Qwertyman No. 215: Crimes and Punishments

Posted on September 14, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, September 14, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 214: Achieved, But Not Aspired For

Posted on September 7, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, September 7, 2026

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

This year’s awardees exemplify that spirit abundantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Photo from news9live.com)

Penman No. 213: The Age of Flex

Posted on August 31, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, August 31, 2026

“FLEX” IS a word I began hearing a few years ago from millennial and Gen Z speakers, and it quickly became clear to me that it had acquired a new meaning beyond the way we oldies had always understood it, i.e., in the sense of flexing your muscles so they stand out. Not all that different, really, but more deliberate and more intense: to flaunt, to show off, to rub your goodies in someone’s face. (As it turns out, upon further study. “flexing” this way was already part of gangster rap at least thirty years ago, and as many counterculture words do, slid into the mainstream.)

Whatever, we Filipinos seem to have embraced flexing with a passion, equating it with Pinoy pride in all its exuberant if not extravagant manifestations, from Eala-mania and the next Miss Universe to Michelin-worthy adobo and the Filipino gene in this and that Hollywood star.

That’s all well and good, as Lord knows we need something to cheer and crow about, with all the political and economic depressants we’ve been imbibing.

Every time I hear the Hon. Robinhood Padilla saying something—anything—I become more convinced that AI will prevail and rule the world, and we may even welcome it, if Robin’s brain—and those of the millions who put him where he is—were to be the standard for human intelligence, as some visiting Martian might surmise. (But wait: isn’t “artificial intelligence” in fact what the good senator possesses in spades?)

I’m sure Sen. Padilla feels he’s flexing something—his wit, his confidence, his irresistible appeal?—when he strides up to that podium sporting that “I know you think I’m dumb, but I’m going to outsmart you” grin. If his charm seems to be lost on doubters like us, that means nothing, because he’s not performing for us but for his faithful, whose adulation for their hero is merely amplified by every brickbat thrown his way. He may, for all we know, even be a lot smarter than we think, may be quietly reading up on algorithms and Habermas over coffee in some Jollibee before sneaking into the Senate to put on his bumpkin act. He’s flexing his acting, his ability to enthrall his audience with his pilosopo character, who pretends to look and sound stupid while nursing some deep-seated truth that every Juan and Juana grasps except all those JDs and professors of Law.

This past month brought some other, far less subtle examples of Pinoy flex.

At his confirmation hearing, Air Force reservist Brig. Gen. Mikee Romero’s “fruit salad” made an active general’s shirtfront look like plain buko pandan, setting off a storm of outrage and wonderment over how a sitting politician could amass such miraculous medals in much shorter time than it took a serving soldier to dodge a bullet and leap into a foxhole. “I never asked for them,” he declared in self-defense while abruptly announcing his retirement, for which candor I daresay he deserves another Congressional Medal of Candor, at least for confirming how the system works: I get you your choppers, you give me a chestful of chopped oranges and pineapples.

But who needs wearable baubles when you can actually drive one? Businessman AJ Violago must have thought the world was his oyster (or Boxster—or Spyder) when he got the keys from his friend the actor Derek Ramsay to go zoom-zoom in a pricey Porsche and, while he was at it, tack on custom license plates with his initials to show who was Spyder-Man. Unfortunately the caper backfired, revealing not only AJV’s folly but someone’s forgetfulness as well in the amount of PXX million in unpaid customs duties. The 918 has been impounded and will be auctioned off to recover that money, so Derek and his friend can at least take comfort in having indirectly contributed to mitigating the Philippines’ P7.2-trillion budget for 2027.

And since we Pinoys love prizes and recognition so much, let’s give the 2026 GMA “I Am Sorry” Award (in honor of the former President, for exemplary albeit dubious acts of contrition) to Dimasalang National High School Principal Randy Emmanuel Bulanon, who gleefully attacked Atty. Jesus Falcis, Rep. Percy Cendaña, and Rep. Chel Diokno for everything from their sexuality to their buck teeth. After the inevitable backlash—including the threat of legal and administrative charges and possible dismissal from the service—Bulanon took down the posts and released a lengthy apology, wishing that he had “exercised greater prudence, restraint, and discernment… especially considering my responsibilities as a school principal.”

