Category Archives: lifestyle

Penman No. 465: Back to the Nineties

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Penman for Sunday, August 11, 2024

AMONG THIS year’s most interesting new books is one that’s neither a novel nor a political exposé, but a musical chronicle of a decade that many Filipinos now look back on with a certain nostalgia, albeit for different reasons—the 1990s.

Say “the Nineties,” and a range of responses will come to mind depending on how old you were then. For today’s seniors, the core of it was likely FVR’s infectious optimism over “Philippines 2000,” the relative stability we had gained after the anti-Cory coups and in anticipation of our centennial in 1998. For those younger but old enough to drink beer, it was the age of the Eraserheads, Clubb Dredd, the ‘70s Bistro, and Mayric’s, an explosion of OPM like we had seen back in the 1970s but with a harder and sharper edge.

It’s that latter scenario—set against the context of our transition from Cory to FVR to Erap—that’s captured in Susan Claire Agbayani’s landmark Tugtugan Pamorningan: The Philippine Music Scene 1990-1999 (University of the Philippines Press, 2024, part of the Philippine Writers Series of the UP Institute of Creative Writing). An indefatigable cultural journalist, publicist, and sometime concert producer (and also, I must proudly admit, my former student), Claire was among the very few writers who could have undertaken this job (Eric Caruncho, Jessica Zafra, and Pocholo Concepcion, all of whom she cites, would have been the others). 

Comprehensively, the book’s chapters cover bars and concerts, the music scene, personality profiles, duos and trios, pop/jazz/R&B/show bands, alternative/rock bands, the Eraserheads (yes, a chapter all to their own), Mr. and Mss. Saigon, and visiting acts, rounded out by a gallery of period pics.

As a compilation of pieces from Claire’s reportage at that time, the book revives not only the music but also the issues besetting the industry then, such as Sen. Tito Sotto’s wanting to ban the Eraserheads song “Alapaap” for supposedly promoting drug abuse. Priceless vignettes abound, such as that of Basil Valdez singing “Ama Namin” to composer George Canseco’s wife over the phone, three days before she died, and of Ely Buendia telling Nonoy Zuñiga that he had won a singing competition in school with the latter’s “Doon Lang.” We learn about Humanities teacher and all-around performer Edru Abraham’s Lebanese ancestry and how it connects him to world music.

The best scenes, I think, are the saddest ones, such as this piece on a jazz diva:

“She goes around greeting the waiters, then the manager. At last, she sits on a stool, and croons ‘Left Alone,’ the song after which the bar was named. She closes her eyes, closed them more tightly as a couple walks out in the middle of her song. The waiters laugh loudly in the background, occupied with their own concerns. Those who remain inside the bar talk not in whispers. No, they don’t know her. They don’t know Annie Brazil.”

But ultimately it’s the music, the sheer variety and vitality of it, that surges through, so innate to the Filipino and so necessary. If there were an Olympics for music, we’d make the podium in all the categories, and Tugtugan Pamorningan reminds us why. As the title implies, it’s a nightlong festival for us when the music starts. But like night itself, even the Nineties came to an end, with the 2000s bringing in MP3, iTunes, and Spotify, and somehow the smoky, small-bar intimacy that the previous decade connoted gave way to Taylor Swift mega-concerts that people actually flew out to instead of taking a taxi.

I contributed an afterword to the book, so here’s a bit more of what I had to say:

I was a bit too old by the time the ‘90s came along to experience it in the way Claire has so capably and faithfully chronicled in this book, but still young enough to imbibe its energy and its excesses. I was 36 in 1990, finishing my PhD in the States, and when I returned to Manila the following year after five years of being away, I found a radically different scene from the one I’d left just after EDSA. I had a lot to adjust to, and somehow San Miguel beer and the city’s new nightlife seemed to ease those pains, at least until the next morning. 

That was how, despite being too old to know the Eraserheads and their music, I managed to stumble once or twice into Club Dredd, Mayrics, the ‘70s Bistro, and a few other meccas mentioned here, but mostly just out of curiosity. I guess I was looking for something else, and found it on Timog Avenue with my partners-in-crime Charlson Ong and Arnold Azurin, finishing up with some coffee or a beer for the road at Sam’s Diner on Quezon Avenue at 3 am. I wasn’t even a Penguin person—I never thought of myself as being hip or cool—and I preferred hanging out with journos after work in that kebab place on Timog.

That was my life as a barfly—which was also how my newspaper column got that title—and its soundtrack consisted of Basia, Bryan Adams, and “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” I wasn’t much into bands—no one could beat the Beatles—and OPM for me meant APO and Louie Ocampo, whose songs were singable and could make me smile, which I needed a lot. It was a wild time, when I was smoking and drinking and messing around town in my white VW, courting disaster, until one day I found my way home and decided to stay there forever.

That makes the ‘90s sound like some kind of inferno, but now that I think about it, it was the last gasp of innocence before the 2000s and everything we associate with it—9/11, GMA and Erap, the Internet, the iPod, social media, K-pop, tokhang, Trump, the pandemic, the Marcos restoration, and AI—came in. There was a simple-mindedness even to our vices then; truth was truth, fake was fake, and it was easy to tell one from the other. It was rough and raw in many ways—even our 14.4K modems screeched like cats in heat when they connected—but we still got wide-eyed about the possibility of extra-terrestial menace in The X-Files, and we may even have believed that FVR’s “Philippines 2000” was going to be a better place even as we got worried sick over what Y2K would bring, so there remained a tender spot of credulity in us.

That’s all gone now, like Jacqui Magno’s voice, replaced by CGIs, deep fakes, and other synthetics produced by FaceMagic and ChatGPT. 

I can’t honestly say that I miss the ‘90s, and I feel much relieved to have survived them, but there’d be a huge hole in my life—and in the nation’s—if they didn’t happen. What’s in that hole is what’s in the music Claire writes about—and the music often gets it better than even we writers can.

Qwertyman No. 105: Pronouns and Parodies

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 5, 2024

SOME DAYS, I swear, when I open my Facebook feed, I’m met by a flood of vexatious opinion certain to trigger my worst reflexes. Much as I’m tempted to respond, I rarely do, knowing that FB comments don’t really soften hearts and minds, but only make them harder. Also, I’m not the witty sort with one-liners that will go viral; my thoughts and words like to ramble and even lose their way, but at least you know it’s not AI or the “Forward” button at work.

