Category Archives: Philippines

Penman No: 490: Unpopular Opinion: Bring AI On

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Penman for Sunday, October 18, 2026

THE LITERARY world has recently been rocked by scandals involving the alleged use of AI in prizewinning entries to prestigious writing competitions.

Last year, the Commonwealth Literary Prize went to the Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir’s story titled “The Serpent in the Grove,” which had been published in the highly regarded literary magazine Granta. A sophisticated AI-checking software program called Pangram flagged it as 100% AI-generated. The author denied it was, and the Commonwealth Prize people reviewed his drafts and stood by him, but Granta took to the matter to heart and severed its ties with the prize, while retaining the story on its website for the reading public to make up its own mind. Nazir has gone on to start work on a novel, but his reputation has been deeply if not irreparably damaged by a charge that, for legal and perhaps even aesthetic purposes, remains unproven.

Last month, France’s Prix Goncourt—that country’s most renowned literary competition that awards a symbolic 10 euros to the year’s best piece of prose—dropped the debut novel of the Canadian-Haitian Thelyson Orelien titled C’etait ça ou mourir (It Was Either That or Die) from its shortlist following accusations of AI use and plagiarism. The novel had already sold tens of thousands of copies, and had won another prestigious literary prize. Orelien disputed the charges, but the judgment had been made.

And just last week, the Atlantic broke a story accusing the winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing, Zimbabwe’s Simbarashe Steyn Kundizeza, of using AI to produce his story “The Blue Fighter.” Again using Pangram, the Atlantic’s Vauhini Vara noted that the text was laden with typical large language model (LLM) prose markers, pointing to repetitive “not X, but Y” grammatical structures and the story’s frequent metaphors (something markedly present as well in Nazir’s piece). The Caine Prize Foundation said it would look into the charges but insisted on employing human judgment to establish the truth. Its chair, Ellah Wakatama, was quoted as saying that that AI detectors were not conclusive, and that “If there is such an accusation, I want proof that does not come from a machine.”

I have no doubt we haven’t seen the last of these controversies—nor were they even the first. In 2024, Akutagawa Prize winner Rie Qudan had no problem admitting that she had used ChatGPT—just a little, about 5 percent of the text—in writing her novel Sympathy Tower Tokyo, because the novel after all features a chatbot. You’d think that would have quelled any controversy, but it didn’t. Mindless critics called the entire novel “AI-written,” and debates broke out over the use of AI in fiction.

It hasn’t been just the text coming into question. In this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards, two books—Obligate Carnivore by Stephanie Johnson and Angel Train by Elizabeth Smither—were disqualified because their publishers were found to have used AI-generated cover designs.

Clearly, the global world of writing and publishing are up in arms, if not in a panic, over the growing intrusion of AI into a sphere we thought reserved for human creativity and imagination.  While beneficial AI use has been well tracked and established in such fields as medicine, the law, and fintech, writers and artists feel much more vulnerable if not resistant to it because of the direct threat it seems to pose to artistic integrity itself and to the livelihood of creatives.

The backlash has been quick and severe. Locally, the F. Sionil Jose Young Writers Award, administered by Philippine PEN, stipulates that built-in or external AI tools may not be used at any stage of the creative process, including using AI for ideation, outlining, drafting, writing, or editing. I’m expecting other major competitions and workshops, such as the Palancas and the UP and Silliman workshops, to employ similar restrictions, if they haven’t already.

Which brings me to how I feel about the whole brouhaha, a position I’ve been forced to define because of my professed openness to the use of AI in my Professional Writing class in UP and even to the possible employment of AI in fiction, in ways and under protocols we have yet to establish.

A friend recently messaged me privately to ask about guidelines for literary judges when addressing entries with suspected AI involvement. My short answer to him was that “Am not prepared to go public with this”—I guess I am now—“but here’s my unpopular opinion: I think anti-AI vetting is ultimately unworkable. Have to be convinced that AI checking is infallible. So either very strict and accurate checking for all entries, or let it be a free-for-all, with no more than a personal declaration of non-AI use if AI is to be shut out entirely.”

Before my literary friends and detractors pounce on me for this apostasy, let me lay a few things down:

1. I still believe that the best of AI cannot and will not replace the best of human imagination and insight and its literary and artistic expression. I simply cannot see AI achieving the quietly explosive turns of mind and phrase of an Anne Carson. But this will be so relatively rarefied as to offer cold comfort in light of other possible outcomes below.

2. Anything below the best is much less certain and highly negotiable. Let’s be honest: AI as it stands can easily out-write most people in most situations, for all their human sincerity and authenticity. The bar over which AI has to jump is very low, and lowered even further by poor education. The threat posed by AI here isn’t that students will use it to do their work and pass their subjects, but rather that students will pass without learning.

3. I’m not calling for unregulated, unidentified AI use. Ground rules should be laid down—but they should be fair, forward-looking, and enforceable.

As I’ve recently been predicting, I foresee a literary future where publishing will eventually be three-tiered, with 100% AI-produced work at the base, catering to the most popular tastes and trends; mid-range, an explicitly hybrid human-AI segment that offers interesting and exciting prospects for experimentation; and at a premium, 100% human-generated work, the best of which will exhibit human inventiveness and empathy, yes, but also courage, resistance, and risk-taking.

That said, the insidious entry of AI into literary competitions bothers me only because it’s undeclared. I would frankly be open to a competition—or even a category of one such competition—where AI can be employed and accepted with neither shame nor subterfuge, if only to explore the imaginative horizons of human-AI interaction. Retain the 100%-human category, sure and of course, but open a door that will be pushed open anyway by another generation if not us, like it or not. Bring AI on; let’s wrestle with it, curse it, bend it, bed it, tango with it, argue with it, embrace it—but we ignore or deny it at our own risk.