I want to show these messages—Bulanon’s original posts, and the letter of apology—to my students in Professional Writing, to ask them which they thought were more personal and sincere and therefore believable, and which may have been AI-generated. It may not matter in the legal sphere where this now all seems headed, but it’s interesting to see where the truth recedes and what takes over when survival’s at stake. (When I look at the “letter of support” circulating on Bulanon’s behalf trumpeting his achievements as an educator, all my AI flags go up, from language to structure.)

Runner-up honors go to Danao City teacher Zenith Enriquez who threatened to shoot presidential spokesperson Claire Castro in the mouth. When netizens recoiled—and Castro threatened to sue—Enriquez said sorry and pleaded for the bashing to stop, because her children were now bearing the brunt of the backlash. Now, I don’t care if you’re DDS, pro-BBM, or as pink as a baby’s butt; but maybe next time, you should keep your lips zipped and look at your kids first before you make that stupid post, because the comeback could be far worse than more words thrown your way.

Confucius could have flexed about all the government positions he held and the rulers into whose ears he whispered. Instead he wrote sobering lines like “The superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions.” And that’s why we remember him more than all those emperors in their fancy tombs.

Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

Posted on July 27, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 27, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 207: Invicted

Posted on July 20, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 20, 2026

WHEN I teach speechwriting—like I’ll be doing again this semester as part of my course in Professional Writing—I tell my students to avoid using quotations from obscure philosophers, great writers like Shakespeare, and even the Bible if it’s highly unlikely that the speaker they’re writing for would have read them in his or her real life and understood what they were saying.

Few people are truly that learned—not that they have to be to render good public service—and the last thing you want to see and hear is your client squinting at and struggling with a sonorous phrase he or she never saw before. Especially if they’re politicians, I’d much rather that they poach “hugot” lines from pop culture that their listeners can relate to, with disarming and self-deprecating humor rather than malice aforethought.

A lot’s been said about VP Sara Duterte’s obvious reference to William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem “Invictus” at the abbreviated “press conference” she held on the second day of her impeachment trial at the Senate. “In this bloodbath and bludgeoning,” she intoned, “I will be bloodied but unbowed.” Lit-savvy netizens quickly jumped on “bloodied” being a misquote, the actual word in the verse being “bloody,” but in the context of her premise about being bludgeoned in a bloodbath (never mind how cheesy that alliteration sounds), “bloodied” makes better dramatic sense, positioning her as the unfortunate receiver of an injurious action, perhaps even more victim than victor.

I wouldn’t put it past VP Sara to have known the Henley poem, which many Filipinos of a certain age would have encountered at some point, like Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.” Indeed, it’s the very popularity of the poem—plus again that awful alliteration that’s the hallmark of a speechwriter reaching for cheap effect (also note: “bloodied” sounds ridiculously inevitable after “bloodbath,” yes?)—that accounts for its hokeyness.

Did a PR consultant put her up to it? (“Go in there, say these lines, then exit forthwith.”) We can’t say. But something tells me that’s the way VP Sara herself wanted it. The speech and the action were entirely in character with someone who sees and represents politics as theater, where broad gestures visible from across the room and the archipelago—the bullying of sheriffs, for example—matter. With the Dutertes, everything has to be punchy, dramatic, theatrical, staged. DENR giving you problems? Dump truckloads of trash right in front of their office. That’s the kind of gesture the DDS faithful lap up as creative, courageous, and even inspired.

So when Sara sneaks into the Senate (the lions’ den!) to give her little speech but quickly departs before she can even be called to the witness stand, let alone bludgeoned, we’re supposed to take that for both bravery and cunning—or at least her supporters are.

On February 18, 2026, when she declared her intention to run for the presidency, she used a series of statements ostensibly begging forgiveness for once having allied herself with her tormentor.

Mga kababayan, humihingi ako ng paumanhin sa inyong lahat. Patawad kung tinulungan kong mahalal si BBM bilang Pangulo ng ating bansa.

