Category Archives: Pinoys

Penman No. 469: Seniors and Their Stories

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Penman for Sunday, December 8, 2024

I HAD the privilege of attending the private launch of a book in Makati recently, a book titled Bridges of Memory produced by a group of seniors who had each contributed their poems, stories, and essays to the collection. None of them was a professional writer; I gathered that they came from distinguished backgrounds in banking, law, public service, and other pursuits. 

Prior to publishing the book, they had been mentored by an accomplished and experienced writer, the San Francisco-based poet Oscar Peñaranda, who just happened to be an old friend of mine. Oscar was in the US when the launch took place, so he sent a congratulatory video. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this was already the “Sunshine” group’s (so named because they meet at the Sunshine Place for seniors in Makati) second such book.

As you might expect, the book contains the authors’ musings on life, love, and loss, the funny with the sad, the joyful with the tragic. The styles and the quality of the writing predictably varied, but the enthusiasm was palpably even, with all the contributors present eager to share their work.

At that very same moment, way across town, another mass book launch was being held at a major university, where one of the featured books was a long and distinguished biography that had partly been edited by me. I had also been invited to that event, but chose to attend the Makati one despite the Christmas traffic, because I had the feeling that it would somehow be a more enjoyable occasion, at least for me, as it would put me in touch with writers of a gentler disposition.

Having been caught in a whirlwind of literary activities over the past two months—from the Frankfurt Book Fair to the Palanca Awards to the PEN Congress—you’d think that I’d shy away from a small book launch, but aside from the fact that some of the authords were friends, I wanted to show my support for this kind of more personal writing and publishing that we too often take for granted as self-indulgence.

I’d seen books like this before, the output of writing groups, barkadas, high-school chums, and fellow alumni. They’re often triggered by an impending milestone, like a 50th anniversary or a grand reunion and homecoming.

The professional crowd might think of such volumes as vanity projects published by people who could never put out their own books. But then that’s the whole point: one person’s vanity is another person’s self-empowerment, and such private publishing reclaims the right to self-expression from the academic and commercial gatekeepers. The works they contain may not win any literary prizes, but they are as honest and heartfelt as writing can get, and satisfy the most basic urge that impels all good writers: to use words to give shape to one’s thought and feeling, and to share those words with others so they might think and feel the same way. They’re written neither for fame nor fortune, but to leave some precious memories behind for a very specific audience—although some pieces may be of such merit as to be more widely appreciated.

I’ve always said, even in my own creative writing classes at the university, that I believe that every person has at least one good story in him or her—and that it’s my job as a teacher to bring that story out. And people know this, too—many of them are dying to tell their story, but don’t know where and how, and who will listen. That’s particularly true for digitally-challenged seniors, who don’t have access to blogging, and who use Facebook for little more than “Happy Birthday!”

I’m particularly taken by the fact that these books are produced by seniors, who are increasingly being left out of a social world ruled by schemes and products for young people. Even within families—let’s admit it—very few grandchildren now have the time nor the patience to listen to their elders’ stories, much less to ply them with questions; they’d rather scroll through their social media than ask what a typical summer vacation was like half a century ago, or what people did before there were cellphones, computers, and satellite TV.

Years ago, fearing we would lose her soon because of her illness, I’d asked my mother to write down her memoirs in notebooks which I still keep. As it happened, she recovered magnificently, miraculously, and is approaching 97, still strong and alert, albeit a little slow. She walks every day, plays games on her iPad, and navigates Netflix on her own. When she’s staying with us (we siblings share her company), Beng and I pepper her with questions about her childhood in their village in Romblon, where she rode a horse and scooped fish out of the plentiful sea. The youngest of a dozen children, she was the apple of her father’s eye, and the only girl he sent to Manila for high school and college at UP. They had a rice mill, and snakes roosted in the large straw bins that kept the unhusked rice. But the snakes were to be feared much less than the beautiful encantos that came down from Kalatong on fiestas and lured their victims to join them with offerings of black rice. How could you not like and want to retell stories like that?

Our seniors are a treasury of stories to be told. They just need to be asked, encouraged to write, and published.

(For your copy of Bridges of Memory, email marketing@sunshineplaceph.com.)

Qwertyman No. 126: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (2)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 30, 2024

THIS WEEK I continue with excerpts from my interview with the late Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, on his recollections of his genesis as a young intellectual and activist at the University of the Philippines in the 1950s.

“It was all a popularity contest. Everything just seemed to be socials. Homobono ‘Bon’ Adaza, who was then the editor of the Philippine Collegian, tried to organize a socialist club with me. Bon even put out an announcement for a meeting. Bon and I were contemporaries, but he was a year older than me. I think I was a senior by then. I was living with my father on campus, since he was a professor here. We had a cottage in Area 2, then we later moved to Area 14. Our whole family was here. 

“It was because of my readings. I had already read the history of the socialist movement, and I was fascinated by that so we formed a socialist club. I think just three of us turned up for the meeting—the third was Princess. After that we were always together. We weren’t going steady yet then. We continued being friends because she was the only one who listened to my sermons on socialism. You ask her, but I don’t think she had any association with socialism before. We had just that one meeting. 

“Bon was eventually expelled from UP, but I had a hand in his election as chairman of the Student Council and editor of the Collegian twice because we were friends. The editor was elected from among the topnotchers of the exam. 

“The UPSCAns didn’t have a candidate who passed the exam, who were all frat boys. Bon landed in the top three, but he had no supporters. I bargained with the UPSCAns because they held the majority. So I used my vote in the council to push for Bon. Eventually he became editor of the Collegian. 

