Category Archives: history

Qwertyman No. 88: Wanted: Gentlemen

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 8, 2024

A SHIPLOAD (let’s get that consonant right) of questions has been raised over the “gentleman’s agreement” alleged to have been entered into between former President Rodrigo Duterte and China’s Xi Jing Pin over the disputed Ayungin Shoal in the West Philippine Sea. China has suggested as much, complaining about the present administration’s “inaction” over what it apparently considered a done deal.

According to former Duterte spokesman (should we also call him “former human rights lawyer”?) Harry Roque, Duterte and Xi did pledge between them to “maintain the status quo” in the troubled zone, meaning, there would be no rebuilding or reinforcement of Philippine installations there—specifically referring, I suppose, to the hopelessly decrepit BRP Sierra Madre that has to be the sorriest and loneliest maritime outpost in the world. 

Chinese Coast Guard cutters have routinely tried to block Philippine vessels attempting to resupply the Sierra Madre. A month ago, four Filipino sailors were injured when they were water-cannoned by the Chinese, and their ship rammed. Our resupply ships have been running these Chinese gauntlets to reach the marines on the grounded Sierra Madre, which symbolically enforces our claim to the Spratly Islands, or that portion of it we call the Kalayaan Islands group. This was precisely the kind of situation that Duterte and Xi reportedly tried to avoid with their agreement.

Upon hearing his former colleague’s explosive revelations, former presidential counsel Salvador Panelo quickly went on the air to dismiss them as the fabrications of a publicity-seeker, assuring the public that Digong himself had denied the report. He added that his old boss would never have sold out the country that way. In fact, Panelo claimed, Duterte had brought up the Philippines’ arbitral victory against China at the Hague with Xi—a judgment Duterte had ironically threatened to toss into the wastebasket as nothing more than “a piece of paper.” Roque then went on to explain that the “gentleman’s agreement” covered not just Ayungin Shoal but the entire West Philippine Sea, enlarging its scope exponentially. If it was a lie to begin with, as Panelo suggested, well, the lie got much bigger.

This spectacle of two Duterte mouthpieces not just speaking at cross-purposes but putting each other down would be immensely entertaining if our national territory and patrimony weren’t at stake. It doesn’t really matter who between these two, uhm, gentlemen is right, or whom we end up believing. What’s clear is that either way, beyond token whimpers and some lip service to sovereignty, Duterte and his crew never did much to defend Philippine territorial and maritime rights in the WPS, debating with their local critics on the issue more than with the Chinese, even waging a vain effort to denigrate the Hague ruling and those who had fought so hard for it. 

Given the new administration’s popular pivot toward a more aggressive stance on China, we can understand if Duterte and his boys seem scrambling to be seen as having been patriots all along. Who knows, maybe they were, and maybe we poor kibitzers were just too dumb or too dense to see that. 

Remember when Duterte made that famous “wastebasket” remark in May 2016? Then-spokesman Roque tried to spin that by saying no, no, no, you have to “apply the proper construction” (his exact words) to that statement—meaning (hold your breath), “He really didn’t mean it that way. Instead, go back to his UN speech where he vowed to defend the Philippines against China. When he said ‘I’ll throw this into the wastebasket,’ he wasn’t speaking for himself, he was speaking from the point of view of the Chinese.”

Huh? Forgive me if I can’t wrap my non-lawyerly mind around this “proper construction,” let alone explain why a Philippine president should be expressing the Chinese view.

To help sort this mess out, Sen. Risa Hontiveros has called for a hearing to find out if, indeed, Duterte and Xi had, as the young ones put it, an “MU” over Ayungin and the WPS. Predictably, Panelo thinks this probe will be a “waste of time,” insisting that the reported “gentleman’s agreement” never happened. 

Another newspaper quotes an anonymous Chinese official saying, like Roque, that it did. Under the reported terms of the deal, China would allow the Philippines to resupply the BRP Sierra Madre for as long as it did not reinforce or rebuild the ship. (How the agreement supposedly applies to the entire WPS as Roque claims remains murky.)

One would think that a true, broader, and more meaningful “gentleman’s agreement” in the West Philippine Sea would involve the non-building of offensive structures and bases, the avoidance of violent confrontation, respect for our fishing rights, and freedom of navigation for all nations in international waters—all of which the Chinese have flouted with impunity. Instead—and if true—all our former president did was to ask the Chinese for permission to resupply our own aging and ailing vessel, in exchange for a promise to let it rot. Whether that’s treason or patriotism, you be the judge.

Pending further inquiry, I myself suspect that some kind of bargaining did take place, but I somehow doubt that it was a gentleman’s agreement. For that you’d need at least two gentlemen in the house.

Qwertyman No. 87: A French Sojourn

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 1, 2024

MY WIFE Beng and I were in France last week to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, better known as SciencesPo. They don’t formally observe Holy Week in France (nor, for that matter, do many Filipinos to whom it’s simply come to mean “long weekend”). So we thought that it was the best time to come over and share some of our insights into Philippine literature, art, and politics with young French students as well as our countrymen in Paris, for whom I and fellow writer Cris Yabes, who’s based in France, gave a special reading at the Philippine embassy.

For those who’ve never heard of it—which won’t be too surprising given our Pinoy fixation on top American and British universities—SciencesPo (pronounced SEE-ansPO) is France’s leading university in the social sciences. It now has 14,000 students spread out over seven campuses across the country. Only 4,000 of those students are undergraduates; the rest are graduate students, including 350 taking their PhD. Unlike our universities, SciencesPo’s undergrads can finish in only three years, with their last year spent abroad. I was told that there are about 20 Filipino students currently enrolled at SciencesPo, and about half of its students come from overseas. As a public research university, SciencesPo is supported by the government through a private foundation, an arrangement that gives it a high degree of autonomy.

Founded in 1872, the university has served as the training ground for France’s political elite, producing five out of France’s eight presidents: Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac, Hollande, and the incumbent Macron. Marcel Proust studied here for a year, and Christian Dior was a graduate.

