Qwertyman No. 73: Nurse and Patient Both

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 25, 2023

(Today I’m offering, as I customarily do, a Christmas story, albeit one in rather unusual circumstances, to provoke us into reflecting on what Christmas should mean.)

NURSE NESTOR couldn’t recall how many times he had performed this procedure—thousands, for sure, in the ten years he had been with the hospital—and he had to acknowledge that it did get easier with practice to the point that he could lecture newbies on the proper way of doing things, such as changing diapers based not on their availability but on the patient’s needs, to avoid prolonged wetness leading to contact dermatitis.

He had become largely inured to the smell of urine and excrement, and all the other effusions sick bodies produced. Some other nurses and doctors dealt with that by employing exotic methods like putting coffee grounds or some other odor absorber in the room or applying lavender oil under their noses, but double-masking was enough for him, until he understood that some smells were simply too powerful to be suppressed, and that a philosophical kind of acceptance was the only real way of surviving along with one’s patients. Soon he reveled in being able to undertake the toughest assignments, such as the aging movie star who refused to let people know that he had had a colostomy, even when the hole in his belly began to leak. They had chatted about his biggest hits as Nestor irrigated the stoma, flushing out the detritus, until the man was in tears, but not over the pain of the process. 

It would have been easy to say that Nestor was now on duty in the ICU because of his proven expertise, and that he could be proud of having been selected for this shift on Christmas Eve, but he knew none of it was true. He was there because everyone else had a family to hurry home to, and he did not. He lived in a rented room in San Marcelino, a short jeepney ride away from the hospital, and took his meals in a nearby restaurant that toted up his bills at the end of the month; he did not even need to tell them what he wanted for breakfast. They would be closed on Christmas morning, so he would have to reach into his cupboard for some noodles or sardines.

It would have been different if Celeste hadn’t gone off with that anesthesiologist in his Miata, just because Nestor was on overtime when she needed a ride home. They used to wait for each other in the cafeteria, watching YouTube videos or making silly Facebook posts. Months afterward, when her blistering affair with the doctor was over and he saw her in her old chair fiddling with her phone, he would have swallowed his pride and swept her back into his arms, but she looked away and he had to pretend to be interested in the lunch menu.

Nestor knew the minute he saw the boy—because that was just what he was, a boy in a tall man’s frame—that he was trouble. Half his head was swathed in bandages and a leg was encased in plaster, like he had stepped out of a Mr. Bean comedy with something explosively hilarious about to happen, but the boy stared at him with a vehemence Nestor did not think possible out of one good eye. Nestor read his chart and saw that Patient Philip V. had been involved in a car crash the day before and had broken some bones, but nothing too seriously; he was going to live. He had not been drinking, which was unusual. Nestor could see that Philip had wetted himself, which was also unusual, as most patients had a hard time pissing after surgery, for a variety of reasons. He wondered why Philip had not been catheterized—possibly the Christmas rush? 

“I’m wet,” said the boy in an angry slur. 

“I know,” said Nestor, lifting up the patient’s gown to verify what he could sniff. It was nothing.

“I’ve been buzzing you—someone, anyone—for minutes. Where the hell is everybody?”

“It’s Christmas. People go home. People stay home. What happened to you?” Nestor began putting on his gloves.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m cleaning you up. If you don’t mind, I’m going to wipe you front to back to minimize infection, examine you for rashes. Then I’ll put a diaper on you, unless you want a catheter—you know, a tube I’ll stick into you—”

“I know what a catheter is. I have a master’s degree, in something no one cares about. I look too young, right? People always tell me I’m too young for this and that.”

Nestor looked at the boy and the hollows of his cheeks, the pale skin that bruised too easily, the slender bones that spoke of homes with swimming pools and SUVs in the garage and colognes in the bathroom. He remembered Celeste’s beau, a mestizo Chinese who wasn’t even handsome but who, Celeste said, could play the piano. He saw the boy’s limp privates and wondered what damage they had done, and felt a welling contempt. He wanted to pull the sheet out from under Philip as roughly as he could and shove him against the bed’s railing until he screamed.

“Hey, you look annoyed,” said Philip. “I know what you’re thinking. It’s Christmas and you’re stuck here with me and my—whatever. Go ahead, take it out on me. Hurt me. I never asked for this,” he said, gesturing at the straps and tubes he was attached to.

“Shut up and let me work.” Outside the ICU he could hear the patter of feet and the squeak of a gurney being rolled down the corridor, at the end of which a string of colored lights blinked around the swing doors, surrounded by foamy patches of fake snow.

“How much worse can it get? My parents are flying in tomorrow and will pull me out of this, like they always do—” He felt Nestor grab his leg. “You can’t hurt me even if you wanted to. I tried to kill myself, did they tell you that? I crashed my car into a post, but—the post was lousy and gave way. Whoever built that made some money.” He let out a dry chuckle.

