Category Archives: history

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.

Qwertyman No. 68: What We Aspire For

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 20, 2023

IT WAS a humbling but also uplifting experience to attend the 65th Ramon Magsaysay Awards ceremonies last November 11 at the Metropolitan Theater, in which four new awardees—including Filipino peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer—were honored for their contributions to humanity. Long considered Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize and certainly its most prestigious honor, the RMA has now gone to over 300 recipients from all over the world in the fields of government service, public service, community leadership, journalism, literature, and creative communication arts, peace and international understanding, and emergent leadership.

This year’s four laureates represent a wide range of endeavors.

Miriam Coronel-Ferrer (Philippines) exemplified and championed the role of women in peacemaking, leading the negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that led to a Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro. She has since lent her skills and wisdom to peacemaking efforts in East Timor, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq, among other conflict zones.

Eugenio Lemos (Timor-Leste) mobilized young Timorese to adopt permaculture, a holistic system to create and manage sustainable agrosystems. His approach and methods have been adopted by Timor-Leste’s schools and local governments. Going beyond food security, Lemos emphasizes the need for “food sovereignty,” a country’s ability to produce its own food, with a focus on local, natural, and nutritious food. 

Ravi Kannan (India) set up the Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Center in one of India’s most remote and poorest regions to bring cancer care to those who could least afford it. Dr. Kannan resolved not just to create a state-of-the-art facility, but also to make it accessible to the poor by offering free treatment, room and board, temporary employment for caregivers, and a homecare program for patients. 

Korvi Rakshand (Bangladesh) began by helping poor Bangladeshi children learn English so they could find gainful employment. His JAAGO Foundation has since expanded to provide free English-language primary and secondary education to 30,000 students in both traditional and online schools, as well as embracing other causes such as women empowerment, children’s rights, and climate change.

One thing stood out in all of these awardees—and, indeed, in those who preceded them as RM laureates. It wasn’t about them. Their backgrounds, their education, their previous honors and awards were hardly even mentioned—and when they were, it was only to suggest that Dr. Kannan could have chosen to pursue a lucrative career as an oncologist in Chennai, and Rakshand could have parlayed his law degree from the University of London into success as a barrister. 

It was all about what they did for others, the public service they performed with quiet dedication, selflessness, and humility. Rakshand would relate that when he got a phone call from RMAF President Susan Afan, his first thought was that he was being called to vet another candidate, not expecting to be told that he was the awardee.

All this made me think more deeply about how the rest of us aspire for honors, by which we almost exclusively mean personal and individual recognition. Indeed, from the grades up, we’re trained to venerate valedictorians, summa cum laudes, board topnotchers, top salesmen, beauty queens, boxing champions, singing sensations, and best actors and actresses. To be one of them is to have achieved meaning in one’s life. Our living rooms and offices have long been excuses for trophy displays, but now social media has done them better by offering a free and wide platform for self-promotion, so that not a day goes by without someone announcing some new achievement.

And why not? I suppose it’s a natural human desire to rise above the herd and be known for something, be it physical beauty, vocal prowess, athletic skill, or mathematical genius. In a world where we’ve become increasingly commodified and homogenized, self-assertion (in many cases—think Instagram—to the point of narcissism) seems mandatory, if only to say “I’m here. I’m good—no, make that, I’m great!”

So we look around at what others are doing and try to do them one better. The Internet has magnified expectations to such unrealistic extents that young people have committed suicide for reasons that people from a hardier generation would have found laughable were they not so tragic. In our quest for recognition—any recognition—we’ve fallen prey to a slew of awards, pageants, and prizes of doubtful value, even paying to play Cinderella for a day and half the night. The awards themselves have become commodified and homogenized.