Do I use AI in my own work? In my creative nonfiction, including this very piece, yes, for research and organization, for transcription, and for mechanical tasks; I review all outputs for slop, misattributions, and misreadings. In my fiction, yes, for research (as in the historical novel I’m working on) and nothing more—at least not yet. If and when I do find an interesting use or need for it, I’ll say so and take full responsibility for it, although I still don’t see it happening.

But to return to the matter of literary judging (which I have stopped doing for many years now and have forsaken for good), there’s something ironically odd if not hypocritical about using an AI tool like Pangram to police and catch AI use in a piece of text. (I’ve used Pangram on a trial basis, and it is terrifyingly good.)

At the very least, if you have to, let the pre-screening of entries be done by a technical committee—not by the jurors themselves, who should bring only their discernment and connoisseurship to the judging table. Should a work truly prove outstanding despite certain AI misgivings, give it the benefit of the doubt; a great story remains a great story no matter whom or what it was written by. (I have read both “The Serpent in the Grove” and “The Blue Fighter” and found them powerful and moving.)

We don’t know how many masterpieces of the past were birthed and nursed by angels, demons, and other artificial handmaidens. Why not AI?

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

Qwertyman No. 220: Living with Evil

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 19, 2026

A YOUNGER friend messaged me last week to ask for some advice. Would it be wrong, he said, if he left the country in the event that the Dutertes returned to power? He was neither a political figure nor a tycoon, but just an ordinary middle-class citizen engaged in his own small business.

What revolted him was the thought of sharing space with millions of fellow Filipinos who, regardless of the Senate impeachment trials, still want a Duterte in the Palace.

In another era, until a few years ago, I would have told him, “Don’t. Stay here. Persevere. Endure. Fight on.” Instead, I found myself texting him back, “If that’s an option, why not? Might be time to give yourself a break.”

There’ll be many who’ll be unhappy with that reply, but can you really blame someone who believes that a Duterte restoration will be nothing short of a zombie apocalypse, and who’ll want to escape?

Me? I’ll probably take my own advice, stay put, and find a way to survive. (We do have an option—a daughter living in the States who’ll only be too happy to have us over, but who’s the crazy foreigner who wants to live in Trump’s America?)

I’m no Pollyanna, and maybe it’s just the Boomer stubbornness in me, but I haven’t given up on this country yet, despite all the aggravations we have to live with. Living with evil is what it is—the traffic, the pollution, the floods, the poverty, the injustice, they didn’t just happen; they’re part of the architecture of a State fashioned by morally corrupt and greedy people who couldn’t care less about others.

That’s pretty dismal, I know, and even more reason for my friend to flee. Still, there’s an upside to all this: if only because of the floods and traffic et al, our people seem to be waking up to the existential need to fight corruption, practice good governance, and educate our young so they’ll know and do better than we ever did.

Even the DDS comeback that terrifies my friend might not happen, or come apart with time.

I’ve long argued—and I could be whistling in the wind—that the DDS faithful are not a monolithic bloc. Yes, most of them come from Mindanao and the Visayas, but most are also poor, a more universal and distributed trait. (Don’t count the social media trolls and the hired help.) I suspect—or at least I hope—that many might yet be persuaded to reconsider their loyalties, likely less by any Kakampink logic than by their own harsh realization that they have been betrayed and even stolen from by their patrons.

Sadly, whoever wins in 2028, I think it will take at least two more generations for those learnings to take root. Our present principals have to vanish from the scene to refresh our political stock and spirit, which is why educating our youth today—in school or through the Senate hearings—is crucially important.

If the Dutertes prevail, it will be terrible, but the sky will not fall. We will find ways to keep our heads above the floodwaters; most of us will persevere, and some if not many will fight on.

My own best antidote to despair over our political fortunes is to remind myself that we survived martial law. Having said that, I should add that survival often involves some degree of acceptance, creative adaptation, compromise, and even complicity.

Again I recall Nick Joaquin’s observation that a few weeks after the Japanese marched into Manila, things uncannily returned to normal—not that we embraced the invaders, but had found reasons and ways to persist.

I know that the once much-vaunted word “resilience” has become almost pernicious in our appreciation of it today, but it’s no less true for all the beatings it’s taken.

In a poem about the Second World War, W. H. Auden describes this urge to maintain or feign normalcy amid chaos:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home.

The true danger lies in forgetting the big picture as we fuss over the details of daily routine and struggle. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has this marvelous episode from his novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” where his protagonist—a stonemason banished to the Soviet Gulag—is assigned to build a brick wall, a task he performs with great pride and precision, momentarily oblivious to the fact that he is reinforcing his own prison.

Last week’s tributes for and tirades against the late Cesar Virata again brought to fore the issue of complicity in an oppressive regime. He wasn’t alone. There was—and there remains—a small but vigorous resistance to dictatorship, but at least until EDSA, many of us learned to make our bed with Marcos and to lie in it.

Living with evil is a given part of the human condition, and it’s what we do in relation to it that ultimately defines us. There are those who would try to have as little to do with it as possible, and who would demand the same moral consistency of others, but it’s hard to avoid. It’s not some dark entity out there, or even a stranger across the hallway or in the seat next to you; it’s in you, that part of you that thinks killing drug suspects was a good idea.

What may ultimately bring us all together and move this country forward as a whole is the realization and acceptance of the fact that very few of us will come to the table with pure consciences and clean hands. Living with evil leaves stains, but even the stained come with valuable experience and insight.

Sometimes it’s not the obvious enemy, the ones most different from us, who bring the most pain and aggravation, but those closer to us, the ones we agree with on nearly everything—but who disdain and even demonize us for that ten percent we disagree on. Black or white suddenly counts less than shades of red or pink.

As Bertolt Brecht put it in his poem “To Those Born Later”:


Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Evil is more singleminded and less quarrelsome than the good. It is not so easily distracted; it does not forget. It will expand at all costs, seize every advantage, tolerate and even accept tactical differences, take and exploit whatever’s available.

If we can be as adept as evil and pitch as wide a tent, then the good in and among us might yet prevail.