Nestor stopped, holding an immaculate diaper between his hands. “No. Why would you do that?”

“Because they wanted to keep me away—from—from Timmy. They didn’t need to. Timmy’s gone. He left ahead of me, a week ago. He was better at it than I was.”

There were ways, Nurse Nestor had sometimes thought, that patients falling under “Code Gray”—unruly, irrational, and combative persons—could be brought to heel, or even privately punished. Caregivers needed that certain leeway—a pinch here, a pull there—to express and to expel their innermost emotions. He looked at Philip, suddenly smaller and meeker in his hospital gown. He resolved to show him how an adult diaper could be put on with the least discomfort, to nurse and patient both.

Qwertyman No. 72: Bullets to Ballads

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023

MAYBE IT’S that time of year, when we get all wishful and start asking for things that will likely never come or never happen—like peace on earth and goodwill to men—but it’s the wishing that keeps us human.

Two weekends ago, I had the extraordinary privilege of spending Saturday night and then Sunday morning listening to two different concerts. The first, at Manila Pianos in Magallanes, featured tenor Arthur Espiritu and soprano Stefanie Quintin Avila in a program that brought the audience to its feet and singing along at the end of many encores.

After that wonderful performance, I messaged my deepest thanks to concert producers Pablo Tariman and Joseph Uy, noting that they made “magical interludes like this possible in these stress-filled times. If only all those bombs and bullets in Ukraine and Gaza were music. Fire symphonies, concertos, fugues, and cantatas across the border!”

The next morning, we drove out to Batangas City for another friend’s birthday celebration, which was heralded by a sparkling mini-concert with soprano Rachelle Gerodias and tenor Jonathan Abdon. At lunch that followed, I sat down at a table with a renowned journalist, a composer-performer, and a senator, and we were all breathless with joy at the music we had just experienced. It was the composer who put it best: “How can anyone argue with that?”

Indeed, in a world and at a time prone to argument and conflict, where even the most innocuous remark can ignite scorching disputation, the enjoyment of music seems to serve as a universal balm, a hushing power that creates a pause just long enough for us to remember our better selves—taming fangs, retracting claws, infusing tenderness into the coarsest of sensibilities. As William Congreve put it more than three hundred years ago, “Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast” (not “beast” as it’s often misquoted, although it could apply just as well).

As I’ve noted elsewhere, whenever I think of music as a discipline, what comes to mind is Leonard Bernstein’s description of it as “the only art incapable of malice.” That may or may not be true—music in specific historical contexts such as Nazi Germany and our own martial law has certainly been made to serve the purposes of despotism. 

I recall that in 1980, in particularly disturbing example of music perverted for fascist pleasure, a film titled “Playing for Time” (written by Arthur Miller as an adaptation of the French Jewish singer-pianist Fiana Fenelon’s autobiography The Musicians of Auschwitz) showed how concentration-camp musicians were forced to play to entertain their jailers as well as to stay alive. It still chills me to the bone, as a prisoner under martial law, to hear the New Society anthem “May Bagong Silang” being played anew over the radio as though the past half century never happened.

Still, most people will surely agree that music has wielded a beneficent influence on human life and society, in ways that appeal directly to the heart and mind. 

In my own lectures, whenever I need to reach for metaphorical illustrations of the power of art to compel the human spirit, I turn to music. I advert to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance, and to the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945 (supposedly you can hear artillery in the background of that recording). 

It may be too romantic to hope that music will waft over the bunkers in Ukraine and Gaza this Christmas season and still the gunfire, however briefly. We’ve all seen that movie and know how it ends, with a renewed barrage of rockets—ordered by stiff-backed men far away from the trenches—drowning out the carols.

But there are other battles being waged much closer to us this season where a little night music might help quell the temptation to savage one another—even across the dinner table. 

I can imagine how many Christmas parties will settle down to drinks and coffee and devolve into a discussion of the Israel-Hamas conflict, and explode quickly into partisan debate over proportionality, Biblical prophecy, Hiroshima, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Zionism, British colonialism, Arab nationalism, Munich, Entebbe, Eichmann, George Soros, anti-Semitism, Netanyahu, 9/11, and the Yom Kippur War (have I missed anything?). Half the world away from the frontlines, I haven’t seen an issue divide Filipinos—at least those who keep abreast of the news—so sharply as this one, which has become a kind of litmus test of one’s faith or humanity.

Much of that acrimony has, of course, been enabled by the Internet and the ease it provides for instant (often unthought) response—a habit we’ve ported over, perhaps unconsciously, into our daily lives.

Against this backdrop, music is a call to order, a shaping of emotions across a roomful of rampant urges, longings, and resentments. We can choose but not control it; the best response to music is one of sublime submission, from which experience we emerge refreshed and ready to be human again. 