Patawad kung hanggang ngayon ay marami pa ring Pilipino ang nalulunod sa baha nang dahil sa malawakang korapsyon.

Patawad kung lantaran ang pang-aabuso sa ating mga institusyon para sa pansariling interes ng mga pulitiko.

Rhetorically, this usually works. She (or her speechwriter) is employing a device called anaphora, which repeats key words or phrases with incremental changes. It’s effective because it establishes a certain cadence, a regularity of structure that implies you’re in command of your material and know and mean what you’re talking about. The best-known example from modern history comes from Martin Luther King Jr., who declared in 1963 that “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up… I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia… I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin…”

Now, Sara Duterte is no MLK, but she was saying things her own people needed to hear. It wasn’t a speech to persuade BBM’s followers much less Kakampinks to seriously consider her as the better alternative. It was a speech to malign the enemy, a litany of grievances to justify her turnaround and to pass some moral ammunition for her troops to shoot with. Never mind that “malawakang korapsyon” and “pang-aabuso ng institusyon” are precisely the issues that have now landed her in impeachment court. As with Donald Trump, she’s learned that the best way to deal with political mud is to throw it right back at the accuser.

She has no problem working up her minions with these verbal broadsides. But beyond the home crowd, the problem with VP Sara is that she can’t seem to sustain an extended, rational, and unemotional argument. If I were her handler, I would worry that, on her own, she might prove incapable of discussing specifics, of fleshing out policy, of speaking beyond platitudes and generalities. You can imagine how she would respond to the cool but relentless questioning of an Atty. Ligutan or an Atty. Diokno. She would sputter and explode, and walk off the stand.

I’ve gone through her speeches on her OVP website, and they betray little of whatever originality she may be capable of. The major pieces—an education keynote in South Korea, for example—are competent, but pedestrian and undistinguished, patently outsourced. Her talks to grade-schoolers focus on the “4 Be’s”—“be kind, be humble, be happy, and be careful”—which is all well and good if you can inspire them by personal example.

It’s not that she’s unintelligent; her feral brain knows what it needs to do to survive.

In her mind she has already dismissed the Senate trial as a fruitless exercise. She’s confident she has the votes to be acquitted, and they can rail at her as much as they want and work themselves blind trying to prove her a crook, but in the end the votes will break her way, her misdeeds will be deemed expunged, and best of all, she will emerge triumphant—bloodied but unbowed—and even more powerful, which is all that will matter leading up to 2028.

That’s why she can afford to ignore whatever summons they send her way, and deprive her prosecutors and the public of the spectacle of her appearance at the witness stand. Her absence, heavy with mystery, is within her control. Her testimony, fraught with danger, will not be. That is cold calculation, intelligence of the hardest kind.

And that’s why she can’t give a damn what Lit profs like me say about her spouting “Invictus” in lieu of testifying—she’s boxed herself into that character, which makes her sound like she’s fighting when she’s not.

Qwertyman No. 206: The Unfinished Building

Posted on July 13, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 13, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 205: Selective Religion

Posted on July 6, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, July 6, 2026

LET’S ASSUME that you’re one of the leaders—if not the Great Leader himself—of the Iglesia Ni Cristo (INC), with 3 million followers at your beck and call. You get word that one of your most prominent members, a sitting senator of the Republic, is going to be charged soon with plunder for admittedly pocketing P75 million in private donations without reporting it either as a campaign contribution or as personal income.

But you don’t bother yourself with the legal niceties of the case; they’re not important. What alarms you is the fact that one of your staunchest protectors—and not just of the INC, but of the Dutertes with which your church has cast its lot—is facing prison. It’s not the legal case, not a technical matter of proving plunder; while the senator himself seems to be taking things in stride, making noises about his willingness to go to jail, you know that it’s more existential than that.

It’s your own power that’s under threat, that’s being tested by the ingrate you helped to seat in the Palace. His presumptive successor, on whom you’ve bet all your marbles, herself stands to be impeached in the Senate for all manner of grave financial wrongdoing. You need your senator’s vote for her to escape the noose. Her once-formidable alliance is thinning by the hour—whether by their own commission (one has had to disappear to save his own neck, another is already in prison, also for plunder) or through deft politicking by unseen hands.