Two topics did get me worked up a bit last week, and I’m going to use this column to write the kind of longish social-media comment no one will read. You’ll recognize both issues instantly if you haven’t been living under a rock.

The first was that picture of a seated gay “personality” (I’m never quite sure how persons become “personalities”) lecturing a waiter standing at parade-rest, reportedly for two hours, on gender sensitivity, all because he called her “Sir.” 

There’s a part of me that understands how and why that happened. Some will call this silly wokeness, but in UP, we take our students’ preferred pronouns and names seriously as a sign of respect for the person. 

But what I also know is, when I teach, I stand and my students sit. That’s not to emphasize my authority, but so they can relax, listen, and hopefully imbibe what I’m telling them. I realize that the lady said she invited the waiter to sit down, but I also understand why he declined. Staff don’t sit for a chummy chat with customers. And imagine this: if I (an old man, dirty or not) were the customer and I felt poorly served by a female employee, and I asked her to sit at my table for two hours while I educated her on the finer points of etiquette, would or should she oblige? And I hate listening to or giving long lectures. If I can’t get something across in twenty minutes max, then I’m a lousy teacher.

There’s politics which can be good and right—and people who may not be. Some of the most politically savvy people I’ve met have also been, as some would say, that part of you where the sun don’t shine. 

The other hot topic, of course, was the “Last Supper” tableau at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics in Paris, which allegedly mocked the Lord and Christianity itself by replacing Jesus and his apostles at the long table with a raft of drag queens and other presumably degenerate characters. 

I never saw so many Christians and especially Catholics (some of them my good friends) come out of the woodwork to profess their outrage at what they took to be willful sacrilege. And predictably, like wolves sniffing out red meat, many more friends from the other side piled on the “offendees” with mini-treatises on Bacchus and bacchanals, pagan elements in Christian ritual, art criticism, the French mentality and sensibility, and such other topics worthy of dissertations.

Now, as I’ve often confessed in this column (maybe losing five readers and FB friends every time I bring it up; in this context, maybe more), I’m not much of a churchgoer, and have continuing issues with the religion I was born into—and with all of organized religion for that matter, despite growing up in Catholic school. I prefer to pray on my own. I have nothing against people who stay in the fold, go to Mass regularly, post daily proverbs on Viber, and believe in the Bible as the one and only true source of, well, the truth. If their faith keeps them whole and happy—and I can see in many cases that it does—then well and good. Some may be hypocrites, but I’m sure many or most aren’t—and there are hypocrites as well (and worse) among apostates like me.

But back to Paris. What I’m not going to say is, “You shouldn’t have been offended.” If you were, you were. Even if you later changed your mind after listening to all the learned explanations (to some, I’m sure, excuses), the fact is, you saw something you didn’t like. (I just have to wonder—how many people responded directly to the tableau itself, and how many were nudged into seeing it and later objecting by another post screaming, “Hey, you have to see this! Look what they’ve done to Jesus!”? It works the same way on the right and on the left: a meme cascades swiftly down the Internet, and people react viscerally even before they can think.) 

Sure, the “Last Supper” is only a painting by one Leonardo da Vinci, that smart Italian fellow who also imagined flying machines, tanks, and other wonderful contraptions—so why not Jesus’ last meal? (I don’t think there’s an exact record in any of the four Gospels about how the scene was blocked for thirteen characters, except that Christ very likely sat in the middle for better reach, and certainly nobody knows who sat next to whom and leaned over whom. Some depictions down the centuries don’t even use a straight table but an inverted U, or have everyone reclining on mats and pillows, or sitting in a circle.) But even images and objects have symbolic meaning and power, so it’s easy to get hopping mad if someone, say, spits on a painting of your grandmother, or turns it into an unflattering cartoon. 

I do share the consternation over why a hyper-expensive and PR-conscious global enterprise like the Olympics would risk alienating half of France and a third of the world (presuming all Christians took umbrage at the Blue Guy) by—according to the charge sheet—deliberately, premeditatedly, and maliciously mounting a patently anti-Christian production for the whole planet to see. I know the French eat strange things like sheep testicles and have a law requiring skimpy trunks and head caps (yes, even if you’re bald) in public pools, but really now, mock the Last Supper? Sacré Dieu! (Or, excuse me, let’s use the milder sacré bleu!)

Given all of that, my only question is, where was all the outrage when that President was joking about raping captive nuns and cursing the Pope? And speaking of the Renaissance and the power of representation, remember that Pieta-like photograph of a grieving mother cradling her murdered son at the height of that same President’s tokhang campaign, that President who called Catholic bishops “gay SOBs”? Where was all the righteousness? But maybe we’re just getting started. There’ll be FB accounts I’ll be checking in on, the next time something wildly repulsive happens.

(Image from arnoldzwicky.org–Please condemn him. not me!)

Penman No. 464: A Fantasy Memoir

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Penman for Sunday, July 7, 2024

THE AUTHOR calls his book a “fantasy memoir,” and if it’s a genre you’re not familiar with, you wouldn’t be alone. Or maybe that’s just because you’re a dour and straight septuagenarian like me who doesn’t go out too much, watches true-crime shows to relax, and presses his pants and shines his shoes because, well, that’s the way it should be. I later googled the term, just to see what’s out there, and much to my surprise, it does exist—a genre defined by “imagination, escapism, and dreams,” with the stipulation that these fantasies, or products of the mind, are just as valid as memory in recreating one’s life.

Thankfully, from the cover onward, Michael Gil Magnaye’s La Vie en Pose makes it purpose clear to the most casual and non-literary of readers: to have fun—while raising some very serious questions on the side about who and what we are (or pretend to be), what poses we ourselves assume, consciously or not, in our everyday lives, and how our identities are constructed by something so simple as what we wear.

La Vie en Pose is one of those rare books one can truly call “inspired,” resulting from the kind of half-crazy “What if?” lightbulb moment that strikes you over your tenth bottle of beer at 3 in the morning. Unlike many such flashes, this one stayed with Gil, took firmer shape, and turned into a virtual obsession—a first book to be completed by his 60th birthday, not just any book, not one of dry prose between the covers, but one certain to make a personal statement for the ages.

