Category Archives: Politics

Qwertyman No. 159: No Room for Nuance

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 18, 2025

LIKE MANY of his friends from the University of the Philippines and the legal profession, I was extremely saddened last week by the events surrounding and following the announcement of Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in the case of Duterte v. House of Representativesthat effectively stalled the impeachment process against Vice President Sara Duterte. As someone inclined to believe in the VP’s culpability, I was of course disappointed by the decision, and dismayed that it was Justice Leonen justifying it as the ponente. 

Scores of former justices, lawyers, editorialists, and activists have since weighed in to expound on the perceived infirmities of the decision, and on the damage it has wrought on both our political and judicial institutions. Not knowing any better than these sharper minds, I can’t add anything much to those arguments, except to observe that from my layman’s point of view, it does seem that Justice Leonen went well out of his way to make impeachment more difficult even for those deserving of it.

I was saddened, but not surprised, when Marvic—both the justice and the man—was pilloried in the press and social media for his role in the matter. Insinuations floated that Leonen had been “bought” by the Dutertes in exchange for a promise of being eventually appointed Chief Justice under a Sara presidency. Other critics pointed to supposed flaws in his character, even equating him with Senate President Chiz Escudero, under whose clever management the VP’s impeachment did not push through “forthwith,” but has instead been “archived” for at least the next sixth months.

I don’t mean or need to defend Marvic, who can very well speak for himself. He was and remains a friend—we worked together in UP administration, where he served as VP for Legal Affairs and then Dean of the College of Law and I served as VP for Public Affairs—although I don’t know him nearly as well as his own compañeros in the profession. One of them, a mutual friend, came out with a stinging rebuke of the decision, while attesting—like many who know the justice and his background closely—to his personal and intellectual integrity.

I know a bit of that background, having mentioned and quoted Marvic in my recent biography of Justice Conchita Carpio Morales. He was among the four justices who dissented when, in July 2016, the Court dismissed the plunder case against former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo for lack of evidence. His remark then was simple but damning: “The scheme is plain except to those who refuse to see.” Earlier, as UP Law dean, Marvic had served as chief negotiator for the Philippine government in talks with the MILF, leading to a comprehensive agreement. He had also led the call asking a sitting justice to resign for alleged plagiarism; instead, the Court cleared its colleague and got back at the complainants (Carpio Morales dissented). Even before that in 2004, as a young lawyer, Leonen had argued for indigenous peoples in the La Bugal case questioning the constitutionality of the Mining Act. The Court agreed with him, only to reverse itself later.

Marvic Leonen’s performance as a lawyer, a legal academic, an advocate for the oppressed, and a justice are a matter of public record—which understandably, most Filipinos likely don’t know or care about. The question that bothered me in the aftermath of the Duterte decision was, “Should one act—widely perceived to be wrong—occlude a lifetime of good and right deeds? Are we judging the decision, or judging the man?” (The flipside of this is the sudden elevation of heels to heroes, because of one popular stance taken, as in the Senate vote.)

I asked this only because of the increasingly personal nature of the attacks against Marvic—which of course in today’s environment he had coming, even from those of us who deplore the personalistic nature of our politics. The term “cancel culture” has been often brought up in this context, a phrase more likely to be used by those on the receiving side of it. 

There are pluses to this form of public outrage, in that it can be unequivocal, if sometimes crude and over-the-top. As a way of telling public personalities that “You’re wrong” or “You suck,” there’s nothing like a torrent of posts and memes deploring or ridiculing their actions, taking minutes to form a tsunami of public opinion. In propaganda, we might call this the art of posterization, of reducing complex issues and character traits to one clear image and message, of stripping out the nuances, the “but’s” and “maybe’s,” the kind of hand-wringing I’m doing now in an effort to understand why people do what they do. 

From this perspective, and to use one of this century’s most telling cliches, at the end of the day, only the public impact of your actions count. No one needs to know or to understand your personal motivations; no one owes you the benefit of the doubt. Public opinion can sway (Shakespeare famously called it “the vagabond flag”), can be savage and cruel, but as with bees in a swarm, it’s in the nature of the hive mind to congeal and to move as one, with no room nor time for demurrers. Social media assists the formation of that hive mind exponentially, in post after repost, seeking and gaining affirmation in numbers. 

On the other hand (a phrase you hardly ever hear online), the dramatist and fictionist in me—as opposed to the propagandist—likes to individuate the caricature, to tease out the nuances of characters and situations, to explore context and subtext. That viewpoint might appreciate Marvic as a person whose own brush with impeachment made him the ideal spokesman for eleven other gray justices, serving as both lightning rod and fall guy, putting his own hard-won reputation at risk. 

Duterte v. House of Representatives wasn’t and shouldn’t have been about Justice Leonen, and not even the judiciary itself, but rather about seeking justice over the gross misdeeds attributed to a high public official. To the extent that we’re not talking about the massive and blatant corruption that prompted the impeachment in the first place so much as we’re dwelling on our disappointment with a perceived champion of the public interest, then the dark side continues to win by distraction. Methinks we should refocus on the real crooks—there’s a few more to root out in the Senate, and they were never even the good guys to begin with.

Qwertyman No. 158: Other Battles to Fight

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Qwertyman for Monday, August 11, 2025

A LOT has been said this past week about the 12-0 decision of the Supreme Court on the impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte essentially supporting her contention that the one-year rule against bringing up new impeachment charges had been violated by the House of Representatives, and pushing back the earliest date for any resumption of such charges to February 6, 2026.

Predictably, the decision raised a storm of protest involving no less than former Justices of the Court, our top legal luminaries and lawyers’ organizations, and key media and political personalities who accused the Court of judicial overreach. On the other side were somewhat more muted voices calling for respecting the Court’s judgment—including, surprisingly or otherwise, a very sedate Sen. de la Rosa, now all flush with legal wisdom and temperance; to be fair, some of these people were hardly Duterte fans, but likely just citizens tired of all the bashing going on. (The Senate’s subsequent vote to “archive” the impeachment complaint would catch even more flak.)

However this issue is ultimately settled, one thing is clear: the Filipino public’s trust and confidence in their political institutions has hit a new low. And contrary to certain suggestions, it’s not because of journalists and gadflies like me who seem keen on tearing the house down, but because, well—it’s in the nature of the beast (or the human) for something so supposedly venerable as our Supreme Court to behave strangely in certain situations. 