With that kind of elite status comes criticism and controversy, and SciencesPo has had its share over the years. Nevertheless, it remains high on the list of desirable universities, especially for students with plans of joining the French civil service, after further studies at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (At Inalco, another Fremch university, we were surprised to find eight Filipino-French students studying Filipino for their degree under Prof. Elisabeth Luquin, who studied in UP and speaks Filipino like a local.)

Beng and I gave presentations on the Philippines at SciencePo’s main campus in Paris—a sprawling complex comprising ten buildings in some of Paris’ most precious real estate—and I had an additional three sessions in Le Havre, where SciencePo’s campus focuses on Asian studies. Wherever we went, we could see signs of intellectual and political ferment; like their predecessors at the Sorbonne whom we admired for their militancy 60 years ago, SciencesPo students have protested and rallied over many causes from domestic violence to Gaza.

To be fair, these concerns have occupied much of the rest of France as well. In a country where street protests are a time-honored tradition that have a real bearing on political outcomes, differences of opinion can run deep and long, and controversy stalks nearly every issue, from the wearing of religious headgear to the extension of the retirement age. To “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” we must now add “identité,” the subject of identity so central to political discourse in many countries today, especially those with large and strong immigrant populations like America and France.

“Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars—a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity,” noted sociologist Daniel Zamora in an article for Catalyst in 2021. “Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. Building on what we have in common, Macron argued, meant finding an answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be French?’”

Identity, at least, was not in question when Cris Yabes and I gave our reading at the Philippine embassy, thanks to the invitation of Ambassador Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, one of the most amiable, gracious, and artistically inclined ambassadors I’ve ever met. (She was very game as well, happy to hoist an IPA beer with my wife Beng after our talks.) To a fairly sizeable group from the Filipino community in Paris, Cris and I read pieces that had to do with our foreign relations, particularly in my case with our diaspora, which my second novel Soledad’s Sister (which has been published in French by Mercure de France) dealt with. 

In the conversations that followed, I learned that there are around 26,000 documented Filipinos in France, with perhaps just as many existing belowground, most of them domestic helpers. One of them, Zita Cabais, was a victim of human trafficking more than two decades ago, having been enticed to come to Europe with the promise of a visa and a good job. Instead she was brought to Hungary, from where she was led on foot through Europe to finally reach France, whereupon her employer confiscated her passport, effectively holding her hostage. But unlike many other DH’s, Zita fought back, sued her employer, and succeeded. Since legalized, she now works for organizations devoted to fighting human trafficking. (The path to legalization is reportedly shorter in France, but knowing the French language is a prerequisite.)

One unexpected highlight of our visit was running into a group of Filipino seamen in our hotel in Le Havre, prior to my lecture. Beng and I had just come down for breakfast when we heard the familiar chatter of Filipinos at a nearby table. We came up to them and introduced ourselves, and we had a lively conversation during which they explained that they were still waiting for their ship to dock because of the bad weather. I’d met and chatted with seamen like them before in Hamburg and in Christchurch, among other places; as a writer and as a Filipino, I take it as a pleasant obligation.

Competition, they said, was driving them to accept shorter four-month stints at sea. “We barely break even, and it’s a tough life at sea, but we have no choice, since our families depend on us.” Part of my lecture that day was going to be about our Filipino notion of the hero as martyr, of Christ-like sacrifice for the common good. I suddenly realized that it was Good Friday. We had our smiling selfies taken, and they seemed proud to stand with UP professors, but it was Beng and I who felt honored to be there with them.

Qwertyman No. 85: Epilogue to a Novel

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 18, 2024

IT WAS in 1986, shortly after EDSA and my arrival in the US for my graduate studies, that I began thinking about what would eventually become my master’s thesis and my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. It was published by Anvil in 1992 when I came home to resume teaching after completing my PhD. 

For those who’ve never heard of it, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of coming of age during the Marcos years, from the point of view of a Filipino who makes the traditional journey from island to metropolis to the world at large, becoming, in the process, a kind of political chameleon. 

I had sent the first draft directly to several US publishers—my first try at getting a book published abroad—and one of them, Alfred Knopf, responded. They were interested, they said, but they needed some revisions. I knew very little about the book publishing industry then; I had no agent, wasn’t sure what lay ahead, and was in a hurry to see my book out, so I passed on Knopf—which turned out to be a titan in literary publishing—and went with Anvil, which had barely just opened.

I haven’t regretted that decision, although the Knopf deal, had it pushed through, would have been a tremendous break, not just for myself but for Philippine literature as a whole. I could understand that after EDSA, US publishing was hungry for books from and about the Philippines, so that opportunity was there, but I was also impatient to be read as a novelist by my fellow Filipinos, after having written short stories and plays. 

Anvil published the book in many printings and editions over the next two decades, as it got on the syllabi of college teachers who were looking for a novel in English on martial law, alongside Lualhati Bautista’s iconic Dekada 70. This has been my greatest reward and satisfaction from this book—knowing that somehow, it helped some of my countrymen understand what they went through.

It took a while for the novel to gain some traction overseas. In 2010, it was published in the US by Schaffner Press in a dual edition with my second novel, Soledad’s Sister. In 2012, it was translated into Spanish by Maria Alcaraz and published in Barcelona by Libros del Asteroide under the title Pasando el rato en un pais calido.

A few months ago, I received the happy news from my publisher Anvil that Killing Time was being picked up by the German publisher of Soledad’s Sister, which had apparently been doing well in the German market. So now the book is being translated into German, hopefully for a launch by Transit Verlag in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair this October, leading up to our big Frankfurt Guest of Honor year in 2025.

But I didn’t write this column just to tell you about the story of a book—rather, I wanted to say something about the story of its story.

In a message to Anvil a few days ago, my German publisher requested that I write a short epilogue to the novel, given that it’s been more than 30 years since it first came out, and that many things have happened since to the world and the Philippines—the Internet, Trump, and fake news, among others. 

