Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No. 127: From St. Louis to San Diego

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 6, 2025

I’M WRITING this on New Year’s Day in San Diego, California, where we’ve been visiting our married daughter Demi, who’s been living and working here for the past seventeen years. It was our first Christmas in America in ten years, and our second visit since the pandemic ended. 

Last night, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I watched a long and fascinating documentary on cable TV on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which ran from April to December that year. We Filipinos recall that event for its importation of over 1,000 of our countrymen to demonstrate what “savagery” meant—specifically, through the public butchering and eating of dogs. 

That bloody sideshow raised an outcry even then among both Filipinos and Americans, a pain we still feel more than 120 years after. Lost to many of us as a result of that diversion was the magnificence of the fair in many other respects, especially in terms of advances in science and technology. Many necessities and amenities we associate with the 20th century—electrical lighting, wireless telegraphy, the X-ray machine, baby incubators, and tabletop stoves, among others—were first shown to the public at the fair. 

But the fair, above all, was meant to showcase American ascendancy in politics and culture and in military and industrial might. America had just defeated Spain and had become a global maritime power, and was eager to flex its muscle, so this triumphalism underscored the great urge at St. Louis to introduce the world to America, and America to the world.

Just a few days earlier, we came out to San Diego’s famous waterfront to watch a parade to celebrate the Holiday Bowl, a football game scheduled for the Christmas break, with floats, balloons, marching bands, and military vehicles. It was a moment of pure Americana, brimming with Christmas cheer. I did my best to keep politics out of my mind for that golden hour, but of course it was never far away—especially in San Diego, a border city that could soon find itself caught in the mass-deportation drama promised by the incoming Trump administration, which takes office in less than three weeks.

This morning we woke up to the news of at least ten people being killed and dozens more injured on the street in New Orleans by an ISIS sympathizer plowing into a crowd of New Year revelers. That could very easily have been us at the parade, and again I had to wonder if—despite all the bad press the Philippines gets, with some reason—the US was truly a safer place, given its new realities of normalized and often racist violence. 

It doesn’t even take a bearded terrorist to wreak havoc in American life; as of December 17 last year, 488 mass shootings had been recorded in the US, so often that they’ve become a news staple eliciting just about as much outrage and action as another mugging at Central Park. Anti-Asian violence—to include both physical assaults and verbal or online abuse—has been on the rise, with Southeast Asians reporting the highest number of threats, despite polls showing most Americans believing that anti-Asian-American attitudes are on the wane, post-pandemic. 

That’s not going to deter the hundreds of thousands of Pinoys who, like us, still need or want to visit America each year—mostly as tourists who just want to see Disneyland, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building, aside from picking apples in Michigan, tasting wine in Napa Valley, and skiing in Colorado. The magic of an America we fantasized about—growing up watching Hollywood movies, listening to American songs, reading American books, and following American idols—remains powerfully attractive, enhanced by an image we retain of America as an innocent, benign, and giving place. This might be especially true of us Boomers who learned about snow and white Christmases long before we came across the real thing.

I doubt, of course, that our forebears who stood half-naked in their tribal garb for the delectation of the crowd in St. Louis saw anything so warm and fuzzy about America. Instead they saw curiosity, pity, and revulsion. American “innocence” was always a romantic illusion; America the Beautiful can turn on a dime to become America the Ugly.

When I put all these things together in my mind, I wonder if we 21st-century Filipinos identify more ourselves today with those “savages” on exhibit or with their onlookers, particularly those Pinoys who have crossed over to become Americans—in some cases, even “more American than the Americans,” as I’ve heard it said, proud of their assimilation into a mainstream moving farther than ever to the political right. 

As a teacher of American literature and society—who also studied, taught, and worked in the Midwestern heartland for many years—one thing I always remind my Filipino students is that there’s no such thing as a single, monolithic America, and that, whatever its current majorities might say, American society is diverse and ever more diversifying. To the American right, that’s the “great replacement theory” at work, the horrifying possibility that non-whites—the carnival freaks—are taking over the country, prompting the Trumpist turnaround from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI policies. To me, diversity offers both challenge and hope.

Out of respect for my hosts and friends here in San Diego—some of whom, for their own reasons, voted for Donald Trump—I’ve held my tongue for the time being, telling myself that it’s their country and their choice, although that choice will inevitably affect our lives halfway around the world. 

Among my liberal American friends, I sense an urge to disconnect at least temporarily from political reality and to go into passive resistance while they regroup. It’s a position that I can identify and sympathize with, as we sort out our options in the Philippines of 2025. We survived martial law; you’ll survive Donald Trump, I tell them. To survive may well be our best New Year’s resolution: against the aggravations and vexations of the world we’ve come into, survival is the best revenge.

Penman No. 470: A Collector’s Christmas

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Penman for Sunday, January 5, 2025

MY WIFE Beng and I in San Diego, California for our first Christmas in the US in ten years, visiting our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry. San Diego’s one of those perennially pleasant places where the weather seems to be perfect almost all year round. You don’t come here for a white Christmas—although there’s snow up in the mountains not too far from town. It’s still sunny and warm enough in late December for people to be going around in T-shirts and shorts in the daytime, but for us Pinoys who love to freeze, sweaters and jackets are de rigueur.

We’ve been coming here for twenty years now, and while San Diego is chockfull of attractions—this is, after all, where Comic-Con happens every July (been there, done that twice) and where the waterfront boasts a flotilla of historic ships from a life-size Spanish galleon to the USS Midway—I have to admit that the collector in me loves San Diego for its antique malls, flea markets, and thrift shops, of which scores can be found in the city and its suburbs. I’ve found many a prize piece in these places—such as a working gold-plated 1930s Hamilton “Curvex” watch in a basket marked “Any item $5”—which, for me, beats walking into a boutique and plunking down your credit card to pay full price.

I guess I’m a cheapskate at heart, which is why everywhere Beng and I have gone around the world, flea markets and thrift shops—aside from museums—are at the top of our to-do list. The thrill is even less in the purchase itself than in finding something old, beautiful, potentially valuable—and at a bargain. 