The controversy stirred up by the Court in the Duterte case reminded me of a passage that I quoted in my recently published biography of retired Associate Justice and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales, who has also manifested an opinion contrary to that of her current peers. The quotation comes from the former law dean and legal scholar Pacifico A. Agabin, who wrote in his book The Political Supreme Court (Quezon City: UP Press, 2012):

“The Supreme Court, like the US Supreme Court, is both an appellate and a constitutional court. Unlike most countries in Europe, we do not have a constitutional court, and so our high tribunal performs these dual functions under the Constitution. And when it decides constitutional cases, it becomes a political body, just like the executive and legislative branches. ‘Political,’ as used here, means that it acts as a legislature, according to Richard Posner, in the sense of having and exercising discretionary power as capacious as a legislature’s. According to Posner, ‘constitutional cases in the open area are aptly regarded as ‘political’ because the Constitution is about politics and because cases in the open area are not susceptible of confident evaluation on the basis of professional legal norms.’ Thus, when the court decides constitutional cases, it becomes a political organ. Like a chameleon, it changes color and assumes a different role as a political body.

“To repeat, I use the term ‘political’ here not in its partisan sense, but more in its ideological connotations. Unfortunately, there is no dividing line between the ideological and the partisan meanings, and sometimes, these blur into each other. The court itself sometimes fall into the partisan trap.

“This holds especially true in a personalistic culture like ours, where values like utang na loob and pakikisamaare embedded in the Filipino’s subconscious.”

Now, that’s all still very high-minded, but another memory that’s even more disturbing comes from a book that I edited (anonymously, because I didn’t want to be saddled with a libel case—as its author inevitably was): Shadow of Doubt: Probing the Supreme Court (Newsbreak, 2010), written by my friend, the prizewinning journalist Marites Vitug. In her prologue, she recalls this incident:

“During an interview, after I asked an aspiring candidate to the Supreme Court about the unsavory realities of the appointment process, he advised me to tread carefully. The candidate, a Justice of a mid-level court, was fearful of the effects of a book that would pry into the sanctuary of the Supreme Court and ruffle the institution. 

“Over an oatmeal breakfast (mine) and coffee (his), he worried that the public may lose their confidence in the Court. He then told me the story of a staff member of a Supreme Court Justice decades ago. This man had access to confidential information and, after learning of Court decisions, immediately approached winning litigants and informed them that he could work on their cases and get favorable results. He asked for money—and, voila, delivered them the good news when the decisions were promulgated. He always had happy clients.

“The Justice I was speaking with was, at the time, working on the Court. Disturbed by the corrupt behavior of a colleague, he reported this to the Chief Justice. However, the Chief Justice took a benign, almost indifferent view. He told the young lawyer that this would soon come to an end because the erring staff member was about to leave the Court; he held a post co-terminus with that of his boss, an associate Justice. 

“It was best, the Chief Justice said, to let it pass. He feared that if the Court acted on it and the anomalies became known to the public, confidence in the ‘last bulwark of democracy’ would wane. It was paramount to keep the institution pristine in the eyes of the public, never mind if wrongdoing was gnawing the Court.

“The Justice looked back at this moment and narrated the story to impress on me how important it is to protect the institution. For him and the Chief Justice who initiated him into this misplaced patriotism, strengthening the institution meant glossing over grave offenses.”

I’m not a lawyer (something we very often hear these days, followed by some legalistic opinion), but my pedestrian sense tells me that this Court and this Senate aren’t going to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve jumped into. Pinoy officialdom never admits mistakes and apologizes, like the Japanese do; we love to brazen it out with the thickest of cheeks. 

Given that, let’s not hang our expectations on this one peg of VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment. Whether she gets impeached or not, she’ll still have to answer for the serious charges brought against her, perhaps with even more finality than her removal from office will bring. 

February 6, 2026 is less than six months away. Let the prosecutors use the time to prepare an airtight case that will secure a clear conviction, in the court of public opinion if not in the Senate tribunal—a case so compelling that it will embarrass any senator-judge who will ignore its logic (and let’s face it, there will be many), and hold him or her accountable to the people at the next election.

In the meanwhile, we have many other and far more consequential battles to fight—our bloated budget, our growing debt, the illiteracy of our youth, the hunger and homelessness of our poor. These can’t be “archived,” and the “forthwith” on these issues came and went a long time ago.

Qwertyman No. 156: That Bam-Kiko Thing

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 28, 2025

RETURNING SENATORS Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan have been getting roasted online for joining the majority bloc in the incoming Senate, thereby securing important committee chairmanships under the highly unpopular but tough-to-unseat Senate President Chiz Escudero. Despite sympathetic reactions from such opposition stalwarts as former VP and now Naga Mayor Leni Robredo and Sen. Risa Hontiveros, the two have been roundly scored for their decision.

Typical of the outcry was this much circulated post by a friend I deeply admire, the penal and judicial reformer Raymund Narag, who lamented that “They will join the majority. The same majority that excuses corruption as politics, power as protection, and self-interest as national interest. But what they forget is that we voted for them not to play the game. They forget that it was not just about committees, or positions, or so-called influence. It was about principle. We mourn the death of idealism in Philippine politics. But it’s a slow death. Not by assassination, not by defeat, but by compromise. And the executioners are the very people who once called themselves idealists.”

It’s a heavy to charge to lay at the feet of these two men—turncoatism, betrayal, the surrender of idealism, latent hypocrisy—and I can see where the disappointment and dismay are coming from. But with all due respect to my friend Raymund and to those who share his sentiments, I don’t see these dire reversals at all in the choices that Bam and Kiko made, but possibly an interesting and potentially significant maturing of our political culture, especially within the opposition.

It’s true that the Bam-Kiko decision came as a surprise, and that things would have been much clearer, the battle lines much more cleanly drawn, had they sat with Sen. Risa Hontiveros in a true and unflinching albeit tiny minority, duking it out with the majority at every turn, exposing wrongdoing right and left, and remaining unblemished by compromise to the end of their term. We could have remembered them for their impassioned speeches in defense of democracy and justice, tilting against the windmills of the Marcos-Duterte regime.

But I don’t think that’s all or what we elected these two senators for—or was it? As far as I can tell, we voted for them to get things done—the good, the right, and the best things—where they mattered, in their areas of expertise: Bam in education, and Kiko in agriculture. Granted, it may have been secondary to sending a message upstairs that these were the good guys, infinitely much better than the trapos being foisted on us by both the Marcos and Duterte factions, but it was their track record that gilded their credentials.

In case we’ve forgotten or weren’t listening too closely when they were campaigning, Bam Aquino authored 51 laws, including the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, the Go Negosyo Act, and the Microfinance NGOs Act. He was also behind the Masustansyang Pagkain para sa Batang Pilipino Act and the No Shortchanging Act of 2016. Kiko Pangilinan, an even more seasoned lawmaker, produced over 150 laws, including the Sagip Saka Act, the Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund Act, and the 105-Day Expanded Maternity Leave Law.

