the public was collectively exposed to adversarial litigation. So DDS partisans would praise the defense lawyers and bash opposing counsel, and vice versa, not necessarily with any real appreciation of the legal points made. The people are provided with new information but we doubt if these were properly processed. More than anything else, we sense this exposure to adversarial lawyering has further fed political polarization.”

“Overall negative,” concurs Lawyer B. “We cannot blame those who came away thinking even more negatively of lawyers.” But, she explains further, “It is easy, from the outside, to assume that a lawyer believes every word he says. That his argument is his opinion, that his client’s cause is his own. More often it is not. Lawyers are frequently called to carry out a client’s instructions, to give shape to a vision that is not his and to set aside, quietly, what he might feel or think about the matter. It is not necessarily being a mercenary, it is the job. Of course, none of that spares you from the consequences of taking up the cause of the genuinely indefensible. You must be prepared for the scorn of your fellow lawyers as well as of the public. The profession does insist that everyone deserves a defense but it does not promise you will be admired for providing it.”

But there were bright spots as well. Lawyer B continues that “The most brilliant moments of the trial that made me proud to be a lawyer are actually the Chill Chel moments. With decades in courtroom experience behind him and brilliance of thought and communication, he showed the nation what a real grasp of the law can do, and how cutting and effective a sharp lawyer whose skills have been honed can be, all without the table-pounding and the theatrics and the condescension.”

For Lawyer A, “The oral arguments of Diokno and Poa and the presentations of the amici curiae, precisely because they were non-adversarial, provided the quietude so needed for important ideas to be clearly presented. Kapunan also provided valuable lessons for younger lawyers on the delicate balancing act a litigator often has to strike between pure trial advocacy and theatrics.”

The theatrics are of particular importance, given that, for over a month now, a Filipino audience of over 100 million viewers—about 70 million of them registered voters—has been privy to an almost-daily dose of courtroom drama. And like theater-goers, what most of the rest of us see and look out for is the performance. All the Senate’s a stage, and everyone stepping on to it is deemed an actor in a role playing someone not quite himself or herself in real life but something larger, more sincere, more logical, more certain of the ineluctable truth. The prosecution knows that, the defense knows that. 

So in a public arena such as an impeachment trial, where ultimate guilt or innocence might come down to perception rather than fact, would good lawyering require more than a solid grasp of the law, but a performative aspect as well, ie, the awareness that one is addressing not just the court but a viewership of millions? 

“Yes,” says Lawyer A, “but with an important caveat. The ‘performative’ aspect should not be drama for drama’s sake, but as a tool toward good communication and education.” Adds Lawyer C: “What makes impeachment cases unique is the fact that it is driven and decided by elected politicians rather than career judges. The performative aspect then of lawyering becomes extremely important. The Congressmen on three-year terms and Senators on six-year tenures need the votes. They have to get up, dress up, and show up, so that their constituencies will continue supporting them.”

All this leads me to think that it’s not really just VP Sara and not even the Senate itself on trial, but the law and the legal profession itself. As they say in show business, abangan.

Qwertyman No. 215: Crimes and Punishments

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 14, 2026

BACK IN the early ‘90s, I wrote an essay titled “Killing Time in Little Earth,“ in which I noted that “In the Philippines, we have crimes and punishments aplenty, but they have very little to do with each other.” I don’t think much has changed in thirty years, as recent events amply demonstrate.

For example, what it is about impending imprisonment that makes corrupt but otherwise bouncy politicians and officials suddenly acquire some debilitating disease that obligates their solitary confinement not in prison but in some swanky hospital suite?

Our prisons are bursting with inmates afflicted by tuberculosis, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, HIV, and host of other crippling ailments. But none of these inmates get the executive suite, and not everyone gets the treatment they need, if only because our jails are almost 300% congested, according to the BJMP’s own figures. Even if prison hospitals exist, they simply can’t keep up with the cases coming in; they’re swamped, and whoever they can’t serve go back into their overcrowded cells, carrying all kinds of communicable diseases. 