Collectors everywhere know the feeling—that tingle in your bones and at your fingertips when you step into a shop and scan the territory, and notice something in the hazy distance that seems to look like your obscure object of desire. As a collector of vintage fountain pens, I naturally gravitate toward small tubular shapes in black, silver, or gold—which was how, last March, I spotted and bagged a gold “safety” French-made pen from the early 1900s, sitting all by its lonesome at a table at the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris, a 40-euro find for something easily worth five times as much. 

Everyone has his or her strategy, but mine has always been to do a quick march down and around the street or aisle, just to see what’s out there and to catch obvious standouts, before taking a more leisurely and more probing walk back, peering into corners and at the details of particular pieces. It pays to come early—flea markets open as early as 5 am—and we’ve been lucky to bag early-bird bargains at cock’s crow in a barn in Ohio and the flea market at Covent Garden in London.

Unfortunately, flea markets of this sort have yet to become a regular feature of Filipino life, unless we count the Bangkal used-goods market in Makati and the plethora of Japan-surplus stores that have sprung up around the country. 

Fortunately, there’s a global flea market that’s accessible to nearly everyone and which doesn’t even require you to fly overseas and deal with visas, airfares, and airports. That market is eBay, which I like to call the great equalizer, since anyone with an Internet connection and a bank account can tap into the millions of items that eBay has online at any given second.

To my great wonderment and not a little horror, I realized as I was writing this that I’ve been on eBay for 27 years now, having signed up with the website just three months after it changed its name to eBay from Auction Web in September 1997. My first buy was a 1950s Pelikan 140 fountain pen from Germany, and since then I’ve made almost 2,000 purchases covering all my collecting passions, from pens, typewriters, and Apple computers to antiquarian books, paintings, and clothes. (Clothes? Yes! If you’re a rather large man like me who has difficulty finding his size in local stores, you’ll have lots more choices on eBay for less as long as you’re sure of your shirt, blazer, pants, shoe, and hat sizes.) 

Shipping each item to Manila directly from the US or the UK (another eBay paradise) will be too costly, so what I and other experienced collectors do is to open an account with a forwarder like ShippingCart or Johnny Air Cargo, which gives you a local address, wait until the items pile up, and then ship them in a box to Manila. (Check with each shipper’s website for their specific insurance and customs policies.) I generally get my goods within two weeks of shipping them out.

I began by mentioning that we were in San Diego because this ties in with another twist to the Pinoy collector’s and shopper’s strategy: if you know you’re going to be in the US and will be staying with a relative or friend, you can have your eBay or Amazon items shipped to that address over, say, the preceding month, and bring everything home with you in the second suitcase you’re entitled to, saving a ton on air freight costs. 

This time around, to give you an idea of what my Christmas loot has been, I’ll be filling up a suitcase (or more likely my carry-on) with some small things of little commercial value but of great interest to hopeless hoarders like me. They’ll include:

– A copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from April 1825, in which an article predicts that “It appears that Spain is likely to lose her possessions in the Eastern, as well as the Western world” because of rebellions and crimes in the Philippines as well as at home, including “ravages committed (in Catalonia) by wolves within the last twelve or fifteen months…. The last was a young girl who, on the 18th instant, was almost entirely devoured by the wolves” (which, according to the monks, were “animated by the souls of defunct Constitutionalists”);

– A first American edition of Paul Proust de la Gironiere’s Twenty Years in the Philippine Islands, published in New York in 1854;

– A lovely Art Nouveau rocker ink blotter from around 1915, once used to mop up excess ink from fountain pens; and

– A Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in pearl and black from around 1929, once owned by a “Francis J. Keefe” whose identity will be another mystery to explore.

If Christmas was this bountiful, I can only imagine what the New Year will be like.

Qwertyman No. 126: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (2)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 30, 2024

THIS WEEK I continue with excerpts from my interview with the late Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, on his recollections of his genesis as a young intellectual and activist at the University of the Philippines in the 1950s.

“It was all a popularity contest. Everything just seemed to be socials. Homobono ‘Bon’ Adaza, who was then the editor of the Philippine Collegian, tried to organize a socialist club with me. Bon even put out an announcement for a meeting. Bon and I were contemporaries, but he was a year older than me. I think I was a senior by then. I was living with my father on campus, since he was a professor here. We had a cottage in Area 2, then we later moved to Area 14. Our whole family was here. 

“It was because of my readings. I had already read the history of the socialist movement, and I was fascinated by that so we formed a socialist club. I think just three of us turned up for the meeting—the third was Princess. After that we were always together. We weren’t going steady yet then. We continued being friends because she was the only one who listened to my sermons on socialism. You ask her, but I don’t think she had any association with socialism before. We had just that one meeting. 

“Bon was eventually expelled from UP, but I had a hand in his election as chairman of the Student Council and editor of the Collegian twice because we were friends. The editor was elected from among the topnotchers of the exam. 

“The UPSCAns didn’t have a candidate who passed the exam, who were all frat boys. Bon landed in the top three, but he had no supporters. I bargained with the UPSCAns because they held the majority. So I used my vote in the council to push for Bon. Eventually he became editor of the Collegian. 

“Together with the chairman of the council and also the leader of the UPSCA, we decided to hold the first student strike. This was because for one and a half years, UP had no president, with Enrique Virata serving as acting president. It came down to a stalemate between Vicente Sinco and Gonzalo Gonzalez. Squabbling behind them were Jose P. Laurel, who represented the Senate on the Board of Regents, and Carlos P. Garcia who was supporting Gonzalez. No one could get the majority. I was on that strike. I proposed a solution arguing for the Board to take decisive action but also endorsing Salvador Lopez, whose essays I loved, for president. The UPSCANs didn’t care who won, as long as we had a president. 

“Our strike paralyzed the campus for a couple of days. It didn’t last as long as the Diliman Commune, but it was the first—and it was my first mass action. I was the one who was planning the tactics. 