A meaningful and peaceful Christmas to us all!

(Image from economist.com)

Qwertyman No. 71: A Breakthrough for Peace

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 11, 2023

I HONESTLY didn’t know what to feel when I first read the news that a breakthrough appears imminent in peace negotiations between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front (and behind it, the Communist Party of the Philippines), whose soldiers and partisans have been at war with each other for over half a century, in one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies.

As a student activist who fought martial law and got imprisoned for it at age 18, I didn’t expect to live past 25 because so many of my friends and comrades were giving up their lives around me in the name of freedom and justice. Instead, in a Forrest-Gumpish turn of events, I survived and even prospered for another 50 years. As I wrote in my introduction to the book SERVE (Ateneo Press, 2023), co-written with 19 other fellow stragglers from what we called the First Quarter Storm, “We celebrated our seniorhood as the ultimate victory” even as “the experience of martial law coded itself into our DNA.” That victory, of course, is a shallow one, considering that the causes we fought for remain as valid and as urgent today, and that the social cancer we sought to excise “had never left, was always there, lying cruelly in wait for a chance to ravage us again—and not only us this time, but our children and grandchildren as well.”

My reaction to the peace talks—and I would guess that of many of my peers as well—was one of joy and relief, but inevitably compounded by some doubt and apprehension. All of these responses, however disparate, have their reasons.

The joy and relief must be paramount because, however we look at it and whatever arguments may be presented by either side, the armed conflict has gone on too long, without truly positive and strategic gains to show for five decades of warfare, at the cost of innumerable lives and massive drains on our resources. This is not to say that those lives were wasted nor that everyone’s goals have been met, but that surely there must be a better way—a more humane and effective way—to resolve our differences and move forward together without having to kill yet another cadre or yet another soldier, both of them probably just farm boys looking to improve their lives. 

Ultimately and simply, it didn’t work as planned—neither the “people’s war” nor the counter-insurgency. (Curiously, they manifest a kind of symbiosis or co-dependency, with one providing the basis for the other.) The Left is as far from seizing State power as we are from achieving a FIBA championship (no matter virtue, skill, or tenacity), and the Right remains essentially as it has always been, unreformed and unrepentant in its monopoly of economic and political power. But the Right seems to have been more clever at shapeshifting, riding on and pandering to the digital consumerism of a new generation and thereby dousing its revolutionary fervor, while the Left has basically stuck to the playbook and rhetoric of 1970s Maoism.

Meanwhile, in the great section between them, the masses of our people remain largely poor and vulnerable, in desperate need of food, housing, work, and education, a significant number of them kept afloat only by the grueling sacrifices of fathers, mothers, and siblings laboring overseas. Some decline has been noted in the incidence of mass poverty in recent decades, but it has been slow and uneven; even moderate economic growth did not necessarily lead to significant poverty reduction. 

We are said to have a rising middle class—estimated by the Philippine Institute of Development Studies at 40 percent of the population—but it is a very fragile one, strongly aspirational in its longing to be rich or be like the rich, but weak in the knees, and easily crushed or co-opted. Those of us in this category spend our lives saving up for the good things and cultivating our composure, only to lose all that in one catastrophic illness or declaration of redundancy.

Politically, as well, I place myself squarely in the middle, never having trusted the Right and its compulsive greed for wealth and power and long having fallen out of love with the Left, which has shown itself to be just as capable of cynical calculation. I declare myself a liberal (with the small “L”), with all of that word’s ambiguities and contradictions. I repose my faith in no party or church or army, but trust my reason (however faulty, and with God’s grace) to lead me to the truth and to the right decisions. I draw strength from knowing, as I saw in the crowds of May 2022, that a huge wellspring of goodness and positive purpose resides in many if not most Filipinos. We cannot and will not let bad politics and bad politicians stop us from doing good, in our families, communities, and eventually our nation.

However fractured our society remains, in the very least we deserve peace, and must agree on peace, so we can banish one of the darkest specters in our national history. No more war; no more political prisoners; no more tokhang. And please, no more Leila de Limas.

But a just and lasting peace will require not only a rejection of violence as conflict resolution. It should also mean strengthening the law and the independence of the judiciary, reducing corruption, and depoliticizing the military and police. It should mean dismantling the broad and expensive State apparatus devoted solely to counter-insurgency, a factor that the National Security Council itself has declared “a dying threat” even as military budgets remain high. Deploy our soldiers to our coastal waters and boundaries, where the real dangers to our national security loom.