“Together with the chairman of the council and also the leader of the UPSCA, we decided to hold the first student strike. This was because for one and a half years, UP had no president, with Enrique Virata serving as acting president. It came down to a stalemate between Vicente Sinco and Gonzalo Gonzalez. Squabbling behind them were Jose P. Laurel, who represented the Senate on the Board of Regents, and Carlos P. Garcia who was supporting Gonzalez. No one could get the majority. I was on that strike. I proposed a solution arguing for the Board to take decisive action but also endorsing Salvador Lopez, whose essays I loved, for president. The UPSCANs didn’t care who won, as long as we had a president. 

“Our strike paralyzed the campus for a couple of days. It didn’t last as long as the Diliman Commune, but it was the first—and it was my first mass action. I was the one who was planning the tactics. 

“I was really looking for allies when I met this labor leader who used to be the secretary-general of the Federation of Free Farmers. [We’ll call him Hernando for this account, pending verification of the name—JD.]He claimed to be a socialist and he seemed to have read books on socialism. He was a layman. He was the one who introduced me to labor leaders such as Ignacio Lacsina and Blas Ople. They had a group of young people who revolved around Lacsina, and they met at his office in Escolta. 

“But I continued my reading. Sometimes I felt alienated because they weren’t Marxists. They were just for nationalization, and I felt more advanced than they were. There were other students there, but they were not as involved as I was. When the Suez Crisis exploded in 1957, the Americans intervened in Lebanon. We decided to picket the US embassy. We were  already using the word ‘imperialism’ then. Prominent labor leaders were there, including Hernando. When we got there, the labor attaché invited us inside to have breakfast with the US ambassador. I didn’t want to go in, but Ople and Lacsina thought they could change US policy by convincing the ambassador, so we did. I was utterly disgusted by that experience. 

“I was due then to go to US for my PhD, on a Rockefeller fellowship at Columbia University. Our demonstration took place just a few months before I was to leave. I was an instructor in UP and my college wanted me take up Public Ad, but I wanted to get out of that so I chose Political Sociology. I had become an admirer of C. Wright Mills who worked there and I wanted to work with him, only to find out that he didn’t want to handle graduate courses. 

“I already had a room at the International House in Columbia. Everything was prepared. I already had my visa. But on the day I was supposed to leave, the embassy told me that I could not leave. The consul general showed me the immigration law, which banned the entry of communists, anarchists, drug addicts, and prostitutes. 

“I think they had some earlier information about me because Lacsina later told me that Hernando was a CIA agent. He said that once, he and Blas Ople wanted to invite Hernando for a drink so they could get him drunk and then ply him with questions to extract the truth. What happened instead was that Blas got drunk first so nothing happened. Then he lashed out at Hernando and told him to his face that he was a CIA agent, and cursed him for blocking me from taking up my scholarship in the US. Looking back, I think Lacsina was right!”

Dodong Nemenzo eventually went to the University of Manchester in the UK for his PhD in Political History. He returned to serve as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, chancellor of UP Visayas, faculty regent, and 18th president of the University of the Philippines. He married Ana Maria “Princess” Ronquillo and they had three children—one of whom, the mathematician Fidel, became chancellor of UP Diliman.

Qwertyman No. 124: In Sin and Error Pining

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 16, 2024

IT WAS at an early Christmas lunch when a friend asked if I thought that Vice President Sara Duterte would be impeached, with all the motions now on the table to that effect. I wasn’t expecting politics to be taken up over the merrymaking, but this is the Philippines where we breathe politics, so I obliged. 

I said that while I certainly believed that the VP was fit to be impeached for all the obvious financial irregularities happening under her watch, I very much doubted that it was going to happen. And why not? Because it was going to come down to the votes in the House and in the Senate, and while President BBM and his allies doubtlessly had the muscle to push the motion through, I just didn’t see why they would. And again why not? You don’t think they can come up with the evidence to find her culpable for the misuse of hundreds of millions of public money in confidential funds? They could, if they want to, I said—but again, why would they? 

Think about it this way, I said. Impeachment is political, so the facts don’t really matter much, except for propaganda purposes—especially with elections coming up in a few months. Don’t get me wrong—there are people who take the process and its reasons seriously, as we all really should, because millions going to non-people like “Mary Grace Piattos,” “Chippy McDonald,” and “Fernando Tempura” in the guise of “intelligence operations” insults our non-artificial intelligence. 

VP Sara’s refusal to explain these strange endowments paints her further into a corner—which, it seems, is exactly where she wants to be. When she says, “I’ll be at peace when I’m impeached,” and when her drumbeaters exclaim that the hearings are turning the Dutertes into “folk heroes,” then you know that she’s not going to get what she wants. 

Why would PBBM let her go? What would be in it for him? He doesn’t need a functioning Vice President—he never had one; this VP can’t point to a single memorable deed beyond publishing an expensive book. Cutting off his “Uniteam” partner and depriving her of her last official job would simply give her free rein to wreak more mayhem with no accountability to the government or the people. 

Keeping her on the official payroll—but fundamentally powerless—would be the smarter thing. It was never in Sara’s nature to do a VP Leni, and turn political Siberia into a veritable factory of good deeds. She’ll stew in the OVP, sans her confidential kitty, until she can’t take it any longer and resigns, which could easily be spun into a form of surrender or an abandonment of her sworn duties.

The other reason, of course, is that while VP Sara is drawing fire, PBBM can enjoy some peace of mind, and make benign speeches at this and that forum with a heartfelt smile. He knows that he has benefited immensely from the odious alternative the Dutertes represent in the eyes of many Filipinos, even those who staunchly opposed his candidacy in 2022. 

The Dutertes have done Marcos Jr. the priceless favor of making him and whatever he does look good by comparison—a difference he has substantively emphasized by rejecting his predecessor’s slavishly pro-China policy and (despite reports of continued EJKs under his regime) withdrawing Digong’s murderous tokhangcampaign. He has had his missteps, like that bizarrely ill-conceived Maharlika Fund, but I have been hearing murmurs of approval from otherwise progressive friends—albeit grudging and cautious—for many of his positions, an unthinkable proposition just a year ago, when the wounds of 2022 were still fresh. 