“I was really looking for allies when I met this labor leader who used to be the secretary-general of the Federation of Free Farmers. [We’ll call him Hernando for this account, pending verification of the name—JD.]He claimed to be a socialist and he seemed to have read books on socialism. He was a layman. He was the one who introduced me to labor leaders such as Ignacio Lacsina and Blas Ople. They had a group of young people who revolved around Lacsina, and they met at his office in Escolta. 

“But I continued my reading. Sometimes I felt alienated because they weren’t Marxists. They were just for nationalization, and I felt more advanced than they were. There were other students there, but they were not as involved as I was. When the Suez Crisis exploded in 1957, the Americans intervened in Lebanon. We decided to picket the US embassy. We were  already using the word ‘imperialism’ then. Prominent labor leaders were there, including Hernando. When we got there, the labor attaché invited us inside to have breakfast with the US ambassador. I didn’t want to go in, but Ople and Lacsina thought they could change US policy by convincing the ambassador, so we did. I was utterly disgusted by that experience. 

“I was due then to go to US for my PhD, on a Rockefeller fellowship at Columbia University. Our demonstration took place just a few months before I was to leave. I was an instructor in UP and my college wanted me take up Public Ad, but I wanted to get out of that so I chose Political Sociology. I had become an admirer of C. Wright Mills who worked there and I wanted to work with him, only to find out that he didn’t want to handle graduate courses. 

“I already had a room at the International House in Columbia. Everything was prepared. I already had my visa. But on the day I was supposed to leave, the embassy told me that I could not leave. The consul general showed me the immigration law, which banned the entry of communists, anarchists, drug addicts, and prostitutes. 

“I think they had some earlier information about me because Lacsina later told me that Hernando was a CIA agent. He said that once, he and Blas Ople wanted to invite Hernando for a drink so they could get him drunk and then ply him with questions to extract the truth. What happened instead was that Blas got drunk first so nothing happened. Then he lashed out at Hernando and told him to his face that he was a CIA agent, and cursed him for blocking me from taking up my scholarship in the US. Looking back, I think Lacsina was right!”

Dodong Nemenzo eventually went to the University of Manchester in the UK for his PhD in Political History. He returned to serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, chancellor of UP Visayas, faculty regent, and 18th president of the University of the Philippines. He married Ana Maria “Princess” Ronquillo and they had three children—one of whom, the mathematician Fidel, became chancellor of UP Diliman.

Qwertyman No. 125: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (1)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 23, 2024

IT WAS with deep sadness that we received the news last week of the passing of Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, the staunch Marxist, nationalist, and former president of the University of the Philippines. My wife Beng and I are spending Christmas with our daughter in the US and being an all-UP family, we all knew Dodong and were much affected by his loss. Beng had been a student of Dodong’s at UP, and I was privileged to serve under him as his Vice President for Public Affairs twenty years ago. But long before this, I had met him as a student at the Philippine Science High School where his wife Princess taught us History; he came to pick her up in the afternoon in his Volkswagen Beetle whose door was emblazoned with the Bertrand Russell “peace” sign.

We will be missing the many memorial events that will surely be held in his honor these coming days, so I thought of recalling Dodong in a different way from what most of his colleagues and comrades will be speaking about him. More than ten years ago, I interviewed Dodong for a book I sadly have yet to finish, and he spoke with me about his life before he became the fighting ideologue everyone now remembers him to be. Let’s hear him in this abbreviated excerpt:

“We went back to Cebu after the war. Everything was still in turmoil. I enrolled at the Miraculous Medal School, a Catholic school, and completed my third and fourth grade there. By the time I reached fifth grade, Cebu Normal School was opened so I graduated from there. After sixth grade, I spent a year in the seminary in Cebu. That was my parents’ plan ever since I could remember. I was the only boy among three children, and the eldest. My parents were devout Catholics, and they considered it an honor when a member of the family became a priest or a nun. Since I was an only boy they wanted me to become a priest. I stayed there for only a year, and then I quit. That was probably the beginning of my radicalization. The seminary back then was run by Spanish or Vincentian priests who were supporters of Franco. They looked down on Filipinos and despised Rizal. 

“I went to the University of San Carlos. It was a Catholic school but my father was unhappy with the Science instruction. Our science textbook used the question-and-answer method and my father didn’t like that. He examined my notebooks every day and corrected what my teacher said. He got mad when we were taught creationism, and he lectured me on Darwin and evolution. I answered my teacher back and the principal reported me to my father for my heretical tendencies. My father decided to free me from this nonsense and transferred me to the Malayan Academy, a private non-sectarian school that had very good teachers. I finished near the bottom of my class, failing in Conduct and Tagalog. 

“I entered UP Diliman in 1953. The rule then was that you were exempted from the entrance exam if you had an average of 82, but my average was around 77 so I had to enroll in a summer institute that was like a backdoor into UP if you passed 6 units there. I didn’t know what course to take. My father didn’t want me to take up Law and wanted me to become a scientist like him, but I reckoned that if I did that, I would always be compared to him and come up short. So I chose a course called AB General. 

“The advising line was a mile long. Jose ‘Pepe’ Abueva, a friend of my father’s, passed by and saw me in the queue. He asked after me and I told him that I couldn’t think of a course I really wanted. He tried to sell me on Public Administration, but I didn’t like to serve in a bureaucracy. He said there’d be a lot of opportunities abroad, scholarships, and if I did well I could join the faculty. He had a lot of arguments, but the one that persuaded me was ‘If you join Public Ad right now, I’ll sign your Form 5 right away, and you won’t have to join this crowd.’ 

“That’s how I ended up in Public Ad. When the dean of Business Administration tried to recruit me and my (Pan Xenia fraternity) brod Gerry Sicat who was then in Foreign Service to go into Economics for our master’s, Pepe Abueva again swooped in and told me to take up an MPA instead, and to join the PA faculty immediately. So I became a faculty member in my senior year, just before my graduation, as an assistant instructor. I probably had the longest title in UP: ‘research assistant with the rank of assistant instructor, with authority to teach but no additional compensation.’ I really wanted to teach, but had no actual assignment. I only took over the classes of professors who went on leave. 