The irony of another President Marcos securing the peace has not escaped me, as I’m sure it will perplex others, but I grant that peacemaking will require being able to look beyond the persons for now and focus on the larger goals and processes involved; other reckonings can follow. I’m under no illusion that the GRP and the NDF will sing “Kumbaya” around a campfire and that all will be well thereafter. Neither party comes to the table with clean hands and consciences. Both come with long histories of violence, betrayal, and guilt. There will be more hope than trust to share.

But a peace agreement is not a marriage, with a pledge to love and hold hands no matter what, merely a civil agreement to live under one roof without killing each other and maybe, just maybe, have an occasional cup of coffee or a meal together. 

For this I am willing to suspend my disbelief, and wish all the parties the best of luck, with a silent prayer for this most unlikely and difficult of enterprises. Other battles and debates can follow; let’s end this one first.

Qwertyman No. 70: Life (and Death) on Installment

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 4, 2023

THE SUDDEN collapse of Loyola Plans—yet to be explained to longtime customers like me—reminded me of the fragility of our expectations. Like probably hundreds of thousands of other pre-need plan holders, I was just going about my daily business, secure in the thought that whatever happened, I could look forward (well, not exactly, but…) to a coffin, an air-conditioned room full of flowers, and a patch of grass or a marble urn at the end of the road.

That road apparently ended sooner for Loyola than for me and my wife, and we are now in the odd situation of having outlived our funeral plans and the company that was supposed to fulfill them. I understand that Loyola sold educational plans as well, which in a way is even sorrier for the supposed beneficiaries, whose lives are just beginning as opposed to ours. 

We bought those plans more than 30 years ago, when we were in the middle of our lives and careers and just beginning to think of a far future, of the sunset over the horizon and such other clichés meant to assure us that life follows a predictable if not comfortable trajectory. Beng and I were both student activists who, much to our surprise, had survived the First Quarter Storm and martial law, when our friends and comrades were being murdered right and left. We got married and became parents in the middle of all that, and became tentatively hopeful that we would live a little if not much longer.

In true middle-class fashion, we paid for that future on the installment plan. We bought a subdivision house and lot in the boonies of San Mateo on installment, faithfully amortized for P784.54 a month over fifteen years (you don’t forget a figure like that when you write a check that often). We bought a used Volkswagen Beetle on installment, spread out over 36 months. We bought a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica—the crowning glory of the middle-class library—on installment. We budgeted by the month, our wages largely committed to patient creditors whom I imagined sitting at their desks slitting hundreds of envelopes stuffed with checks and cash (back then, we still trusted the postal system enough to actually send money in the mail). 

Come to think of it, our parents also lived from month to month. Their big thing was appliances—TVs and refrigerators, especially—that they checked out on the display floor, ooh’ed and aah’ed over, and then deposited a down payment for, withdrawn from the bank that afternoon with a sigh at once hopeful and despondent. These appliances became virtual members of the family, occupying positions of prominence in our living rooms and kitchens—until, sometimes and shockingly, they were carted away by strangers to Mama’s tears and Papa’s embarrassed silence. We younger ones learned that installment plans bore obligations that also carried emotional costs.

A little Googling tells us that installment buying has been around since at least 1807, when a New York furniture store offered the option. In 1850, Singer began selling its sewing machines on installment. The practice took off in the 1920s, and became even more hugely popular in the 1950s with the growing use of credit cards.

At least, those kinds of plans began with you getting some product up front. Until the repo man knocked on your door or until the blacks of your eyes turned white from viewing, you used and enjoyed your 14” TV. That’s not the case with educational and funeral plans, which are a kind of a safe bet that tomorrow’s prices will be higher than today’s, so you might as well buy now what you’ll pay for tomorrow anyway. At the end of your long period of indenture, you even get a document in fancy script—like we did—as final proof of your faithfulness and as a guarantee, graven in legal stone, that you will get what you paid for.

Except that now, that’s not going to happen. As the thousands of Filipinos who bought into the College Assurance Plan (CAP) two decades ago discovered, sometimes the bottom falls through the piggybank, and suddenly your dreams go “Poof!” (The CAP case, I’m told, is a complicated one, compounded by the unexpected rise in tuition fees and a new government requirement to produce billions of pesos up front. Last year, after an 18-year battle through the system, a Supreme Court ruling finally allowed for CAP’s rehabilitation, theoretically enabling the payment of 50 centavos for every peso owed a plan holder.)

Not being an avid follower of the business news, I heard about Loyola’s troubles only after their liquidation and the procedure for claims (until April 18, 2024, for the equally ignorant) were announced. As these claims processes go, we could be strumming lyres in heaven (or dodging forks elsewhere) before we see the color of money—and even so, if they just give us back what we paid in, instead of the now-expensive service we paid for, then it’ll be laughably (make that cryingly) small. 

My 95-year-old mother’s response probably said it for most plan holders her age: “I can’t die now.” No, you can’t, Nanay, and not just because we need to find you—and us—a new plan, which hopefully will be worth more than the paper it’s printed on. 