Qwertyman No. 219: Notes on Cesar Virata (1930-2026)

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 12, 2026

FOR A personality so closely associated with the Marcos regime, it was inevitable that the obituaries following the passing last week of former Prime Minister Cesar Virata would reflect a broad range of opinion. 

The gentlest take on the man was that he was an honest, modest, and hardworking academic who found himself with an opportunity to help direct national economic policy, and who did his best, within a profligate bureaucracy, to mitigate economic catastrophe and sustain international support for the Philippines.

At the harshest extreme is his depiction as a complicit enabler of Marcosian martial law, a window-dresser for the regime, and ultimately an ineffectual technocrat—like others of his training and generation—who refused or failed to acknowledge the crimes of the regime he had been serving faithfully.

Those assessments came freely in social media last week, from friends I respect on either side. The variance told me as much about how we choose to remember history as how we choose what to forget, or at least to mediate after half a century, which probably tells more about us than about the other person.

I had several opportunities to meet with and to interview PM Virata, as he most likely would have wanted to be remembered, in the course of completing books to which he had something to contribute from his vast experience. We discussed mainly his life as an academic and as one of SGV’s early pillars, as well as being a member of Cavite’s prominent Aguinaldo and Virata clans. Inevitably—usually after the formal interviews, when he took me out to lunch for a more relaxed chat—he opened up about his life as a Marcos technocrat. He allowed me to take notes, from which I now share some interesting episodes and insights—edited for clarity—that might help complete whatever picture of the man we had in mind.

On martial law: “We didn’t know about the preparations for martial law. The President kept it to himself…. I was in the US when martial law was declared. I was attending a World Bank meeting. I went to my hotel room in DC, where we often stayed, although the actual meeting was at the Hilton. I got a call from one of the more senior Department of State reporters who had covered the negotiations on the Laurel-Langley Agreement. He said, ‘Don’t you know, Mr. Secretary, that martial law has been declared?’ I said no. That was around 4 pm because I had a 5 pm tennis game with Ambassador Suarez, who must also have been surprised, because he didn’t know, either. I thought of calling Joy, but she would have been asleep then, so we played our game and I waited until around 6 am to call her. When I did, the operator said, ‘All calls are suspended to the Philippines.’ Later, Alex Melchor and I were told to go to San Francisco and LA on our way home to tell the Filipinos and the consulate there about martial law. I still didn’t know what we were supposed to say. Eventually, when that same American reporter asked me for my reaction to martial law, what I said was, ‘Well, the Philippines just joined the rest of Asia,’ because everyone else around us had declared martial law—South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.”

On the Aquino assassination: “August 21st, Ninoy was killed. I was at home in Philam that day. Joy was having a show in Makati, so I had lunch with my sister in Kalayaan. I went home and I fell asleep. I was woken up by my military aide, saying that Sen. Aquino had been killed and that the President would be making an announcement soon. We had a TV and a radio in my room and turned both of them on, but the President didn’t appear, just his photo. It turned out that he was about to have an operation. We were called to Malacañang, but when we got there, the guards told us not to approach the President, because he was all bundled up. He was really struggling and had to be helped to the elevator. We learned that he was going to have a kidney transplant! He did instruct us to pay our respects when Ninoy’s body arrived. We went to the house on Times Street but we weren’t allowed in, so I wrote a letter to Butz Aquino, who was the only one I knew then.”

On the Constitution: “I just learned recently that a Cabinet meeting was called right after martial law that I was not present at. The issue presented by the President to the Cabinet was that he had received a summons from the Supreme Court because there were petitions asking for martial law to be declared unconstitutional. There was a group that included the military and I think even Sec. Abad Santos who were in favor of declaring a revolutionary government. But the President did not accept this. He said, ‘How can you assert civilian authority over the military without a Constitution?’ He really believed in Atty. Estelito Mendoza, so he asked Mendoza to respond to the Supreme Court summons, and Mendoza said he’d try to argue that this was a political issue and not within the Court’s jurisdiction.”

On becoming Prime Minister: “The President kept me concurrently as Finance Minister, but my weakness really was that I wasn’t a politician, so I wanted Jose Roño, the Minister for Interior and Local Government, to be my deputy because he knew the local governments and politicians. At that time, Foreign Minister Romulo wanted to be the deputy PM. CPR said, ‘Look at Singapore, Rajaratnam serves as both deputy PM and foreign minister.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m not a politician and you’re away most of the time, so how will I operate? If there was more than one deputy prime minister, I’d probably nominate you, but there’s only one vacancy!’”

There was a lot more I learned from PM Virata, both about and outside of martial law, but there are some stories you realize are being told to you in confidence that are best kept that way. It’s a sad thing that the general tendency these days—especially in social media—is to reduce people to their politically posterized worst, discarding the innate complexity in every person. Maybe I’m too naïve and tolerant, but the fictionist in me looks for those complexities and ambiguities rather than bottomlines better left to accountants and scholars. 

One detail I do remember about Cesar Virata was that he was already dean of the UP School of Business Administration (which now bears his name) when his father Enrique, a professor of mathematics, was named Acting President of UP. Cesar resigned and joined SGV rather than put both of them in an awkward situation. I know his detractors might say that he could and should have exercised the same delicacy in his later positions in government, but that’s a longer argument for another time.

Qwertyman No. 218: A Dead Man’s Voice

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 5, 2026

TODAY I’M going to turn over this column to the voice of a long-dead man, and all because—when last week I picked up a book he had published in 1957—I thought he might as well have been writing in the present, so uncannily familiar were the vignettes he recounted from this country’s political life seven decades and more ago.

The man was George A. Malcolm (1881-1961), the first full-time dean of the University of the Philippines College of Law whose building now bears his name, and later an Associate Justice of the prewar Philippine Supreme Court. The book he authored was American Colonial Careerist (Boston: The Chrisopher Publishing House, 1957), a collection of his memoirs and impressions as a civil servant under the American colonial regime over most of that period.