But with more than half his term yet ahead of him, there’s opportunity aplenty for unraveling and for even graver misdeeds. Even now, while we profess shock and dismay over the P500 million spent by the OVP in confidential and intelligence funds for 2023, the House has given BBM a free pass on the even more staggering P4.57 billion his office disbursed for the same purposes that year. 

And that’s why I think it’s wiser to keep the focus on the Dutertes and to keep the VP where you can see and hear her, flailing around and squealing like a stuck pig. The impeachment drama will play itself out in the New Year with more twists and turns than a telenovela, and then, for some reason, the votes will fall short, and the VP will be censured and chastised before being sent back to the pen. For what it’s worth, I don’t think impeachment is the proper penalty here; criminal prosecution, conviction, and punishment should be, but that’s a whole other game.

* * * * *

Christmas will soon be upon us—my 70th, in my case, a milestone I never expected to reach given the many young deaths that marked my generation, but one I thankfully accept as the ultimate gift and blessing, no matter the turmoil in our world today. I personally have much to cheer about and be grateful for—so why can’t I be merrier?

We associate Christmas with joy and new life, with the Christ child’s coming, but there is nothing to be jolly about where wanton greed and senseless death are concerned. 

Everything today points to a headlong dive into a global cataclysm, a World War III that may not have a clear and time-stamped beginning like the invasion of Poland or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but a prolonged and widespread series of provocative and catastrophic events occurring all over the planet—Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, Chinese occupation of Southeast Asian waters, Israel’s pyrrhic extermination of its enemies, North Korea’s incessant saber-rattling and nuclear brinkmanship, America’s surrender of the asylum to the lunatics, and the inexorable degradation of the environment—all of which will come to a head. It will be horrific, but a side of me wonders if we need this cataclysm to remind us of our most basic values and virtues as humans, beyond ideology, religion, power, and wealth.

The other week I had a reader, a pro-Israel partisan, writing me to contend that there was no one else to blame for all the dead children in Gaza but their parents who refused to stand up to Hamas. It saddened more than infuriated me to see that this is where all our presumably educated reasoning has come to—a justification for the slaughter of innocents. I wanted to shake the man by the shoulders, across the Internet, to awaken the terrified and hungry child in him.

Our world will become yet darker and more difficult before it comes to its senses, rediscovers the value of truth, beauty, and courage, and pulls back from the brink of self-annihilation. Yes, I remain optimistic about the future of humanity, about a time when reason and justice will prevail, but I am quite sure I will not live to see this “new and glorious morn.”

Qwertyman No. 122: On Writing as a Profession

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 2, 2024

FOLLOWING THROUGH on last week’s piece about the challenges faced by creative writers trying to make a living in this country, let me share some further thoughts on that topic that I wove into my Rizal Lecture last week at the annual congress of Philippine PEN. My talk was titled “The Living Is in the Writing: Notes on the Profession of  Writing in the Philippines.”

Our writers of old made a profession of writing, often by working as journalists, speechwriters, and PR people at the same time that they wrote poems, stories, novels, and essays on the side. Some also taught, and of course some writing comes with that territory, but with teaching you get paid for your classroom hours than for your word count. (To which I should also add, so much of the writing that our literature professors do today is understandable only to themselves.)

Our best and most prolific writers lived by the word and died by it. The two who probably best exemplified this kind of commitment to writing—and nothing but writing—were Nick Joaquin and his good friend Frankie Sionil Jose. Both were journalists and fictionists (in Joaquin’s case, a poet and playwright as well). We can say the same for Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Kerima Polotan, as well as for Gregorio Brillantes, Jose Lacaba, Ricky Lee, Alfred Yuson, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, and Charlson Ong, among others. 

These were all writers whom you never heard to claim, as has been recent practice, that “I am a poet!” or “I am a fictionist!” They were all just writers, for whom the practice of words was one natural and seamless continuum, and a profession they mastered just as well as we expect doctors, engineers, mechanics, and lawyers to do. This was also when journalists could be poets who could also be politicians and even reformers, revolutionaries, and heroes.

This was paralleled in other arts such as painting, where artists such as Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Botong Francisco routinely accepted commissions to support themselves and any other personal undertakings. (Of course, this was well within the old Western tradition of writers and artists having wealthy patrons to help keep them alive and productive.)

But then came a time when, for some reason, creative and professional writing began to diverge, as creative writing withdrew from the popular sphere and became lodged in academia, where it largely remains today. Professional writing, or writing for, money, came to be seen as the work of hacks, devoid of art and honor. Even George Orwell urged writers to take on non-literary jobs such as banking and insurance—which incidentally T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens did, respectively—rather than what he called “semi-creative jobs” like teaching and journalism, which he felt was beneath them. (Orwell himself worked as a dishwasher in Paris, where he wryly observed that “nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this.”)

An attitude of condescension soon emerged among poets and fictionists who looked down on journalists as a lesser breed—something I have always warned my students against, having been a journalist who had to turn in a story, any story, by 2 pm every day on pain of losing my job. Never knock journalists. Let’s not forget that when it comes to facing real dangers brought on by one’s written word, poets and fictionists have it easy. The last Filipino novelist who was shot for what he wrote was Jose Rizal; the only writers dying today are our journalists and broadcasters in the hinterlands offending the local poobahs. Governors and generals read newspapers, not novels; they are impervious to metaphor.

Professional writers, on the other hand, saw creative writers as artsy dilettantes enchanted by fancy words and phrases that no one else understood and very few people paid for. Creative writers took it as a given that they were wedded to a life of monastic penury, unless they had another skill or job like teaching, doctoring or lawyering, or marrying into wealth. It even became a badge of honor of sorts to languish in financial distress while reaping all manner of writing honors, in the misguided notion that starving artists produced the finest and most honest work. 