Penman No. 457: The Actor as Painter

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Penman for Sunday, December 3, 2023

A FEW months ago, I had the good fortune of coming into ownership of four watercolors by Juan Arellano (1888-1960), the famous architect of such landmarks as the Metropolitan Theater, the Post Office Building, and the Legislative Building (now the National Museum). Less known to many was that Arellano’s first love was painting, and it was a passion he pursued throughout his life. 

My inquiries into the background of my paintings led me to cross paths—initially online—with Juan’s grandson Raul Arellano, who turned out to be an accomplished painter in his own right. Born in Cagayan de Oro, Raul has been based for almost 30 years now in the United States, but he has recently been returning to the Philippines more often. When, one day, he messaged me to ask if we could meet up, I said yes, eager to learn what he could recall of his grandfather but also to get to know him and his art. 

I’m by no means an art critic, but my wife Beng (a professional art conservator and watercolorist) and I are museum rats and enjoy both traditional and modernist art, and peek into the local art scene when we can. There’s a lot of brilliance and energy out there to be sure, but also much safe and tiresome repetitiveness from artists who’ve settled on a commercial formula, such that their work no longer exudes emotional power. Many young painters—like their writing counterparts whom I meet at workshops and teach in school—also seem to think that the only worthy subject is death and despair, which invariably means dark canvases devoid of any suggestion of wonder and mystery, let alone delight.

When I saw Raul’s work online, even before we met, what leapt out at me was exactly what I found missing in many others—an element of metaphysical magic, fantastical but relatable, the kind of paintings you want to return to over and over again. I saw flashes of Henri Rousseau, Van Gogh, and William Blake, among others, but it was still all him—not his grandfather, for sure—trying to tell me something I hadn’t really thought much about before.

As it turned out, Raul never met his grandfather, who died five years before Raul was born in 1965 (Raul’s father was Juan’s third son Cesar). All he has of him is a self-portrait—and, of course, a passion for art that runs in the family; his cousin Carlos or “Chuckie,” the son of architect Otilio, was a formidable art patron and collector; Chuckie’s younger sister Agnes remains one of the country’s leading and most imaginative sculptors; Cesar’s brother Salvador or “Dodong” Arellano became a well-known painter of horses and game fowl in California.

Raul’s path to painting was neither straight nor easy. His first great obsession was acting, to the point of becoming a resident actor of Tanghalang Pilipino at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, playing a smoldering Tony Javier in a production of Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” “We were trained in method acting,” says Raul, “and it got to the point that I became so immersed in my character that other people on the set found it unnerving.” He would go on to act in the movies, in the crime drama Akin ang Puri(1996) directed by Toto Natividad, Batang West Side (2001) directed by Lav Diaz, and Himpapawid (2009) directed by Raymond Red. Of his performance in Himpapawid, reviewer Jude Bautista noted that “Raul Arellano as the main character is able to show the frustrations of the common man without going over the top. There is a quiet intensity in his performance.”

That intensity had been brewing in Raul the person for some time, leading to and compounded by domestic problems. In 1995, he took the opportunity to go on a film fellowship at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Midwest was too cold so he later moved to California, and quickly realized what all dreamseekers in LA wake up to: that he had to start all over again at the bottom rung of the ladder. “I swept floors. I learned how to operate a forklift. When the big steel container that you’re lifting comes crashing to the ground, you can feel the jolt running down your spine. I was in a lot of pain, but I kept on. When I left, my boss was very sorry to lose me.”

He set up a business restoring American muscle cars. “I had a Russian mechanic, but I took care of the interiors myself. I specialized in Mustangs—you could show me a Ford screw and I could tell you the year and model it came from. I had a fastback Mustang but my best sale was a Shelby Cobra.” But again another personal crisis blew up and he enrolled in a community college to study painting. He left school once he felt he had learned enough about the history, the theory, and the techniques of art to express himself. “Something in me was always wanting to come out, and I found that release in painting. I had no models or artists I looked up to. I just wanted to express myself, to work from my subconscious. I found that I could work best in a cemetery, because it was so peaceful. I still like working in the open, in plein air.”

The lure of painting proved irresistible. He worked in oils, and one of his favorite paints was lead white, popularly used in the past for its visual qualities and permanence. However, it was banned in the 1970s because of the danger of lead poisoning—a danger Raul was well aware of but embraced. “I found a stash of old paint and bought it all up. I was inhaling it every day and I could feel it doing strange things to my head.”

He returned to Manila every now and then and even resumed acting, but the death of a close friend shook him up badly. “I was all set to come out with an exhibit of traditional, representational paintings, but I was overcome with grief over the loss of my friend, and I just had to express that feeling in my work. So I put all my old work aside and began ‘Crucifixion.’” That work is one of his most impressive and a personal favorite, painted in 2004 at the outbreak of the war in Iraq.