So I sat down and wrote the short piece below, which I’m sharing with you since it’s highly unlikely that you’ll come across, or understand, the German translation of this epilogue if and when the new edition comes out. Here goes:

I began writing this novel in 1986, shortly after the downfall of the Marcos regime. That happened because of a massive uprising in Manila’s streets that made headlines and became a kind of model for peaceful anti-authoritarian movements worldwide. I proudly took part in that revolt, and felt the euphoria of liberation after more than a decade of martial law. It was a moment I would often return to and savor as the Iron Curtain fell and as various and largely non-violent revolutions took place elsewhere, including the Arab Spring.

I thought then that the best thing I could do was to write a novel that would try and explain how and why people fell under the spell of a dictatorship, as they did under Nazi Germany—not sparing myself, having been complicit in its later actions as an employee of the regime. I wrote it—in English—in America, mainly to fulfill my graduate school requirements, but also to celebrate our hard-won victory and share the good news with the world.

Almost four decades later, the seemingly unthinkable has happened: the right is back in power, not only in the Philippines but in many places we had thought to be reformed democracies. The optimism sweeping the planet toward the end of the 20th century has given way to a darkening horizon, a hardening of hearts, a closing of minds. Our most basic freedoms and values are under stiff and unrelenting assault, from forces we now realize had never really been vanquished but had merely been lying in wait, biding their time, seeking an opportunity for revival amidst the excesses of late capitalism.

And once again I am hearing the siren song of despotism, and see the eyes of people glazing over in the desperate desire for quick relief from their troubles, for quick salvation. I hear the march of boots, to which many young citizens—their ears plugged by loud music—seem indifferent. Even among many of their elders is a renascent yearning for the simple discipline of strongman rule.

I see all these and I wonder if I should write a sequel, an update for the new century, but what would be the point of repetition? My novel was supposed to be about the past. Why is it so suddenly pertinent again?

Penman No. 460: The Fil-Canadians Speak

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Penman for Sunday, March 10, 2024

WE’VE BECOME quite familiar by now with the writings of our Filipino-American brethren across the Pacific, thanks to the success of such breakthrough works as Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War, R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, Marivi Soliven’s Mango Bride, and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, and to the bridging efforts of such literary stalwarts as Luis Francia, Alfred Yuson, and Cecilia Manguerra Brainard. Of course, they had many antecedents, going back to at least Carlos Bulosan, followed by Jose Garcia Villa, Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, and Alberto Florentino, among many other expatriates. 

But hardly a whisper has been heard from our Filipino-Canadian cousins, as if their experience—whatever it’s been—were simply an extension or an echo of their southern compatriots, with no distinguishing qualities. There’s a reason for that, which we’ll get into shortly, but first let me announce, with both joy and relief, that the long silence is over. Filipino-Canadian literature is introducing itself to the world—and to us in particular—with the publication of the landmark Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Toronto: Cormorant, 2023), edited by Teodoro Alcuitas, C. E. Gatchalian, and Patria Rivera.

I was first alerted to this hefty 390-page volume by one of the editors, Patty Rivera, an old friend from way back who developed into a fine, prizewinning poet when she, her husband Joe, and their family migrated to Canada decades ago. Arriving in Canada in late July 1987, Patty recalls that moment pregnant with both hope and not a little dread that every FOB immigrant seems fated to step into: 

“The air steamed with purpose when summer meant another life to live. From every corner, a mirror to reflect on. Outside our window, the children’s park, though trees, appeared bruised from the dark slits on the windowpanes. Thorny Vineway. Did our new street name augur of tomorrows yet to come? Would our life in this new country lead to a path laid with thorns? We were young at the time, and everything looked promising. We were alive in this new country and were no longer afraid, the years in the future distant and to be savored. We were ready to be every person we chose or wanted to be.”

Today there are nearly one million Filipinos in Canada, which itself is inching close to 40 million. Some years ago, Filipinos edged out the Chinese as the largest group of immigrants in Canada. Many are highly educated, and many work in health care, leading perhaps to a kind of stereotyping of the Fil-Can as caregiver. To be fair, that’s probably how we home-based Pinoys ourselves imagine our Canuck brethren to be, followed inevitably by “Now why did they go to Canada and not America?”

Magdaragat’s editors try to answer that: “It’s the American Dream, after all, that Filipinos chase; Canada is the consolation prize if America, for whatever reason, doesn’t pan out. While, according to historical records, the first Filipinos arrived in what would eventually become the United States in 1587, Filipinos didn’t arrive on Canadian shores (Bowen Island, BC, to be exact) until close to three centuries later, in 1861. In addition, Canada’s population is a tenth of the United States’. Filipino-Canadian history is, thus, of a smaller scope than Filipino-American history. But within that scope are issues unique to Filipinos in Canada that makes Fil-Can history a distinct subject in its own right, not merely an ancillary of Fil-Am history.”

There are, we discover, subtle but important nuances to the Filipino-Canadian experience:

“Another, more insidious, survival issue Filipinos in Canada have to navigate: the passive-aggressive racism of white Canadians. The brazenness of white American racism is well documented (and spotlighted and hyper scrutinized because of the United States’ status as an imperial power); in contrast, white Canadian racism often slips under the radar because it is more typically characterized by microaggressions. The favorite Canadian refrain vis-à-vis racism—‘We’re not as bad as Americans’—constitutes what might be called “maple-washing”: the relentless washing over of all instances of Canadian racism with the claim that it’s still not as horrible as what has transpired in the United States. Accordingly, the racism Filipinos in Canada experience—and which makes its way into some of the pieces in this anthology—is more insidious than its American counterpart and is characterized by shocking ruptures in a strenuously maintained politesse.”