We’ve seen this happen so often here that it might as well be part of the official script: “Public officials above Salary Grade 30 charged with plunder will be subjected to a mandatory initial period of hospital confinement for a minimum of three months and to last no longer than the prescribed punitive period for their offense, during which extensive medical procedures will be undertaken to ensure the patient’s good health and fitness for prospective incarceration. Quality and substantial nutrition shall be provided, along with adequate recreational facilities for the patient’s physical and mental well-being. All this shall be at the state’s expense.”

These country-club habitues and their blue-chip physicians have been known to spin tall tales about how they suddenly acquired hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, osteoarthritis, respiratory ailments, and degenerative disc disease, to name the most popular diagnoses.

But to be fair, this epidemic of hospitalitis has been a global phenomenon. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, arrested in Britain, escaped repatriation and certain imprisonment for six years by reportedly feigning mental incapacity. He was later returned to Chile and charged with many crimes, but ultimately escaped judgment by dying before he could be convicted. Former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, convicted of corruption, spent half of his one-year sentence in a Bangkok hospital before being kicked out by their Supreme Court for malingering. He would get in and out of jail more times since then. So politicians and despots find clever ways of replacing steel bars with green curtains, and justice often has to wait in the hallway while they take their time to recover.

Speaking of tall tales…. All this reminds me when, as an aspiring academic seeking relief from Manila’s infernal heat and university politics, I once found myself in a northern hillside village populated mostly by decrepit seniors. A young man there was causing mayhem with all kinds of vile rumors and fiendish schemes, gleefully hurting his elders without compunction for the sheer delight of watching them suffer, as if he hated what he was fated to become. How could someone so juvenile be so evil? 

A community council was called, to which I was invited as an honored guest. I would have been happy to observe the proceedings from a corner, but they sat me in a tall chair beside the village chief and handed me a bamboo cup filled with potent bugnay wine.

It was suggested, only half in jest, that this pest be disposed of as efficiently as possible, such as by driving a stake between his shoulder blades when he was squatting by the river to pollute the flow downstream. 

A heavily tattooed councilwoman less inclined to brute violence proposed instead that they approach the village shaman to lay a curse on the fellow, so that he would retch uncontrollably every time he did so much as utter a mean word, and grow pus-filled blisters between his legs whenever he mentioned the name of a specific villager who seemed to be the prime object of his mischief.

But then the chief turned to me, as the visiting writer and professor from the city, to ask me for my erudite opinion. Surprised but pleased to be consulted, and emboldened by the bugnay, I got up from my chair, thought hard, put on my sagest and most benign countenance, and drew on my command of fiction to offer counsel:

“O most noble chief, tell him this—you are cursed by the power of Fata Morgana! Fa-Tah Mor-gan-ah! Then turn your back on him—like this!—and leave him be to wonder what the curse entails. I trust life’s natural trajectory to bring him down to a deep dark valley where he will feel as much pain and misery as he is causing now. It happens to everyone. But for most of you here, having lived this long, that moment is surely behind you. For him, the worst yet to come, and he will not even know from where it will descend or arise. He will live the rest of his life in constant dread and anticipation of heaven’s inevitable retribution in some frightful form.”

I had to leave right after that to catch a bus to get to a beach resort in La Union before the sun set, pleased that I had contributed some paltry but precious wisdom to the community. The curse I conjured charmed me; I admired the uncertainty of the specifics against the certitude of the outcome.

But I later learned, in a long text message from the comely barangay nurse whom I had befriended in my first hour there, that the council had pondered my advice for about two minutes, and then, when my bus turned the corner toward the national highway, had deputized someone to whack the fellow over the head with a shovel hard enough to make him a slobbering fool forever. 

He injured no one after that, and the villager he had most maligned was kind enough to daily feed him leftovers from the pig trough with a hard wooden spoon, followed by a cool gulp of soapy dishwater, so he must have lived a reasonably long life. I never knew if he reached that low valley I predicted, but I think the plains were punishment enough.