The fact is, both are two sides of the same coin, which is the currency of public persuasion through words and language. One is an artist, the master of design; the other is the artisan or craftsman, the master of execution. Both can reside in the same person, unless you’re foolish enough to disdain one or the other. You can produce great art, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the hubris for it; but you can also live off your artistic skills, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the humility for it. 

(That said, I have to report that in my forty years of teaching creative writing, some of the students who find it hardest to switch to fiction are journalists, who just can’t let go of the gritty and often linear reality they’ve been accustomed to; poets come next, those who feel preciousness in every word and turn of phrase, so much that they can’t move from one page to the next without agonizing, or, going the other way, without drowning us in verbiage.)

This was why, more than twenty years ago, I designed and began teaching an undergraduate course at the University of the Philippines called “CW198—Professional Writing.” Mainly intended for Creative Writing and English majors who had very little idea of their career options after college aside from teaching, the course syllabus includes everything from business letters, news, interviews, and features to brochures, scripts, speeches, editing, publishing, and professional ethics. The first thing I tell them on Day One is this: “There is writing that you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others. Don’t ever get the two mixed up.”

Qwertyman No. 119: The MAGAverse

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 11, 2024

IT’S NEVER good to write out of rage, no matter how righteous you think your rage might be; the anger clouds your reasoning and could reduce you to incoherence. So as I’m writing this—on the afternoon of November 6, our time, and early morning in America where Donald Trump has already claimed victory in a bitterly fought election—I’m taking deep breaths and thinking of happy and pleasant things, far away from politics, before returning to the task at hand.

After the initial sting, it isn’t so much anger as sadness and consternation that stay with me, a deep sense of regret over what could have been, had the outcome been different. There are at least 15 million Filipinos who know what I’m feeling, having gone through a similar shock that May two years ago, when what we most dreaded happened.

Of course, to many Filipinos, a Trump return won’t make one bit of difference, and why should it? We have enough of our own problems to worry about. But for those like me who see the world today as a widening battleground between good and evil, November 5 was a loss not only for American Democrats, but for freedom-loving and truth-seeking people all over the planet, whose lives will eventually be affected by whatever comes out of Washington, like it or not.

On the eve of November 5, perplexed and dismayed by the statistical closeness of a fight that good sense should have blown wide open, I sent a message to friends saying that “My inner cynic almost wants Trump to win so Americans will see for themselves exactly what MAGA means over the next four years.” So I guess I got my cruel wish, except that to “America” we can now add “the rest of us.” Welcome to the MAGAverse.

But before this moment passes, let me just put this out there to those whom we should hold responsible for trusting a felon with the White House and for whatever he may do hereon.

If you didn’t vote for Harris and stayed home because of what you saw to be her lack of support for the Palestinian cause, just wait until Trump dances with Netanyahu over the graves of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

If you thought that voting for Trump was a vote for the precious life forming in an unborn fetus, start counting the bodies of the living that will pile up in Ukraine when Trump greenlights Putin to take what he wants, with America looking on.

If you’re a legal immigrant from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (one of those “garbage” countries, in Trump-speak) who went for Trump because you think he knows and cares about how hard you worked for your citizenship and sees you as his co-equal American, let’s see how well his Justice Department defends you at your next run-in with the police or with a gun-toting redneck.

If you didn’t vote for Harris because you made a fine point of her waffling on the fracking issue, wait till Trump puts climate-change deniers in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency—which he did, by the way, in 2016, when he appointed a lawyer who led 28 states in a fight against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

If you’re a normally bright and decent person who chose to overlook Trump’s moral flaws and lack of character because you thought he would stabilize and grow the economy, and appoint geniuses to manage the store, wait until the likes of Elon Musk play with government like he did with Twitter. 

(And never mind national security, with Trump being chummy with Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Hungarian tyrant Orban, who just congratulated Trump for “the biggest comeback in US political history…. A much-needed victory for the world!” Who needs counterintelligence when these guys have direct access to the White House? Worry about tooth decay, when RFK Jr. pulls fluoride out of your tap water, because it was supposedly part of a Cold War communist plot to poison America.)

If you took pity on Trump because you felt that Joe Biden had “weaponized” the Department of Justice against him (on cases he had only himself to blame for, like sleeping with a porn star and paying her to shut up), wait until Trump unleashes the DOJ on his political opponents, as he has sworn to do, and anything and anyone else that gets in his way—including you. (I thought that the best endorsement for Kamala was the one from Harrison Ford: “Vote for Harris if you want to protect your right to disagree with her.”)

If this is nothing but doomsaying, what do you think Donald Trump did all throughout his campaign? He is doom, and doom won. This round goes to Darth Vader and the Dark Side.

Excepting Ukraine and Gaza, much of the world will move on like it always has, and so will we. America itself already had a foretaste of Trump in his first incarnation; they survived him and the pandemic as well. We Filipinos survived martial law, right? 

The question is, what did people learn? Or, since those who learn anything eventually die, are people fated to make the same mistakes all over again from generation to generation? There hasn’t even been enough time for the generations to roll over in America since Trump 1.0—didn’t those voters learn anything?

With our own midterm elections coming up next year, we could be telling each other the same things. I better keep my inner cynic in check.

Qwertyman No. 118: A Flickering Flame

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 4, 2024

TOMORROW, NOVEMBER 5 (or Wednesday, November 6, our time), American voters will choose who between Republican Donald J. Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris will lead them from the White House over the next four years.

For more than four million Filipino-Americans, the outcome will bear a direct impact on their daily lives, their choices, their standing in society, their future. For the rest of the world, including those of us here in the Philippines, the result will shape not only how we see America, but also how America sees us in the global scheme of things.

Only the foolish will think that we have no stake in this election, and that America’s position in the world will be the same regardless of who wins. For the people of Ukraine, a Trump victory might as well be his friend Putin’s; for the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, and others dependent on at least the deterrence if not the active deployment of American military power vis-à-vis Chinese expansionism in Asia, Trumpian isolationism can only invite more unbridled aggressiveness from the region’s bullies.