Their acceptance of the agriculture and education chairmanships should help ensure and strengthen their ability to pursue these progressive initiatives further—regardless of how they think about and vote on other issues of national consequence, such as the impeachment of VP Sara Duterte, the national budget, our foreign policy, and constitutional change. 

We have yet to see—as their critics already seem to have foretold—if they will cherish their chairmanships to the extent of abandoning their fundamental principles. Instead I foresee the greater likelihood of the reverse happening: of Bam and Kiko relinquishing their posts should their stay there prove morally untenable. If they were to perform well in their Senate positions, and they were then stripped of their chairmanships for their independent stances, then that still would be more emphatic than if they had never assumed the responsibilities that are also their entitlements, according to their competencies.

But in and of itself, joining the majority bloc—never a firm nor a politically or philosophically cohesive entity in our system of what Shakespeare called “vagabond flags”—should be less of a deal or an issue than it is being made out to be. This “majority,” in any case, seems such a ragtag band that it is almost certain to collapse before the end of the present term.

It probably says more about us as an electorate than about Bam and Kiko when we cast their decision as a “betrayal” of what they were presumably voted for. I’m no political scientist so the experts can explain this better than I can, but it seems to me that we’ve become used to seeing our legislature as a forced marriage of fundamentally incompatible forces—the ruling party (powerful but unintelligent, corrupt, opportunist, cynical, good-for-nothing) and the opposition (weak but progressive, smart, morally upright, idealistic, courageous, media-savvy, and effective). We see the Senate as an arena, a battleground (and often a circus), rather than an office where people are supposed to work, and work together (never mind that some of them are lazy and stupid), achieving results through compromise.

Bam and Kiko just need to prove themselves once more at their jobs and serve the Filipino to the best of their ability, so that when 2028 comes—and whatever their plans may be for that next milestone—they can have a good answer to the basic question that our voters have every right to ask: “So what have you done for me?” It’s a question that the elevated rhetoric of the progressive opposition has sadly often ignored and dearly paid for, almost as if it were beneath consideration. Bam and Kiko need a platform from which to connect corruption to the price of rice, to persistent flooding, to the failure of Filipino children to read at Grade 3. 

Of course, it can be said that that’s exactly what Risa Hontiveros has been doing all by her lonesome—without the benefit of patronage, and with just the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality to her name. She sponsored the passage of the Expanded Solo Parents Welfare Act, the Safe Spaces Act which protects Filipinos, especially women, from gender-based harassment in public spaces, and the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children Law.

Taking another tack but manifesting the same tenacity, Sen. Loren Legarda has survived through many administrations in all kinds of political weather, drawing criticism for that ability, but has remained steadfast in her commitment to protecting the environment, mitigating climate change, and promoting Philippine arts and culture like no other senator nor President for that matter has. 

But for what they’ve already done and could yet do, I think Bam and Kiko deserve our trust. Let’s cut them some slack and give them a chance. We pinklawans aren’t the only voters they’re answerable to.

(Photo from rappler.com)

Qwertyman No. 155: Deflections and Reflections

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 21, 2025

FAR BE it from me to serve as an apologist for the Marcoses, who can easily hire half of Makati and Ortigas, not to mention Madison Avenue, to front for them. 

But speaking as a curious citizen, I’ve been wondering about the recent rash of posts online drawing attention to the unfortunate death in the United States of a member of the Tantoco clan, reportedly from a drug overdose. 

The peg was that the ongoing investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of 110 sabungeros—which reached a climax with the explosive revelations of a whistleblower and the retrieval of possible bones from Taal Lake—was a massive ploy to deflect attention from the real issue, which was First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos‘ rumored involvement in the Tantoco case. 

That death happened in March. Contrary to allegations that it was swept under the rug, or that a media blackout was imposed by the Palace, Rappler has noted on its website that “Mainstream media outlets have reported earlier on the death of the Rustan executive, who died on March 9 at the age of 44. Examples of these news items include a March 9 Manila Bulletin article, a March 10 Philstar.com article, a March 10 GMA News Online article, a March 10 Manila Times article, a March 11 Rappler article, a March 11 ABS-CBN News article, and a March 12 Daily Tribune article.” 

So why the sudden buzz? Because a newspaper columnist known to be a Duterte trumpet very recently came out with an “exposé” claiming that, according to a report supposedly released by the Beverly Hills Police Department, First Lady Liza was among those interviewed by the police after Paolo Tantoco’s death. The BHPD subsequently declared the report to have been tampered with, pointing out that the portion implicating the First Lady had been tacked on.

But the “exposé” was touted as big news in DDS-land, proof of the veracity of which was the rattled haste with which the administration (1) trotted out a “whistleblower” in the lost sabungeros case, followed by divers dramatically fishing out sacks of bones (with the Atong Ang-Gretchen Barretto angle as a saucy aside); and (2) exhumed the long-dead issue of Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro’s Maltese passport, which he had long surrendered. A timeline put out on YouTube by a Duterte publicist “proved” that after every iteration of the “Tantoco-FL” case, a “diversion” engineered by Malacañang immediately ensued, starting with the death itself, followed by the sensational arrest of Rodrigo Duterte and his quick deportation to the Hague for trial by the ICC.

In short, a lot of labor has gone into this conspiracy theory which would have us believe that PRRD was whisked off to the Netherlands, that the lost cockfighters were suddenly found, and that Gibo Teodoro’s loyalties are questionable—just to deflect attention from the real and the most important story (since shown to be fake) that the First Lady was somehow involved in the death of a prominent Filipino family scion. It would be the cover-up of the (21st) century for Pinoys, if true—and a mountain of poop to swallow, which many of the DDS faithful apparently have no difficulty ingesting. And not just them, either—I’ve heard the “Cover-up! Cover-up!” line being echoed by some of my liberal friends.

My own pedestrian take is, so what if FL were somehow involved in the Tantoco case, nefariously or otherwise? So what if Malacañang panicked and sought to quash the news by thinking of gimmicks to overshadow it? Rodrigo Duterte still needed to be shipped off to the Hague to face justice, and he was. The missing sabungeros, more than a hundred of them, still need to be found, and they may have been. If good results come out of shady decisions, I’m thankful they did.

But let me try on that same conspiratorial hat that seems so fetching on DDS heads. It’s a loose fit on mine, but reflecting on these matters like a true conspiracist, where do you suppose all these feeds are coming from, and why? Who stands to benefit from all this disinformation, and has the wherewithal to support a network of trolls, columnists, and “political analysts” all trying to divert public attention from what should be the biggest political story of the moment—VP Sara’s impending impeachment case—to some fake cover-up? 