Qwertyman No. 214: Achieved, But Not Aspired For

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 7, 2026

WITH THE announcement last week of its three new laureates for 2026, the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation (RMAF) once again drew attention to that transcendent quality so sorely lacking in our public life today: “greatness of spirit,” the standard by which RM awardees are measured—a greatness achieved, but not aspired for.

This year’s awardees exemplify that spirit abundantly.

Twice imprisoned by Burma’s military junta for his work in the resistance, Bo Kyi fled to Thailand after his second release in 1998. But rather than simply fend for himself or seek a new life away from politics, Bo Kyi met with his fellow refugees and organized the the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (AAPP), on the founding principle that “As long as political prisoners exist inside Burma, Burma will not be free.”  

The AAPP documents these prisoners—it’s estimated that since 2021 when the military regained power in a coup after a brief civilian interlude, the junta has arrested over 30,000 people, releasing only half of them. As many as 100,000 may have been killed.

It is against these atrocities that Bo Kyi and the AAPP are crying out and mobilizing, providing support to the prisoners and their families, and raising the situation in Myanmar to global attention, knowing that the Burmese people are hardly alone in their plight. Honoring him, the RMAF board of trustees said that “His enduring commitment reflects extraordinary moral courage, personal sacrifice, and an unwavering belief that democracy and human dignity are always worth defending—and that even in the face of oppression, the truth must be told, justice must be pursued, and the freedom to believe must be upheld and defended at all costs.”

The second awardee could not have been more different from Bo Kyi in her circumstances. Born to a family of privilege in Bangladesh, Runa Khan (not to be confused with the movie star of the same name) could have remained in what she calls a “glass bubble”—but instead she chose to immerse herself in the lives of Bangladesh’s poorest and most vulnerable communities, the dwellers of the char.

In Bangladesh, chars are essentially temporary islands or sandbars formed by deposits at the delta of the country’s three great rivers—the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Meghna. While these rivers give the country life, they also, along with the sea, bring terrible floods and disasters. Thus, literally and figuratively, the char people live on shifting sand, ever subject to the vagaries of the weather and climate change, and largely neglected by everyone else.

Runa stepped in to help meet their needs—first, with a hospital ship in 2002. But realizing the challenge was far too great to be met alone, she organized an NGO named Friendship Bangladesh to bring social services, education, and employment to the char, and thereby also dignity and hope to its people. The RMAF trustees noted that “In her hands, privilege became not an entitlement, but a responsibility; not a family legacy to protect, but a gift to be shared.”

The third honoree comes from a small Southeast Asian country now associated with wealth and influence, but when Tommy Koh was born in 1937, it was far from that, a colonial backwater with no mind or destiny of its own. Over his lifetime, Tommy would see all of that change—and be part of the change himself, articulating Singapore’s voice and vision at the United Nations as its youngest ambassador at 29.

That exposure would lead to larger and more significant contributions for Koh in international affairs—most especially in what we now know as the Law of the Sea, which he helped to nurse within the UN from a negotiating committee he chaired in 1978 to its adoption as a UN convention in 1982. This law is what maritime countries such as the Philippines are now holding on to in their definition and defense of their territorial waters, especially against the encroachments of larger and more powerful nations.

But beyond diplomacy, Tommy Koh has made sure that a new generation of Singaporeans could take over from where he and his peers have left off, through legal education and through his many advocacies, which include the rights of the disabled and even animal welfare. The Magsaysay trustees observed that “Through his steadfast faith in dialogue, the rule of law, and international cooperation, he has helped make peaceful coexistence possible in a world of unequal power.”

There are good reasons why the Ramon Magsaysay Awards—unlike even the Nobel Prize to which it is often compared—studiously avoid serving politicians when it considers possible laureates. Foremost, I would surmise, is that politicians are elected and paid to serve, so that whatever great social good they do was exactly what they promised and signed up for, and doesn’t need to be rewarded. 