But what about the literature of that experience? Magdaragat provides ample and eloquent proof of the Filipino-Canadian’s desire to reconnect with the homeland while charting their own course in the new country, as this passage from Deann Louise Nardo’s “Where Do You Come From” illustrates:

“I come from dirt and sand, the scribbled writing of an ancestor in a trance, the sound of droplets on skylights, unopened buds on trees, and the sleep dust in my mama’s eyes. I come from cacao beans and the callouses on fishermen’s hands, the arthritic crackle of my grandmother’s hands as she tends to the garden and mends nets. I come from the silver iridescence of stretch marks, the swirl pattern inside tree barks, the razor-thin whiskers of cats, and eerie creaking of Maplewood floors. I come from lengthwise half-cut bamboo wall sheathing, river mud and buried shards of broken glass, of broken tsinelas and confused roosters singing tik-ti-la-ok at three in the morning.”

There’s a long story by Nathalie de los Santos that alone may be worth the price of the book for its sweeping, multigenerational narrative of the immigrant experience from Bohol to New Brunswick, and from Filipino to Filipinx. The young Kay laments that “Even my relatives can be like this, they remind me how I’m not Filipino enough when I don’t know something about our culture. But then some people here believe I’m not Canadian just by looking at me. When I’m asked, ‘Where you from?’ it implies that. Who am I then?… But, maybe all of this is coming from the same place of hurt?” 

The Fil-Cans have spoken, and theirs are voices worth listening to.

Qwertyman No. 80: Bringing UP to the People

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 12, 2024

SINCE IT was established in 1908 as a “university for Filipinos,” the University of the Philippines has grown into a system of eight “constituent universities,” each with a certain degree of autonomy but all of them unified by a common vision, shared practices, and high academic standards. UP began in Manila, followed by Los Baños and then Diliman, which became UP’s flagship campus after the war. 

Of course, as the country’s premier public university and with its relatively hefty budget, there was pressure on UP to go out even farther, especially beyond Luzon, to become truly more representative of the Filipino people. In the past, that form of democratization was achieved to some extent by UP’s old policy of accepting valedictorians and salutatorians from high schools all over the country; once in UP, these provincianos did well, and many went on to positions of national leadership. 

But the general decline in public education and UP’s more stringent admissions policy have changed all that, so that the majority of successful UPCAT applicants now come from private high schools in the big cities. As nearly everyone agrees, that’s not what a presumably “national” university is supposed to do—meaning, giving quality education to the children of the affluent at the expense of ordinary taxpayers (I say “nearly,” because there are a few on the “excellence” side of this “excellence vs. equity” argument who also argue that the State’s best strategy going forward is simply to fund and support the country’s best minds, no matter where they come from—kind of Singapore-style, but then we’re no Singapore). 

Also, a UP education doesn’t happen just with a student’s admission. Even now that the law has made public university education free (ironically, again, subsidizing rich metro kids), many UPCAT passers from the regions never show up, or drop out early on, because of the prohibitive costs of living and studying in Manila, especially. They could have gone to UP if it were closer to where they were, pointing to the continuing need for more UP units to be opened in our far-flung regions. (To this day, for example, no UP has been established in Bicol, although to be fair, that region is already being served by many excellent universities.)

The traditional reluctance by the UP Board of Regents to open UPs here and there has been based on sound academic reasoning: building and opening a physical school is easy, but establishing academic programs with qualified faculty is much harder, especially in so-called “hardship” posts, to which presumably Manila-based faculty will have to be enticed to relocate until enough local capability is built up. A UP education should come with a guarantee that a degree earned, say ,in Baguio or Iloilo is equivalent in quality and efficacy to one earned in Diliman or Manila. 

There were early attempts to “democratize” UP by setting up teaching outposts as far north as Vigan, where a UP Northern Luzon Junior College was opened in 1930, complementing a similar Junior College in Cebu. (That college in Cebu, interestingly enough, was almost shut down shortly after it opened for lack of funding. Then UP President Jorge Bocobo was too proud and proper to accept a P5,000 donation from Cebuano UP alumni, because it had been raised from sweepstakes. Politicians jumped into the fray, with some arguing that Cebu needed support as a “moral alternative” to Manila, only to be reminded that Cebu was no prelapsarian paradise, with at least “three cabarets and five moviehouses,” according to an unofficial history of UP. The day was saved only when Gov. Mariano Cuenco threw P8,000 into the pot.)

In the late 1950s, President Vicente Sinco set up a Department of Extramural Studies to undertake extension classes in Iloilo, Davao, Zamboanga, San Pablo, Subic, and Clark Airforce Base. 

Thus were the seeds sown for today’s full-blown UP System, which has Diliman, Los Baños, Manila, Visayas, Mindanao, Cebu, Baguio, and the Open University among its constituents.

Each of these CUs has its own specific strengths, history, and traditions—Manila is also UP’s and the country’s health sciences center, with the Philippine General Hospital as its crown jewel; Los Baños celebrates Loyalty Day, which began in honor of faculty and students who took part in World War I (yes, I). UPOU is a regional leader in distance learning, providing a UP education even to OFWs abroad.

A particularly bright spot in this stellar array is UP Mindanao, which is marking its 29th anniversary later this month. When it was established by RA 7889 on February 20, 1995 under President Fidel V. Ramos, it was met with much skepticism even from within UP, and there were dire predictions that it would fail within a few years. The indifference was caused by the fact that UPMin was the first CU to come into being through legislative fiat, rather than the usual process of study and approval by the Board of Regents. What had happened was that UP alumni from Mindanao had banded together to demand a UP on their island, given its economic and political importance. Mindanao’s political leaders led by Reps. Prospero Nograles and Elias B. Lopez rallied to their cause, and UPMin was born.

Almost three decades later, it’s clear that that decision was the right one to make. Despite many teething problems—the path to UPMin’s hilly campus in Mintal was so rough that people took to calling it “Abortion Road”—UP Min has gone on to become an educational powerhouse in the region, particularly in such specializations as Agribusiness Economics. On the cultural front, UPMin leads in such studies as “Mindanao epics as pre-colonial roots of Philippine nationalism” and “Planning and architecture from the vernacular dwellings of Mindanao.” Its writers such as poet and former Chancellor Ricardo M. de Ungria and fictionist and Dean Jhoanna Lynn Cruz are nationally renowned. 