The Dutertes stand to benefit, of course, but the impish fictionist in me says the hand of a larger patron can’t be discounted—particularly when you factor in the Gibo subplot, which concerns a possible presidential candidate who has been very vocal in his criticism of a northern bully. (The operatives peddling the “distraction” story, not incidentally, are the same people who keep reminding us that we asked to be bullied by filing that frivolous and unfriendly suit laying claim to our own territory.)

But of course I could be overthinking, which then again becomes any aspiring and self-respecting conspiracy theorist. I’ll get the hang of it, one of these days. 

 Maybe I’ll begin with the “traitorous” tandem of Bam and Kiko—as they’re now being made out to be even by some of their staunchest supporters—signing up with the Senate majority to worm their way into DDS hearts, so maybe one of them could be Sara’s running mate in 2028 under a broad anti-Marcos alliance. Wild? Can anything run too wild in the Pinoy’s fevered political imagination?

(Image from YouTube)

Qwertyman No. 154: Politics as Melodrama

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 14, 2025

I’VE OFTEN argued that our most popular literary form isn’t lyric poetry, the short story, and certainly not the novel—it’s theater, and more specifically melodrama. Born in the West in the 18th century, melodrama weaves its spell on a suggestible audience through sensational and often ridiculous plots, exaggerated action, overblown emotion, and contrived solutions—all of which viewers happily lap up, and come back looking for more. When you think about it, it also happens to describe our politics, but more on that later.

I used to bring up melodrama when I taught playwriting and screenwriting, by way of analyzing how our Filipino sense of drama works. You don’t have to be a theater scholar or critic to observe that we Pinoys love drama, which to us really means melodrama, whether onstage, onscreen, or in real life.

Subtlety and silence have never been our strongest suit. We like to shout, to scream, to declare, to explain—and to explain some more. Take, for example, our preferred methods of murder. In Hamlet, the villainous Claudius pours poison into the king’s, his brother’s, ear. In The Seventh Seal, a knight faces Death on the chessboard. That may have been thrilling for fans of Shakespeare and Ingmar Bergman—but terribly dull and anesthetic for our kind of crowd.

No, sir, we Pinoys like our killings obvious, loud, and emphatic. Poison in the ear is for sissies. We prefer knives because they mean business, are as personal as personal can get, and they produce a lot of cinematic blood. And it’s never enough to stab someone, certainly not from behind, which would be a complete waste of dramatic possibilities. We like to announce that we’re killing someone, and to explain the reasons why: “Hudas ka, Raymundo, niyurakan mo ang karangalan ng aming angkan, kaya’t tanggapin mo ngayon ang mariing higanti ng hustisya—heto’ng sa iyo!” But of course Raymundo has to have his moment, and must raise that inevitable question: “Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?” Whereupon our hero launches into another lengthy explanation, to which Raymundo offers an impassioned rebuttal, all to no avail, as he is stabbed repeatedly to the accompaniment of further oaths and recriminations.

I used to think that this kind of talkativeness and effusive gesturing was invented by us, until I went to graduate school and realized that it was all over the place in Restoration drama, where the likes of John Dryden had his characters indulge in copious speechifying in the name of love and honor before killing everyone onstage. I suppose a similar trend seized the French and Spanish theater, and thereby later ours, in the zarzuelas, moro–moros, and komedyas that provided us with both entertainment and education. The noisiness carried over to radio, and then to our movies, which never quite shook off the “Ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?” habit. 

And this brings us to our politics, which is not only full of sound and fury, of unbridled verbosity, but of plot twists that strain credulity and yet which manage to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, either roaring in rage, applauding in delight, laughing deliriously, or weeping in sorrow, depending on their persuasions.

The Duterte Saga, our biggest ongoing drama, is now in its fourth act—the Sara impeachment—after the Uniteam victory, the fallout, and the Digong arrest and banishment. A professional scriptwriter could not have done better than giving the VP lines like Sara’s vengeful vows, as the media reported: “I have talked to a person. I said, if I get killed, go kill BBM (Marcos), (First Lady) Liza Araneta, and (Speaker) Martin Romualdez. No joke. No joke,” Duterte said in the profanity-laden briefing. “I said, do not stop until you kill them and then he said yes.” Threatened with impeachment for that statement and for corruption, she said, “I truly want a trial because I want a bloodbath.”

To the uninitiated listener, a madwoman was merely frothing at the mouth, but to the theater-goer, she’s puffing up her feathers, going larger than life, saying outrageous things to define her character and stake out her space like a Maori dancing the haka. Her adversary, PBBM, is playing cool and coy, pretending to be occupied with work and a disinterested party in Sara’s undoing. And yet he whisks off her precious papa in the night to Scheveningen, provoking even more outbursts from the DDS faithful.

Now comes the tearful part. Melodrama moves from Olympian thunder to cloying tenderness, so our next scene, naturally, has Sara’s mom Elizabeth declaring that her estranged husband has been reduced in detention to “skin and bones.” But it’s all right, she says bravely. “And how is my son, acting Mayor Baste?” the Davao City mayor-in-exile asks in a dry croak. “He’s okay, too,” Elizabeth assures him. “His vice mayor is your grandson!” So but for the absent patriarch, all’s well in Duterteland—sort of.

Melodramas love subplots, so let’s introduce one: selling the Duterte house. Common-law wife Honeylet puts up a sign announcing the place for sale (“It’s too painful to sleep there all by myself,” she claims), but son Baste reportedly has the sign removed. Not so fast, VP Sara chimes in; Honeylet could sell her half of it but not her dad’s. Besides, where would Digong live when he returns from the Hague, if Honeylet sold the house? (Cue for hopeful, uplifting music, which tapers off into a melancholic minor key.) “Perhaps he could live with Mama Elizabeth again,” Sara muses. 

Ah, such poignant moments. No one’s been stabbed yet—expect a lot of that to happen, metaphorically, if and when the Senate finds its balls and starts the impeachment trial of VP Sara. What’s theater without traitors? Sen. Migz Zubiri has already thrown down the gauntlet by declaring the trial “a witch-hunt.” But Senator Migz, ano’ng ibig mong sabihin?

Penman No. 475: True Confessions

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Penman for Sunday, July 13, 2025

AS A collector (make that a scavenger) of old books, manuscripts, and what the market generally calls “ephemera,” I inevitably come across material neither written by nor meant for kings and presidents, but rather pedestrians like myself with things to say, perhaps secrets to whisper, likely to no one but to God and posterity.