It’s a sign of the times that as soon as I say this, some worthy Filipino politicians leap to mind, basically because they are exceptionally honest, hardworking, intelligent, and selfless—qualities which, come to think of it, should be par for the course, but now so rare that we feel blessed to find even just a few still standing upright in a pit full of reptiles and roaches. So shamelessly hungry for recognition are these lower creatures that they plaster their names and faces on billboards for projects they probably stole from, and yet so dense and dislocated that they would wear designer outfits to flood-relief sorties. 

Measure that against the Magsaysay awardees—and yes, Ramon Magsaysay himself—and understand why we Filipinos continue to be hounded by injustice, poverty, and despair (not to mention flash floods). If there’s a Pinoy out there with the greatness of spirit to keep our poorest safe, dry, and amply fed in this season of storms, he or she would be my next nominee for the Magsaysay, with possible sainthood to follow.

(Photo from news9live.com)

Qwertyman No. 209: The Pinoy Odyssey

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 3, 2026

LONG BEFORE “The Odyssey” became a must-see movie thanks to the tempest of reviews surrounding Christopher Nolan’s highly publicized iMax version (and to get this out of the way, yes, I’ve seen it), it was a must-read book for us as literature majors, alongside its companion epic, the Iliad. I don’t recall whose translation it was we used, very likely Lattimore’s, but like most students, we were reading it for the story, and as these narratives are meant to do, that story stuck in the mind. That’s the function of myth, what I call the eternal past, a kind of memory that feels we’ve all shared in one way or another, even if we were never there, separated by millennia and thousands of miles.

I appreciated the tragic grandeur of the Iliad, which I would bring up in class when I needed to talk about how great heroes fall and about how the epic seems to glorify war and warriors but actually shows how war dehumanizes us. There are many compelling scenes and situations in the Iliad, but I’ve always found the Odyssey more fascinating because, as the Beatles might have put it, it’s a magical mystery tour that takes its hero to every distant shore except, finally, his home, and even when he gets there, it’s no longer what it used to be; home may be a fixed place in the map of the heart but it’s never static, never just as it was.

I’ve often used the character of Odysseus to describe the modern Filipino, especially in my lectures to foreign audiences (just as I would tell Americans that “We were your first Vietnam” to make sure they would sit up and listen). If the Filipino diaspora, in which a tenth of our population has embarked for the farthest corners of the world, isn’t an odyssey of truly epic proportions, then I don’t know what is. 

It isn’t the departure that matters as much as the homing instinct—the desire to come home, however long or how far away one has been gone, for whatever reason. I’ve yet to meet a Filipino abroad who didn’t want to come home, at least for a visit. When they can’t, Filipinos do their best to recreate home or some semblance of it wherever they are. One of my most touching discoveries was a bar named “Kabayan” in a remote corner of New Zealand, which was open even in the mornings for Pinoy sailors who happened to drift along.

In that sense, Jose Rizal was an early Pinoy Odysseus, traveling the world a century before his countrymen did so in droves, neither for war nor economic opportunity but for knowledge, a journey brightened by dalliances with this Circe and that Calypso. As did the original, Rizal came home to find the place badly out of joint, in dire need of reform (although “reform” seems a kind description of what Odysseus did to his wife’s suitors). The big difference, of course, is that in Homer, Odysseus emerges scarred but triumphant, reunited with his family, the beneficiary of a peace enforced by the gods; Rizal’s happy interlude in Dapitan, on the other hand, ends with a son who dies soon after birth, his abortive entry into a foreign war, and his arrest and execution in a domestic conflict.

Rizal’s novels left us with the figures of Crisostomo Ibarra and Simoun—both returnees from overseas, the former initially brimming with idealism, the latter consumed by retribution. That they are the same man speaks to the extremes in which we find ourselves pulled today by our politics, misty-eyed with patriotic fervor over Alex Eala and the West Philippine Sea, and yet deeply divided and darkly cynical when brought down to our immediate realities. 