“I never joined the UP Student Catholic Action or UPSCA. Well, maybe for one year, but I was never active and then I got out of it. I joined only until I met an UPSCAn named Princess. We always met in Delaney Hall. We were together in the student council. She was representing Liberal Arts, I was representing Public Ad. I joined in 1955, my third year, along with Gerry Sicat, Manny Alba, and Jimmy Laya. I became a liberal and distanced myself from UPSCA. 

“I idolized (Philosophy professor) Ricardo Pascual. I was looking for a cause, but these liberals were just fighting for academic freedom with no purpose. It seemed empty. I was under the influence of Pascual for some time, but we had no advocacy. I joined a short course in Social Order at Ateneo on the papal encyclicals on labor. My liberalism and my growing social consciousness merged and I started reading Marx and Huberman on my own, to find out what we were fighting for. There were a couple of professors like Elmer Ordoñez and SV Epistola who according to Bill Pomeroy had already reached that level of consciousness, but when he left they became liberals, they weren’t really organized.” (To be continued)

(Photograph by Rick Rocamora, used with permission)

Qwertyman No. 124: In Sin and Error Pining

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 16, 2024

IT WAS at an early Christmas lunch when a friend asked if I thought that Vice President Sara Duterte would be impeached, with all the motions now on the table to that effect. I wasn’t expecting politics to be taken up over the merrymaking, but this is the Philippines where we breathe politics, so I obliged. 

I said that while I certainly believed that the VP was fit to be impeached for all the obvious financial irregularities happening under her watch, I very much doubted that it was going to happen. And why not? Because it was going to come down to the votes in the House and in the Senate, and while President BBM and his allies doubtlessly had the muscle to push the motion through, I just didn’t see why they would. And again why not? You don’t think they can come up with the evidence to find her culpable for the misuse of hundreds of millions of public money in confidential funds? They could, if they want to, I said—but again, why would they? 

Think about it this way, I said. Impeachment is political, so the facts don’t really matter much, except for propaganda purposes—especially with elections coming up in a few months. Don’t get me wrong—there are people who take the process and its reasons seriously, as we all really should, because millions going to non-people like “Mary Grace Piattos,” “Chippy McDonald,” and “Fernando Tempura” in the guise of “intelligence operations” insults our non-artificial intelligence. 

VP Sara’s refusal to explain these strange endowments paints her further into a corner—which, it seems, is exactly where she wants to be. When she says, “I’ll be at peace when I’m impeached,” and when her drumbeaters exclaim that the hearings are turning the Dutertes into “folk heroes,” then you know that she’s not going to get what she wants. 

Why would PBBM let her go? What would be in it for him? He doesn’t need a functioning Vice President—he never had one; this VP can’t point to a single memorable deed beyond publishing an expensive book. Cutting off his “Uniteam” partner and depriving her of her last official job would simply give her free rein to wreak more mayhem with no accountability to the government or the people. 

Keeping her on the official payroll—but fundamentally powerless—would be the smarter thing. It was never in Sara’s nature to do a VP Leni, and turn political Siberia into a veritable factory of good deeds. She’ll stew in the OVP, sans her confidential kitty, until she can’t take it any longer and resigns, which could easily be spun into a form of surrender or an abandonment of her sworn duties.

The other reason, of course, is that while VP Sara is drawing fire, PBBM can enjoy some peace of mind, and make benign speeches at this and that forum with a heartfelt smile. He knows that he has benefited immensely from the odious alternative the Dutertes represent in the eyes of many Filipinos, even those who staunchly opposed his candidacy in 2022. 

The Dutertes have done Marcos Jr. the priceless favor of making him and whatever he does look good by comparison—a difference he has substantively emphasized by rejecting his predecessor’s slavishly pro-China policy and (despite reports of continued EJKs under his regime) withdrawing Digong’s murderous tokhangcampaign. He has had his missteps, like that bizarrely ill-conceived Maharlika Fund, but I have been hearing murmurs of approval from otherwise progressive friends—albeit grudging and cautious—for many of his positions, an unthinkable proposition just a year ago, when the wounds of 2022 were still fresh. 

But with more than half his term yet ahead of him, there’s opportunity aplenty for unraveling and for even graver misdeeds. Even now, while we profess shock and dismay over the P500 million spent by the OVP in confidential and intelligence funds for 2023, the House has given BBM a free pass on the even more staggering P4.57 billion his office disbursed for the same purposes that year. 

And that’s why I think it’s wiser to keep the focus on the Dutertes and to keep the VP where you can see and hear her, flailing around and squealing like a stuck pig. The impeachment drama will play itself out in the New Year with more twists and turns than a telenovela, and then, for some reason, the votes will fall short, and the VP will be censured and chastised before being sent back to the pen. For what it’s worth, I don’t think impeachment is the proper penalty here; criminal prosecution, conviction, and punishment should be, but that’s a whole other game.

* * * * *

Christmas will soon be upon us—my 70th, in my case, a milestone I never expected to reach given the many young deaths that marked my generation, but one I thankfully accept as the ultimate gift and blessing, no matter the turmoil in our world today. I personally have much to cheer about and be grateful for—so why can’t I be merrier?

We associate Christmas with joy and new life, with the Christ child’s coming, but there is nothing to be jolly about where wanton greed and senseless death are concerned. 

Everything today points to a headlong dive into a global cataclysm, a World War III that may not have a clear and time-stamped beginning like the invasion of Poland or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but a prolonged and widespread series of provocative and catastrophic events occurring all over the planet—Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, Chinese occupation of Southeast Asian waters, Israel’s pyrrhic extermination of its enemies, North Korea’s incessant saber-rattling and nuclear brinkmanship, America’s surrender of the asylum to the lunatics, and the inexorable degradation of the environment—all of which will come to a head. It will be horrific, but a side of me wonders if we need this cataclysm to remind us of our most basic values and virtues as humans, beyond ideology, religion, power, and wealth.