To be honest, I myself have built up my own little stack of writing prizes, some of them worth more than others. But again, what is “worth” beyond oneself? Like a punch-drunk boxer with a rack of belts, all they show is that I’ve lived a life as a literary combatant, when a writer’s true prize should be the readership of his or her people, perhaps the world. In a society that gives little value to books, or is too poor to buy books, that’s an Olympian challenge. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Awards and what they stand for remind us that while service to others is often thankless and sometimes even dangerous, it’s just as legitimate an aspiration as any other, and one we don’t emphasize enough in our personality-focused culture. Our historians and sociologists will have reasons for why we seem to value kani-kaniya over the tayo, or why the African concept of ubuntu, of finding one’s meaning in community, sounds foreign to many of us. I can only guess that the ruthless demands of surviving and succeeding in a cash-driven society have encouraged us to compete rather than cooperate.

The RM Awards are, of course, also a kind of competition, but one without losers, as everyone nominated has already won in his or her own sphere, has already done good by others. The chosen laureates merely stand for their co-workers, for the ideas and values they represent, and above all for an insistently optimistic and assertive humanity in a world splintered by violence, greed, and intolerance. 

Greatness can be aspired for—I suspect the truly great don’t even think about it—but it cannot be applied for, much less paid for.

Qwertyman No. 67: Business with Culture in Iloilo

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 13, 2023

OVER THE past year, still eagerly emerging from our post-pandemic stupor, my wife Beng and I have been traveling up a storm, limiting ourselves to local destinations such as Bacolod, Virac, Davao, Roxas City, and Iloilo City. We chose these places because we’d never been there before—such as Virac and Roxas—or hadn’t visited for many years.

We were most impressed by the progress shown by Iloilo, whose transformation into a rapidly urbanizing metropolis I had begun to observe well before the pandemic. City and provincial officials, under the initial leadership and with the strong support of former Sen. Franklin Drilon, had managed to unite behind the key objectives of a continuing comprehensive development plan that has straddled several local and national administrations. 

All over the country, you hear about politicians achieving national prominence and power, even to the point of aspiring for the presidency—except that back in their home provinces, they did little or nothing for their constituents, and may even have lost the local vote to an outsider as a result. Drilon never ran for President—a job I think he would have performed excellently, if our voters were thinking rationally—but if he did then he could have counted on a near-solid Iloilo vote for never forgetting where he came from and ensuring Iloilo’s emergence as a model of city planning.

Any visitor to Iloilo cannot fail to be impressed by its dynamic growth, from the minute he or she steps off the plane in the city’s airport in Cabatuan, about 20 kilometers from downtown Iloilo. The long drive to the city down the wide, smooth highway is a virtual introduction to the city’s progress, with new malls, office buildings, car dealerships, hotels, construction depots, hospitals, and housing lining both sides of the road; new bridges and overpasses were rising here and there. A Grab car service just opened this year, our driver said, happy to be lifted by that rising economic tide.

The crown jewel of Iloilo’s renaissance is clearly the Iloilo River Esplanade, now stretching nine kilometers along both banks of the river in its expanded form. Designed by the celebrated architect Paulo Alcazaren, the Esplanade is what we Manileños want our Pasig riverbank to look like, in our dreams, but here in Iloilo, it’s been a reality for over a decade now. From early morning until after sunset, the Esplanade is filled with joggers, couples, families, and tourists who can also duck for a drink or a meal into one of the restaurants and cafes lining the walk. The river itself, once described as a septic tank into which the effluents of the city’s factories, slaughterhouse, and beer gardens drained, is clean and clear, fringed by a healthy belt of mangrove where we spotted egrets taking refuge. 

There’s a point of view that sees malls as the bane of urbanization and the death of small, artisanal businesses, and that’s been true in many places. It’s abundantly obvious that malls and mall culture have invaded Iloilo, with some negative consequences down the road. But so strong is local culture and tradition that it’s almost inconceivable that Iloilo will lose Tatoy’s, Breakthrough, Ted’s La Paz Batchoy, Panaderia de Molo, pancit molo, KBL, diwal, and all the other little things that make the city what it is. Indeed, instead of being pushed out, many of these institutions are now in the malls. At the plaza in front of Molo Cathedral, after a 3-km walk from our hotel via the Esplanade, we had breakfast of mini-bibingkas baked right before us the way they’d been done for decades.