I’m talking about diaries and journals, which people of my generation used to do (and millennials are back to doing). Worse than a pack rat, I hoard other people’s memories, some in diaries that would make people turn in their graves to know I had. I come across these often as discards or stray items among people selling and buying old books, but I find them equally if not even more fascinating than published (and therefore sanitized) material.

Back then, before computers and digital journals, New Year began with the purchase of a new diary, its pristine pages waiting to be filled with birthdays, appointments, expenses—and more interestingly, interjections of love, pain, joy, and grief, life’s highest and lowest moments. 

I myself kept diaries at one time, although the entries tended to peter out around March or April, when fatigue got the better of my enthusiasm. My most interesting one has to be my martial-law diary, which I rather presumptuously began as soon as I was thrown in prison at Fort Bonifacio; I say “presumptuously” because, at seventeen, I entertained the precious thought that somehow, someday, my juvenile musings would be worth something to someone other than my mother (I had yet to find a wife then). 

When the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci languished in a Fascist jail in the late 1920s, presumably between a meager breakfast and gazing out into the starless night, he penned lines like “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” He developed his theory of hegemony and held forth on the role of intellectuals in social change, published in his seminal Prison Notebooks.

My own teenage memoirs have survived, but instead of writing about the dominance of the ruling class or about harrowing details of torture and misery—which did happen to others—I chronicled the visits of the pretty young psychologists assigned by the military to interview us; of course we assumed they were spies, but that didn’t stop us from chatting with (more like staring at) them across a table that felt much too wide.

Indeed, for most of us more interested in the personal than the political (although arguably one will always be the other), the value of diaries lies in their true confessions, in their promise of intimacy and insight—along with, let’s admit it, the wicked thrill of voyeurism.

Among the most poignant of my inadvertent discoveries has been the diary—really more a scrapbook—of a once-famous and gifted writer (whose name I’ll leave out for now as he still has family around) who was imprisoned after the War for his stridently pro-Japanese sentiments and actions. In three languages, both typewritten and handwritten, he acknowledges receipt of his beloved’s supplemental rations—beef, fish, fruits, and coffee—but no letter yet again. “Nang buksan ko kagabi ang bayong, hanap ako nang hanap…. Na naman? Wala? Namanglaw ako nang lubos. Di yata at wala ka na naming panahon.” How many times do I have to tell you, he goes on to lament, that even for important to me than sustenance for my body is sustenance for my spirit?

I once came across a whole sheaf of journals in a ditch in front of our house, which I was inspecting because it had gotten clogged with what turned out to be a plastic bag full of papers. It had been carelessly thrown there by the home’s previous occupants or whoever cleaned it out—we had just moved in. They turned out to be the personal papers of a renowned UP professor, and as guilty as I felt about peeking into her life, I read a few pages, in which she confessed her admiration for a certain man (she lived and died a spinster)—only to remind herself, with what I could almost hear was a deep sigh of regret, that she considered herself wedded to God. I read no further, and decided to turn the papers over to a friend, a former and beloved student of hers who was the closest thing to a son.

Most recently, some diaries from the late 1930s and 1940s came to me along with a medical book, and they contain nothing so revelatory, but the details of everyday life a,re always engrossing. They obviously belonged to a doctor—perhaps more than one—and while they contain medical marginalia they also carry legal notes, so the owner must have been studying to be a medico-legal person. Rather moving is the narrative in one diary of bringing a very sick mother to the hospital; I flipped a few pages and the inevitable entry appeared: “Mother died.” And there lay the stark helplessness of a doctor who could not save his own mother.

For many years now, the writer and presidential historian Manolo Quezon has been on top of an important enterprise called the Philippine Diary Project, a digitized compilation of diaries and memoirs from such notables as Jose Rizal, Ferdinand E. Marcos, Dean Worcester, and Emilio Aguinaldo all the way to the murdered activist Ericson Acosta (clearly more women need to be added to the roster).

“To me there are two holy grails,” Manolo told me. “The first is the diary of Gregorio H. Del Pilar. The diary of the American officer who led the expedition that killed him, Frederick Funston, exists but has yet to be transcribed. It was he, by all accounts, who pocketed del Pilar’s pocket diary; perhaps his papers will reveal them after a thorough search. The other is the diary of Benigno S. Aquino, Sr. The late Benito Legarda, Jr. told me that it was shown to him by one of the sisters of Ninoy, and that, in Spanish, it began, “I have been summoned to a meeting in Malacañan by the commanding general of the Japanese Military Administration…” The thing is, the last sister who had it, lost her memory and her children have not found the diary since.”

He adds that “A large portion of the Marcos diary is missing and anecdotally is said to be in the possession of a former member of his administration. For me though, what I’m seeking are diaries by Filipinos. Our own voices are woefully underrepresented. I think many were lost in Ondoy, many others have been thrown away, still more exist, but families are afraid people will take offense and so prefer to keep them secret.”

What I find from my own small collection is that whether they wrote in English or Tagalog, or used fountain pens or typewriters, our forebears recorded the smallest details such as “Auto repair 15.00” and “Won jai-alai 5-3 event.” Today we do all that with digital ink. I wonder what some digital pack rat will be remarking about us 50 years hence.

Qwertyman No. 153: Our Literary Fathers

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 7, 2025

THE RECENT announcement of the impending sale of the Solidaridad bookshop in Ermita owned and run by the family of the late National Artist F. Sionil Jose understandably triggered a wave of nostalgia for the place, the old man, his dear wife Tessie, and for a bygone era when people strolled into book stores over their lunch break or after work to browse and pick up an Updike, a Le Guin, or a Garcia Marquez—and, of course, a Sionil Jose, and get it signed by the man himself if he was luckily around. Five decades ago, as a writer for the National Economic and Development Authority just a couple of blocks away on the same street, that browser would have been me, for whom Solidaridad and the equally legendary Erehwon nearby were a godsend, an unlisted perk. 

Indeed Solidaridad and FSJ (or Manong Frankie, as we his juniors called him) were inseparably conjoined in the public’s imagination of a man who was not only our most productive and best-known novelist but also an indefatigable purveyor of great literature and critical if occasionally controversial thinking, through his journal Solidarity and his long-running column “Hindsight,” this very space I was honored to have inherited.

Like many others—even those with whom he had quarreled fiercely—I was deeply saddened when Manong Frankie passed away three years ago. It was particularly bittersweet for me because we had become quite close in his last years, after having been somewhat estranged for the longest time. 