(Image from artesdelasfilipinas.com)

Today Raul spends time in a small farm in Batangas, enjoying quick sketches in the sylvan scenery, and contemplating the possibility of exhibiting in his homeland. With him having gone from peace to pain, from calm to conflict and back again, one can only wonder what new work will emerge from this phase of his life. I find myself wishing for his playfulness to return, but that of course depends on what Raul Arellano is feeling inside.

(More here on Raul Arellano: https://artesdelasfilipinas.com/archives/85/the-art-and-thought-of-raul-arellano-original-)

Qwertyman No. 69: Tabi Kayo Riyan!

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 28, 2023

WHEN THE EDSA busway—a special lane just meant for public utility buses—was inaugurated in June 2020, I was among the many millions of Metro Manila motorists and commuters who breathed a sigh of relief and said, “Finally! Somebody’s come to their senses and did what had to be done.” 

It wasn’t going to banish the traffic problem for good—that burden still lies with our woefully inadequate mass transit system—but it applied a logical solution to a particularly oppressive aspect of our urban existence, the infernal sludge that tossing private cars and public buses into the same slurry produces. The traffic’s still bad in many spots on busy days and hours, but at least you could see some order in disorder. For this driver in his car, I can even find some ironic humor in watching buses speed down their lane while I struggle like a jockey in the middle of the pack to keep a nose ahead of the big SUV sniffing at my flank.

We’ve seen these special bus lanes in use elsewhere—most notably in Jakarta and Bangkok—and they seem to work. (Bangkok’s bus lanes have been around since 1980; Chicago adopted the world’s first bus lane in 1940.) London has set aside about 80 kilometers for 24/7 bus lanes, but some other roads also have designated bus lanes during peak hours; the fines are stiff, going up to as much as P11,000 for an infraction.

Here in Manila, according to the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP), just 550 buses transported as many as 450,000 people a day along EDSA as of December 2022; in its 30 months, the busway accommodated 154 million passengers. That’s a lot of traffic and a lot of people, and the true social benefit of a bus lane isn’t that these buses and their passengers are being shunted aside for our cars to move a little faster, but that those passengers—most of them the workers and wage-earners to whom we owe our other comforts—get to work and get to come home to their families sooner. It’s tacit acknowledgment that their lives are hard enough, and every bit of relief counts. In a sense, it’s social justice in practice. 

But now comes a proposal from the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA)—already approved by the Department of Transportation (DOTr), we’re told—to grant exemptions to the President, the Vice President, the Senate President, the Speaker of the House, and the Chief Justice, riding in five-car convoys, to use the bus lanes. Even more, senators and congressmen are also being considered for exemption (emergency vehicles and properly identified government vehicles are already exempted).

It might be argued, at least in theory (since the mischievous will ask for proof), that the big poohbahs have important national business to attend to, requiring their expeditious transport from Point A to Point B. (In Jakarta, only the President and the VP are exempt.)

The same cannot be said for senators and especially congressmen whose business it is to know the situation on the ground and to bring relief to their commonest complaints. Chief among those complaints for millions living in the metropolis is the horrendous traffic, a three-hour immersion in which should be part of every politician’s initiation into public service. 

As even Patricia Evangelista noted in her landmark book, Some People Need Killing, President Noynoy Aquino—for all of his virtues—lacked and almost disdained the common touch. But he understood the fundamental relationship between a leader and his people, and what he may have wanted in empathy, he compensated for in correctness. His proscription against the use of sirens and alarms to open a Moses-like path through traffic for government officials may seem trivial but sent absolutely the right message to citizens for whom “Daang Matuwid” might as well have been just another throwaway slogan. 

Sadly, our “wang-wang” culture—which, as a STAR editorial noted just last week, involves “not just the actual use of sirens and blinkers by VIPs whether in government or in the private sector, but the mindset itself that it’s OK to jump the line and that public officials deserve such VIP entitlements”—has crept back after PNoy, with a vengeance. 

The convoys of black, tinted SUVs with their sirens screaming “Tabi kayo riyan!” have become ubiquitous once again, flaunting the perks of power. The MAP deplored this by stating that “Accommodating convoys of officials demonstrates inconsistency of public policy: favoring the privileged few over the overwhelming majority of the commuters and motorists who deserve an efficient EDSA busway.” I’m sure that you and I have shorter and less Latinate words to say every time one of those convoys brushes past us on EDSA and along that larger avenue we call Philippine society.

That society, for better or for worse, takes its cues from the top. When our presidents behave, we (or most of us, at least) try to walk the straight and narrow; when they steal, their minions feel emboldened if not empowered to fill their own pockets; when their mouths spew obscenities like sewers, rudeness and vulgarity become excusable, and even fashionable.