It was a happy coincidence that, during our visit, UNESCO named Iloilo as the country’s first Creative City of Gastronomy, in recognition of its outstanding culinary culture and heritage. This was achieved by the city government under Mayor Jerry Treñas with the assistance of a team from UP Visayas’ College of Management that facilitated a workshop for the city’s food-industry leaders last May. Education remains one of the city’s strengths; its West Visayas State University College of Medicine is now one of the country’s top-ranked medical schools, aside from UPV’s commanding role in the region.

It was UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano who, after dinner in one of the many seafood restaurants that have cropped up in Leganes on the city’s outskirts, drove us around so we could appreciate the city by night. On our way to Molo, we passed through the new Megaworld/Festive Walk business district and were blown away by how smartly designed everything was; it was almost as if we were in Singapore or some such country. It was hard to believe that not too long ago, this was the old Iloilo airport in Mandurriao, and that the road we were traveling on had once been a runway. This is also where the Iloilo Convention Center is located, where the APEC 2015 summit was held (Drilon had negotiated the donation of the site from Andrew Tan, in exchange for the ICC’s being built there).

We returned to this place in the daytime to visit one of Iloilo’s most recent and also most impressive attractions: the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art or Ilomoca, a three-story showcase of both local and national talent. Ilomoca’s establishment in the middle of one of Iloilo’s CBDs demonstrates what seems to be the local formula for sustainability, the merging of the modern with the traditional, of business with culture. You can best see this in the majestic Consing mansion in front of the Molo Cathedral, which was bought by SM but tastefully renovated and transformed into its Kultura shop. There’s no doubt that modernization is coming to Iloilo in a big way, but its leaders are smart enough to know that the city’s appeal lies in what it has built over the past two centuries, which no money can buy.

You’d think that Iloilo has gotten this far just because of political patronage from Manila, but Iloilo was one of the 15 provinces that went for Leni Robredo in 2022. The city’s former mayor, Jed Mabilog, was hounded out of office by threats of tokhang under the previous administration, but the city seems to have weathered the political storms under Treñas, returning to his old job under the National Unity Party. What this tells me is that good local governance matters, whatever may be happening elsewhere. 

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

Qwertyman No. 66: Beyond Reportage

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 6, 2023

IT WAS probably fitting that I finished reading Patricia Evangelista’s highly acclaimed account of “murder in my country,” Some People Need Killing (Random House, 2023), over a holiday devoted to remembering the souls of the departed. I had received a pre-publication review copy from the publisher months ago under a strict embargo not to talk about it until its formal launch. As it happened, it lay under a pile of other books to be read until a flurry of posts and reviews reminded me that it was out in the open, and that the secret—not just the book, but also what it contained—could now be shared.

I can still recall the day—May 15, 2004—while we were celebrating Pahiyas in Lucban when I got the news on my phone that our representative to the English Speaking Union’s annual public speaking competition in London—a bright and pretty wisp of a teenager named Patricia Evangelista—had won the top prize. We were new to the ESU—subsequently we would produce two more global champions—and it was a grand way to announce to the world that we Filipinos could produce more than boxing heroes and beauty queens. Here was 18-year-old Patricia who could think on her feet and speak to issues of international importance, the poster child of Filipino intelligence and audacity, whose command of the English language led her to meeting no less than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in what amounted to a mini-coronation in recognition of her talent.

As magical as that moment was, I can only imagine how, in the months and years following, it must have begun to grate on the young Patricia to be asked to deliver her prizewinning speech in public forums over and over again, like a wind-up doll, and suffer the fate of prodigies who peak too soon. Surely that was just a beginning; surely there was more she could do—had to do—to outlive her Cinderella-like debut in London. 

I would see some of that when she enrolled in my undergraduate Fiction Writing class in UP. I knew who she was and made sure to give her no special treatment—indeed to lean even a little harder on her, knowing she had what it took—but she got a “1.0” all the same, one of the few I ever gave. I can’t claim to have taught her much how to write imaginatively—her own reading had likely primed her for that—but I can’t pretend not to be proud of what she turned out to be, my pride tempered only by fatherly concern.