I was drawn to the Malcolm book because I collect antiquarian Filipiniana, for one, and of course because of the UP connection, but also because Malcolm graduated from the University of Michigan (where I and many other Filipino scholars took their graduate degrees) and had long been intrigued by Ann Arbor’s contributions (positive and surely some negative ones as well) to Philippine education and government. Michigan also produced Dean Worcester, who would defend America’s paternalistic rule, and lawyer Clyde De Witt, who would practice in the Philippines and later set up an endowment for Filipino student-lawyers in Michigan that would support such legal luminaries as Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Raphael Lotilla.

Because of his positions, Malcolm came to know and befriend nearly all the major Filipino and American politicians and leaders of the prewar period, and his book gives intimate and sometimes saucy sketches of them. Manuel L. Quezon, not surprisingly, dominates his memoirs. “The Filipino is a natural and consummate politician,” he writes. “The great Jefe of them all for three decades was Manuel L. Quezon. He was the spectacular figure who gave color to the scene. A close second to Quezon in astuteness, but lacking his dynamic personality, was Sergio Osmeña.” But he also adds that “Quezon dearly loved the trappings of office. He relished the glittering appellation, ‘Your Excellency.’… An added Quezonian touch was a red shoulder-sash and three foreign decorations—a medal attached to his left lapel and two blazing badges pinned on the right side of his coat above the hip.”

Further, Malcolm notes, “Quezon gave an early demonstration of a desire to see the world at the expense of the taxpayers. In the role of official delegate of the Philippines to the International Congress of Navigation, held in czarist Russia in 1908, the young Assemblyman arrived in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) after the Congress had already adjourned. The P34,000 set aside for this trip was trivial compared to the fabulous expense accounts entailed in paying for other pilgrimages all over the globe with a large entourage. Curiously, the Filipino people were rather proud of the impression their effulgent leader was making in foreign lands and rarely complained of his prodigality.” (One who did complain was a young UP student named Ferdinand Marcos, who railed against MLQ’s “extravagance.”)

But Quezon was hardly alone. Malcolm goes on to say that “Quirino filled the expensive shoes of Quezon, and even added frills of his own concoction. A P5,000 bed to case the President’s slumbers became the prize reference in political campaigns. An investigation conducted by an inquisitive Senate purported to reveal that Quirino had spent about a million pesos on four trips abroad. Journalist Teodoro M. Locsin cynically observed: ‘This is living.’”

Indeed, presidential or not, the corruption we seem so upset about these days was already widespread. Malcolm observes that “Certain phases of the electoral process in the Philippines merit special attention. Aspirants for office have flagrantly and repeatedly flaunted the provision of the Electoral Code which specifies that no candidate shall spend for his campaign more than the total amount of the candidate. Yet, it is common information that a candidate for a seat in Congress, whose annual salary is P7,200, has been required to deposit P25,000 with party chieftains and has had to part with many more pesos in addition to have a fighting chance. In the 1953 presidential election, such sums as P2,000,000 were openly mentioned as needed by each of the three contending parties to finance their campaigns.

“Where did this money come from? The money came from candidates who bankrupted their patrimony and from the ‘big shots,’ in particular the sugar tycoons. Moreover, millions of pesos of the people’s money was drained out of the public treasury, generally for local ‘public works,’ to influence the people’s will…. Many phrases descriptive of Philippine politics have been scattered about. Merely as examples, I quote the words of an American publisher and a Filipino educator. Wrote Roy W. Howard, Philippine politics is ‘a great national pastime,’ with politicians “ten centavos a dozen.” Declared Mariano V. de los Santos, President of the University of Manila: ‘There is no activity in which we can engage where partisan politics does not seep in. Business, industry, agriculture, all are permeated by bad politics. Under such a climate, naturally politicians of all sorts thrive. But they thrive at the expense of the general welfare.’”

And where did many of these politicians come from? We go back to the UP College of Law and its poorer cousins which seem to have mushroomed all over the place:

“One potent reason why politics has come to play such a large part in the life of the people is the preference on the part of the youth for academic education. The result is a bumper crop of lawyers with no place to go except into the government service or into politics. It would inure to good government to have legally-trained and disciplined men and women in public life, if such exaggerated importance was not attached to the title of abogado in the Philippines.

“The College of Law, University of the Philippines, was organized to supply quality, not quantity, leaders. All to no avail. Law schools mushroomed all over the Islands. The Bar examinations became great sporting events, with candidates ready to mortgage their patrimony and sell their souls if only they could get passing grades. Yet when the six long years of study were passed and the Bar examination was hurdled, no clients awaited the embryo lawyers. Droves of half-baked parasites were superimposed on an already top-heavy governmental structure and a lean economy.”

Perhaps we need to bring the spirit of Justice Malcolm back in a séance as amicus curiae in the Senate impeachment trial.

Qwertyman No. 216: The Law on Trial

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 21, 2026

LIKE MANY young Filipinos of my postwar generation, I once dreamt of becoming a lawyer. Alongside medicine, it looked to be the most challenging and the most rewarding if not the noblest profession one could get into. Medicine was also a public service, yes, but one basically remained a doctor forever, while a lawyer could go on to business, politics, or the Supreme Court. It occurred to my teenage mind that the only thing a good lawyer needed was a sharp brain—and the gift of gab, which I thought I had, at least the second if not the first.

Indeed my father Jose Sr., reputed to be the smartest boy in our island province, also wanted to be a lawyer, but was too poor to become one. So having the wits and the words but not the degree, he ended up writing speeches and drafting documents for politicians and bosses who were lawyers. 

Much later, it took my younger sister and brother to achieve his dream. Myself, I entered college on the red carpet of the First Quarter Storm, and with the way the country was going, I had decided even in high school that there was no future for the law in a lawless place, and chose Engineering (and, when I failed my Math, eventually English). The imposition of martial law and my subsequent incarceration hardened that perception: the law was for the powerful, but certainly not for me.