A visiting professor and former colleague at UP’s English department, Dr. Gerald Burns, found that from Rizal onward, we Filipinos have produced a tradition of what Burns calls the “repatriate theme” in Philippine fiction, involving a hero-figure who goes for an extended stay abroad, perhaps for study or work or both, and then comes home with a “boon,” some social good picked up from that sojourn, to be shared with one’s people. The balikbayan is full of progressive ideas—could be from that newly minted PhD, or that stint in Silicon Valley, or that research laboratory in Germany—and thinks that he or she can illumine a benighted motherland with knowledge, only to realize that new ideas and their bearers are unwelcome, and that the path to progress and liberation is dark, narrow, and treacherous. There are no gods who will make things easy, punish evil, or rectify wrongdoing. The Pinoy Odysseus comes home to find Penelope defiled or worse, having abandoned him; his house is teeming with reptilian politicians feasting on what remains of his wealth. 

The Nolan movie divided audiences and critics with its liberal interpretation of whatever it was that Homer wrote (to sum up my own reaction, I found it entertaining but not particularly enlightening, as I—perhaps from my burdensome position as a writer and reader—kept expecting the script to rise to the occasion). Its best service to us as Filipinos may not be to revive our interest in Western classical mythology—although there’s value in regrounding the present century’s infatuation with Star Wars, Tolkien, and Game of Thrones—but to make us think about our sense of home, and why we keep coming back to a place we sometimes feel should be forsaken. Is our Ithaca worth the long journey across monster-infested lands and hostile oceans? Who and what is it that awaits us at our door?

(Rizal image from RizalsofAbra on IG)

Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 27, 2026

 

LATER TODAY, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be delivering his fifth—and second-to-the-last—State of the Nation Address (SONA). In anticipation of that event, I got invitations from several media networks last week to talk about how SONAs get made, and what I expected BBM to say today.

The invitations were likely prompted by someone’s discovery that I used to be a presidential speechwriter—a title that sounds grander than the job itself, which of course is a privilege in some respects (and presuming your principal isn’t a crook, perhaps more honored in the breach) but also in others a crushing chore.

As I must’ve noted in this corner at some point, in a past life, I wrote or drafted speeches for five presidents since my early twenties—for Marcos Sr., Cory Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—but it was FVR whom I served the longest, and frankly with the greatest satisfaction.

I wrote more than 600 speeches for him as part of a small crew of speechwriters that worked quietly off-site—the so-called West Avenue outfit headed by the late Johnny Gatbonton, my model and mentor in the craft. We operated all those years far from Malacañang—a deliberate choice, to isolate and insulate ourselves from Palace intrigue.

We produced tons of material on demand—there were days when I would write four speeches for occasions as diverse as a bridge inauguration, the Famas awards, a peace agreement signing, and a vin d’honneur, with little to go on—not even Google in those pre-Internet days—but my own wits. And yes, my training as a writer of fiction surely helped, along with a diploma in Development Economics that I picked up along the way. We learned quickly, and we delivered. (I never met FVR as a client when I was writing for him, although ironically, as I’ve related before, he was the guest speaker at the TOYM and Palanca awards when I was an awardee—and yes, bizarrely, I got assigned to write his speeches for those events. I never introduced myself to him as his speechwriter until we met again for a book interview shortly before he died. We had a good laugh then.)

The year’s biggest job, of course, was the SONA. Like I told my interviewers, at least in my experience, no single writer writes the SONA. It takes a bureaucratic barangay to produce one, which probably explains the chop-suey character of certain SONAs you’ve heard. Normally, presidential speeches are produced by the Presidential Management Staff, and the executive departments submit their list of accomplishments to the PMS for consolidation and construction into a SONA. (Under FVR, these inputs ended up with us, although of course the President literally always had the last word.) The President—or his or her chief advisers—might come up with a central theme or slogan, around which the rest of the address could be organized. In 1993, for example, it was “a level playing field” for FVR; ten years later, GMA trumpeted her “strong republic.”

My own sense of a good or ideal SONA is one that’s focused, clear, easy to understand, sincere, and above all hopeful and inspiring. It’s a tall order amidst uncertainty and despair, but it’s precisely when times are bad that people need to hear a message of hope—one they can believe in or at least hold the President to, despite their doubts and misgivings. But that’s just me, as a writer looking for stylistic coherence and a Churchillian sort of impact and memorability, rather than a laundry list of X number of bridges built and Y number of tourists brought in. Leave that to a technical appendix.