Today, almost 20 years later, the sometime ingénue returns to the global stage as a hard-bitten, chain-smoking investigative reporter—a “trauma journalist,” in her own words, very possibly one of the world’s best yet again. But there is no real prize, no princely reward, for this kind of distinction, only pain and sorrow which—subdued too many times as a matter of professional discipline—exact their toll on the body and spirit. Patricia has had to suffer that to be able to tell her story as clearly as she could, unimpeded by the hand-wringing and the preachiness that often accompany such exposés of grave misconduct. 

This is not a review of the book’s explosive investigation into the thousands of extrajudicial killings that happened under the Duterte regime—that’s been done very capably by others, and is already the subject of international inquiry. The book will deserve all the journalistic accolades coming its way as an exemplar of excellent reportage. 

I will not even quote from the book, as there are simply too many quotable paragraphs to choose from. Rather, I want to note, from my privileged perspective and for the benefit of younger writers, how Patricia works with language to best serve the truth. Quite apart from its journalistic merits, Some People Need Killing is one of the best textbooks out there for what we now call “creative nonfiction,” a compound of reportage, memoir, history, and fictional technique. Indeed, beyond reportage, the book is a long personal essay in which the author is inextricably part of the story, a significant step away from the impersonal and largely mythic “objectivity” that we associate with traditional journalism.

Probing murder after ghastly murder—sometimes even coming on-scene to prevent one—Patricia is both chronicler and agent, witness perhaps not to the killing itself but to the larger crime of its planning and the exoneration of its perpetrators. Handling the most sensitive and dangerous of material, she draws on more than skill to tell her story; she demonstrates raw courage, an increasingly rare quality among journalists easily seduced and silenced by pragmatism. She names names, which surely will bear consequences both ways. 

I’ve often remarked in my lectures that the most endangered writers in this country are neither the poets nor the novelists, but the journalists who cannot hide behind metaphor and simile to tell the truth. We fictionists make artful lies which governments rarely have the intelligence or the patience to grapple with. Journalists live in the literal world inhabited as well by cops and crooks; what’s interesting is how the flimsy but oft-repeated fictions of “killed while resisting arrest,” so pervasive in this book, emerge from that reality.

Evangelista’s overarching technique is one of narrative restraint, informed by an English major’s awareness of how language and reality shape each other. She constantly parses the perversions of language—how words like disappear, salvage, encounter, verification, and even her own name assume different uses and meanings over time, in specific contexts. She knows—as I remind my students—that for dramatic effect, less is often more, that short sentences and blunt, single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words rather than the long, Latinate ones favored by lawyers hit closer to the gut and heart.

She is keenly aware of the power of irony—of professed liberals supporting EJK, of a morally ascendant Noynoy Aquino showing little empathy for ordinary folk, of her own journalist-grandfather affixing his signature to a petition supporting the older Marcos, and of communal complicity in the reign of terror. She uses people’s own words against them, quoting from the record. She avoids direct editorializing, or speaking in lofty generalizations like “justice” and “civil liberties,” and instead, in the best noir tradition, sees “sagging two-story tenement buildings (that) opened into dirt roads layered with garbage and last week’s rotten Happy Meal.”

After I had finished the book, I woke up at 4 am from a nightmare about running shirtless down a wet, earthen road. I was lucky. Patricia Evangelista lived through it, and I don’t even know if she’s woken up yet. Have we?

(Image from Rappler.com)

Qwertyman No. 64: The Death of a Crony

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 23, 2023

WHEN A friend asked me, about 15 years ago, if I would meet with another friend of his who wanted me to write his biography, I almost fell off my chair when I learned who my prospective subject was.

“It’s Rudy Cuenca,” I was told. 

I knew who he was, of course—a “Marcos crony,” which had become an almost generic term at one point, there being so many. I had actually met the man once before, on a bus trip to the Pahiyas festival in Lucban arranged by the late Adrian Cristobal. My first impression had been a surprisingly positive one: he was polite, urbane, funny, hardly the obnoxious and domineering person I had imagined a crony might be.