The other week I had a reader, a pro-Israel partisan, writing me to contend that there was no one else to blame for all the dead children in Gaza but their parents who refused to stand up to Hamas. It saddened more than infuriated me to see that this is where all our presumably educated reasoning has come to—a justification for the slaughter of innocents. I wanted to shake the man by the shoulders, across the Internet, to awaken the terrified and hungry child in him.

Our world will become yet darker and more difficult before it comes to its senses, rediscovers the value of truth, beauty, and courage, and pulls back from the brink of self-annihilation. Yes, I remain optimistic about the future of humanity, about a time when reason and justice will prevail, but I am quite sure I will not live to see this “new and glorious morn.”

Qwertyman No. 123: A Forgotten Hero

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 9, 2024

A HANDSOME book—as handsome as its subject—was launched last week by the Ateneo University Press, a biography of another unsung Filipino hero who would have faded into oblivion had it not been for the efforts of an American expat in the Philippines with a deep sense of history. 

The hero was Col. Narciso L. Manzano, the highest-ranking Filipino in the US Army during the Second World War, and the man who rescued his memory is Craig Scharlin, a former English teacher, gallery owner, and biographer who served for some time as Manzano’s personal secretary fifty years ago. I had met and known Craig earlier as the author, with his wife Lilia Villanueva, of the biography of Filipino-American labor leader Philip Vera Cruz; when he asked me to help him put together what eventually became The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano, I agreed, especially after hearing his story of the life of this remarkable man. 

Craig had learned that the MacArthur Library in Virginia had a 260-page handwritten autobiographical manuscript that had been written by Col. Manzano in 1948, to which were later added another memoir written in 1983 for his grandchildren; his son Jaime had also written a family history. Craig acquired copies of all these and the necessary permissions to publish them; I helped stitch the manuscripts together into a more coherent whole and edit the text.

Though born in Manila in 1899, Manzano grew up in Atimonan, Quezon before leaving at age ten for Spain where his family hailed from. He was a mestizo through and through: Filipino by birth and allegiance, Spanish by blood, and American by military service and later citizenship. After returning to Manila and studying Engineering at UST, he signed up to join the US Army, hoping to fight in the First World War, which ended too soon for him. He went to the US for further military training, and served back home as a Philippine Scout, and then as a colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

It had been one of Manzano’s pre-war missions to map out the Bataan peninsula carefully in preparation for War Plan Orange 3, which MacArthur eventually discarded. It was in this zone that Manzano would first earn praise for his bravery. As Craig’s introduction tells it, “It was Manzano, along with his American co-commander, Lt. Col. Skerry, who led their engineers in setting the explosives to blow the bridge at Calumpit, the last and most vital bridge in Central Luzon…. When Gen. Wainwright decided the bridge had to be destroyed to halt the rapidly advancing Japanese invading forces, the Army engineers assigned this task led by Manzano were on the wrong side of the bridge, the Japanese side. Manzano requested that Skerry wait to blow it until he and his men could get across… but Wainwright had no choice: the bridge had to be blown as the Japanese were advancing too fast in order to save the entire American and Filipino forces and allow them time to retreat to Bataan…. Somehow Manzano, along with another of his American officers was able to evade the Japanese on their own and made their way with all their men to Bataan.”

Working in intelligence in Bataan, he was later captured and imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell; upon release, he was quickly assigned to develop an intelligence network in Luzon, at which he proved exceptionally capable. His wife Charo was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese. But he pressed on, and when his network was exposed, he moved to Mindanao from where he hoped to be taken by submarine to Australia so he could properly advise MacArthur, who was getting poor intelligence. MacArthur’s lackeys scotched that plan, forcing Manzano to improvise as a guerrilla until MacArthur returned. He later moved to the US with his family, where he died in 1986, proud of his life’s work despite being embittered by the betrayals he had to suffer, and disappointed at being passed over for the generalship he had expected.

That’s not even half of the story; brimming with the candor of a man with nothing to lose, Manzano’s memoirs are full of vignettes and reflections about people at war, and Manzano can be painfully scathing in his estimations of those he felt had betrayed his country. He whittles down MacArthur and his aides for what he saw to be their foolish and costly unwillingness to listen to lifesaving intelligence (an opinion shared by historians such as Hampton Sides, who wrote that “MacArthur’s judgement, clouded by his gargantuan ego, was sometimes deeply, dangerously flawed. The men who fought under him, and the civilians who happened to get in his way, often paid a terrible price.”) Manzano was highly critical of MacArthur’s abandonment of War Plan Orange 3, and even said that he would have testified in support of Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma had he been asked.

He not only believed President Jose P. Laurel to be a collaborator, but plotted the failed operation to assassinate him on the golf course at Wack Wack. For this alone, the book should be well worth reading; I among others have a contrary view of Laurel, but Manzano was there and we were not. Manzano has spicy opinions of other wartime and postwar personalities whom we have named streets after—again, quite an eye-opener. He reserved some of his choicest words for Ferdinand Marcos, whom he called “a poser, a phony, a fake, a war profiteer.”

In his introduction to the book, Craig Scharlin recalls his first meeting with Col. Manzano in San Francisco in 1975: The movie “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino had not yet come out. However, the character Pacino played in that movie, Frank, was a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. As portrayed by Pacino, the character had Old-World charm, dressed impeccably, and even in his older age had ramrod-straight posture, showed strength of character and conviction, and the demeanor of an officer who had commanded other men and led them into battle. But he also carried scars of resentment and a certain sadness, a lament of unfulfilled destinies, of real battles won and others lost. And of course it was all Al Pacino—short, dark, brooding, yet still incredibly charismatic.

“That was the man I met in 1975 in a well-appointed penthouse apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco. The only difference was that this wasn’t Al Pacino nor a fictional movie character, but the real deal—a retired US Army colonel named Narciso L. Manzano.”

Meet the rest of the man in the book, which you can order here: https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/manzano-memoirs-life-and-military-career-colonel-narcisco-l-manzano.