EDSA and the restoration of our civil liberties did much to change that. I followed and listened to such luminaries as Cecilia Muñoz-Palma, Jovito Salonga, Joker Arroyo, Rene Saguisag, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, Jose W. Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada, Haydee Yorac, and others of their caliber and character, and I was convinced and relieved that the lamp of truth, reason, and justice would finally shine brightly over our benighted nation.

And then the 2000s came in, and with them the long backslide into the morass of corruption and authoritarianism—much of it enabled and justified by a new generation of lawyers with far fewer scruples than their predecessors. Amidst this transactionalism, my old pessimism has returned, moderated only by my knowledge that many good and honest lawyers remain to carry on the fight.

The Senate’s current impeachment hearings in the case of Vice President Sara Duterte led me to wonder how they might affect young students contemplating a future in the legal profession, and how the general public perceives lawyers and the law itself today, given what they’ve seen.

I posed these questions to some lawyer-friends who have also followed the trial keenly. First, what impression of lawyers has the trial so far left on the general public?

“Negative overall,” says Lawyer A. “Because of the way the Senate is conducting the impeachment trial, the public was collectively exposed to adversarial litigation. So DDS partisans would praise the defense lawyers and bash opposing counsel, and vice versa, not necessarily with any real appreciation of the legal points made. The people are provided with new information but we doubt if these were properly processed. More than anything else, we sense this exposure to adversarial lawyering has further fed political polarization.”

“Overall negative,” concurs Lawyer B. “We cannot blame those who came away thinking even more negatively of lawyers.” But, she explains further, “It is easy, from the outside, to assume that a lawyer believes every word he says. That his argument is his opinion, that his client’s cause is his own. More often it is not. Lawyers are frequently called to carry out a client’s instructions, to give shape to a vision that is not his and to set aside, quietly, what he might feel or think about the matter. It is not necessarily being a mercenary, it is the job. Of course, none of that spares you from the consequences of taking up the cause of the genuinely indefensible. You must be prepared for the scorn of your fellow lawyers as well as of the public. The profession does insist that everyone deserves a defense but it does not promise you will be admired for providing it.”

But there were bright spots as well. Lawyer B continues that “The most brilliant moments of the trial that made me proud to be a lawyer are actually the Chill Chel moments. With decades in courtroom experience behind him and brilliance of thought and communication, he showed the nation what a real grasp of the law can do, and how cutting and effective a sharp lawyer whose skills have been honed can be, all without the table-pounding and the theatrics and the condescension.”

For Lawyer A, “The oral arguments of Diokno and Poa and the presentations of the amici curiae, precisely because they were non-adversarial, provided the quietude so needed for important ideas to be clearly presented. Kapunan also provided valuable lessons for younger lawyers on the delicate balancing act a litigator often has to strike between pure trial advocacy and theatrics.”

The theatrics are of particular importance, given that, for over a month now, a Filipino audience of over 100 million viewers—about 70 million of them registered voters—has been privy to an almost-daily dose of courtroom drama. And like theater-goers, what most of the rest of us see and look out for is the performance. All the Senate’s a stage, and everyone stepping on to it is deemed an actor in a role playing someone not quite himself or herself in real life but something larger, more sincere, more logical, more certain of the ineluctable truth. The prosecution knows that, the defense knows that. 

So in a public arena such as an impeachment trial, where ultimate guilt or innocence might come down to perception rather than fact, would good lawyering require more than a solid grasp of the law, but a performative aspect as well, ie, the awareness that one is addressing not just the court but a viewership of millions? 

“Yes,” says Lawyer A, “but with an important caveat. The ‘performative’ aspect should not be drama for drama’s sake, but as a tool toward good communication and education.” Adds Lawyer C: “What makes impeachment cases unique is the fact that it is driven and decided by elected politicians rather than career judges. The performative aspect then of lawyering becomes extremely important. The Congressmen on three-year terms and Senators on six-year tenures need the votes. They have to get up, dress up, and show up, so that their constituencies will continue supporting them.”

All this leads me to think that it’s not really just VP Sara and not even the Senate itself on trial, but the law and the legal profession itself. As they say in show business, abangan.

Penman No. 489: Grateful and Graceful

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Penman for Sunday, September 20, 2026

IT ISN’T every day that a certified celebrity comes up to shake your hand and to introduce herself to you as your fan—especially when it’s really the other way around. Here’s someone you’ve admired from a distance all your life, maybe even had a schoolboy crush on, and now here she is, taking your hands in hers like an old friend.

This happened last week at the Manila International Book Fair at SMX, where I was signing books for Anvil Publishing among others, and the surprise visitor to my table was none other than Boots Anson-Roa (now Rodrigo)—the actress, radio-TV host, humanitarian, and public servant—who, as it turned out, was also an Anvil author and who was also signing her newly minted biography titled Grateful, co-authored by Jennie Leuterio Ilustre.

Intrigued, I secured a copy of the book, and soon found myself drawn into the engaging story of a life well-lived, despite the inevitable dips and turns that come with surviving so many tumultuous decades. I recalled my own unpublished biography of another great Filipino actress, the late Rosa Rosal, whose vampish roles tended to be the complete opposite of Boots’ motherly persona, and whose real-life drama outclassed anything she portrayed onscreen—two very different images, and yet two women bonded by the same deeply held traditional values and by their devotion to family and public service.

Maria Elisa Cristobal Anson was born on January 30, 1945 ,just days before the Battle of Manila began, to Oscar Anson (later the actor Oscar Moreno, the “Robert Taylor of the Philippines) and Belen Cristobal, a pharmacy board topnotcher and chemistry teacher, who met and fell in love amidst the turmoil. Belen became pregnant, and the book reveals that it was only at age 53 that Boots discovered that the couple had considered terminating the pregnancy because of the harshness of the times; instead they decided to marry, making Boots possible. (The “Boots” comes from “Bebot” then “Bot.”) 