Still, he was who he was, and I didn’t know that writing a book about his life was the right or smart thing to do. I has already written Wash SyCip’s biography, and that man was almost saintly, or sainted by the acclaim of his peers and juniors. A Marcos crony was something else.

“How can I work with someone whose boss put me in prison?” I told my friend. As a student activist, I had spent seven months in Bicutan under martial law.

“Just meet with him, listen to what he has to say,” he said. “No commitments, no promises.”

And so I did. “I have a story to tell,” Cuenca told me over coffee. I knew what he was saying: he had been privy to the Marcos regime’s internal workings, and had been one of the President’s closest golfing buddies, but, at one point, had found himself fallen from favor, eased out of the inner circle by a more unctuous lieutenant. As stories went, it was irresistible. 

I took a deep breath and told him in so many words what I’ve said to many other clients since: “I’ll help you tell your story, but I won’t lie or lawyer for you; your story will speak for itself. What I leave within quotation marks will be you speaking, not me. I’m under no illusion that you will tell me everything you know, but to the extent possible, I’d appreciate your being honest with me, so I can tell your story the best way I can.” He agreed. What followed was Builder of Bridges: The Rudy Cuenca Story, co-authored by a former student of mine, Antonette Reyes. It was published by Anvil Publishing in 2010 and became a finalist for the National Book Award the following year.

A college dropout, Cuenca taught himself the basics of business and civil engineering, and went on from small public-works contracts to some of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects such as the North Luzon Expressway and the San Juanico bridge. It was widely believed that Cuenca’s Construction Development Corporation of the Philippines (CDCP), then the region’s largest construction company, benefited from his closeness to Marcos, whom he had supported since his first presidential campaign.

Most interesting were Rudy’s stories of Palace life. Herewith, some excerpts from the book:

“I was a member of Wack Wack and Valley Golf for a number of years before I joined Manila Golf’s ‘Mafia’ group in 1973 with Charlie Palanca as the head man. Golf helped me gain some ground in business. I became a Marcos golfing crony around 1969. Marcos ended the afternoons at the nine-hole Malacañang course. Typically, a call came from the Study Room—either golf at 4:30 in the afternoon or party organized by the First Lady. The afternoon golf was meant to be the President’s peaceful time, but this was taken advantage of by those who wanted to get his undivided attention. The HIS and HERS were with their folders and envelopes for endorsement or approval. The HERS usually could not get to see him, so they were inserted as part of the regular golfing group.

“The Study Room was operated by Presidential Security Command personnel. Blue Ladies and cronies alike waited for this office to call them to major Palace functions. If no such call came, they would run around like headless chickens in search of that awaited invitation. One crony got the message that the President no longer wanted his company through the Study Room, obviously on Imelda’s instructions. As Marcos was the sole source of dispensation, those seeking approval tried to find parings or sponsors. Sometimes, those projects were so absurd that they were rejected outright.”

Rudy remembers that “Every morning, Marcos got a written report from Fabian Ver about what was going on in the country. But Marcos also got two more reports, one from Alex Melchor, and one more I think from Johnny Ponce Enrile. Marcos read these three reports at breakfast, so he knew what was going on everywhere. These reports contained lots of information—who was the boss of who, who went where, and even who was fooling around with who. He knew everything.”

Rudy doesn’t deny the systemic—but relatively small—pay-offs that got projects approved and claims processed and released in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. But he also says that they were amateurs compared to today’s pros, and that the scale of greed has grown exponentially. “In the old days, nobody asked you to give,” he says. “If you did, you gave them dinner. Today, people are told outright and up front what they’re expected to pay, and those amounts are outrageous. No advance payment, no contract.” 

When asked why, for example, Philippine roads seem visibly inferior to those of even other Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia, he says: “It’s simply a matter of greed. In Malaysia there’s also corruption—I’ve lived there, I should know—but the thieves there make their money by overpricing the materials. Here in the Philippines people are extraordinarily greedy. Not only do they overprice, they also steal the materials. The cement’s deficient, the gravel’s deficient. So the thing crumbles that easily.”