As I’ve often said here before, like many millions of Filipinos, my stake is more personal than that: our daughter lives and works in California, and my sister is also a US citizen, both of them contributing productively to that country’s economic and social well-being. Both are proudly voting and campaigning for the only candidate who offers real hope for the future of America and the world: Kamala Harris. To them, she represents not just the right political but also and even perhaps more importantly the right moral choice.

Of course, I totally agree. Why anyone would vote for a man who even many of his supporters admit is a convicted felon, a habitual liar, a womanizer, a pervert, a racist, a chauvinist, and a would-be dictator is beyond me. But apparently enough Americans will, enough to make all polls point to a dead heat between the two candidates, with the outcome likely to be decided by voters in a handful of so-called “battleground” states.

Among those many millions of Trumpists willing to overlook his not-insubstantial shortcomings are legions of Fil-Ams who—despite having historically voted Democrat as an ethnic minority—now find common cause with Trump’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric (it isn’t even about illegal immigration anymore, but about immigrants from “garbage” countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) and his supposed “anti-abortion” stance (since diluted for political expediency). Among other single-issue MAGA voters, “the economy” remains their strongest reason for choosing Trump, despite 23 Nobel-prizewinning economists writing that Trump’s tariff-based economic plans will be disastrous for the US.

Eighty-two Nobel laureates, in fact, are on record supporting Harris, but that clearly matters little in an election driven more by primal fear than by truth and reason. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson lamented, “How sad it must be—believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.”

My own sense is that many Trump voters won’t be voting for Trump the man, whom his sharper and more hidebound supporters—many of whom, like Sen. Ted Cruz, he has savagely maligned but who have masochistically endured his insults to ensure their own survival—will admit before God to be the lowest of the execrably low. They will be voting for the deep grievances and resentments that Trump has so craftily stoked in them, and against the idea of an “elite” and a “swamp” that Trump and his new acolyte Elon Musk, strangely enough, represent more visibly than most Democrats.

Thus the very real possibility remains that we may wake up Friday morning to the specter of Trump 2.0 and whatever it will bring. Should that happen, we can imagine the global wave of consternation and dismay that will ensue among liberals and progressives everywhere. On the other front will resound the triumphant cheers and chuckles of global despots and their minions.

All this brings me to what I suspect has been my real worry all along—not the US election, about which we can do nothing, but our own political horizon, on which familiar dangers are looming large.

At least one online pundit with an unusual point of view has lauded the recent performances of Vice President Sara Duterte and her father former President Rodrigo Duterte at their Senate hearings as a kind of resurrection—in the very least, an affirmation of their continuing political viability, if not resurgent power. 

The Dutertes mastered their fumbling inquisitors, this commentator crowed, reporting that the gallery even clapped for the senior Duterte at the end of a raucous session at which he virtually confessed to willfully causing the summary execution of suspects without ever being prosecuted. The Dutertes, he seemed to imply, remain above and beyond the law; with their cohorts in office, they are the law, or shall soon be again.

Indeed Philippine politics has become a theater where bravado, bluster, and buffoonery matter. We cannot even tell the actors from the characters any longer. Lies resound louder than the truth, and the audience rewards the best “hugot line” with wild applause.

The upcoming midterm election already promises to showcase the worst of our political predilections, with family dynasties and patently unfit candidates crowding the top of the poll rankings.

So if the Americans choose Trump over Harris, why should we be surprised? Where character, reason, and talent no longer matter, the tyrants rule with fools at their feet to keep the populace amused.

But if Kamala Harris wins, whatever it brings to America, it will mean for me that, however fragile, hope remains for good sense to prevail even in extremely fraught situations such as ours. If only for that flickering flame, I pray she wins.

(Image from newsweek.com)

Penman No. 467: Recovering Our Memory of the Sea

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Penman for October 20, 2024

I’VE OFTEN remarked, in academic conferences, about the glaring absence of the sea in our mainstream and modern literature, beyond serving as a decorative backdrop or romantic element. I recently learned that this may not be so true of the native literatures of the Philippine South, for whose people the sea is their economic and cultural lifeblood, but for most of the rest of us, the only sea we’ll ever know is Boracay, or the Dolomite Beach.

That’s a sad thing when we consider that the Philippines—the world’s second largest archipelago after Indonesia—also has one of the world’s longest coastlines (over 36,000 kilometers), is rich in marine biodiversity, and can look back to a long, proud, and continuing seafaring tradition. Despite the alarming depletion of our marine resources due to overfishing and damage to marine ecosystems, we continue to rank high among the world’s fish producers; ironically, our fishermen are among our country’s poorest citizens. And for many decades now, the Philippines has sent out its seafarers to crew the ships of the world—over 550,000 of them last year, making up a fourth of all the world’s seaborne workers.

To go back even farther into the past, pre-Hispanic Filipinos built the balangay that helped populate Austronesia as well as the speedy warship, the caracoa; in Spanish times our ancestors built the galleons that crossed the oceans. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville referred to Filipinos aboard the whalers as “Manila men.”

Behind these figures runs a compelling human and social drama, but it’s a story largely unknown and untold to our own people, and what little we know is fading even faster as more of us leave our islands for the big cities, slowly but surely losing our personal connections to the sea. We encounter sea life only in the fish market or the seafood section of the grocery, or in tin cans; our children do not know the names of fish, which many now refuse to eat, in favor of sausages and noodles.

Thankfully, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has done something critically important to fill this gap in our collective memory—by establishing a Museum of Philippine Maritime History (MPMH) that tells the story of our seafaring past. And it’s significant that this museum isn’t located in Manila, which would seem to be the logical first choice given Manila Bay and its port, but in Iloilo, which has also had a long and continuing affinity with the sea. Iloilo has historically supplied many if not most of the country’s seafarers to the global market. The city has a plethora of schools offering maritime courses, ensuring the continuity of talent.