It was no accident that, when he was choosing a site for his investiture last September as UP’s 22nd president, Atty. Angelo A. Jimenez—UP’s first Mindanawon and lumad president, having been born a Manobo in Butuan City—chose UP Mindanao. Keenly conscious of his opportunity to make historic changes, Jimenez has pledged to improve access to a UP education even further, especially for the poor and the underrepresented. 

We look forward to a time when the children of farmers, fisherfolk , and factory workers can walk UP’s hallways again with their heads held high—if not in Diliman, then in a capital city closer to home. It will go a long way toward making UP a truly “national university,” and help build a stronger and more cohesive nation.

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Qwertyman No. 79: Hymns of Repentance

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 5, 2024

A CERTAIN senator was quoted some time ago as saying that Filipinos supporting the intentions of the International Criminal Court to probe the Duterte administration’s bloody tokhang campaign should be made to sing the national anthem 1,000 times to regain their sense of patriotism. The clear message was that, if you were in favor of an international body looking into local crimes and liabilities, you were being anti-Filipino. 

It wasn’t surprising, of course, given that the good senator was among those prominently mentioned as possible defendants in the case. In jest, he said that if he were found guilty, he would miss his grandchildren if he were incarcerated in the Hague. And just to be sure, he added that not all people in jail are guilty—he certainly wasn’t.

Without commenting on the merits or demerits of a hypothetical ICC case against officials of the previous administration—something we have enough lawyers on both sides to perorate upon—I’ll just observe that the quality of justice the senator and his likely dock mates can expect from the ICC will surely be far better than that received by the victims of summary and extrajudicial executions under the regime of tokhang. In the very least, guilty or not, they will be alive and reasonably comfortable, although they might temporarily miss the company of family and friends, as those bereaved by tokhang have come to experience for all eternity.

I was intrigued by the suggestion that repeated singing of “Lupang Hinirang” would make a better Filipino out of me, or at least make me think of the ICC as some kind of fire-breathing Godzilla threatening to incinerate the Filipino race off the face of the earth.

There are far more effective songs  for instilling love of country. Yoyoy Villame’s “Philippine Geography” will teach us more about the country we say we’re dying for than our anthem, which must have been sung hundreds of times in the halls of Congress without much palpable effect on the patriotism of some occupants. At least I’m assuming it’s regularly sung there; if not, then perhaps our senator can start a little closer to home.

(As for professing one’s innocence, oldtimers will remember Diomedes Maturan’s “Huwag Kang Manalig sa Bulong-Bulungan” (remade by Victor Wood). Even Billy Joel warbled that “Although this is a fight I can lose, the accused is an innocent man!”)

On a more serious tangent, let me swipe a page from a recent talk given by UP President Angelo A. Jimenez, himself a lawyer, at a seminar of police officials on the thorny topic of national security and human rights:

“Our police officers should be commended for the seizure of a total of P6.2 billion worth of illegal drugs in the first half of 2023. The PNP’s Intensified Cleanliness Program, aligned with the Philippine Anti-Illegal Drugs Strategy, has employed a coordinated approach among government agencies to create drug-free communities. This shows that a serious and successful war on drugs can be undertaken without any needless loss of life, for as long as we observe the law, fight corruption, and remember the need for compassion in a just society. Even drug suspects have rights—indeed, even convicted prisoners—and we maintain our moral superiority by respecting those rights, even as we dispense justice. Only then and only thus can we regain our people’s trust.

“Ours is a society that operates on leadership by example. If people see their public officials and law enforcers doing the right thing, they will follow suit. If they see the law being flouted by these very same people—such as unauthorized government SUVs using the bus lanes along EDSA—they feel entitled and emboldened to do wrong themselves. Exemplary behavior at the top will create and strengthen the moral foundation for a responsible and law-abiding citizenry. We cannot demand what we ourselves cannot supply or enforce.”

Frankly, I myself doubt that a full-blown ICC investigation will prosper under the present dispensation, which reportedly promised the senator that not a hair of his (but then, where’s the hair?) would be touched by the ICC, back when the two camps were—just to use an idiomatic expression, and meaning no malice—as thick as thieves.

Now that the knives are out between the erstwhile allies, the ICC card seems to be in play again, teasing us with the possibility of justice being done, but I’m not holding my breath. It’s just too big a risk for those in power to take, too wide a door to open—like Cha-cha for ostensibly just economic provisions. Who knows what other crimes the ICC will unearth, who else they will indict, and how far back they will go? Once you give people a taste of respect for human rights, why, they’d be at it like potato chips—they’ll keep wanting more. There’d be chaos in the streets and no, sir, we can’t have any of that, just when we need law and order.

For this reason alone, I don’t think our good-humored senator has anything to worry about, neither from the Palace nor from the Hague. He can finish his term, retire to his farm in peace, shoot the breeze (or something else) with his old boss, and have his memoirs ghost-written. Unless, of course, a certain lady succeeds in clawing her way to the top, in which case the senator—still fairly young as senior politicos go—can expect a new lease on his public life and serve afresh, perhaps in the Cabinet, where men and women of action belong, rather than in the Senate, where they’re reduced to preening and tweaking their moustaches.

Someone with far greater and indisputable jurisdiction will take over this case and pronounce ultimate judgment; he will need no rapporteur, no investigating party, no authorization, no earthly prison; his verdict will be unappealable. His brand of justice will make the ICC look like talent-show judges by comparison. Those found guilty will be killing lots of time in a very warm place. Some people better start learning and singing hymns of repentance.

Qwertyman No. 75: Trump 2.0

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 8, 2024

IN MY column last week, I mentioned the “Trumpian dystopia” threatening to take over the United States and many other rightward-leaning societies and governments around the world. 