There could be more desertions down the road, as the impeachment trial starts this week. You know these characters; they’ve all come to you for your blessings, your quid for their quo, and you know how fickle allegiances can be, especially under pressure. But you have your own pressure to exert. You need to remind them of that cordial but heavily nuanced conversation in your office, of the vast difference 3 million votes can make in the senatorial tally. (More on this later, but let’s get on with our scenario.) So what do you do?

You call the faithful out to the streets for a show of numbers, for the kind of visual impact that the network news and social media tend to magnify. You decide to hold this at the EDSA Shrine among other places for whatever symbolism it might carry, never mind that Mother Mary, so central to the EDSA spirit and experience, holds no special place of honor in INC belief. The night before, your organizers send out text messages ordering your people out to EDSA as early as 5 am; every “lokal” has to be represented. You know that you can rely on what your members have had ingrained into their minds and bodies: unquestioning obedience to authority. (Some of their T-shirts will declare this openly: “Obey and Never Complain”.)

You beam with pride and pleasure as the crowds begin to gather at dawn, catching the drowsy city by surprise. You manage to choke off the city’s busiest and most important highway, convincing yourself and your own people that a day or two’s disruption of work and traffic is a mild inconvenience compared to the issue at hand. Ah, the issue—yes, let’s go with “selective justice,” which is clearly at work in the plunder case they whipped up against the good senator. Why him? Why now? What for?

This was the senator bravely threatening to unmask the biggest crooks in the highest echelons of government—never mind that he himself was now being unmasked for palpably gross misdeeds. You trot out a small parade of notoriously unsavory politicians—but then who else have you got?—to amuse the gathering. Never mind the irony of an Imee Marcos crying “Walang uwian!” at the very place that sent her and her family packing off for Hawaii forty years ago (we don’t know if she stayed the night huddling with the INC masses—or went home as senators are wont to do after their speeches).

Nowhere in this spectacle did God or religion visibly figure—what the INC’s conception of justice was, how the Dutertes and Marcoletas would spread God’s dominion over the earth, how individual INC members (especially senators) were supposed to discern right from wrong except by executive fiat, and how the reported INC practice of cornering certain lucrative government posts after elections fulfills God’s mandate.

Sure, they can fill up streets, and hold parts of a city hostage for a few days. They can make it look like they centrally matter, and perhaps in some swing situations they do, as did the support they allegedly threw behind Bam Aquino last year.

But here’s the bottom line. The INC’s reputed 3 million members comprise voters and non-voters including children. Studies put the real number of voting INC members at less than 1.4 million, and even less in terms of who actually shows up at the polling booths. SWS chair emeritus Mahar Mangahas puts it at “around 5 percent” of all voters.

Do they vote as a bloc? Yes—but not absolutely. The 2016 TV5-SWS Exit Poll showed that 77.2 percent of INC voters supported Rodrigo Duterte. SWS data also indicate that around 20 to 25 percent of INC voters do not vote for church-endorsed candidates. So 75 to 80 percent do vote by command—but whether they do so because of obedience or because the INC tends to endorse popular candidates has yet to be determined. So the discipline and the reliability are there to some extent, but it’s a power that can be easily overstated and just as easily abused.

The greatest damage wrought by the INC in its EDSA excursion was neither to the traffic situation and much less to the case against Sen. Marcoleta. It was to its own image as a religious faith to be taken seriously as such, a body of belief driven by godly wisdom. By consistently supporting morally compromised politicians, it has revealed itself as a political instrument, manipulable and deployable, for reasons and purposes known only to its leaders.

And that’s sad because I do have some INC friends, upright people for whom I have a deep respect, and whom I would be glad to hear from on the issues I raised above. I’ll promise them fair representation in this space—but they’ll have to speak for themselves and not their leaders, to the extent that that’s even possible.