I stumbled on the MPMH during a recent visit to Iloilo—among my favorite local destinations for all the obvious reasons (the food, the Esplanade, the heritage houses, the churches, the hospitality, the culture, and of course the people). The amazing boom it’s undergone over the past two decades under the sponsorship of former Sen. Frank Drilon and his local counterparts has dramatically transformed the city’s physical and economic landscape, but it hasn’t forgotten its past as it moves resolutely forward. 

Iloilo has long been known as the city of museums. Aside from the Museo Iloilo and any number of restored mansions, it now boasts the Museum of Philippine Economic History, which chronicles the city’s and region’s central role in sugar, shipping, and commerce; the Rosendo Mejica Museum, which celebrates Iloilo’s journalistic heritage (and I’m proud to say that my wife Beng descends from a Mejica); and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, which places Iloilo squarely in the center of cutting-edge art production.

The MPMH, which opened in January 2023 at what used to be the Old Customs House on Calle Loney and Aduana in City Proper behind Sunburst Park, walks the visitor through exhibits covering the past until the Spanish era, and the American period to modern times. One very informative section presents the variety of Philippine boats (biray, casco, vinta, batil, etc.); scale models bring some to life. Key figures in our maritime history such as Luis Yangco (1841-1907), who had a shipping empire and supported the revolution are introduced. Historical photographs, posters, and other artifacts provide vivid visual proof of how vital the maritime industry was to our economy and society. Another panel notes the many waterborne festivals we Filipinos hold throughout the country, such as the Pista ‘Y Dayat in Lingayen, Pangasinan every May, and the Bangkero Festival in Pagsanjan, Laguna every March.

It’s not a huge gallery, and one wishes there were even more artifacts on display to ponder, but in terms of curation and presentation, the MPMH can hold its own, given its present limitations, against other international museums of its kind, with crisp, clear graphics, well-chosen items, and useful and interesting detail. (I’ve had the privilege of visiting the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in the UK and the Museo Naval in Madrid, so as global standards go, those two maritime giants would be tough to match.) The MPMH’s best come-on—which probably accounted for the hordes of students present when we came by—is that it’s absolutely free, although donations are welcome. That’s a great start, with the kids, toward recovering our memory of the sea.

Qwertyman No. 116: Dynasty

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 21, 2024

“MAMA, PAPA, I wanna be a congressman!”

Senator Bebot Maybunga and Governor Kikay Maybunga looked up from their dinner plates at Mikmik, who sat at the far end of the table, to where they had deported him for a little peace of mind. Their younger son was given to wild outbursts that disrupted his parents’ serious deliberations about politics, business, and entertainment. Governor Kikay and her friends were planning for Paris Fashion Week, while Senator Bebot was thinking F1 at the Austrian Grand Prix.

“Well it’s about time Hamilton left Mercedes,” Bebot was saying while chewing at his bistek, “after all the crappy cars they built for him. A man’s got to go where he’ll do best. That’s why we joined the Federalistas, right? What’s the use of being a Progresibo if you can’t get any of your projects through? Pity our poor constituents! So we go with the Ferraris of Philippine politics—the Federalistas! And let me tell you something, honey—I’m going to be their Verstappen!”

“Who’s Fershwersh?” asked Kikay. “I want to know what really happened between Nicole Kidman and Selma Hayek. I mean, did Nicole really brush Selma off at the Balenciaga show?” She popped an overripe tomato into her mouth, savoring its sweet-sourness. “The only time I’d swat your hand away is if it was pawing someone else, like that starlet at the XYZ Awards. Don’t tell me you didn’t know she was coming on to you while you played Daddy-o!”

“I want to be a congressman!” cried Mikmik again, this time hitting his plate with his spoon four times for emphasis. Their housemaid Yeye hurriedly mopped the bistek sauce that scattered all around him.

“Stop yelling and finish your food!” said Bebot. “You can’t be a congressman if you don’t finish your food.” That had been Mikmik’s problem since early childhood—half his plate always went to the dogs, so they now had three Rottweilers and three dachshunds, despite which the boy got all puffed up like an Obemio painting. They’d sent him everywhere from the Mayo Clinic to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but all the doctors could tell the Maybungas was that Mikmik had low self-esteem, for which he tried to compensate by eating a little a lot—something called the Schlumpfegel Syndrome, which could be addressed only if the boy succeeded at something truly outstanding, after which he would then complete his meals. It was complicated—and expensive, but thankfully there was all that land that Kikay owned, which Bebot found ways to run public roads and bridges through.

“But what do you want to be a congressman for, hijo?” asked his mama, trying to play the part of the good parent, as Bebot groaned. “It’s a hard job. Look at your Kuya Pepito, he’s always out somewhere with the President, trying to make sure that everything will be okay for—well, everybody.”

“The only thing that bastard is looking out for is himself,” grumbled Bebot. “After everything I did for him, imagine, he goes to Singapore for F1 with the President and leaves me behind!”

“Don’t call him a bastard! He’s our son, he has a father and a mother!”

“Am I a bastard, Mama?” asked Mikmik. Kikay rushed over to where Mikmik sat to wrap her arms around him, as Bebot smirked. Their political enemies had spread the dastardly humor that Mikmik had actually been fathered by one of Kikay’s old flames—something Bebot himself had long suspected, for how could he possibly have spawned such an idiot, but had never pressed because he still needed Kikay’s old-family money for his higher ambitions.

“No, of course not, Mikmik! You too have a mother—and a father!”

“I wanna be a congressman!”

“But your Kuya Pepito is already congressman for the first district, hijo! When his next term ends, Mama will be congressman, because Kuya will be governor.”