Rodolfo Magsaysay Cuenca’s passing last week at the age of 95 reminded me of how many stories about Ferdinand Marcos and martial law remain to be told. Fifteen years ago, it might have been considered safe for the members of that generation to spill their secrets (or justify their choices—no one will deny that these biographies are essentially self-serving), but the present dispensation will likely make people think twice about being so candid. 

I will leave it to more qualified scholars and more intrepid journalists to sift through the material and annotate the margins of my Cuenca biography, but I feel privileged to have listened to the man and to put him on the record. By any measure, it was a remarkable life. (In an even stranger twist, another crony approached me after I had done the Cuenca book, wanting me to do the same for him—the late Herminio Disini, of Westinghouse fame. I completed a draft but had to walk away, and the book never came out—but that’s another story.)

(Photo from riles.upd.edu.ph)

Qwertyman No. 63: The Slaughter of Innocents

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Penman for Monday, October 16, 2023

TWO SATURDAYS ago, my wife Beng and I sat enthralled as we watched a brilliant performance of the play “Anak Datu” at the CCP’s Black Box Theater. It was a play that, among other objectives, sought to trace the roots of the armed conflict in Mindanao to a series of massacres perpetrated by the military against Muslims just before and after the declaration of martial law. It began with the well-documented killings of young Tausug recruits being trained in Corregidor for an abortive invasion of Sabah in 1968 and went on to the less-known Malisbong massacre in Sultan Kudarat on September 24, 1974, in which 1,500 men were reportedly killed.

For us—and I’m sure for the packed crowd in the theater as well—it was a harrowing revelation. We had known about the troubles in Jolo and had followed the rise of the MNLF, but to most Manileños then and now, Mindanao was another country, tourist-pretty but woeful, home to exotic fruits, fabrics, and dances, but otherwise mired in poverty, corruption, and bloodshed. The play tries to break through those stereotypes even as it acknowledges the complexities of politics and culture as they apply to Mindanao, especially to people just trying to catch a breath of peace.

In pointed irony, earlier that same day on the other side of the world, Hamas militants had begun to mount an attack on Israel, eventually killing about 1,000 people and taking hundreds more hostage. In retaliation, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip and killed about as many. This nightmarish war of attrition is still continuing more than a week on, with no clear end in sight.

Like many Filipinos far from that war zone, all we could do was to mutter prayers for the dead, the displaced, and the suffering on both sides. On top of the war in Ukraine and natural disasters ravaging the planet, it seemed like the world was in the sorriest mess it had ever been since the Second World War, emerging from a pandemic only to destroy itself with more willful deliberation.

I know that some were not so generous as to seek or see a moral balance, and immediately identified with Israel, invoking the Bible, Washington, and common sense, especially with the reports and pictures of brave Filipino nurses standing their ground and being murdered by Hamas.

For certain, whatever and however long the history may be behind the legitimate grievances of Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation, Hamas’ brutal assault on ordinary citizens will not win them any sympathy, at least in the Western media which we depend on for our news. We know that there has to be another side to the story, perhaps one just as terrifying, but we go with what we see. It could be argued that Hamas’ actions were the result of decades of oppression, like a man running amok; but this was cold premeditation, factoring in the inevitable retaliation it would provoke.

Still, with both Jews and Palestinians fighting for survival, we forget that not all Palestinians are Hamas, and that not all Israelis supported Netanyahu. The guns will drown out the voices of moderation in both camps, those who understand that there can be no real victors in these messy wars, only losers. Lives are lost, the truth is lost, our humanity is lost.

Countless posts on social media claim that the Lord has already taken a side in the conflict. But not being particularly devout, I remember only how often the Almighty’s name has been invoked to kill. The skeptic in me suspects that the Lord is, must be, indifferent, so we can use our own hearts and minds to sort things out; he will not play deus ex machina.