He had taken me under his wing on a writers’ conference in Bali in 1983, in a group of young, aspiring writers finding their way in a broadening literary world. But shortly after, in an interview with National Public Radio in America where I had gone to study, I offered my rather injudicious opinion of his prose—not mine alone—which he must have gotten wind of and found disparaging, because he gave me the cold shoulder afterwards. Like other younger writers, I would bristle at his hectoring moods—which I would better understand as I myself got older—during which he lamented the seeming alienation of the Filipino writer from his or her own social and political reality. 

It was a concern we happened to share, and he began to know and appreciate me as someone who eschewed academic snobbery as much as he did, having transitioned to fiction from a background in journalism rather than the writers’ workshop system that he was deeply dubious of. In other words, we had more in common than each of us thought, and our work in the Akademyang Filipino brought us closer together. At one time I gifted him with the very first issue of Solidarity—Vol. I, No. 1—which I had found, and which he had not seen for ages; he was happy. After my speech at the Palancas in 2017, he came up to shake my hand.

Ironically, this happened at a time when FSJ, ever strongly opinionated, turned off many of his readers with his pro-Duterte sentiments, his putdowns of Nobel prizewinner Maria Ressa and others he thought undeserving of their fame, and his acerbic loathing of certain families he considered oligarchs despite their long having been supplanted by new and far more ravenous overlords. I did not share these views, and he knew that, but I think we had quietly decided that our friendship was more important than our politics. Shortly before he died, he sent me a brief letter that will be a cherished secret to keep until I myself pass on.

I didn’t learn writing from Manong Frankie; rather, I observed and admired his persistence and perseverance, literally writing to the last on what turned out to be his deathbed. I enjoyed his stories more than his novels, but in the end my own preferences don’t matter. He left a sprawling, robust, and indelible body of work that for many readers here and overseas will define Philippine literature in English for the latter 20th century. He led what our mutual friend the novelist Charlson Ong called “a well-managed life,” building a legacy partly through Solidaridad, Solidarity, and Philippine PEN which he led for a long time, apart of course from his work, and making sure he was heard when he spoke. 

His passing reminded me of the other members of his generation—his seniors and juniors by a decade or so—whom my generation in turn looked up to and at the same time, in that perpetual cycle of revolt and renewal, sought to depose. Nick Joaquin we adored as much for his prose as for his prodigious drinking (and seriously, for putting as much of his heart and craft into his journalism as into his fiction). NVM Gonzalez, who happened to have been born in Romblon (and not in Mindoro as many think) several kilometers away and forty years ahead of me, had that common touch many citified writers lost. Edilberto Tiempo I owe for urging me to return to school and devote my life to studying and writing rather than to bureaucratic servitude. 

Bienvenido Santos, twinkly-eyed and gently smiling, was my favorite of them all in terms of the quietude but also the emotional resonance of his stories, so graceful and yet so powerful. If I were to think of a literary father, it would have been Franz Arcellana, whose work may have been so vastly different from mine and yet, as my mentor in school, was the one I sought to please, slipping my story drafts under his office door and praying for his approval. Gregorio Brillantes, the youngest of them and perhaps more properly belonging to the next generation along with Gemino Abad, has been my writing hero for his superlative technique and unfailing sense of character. All these men (and women as well, for whom a separate story should be told) have taught me and my peers much, not just about the craft of writing but just as importantly the writing life, this vocation of books and words we have ddevote ourselves to for the bliss and yet also often the anguish of finding meaning in life through language.

Manong Frankie has passed on and soon so will his fabled bookshop, but his words, as well as ours, now have a life of their own.

Qwertyman No. 152: A Probinsyana from Paoay

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 30, 2025

IT WON’T officially be out for another couple of weeks, but I’m happy to announce the publication of my latest book, the biography of one of the Philippine judiciary’s most fearless and remarkable women, former Supreme Court Justice and Ombudsman Conchita Carpio Morales. Begun during the pandemic, Neither Fear Nor Favor: The Life and Legacy of Conchita Carpio Morales (Milflores, 2025) traces the journey of a probinsyanafrom Paoay, Ilocos Norte to the country’s highest court, followed by an even more distinguished period of service as “the people’s agent” at the Office of the Ombudsman.

I’ve written a number of biographies of outstanding Filipinos before—among them the accounting titan Washington SyCip, former UP and Senate President Edgardo Angara, and the renowned economist Leonides Virata, as well as the revolutionary Lava brothers—but this was different in many ways. 

Foremostly, it was because my subject was a woman working her way up a heavily male-dominated system, constantly challenged to adhere to her fundamental values and principles in an environment of corruption, intimidation, and political accommodation.  For the men—given that they had the talent and the grit, and possibly the right connections—success was practically a given; for such women as Conchita, proving oneself worthy was often doubly difficult.

Since the Supreme Court of the Philippines was established in 1901, almost 200 justices have been appointed to that exalted bench; only 18 have been women as of 2023, and it wasn’t until 1973 that the first female justice, Cecilia Muñoz Palma, took office. After Morales was appointed to the SC by President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo in 2002, among the first cases to fall on her lap was the impeachment of no less than Chief Justice Hilario Davide, brought on by pro-Estrada congressmen who believed Davide had misused the Judiciary Development Fund. A fellow Justice approached the novice to ask her pointblank, “Chit, do you think you can handle this?” Inhibiting herself from the case would have been the prudent option, but she took it on, and wrote the decision disposing of the complaint.

She would soon be known for her fierce independence. Despite death threats—a grenade was once left outside her Muntinlupa home, along with a threatening message—she worshiped no sacred cows, spared no one from judicial scrutiny when the situation demanded. This was even much clearer when she retired from the Supreme Court and was appointed Ombudsman, in charge of investigating and prosecuting high-profile cases of graft and corruption in government. Among the cases that crossed her desk were those against PGMA, President Noynoy Aquino, former Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, and former Vice President Jejomar Binay.

While most of a Justice’s or Ombudsman’s work is done quietly, away from public view, occasionally they come into the limelight even against their wishes because of our fraught political environment where issues often end up in court. One such case was the 2011 impeachment of Chief Justice Renato Corona, a highly significant and contentious case that centered on serious allegations of corruption and betrayal of public trust. 

Then the Ombudsman, Morales engaged a former Supreme Court colleague, Serafin Cuevas, in what came to be known as the “battle of retired justices. “I had been summoned as a hostile witness by the defense,” Conchita recalls. “I sensed that the defense wanted to embarrass and humiliate me even. They thought that my alleged opinion that Corona had millions of dollars in undeclared deposits had been based on the three complaints filed before the Office of the Ombudsman. But it was the Anti-Money Laundering Council that had furnished me with the CJ’s record of bank transactions. I had requested their assistance as reported by the media even before I was summoned to testify. The three complaints filed at the OMB never mentioned any dollar deposits. If the defense counsels had been insightful enough, they should have figured that out.” Corona was eventually impeached on a vote of 20-3.