Qwertyman No.204: The Anatomy of a Grievance

Posted on June 29, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, June 29, 2026

BARELY HAD we wrapped our heads around what happened to lead to the deaths by drowning of the two Ateneo athletes Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili when we got the news of a mass shooting at the San Jose National High School in Tacloban, Leyte, with two teenagers allegedly responsible for killing three students and injuring many others.

Both events were met with shock and outrage, as was to be expected. Even in the long catalog of evils and misfortunes that we Filipinos have become familiar with, these did not exist. Healthy, star-quality athletes do not suddenly die; Filipino teenagers tied to their cellphones do not bring guns to school and shoot their peers dead. It was as if we had let new and unfamiliar monsters into our fold, and we were eager—indeed adamant—to give them a face, a name, and a motive. At the very least, we needed someone or something to blame, to ease our consciences.

That consternation likely accounts for the plethora of suspicions, accusations, and conspiracy theories that emerged in the wake of these tragedies, ostensibly to throw light on “what really happened” but achieving the opposite effect of leading us even farther away from the truth. I myself have been mighty confused by some of these responses—who said exactly what, where did that come from, etc.—that I turned to AI (yes, I know, something that some of us trust even less than the cafeteria Marites) to help me sort things out; in this instance, I used Claude, which has proven to be a reliable assistant in my nonfiction work. (We can have another debate another time about whether writers like me should even resort to AI—at which I’ll ask if you’ve ever used Google or an electronic calculator, for that matter—but I’m hoping that this present discussion will offer proof enough that there’s room for mechanical assistance in human argumentation.)

Most troubling if not ridiculous of all have been a couple of memes I’ve seen claiming that Rene was beaten up and drowned by his fellow players and that the coaches merely looked on.

These speculations apparently ride on the allegation made by Rene Baterbonia’s mother Rovelyn that her son’s death was no accident—a short step away from claiming that Rene was murdered, as some netizens have chosen to interpret it. But nowhere in her many interviews did Rovelyn clearly and verifiably say that “My son was murdered.” (And neither am I saying that she had no right to claim that had she wanted to, as the most aggrieved party entitled to her darkest fears and suspicions.)

What the record shows is that, based on what she initially heard, she believed that Rene’s arms and legs had been weighted down (subsequently denied by the autopsy results), and that the dangerous exercise had taken place without informed consent (a continuing issue). She also took Ateneo to task for not communicating with her quickly and clearly enough (I think a fair charge). So no, Mrs. Baterbonia never said nor suggested that someone purposely killed her son. She does allege criminal negligence, which many people suspect, and a sorely inadequate response on Ateneo’s part, which I think even Ateneans admit in their heart of hearts.

What muddled this further was the CIDG’s reported statements, made more than a week after the June 9 incident, that the deaths were “not an accident,” apparently contradicting the local police’s initial assessment. That later statement, made by CIDG Director Robert Morico II on June 17 and repeated on June 18, was hedged as a presumption awaiting further evidence. It ultimately recommended, in its June 26 findings submitted to the Department of Justice, that an anti-hazing case should be filed against 11 individuals led by Coach Tab Baldwin, since the team-building activity constituted hazing under dangerous conditions. But “not an accident” resulting in homicide again doesn’t translate to willful murder—or a plot, as the DDS puts it, for Luzon to kill off Mindanao’s finest. It’s now up to the DOJ to move matters forward.

What this tells me is that in the absence of factual information, clearly and promptly disseminated, all kinds of malicious rumors will emerge and easily find sympathetic receptors and transmitters. (I suspect the counter-narratives would have arisen anyway—the trolls have to earn their keep, which means the fact-checkers and truth-sayers have to work at least as hard.)

The same miasma now threatens to engulf the Tacloban shootings, in which two teenagers carrying a .38 revolver and a Glock 9-mm were involved. The Internet was quick to spit out AI-generated pictures of Sens. Kiko Pangilinan and Risa Hontiveros coddling the two suspects, with Sen. Kiko being blamed for his sponsored law setting the bar for criminal responsibility at age 15 (the UN recommends a minimum of 14 years).