Magnaye, who works as an advisor to an international NGO, describes the book as “a fantasy memoir told in a hundred photographs of the author in costume, striking a pose around the world. Designed and photographed over a decade, these vignettes depict media celebrities, politicians, literary characters and wholly fictitious figures drawn from Magnaye’s fertile imagination. The collection offers satirical, often hilarious commentary on noteworthy personalities in pop culture, politics and history, from Game of Thrones to Bridgerton, from Jackie Onassis to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

Divided into eight chapters and edited by the celebrated Fil-Am writer Marivi Soliven, the book takes Gil around the world (none of this is AI—the photography took many years and plane flights to complete), posing in various locales and contexts, often in costume, to mimic or to pay homage to familiar figures and situations. The pop-culture setups will likely elicit the most laughs and smiles—Tina Turner, Maria von Trapp, and of course Barbie all get their comeuppance—and the UP Oblation poses (thankfully just backsides) show the malayong lupain that our iskolars ng bayan have reached (Gil studied and taught Humanities in UP before going to Stanford for his master’s). The levity aside, he strikes thoughtful, almost architectural, poses against spare backdrops. He draws his husband Roy, a normally reticent software engineer, into take-offs on couples (Ari and Jackie, Ennis and Jack). The effect is both riotous and reflective, a visual essay on how pop and political culture have overwhelmed us, but also how we have appropriated and domesticated them for our own purposes, if only to say, “Hey, I can be as good that!”

The poet and queer theorist J. Neil Garcia explains it better in this note he posted online about the 30thanniversary of the landmark Ladlad anthology he co-edited with Danton Remoto: “Queer creativity is itself an integral component of the equality message, and not simply a means to an end. Since the freedom of the imagination is perhaps where all freedom begins, it is clear that giving the queer artist the power or the ability to create their own texts and art works needs to be seen as a vital objective of the equality movement, one of whose primary interests must be in securing this imaginative and/or cognitive ability above all. Hence, we need to insist on the truth that queer creativity isn’t simply a tool to promote the equality message and other activist agendas; rather, queer creativity itself is part of the agenda—is part of the equality message itself (and so, queer creativity is not just a means to an end; quite crucially, as the best evidence and enactment we have of individual and collective agency, even against the harshest of odds, it is an end, in itself).”

For Gil—whom I was friends with back when he still had a girlfriend and confronting his sexuality—the book is more than a personal celebration (he launched it in UP last June 23 to mark his 60th birthday); it’s also an assertion of his rights as a queer (the preferred term these days to “gay”) person—and by extension, of all other LGBTQ+ people as well—to express themselves creatively. In his introduction, he notes that “This book is born at a fraught moment in gender politics. Some states in the US have passed legislation that attacks transgender youth for their chosen wardrobe or preferred pronouns. A drag artist in the Philippines has been jailed for performing an irreverent dance interpretation of a Catholic hymn. Such adverse events would seem to suggest that cross-dressing is an act of subversion. I would argue that cross-dressing and mimicry are strategies that drag queens, drag kings, non-binary performers, and gender benders employ to resist, challenge, navigate, and extricate themselves from systems imposed by traditional constructs. And it’s a lot of fun.”

La Vie en Pose most surely is. Copies might still be available at the UP Center for Women’s and Gender Studies.

Qwertyman No. 97: The City That Works

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 10, 2024

I WAS back last week in the city of Kaohsiung in Taiwan with a group of writers from the University of the Philippines Institute of Creative Writing, at the invitation of Dr. Eing Ming Wu of the Edu-Connect Southeast Asia Association, an education NGO seeking to establish stronger ties between Taiwanese universities and their counterparts south of Taiwan. We were there to meet with our literary and academic counterparts, but also to acquaint ourselves with contemporary Taiwanese society and culture. What we found along the way was a city and a government that works—a model we have much to learn from.

It was my second time in Kaohsiung and my sixth in Taiwan since my first visit in 2010, but those earlier sorties were either for tourism or for attending meetings and conferences, so we never really got to immerse ourselves in the place and its people. This time, Dr. Wu made sure that we went beyond casual handshakes and pleasantries with city and university officials to engage our hosts in in-depth conversations.

The first thing that usually strikes visitors about Taiwan is how modern it looks, especially when flying in through Taipei—the High Speed Rail (HSR), the wide roads, the skyscrapers (think Taipei 101, once the world’s tallest), the late-model cars. For quick comparisons, consider this: Taiwan’s population, at 24 million, is about a fifth of ours; in terms of land area, we are almost ten times larger; its nominal per capita GDP, however, is almost ten times larger than ours at US$35,000. Not surprisingly, Taiwan now ranks around 20th in the world in terms of its economic power.

That power came out of decades of dramatic transformation from an agricultural to a highly industrialized economy, starting with massive land reform and the adoption of policies that spurred export-driven growth. Industrialization itself went through key phases from the production of small, labor-intensive goods to heavy industry, electronics, software, and now AR/VR and AI tools and applications.

At a briefing at the Linhai Industrial Park by Dr. Paul Chung, a US-trained engineer who was one of the architects of this economic miracle, we learned how Taiwan built up the right environment for economic growth through such strategies as the creation of industrial parks (there are now 67 of them covering more than 32,000 hectares, with 13,000 companies employing 730,000 people and generating annual revenues of more than US$260 billion—almost eight times what all our OFWs contribute to the economy). The Taiwanese government has also implemented a one-stop-shop approach to investments, bringing together the approvals of many ministries and local governments under one roof.

Consistently, in modern times, the private sector has led the way forward, with the government acting as facilitator. This was much in evidence in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s southern industrial hub that was, until relatively recently, a virtual cesspool, the prime exemplar of industrialization gone amuck. A strategic seaport, Kaohsiung grew out of the need to export Taiwanese sugar during the Japanese occupation (1895-1945); the sugar industry gave rise to railways that went far up north to Keelung and became the backbone of the country’s transport system. After the war, the Kuomintang who displaced the Japanese did little to improve things until a visionary mayor undertook reforms that cleaned up the place. Industry also achieved important synergies by adopting policies toward carbon neutrality and reducing waste—for example, one company’s blast furnace slag is being used to pave roads, and harmful carbon monoxide emissions have been rerouted as inputs to chemical companies.

Kaohsiung today is a city of 2.8 million people, a showcase of how runaway industrialization and urban blight can be reversed through good governance and political will. “People need responsible, responsive, and accountable government,” says Dr. Wu, a public-administration expert who worked for 15 years with five Kaohsiung mayors and who now serves as a visiting professor at UP’s National College of Public Administration and Governance (NCPAG). 