A “dystopia” is, of course, a place or a situation where everything has been turned on its head, where the bad has become good and the wrong has become right, and where the things we most feared or abhorred have become the norm. You find this in George Orwell’s 1984, where the government controls everything; younger readers and viewers will relate to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, where citizens are sacrificed for the Capitol’s entertainment. In other words, it’s social and political hell for those reared in the kind of postwar liberalism that eschews racial discrimination, authoritarianism, gender inequality, and religious intolerance, among other shibboleths.

It’s hard to believe that much of America seems to be marching in lockstep toward that dystopia under a revived Donald Trump, wh0m nearly all polls see as leading the race for the US presidency, which will be at stake in November this year. On this date three years ago, he was squarely in the doghouse in the aftermath of the shockingly violent assault on Congress on January 6 by Trump partisans unwilling to accept that he had lost to Joe Biden in the election. Even his closest allies at that time distanced themselves from his apparent captaincy of that bloody caper, although many of them have returned to his kennel. 

Nearly a full presidential cycle later, he’s back in the Republican saddle, way ahead of a pack of rivals who, save one, have refused to denounce Trump for what he is: the greatest single threat to American democracy because of what he represents (leaving aside foreign tyrants like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un). That, not surprisingly, is President Joe Biden’s exact description of him, so some might say it’s biased, but to remain unbiased against Donald Trump is to lie prostrate in front of a steamroller, begging to be annihilated.

It doesn’t help that the incumbent is 81 years old, palpably slow, avuncular, and whispery where Trump screams into people’s ears (to the delight of many). Their age difference—just four years—isn’t actually all that much, but beyond personalities, it’s a difference in cultures, and perhaps of understanding how politics works in this post-Facebook age, where obnoxiousness has become a virtue and regularity a liability.

Trump thrives on notoriety, parlaying the four indictments involving 91 criminal charges against him—plus the two disqualifications from state ballots—into a kind of a badge of courage, flipping prosecution into persecution. Rather than fracture his base, any attack on Trump (and any attack by him) only seems to consolidate the estimated 30-40% of hardcore Trumpers who now effectively define the Republican party, the tail wagging the dog.

Among the most repugnant (and, by Trumpian logic, among the most attractive) of his recent statements has been his denunciation of undocumented migrants as “poisoning the blood of our country,” specifically mentioning Latin America, Africa, and Asia as the sources of what in other speeches he has called rapists, terrorists, and Covid carriers.

You would think that that kind of Hitlerian rhetoric would galvanize the Hispanic and Asian-American—not to mention the African-American—communities in America against Trump, but no. If anything, his support among these groups seems to be rising, driven ironically enough by his hardline position on immigration, the very same factor that made these minorities possible to begin with.

What I’m interested in is how the Filipino-American community will respond to Trump 2.0, and what that will say of us as a people, albeit as one of many minorities in America’s multiracial society.

There are now about 4 million Filipino-Americans; half of them, 2 million, are voters. (To put this in context, the US population now stands at 336 million, of whom 170 million are voters.) Historically, Filipino-American voters have leaned Democrat, with a majority of them voting for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020. But a very vocal (though perhaps somewhat less visible, as many people tend to reveal their preferences only in the voting booth) “Filipinos for Trump” movement exists, and if trends persist will likely gain more traction this time around.

In 2020, Filipino pro-Trumpers cited “family, religion, and faith” as the main reasons they were backing him, like many American evangelicals, despite all the evidence to the contrary in Trump’s personal behavior and speech. For many, it all came down to one issue—abortion—the right to which has now been successfully rolled back by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. This time around, the flashpoint will likely be immigration, a global problem abetted by collapsing economies and repressive regimes. Well-settled minorities such as Filipino-Americans derive a strong sense of entitlement from all the personal sacrifices and legal processes they went through to acquire their citizenship, and feel cheated by migrants scrambling across the border. This kind of single-issue vote—a gross simplification and reduction of values into one criterion—favors demagogues like Trump, who work through two-dimensional posterization.

A more interesting—and more sinister—reading of Trump’s popularity came up in a recent guest essay in the New York Times by Matthew Schmitz, arguing in his title that “The Secret to Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism,” but rather that “Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters—often with good reason—as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate” and “a flexible-minded businessman who favors negotiation and compromise.” That logic, while fetching, predictably drew quick rebukes. One reader said: “Thanks, Mr. Schmitz, but we’re already well aware of this. Italians liked Mussolini because he ‘made the trains run on time.’ This is exactly our point. This is how dictatorships happen.”

That brought me back to our own long and continuing affair with despotism, and how sharply simplified populist sloganeering can cut through and cut down on complex reasoning—with devastating consequences for democracy, here and across the Pacific. 

(Photo from colorlines.com)

Qwertyman No. 74: A Church for All Humanity

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 1, 2024

YOU NEVER see me write about religion, because I believe it’s an intensely personal thing (albeit with a communal aspect), but I can’t help being surprised and saddened by what seems to me to be the latent homophobia—intentional or otherwise—brought to the surface by Pope Francis’ recent statement allowing Church blessings for same-sex couples. Despite the fact that that statement was heavily qualified—that it wasn’t to be seen as “sanctification,” etc.—it still triggered a violent backlash from conservative Catholics, clergy and lay persons alike, who protested that the edict violates established Church doctrine. 

Some of these objectors are my good friends (and they will remain so, unless they say otherwise). Many among them will proclaim that they’re not homophobic at all, that gay people and couples are among their best friends, and that they’re merely upholding a key tenet of their faith—which just happens to exclude homosexuals from the blessings of the Church, because they’re fundamentally living in sin.

But I can’t see how that attitude—which some might call a holier-than-thouness—advances Christian love and charity. Pope Francis’ halfway gesture is compromised enough as it is, but would still have been a welcome step toward redefining a church that’s tried to keep a stiffly male face—despite the many gay people in its ranks—for millennia.