Nothing, not even quoted Scripture, will convince me that the slaughter of innocents in the name of God, Allah, or Yahweh is morally justified. It has happened, it happens, and will always happen because of our brutish nature, but that will be an explanation, not an excuse. The hard-nosed men in the war room will dismiss all this preciousness as so much sentimental handwringing, and raise the killer question: “If the enemy goes for your wife and daughter, won’t you go for theirs?” Revenge and retribution, an eye for an eye, will prevail over reason and compassion, often devalued as suicidal weakness.

Come to think of it, no one ever called the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in which over 100,000 people died—“massacres.” Most of them were ordinary citizens just going about their business, with little or no say in their country’s militarist policies. Instead, conventional political and military wisdom has always insisted that these deaths were necessary for other deaths—particularly American, in a projected invasion—to be averted. One hundred thousand innocent lives wiped off the face of the earth in a literal flash, and no one in power even blinked, because of course it was justified as the lesser evil, made more acceptable by the savagery unleashed by Japanese soldiers on their captive populations.

In graduate school, I developed a keen and rather morbid interest in a genre of English Renaissance drama called “revenge tragedy” (think “Hamlet,” but there were many cruder, bloodier and frankly more entertaining examples). The object of all those plays was to show that “revengers” begin with a just cause, the victims of insufferable oppression and humiliation. But ultimately they prove little better than the beasts they seek to extinguish, wreaking havoc on the innocent. They cross a line, and lose all moral superiority.

That line is drawn somewhere in the sands of the Middle East, but  just as importantly, it also crosses our conscience. When we recall how easy it was for many Filipinos—even those who professed to be devout Christians—to condone and even applaud extrajudicial killings, thinking that society was merely ridding itself of riff-raff, we see how righteousness and evil can so comfortably cohabit.

I have no easy and firm conclusions to draw from this most recent conflagration, and I feel that we have to look beyond the intricacies of history and politics for answers. Diplomats, scholars, and zealots have tried almost all the formulas at their disposal, to no avail—with the notable exception of the two-state policy, an elusive political solution that will come with its own challenges.

It may be that only the hopelessly naïve or the naively hopeful—and I plead guilty—still imagine that any kind of just and enduring peace can be achieved in these circumstances. But before or while we condemn barbarity elsewhere, we have our own hordes of howling ghosts to confront, coming out of the Chinese pogroms under the Spanish, Bud Dajo, Samar, Corregidor, Malisbong, Mendiola, Maguindanao, and Mamasapano, among others. Let more “Anak Datus” be written, to lift and save us from Facebook’s summary judgments.

(Image from broadway world.com)

Qwertyman No. 62: Remembering Ed Hagedorn

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 9, 2023

LIKE MANY Filipinos, I was surprised to hear last week that former Puerto Princesa mayor and Palawan congressman Edward “Ed” Hagedorn had passed away aged 76. It was a peaceful death, according to reports, which might have raised some eyebrows among those who knew him and his colorful past. Beyond surprised, I felt genuinely sad, because I had met the man and been much impressed by what he had been able to achieve, despite the brickbats thrown his way by his enemies and critics until the very end. (Only last July, the Sandiganbayan found him guilty of malversation of public property for failing to return some firearms issued to him when he was mayor.)

Hagedorn was one of those larger-than-life figures who stick in your memory like a barnacle. I came to know him two decades ago when he needed someone to write a book about Puerto Princesa’s regreening; I was available and happy to fly down to Puerto to see for myself what the buzz was all about, and looked forward to quiet beachside chats over beer and broiled squid. Instead I found myself rattling in the front seat of Hagedorn’s SUV on earthen roads at breakneck speeds, absorbing his stories, which never failed to make me wonder, “Is this guy for real?” But he was—a true politico, to be sure, who ate controversy for breakfast, but also a game-changer who left an indelible imprint on the community he served, just as Dick Gordon did for Subic and Bayani Fernando did for Marikina.

In memory of that man, let me share some unpublished notes I took for that project (which itself was overtaken by events, but that’s another story). Flash back to the early 2000s, and say hello to Ed Hagedorn:

With his well-combed pompadour, mestizo looks, and neat moustache, Hagedorn looks like a cross between actor-turned-President Joseph “Erap” Estrada and rebel-turned-Senator Gregorio “Gringo” Honasan. The resemblance goes beyond the physical, and the key lies in the movement of these men from the fringe to the center, in their mutation from outcast to power player.