In the Tang dynasty, the Emperor Taizong was known to be a wise ruler, and even wrote The Zenghuan Executive Guide, a kind of management manual. Among his best practices was the employment of “remonstrants”—as many as 36 of them—whose job was to provide the Emperor with “remonstrances,” to tell him to his face what he was doing wrong. “I often sit quietly and reflect on myself. I am concerned that what I have done may … cause public discontent. I hope to get advice and remonstrance from honest men so that I am not out of touch with the outside world,” Taizong was quoted as saying.

There’s no record of whether the Emperor Taizong’s soldiers pushed other wagons and pedestrians aside on the road to make way for the imperial train, but I suspect not. I just wonder, who will be our Taizong, and who will be his remonstrants?

(Photo from topgear.com.ph)

Qwertyman No. 68: What We Aspire For

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 20, 2023

IT WAS a humbling but also uplifting experience to attend the 65th Ramon Magsaysay Awards ceremonies last November 11 at the Metropolitan Theater, in which four new awardees—including Filipino peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer—were honored for their contributions to humanity. Long considered Asia’s version of the Nobel Prize and certainly its most prestigious honor, the RMA has now gone to over 300 recipients from all over the world in the fields of government service, public service, community leadership, journalism, literature, and creative communication arts, peace and international understanding, and emergent leadership.

This year’s four laureates represent a wide range of endeavors.

Miriam Coronel-Ferrer (Philippines) exemplified and championed the role of women in peacemaking, leading the negotiations with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front that led to a Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro. She has since lent her skills and wisdom to peacemaking efforts in East Timor, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Iraq, among other conflict zones.

Eugenio Lemos (Timor-Leste) mobilized young Timorese to adopt permaculture, a holistic system to create and manage sustainable agrosystems. His approach and methods have been adopted by Timor-Leste’s schools and local governments. Going beyond food security, Lemos emphasizes the need for “food sovereignty,” a country’s ability to produce its own food, with a focus on local, natural, and nutritious food. 

Ravi Kannan (India) set up the Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Center in one of India’s most remote and poorest regions to bring cancer care to those who could least afford it. Dr. Kannan resolved not just to create a state-of-the-art facility, but also to make it accessible to the poor by offering free treatment, room and board, temporary employment for caregivers, and a homecare program for patients. 

Korvi Rakshand (Bangladesh) began by helping poor Bangladeshi children learn English so they could find gainful employment. His JAAGO Foundation has since expanded to provide free English-language primary and secondary education to 30,000 students in both traditional and online schools, as well as embracing other causes such as women empowerment, children’s rights, and climate change.

One thing stood out in all of these awardees—and, indeed, in those who preceded them as RM laureates. It wasn’t about them. Their backgrounds, their education, their previous honors and awards were hardly even mentioned—and when they were, it was only to suggest that Dr. Kannan could have chosen to pursue a lucrative career as an oncologist in Chennai, and Rakshand could have parlayed his law degree from the University of London into success as a barrister. 

It was all about what they did for others, the public service they performed with quiet dedication, selflessness, and humility. Rakshand would relate that when he got a phone call from RMAF President Susan Afan, his first thought was that he was being called to vet another candidate, not expecting to be told that he was the awardee.

All this made me think more deeply about how the rest of us aspire for honors, by which we almost exclusively mean personal and individual recognition. Indeed, from the grades up, we’re trained to venerate valedictorians, summa cum laudes, board topnotchers, top salesmen, beauty queens, boxing champions, singing sensations, and best actors and actresses. To be one of them is to have achieved meaning in one’s life. Our living rooms and offices have long been excuses for trophy displays, but now social media has done them better by offering a free and wide platform for self-promotion, so that not a day goes by without someone announcing some new achievement.

And why not? I suppose it’s a natural human desire to rise above the herd and be known for something, be it physical beauty, vocal prowess, athletic skill, or mathematical genius. In a world where we’ve become increasingly commodified and homogenized, self-assertion (in many cases—think Instagram—to the point of narcissism) seems mandatory, if only to say “I’m here. I’m good—no, make that, I’m great!”

So we look around at what others are doing and try to do them one better. The Internet has magnified expectations to such unrealistic extents that young people have committed suicide for reasons that people from a hardier generation would have found laughable were they not so tragic. In our quest for recognition—any recognition—we’ve fallen prey to a slew of awards, pageants, and prizes of doubtful value, even paying to play Cinderella for a day and half the night. The awards themselves have become commodified and homogenized.

To be honest, I myself have built up my own little stack of writing prizes, some of them worth more than others. But again, what is “worth” beyond oneself? Like a punch-drunk boxer with a rack of belts, all they show is that I’ve lived a life as a literary combatant, when a writer’s true prize should be the readership of his or her people, perhaps the world. In a society that gives little value to books, or is too poor to buy books, that’s an Olympian challenge. 