I grew up a church-going Catholic boy (inevitably for a La Sallista) but stopped going to Mass a long time ago, as a liberal feeling distanced from the Church’s positions on such hot-button issues as birth control, abortion, divorce, and homosexuality, not to mention its too-cozy relationship with authoritarian regimes in many places around the world. 

I do admire and support the efforts of many priests, nuns, and other religious to confront and ameliorate our social problems and fight for justice and freedom. I continue to pray, many times a day and at bedtime, for the sick and the oppressed, and to thank God for my blessings. I never formally studied theology nor the history of religions, but from what I can gather (and here I invite the experts to instruct me) what distinguishes the Catholic Church from others is its emphasis on good deeds as the path to heaven, rather than faith alone. You have to earn your sainthood; it is neither promised nor can it be bought. If so, that appeals strongly to me, as I’m sure it does to others. 

But whenever I think of the Vatican and its hierarchy of old men whose meals are answered for by the alms of billions of the faithful and investments in blue-chip companies and real estate, among others, I remember a side of the Church that depends on its moral authority to survive as both a keeper of beliefs and as a global industry. 

No one is surprised by the sordid financial and sexual scandals that have rocked the Church, as they merely prove that some people who run it are as fallible as anyone else. This is not why I left the Church, which I still want to think of as something transcendent, an idea of community above the mortal men and women who make up its body. What disaffected me was the arrogance of its orthodoxy—in which, among religions, it is hardly alone.

I’ll grant that every religion needs a body of core beliefs, some of which will be non-negotiable; if you don’t like what you see, you’re free to go somewhere else. I understand the dismay of the faithful over “cafeteria-style” religion where you can pick and choose what to practice and what not. But I had thought, perhaps mistakenly, that religions have a stake in inclusivity, in upholding beliefs and values that embrace persecuted minorities (as the Christian church itself once was).

I’ll acknowledge that apostates like me probably have no business lecturing devout believers on matters of doctrine. But this isn’t even about the finer points of doctrine, but rather about the broad strokes of faith and, ultimately, what and who that faith serves. If issues like gay relationships and marriage and divorce are to be the line in the sand that separates the true Church from the false (rather than, say, love of neighbor), then sadly I must stay out (to which the conservative core can say “good riddance,” or otherwise pray for my wayward soul). Exclusionary policies are never just internal matters, because they affect the perception of the excluded; indeed, they affect the excluded, and those who identify with them.

Pope Francis has been the first Pope in a long time to have revived my hope in a Church that finally embraces the idea of an inclusive love of humanity as central to its practice, if not its survival. The closing of minds and hearts in our growing Trumpian dystopia calls for a far more powerful spiritual force to overwhelm the spitefulness gripping much of the world today. I would rather look up to Pope Francis and such other figures as the Dalai Lama—rather than a consistory of ambitious cardinals and bishops—to show the way forward. 

I hope I won’t be alone in suggesting that much more work remains to be done, even beyond Pope Francis, toward such liberative measures as the ordination of women, for the Roman Catholic Church to be not just a church for the 21st century, but for all time, and for all humanity.

(Photo from cnn.com)

Qwertyman No. 72: Bullets to Ballads

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023

MAYBE IT’S that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen—like peace on earth and goodwill to men—but it’s the wishing that keeps us human.

Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores.

After that wonderful performance, I messaged my deepest thanks to concert producers Pablo Tariman and Joseph Uy, noting that they made “magical interludes like this possible in these stress-filled times. If only all those bombs and bullets in Ukraine and Gaza were music. Fire symphonies, concertos, fugues, and cantatas across the border!”

The next morning, we drove out to Batangas City for another friend’s birthday celebration, which was heralded by a sparkling mini-concert with soprano Rachelle Gerodias and tenor Jonathan Abdon. At lunch that followed, I sat down at a table with a renowned journalist, a composer-performer, and a senator, and we were all breathless with joy at the music we had just experienced. It was the composer who put it best: “How can anyone argue with that?”

Indeed, in a world and at a time prone to argument and conflict, where even the most innocuous remark can ignite scorching disputation, the enjoyment of music seems to serve as a universal balm, a hushing power that creates a pause just long enough for us to remember our better selves—taming fangs, retracting claws, infusing tenderness into the coarsest of sensibilities. As William Congreve put it more than three hundred years ago, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (not “beast” as it’s often misquoted, although it could apply just as well).

As I’ve noted elsewhere, whenever I think of music as a discipline, what comes to mind is Leonard Bernstein’s description of it as “the only art incapable of malice.” That may or may not be true—music in specific historical contexts such as Nazi Germany and our own martial law has certainly been made to serve the purposes of despotism. 

I recall that in 1980, in particularly disturbing example of music perverted for fascist pleasure, a film titled “Playing for Time” (written by Arthur Miller as an adaptation of the French Jewish singer-pianist Fiana Fenelon’s autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz) showed how concentration-camp musicians were forced to play to entertain their jailers as well as to stay alive. It still chills me to the bone, as a prisoner under martial law, to hear the New Society anthem “May Bagong Silang” being played anew over the radio as though the past half century never happened.

Still, most people will surely agree that music has wielded a beneficent influence on human life and society, in ways that appeal directly to the heart and mind. 

In my own lectures, whenever I need to reach for metaphorical illustrations of the power of art to compel the human spirit, I turn to music. I advert to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance, and to the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945 (supposedly you can hear artillery in the background of that recording). 

It may be too romantic to hope that music will waft over the bunkers in Ukraine and Gaza this Christmas season and still the gunfire, however briefly. We’ve all seen that movie and know how it ends, with a renewed barrage of rockets—ordered by stiff-backed men far away from the trenches—drowning out the carols.

But there are other battles being waged much closer to us this season where a little night music might help quell the temptation to savage one another—even across the dinner table. 