The young Boots tagged along with her father to his shoots, so pretty that Sampaguita boss “Doc” Perez predicted she would become a star, but she was more interested in watching movies than being in them. She did join theater at the University of the Philippines where she studied English, speech, and drama and served as a corps sponsor, but it was a hosting gig at TV 5’s popular Dance-O-Rama—a slot she twice refused—that finally landed her onscreen.

That choice proved life-changing in another, even more significant way, because this is where the “Roa” in her name comes in, care of Pete Roa, her Dance-O-Rama co-host and reputed ladies’ man, who courted her with flowers plucked from the show’s bouquets and asked her out to post-show dinners “to critique her performance.” The tactics worked. Boots fell for Pete, the two decided to get married, the parents on both sides naturally threw a fit, leaving elopement the only way out. The two snuck out of their show after a commercial break, and managed to get then QC Mayor Norberto Amoranto to marry them on June 5, 1964, followed by a hasty church wedding that same afternoon.

So began a highly visible and celebrated marriage of 43 years that produced four children—Leah, Joey, Chiqui, and Ben. The “Roa” would stick to “Boots Anson” so permanently that even after her second wedding to King Rodrigo in 2014, King would urge her to keep it, to honor that bond. 

The Boots Anson-Roa we know comes mostly from her movies—over a hundred of them—and her TV hostings. Her first movie came in 1968, when she was already a wife and mother of two, then highly unusual—indeed unheard of—for a leading lady. It was her role as the governess Carla in Lino Brocka’s landmark 1970 tearjerker Wanted: Perfect Mother that remains embedded in my memory, as in many others’—caring, loving, but also proper and self-sacrificing, an image that probably prompted her daughter Chiqui to call Boots “the quintessential Mama Mary.” Boots received a FAMAS Best Actress nomination for that performance, and she would go on to major roles in such movies as Tatay Na si Erap (named Best Actress along with Vilma Santos), May Minamahal, Mano Po, Blue Moon, Caregiver, and One True Love.

But from her elopement story onwards, Boots would be the first to upend her “Goody Two-Shoes” projection. “I’m not a saint,” she insists—just level-headed, fair, and thoroughly professional, the kind of performer who always shows up on time, delivers, then goes home to family. The book also chronicles her many other roles and jobs, which we know or remember little of: her work with the US Embassy in Washington in the 1980s, with the Population Commission in the 1970s, with the UP-PGH Medical Foundation, with the Philippine Red Cross, and up to now with Mowelfund. She also taught Communication Arts subjects in UP, Ateneo, and La Salle, wrote newspaper columns, and handled radio programs. Always more than a sweet face, she brought substance to the job.

Pete’s passing in 2007 is a poignant highlight. Hit by a stroke in 1997, Pete soldiered on for another decade (I recall being a few beds away from him for physical therapy in the early 2000s at Capitol Med). He later acquired incurable cancer, and facing the inevitable, the family prayed for a peaceful passing, which happened on August 9, 2007, with Boots at his side. Pete had requested a concert instead of a solemn wake, so the industry gathered to pay him tribute. “It was late into the night,” Boots recalls. “All sympathizers and revelers had left what was originally meant to be a quiet chapel. The music was silenced; the animated conversations were stilled; and the laughter was muted. In a rare moment alone with Pete, I did a ‘curtain call’ for his performers. Now allowing that tear to drop, I bid Pete good night until the next morning for his burial. I gleaned a peaceful countenance. I was confident we made him happy. I was glad that, in his repose, he applauded his friends’ command performances. But, tongue-in-cheek, I begged him to spare me his own standing ovation.”

But the book ends with the happy note on which it begins, with Boots’ second marriage to lawyer Francisco “King” Rodrigo Jr., an old family friend and also a widower. For both, it was love the second time around. 

Indeed Boots Anson-Roa has much to be grateful for, as her book title suggests. But “graceful,” which she would never immodestly use for herself, seems just as apt for this woman who has led such a long and distinguished life with dignity, verve, and faith. Pleased and honored to shake your hand, and to wish you and King well for the rest of our earthly time!

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

Qwertyman No. 211: Saving the Newborn

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 17, 2026

GIVEN ALL the political, economic, and even meteorological turmoil we’ve recently been going through, I thought I’d write about something undeniably and visibly positive this week, if only to remind us that good things are possible if the “whole of government”—including even our fractious Senate—puts its mind to it. 

Full disclosure: I’ve been editing a book on, of all things, the Philippine Newborn Screening (NBS) program, and I’ve been so impressed by what I’ve come across that I requested and secured permission from its author, Dr. Carmencita D. Padilla, to share some highlights of that program. Dr. Menchit, as we call her, is no ordinary physician; a clinical geneticist and pediatrician, former chancellor of UP Manila and a key figure behind its National Institutes of Health, she was named National Scientist in 2023 for her contributions to medicine.

Back in 1990, Menchit had just returned from a fellowship in Sydney, brimming with enthusiasm about NBS, which had already been adopted and routinely practiced in Australia. 

What NBS addresses is this: babies can be born with any of almost 30 conditions inimical to their health, including congenital hypothyroidism (mental retardation and growth delay, with IQ loss possible as early as the second week of life), congenital adrenal hyperplasia (salt-wasting crisis, shock, death by the end of the first week), PKU, and galactosemia. 

A newborn with any of these conditions looks perfectly well: doctors and mothers will see no rash, no fever, no warning. Looking healthy, the baby will go home, with the disorder hidden for months, or even years, until the symptoms appear—by which time, it could be too late to reverse the damage. Ironically, if the problems are spotted early, there are treatments available, often as simple and as cheap as a modified milk formula for phenylketonuria (PKU), which causes irreversible intellectual disability if left alone.

So early screening of all newborns is key. The process itself is fairly straightforward: “puncturing the heel of a newborn, absorbing a few drops of blood onto a special filter paper card, and transporting the specimen to a specialized laboratory for testing.” These cards could be easily mailed to a central laboratory. In the early 1960s, an American microbiologist named Dr. Robert Guthrie—whose own son and niece suffered from developmental problems—created a test to scan blood samples for indicators of anomalies and proposed this solution. But the medical and scientific communities shunned him, until sufficient publicity forced them to see he was right.