There are many other aspects to this case, including that of gun ownership, but let’s focus for now on this age-of-criminal-responsibility thing, which Pangilinan’s DDS detractors want to bring down to 10. Again, to be clear, Kiko stated that the law as it stands doesn’t automatically absolve the juvenile shooters from responsibility; they remain accountable in various ways, and cannot simply be released.

If they used the same AI they used to malign the senators, the DDS propagandists would have discovered that the UK, which does use age 10 as its baseline, has a higher crime rate than other European countries using 14-15. The Nordic countries start at 15 and are among the world’s safest. (North Korea reportedly sets its bar for criminals at 6.)

We seem so eager to establish at what age young offenders can be punished that—as horrendous as the Tacloban shootings were—we forget the far more numerous and grievous crimes committed every day by adults in this country that go unpunished.

In any case, the most sensible response I’ve read to the Tacloban shootings came from a Facebook poster named Raffy Magno, who said that “There is something deeply troubling about a society that is quick to demand the harshest punishment for young people, while celebrating convicted plunderers, tolerating corruption, and rewarding leaders who normalize violence.

“Young people do not grow up in a vacuum. They learn from the values we model, the behavior we reward, and the systems we build around them. Violence rarely begins at the moment it becomes visible. It is often preceded by bullying, social isolation, neglect, untreated trauma, and countless missed opportunities for intervention.

“If we want children to reject violence, then we must also be willing to examine the ways our society excuses, glorifies, and profits from it. We cannot celebrate violence among adults and expect young people to learn a different lesson.”

The call for justice begins with raw and strong emotion, but ultimately it has to be dispensed with cool and thoughtful reason.

Qwertyman No. 203: Camara v. DENR

Posted on June 22, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, June 22, 2026

I WISH I could say that this is a welcome break or a pleasant diversion from the infernal politics rocking the Senate (which thankfully seems to have settled down, at least for the time being, with the miscreants licking their wounds), but it’s neither pleasant nor a diversion, as it reminds us that real problems remain out there that demand both governmental action and civic awareness to resolve.

As an opinion writer, I receive a fair number of messages requesting that I highlight certain issues and causes, and while many are patently trivial and self-serving enough to easily ignore, some pique my interest because of their strategic implications for our future—not even just ours, but our children’s and grandchildren’s.

One of those messages came from Philip Camara—whom I don’t know and have never met, but who introduced himself as a Zambales resident and Executive Director of the Institute of Area Management (IAM). He had served as the DENR Undersecretary for Field Operations under the late Sec. Gina Lopez, before the mining lobby gutted her appointment.

Philip himself may have been out of a job, but he continued his advocacy in private by founding the Zambales-based IAM, an NGO that promotes “areaism,” an alternative community development framework that emphasizes resource management and governance by geographic area than by sector.

This month, Camara and IAM—along with minor Placida Natividad C. Montefalcon and “generations yet unborn”—filed a petition for a Writ of Kalikasan and Continuing Mandamus before the Supreme Court against the DENR and the Mine and Geosciences Bureau (MGB). The petition also asks for a Temporary Environmental Protection Order (TEPO) for immediate interim relief while the case is pending.

What’s the issue? Philip says that “Living in Zambales—where there are highly destructive watershed-based mines and where the political dynasty acts with impunity in its pro-extractive corporate activity—gave me little choice but to take legal action. This action challenges what we call ‘Sectoral Rationality’—the bureaucratic practice of approving mining and dredging projects based on short-term revenue while assigning a value of ZERO to environmental destruction and public health burdens. Backed by hard 2024 and 2025 scientific data from Zambales, our petition argues that this framework is now explicitly illegal under the new PENCAS law (RA 11995), which mandates natural capital accounting.”

In other words, Philip claims that the DENR and MGB have been approving potentially destructive projects without taking their environmental and health impact into account. This runs contrary to the new Philippine Ecosystem and National Capital Accounting System (PENCAS) Act, signed into law in 2024 to factor the environmental costs and benefits of projects into development planning and align the Philippines with international environmental accounting standards. So when you put up a mine, you don’t think about just how much money it’s going to make for the short term, but also what it’s long-term impact on the environment and the community will be.