I can imagine how many Christmas parties will settle down to drinks and coffee and devolve into a discussion of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and explode quickly into partisan debate over proportionality, Biblical prophecy, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Zionism, British colonialism, Arab nationalism, Munich, Entebbe, Eichmann, George Soros, anti-Semitism, Netanyahu, 9/11, and the Yom Kippur War (have I missed anything?). Half the world away from the frontlines, I haven’t seen an issue divide Filipinos—at least those who keep abreast of the news—so sharply as this one, which has become a kind of litmus test of one’s faith or humanity.

Much of that acrimony has, of course, been enabled by the Internet and the ease it provides for instant (often unthought) response—a habit we’ve ported over, perhaps unconsciously, into our daily lives.

Against this backdrop, music is a call to order, a shaping of emotions across a roomful of rampant urges, longings, and resentments. We can choose but not control it; the best response to music is one of sublime submission, from which experience we emerge refreshed and ready to be human again. 

A meaningful and peaceful Christmas to us all!

(Image from economist.com)

Qwertyman No. 71: A Breakthrough for Peace

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 11, 2023

I HONESTLY didn’t know what to feel when I first read the news that a breakthrough appears imminent in peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front (and behind it, the Communist Party of the Philippines), whose soldiers and partisans have been at war with each other for over half a century, in one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies.

As a student activist who fought martial law and got imprisoned for it at age 18, I didn’t expect to live past 25 because so many of my friends and comrades were giving up their lives around me in the name of freedom and justice. Instead, in a Forrest-Gumpish turn of events, I survived and even prospered for another 50 years. As I wrote in my introduction to the book SERVE (Ateneo Press, 2023), co-written with 19 other fellow stragglers from what we called the First Quarter Storm, “We celebrated our seniorhood as the ultimate victory” even as “the experience of martial law coded itself into our DNA.” That victory, of course, is a shallow one, considering that the causes we fought for remain as valid and as urgent today, and that the social cancer we sought to excise “had never left, was always there, lying cruelly in wait for a chance to ravage us again—and not only us this time, but our children and grandchildren as well.”

My reaction to the peace talks—and I would guess that of many of my peers as well—was one of joy and relief, but inevitably compounded by some doubt and apprehension. All of these responses, however disparate, have their reasons.

The joy and relief must be paramount because, however we look at it and whatever arguments may be presented by either side, the armed conflict has gone on too long, without truly positive and strategic gains to show for five decades of warfare, at the cost of innumerable lives and massive drains on our resources. This is not to say that those lives were wasted nor that everyone’s goals have been met, but that surely there must be a better way—a more humane and effective way—to resolve our differences and move forward together without having to kill yet another cadre or yet another soldier, both of them probably just farm boys looking to improve their lives. 

Ultimately and simply, it didn’t work as planned—neither the “people’s war” nor the counter-insurgency. (Curiously, they manifest a kind of symbiosis or co-dependency, with one providing the basis for the other.) The Left is as far from seizing State power as we are from achieving a FIBA championship (no matter virtue, skill, or tenacity), and the Right remains essentially as it has always been, unreformed and unrepentant in its monopoly of economic and political power. But the Right seems to have been more clever at shapeshifting, riding on and pandering to the digital consumerism of a new generation and thereby dousing its revolutionary fervor, while the Left has basically stuck to the playbook and rhetoric of 1970s Maoism.

Meanwhile, in the great section between them, the masses of our people remain largely poor and vulnerable, in desperate need of food, housing, work, and education, a significant number of them kept afloat only by the grueling sacrifices of fathers, mothers, and siblings laboring overseas. Some decline has been noted in the incidence of mass poverty in recent decades, but it has been slow and uneven; even moderate economic growth did not necessarily lead to significant poverty reduction. 

We are said to have a rising middle class—estimated by the Philippine Institute of Development Studies at 40 percent of the population—but it is a very fragile one, strongly aspirational in its longing to be rich or be like the rich, but weak in the knees, and easily crushed or co-opted. Those of us in this category spend our lives saving up for the good things and cultivating our composure, only to lose all that in one catastrophic illness or declaration of redundancy.

Politically, as well, I place myself squarely in the middle, never having trusted the Right and its compulsive greed for wealth and power and long having fallen out of love with the Left, which has shown itself to be just as capable of cynical calculation. I declare myself a liberal (with the small “L”), with all of that word’s ambiguities and contradictions. I repose my faith in no party or church or army, but trust my reason (however faulty, and with God’s grace) to lead me to the truth and to the right decisions. I draw strength from knowing, as I saw in the crowds of May 2022, that a huge wellspring of goodness and positive purpose resides in many if not most Filipinos. We cannot and will not let bad politics and bad politicians stop us from doing good, in our families, communities, and eventually our nation.

However fractured our society remains, in the very least we deserve peace, and must agree on peace, so we can banish one of the darkest specters in our national history. No more war; no more political prisoners; no more tokhang. And please, no more Leila de Limas.

But a just and lasting peace will require not only a rejection of violence as conflict resolution. It should also mean strengthening the law and the independence of the judiciary, reducing corruption, and depoliticizing the military and police. It should mean dismantling the broad and expensive State apparatus devoted solely to counter-insurgency, a factor that the National Security Council itself has declared “a dying threat” even as military budgets remain high. Deploy our soldiers to our coastal waters and boundaries, where the real dangers to our national security loom.

The irony of another President Marcos securing the peace has not escaped me, as I’m sure it will perplex others, but I grant that peacemaking will require being able to look beyond the persons for now and focus on the larger goals and processes involved; other reckonings can follow. I’m under no illusion that the GRP and the NDF will sing “Kumbaya” around a campfire and that all will be well thereafter. Neither party comes to the table with clean hands and consciences. Both come with long histories of violence, betrayal, and guilt. There will be more hope than trust to share.

But a peace agreement is not a marriage, with a pledge to love and hold hands no matter what, merely a civil agreement to live under one roof without killing each other and maybe, just maybe, have an occasional cup of coffee or a meal together. 

For this I am willing to suspend my disbelief, and wish all the parties the best of luck, with a silent prayer for this most unlikely and difficult of enterprises. Other battles and debates can follow; let’s end this one first.