For a man once feared as a teenage toughie, gambling lord, logger, and survivor of at least two assassination attempts, the two-term mayor of Puerto Princesa, Palawan, can be surprisingly gentle and charming. He speaks with an easy smile and a quiet, slightly raspy voice, the golden pin of a Christian dove bright on the collar of his gray bush jacket. He knows that the past hangs on his shoulders—something he has the honesty and the good PR sense not to deny—but he speaks much more enthusiastically about Puerto Princesa’s future, and its own transformation from sleepy island town to a global model for ecotourism, as acknowledged by no less than the United Nations.

Hagedorn appreciates the irony of his situation, and attributes his conversion to a religious faith that he now applies with a fanatic’s fervor to his job. Mayor since 1992, Hagedorn drove his former partners in crime out of the city, set down clear and strict environmentalist policies, especially those having to do with illegal logging, illegal fishing, and waste disposal. Today most of the land within Puerto has been reforested; a “Baywatch” program patrols the water; and a cigarette butt on the open street is about as common as hen’s teeth.

The story of Puerto Princesa’s regreening into a world-class showcase of Philippine environmentalism is an inspiring one, but the Hagedorn story is clearly the stuff of action movies. In fact, not one but two movies have already been made about the flamboyant mayor, who reconnoiters the city in his Chevy Suburban, wearing his trademark wraparound Cazal sunglasses and Rolex wristwatch (“It’s fake,” he says with a grin). 

He doesn’t drink, but until a few years ago couldn’t quit smoking, needing the nicotine to keep him going on typical killer workdays that begin at 6:00 a.m. and end at around 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. the next morning. (He kicked the habit in 2002.) “When I came into office in 1992,” he says, “I inherited the grand total of P26,000, plus one tractor and two dump trucks. In three years, we were able to pave 340 kilometers of roads—just 1,000 kilometers more to go!” Appalled by the city’s conditions when he assumed the mayorship, Hagedorn declared a state of calamity to gain access to P20 million in calamity funds; the government balked at his move, but the courts have since upheld the mayor. He talks about setting up International Environmental University on a large estate already blocked off in Puerto for environmental development.

People wait along the road for his SUV and flag him down. He stops to listen to an assortment of complaints; a secretary takes down notes and his instructions. Like a good politician, Hagedorn has a phenomenal memory: hosting several hundred guests at a banquet at a major hotel, he greets all the luminaries present by name, without notes. The next day he takes his guests to a bayside sari-sari store for a snack of cheap sweet biscuits and soft drinks; the tab comes out to P155; he hands the giggling storeowner a P500 bill and tells her to keep the change. “Don’t evict, develop,” he says of a squatter community that had sprung up on the bayshore. He has also set up 160 low-cost housing units on 100-square meter lots, payable at P500 a month for 25 years. Like an automatic wristwatch, the man’s mind is constantly working, kept alive by motion.

In quick succession, the mayor answers the typical interviewer’s questions:

“Is there anyone next to God whom Edward Hagedorn fears?” Answer: “My wife Ellen!”

“Whom did you grow up admiring the most?” Answer: “The Godfather!”

“Any political plans?” A job, he says, that would let him do more for the environment.

When Joseph Estrada was forced out of the Palace in early 2001, his staunch friend Ed Hagedorn stood by him to the end. That probably cost him the governorship in the election that May, when he challenged incumbent Gov. Joel Reyes for the job, running under the fallen Erap’s standard. We’ve heard that many trees have also fallen since in Palawan’s forests—one of them, reputedly the province’s largest, said to have been carted off to become a centerpiece for a politician’s house. 

I remember remarking then that to call Ed Hagedorn a saint would send St. Ignatius of Loyola—himself a colorful character in his time—into a spasm, but Edward Hagedorn is beginning to look like someone we’ll sorely miss when those trees start coming down for some bigshot’s dining table.