The “writ of kalikasan” that the petition is praying for is a Philippine legal remedy for environmental protection, based on the constitutional right to “a balanced and healthful ecology” under Article II, Section 16 of the 1987 Constitution. Created by the Supreme Court in 2010, it’s a pioneering remedy that few other countries have. The idea is to give citizens a fast, powerful tool to stop large-scale environmental damage without getting bogged down in ordinary litigation.

The writ has a scale requirement that comes into play when the environmental harm is large enough to “prejudice the life, health, or property of inhabitants in two or more cities or provinces.” It can’t be invoked for local or isolated environmental damage, like a factory polluting your backyard—it has to cross jurisdictional boundaries, which Camara argues is the case in Zambales, where the contamination and erosion produced by mining reaches out toward Pangasinan.

You don’t even have to be directly affected to be able to file a petition for the writ before the Supreme Court (and yes, such petitions go straight to the SC, bypassing the judicial bureaucracy, in recognition of the writ’s importance). It’s worth noting that the petition is also being made on behalf of “generations yet unborn,” taking a page from the landmark 1990 Oposa v. Factoran case premised on the argument that natural resources such as forests belong not just to the present generation but the future as well. If it agrees, the SC can then compel the respondents (public or private) to stop the damaging activity, protect or rehabilitate the environment, monitor compliance, and submit reports.

The Camara petition rests on the legal notion that the 1995 Mining Act (RA 7942) requires that mineral exploration be “rational” without actually defining what “rational” means, effectively assigning a value of zero to watershed destruction, shoreline collapse, food contamination, public health damage, and harm to future generations. It cites two scientific studies to back up its claims as to the critical nature of this negligence. A 2024 toxicity study in Sta. Cruz, Zambales found nickel enrichment factors, cancer-risk, and hazard values exceeding international safety thresholds, and contamination reaching local rice crops. A 2025 erosion study in San Felipe, Zambales found dredging within the “Depth of Closure” zone, shoreline retreat of about 16 meters per year, and projected losses of ₱3.88 billion by 2030.

There are globally adopted scientific methods and measures in place to establish “rationality.” Leaving it vague and undefined—we hope not intentionally—opens doors to misinterpretation, abuse, and corruption. Far worse, it will destroy the future, with the law standing by in complicit silence and virtual approval, if this loophole remains unplugged.

So thank you, Philip Camara, for bringing this to our attention—but more importantly, I hope it reaches sympathetic ears at the Supreme Court, whose favorable judgment can make a tremendous difference for those “generations yet unborn.”

Qwertyman No. 202: Oh, Ateneo

Posted on June 15, 2026 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, June 15, 2026

WITH SO much already having been said and posted about last week’s saddest story—the tragic drowning of two Ateneo student-athletes in a training activity far off-campus—it seems pointless to add anything more. But as a former university administrator (with that other big school at the other end of Katipunan Avenue, the University of the Philippines), I feel compelled to think aloud and wonder what we should and could have done had this happened to us across the street.

The Ateneo university administration has been roundly (and I believe fairly) scored for not saying and doing enough in the immediate aftermath of the apparent accident to establish what happened, determine accountabilities, and provide sympathy and support to the bereaved. What drowned in Aurora were more than two boys and their hopes; into the depths went their school’s hard-won reputation for a culture of caring.

Institutional mindsets would reflexively call this “damage control,” but “damage control” sounds profoundly inappropriate and inadequate in these circumstances—the greatest damage done was that to the families of Rene Baterbonia and Divine Adili, and it is permanent and cannot be undone. Even to a people inured by tokhang, the heartrending video of a mother’s grief cuts to the bone.

The damage to the university’s reputation is substantial but, in the thick-skinned way these things go, fleeting and survivable. What people are calling for is justice, and let the damage fall where it may. In an academic universe increasingly driven by global ratings, a university’s reputation should seem to matter more, but where in the statistics do factors like compassion count?