The fact is that SONAs are constitutionally mandated documents, a report of an administration’s accomplishments provided as a matter of public accountability. It began in America with George Washington and now continues as the State of the Union (SOTU). For over a century from Jefferson onward, the SOTU became just a written report submitted to Congress; Woodrow Wilson revived it as a speech, thinking that a president had to be seen and heard by the people. We Filipinos took up the practice—and also constitutionalized it—in 1935, with President Quezon focusing presciently on national defense. (Interestingly, he spoke before a unicameral assembly—no senators to complicate life then for a brief interlude.)

It used to be that no one seemed really that interested in SONAs. Even on January 26, 1970, when as a sixteener I marched with thousands of other students outside the Legislative Building to protest Ferdinand Marcos’ SONA and thereby unwittingly helped trigger the tumultuous First Quarter Storm, we neither knew nor cared what FM was saying inside. Today people watch SONAs for the fashion show and for the inevitable mayhem outside the Batasan.

But last year, BBM dropped a bomb at the SONA that I suspect even he didn’t realize was going to be that big. His “Mahiya naman kayo!” broadside against corruption set off a further and indeed continuing series of explosions, all the way to the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte, as well as a Kanagawa-sized wave of expectations that now hovers over the last two years of his administration.

So what will or should BBM talk about this afternoon? My short list:

1. An acknowledgment of the economic crisis our people are suffering, and an announcement of meaningful measures to bring some relief. Talk about horrendous power bills, jeepney drivers pulling 16-hour days, seniors collapsing at ayuda lines: this is reality for most Filipinos today.

           2. An update on his professed campaign against corruption; what next after the ill-conceived and underpowered Independent Commission on Infrastructure? Corruption bridges economics and politics, with public money being used by and for political power. I doubt that BBM will directly address Sara’s impeachment—best for him to stay above it and let the prosecution do its job—but it remains a corruption and accountability issue, and should be taken in that context.

            3. A resolve to pursue these priorities over his last two years. He won’t and can’t use the word “redemption”—a mountain of skepticism still stands in his way there—but I’m sure he’s aware that people are watching what he’ll do next. In the end, it won’t be speeches but deeds that will make the difference—but as he learned last year, a few words can make big things happen. If I were the President—which every presidential speechwriter has to fearlessly assume for a few hours—the best way to think of the next two years is to think of forever.

               

               

               

               

               

               

              Qwertyman No. 206: The Unfinished Building

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              Qwertyman for Monday, July 13, 2026

              AS I noted in a Facebook post last week, attending a graduation at the University of the Philippines, as I did last July 5th, always brings a tear to my eye, especially when everyone sings “UP Naming Mahal” at the closing. No matter all the heartaches, disappointments, and challenges we may have gone through in UP as a student, teacher, administrator, and alumnus, and no matter all our disagreements over failed policies, missed opportunities, and misdirected priorities—as an institution, this university of the people remains immutably noble in purpose, an ideal constantly being realized. 

              More than 5,000 students graduated from Diliman last week, as well as many more thousands in UP’s eight other constituent universities across the country. Thousands came away with honors—raising the question of whether our students have really gotten that much better, or if our standards seem to be getting laxer; the debate goes on, although no one’s taking anything away from the laureates. This was, after all—as UP President Angelo Jimenez noted—the last pandemic batch to graduate, who entered UP in extremely difficult circumstances, tied down to Zoom, without the benefit of campus life for a significant period.

              I sat at the grandstand in Quezon Hall as a professor emeritus among the university’s officials and guests, recalling how I had stood on the other side of that amphitheater more than four decades ago, wondering what the future would be like (short answer: 35 more years in UP). I would become a professor, an administrator, and a retiree, as deeply engaged in university affairs as I had been as an activist toting a molotov cocktail (which I never threw) at the Diliman Commune in 1971. 