Her confrontations with former President Rodrigo Duterte—a distant relative, through the marriage of her nephew Manases Carpio to presidential daughter Sara—were also the stuff of theater. At the 2016 wedding of Manases’ brother Waldo, the President and the Ombudsman walked down the aisle together arm in arm—he in a cream barong and she in a bottle-green gown—and appeared friendly, making small talk. The cordiality would not last long.

One year later, in October 2017, President Duterte challenged Conchita to resign as Ombudsman, claiming that she had exercised “selective justice” in asking her deputy, Arthur Carandang, to investigate his unexplained wealth. Duterte suspended Carandang, and threatened to impeach Conchita. “Resign now,” he told Morales, “at kung hindi, huhubaran kita!” The last line—which literally translates into “or else I’ll strip you naked”—was egregiously coarse, but came as no surprise to audiences familiar by this time with Duterte’s tough-guy and often misogynistic language.

Morales promptly hit back, vowing not to be intimidated. “If the President has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear,” she coolly told a press conference.

What most people never saw was Conchita’s lighter side. The first time she went to Broadway in 1981, she watched Evita with her sister Vicky. Before watching, they had dinner at Gallagher’s, where the size of the steaks made Conchita’s eyes pop. She couldn’t finish her portion and, ever the Ilocana, wanted to have it wrapped to take home. Her sister told her not to do that, so Conchita went to the ladies’ room, got some tissue paper, and wrapped the steak. The following day, they went to Washington, where they went to dinner and had shrimp cocktail. Conchita then took out the previous day’s steak to the shock of Vicky, who said, “Don’t bring that out. Don’t embarrass me!” The steak ended up in the wastebasket. 

Lawyer Ephyro Amatong and others who trained with her were privy to Conchita’s moods and modes. “When she was in her ‘Justice’ mode, she was very strict, very sharp, very hard to read, with an incredible poker face. I knew lawyers like the co-head of litigation at a big firm who thought that she was scary,” Eph says. “But while she could be reserved, she could also be very charming and accommodating. She had a great sense of humor. I remember when she had to attend an en banc meeting or when she had a ponencia for deliberation, just before she went out the door, she might be laughing or making jokes about the grilling she might get, or mention what she was wearing and how fashionable she was. But once the door opened and once she stepped out, her ‘Justice’ face came on, ready for battle.”

You can read more about this feisty Filipina, the Ramon Magsaysay awardee for public service in 2016, in the book. Neither Fear Nor Favor: The Life and Legacy of Conchita Carpio Morales will be available on Shopee and Lazada or from milflorespublishing.com very soon.

Qwertyman No. 151: For Don, a Meditation

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 23, 2025

(Photo of Los Cabos by Kurt Nichols)

I WAS looking for a topic for this column last week when it occurred to me that I had been staring it in the face, in the news and in the Facebook feed that, like for many, my days begin and end with. It was the omnipresence of death, in its many forms and guises, swift and slow, painless and agonizing, arriving on whispery feet and crashing through one’s roof or window. 

“A screaming comes across the sky,” the line with which Thomas Pynchon famously begins his novel Gravity’s Rainbow, was how death and destruction came last week to hundreds in Kiev, Tehran, and Tel Aviv, in missiles and drones designed and manufactured for but one purpose: to deliver death by inexact algorithm to place-names plotted on digital maps. 

In India we marveled at the horror and the mystery of one survivor escaping a catastrophic plane crash barely a minute after take-off: a moment when most of us would have just begun to fidget with the entertainment controls, wondering whether to take in a comedy or a thriller for the next two hours and what the meal choices will be. 

In Minnesota, a MAGA gunman stalked Democratic lawmakers and their families, shooting four and killing two on a long list of intended targets—murders that a Republican senator reflexively attributed to “Marxists not getting what they want.”

Most appalling was the report of Israeli tanks firing into a crowd of Palestinians lining up for food in Gaza, an incident that led to about 60 deaths and more than 200 wounded, for which the Israelis apologized with this statement: “The IDF regrets any harm to uninvolved individuals and operates to minimize harm as much as possible to them while maintaining the safety of our troops.”

As if the news isn’t enough, every time we scroll through our social media accounts, more deaths emerge, in the now-familiar solitary-candle meme and in the garlanded portraits of the recently departed. Facebook has become our new obituary page, our book of condolences, our virtual wake. The friend or the kinsman in us takes the loss with the requisite pain and grief; the enemy with muttered thankfulness, or more rarely forgiveness; the human with relief, that we are reading and not being read about.

Death in the news is meant to outrage us, and it still does, at least for a while, especially senseless and preventable death, willful murder, and patent genocide. But sadly we can only take so much, even with the keenest of consciences; there is something in our brains, a control or shut-off valve, that says “Enough” and leads us back into the immediate and comprehensible present, back to chocolate cupcakes, Torx screwdrivers, tomorrow’s court hearing, and Lola’s birthday. This, we remind ourselves, is life, the only one we have, our chief responsibility above all others to live and to give meaning to. 

We try to make sense of death as much as we do of life, and for those of us of a certain age, that means the acceptance of its inevitability. I suspect that those of my generation who came of age under martial law and fought it, who saw dozens of our comrades die, can do that with more equanimity than most, never having expected to live beyond twenty-five; every year and decade since has been a grace note, a blessing we have been careful not to waste. We are lucky to have come this far, and can leave without regret.

The Buddhists have what they call maranasati, the practice (says Google, meat-eating me being decidedly non-tantric) of contemplating one’s own mortality to cultivate mindfulness, reduce fear of death, and appreciate the present moment. The practical Swedes have döstädning, celebrated in The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: How to Free Yourself and Your Family from a Lifetime of Clutter by Margareta Magnusson, a Nordic Marie Kondo who advises us to downsize and clean up our mess before we croak to save some grumpy nephew the trouble of sorting out which things go to the trash and which go to the resale shop. 

Speaking of which, my devotion to Japan-surplus stores and their wonderful bargains is tempered by the knowledge that most of these items were likely made available by the peculiarly Japanese practices of hikikomori, or withdrawing from society and living alone, and the even sadder kodokushi or “lonely death,” where the bodies and belongings of the forgotten might be found days after their passing. But then, as a collector of vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books, I am well aware that these precious objects have passed through many lives and survived their owners, and will certainly survive me, which is strangely reassuring. They offer proof of an afterlife—maybe not paradise, but the life of the people and things you leave behind.