“But I can be congressman for the second district, Mama—”

“No, hijo, we don’t live there—”

“But Papa has a house there! A nice house, with a swimming pool!” Bebot nearly choked on his ball of rice, as Kikay’s eyes narrowed into slits. Their political enemies had let it be known to one and all that the senator kept a mistress in the second district, but Kikay decided not to bring it up because, well, she was a firm believer in family unity, and her brothers and sisters would never have forgiven her if they lost their juicy contracts on account of some silly spat over a querida. 

“I know what we can do, hijo!” Kikay exclaimed, struck by a brilliant idea. “We can make you mayor! This nincompoop mayor of ours has been talking about getting his even more nincompoop wife to run against me for governor, so why not take his job? I agree, it’s about time you joined us in this noble profession!”

“Can a mayor drive a big car and go wang-wang? Because Kuya Pepito does that and it’s why I want to be a congressman!”

“Of course, hijo, you can drive a big car around town all day and go wang-wang if you like. You can even have a police escort and they’ll go wang-wang too.”

“And Papa won’t get mad and hit me over the head like he always does?”

Kikay glared at Bebot who was looking away, whistling.

“No, hijo, even senators can’t hit mayors over the head—”

“But if I’m mayor, then I can hit people over the head, right? Like a, a sheriff, right? I saw it on TV once!”

Bebot finally turned and said, “You can’t be congressman, you can’t even be mayor! The law says you have to be at least twenty-three to be mayor, and you’re only twenty-one—at best!”

“What does he mean by that, Mama? Look, Mama, Papa’s making a face at me again, like he’s going to hit me!”

Again Kikay wrapped her arms around Mikmik and flashed Bebot her meanest look. “No, baby, he won’t, and you’re going to be mayor, Mama will make sure of it. Don’t worry about your age, it’s only a birth certificate, and since when was that piece of paper a problem? Mayor Mikmik Maybunga—let’s not forget your middle name, Mikmik Macatangay Maybunga. Aren’t these people just so lucky to have us at their service?”

Qwertyman No. 115: Why I Teach

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 14, 2024

LAST OCTOBER 5, we marked World Teachers Day—not one of our most popular or noisiest holidays (it isn’t even an official one), but one that gives us pause to remember some of the most important people in our young lives. I taught for 35 years before I retired in 2019, and I still teach one writing subject every semester as professor emeritus, so I suppose I wanted to be that “VIP” in someone’s life. 

When we teach writing—and not even creative writing, but composition—to freshmen, we take young people by the hand and help them make sense out of their lives and their ideas, such as they are. The term “composition” applies as much to the writer as to the text: one composes oneself, drawing out the essentials and leaving out the dross. Creative writing pushes that process one step farther, by turning to the imagination instead of one’s limited experience for material and insight. 

The creative writing teacher’s task is not only to encourage but also to guide and to train that imagination, sparing the student from having to reinvent the wheel but affording him or her the thrill of self-discovery. 

It’s an inarguably fine and noble mission. On the other hand, and in economic terms, the teaching of creative writing is brutally inefficient. In a typical workshop class of 20 people, an instructor would be fortunate to find two or three with real talent—an aptitude for language, a maturity of insight, a stylistic flair. Among those, far fewer will have the discipline and perseverance to write and write well for life.

So why should we even persist, or expend public funds to produce boatloads of people who will probably never write the kind of line you will mumble in your half-sleep, or will cry out to the heavens in your most painful or most euphoric moment?

For one, because producing good creative writers is like mining for precious stones, where a ton of ore might have to be torn out of the earth and sifted through to produce one small jewel-grade rock, which has yet to be cut and shaped by expert hands. 

We must also persist in teaching creative writing because the production of new literature reinvigorates and replenishes our imagination as a people, our imagination of ourselves. It is that imagination, however dark, that gives us hope and makes reality endurable. The truth of numbers—of GDP and ROI and per capita income and population growth rates—is important (I’ve often remarked what a terribly innumerate society we are); but it is a limited and even sometimes deceptive truth that barely begins to tell our story. History does this, but without much latitude for pure conjecture. As in painting and the other arts, creative writers have often simply done, and done first, what critics and theorists would later describe and systematize. Creative writing is a breath of intuition caught on paper.

But I also teach creative writing in the conviction that every student—no matter the person’s background—has at least one good story to tell, and that it is our task as teachers to release that story. Most of my students may come to my classes merely to pass the time, or fulfill a requirement, or satisfy a craving for some critical attention; many may never write another story in their lives. But I want them to come out appreciating and respecting the liberative and ameliorative power of art—which is a fancy way of saying that, for those of us who will never be mistaken on the street for Brad Pitt or Superman, here we can be and do anything, for as long as we make artistic sense.

As K. Patricia Cross, professor emerita of higher education at Berkeley, reminds us, “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

Anyone can write anything, but not everyone can be a writer. By the same token, not every writer can be a teacher. People who have no problems stringing seamless paragraphs of compound-complex sentences can’t give a lecture or an exercise worth an ATM receipt. It takes a different sensibility—and, yes, another set of talents (or what I call a whole bunch of P’s—preparation, perseverance, patience, and passion)—to teach well and to endure in the classroom.

I feel passionate about teaching in UP and in this country, and in giving back to them, through my students, what they have given me. But teaching is not a word I often say in the same breath as love. I cannot honestly say that I love teaching, in the sense of wanting to do it for most of my waking hours, or missing it terribly when I’m doing something else. Teaching is one of the most exhausting jobs you can get. The job doesn’t begin or end in the classroom; it just happens there.

Every time I step into a classroom, I pause at the doorway to expel a deep sigh and collect my thoughts, wondering if I have enough to sustain a 90-minute performance. As the American novelist Gail Godwin famously said, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.” Indeed I spend the last ten minutes before class writing a script in my head: I will say this; I will do this; I will bring these props and use them at some point; I will ignite an argument; I will leave them with a question that will buzz in their ears for a week. Even bad stories can be turned to great lessons; where’s the teaching point? How can I say it without crushing or diminishing the person? 