A longtime visitor to the Philippines, Dr. Wu has made it his personal mission to promote Philippine-Taiwanese people-to-people relations—a concept he calls “taiwanihan”—in the conviction that the two countries have much to learn from each other and form a natural geographical, economic, and cultural partnership. “We are each other’s closest neighbor,” Wu says. “Taipei is 96 minutes away by train from Kaohsiung, but Kaohsiung is only 90 minutes away by air from the Philippines.” 

Wu and his colleagues at NCPAG have been exploring the possibilities of developing a corridor of cooperation between Southern Taiwan and Northern Philippines, given their proximity. “We have the technology, you have the resources like biomass,” he adds, pointing out as well that taiwanihan doesn’t just mean a one-way relationship, but that the Philippines can also assist Taiwan with its growing needs, such as engineering talent and manpower. Some 8,000 Filipinos now work in Taiwanese factories, but Taiwan’s demand for highly skilled workers will only get higher as it moves into the next phase of its development, which will be heavily dependent on AI.

Artificial intelligence already takes care of many of Kaohsiung’s more mundane needs such as remote traffic monitoring and even the paid parking of vehicles, which has been outsourced by the government to a private entity. “We buy services, not things,” explains Dr. Wu. “The government provides the land for the parking, the private sector supplies the technology and the hardware. This is our version of public-private partnership: the government listens to the private sector, which can use the city as its lab.” 

E-governance and decentralization led us to an unusual sight: we visited City Hall on a weekday and saw very few people in the lobby, unlike its Philippine counterparts. That doesn’t mean that government is distant from the citizens, as a “1999” complaints center receives and fields calls online or in person, employing the disabled to man its booths. 

And even as AI has taken the forefront, it was abundantly clear that human intelligence and human priorities remained important. Good community governance, for one thing, was key to clean and peaceful neighborhoods (their village officials are appointed rather than elected, eliminating vote-buying). Their libraries alone show how and why the Taiwanese are succeeding: they not only have hundreds of thousands of books available to their citizens, but they have innovations such as the “Adopt-a-Book” program by which you borrow a book just based on a previous reader’s recommendation, and books in both Braille and regular text, so that sighted readers can read along with the blind and enjoy a story together. A city that goes that far to meet its people’s needs can’t fail.

Penman No. 463: Masters of the Old and New

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Penman for Sunday, June 10, 2024

THE WORK of two outstanding Filipino artists drew my attention last month, in events that could be considered retrospectives of remarkable if somewhat divergent careers. 

The first was the exhibition “Looking Back” mounted by Fernando Modesto at the Galerie Hans Brumann in Makati, running until June 30, which gathers some of the painter’s best work over the past five decades, many of them from the private collection of the longtime Manila resident Brumann himself. That Brumann—now 83, and also a renowned artist and jeweler—was letting go of these pieces struck me much less as a disposal of worthy objects than a bequeathal, an opportunity to share the best of Modesto with other collectors. Laid low by a stroke some years ago, “Mode” as his friends know him remains mentally as sprightly and mischievous as ever; and he has striven and managed to produce new work despite his condition, taking off from the Mode we knew.

That Mode was irrepressibly bright, witty, and playful. In contrast to the somber and even dismal realism of many of his contemporaries from the 1970s onwards, Mode made light of things, opening up a world of freedom and delight in an oppressive universe. 

The playfulness, at one point, was literal. In 2018, writing in Frieze magazine, Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva reported on the Ateneo Art Gallery’s recreation of an early Modesto installation from 1974 titled Dyolens(Marbles) that involved laying out thousands of marbles on the floor for visitors to kick around. That was about the time I first met him during my days as a printmaker in Ermita; Mode had already gained fame—or notoriety if you will—for his depictions of pendant penises, which even then were clearly meant not to offend but to make one smile.

The Brumann exhibit documents Mode’s progression from tongue-in-cheek wit to transcendent wisdom, opening a door into a world we can only hope to inhabit, where angels reach for a shimmering sun (or are they playing volleyball?) in an iridescent haze, or float face-up in a cosmic pool. His most recent work such as King of the Islands II (2021) retains that rare equanimity in the cool blue gaze of its subject.

If Fernando Modesto is a master of the modern, the second painter who caught my eye reminded me of how much richness remains to be discovered in our artistic past. May 24 saw the launching of Matayog na Puno: The Life and Art of Hugo C. Yonzon, Jr. (published by Onyx Owl, 248 pages), on the centennial birthdate of Yonzon. Authored by Hugo’s son Boboy and the late Neal Cruz, the book chronicles the life and work of a man for whom art was both a passion and a living. Hugo’s career harkened back to a time when the line between fine and commercial art was blurry and perhaps not all that important, for as long as the artist gave the work his all. 

Yonzon had to leave school early to take a job—just the first of one or many—and he would go on to become much more of a journeyman, one viscerally engaged in the trade, than an aesthete or academic. “Yonzon was always invited to the various sessions held by the Saturday Group and other weekday groups that tried to establish their name and weight in the art scene,” says the book. “But he never stayed long nor drew enough on-the-spot sketches; although he had an eye for women, nude sketching did not interest him. He would rather banter and drink a cup of coffee, then return promptly to his favorite themes in his perpetually makeshift studio.”

He was friends with some of the best artists and illustrators of his time, including Mauro “Malang” Santos and Larry Alcala. Having worked as an illustrator and as an art director for an advertising agency, Hugo wielded an extremely versatile brush, adjusting his style and treatment to the client’s needs. It got to the point that visitors to his one-man show became confused, seeing so many different styles on display, but that range was a great part of the reason for Hugo’s popularity. 

But he kept returning to his favorite themes—the pastoral, the folk, the heroic, the visual representation of what he imagined Filipinos at their best and most essential to be. This appealed to the sensibilities of patrons such as First Lady Imelda Marcos, who generously supported Yonzon. Hugo was tireless in his painting and gave his friends huge discounts to the point that his wife Betty felt compelled to manage his financial affairs.

His lifestyle was appropriately flamboyant. “Dad was a loud but chic dresser,” recalls his eldest daughter Minnie. “When psychedelic colors and prints were in vogue, his long-sleeved shirts were in paisleys and reds and greens. Why, he even painted the air scoop of our brand-new Beetle in paisley!”

The life depicted in the book is fascinating, full of struggle and drama, but ultimately it is the art that imprints itself in our consciousness—one full of vigor, color, inventiveness, and variety, celebratory in every way of the near-mythic Filipino. The writer and art critic Lisa Nakpil would say that Yonzon, who died in 1994, was the “underrated master of heroic Filipino iconography,” and this book clearly shows us why.