In a way, death’s predictability (or the illusion thereof) is comforting, because we think we can therefore prepare for it, as for the coming of a friend who will lead us away by the hand, down to the smallest detail. Despite her surprisingly good health, my 97-year-old mother has written out her DNR instructions, and a year ago we made a light-hearted trip to the mall to pick out her funeral dress, in a deep, pacific blue. Well before my father died of an aneurysm almost thirty years ago—he was a chain-smoker and a candidate for early passage—I had written out a scene in my first novel where the protagonist comes home to his father’s wake, which was my way, the privilege of imaginative writers, of cushioning the real pain when it struck; when it did, I still wept like my father’s child.

I’m writing this because I’m actually not very good at dealing with death and processing grief, as detached or as flippant as I may sound about it. I avoid or don’t stay long at the wakes of friends because I tend to say the lamest things. 

Last week I lost good friend—a high-school classmate named Don Rodis, brother to lawyer Rodel and producer Girlie, whom more people know—our Philippine Science High School batch’s livewire and indefatigably perfect host, to those visiting him in San Francisco. On vacation with his family in Los Cabos in Mexico, Don was strolling on the beach when a rogue wave known by the locals as the mar de fondo caught and swept him out to sea. Despite a massive search, his body has yet to be found. We are all stunned and awash with grief, but what struck me was how pretty that beach was from all the pictures, how blue and inviting its waters. And now I’ll say a stupid thing, for Don: rather than dying from a rocket to your head, or rotting from within, or freezing alone in Yamagata, sometimes we die in beauty’s arms. 

(Don Rodis, 1954-2025, with his wife Jocelyn)

Qwertyman No. 150: Let the Curtains Rise

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Qwertyman for June 16, 2025

UNLIKE MANY newspaper columnists, I don’t have much of a political or business network, being a not-very-sociable recluse who prefers to play poker with a few regulars and going out on dinner dates with the wife than to clink glasses with the cognoscenti. 

But every now and then I get a seat at the table with people who seem to truly know what is going on—political operatives and operators with the inside track on where people really stand and who’s in bed with whom, and bankers who find themselves serving as confessors to clients pouring out their tales of woe (e.g., the going rate of commissions on government contracts). 

As the fly on the wall with little to contribute but my amazement and credulity, I leave such meetings often profoundly depressed but also grateful to be more of a fictionist than a journalist, a writer who fancies the eternal verities of life instead of someone who has to gulp and swallow the unreportable.

Last week, I sat down to one of these powwows with a group of eminently connected friends whose identities shall go unmentioned, and the talk of course quickly went to VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment, and to the twists and turns the process has taken from the House to the Senate and back to the House again. The consensus among these pundits—who all come from different political persuasions—was that (1) Sara was guilty as hell of something or other; (2) but the trial wouldn’t take place; and (3) even if it did, she would surely get off the hook. 

The reasoning was that, as the last elections showed, the Dutertes were still surprisingly strong, and that the old man Digong’s banishment to the ICC only galvanized his base; therefore, Sara remained a viable candidate for 2028 (barring her impeachment and perpetual disqualification). If the administration slate had done better and had a lock on the numbers, that impeachment and Sara’s future would have been moot. 

But with the tide seemingly shifting Sara’s way—remember, she doesn’t need as many senators to acquit her as those required to convict her—then it may prove opportune for some senators to straddle the fence under cover of impartiality and assure their political future under Duterte 2.0 by at least keeping the door open for the lady. A more impish conjecture had it that this “remand” maneuver—which seems to have taken everyone by surprise except its chief instigator—provides an interlude during which certain crucial negotiations can take place. “It always comes down to money,” concluded one of our cohort. It was in everyone’s best interest not to have a trial, said another, because it would open a Pandora’s box of embarrassing revelations that would make Sara’s alleged transgressions look as petty as, well, Piattos.

Finally, the little Quixote in me had to speak up, and all I could say was, “If there’s no trial, there’ll be big trouble.” Feeling a bit bolder, I added, “And it’s not even just about winning, but holding people accountable—not just Sara but the senators as well.” Cynicism, I thought, was the real enemy in matters like these; we can’t let ourselves be paralyzed by cold reality, and it’s surprising what a little hope and even folly can do to change that reality.

Exactly what I had in mind when I said “big trouble,” I have to admit I wasn’t too sure of. I know people have been talking about an “Edsa IV” (let’s put that in Roman numerals to make it look more historic). But while I like the sound of it and would probably join the angry mob marching to the Senate to the beat of “Do You Hear the People Sing,” there’s an inherent problem or two with this “Edsa IV” scenario. 

Edsas are usually aimed at shaming and shooing someone out of office, but who would we be up against this time? Certainly not BBM (about whom more, later), who’s been enjoying a free ride on the center-left’s campaign against the Dutertes. VP Sara? She’s beyond shame and will never quit. SP Chiz Escudero? It would flatter him too much to be rallied against; besides, if you counted all the needles already being stuck into his homunculus by the enraged public, he’d look like a porcupine. Also, Edsas work when they reach a turning point, like when the Army decides to go south when they’re being ordered north; no such tactical possibilities here.

So it looks like we’re going to be stuck with the notion of a trial, which I believe will happen despite all the noises to the contrary because—take note I said this—we Pinoys can’t resist putting on and watching a good show and this impeachment promises to be a blockbuster of a melodrama. One way of framing it would be to present a beleaguered princess on the dock, invoking an exiled father and suffering the wrath of a cousin who usurped the throne; or, a comely damsel is revealed to be a hissing and slithering snake-witch when sprayed with the Holy Water of Truth by the village elders. There will be ample opportunity for all players to emerge as heroes or villains in this unfolding narrative.

And then there’s BBM, whose coy “hands-off” pronouncements no one at our table would take at face value. Even as I fought off cynicism, I reminded myself how we fictionists and dramatists sometimes have to be even more cynical than the most hard-bitten journalist to do our work well. We work with human nature—not with data, like good social scientists do, which is also how and why we can make people cry and laugh like the best scholars can’t. We have to see both the best and the worst in our characters to understand them thoroughly. “Ask yourself,” I often tell my writing students, “what does your character most strongly desire? What can he or she least afford to lose? In their moments of direst need, what do they pray for? If you can answer that, then you know who they are.”

So I asked myself: what does BBM want? To survive and prosper, of course—and then again, whether he’ll admit it or not, as a character in a play, he will want redemption, if not for the family name then for himself, to be a Marcos and yet be his own man. What does Sara want? Survival as well, of course, and exoneration—and beyond that, as she has made abundantly plain, revenge for betrayal and willful injury. 

I may not know that much about politics or business, but this has moved to the realm of theater. Mark my words, those curtains will be rising soon.

(Photo by Ted Aljibe/AFP)