It doesn’t always work—sometimes I simply collapse into my chair and count away the minutes—but we all attempt some variation of this drill. Basically, we are saying: I will do my best to make this day worth their time and mine. It’s what they expect; it’s what I promised.

It is not love but duty that drives me to teach—although duty, perhaps, can also be a form of love; a love not of the thing itself but of some larger principle. That principle to me is service—service to country, people, university, and service to the great and truly free republic of the imagination.

“How do you know that what you’re doing matters?” I was asked once. “How can you tell if you’re making a difference?” My answer was, I don’t know, I can’t tell. But for a teacher, the only distinguished achievement that counts is the quality of one’s students. You are distinguished by their achievement, and in this sense, I have been distinguished aplenty.

Qwertyman No. 114: That Viral Picture

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 7, 2024

IT’S TOO bad that we don’t have space on this page for cartoons, because I would have asked for one to illustrate this piece for this week. Imagine this: a scene at the NAIA baggage claim area on a busy day, with throngs of passengers crowded around the carousel, waiting for their luggage. Behind the yellow line stands a slim senior lady in a simple black outfit, holding on to a cart, chatting casually with her companion. Across them, let’s show two other passengers, both watching the woman intently. The elderly man has this thought bubble: “Oh, wow, that’s Mrs. Billionaire CEO, waiting for her luggage.” The grim-faced young woman beside him is thinking: “Heartless capitalist! Too cheap to even pay a porter!” 

Now how and why did image cross my mind?

Last week, a picture I took of that same scene and which I (perhaps stupidly) posted on Facebook went viral. If I got a peso for every time that image was liked and reposted, I could get myself a new iPhone 16. But what really surprised me wasn’t the velocity with which my post went out there, but how sharply it divided the people who responded to it and the intensity—sometimes the vehemence—with which they expressed their thoughts. Maybe I should’ve expected that, knowing how social media works. As psychologists will tell us, the same picture can mean very different things to different people.

Most responses—especially the initial ones—were positive, and praised the subject for her “just-like-us” simplicity and humility. I saw a lot of messages attesting to this being her usual behavior, harking back to her family’s rise from modest and hard-working origins to their present prominence and affluence. Sure, some of the praise may have been effusive, but it was consistent and anecdotal, drawn from personal knowledge of and encounters with the lady (whom, I have to say, I’ve never formally met, although I interviewed her briefly once on Zoom for a book project). 

And then, perhaps inevitably, the backlash came. Someone accused me of being a stalker and a marites, of invading a celebrity’s privacy. And what was the big deal, someone else said, when we all have to wait for our luggage? In other places like Scandinavia, even prime ministers carry their own bags. Why praise a billionaire for doing what the rest of us do? Why get starstruck by the rich and powerful?

That puzzled me, because I thought that was the whole point. The rich are not like you and me, as Fitzgerald said: they have others do their menial chores for them. (When was the last time you saw a senator or a CEO pick up his or her own bags?) This is the Philippines, not Scandinavia, where entitlement is king; the lady’s noteworthiness comes not from her being one of us, but her being one of them doing something like one of us.

It went on from there to a dissection of the lady’s family fortune and how it was allegedly fattened by the blood and sweat of underpaid contractual workers, particularly at her family’s department store chain. “You’re blind to capitalist exploitation!” someone screamed. (I was aware of the labor issues, which have yet to be fully resolved, but all I decided to reply was “If you say so.” I was blind because it wasn’t what I saw at that moment or was looking for.) “How many UP students have been truncheoned by the police because they marched with that company’s striking employees?” another asked. (I honestly don’t know, but UP being UP, it would have been quite a few. “How many UP students shop at that department store?” I had to ask back. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit to being a suki of that store and a holder of its card; I can’t afford upscale boutiques.) And so on.

I could’ve been snarkier in my retorts, but what for? I’m a quiet and largely benign (I think) presence on Facebook, a platform I eschewed for the longest time before finally giving in a few years ago, out of the need for its marketplace (yes, I was looking for things, not people, which probably tells you something). Since then, despite my natural tendency to stay away from what the Desiderata calls “loud and aggressive persons… vexatious to the spirit,” I’ve run into a good number of them—some even happen to be my friends with good reason to be loud and aggressive over causes they feel passionate about. When you get into social media, that comes with the territory. But at my age, I have to pick my fights, no longer having the kind of moral stoutness that can comprehensively and intensely feel outrage at every instance of perceived injustice; I keep trying to do right, but am happy for small graces in an unkind world.

Much of this goes to how we view the rich from our middle-class perches. There’s a part of us that suspects that all that wealth has to be the fruit of evil, with so many exemplars around to prove it, and another part that yearns for all that ease and comfort (or the lifestyle and the luxury, for the younger set). Having dealt with a number of them because of my work, I’ve come to see the rich and famous as characters in stories with surprisingly unsurprising and fairly predictable arcs, so I’m gratified when now and then I come across an interesting deviation. 

Historians, journalists, and critics will exhaust the complexity of the big picture; they like landscapes. My inner fictionist responds to telling moments in isolation; I draw portraits. To write good stories, we script the unscripted. I often say at lectures that characters become most interesting when they go out of character—when they do something that they were never expected to do, whether good or bad, but which had always been in them in wait for the right confluence of conditions to emerge. I challenge my students to bring their characters out of their usual context to reveal more of their true selves: don’t show a priest in church, but bring him to a fish market, or a construction site (or even a girlie bar, but Somerset Maugham already did that, sort of, in “Rain”).

Social media is a huge lens that hyper-magnifies everything—virtue and vice alike. It’s also a mirror that ultimately tells us that what we see (or decide to see) is who and what we are. My little experiment with a picture that went viral just showed us how.