It would take more than 30 years for NBS to reach the Philippines, largely through the efforts of Dr. Carmelita Fagela-Domingo, who had seen NBS working in the West and tried her best to persuade the Philippine health bureaucracy to adopt it, and Dr. Padilla, who finally succeeded where Dr. Domingo had initially failed.

What worked for Menchit Padilla was the support of people like Dr. Domingo herself and UP College of Medicine Dean Alfredo Ramirez, and subsequently other allies in both executive and legislative branches beyond academia. Together, the two women pushed for a comprehensive pilot study that could form the basis for official government policy. Padilla also met Dr. Guthrie, who encouraged her to persevere in the effort.

Twenty-four Philippine hospitals took part in the study as members of the NBS Study Group. Private donors contributed computers, video cameras, fax machines, and pagers. A Finnish company donated a refurbished NBS machine. By 1997 the program was well underway. What was needed now was for the DOH to take over for the program’s full implementation nationwide. By 2000, there were still less than 200 hospitals out of 3,000 birthing hospitals participating in the program.

What was needed was an enabling law. This is the part of the story that I find most instructive, given our current Senate, and which I urged Dr. Menchit to include in her book (which she did, despite her initial misgivings). 

Because they couldn’t afford a lobby group, Menchit took it upon herself to draft the bill—after enrolling for a Master of Arts in Health Policy Studies degree at UP Manila. (I wonder how many of our lawmakers would go that far to get things done right—but then of course they have millions to spend on staff.)

Versions of the bill were filed at the House and Senate early in 2003, but by mid-year, hearings had yet to begin. To get the bill certified as urgent, its proponents had to get the support of Sen. Juan Flavier, who warned them that it would likely take ten years to get the bill passed. Desperate, Padilla turned to Sen. Loren Legarda, who was still hosting a talk show; between breaks, Menchit filled her in and persuaded Loren to start hearings on the bill and to file her own version, which she did on August 1. I’ll leave the rest to Dr. Padilla’s recollection:

“With barely three days until the end of the 12th Congress, we were advised to lodge an appeal for an ‘urgent bill’ with the House Presidential Legislative Liaison Officer, Undersecretary Bernardino Sayo. 

“It was a Wednesday, 5 pm. We went to his office at the House of Representatives. After listening to our desperate appeal, which was supported with albums full of pictures of saved and not-saved babies, Undersecretary Sayo agreed to arrange for a certification of an ‘urgent bill’ to be signed by President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the following day Thursday at 10 am. We were advised to return to the House of Representatives the following day for the second reading at 4 pm, the last day of the session at the House. With the bill now certified as urgent, our schedule for a second reading was bumped up. House Majority Floor Leader Neptali Gonzales, fortunately for us, helped the bill pass the second reading in the midst of calls for adjournment from the floor. 

“Garnering a unanimous affirmative vote, the bill moved to the required final third reading the following day, Friday, the last day of the 12th Congress. I received a phone call at 6:30pm from the Chief of Staff of Senator Flavier, Mon Navarra. He said ‘The NBS bill was passed into law! We were able to do it in 10 months—not 10 years!’ And since the House had adopted the Senate version in its earlier deliberations, there was no need for a bicameral session. We just had to wait for the signature of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, which happened on April 7, 2004.”

The NBS bill, RA 9288, had itself become something of a miracle baby, giving hope to millions of newborns and the yet-unborn. Today well over 90 percent of Filipino newborns are covered by NBS, with a 100% rate targeted by 2028. Would that our government were so singularly and charitably minded in our other national priorities, especially for those already long born! 

(Top image from miraclefeet.org)

Penman No. 488: Artists in Residence

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Penman for Sunday, August 2, 2026

IT ISN’T every day that I get to spend time with two outstanding artists, and while I’ve become something of a recluse myself, exhausted by literary polemics and limiting my social life to very close friends, I couldn’t say no when my wife Beng asked me if I cared to join her on a day trip to Los Baños to visit the sculptor and painter Junyee. Junyee was a good friend of Beng’s from the UP College of Fine Arts, and while he lives in Los Baños with his wife Tess, Junyee has done many art installations around Diliman and often comes by our house on campus to drop off some buko pie. I’d enjoyed chatting with Junyee whenever our paths crossed, taking in his stories about his arduous struggle to become an artist, including a time when he had to work as a make-up artist for the dead in a funeral parlor in Cebu. But more on that later.

I was doubly pleased to learn that we would be accompanied to Los Baños by another artist-friend, Fil de la Cruz, whom I had known for over fifty years, and by his son Janos, also a talented and highly regarded young artist. Fil stands among our most brilliant, versatile, and accomplished printmakers; both he and Junyee have been nominated for the National Artist Award.

We had long been planning to visit Junyee in LB, where he and his wife Tess, who taught in UPLB, have lived for decades. When Tess retired a few years ago and they had to give up their home on campus, they found and bought a private lot just beyond the university property line, and built a new house there. Since anything that Junyee built was bound to be interesting, we wanted to see it, but the house was honestly just an excuse; we were going there for the artist himself. Now 84, Junyee recently hasn’t been in the best of health.

Though younger at 75, Fil has been facing serious challenges of his own. They had a lot to talk about, for sure—but we resolved to undertake this trip in high spirits, to celebrate art and life in joyful company. 

First we picked up Fil at his home in Muntinlupa. Aptly named Bahaysining, the three-story brick house is part (if not largely) studio, part gallery, and part living space, but immediately the visitor knows it’s a house made by artists for artists in both form and function. “This was much smaller early on,” Fil says of the place, ”and then I just kept adding to it as my practice and capabilities grew.” He shares the space with his son Janos, who keeps a studio of his own on the premises and helps his dad with both work and the daily business of living. 