Qwertyman No. 95: Till Divorce Do Us Part

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 27, 2024

IS THERE anything about divorce—a bill legalizing which will soon be taken up in the Senate—that hasn’t already been said, or that most people don’t know? This was on my mind last week as I walked to school, wondering what my class of 20-year-old seniors thought about the issue. As young people likely to get married within the next five to ten years, they’re the ones who stand to be most affected by the outcome of the current drive to get the bill passed.

So I brought it up—we’re taking up argumentative or opinion writing, and how to handle contentious topics, and divorce was right up that alley. I didn’t tell them which side I stood on, although, knowing me to be a flaming liberal, they could have guessed that. I let them speak. Given that this was the University of the Philippines, and even factoring in the possibility that students tend to dovetail along with what they think their teachers believe, it was no big surprise that everyone who spoke up in that room did so in favor of legalizing divorce; if there was anyone in opposition, which I rather doubt, he or she chose to remain silent. 

Clearly, a majority favored the move, for the very reasons cited by the bill’s supporters. One student had a very personal take on the matter: “As the child of parents whose marriage was annulled,” she said, “I can remember all the things they had to do to get that annulment. The poor can’t afford it.” And economics aside, what did divorce offer that annulment didn’t? “The freedom to remarry!” everyone chimed in. (Correction: annulment allows for remarriage, but legal separation doesn’t.)

But—I said, just to probe a bit further—what about the argument that divorce will contribute to the break-up of marriages? “Those marriages are already broken,” said a student. 

But the Vatican opposes divorce, doesn’t it? (It’s the only other country in the world, aside from the Philippines, which doesn’t recognize divorce.) “Priests don’t get married. What do they know about marriage?”

At this point, I found it useful to introduce a fact that was news to everyone in the room. “Did you know that we used to have divorce in the Philippines?” No! Really? “Yes, a divorce law was enacted under the Americans in 1917. It was even expanded under the Japanese Occupation, and continued after the war until the Civil Code of 1950 abolished absolute divorce and replaced it with legal separation. Go on, look it up. I don’t know how many Filipinos actually availed themselves of divorce when it was legal—it would be interesting to see the statistics—but it’s not like we never had the option. It was there, but Church-supported politicians took it back.” Did the Filipino family collapse back then because of the availability of divorce? Show me the proof.

If this exchange sends chills up the spine of ultraconservatives who still think of UP as a haven of rebels, atheists, and devil worshippers, I’m happy to tell them that religion is alive and well in UP—the services in both Catholic and Protestant chapels are usually full. But so are reason and critical thinking, which to me remain the best antidotes to doctrinaire dogmatism, whether from the left or from the right. 

The Catholic Church’s steadfast resistance to legalizing divorce and my students’ apparent willingness to push back against that bulwark reminded me of a critical period back in the 1950s when UP was torn by a struggle between religious forces allied with the popular Jesuit Fr. John Delaney such as the UP Student Catholic Action and those who, like Philosophy Prof. Ricardo Pascual, believed in maintaining UP’s non-sectarian character. In the end, secularism prevailed, but at the price of Pascual and other liberal-minded professors being denounced as “communists” before the House Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities.

I’d like to think that a lot has changed since then, although sometimes things seem pretty much the same, given how the Red-tagging continues despite the sharply diminished power and influence of the CPP-NPA. One thing that has changed, at least in the public’s perception, is the presumption of moral superiority once claimed by a Church now embroiled in sexual and financial scandal. Its invocations of “divine law” or “natural law” in matters relating to homosexuality, contraception, and divorce sound almost medieval in a world that has largely moved in the opposite direction—something the conservative faithful will see as all the more reason to hold on inflexibly to their core convictions.

We can’t argue with those convictions, to which everyone has a right, but conversely, our people as secular citizens shouldn’t be subject to any religion’s doctrines when it comes to personal decisions that are no prelate’s or imam’s business. (And just for the record, I have no plans of divorcing my adorable wife, with whom I just celebrated 50 years of a typically mercurial but happily enduring marriage.)

I’ve written previously about my disaffection with organized religion, so that may provide some context; I do believe in God and in the value of faith and prayer in our lives, and in the right of others to practice their religion—for as long as they don’t insist that theirs is the only right way forward, and impose their way of life on me. If you want to stay married in mutual and lifelong misery because you believe it’s the right thing to do, fine; but don’t expect others to do the same, because their lives aren’t yours to mess up. Happiness is hard enough to find in this dystopic world we live in; let’s not make it harder for others looking for another chance at love and peace. 

I doubt that they’ll change the wedding vows—“For better or for worse, till death do us part” is always worth two people’s best shot, until worse comes to worst. But divorce should be an option better left to the individual’s God-given intelligence, conscience, and emotional honesty to sort out than to institutions more concerned with abstractions than reality. It’s ultimately a reminder of how human we are—people make mistakes, which can’t be corrected by prolonging them; we learn, we do better, and we live on. I think that’s what a just and kind Almighty would wish for his creations.

(Image from montanoflamiano.com)

Qwertyman No. 94: Artificial Intelligence

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 20, 2024

DR. CHICHOY Carabuena had a problem. He wanted the school he owned and ran—the Generoso Carabuena Academy of Pedagogy in Santa Vicenta—to place higher in both national and international rankings, partly so he could raise tuition fees, and also so he could claim bragging rights among his university-president friends and drinking buddies. He had inherited the school from his grandfather; Generoso Carabuena was a banker who had collaborated with the Japanese and stolen the money they left behind to open a school for teachers, which was his wife’s dream, becoming a war hero in the process for outsmarting the enemy. 

The school had done well enough to the point that Chichoy’s dad Ramoncito could buy a Mercury Capri that he regularly drove to Manila to carouse in its nightclubs. Chichoy was the product of one of Ramoncito’s dalliances with the agreeable ladies, and it fell on him to rescue both the business and the family name from ruin and disrepute. He had been managing a carinderia for Pinoy workers in Dubai when the call came, and always wanting to become someone of substance, he returned to Sta. Vicenta to turn the daughters and sons of hog butchers and vegetable growers into teachers, like he imagined himself to be. Surely higher education wasn’t all that different from running a restaurant and coming up with the right menu at the right price for your customers. He had secretly dreamed of becoming a mayor, a congressman, or even governor, but first, he had to make a name for himself and make money.