I know how difficult it is for academic bureaucrats to respond to a crushing crisis like this. My old job at UP, aside from teaching English and creative writing, was that of Vice President for Public Affairs, which meant that I was both the university’s spokesperson and shock absorber, the one who had to face the likes of Ka Tunying at seven in the morning to answer questions about all the rich kids in UP, fraternity hazing, communists on campus, and UP’s squatter problem.

It was understood that I was there to help promote and protect the university’s image, at a time when that image was being battered from both right and left, often from critics at the very top of the same government that we were dependent on for our annual budget. For the sake of that budget—which had its own critics—we had to tread a thin line between cooperating with authority and preserving our autonomy and academic freedom, a process fraught with conflict and, yes, sometimes hypocrisy, as when we had to smile in the face of politicians we would otherwise have cursed. While each little and isolated case may have been challenging and disturbing, eventually they all became administrative routine, necessarily tolerable.

But for every institution, there comes a defining moment when more than budgets or reputations are at stake, when its very spirit itself is under question and under threat. That moment seems to have arrived for Ateneo, a great university unlike many others, even unlike UP, founded as it is on Christian and indeed Ignatian principles that include magis or the striving for excellence for God’s greater glory and cura personalis or caring for the whole person. As Fr. Pedro Arrupe, SJ put it, a Jesuit education aims at producing “men and women for others.” UP has its “Serve the People,” but its secular character imposes less of a spiritual and more of a political mission on its community.

This is why the Ateneo administration’s seeming inadequacy of response to the accident, beyond its terse initial announcement, comes as a perplexing disappointment to many, on top of the awful pain and grief caused by the deaths themselves. In the very least, a statement providing more details of what happened, committing to a thorough and impartial investigation, and offering support to the affected families would have eased many initial concerns.

Ultimately an institution’s image is made more by what it does than what it says, but the saying is also part of the doing. I would have arranged an immediate meeting between the Ateneo president and team coach and Rene’s family—and at least by Zoom with Divine’s—for them to personally explain what happened and to make the necessary amends.

Despite efforts to politicize and capitalize on the issue, I myself believe that what happened was a terrible accident, albeit a preventable one, with better foresight. Almost exactly a year ago, I lost a good friend, Don Rodis, to a rogue wave and riptide that pulled him into the waters off Los Cabos in Mexico; one minute he was just strolling on the beach, the next he was gone.

That’s nature at its indifferent and cruelest worst, which, beyond preparing for, we can do little about. Human nature also arises spontaneously, in the shock, grief, and even anger that followed the accident. But human agency is something else—the “what could and should have been done’s,” both before and after the event.

I can imagine, as administrators would have instinctively responded, that Ateneo’s academic and athletic managers first called the lawyers in to find out who was responsible for what and what the university’s liabilities were. It’s a logical institutional reaction, but again Ateneo could have risen above that to show true compassion, which should come instantly and unbidden, without lawyers or preconditions. I have no doubt that the likes of Fr. Flavie Villanueva, Fr. Albert Alejo, or Fr. Robert Reyes would have rushed to and embraced the grieving mother if they could.

(It has been a bad week for Ateneo in more ways. The athletes’ deaths obscured the passing of another prime Atenean talent, the poet and professor Rofel Brion. Rofel once said that “I write mostly about small, ordinary events, and in doing so, I capture them. I hold on to them and never let them go. And this, I guess, is how I pay homage to them.” This was his way of living the Ignatian principle of finding God in the ordinary. )

I have many friends at Ateneo and have even taught there—once as a substitute for the late Prof. Doreen Fernandez when she was unwell, and another time as the holder of its professorial chair in creative writing. While not particularly religious myself, I am a strong believer in its mission and in its products. I appreciate its efforts to diversify and to bring in more poor scholars into its fold.

If Ateneo is as great as its history suggests, it will use this instance to reflect deeply on what it wants to be, and to be regarded as. I have no doubt that with sincere introspection and self-criticism, it will find the best ways to do right by the families of Rene and Divine, to run a fit and humane athletics program, to set the right policies and put the right people in place, and to reassure its community that it has recovered its true Ignatian spirit.

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Category Archives: Law and Justice