Qwertyman No. 120: Greatness of Spirit

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 18, 2024

AFTER A week marked by sordid political revelations, reversals, and antics that make us despair over the future of democracy in this country and elsewhere in the world, it was refreshing and inspiring to be reminded last Saturday that goodness, reason, and justice still prevail somewhere, even against monumental odds.

Saturday was when the 2024 Ramon Magsaysay Awards were handed out to five Asian champions who made landmark contributions to their societies and the world at large  by manifesting “greatness of spirit,” the lofty benchmark established by the foundation granting the prestigious awards, often referred to as Asia’s Nobel Prize.

I was privileged to attend the award ceremonies at the Metropolitan Theater, and thereby to meet this year’s laureates. There were no Filipinos among them this time around (last year, they had peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer), but the causes and concerns that each laureate represented would have resonated well with Filipinos on many levels.

The Thai Rural Doctors Movement (RDM), for example, addressed a problem that has plagued many developing countries around the world: the chronic lack of doctors to provide adequate medical care in the countryside. In the 1970s, idealistic young doctors joined the popular pro-democracy movement in Thailand, but a government crackdown forced them to seek refuge in the rural areas. The doctors formed close bonds with their host communities and attended to their needs. When these doctors later gained national influence, they maintained their focus on the rural poor, to the point that Thailand now has one of the best Universal Health Coverage systems in the world.

In Vietnam, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong confronted a lethal legacy of the war that had nearly destroyed her country half a century earlier. Despite the passage of so much time, many Vietnamese, including newborn babies, continued to suffer from one of the war’s cruelest after-effects: the damage caused by TCDD or “Agent Orange,” one of the most toxic chemicals known, used freely by the American military to flush out their enemy. Dr. Phuong took it upon herself to discover the truth about Agent Orange, seek justice for its victims, and help the afflicted.

Indonesia’s Farwiza Farhan took on a most formidable challenge despite her relative youth: the environmental damage wrought on the Leuser Ecosystem in her home province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra. Working with fellow activists and especially local women, she founded the Forest Nature and Environment of Aceh Foundation or Yayasan Hutan Alam dan Lingkungan Aceh (HAkA), which has succeeded, among others, in gaining a court verdict that led to USD26 million in fines against a palm oil company that burned forests, and stopped a hydroelectric dam that would have threatened the elephant’s habitat. Most importantly, her organization has trained local communities to protect their environment through sustainable forest management.

Mountainous Bhutan is a country often idealized as an idyllic Shangri-la and prime tourist destination, but it is in fact a low-income country plagued by unemployment, inadequate social services, and threatened traditions and values. Taking these problems by the horns, a young Oxford-trained monk has combined his religious devotion and historical scholarship with modern management to help bring Bhutan into the 21st century. Karma Phuntsho established the Loden Foundation to promote education, practice social entrepreneurship, and document the country’s cultural heritage. Phuntsho himself has written a definitive history of Bhutan, whose next stages he and the Loden Foundation will help define.

And finally, Japan’s Miyazaki Hayao has created some of the world’s most memorable animated films through Studio Ghibli, established in 1985 and today a byword in digital animation. While animated films in the West have fed off a broad audience employing superheroes with lucrative market appeal, Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have focused on an audience most difficult to please—children. Nevertheless, Ghibli classics such as My Neighbor Totoro have also called out to an adult fan base charmed by Miyazaki’s craft. This director has taken animation beyond entertainment and even education to enlightenment, always in an engaging manner.

That such good people exist and persist in their passions offers a bracing antidote to the creeping pessimism in which we seem to be wallowing today, an easy and perhaps fatalistic surrender to inaction, tyranny, and hopelessness. We Filipinos are no strangers to distress and despair, with millions remaining in abject poverty, left behind by any growth in our economy. Adequate healthcare remains beyond the reach of most of us, with even middle-class families left devastated by just one catastrophic illness. But neither do we lack for champions and heroes seeking to alleviate these hardships.

Instructively, for the Ramon Magsaysay laureates, their life’s mission often began with dark epiphanies. For Dr. Phuong—who would go on to head Vietnam’s largest obstetric hospital—it was her encounter as a young doctor with babies severely deformed by Agent Orange and their mothers’ anguished and then-unanswerable questions. For Farwiza Farhan, it was returning to Indonesia from her studies abroad, only to discover that the island home whose forests she had embraced as a child was now being ravaged by commercial exploitation. For rural doctors in Thailand, it was seeing poor farmers sell their daughters just so they could pay for the medical care they needed. But rather than be paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge, they decided to do something about it, rolled up their sleeves, and have yet to roll them down.

Something that stands out to me is that these Magsaysay awardees were hardly fire-breathing revolutionaries who sought sweeping changes in one convulsive action, but reformers who pursued their objectives over decades with as much patience as passion—and, of course, vision, anchored on a unquenchable faith in the attainability of a better world, starting with one’s own space and sphere. And beyond individual actions, they set up networks of influence to spread the message and the work, and ensure that whatever they began would survive them. It was never about them, and that’s greatness of spirit.

Qwertyman No. 119: The MAGAverse

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 11, 2024

IT’S NEVER good to write out of rage, no matter how righteous you think your rage might be; the anger clouds your reasoning and could reduce you to incoherence. So as I’m writing this—on the afternoon of November 6, our time, and early morning in America where Donald Trump has already claimed victory in a bitterly fought election—I’m taking deep breaths and thinking of happy and pleasant things, far away from politics, before returning to the task at hand.

After the initial sting, it isn’t so much anger as sadness and consternation that stay with me, a deep sense of regret over what could have been, had the outcome been different. There are at least 15 million Filipinos who know what I’m feeling, having gone through a similar shock that May two years ago, when what we most dreaded happened.

Of course, to many Filipinos, a Trump return won’t make one bit of difference, and why should it? We have enough of our own problems to worry about. But for those like me who see the world today as a widening battleground between good and evil, November 5 was a loss not only for American Democrats, but for freedom-loving and truth-seeking people all over the planet, whose lives will eventually be affected by whatever comes out of Washington, like it or not.