Somewhere along the way he picked up a “Dr.” from a diploma mill and dressed the part, coming to his office even in the warmest of days in coat and tie. “More than anything else,” he would lecture his new recruits, “first impressions count, so before you even become a teacher, you have to look like a teacher, walk like a teacher, and sound like a teacher!” He had a faux marble statue made of his grandfather to greet visitors at the school entrance, and another one of Jose Rizal standing behind Generoso, as if looking on in approval. 

But lest people think he was beholden to the past, Chichoy Carabuena peppered his speeches with 21st-century mantras like “disruption,” “innovation,” “sustainability,” “customer-centric,” and, yes, “21st-century.” “The great challenge to higher education today,” he would often declaim, “is to produce graduates attuned to a global climate of disruption and innovation, mindful of evolving needs and opportunities in the marketplace of ideas while seeking sustainable and synergistic 21st-century solutions to problems rooted in our feudal and neocolonial history.”

Those speeches were written for him by his former executive assistant named Mildred, a UP graduate whom he had to fire when his wife discovered them smooching in his office—an act he vehemently insisted to be no more than a paternal gesture, much like  former President’s public bequeathal of a kiss on a married woman, a defense that gained no ground. His wife personally chose his next EA, a former SAF commando named Dogbert; making the best of the situation, Chichoy paraded Dogbert around as his bodyguard, spreading the rumor that his life was under threat from unspecified enemies determined to keep the quality of Philippine education down. “We can give them no quarter,” he declared at the last CHED event he attended. “We must resist, with all impunity, those who aim to keep our poor people shackled to the twin pillars of ignorance and idiocy!” He missed Mildred in those moments, but he felt quite pleased with his growing self-sufficiency in speechwriting, thanks to his new discovery, ChatGPT. Of course it never quite came up to his standards, so he tweaked the prose here and there, like that reference to Samson that he hoped would bring the house down.

But now, reading the reports of top Philippine universities slipping in their rankings in the usual Times Higher Education and Quacquarelli-Symonds surveys, Dr. Carabuena saw an opportunity for his modest HEI to rise. “As their mystique diminishes, so our aura will grow,” he informed an indifferent Dogbert. “We just need to come up with sustainable innovations that will disrupt the status quo.” Dogbert handed him a slim folder. “Sir, someone wants to see you, to apply for the position of Academic Vice President.” It was a position that Chichoy himself had held concurrently to save on salaries, but now he felt obliged to pass it on to a real expert. He flipped the folder open and saw the picture of a cute Chinese-looking woman going by the name of “Dr. Alice Kuan.” Chichoy was mesmerized. “Send her in—and get out!”

When Dr. Alice Kuan stepped into Chichoy’s office, he felt himself enveloped in a miasma of jasmine, peonies, and five spices—everything good he remembered from his only visit to China many years ago. Her lips were lotus-pink, her skin ivory-white, and here and there dumplings suggested themselves to his imagination. “Good morning, Dr. Kuan! Please, have a seat! You’re here to apply for the AVP job?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” she said with a quarter-moon smile, “and I come with many ideas for both improving your curriculum and raising revenues through academic innovations.”

“Innovations! I like that! Like what?”

“Why artificial intelligence, of course! We could use AI to teach many of our courses, reducing costs. Also, we could bring in more foreign students from—uhm—friendly neighboring countries, while creating part-time employment opportunities for them in—uhm—online entertainment, for which we could even lease out some of your campus property. It would create a huge economic boost for Sta. Vicenta!” 

Temple bells rang in Chichoy’s mind. Not only was she fetching; she was smart! Suddenly he could see his political future brightening. He wanted to know more about this adorable avatar, and only then did he notice how patchy her resume was. 

“Your birth certificate was filed when you were…. 17?”

“Was it? I don’t remember.”

“Which elementary school did you go to?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe homeschooling?” She threw him an exasperated sigh. “Look, Dr. Carabuena, does it matter? I can have AI do a perfect resume if that’s what you want. If not, I can take my ideas to the Fontebello Institute of Technology in San Bonito just an hour away, and maybe they’ll be more receptive to disruptive innovations—”

“No, no, no! Disruptive, I like disruptive! Please, Dr. Kuan, stay in your seat! I’ll have somebody prepare your contract. Dogbert!”

(Image generated by AI.)

Qwertyman No. 92: The Return of the Old Normal

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 6, 2024

FEW WILL remember it, but yesterday, May 5, marked the first anniversary of the official end of the Covid-19 pandemic as a global health emergency, as announced by the World Health Organization. Of course it didn’t mean that Covid was over and gone—it would continue to mutate into thankfully less lethal variants—but the worst was over. It had infected more than 765 million people around the world, and killed almost 7 million of them; in the Philippines, as of last month’s latest figures, over 4 million of us caught Covid, and we lost more than 66,000 friends, family members, and neighbors to the disease.

It’s amazing what a difference a year makes. The pandemic rules had been relaxed long before May 5 last year, and much of 2023 and 0f the present year had been spent by us trying to get back to life as we knew it pre-Covid at a frenetic pace—engaging in that new term, “revenge travel,” buying new cars, building new homes, and as of last week, complaining about the infernal heat wave like it was the worst thing to have plagued us in decades (maybe it was—since Covid). For the most part, we seem to have willed Covid out of our minds, eager to replace its bitter memories with fresh and happy ones—an entirely human thing to do, to cocoon ourselves against the pain of loss. Are we in the “new normal,” or have we returned to the old?

I remember most vividly the paranoia that gripped the country during the pandemic’s early days—the first reports of people we knew dying horrible deaths in isolation, the terror following a sudden and suspicious onset of coughing and fever, the constant fear of carrying the virus home to the innocent and the infirm in one’s shoes, one’s clothes, one’s merest touch, the rapid disappearance of disinfectants and bread from the shelves, the inevitable closure of cinemas and restaurants, the anxious eyes peering above face masks and through face shields, the physical boundaries beyond which only a select few could cross—and, of course, the near-endless wailing of sirens announcing the imminence of death and dying. Unfamiliar words and phrases entered our vocabulary: co-morbidities, social distancing, quarantine, lockdown, ECQ, EECQ, RT-PCR, community pantry, antigen, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Sinovac (and anti-vaxx), etc.