              That morning’s guest speaker was former Ombudsman and Justice Conchita Carpio Morales, whose biography I had written, so I was glad to run into her at the processional, and I urged her to give everyone a piece of her famous mind. “I’ll be gentle today,” she told me, smiling. Taking off on this year’s commencement theme of “Gumagalang” or “respectfully,” she spoke on the need for respect of the law at a time of great confusion over who and what to follow. 

              “In a world increasingly divided by arrogance, intolerance, and indifference, the call to gumalang (respect) is not merely timely, but urgent,” she said. “As a magistrate, it pains me to see lawmakers alleged to be lawbreakers. Rules bent, redefined, or misinterpreted to suit individual or group interests. There is little paggalang for those who have limited or no voice at all. The powerless have become dispensable…. The rule of law is the bedrock of democracy. Sadly, in many parts of the world today, the rule of law is being disregarded…. Unfortunately, what we increasingly see today in many places is the rule of man, where the exercise of power depends less on the law and more on the whims, preferences, or interests of those who hold office.” At the same time, she emphasized that “respect” could not be used as an excuse for authoritarianism, or for stifling contrary voices. (And before you ask, no, I didn’t write or draft those words for her. Nobody writes CCM’s speeches but herself, and if you did, she’d very likely pepper your draft with corrections, as generations of her law clerks well know.)

              That was particularly apt in UP, where the commencement ceremonies ended with the customary (by now) lightning rally, and while some slogans sounded rather tired, this year’s emphasis on fighting corruption gave it a particular urgency. UP Diliman’s graduation was taking place on the eve of the opening of the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte at the Senate, titanic confrontation on both sides of which prominent UP alumni were ranged. 

              The irony of the moment could hardly be overstated. Historically, UP has been known to be a bastion of dissent, a haven of nonconformists and rebels of all stripes and colors. I often cite the examples of then UP President Rafael Palma’s daughter Fe, who took part in the first documented student protest action in 1933, a boycott prompted by a tuition fee increase, and of President Manuel L. Quezon being lambasted for extravagance by a young hothead named Ferdinand Marcos. 

              Since the 1960s and 1970s , UP has acquired—inaccurately, I think—a reputation for being a breeding ground of communists, a convenient target for such Red-taggers as the NTF-ELCAC and a good excuse for its billions in funds. (Which reminds me: they should set up an NTF-ELCAC to seek and weed out the corrupt.) People forget that for every Joma Sison we produced a Juan Ponce Enrile; for every Benito Tiamzon a Fabian Ver; for every Lean Alejandro an Alan Peter Cayetano; for every Lorie Barros a Pia Cayetano. 

              As I emphasize whenever I can, even at the height of student activism, the radical Left was always in the minority in UP as it probably was elsewhere; we were just noisier, better organized, more determined, and literally ready to die for our cause. 

              What the usual UP narrative also often ignores is the fact that many of us from the Left who survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law moved toward the liberal middle—indeed, some even to the far Right, becoming its ideologues, executors, and apologists. 

              Surveying this year’s crop of bright and starry-eyed graduates, hundreds of them finishing with high honors, I wondered how many of them would, in the next twenty or thirty years, materially contribute to our people’s well-being, and also how many to its deterioration. I don’t think anyone goes to graduation with malice aforethought, but life has a strange way of shaping and testing character in a way that classrooms simply can’t. As we learned in martial-law prison, sometimes it’s the most seemingly inflexible who prove the most brittle and break.

              At the ceremonies, pointed comments were made by some deans presenting their graduates about all the unfinished buildings on campus—the new Faculty Center has been a decade in the making, with the refurbishment of Abelardo Hall and the UP Main Library trailing closely behind. These delays can largely be traced to mismanagement under the old DPWH, a couple of projects possibly even tied to the Discayas. 

              But it struck me that the truly unfinished building to contemplate is the university itself, in constant reconstruction under pressure from AI, global rankings, and the needs of the people it remains accountable to. Just having marked its 118th anniversary, it could yet be the Sagrada Familia of our national aspirations.