The rooms teem with paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, and most visibly, printmaking presses in various sizes that Fil himself designed and had made over the years. Much of his equipment rolls on wheels, the better to move them around when the studio has to meet a commission, and Fil and Janos have to labor long days and nights to get the job done. Fil is amazed that clients remember him and his work from way back and return to order new pieces. 

Fil also paints and sculpts as does Janos, but it’s in printmaking—the art of producing numbered copies of a design pressed on paper in limited editions—that you know his heart truly lies. I met Fil in the early 1970s in one of my past lives as a printmaker. He had graduated from his studies at UST, and I had just come out of martial law prison—where, to pass the time, I had taken up drawing with my fellow detainee Orly Castillo, who then took me under his wing at the Philippine Association of Printmakers in Ermita. The PAP was a hotbed of production for young artists then, and I was lucky to run into the likes of Bencab and Tiny Nuyda (not to mention a pretty girl named June “Beng” Poticar, who became my wife)—and yes, Fil de la Cruz, who even then was already establishing himself as a master of one of printmaking’s most difficult techniques, mezzotint, which produces an almost velvety texture. 

Perhaps because prints are relatively cheaper and come out in multiples, they’ve never quite gotten the respect they deserve, especially here in the Philippines, where the art market is enthralled by multimillion-peso paintings by the masters and by the exclusivity they exude. (Around 1974, when we were all working and hanging out at the PAP studio on Jorge Bocobo, it was a big day when a dealer came by to purchase our prints in bulk for as low as P15 per print, so she could stick them into frames she sold as décor to American servicemen in the bases.)

Fil’s come a long way from those days, and Bahaysining is a testament to his professional success, which has traveled a long arc from his youth in Bulacan and his student days at UST to further studies in New York and Paris, to over thirty solo exhibitions that have brought his prints to France, America, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany, China, Hong Kong, Korea, Spain, Belgium, and throughout the Philippines.

As it was a sunny weekday, the drive to Los Baños didn’t take long through the Jamboree route. Junyee had offered to take all of us out to lunch, but of course we first had to see and tour his and Tess’ three-year-old home. 

To know Junyee—“Luis Enano Yee Jr.” on his birth certificate—is to understand how inseparable art and life can be in the person who, from his youth onward, has seen art not only as descriptive or decorative but liberative, rooted yet transcendent, impermanent yet memorable. Widely acknowledged to be the father of installation art in the Philippines, Junyee has always been testing and pushing the boundaries of art, unbothered by commercial trends. Whether he works with discarded wood, woven metal, or wisps of sooty smoke, Junyee seems compelled to give physical shape to our thoughts and emotions, often using outdoor space as his canvas.

Born in the South and discouraged by his father from pursuing his artistic inclinations, Junyee fled to Manila and UP, where he apprenticed with Napoleon Abueva and found support from Jose Joya—masters whom he would soon surpass in competitions. Caught in the insurgent politics of the sixties, Junyee crafted work like his “Balag” trellis on which protesters could hang their slogans, but unlike many other artists of his time, he never let ideology dictate his insight and technique. He would later devote most of his art to environmental themes.

This was most evident in his new home, a modestly modern structure from the outside, nothing showy, but warm inside with wood, stone, and other natural elements, from the balayong door to the leaflike tapestry to the upturned hammock serving as a lampshade. 

Welcoming our party, Junyee points to a blank wall and remarks with a chuckle that something big used to hang there but had to be let go of, presumably for his crushing medications. It’s one of the few times he’ll advert to his maladies, of which he—and Fil for that matter—don’t make a big thing. When Junyee learns that Fil is similarly afflicted, the men knowingly embrace and call each other “classmate.” They smile, they laugh, they speak excitedly of the work that occupies their waking hours. There’s no time to be glum. Fil and Janos keep racks of sporty bicycles at home, hanging from the ceiling; Junyee shows off a gleaming high-performance BMW motorbike which he received from a patron, adding with a chuckle that “I don’t even know how to ride one!”

Over lunch at a favorite restaurant nearby, we have an animated discussion of AI and its likely effects on art and literature. I expect them to resist, but Junyee in particular is surprisingly open to the possibilities of hybridizing art and technology, as I am. “I’ve always been a fan of science,” he says, “and when I write my memoirs, which I’ll be doing soon, I’ll make sure to include a section on how science has influenced my life and work.” But even more useful and valuable than science for both men right now is faith, and Fil and Junyee speak unabashedly of how their faith strengthens them through their trials. As an installation artist, Junyee has never worried about transience and impermanence. “Everything in this world will pass anyway,” he says.

We pay a visit to the Sculpture Garden that UP Los Baños has put up on campus to showcase some of Junyee’s most important pieces. It is an outdoor gallery of some of his finest pieces, displaying the full range of his concerns, techniques, and capabilities. It’s hugely impressive, but Junyee makes it clear that he isn’t done yet. Across his home, he is constructing an art museum that he hopes will help spark a cultural renaissance in Los Baños, better known for agriculture and forestry, which Junyee’s art has also tapped into. His labors have not gone unnoticed; on top of his numerous local and international awards, Junyee will soon be receiving the highest recognition his alma mater can confer, among the worthiest of its recipients.

Neither is Fil de la Cruz resting on his laurels. He’ll be showing his newest paintings in an exhibit titled “Ephemeral & Eternal” opening next Saturday, August 8, running until the 22nd at Art Camp in Greenbelt 5, Makati. “The central thesis of the exhibition revolves around the duality of existence—the fleeting ‘ephemeral’ moments of lived experience versus the ‘eternal’ span of divinity,” according to the exhibit notes. “De la Cruz does not present time as a linear progression but as a divine force, encompassing all. In this series, he treats the passage of time not with anxiety, but with a refined serenity and deep reverence, seeking to capture the precise point where the transitory nature of life intersects with the infinite.” 

It’s as good a description as any of that trip to Los Baños and of our visit to these artist-friends’ homes, at this point between our shared past and the eternity that beckons to all of us.

Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

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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

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              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.