Like many others, I lost friends to Covid, from very early on when no one knew what was really going on and what could be done to save patients who were turning up feverish and could hardly breathe. One of them was my own cardiologist, who reportedly assisted a patient whom he didn’t know carried the virus. Others were academics and senior officials returning from conferences overseas. Fortunately, no one in our families died of the disease, although many of us, myself included, later caught it at some point despite all precautions. When I did catch it, I have to admit that it was with a strange sense of relief, not only because I could now count myself a participant in a grand if horrible experience, and also because I imagined, perhaps foolishly, that I would be rewarded with some kind of immunity from further and worse infection.

Those of us who survived Covid hopefully did so with a more profound appreciation of the gift and value of life, and of the need to do good in the time we have left. But the 2022 elections only seemed to prove the power of political patronage, which became even more keenly felt during the pandemic, when local officials down to the barangays held sway over their constituents like never before. Covid sharpened the already stark contrast between rich and poor, from access to what were seen as the most effective vaccines to self-declared exemptions from certain restrictions like liquor-lubricated parties and literal hobnobbing. In the end, the virus didn’t discriminate, scything rich and poor alike, although the poor, living in cramped communities, were always more likely to fall ill and die.

What the public often failed to witness—and therefore can’t remember—were the stories of the frontliners who met Covid head-on and served as heroes behind the scenes. I’m now working with Dr. Olympia Malanyaon—a pediatric cardiologist who also served as Director of the Information, Publication, and Public Affairs Office of UP Manila—on a book she’s writing to document the efforts of UPM and of the Philippine General Hospital (which is part of UPM) to respond to the Covid crisis. The PGH, the country’s largest public hospital, was designated a Covid-referral hospital almost as soon as the pandemic broke, and its people found themselves in the vortex of an unprecedented medical and social crisis, and we want to tell their stories in this forthcoming book.

The word “hero” gets bandied around a bit too easily these days, but if there was a time for heroes to emerge, it was during the pandemic, when what used to be the most routine decisions (“Should I report for work today?”) could mean a matter of life and death. When the death toll mounted, many PGH staff resigned for fear of infecting their families, but many more stayed on, with nurses pulling 16-hour shifts and some doctors remaining on duty for as long as 30 hours.

Even utility workers recalled how pitiful the plight of the afflicted was. One said that “They had no one with them, not even when they died. They would be put into body bags, which could not be opened. Then they would be cremated the next day, without being seen by their families.” And then, the staff felt shunned by society when they went home as ordinary neighbors. “When we ordered at the fastfood, the guard shooed us away when he learned that we worked in the Covid unit,” recalled another. “I was very upset. It felt very degrading to work so hard, to line up for food when you got hungry, only to be turned away.”

Thankfully, the crisis also brought out the best in some other Filipinos, such as those who poured their time and money into community pantries that served the hardest hit. For a while back there, we saw and felt the glimmer of our inner heroes. It was a spirit that I hoped would be sustained into a broader and more enduring wave of change in 2022, but as the pandemic receded, we realized how much of the old normal yet remained.

Covid made us aware of the precariousness of our health as individuals. Looking forward to 2025, I wonder what it will take for our people to value their well-being as a society and as a nation.

(Image from Reuters/Lisa Marie David)

Penman No. 461: A Parisian Interlude

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Penman for Sunday, April 7, 2024

WHY IS it that just when you think you’ve begun to figure out a foreign city’s transport system, it’s time to come home? That happened again barely two weeks ago when my wife Beng and I flew to France for some speaking engagements in Paris and Le Havre. We were there for work, not tourism, and more work waited for us as well back home, so we couldn’t stay for as long as we would have wanted to. We’d been to Paris three times before and had done the obligatory Louvre and Eiffel Tower visits, but it almost seems criminal not to linger and loiter around such a beautiful city.

We were there at the invitation of SciencesPo, France’s leading social sciences university, for a series of talks on Philippine literature and art. Along with France-based writer Criselda Yabes, I gave a reading as well at the Philippine embassy in Paris at the behest of our most gracious ambassador, Mme. Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, an avid amateur painter and supporter of Philippine culture. Our host at SciencesPo, Dr. Pauline Couteau, also arranged some events for us at their campus in Le Havre and sponsored a special screening of Lino Brocka’s classic “Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” at the Entrepot Theater in Paris.

It was a hectic week that left these footloose septuagenarians exhausted but exhilarated at the same time, warmed up in France’s unseasonably chilly weather (often falling below 10C) by the enthusiasm of our new friends, both French and fellow Filipinos. 

Again, however, we had a sweet problem to deal with even before we flew to Paris: with such little time left on our schedule for more casual diversions, what places or experiences would we put on top of our list for our relaxation and amusement, given Paris’ almost inexhaustible offerings of wonder and delight?

Anthony Bourdain, bless his soul, famously advised short-term visitors to Paris not to make a mad dash to try and see everything all at once, but to just relax, have coffee, imbibe the neighborhood culture, stay in bed (and for those able and inclined, make love). Beng and I recalled, with both fondness and regret, how we had first seen Paris a quarter-century earlier from the back of a bus on a 99-pound budget tour from our base then in Norwich, England. The bus went by the city’s landmarks so fast that Beng missed Rodin because she was in the on-board restroom then. Subsequent visits afforded us a bit more time to see the Mona Lisa (of course) and to go up the Eiffel Tower (of course) but our happiest memories came, as Bourdain suggested, from just walking in the city gardens and along the Seine.

This time, we decided to do just two things with our limited free time: visit one museum, and hit the flea markets. This follows a pattern that Beng and I have observed over decades of traveling together, from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and London to New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The museums capture and preserve the glory of the past, and if you’re lucky, rather than pay for made-in-China miniatures at the museum gift shop, you can find some genuine article from that past in the flea market. 

Our choice of museum was easy: Paris has dozens of fantastic museums—and you’ll never, ever finish the entire Louvre in one visit—but the great one we’d never been to was the Musée d’Orsay, the former train station that’s become France’s cathedral of Impressionism. Finally, this time, in the few hours we had just before boarding the train to Le Havre, we managed to step into the Musée d’Orsay, and what a divine experience e that was, to find room after room filled by the masterworks of Renoir, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Redon, Courbet, and so on, like walking into a book of pictures. 

Understandably, hundreds of other people had the same idea, so the best time to visit may have been after 6 pm—the museum closes at 9:45—when admission rates are also cheaper. Not a few friends have remarked that they found the Musée d’Orsay much better than the Louvre, perhaps because of its relative compactness and its delivery of proven crowd-pleasers in its collection.