On the eve of November 5, perplexed and dismayed by the statistical closeness of a fight that good sense should have blown wide open, I sent a message to friends saying that “My inner cynic almost wants Trump to win so Americans will see for themselves exactly what MAGA means over the next four years.” So I guess I got my cruel wish, except that to “America” we can now add “the rest of us.” Welcome to the MAGAverse.

But before this moment passes, let me just put this out there to those whom we should hold responsible for trusting a felon with the White House and for whatever he may do hereon.

If you didn’t vote for Harris and stayed home because of what you saw to be her lack of support for the Palestinian cause, just wait until Trump dances with Netanyahu over the graves of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

If you thought that voting for Trump was a vote for the precious life forming in an unborn fetus, start counting the bodies of the living that will pile up in Ukraine when Trump greenlights Putin to take what he wants, with America looking on.

If you’re a legal immigrant from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (one of those “garbage” countries, in Trump-speak) who went for Trump because you think he knows and cares about how hard you worked for your citizenship and sees you as his co-equal American, let’s see how well his Justice Department defends you at your next run-in with the police or with a gun-toting redneck.

If you didn’t vote for Harris because you made a fine point of her waffling on the fracking issue, wait till Trump puts climate-change deniers in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency—which he did, by the way, in 2016, when he appointed a lawyer who led 28 states in a fight against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

If you’re a normally bright and decent person who chose to overlook Trump’s moral flaws and lack of character because you thought he would stabilize and grow the economy, and appoint geniuses to manage the store, wait until the likes of Elon Musk play with government like he did with Twitter. 

(And never mind national security, with Trump being chummy with Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Hungarian tyrant Orban, who just congratulated Trump for “the biggest comeback in US political history…. A much-needed victory for the world!” Who needs counterintelligence when these guys have direct access to the White House? Worry about tooth decay, when RFK Jr. pulls fluoride out of your tap water, because it was supposedly part of a Cold War communist plot to poison America.)

If you took pity on Trump because you felt that Joe Biden had “weaponized” the Department of Justice against him (on cases he had only himself to blame for, like sleeping with a porn star and paying her to shut up), wait until Trump unleashes the DOJ on his political opponents, as he has sworn to do, and anything and anyone else that gets in his way—including you. (I thought that the best endorsement for Kamala was the one from Harrison Ford: “Vote for Harris if you want to protect your right to disagree with her.”)

If this is nothing but doomsaying, what do you think Donald Trump did all throughout his campaign? He is doom, and doom won. This round goes to Darth Vader and the Dark Side.

Excepting Ukraine and Gaza, much of the world will move on like it always has, and so will we. America itself already had a foretaste of Trump in his first incarnation; they survived him and the pandemic as well. We Filipinos survived martial law, right? 

The question is, what did people learn? Or, since those who learn anything eventually die, are people fated to make the same mistakes all over again from generation to generation? There hasn’t even been enough time for the generations to roll over in America since Trump 1.0—didn’t those voters learn anything?

With our own midterm elections coming up next year, we could be telling each other the same things. I better keep my inner cynic in check.

Qwertyman No. 118: A Flickering Flame

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 4, 2024

TOMORROW, NOVEMBER 5 (or Wednesday, November 6, our time), American voters will choose who between Republican Donald J. Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris will lead them from the White House over the next four years.

For more than four million Filipino-Americans, the outcome will bear a direct impact on their daily lives, their choices, their standing in society, their future. For the rest of the world, including those of us here in the Philippines, the result will shape not only how we see America, but also how America sees us in the global scheme of things.

Only the foolish will think that we have no stake in this election, and that America’s position in the world will be the same regardless of who wins. For the people of Ukraine, a Trump victory might as well be his friend Putin’s; for the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, and others dependent on at least the deterrence if not the active deployment of American military power vis-à-vis Chinese expansionism in Asia, Trumpian isolationism can only invite more unbridled aggressiveness from the region’s bullies.

As I’ve often said here before, like many millions of Filipinos, my stake is more personal than that: our daughter lives and works in California, and my sister is also a US citizen, both of them contributing productively to that country’s economic and social well-being. Both are proudly voting and campaigning for the only candidate who offers real hope for the future of America and the world: Kamala Harris. To them, she represents not just the right political but also and even perhaps more importantly the right moral choice.

Of course, I totally agree. Why anyone would vote for a man who even many of his supporters admit is a convicted felon, a habitual liar, a womanizer, a pervert, a racist, a chauvinist, and a would-be dictator is beyond me. But apparently enough Americans will, enough to make all polls point to a dead heat between the two candidates, with the outcome likely to be decided by voters in a handful of so-called “battleground” states.

Among those many millions of Trumpists willing to overlook his not-insubstantial shortcomings are legions of Fil-Ams who—despite having historically voted Democrat as an ethnic minority—now find common cause with Trump’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric (it isn’t even about illegal immigration anymore, but about immigrants from “garbage” countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) and his supposed “anti-abortion” stance (since diluted for political expediency). Among other single-issue MAGA voters, “the economy” remains their strongest reason for choosing Trump, despite 23 Nobel-prizewinning economists writing that Trump’s tariff-based economic plans will be disastrous for the US.

Eighty-two Nobel laureates, in fact, are on record supporting Harris, but that clearly matters little in an election driven more by primal fear than by truth and reason. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson lamented, “How sad it must be—believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.”

My own sense is that many Trump voters won’t be voting for Trump the man, whom his sharper and more hidebound supporters—many of whom, like Sen. Ted Cruz, he has savagely maligned but who have masochistically endured his insults to ensure their own survival—will admit before God to be the lowest of the execrably low. They will be voting for the deep grievances and resentments that Trump has so craftily stoked in them, and against the idea of an “elite” and a “swamp” that Trump and his new acolyte Elon Musk, strangely enough, represent more visibly than most Democrats.

Thus the very real possibility remains that we may wake up Friday morning to the specter of Trump 2.0 and whatever it will bring. Should that happen, we can imagine the global wave of consternation and dismay that will ensue among liberals and progressives everywhere. On the other front will resound the triumphant cheers and chuckles of global despots and their minions.

All this brings me to what I suspect has been my real worry all along—not the US election, about which we can do nothing, but our own political horizon, on which familiar dangers are looming large.

At least one online pundit with an unusual point of view has lauded the recent performances of Vice President Sara Duterte and her father former President Rodrigo Duterte at their Senate hearings as a kind of resurrection—in the very least, an affirmation of their continuing political viability, if not resurgent power. 

The Dutertes mastered their fumbling inquisitors, this commentator crowed, reporting that the gallery even clapped for the senior Duterte at the end of a raucous session at which he virtually confessed to willfully causing the summary execution of suspects without ever being prosecuted. The Dutertes, he seemed to imply, remain above and beyond the law; with their cohorts in office, they are the law, or shall soon be again.

Indeed Philippine politics has become a theater where bravado, bluster, and buffoonery matter. We cannot even tell the actors from the characters any longer. Lies resound louder than the truth, and the audience rewards the best “hugot line” with wild applause.

The upcoming midterm election already promises to showcase the worst of our political predilections, with family dynasties and patently unfit candidates crowding the top of the poll rankings.

So if the Americans choose Trump over Harris, why should we be surprised? Where character, reason, and talent no longer matter, the tyrants rule with fools at their feet to keep the populace amused.

But if Kamala Harris wins, whatever it brings to America, it will mean for me that, however fragile, hope remains for good sense to prevail even in extremely fraught situations such as ours. If only for that flickering flame, I pray she wins.

(Image from newsweek.com)

Penman No. 467: Recovering Our Memory of the Sea

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Penman for October 20, 2024

I’VE OFTEN remarked, in academic conferences, about the glaring absence of the sea in our mainstream and modern literature, beyond serving as a decorative backdrop or romantic element. I recently learned that this may not be so true of the native literatures of the Philippine South, for whose people the sea is their economic and cultural lifeblood, but for most of the rest of us, the only sea we’ll ever know is Boracay, or the Dolomite Beach.

That’s a sad thing when we consider that the Philippines—the world’s second largest archipelago after Indonesia—also has one of the world’s longest coastlines (over 36,000 kilometers), is rich in marine biodiversity, and can look back to a long, proud, and continuing seafaring tradition. Despite the alarming depletion of our marine resources due to overfishing and damage to marine ecosystems, we continue to rank high among the world’s fish producers; ironically, our fishermen are among our country’s poorest citizens. And for many decades now, the Philippines has sent out its seafarers to crew the ships of the world—over 550,000 of them last year, making up a fourth of all the world’s seaborne workers.

To go back even farther into the past, pre-Hispanic Filipinos built the balangay that helped populate Austronesia as well as the speedy warship, the caracoa; in Spanish times our ancestors built the galleons that crossed the oceans. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville referred to Filipinos aboard the whalers as “Manila men.”

Behind these figures runs a compelling human and social drama, but it’s a story largely unknown and untold to our own people, and what little we know is fading even faster as more of us leave our islands for the big cities, slowly but surely losing our personal connections to the sea. We encounter sea life only in the fish market or the seafood section of the grocery, or in tin cans; our children do not know the names of fish, which many now refuse to eat, in favor of sausages and noodles.

Thankfully, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has done something critically important to fill this gap in our collective memory—by establishing a Museum of Philippine Maritime History (MPMH) that tells the story of our seafaring past. And it’s significant that this museum isn’t located in Manila, which would seem to be the logical first choice given Manila Bay and its port, but in Iloilo, which has also had a long and continuing affinity with the sea. Iloilo has historically supplied many if not most of the country’s seafarers to the global market. The city has a plethora of schools offering maritime courses, ensuring the continuity of talent.

I stumbled on the MPMH during a recent visit to Iloilo—among my favorite local destinations for all the obvious reasons (the food, the Esplanade, the heritage houses, the churches, the hospitality, the culture, and of course the people). The amazing boom it’s undergone over the past two decades under the sponsorship of former Sen. Frank Drilon and his local counterparts has dramatically transformed the city’s physical and economic landscape, but it hasn’t forgotten its past as it moves resolutely forward. 

Iloilo has long been known as the city of museums. Aside from the Museo Iloilo and any number of restored mansions, it now boasts the Museum of Philippine Economic History, which chronicles the city’s and region’s central role in sugar, shipping, and commerce; the Rosendo Mejica Museum, which celebrates Iloilo’s journalistic heritage (and I’m proud to say that my wife Beng descends from a Mejica); and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, which places Iloilo squarely in the center of cutting-edge art production.

The MPMH, which opened in January 2023 at what used to be the Old Customs House on Calle Loney and Aduana in City Proper behind Sunburst Park, walks the visitor through exhibits covering the past until the Spanish era, and the American period to modern times. One very informative section presents the variety of Philippine boats (biray, casco, vinta, batil, etc.); scale models bring some to life. Key figures in our maritime history such as Luis Yangco (1841-1907), who had a shipping empire and supported the revolution are introduced. Historical photographs, posters, and other artifacts provide vivid visual proof of how vital the maritime industry was to our economy and society. Another panel notes the many waterborne festivals we Filipinos hold throughout the country, such as the Pista ‘Y Dayat in Lingayen, Pangasinan every May, and the Bangkero Festival in Pagsanjan, Laguna every March.

It’s not a huge gallery, and one wishes there were even more artifacts on display to ponder, but in terms of curation and presentation, the MPMH can hold its own, given its present limitations, against other international museums of its kind, with crisp, clear graphics, well-chosen items, and useful and interesting detail. (I’ve had the privilege of visiting the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in the UK and the Museo Naval in Madrid, so as global standards go, those two maritime giants would be tough to match.) The MPMH’s best come-on—which probably accounted for the hordes of students present when we came by—is that it’s absolutely free, although donations are welcome. That’s a great start, with the kids, toward recovering our memory of the sea.