Our flea-market sorties proved just as wondrous, with the additional thrill of unpredictability, as each table will be different from the one before it and you need a quick, trained eye to spot the jewel in the junkyard. As flea-market addicts from decades back when we used to scour the yard sales and antique barns of the American Midwest for things we could drag home, Beng and I have developed a routine of scan-and-scrutinize, looking for our respective grails (old fountain pens for me, old bottles and costume jewelry for her).

We were lucky to be billeted near our first flea market, the one at Porte de Vanves, which has about a hundred dealers strung along a large city block selling all manner of goodies from 18th-century books and Christofle silverware to walking sticks and paintings. I searched in vain for that lost Juan Luna and that stray copy of the Fili (which Rizal finished in Paris), but the flea-market gods blessed me instead with an early 1900s “safety” fountain pen sheathed in gold, perfect in every way, lying all by its lonesome on a table of bric-a-brac. “Combien, madame?” I asked in my schoolboy French, my throat dry with anticipation. “Cinquante euros,” she said; it was easily worth five times that, but I gathered up all my courage and countered, “Quarante?” “Okay,” she said, “A quick “Merci!” and 40 euros later, I was a happy boy with a new toy—what could be a better memento of this short trip than a gorgeous century-old pen with the word “Paris” on its 18-carat nib?

Of course, this luck was not to be repeated on our visit to the big flea market of St. Ouen in Clignancourt—reputedly the largest of its kind in the world—a few hours before boarding the plane back for home, but we rewarded our labors with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant. After a week of French cuisine, immersed in the grandeur of French art and culture, huge platefuls of Cantonese fried rice sounded just about right. It was as if we were being told, “You’ve had your Parisian interlude and your souvenirs, it’s time to go home.” Au revoir!

Qwertyman No. 86: The Real Pasaways

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Qwertyman for Monday, March 25, 2024

THE LOCAL Internet came down hard last week on an anonymous teacher who was caught on livestream giving her students a scorching tongue-lashing for what she claimed was their lack of respect and discipline. Almost hysterical, Teacher X called them good-for-nothings without a future. Predictably, netizens deplored her derogatory language, which they equated with child abuse, and called on the Department of Education to investigate the incident and impose some disciplinary measure on the teacher concerned.

I agree that Ma’am seems to have gone overboard in expressing her displeasure over her students’ misbehavior, and that she could have been more circumspect in her choice of words. I’m certain that DepEd—which happens to be headed by someone who doesn’t mince words herself when it comes to court sheriffs—will use her case to remind teachers of the need for exemplary behavior, if not some sweetness and light, in classroom management. 

At the same time, having been a teacher myself for forty years, I can imagine and understand the exasperation that must have gone into a titanic diatribe like that. I’ve never taught in elementary or high school, where these aggravations come in spades on both sides of the teacher’s table, but I’ve heard and read enough to know what a cauldron of high emotions a Filipino classroom can be in the worst of circumstances. 

Let’s pack a room meant for twenty students with twice that number or even more, with the heat from a tin roof bearing down on everyone (or, in another season, rain leaking down onto desks and textbooks). The teacher recites her lesson in a funereal monotone, expecting her students (who keep themselves awake by sneaking glances at TikTok on their phones) to regurgitate what she has just said: “Class, how do you pronounce a-DO-le-scent?” 

Not that she truly cares what they say, because her mind’s on the box of chocolates she has to buy for the supervisor whose signature she needs for her salary loan. She’ll spend half that loan on a fence around her garden to keep the roaming pigs and pissing drunks away, and the other half on a new cellphone because her arch-rival Mrs. Buenafe has one that can take selfies without the blemishes. Maybe, if she took better pictures of herself, she could win back her husband Temyong from that tramp in Trece Martires.

Just then a fight breaks out at the back of the room because Etoy has dropped a ballpen to sneak a look at Corito’s underwear, in full view of Corito’s alleged boyfriend Mikmik. “Stop that, quiet, gademet, you imbecile a-DO-lescents, I order you to behave or I’ll squeeze your little balls until they pop! You have no future, you worthless pasaways! You’re going to rot in this living hell they call a classroom!”

Now, when Teacher X says “You have no future,” I take it to mean that Ma’am has read the Edcom II report on the sad state of Philippine education, which puts our young learners practically at the cellar of global achievement. Unless some systemic reforms are put in place by the same DepEd that will now trumpet the virtues of better decorum in the classroom, we might as well have cursed those kids that caused Teacher X to blow her top—and by “curse” I don’t mean the use of foul language, but rather a hex such as a witch might put on some unfortunate soul. 

Philippine education is full of pasaways, many of them more than ten or even fifteen years old. Some have been in the system for so long that they have mastered its ways and means (e.g., how to make good money off bad textbooks) to a level of proficiency worthy of a doctorate. Secretaries of Education come and go—some more lamented than others—but these pasaways remain, as they do in certain bureaus dealing with government revenues, because they ensure continuity, which everyone but the occasional and hopelessly naive reformer appreciates. They may even be well-mannered, with the nicest smiles and mildest dispositions you ever saw, because of their contentment with the world as it is and their philosophical acceptance of human frailty.

This brings to mind another kind of pasaway, a certain man of God—no, make that Son of God—who has steadfastly refused to honor a summons by a Senate committee looking into sex trafficking, of which this pastor has been accused, among other crimes and misdemeanors. Let me judged by the proper court, he has argued through his lawyers, although—if he is who he claims to be—then no one but God the Father will qualify for that privilege.

God must have been a prolific babymaker, because this prosperous preacher is but one of many around the world proclaiming themselves to be Sons of God. Nearly all have landed in some kind of trouble with the law, usually in matters of sex and money, paltry and mundane emoluments that Sons of God seem to feel especially entitled to, in partial recompense for the heavy burdens of divinity.

Someone should have assured our good pastor that the Senate is a decorous institution, exceedingly kind to its guests, as a recent hearing involving police officials being questioned by a former police official showed. A senator who walked out of that hearing out of disgust over the “babying” shown the witnesses by their inquisitor now himself stands accused of discourtesy. Notwithstanding the presence of a chairperson known for her intolerance of untruths, our Son of God can surely count on the professed and unshakeable friendship of some of her honorable colleagues to shelter him from the slings and arrows of earthly justice. We are a much kinder people than that apoplectic teacher might suggest.