The Ramon Magsaysay Awards and what they stand for remind us that while service to others is often thankless and sometimes even dangerous, it’s just as legitimate an aspiration as any other, and one we don’t emphasize enough in our personality-focused culture. Our historians and sociologists will have reasons for why we seem to value kani-kaniya over the tayo, or why the African concept of ubuntu, of finding one’s meaning in community, sounds foreign to many of us. I can only guess that the ruthless demands of surviving and succeeding in a cash-driven society have encouraged us to compete rather than cooperate.

The RM Awards are, of course, also a kind of competition, but one without losers, as everyone nominated has already won in his or her own sphere, has already done good by others. The chosen laureates merely stand for their co-workers, for the ideas and values they represent, and above all for an insistently optimistic and assertive humanity in a world splintered by violence, greed, and intolerance. 

Greatness can be aspired for—I suspect the truly great don’t even think about it—but it cannot be applied for, much less paid for.

Penman No. 456: A Pocket of Peace and Quiet

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Penman for Sunday, November 5, 2023

ROXAS CITY, the capital of Capiz, is proud to declare itself the “Seafood Capital of the Philippines” as well, but I didn’t even know that when I booked a flight for me and my wife Beng last month to spend a few days in Roxas. I still had a few “super passes” I’d bought a bunch of from an airline promo last year and they were expiring soon, so as Beng and I are wont to do, we decided to pick a place on that airline’s list of destinations, one where we’d never been before. It would help that Beng was Ilongga, and having been married to her for almost 50 years, I could understand Hiligaynon, so getting around would be no problem. The “seafood capital” tag popped up when I googled “Roxas City” for ideas about where to go and what to do—that was the clincher for me, the scourge of crabs, shrimp, scallops, and all aquatic arthropods. 

An hour-long plane ride from Manila deposited us in Roxas City’s airport, which has the advantage of being a short tricycle ride away from downtown. 

For our “hotel,” I picked out, online, a place called the Olive Hostel, which proved to be an adventure on its own. At just over 1K a night with free breakfast and within walking distance of Western civilization, it seemed just right for Beng and me, who don’t insist on five-star luxury. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live in a container, well, we found out. It literally was built out of steel containers piled on top of each other, with doors and windows cut out. But don’t get me wrong: it was all very capably and tastefully done, and as tiny as our quarters were, it was actually quite cozy; the bathrooms were immaculately clean and the wi-fi was strong. There was no TV, but we made up for that by watching Netflix on my laptop, perched on my tummy. (Beng and I are used to tiny hotels in HK, Japan, and Korea; I’m usually claustrophobic, but I don’t feel that with Beng beside me.) 

The Olive Hostel’s grounds were, by contrast, spacious and very well maintained, lovely especially in the evening. For those seeking more traditional lodgings, the President’s Inn downtown comes highly recommended. Among the city’s newest and most modern hotels, three—the Veronica, the Urban Manor, and the Islands—can be found in Pueblo de Panay township.

Roxas City has one of the prettiest and cleanest plazas I’ve seen around the country, small but the very picture of what a plaza has always been in our provincial imaginations, with City Hall, the church, and a park with a bandstand beside a river.

To one corner stands the Panublion Museum, a cleverly repurposed water tank that showcases highlights of Capiznon history and culture. Managed by its very capable director, Cheryl Anne del Rosario, Panublion features the personal memorabilia of the city’s favorite son, President Manuel A. Roxas, including the flag flown at the July 4, 1946 inaugural of Philippine postwar independence. (President Roxas’ ancestral home is not too far away and is open for public viewing, but was closed on the day we toured the city.)

The museum also showcases the tools and finery of the province’s and island’s indigenous peoples. Most captivating were the exhibits  featuring Capiz’s two female National Artists—Jovita Fuentes for Music and Daisy Avellana for Theater. Fuentes’ golden gown contrasted sharply with the suit of armor worn by Avellana as Joan of Arc. Entrance to the museum is free, but donations are welcome. 

On our first night we walked out to a neighborhood restaurant where the chicken inasal was P108 with unlimited rice and a surprisingly good fruit drink, plus lomi at P68. We had the obligatory seafood lunch in one of the many restaurants along Baybay (literally, the beach), but much more charming and restful was a similar lunch on a bamboo raft on the river at the Palina Greenbelt Ecopark, normally part of a lazy cruise (the tide was too low when we arrived for any cruising, but the scenery was enough to soothe the senses).

Roxas has no shortage of malls for the urban dweller. The usual suspects—SM, Gaisano, CityMall—line the main highway downtown. Its equivalent of Metro Manila’s BGC is the 670-hectare Pueblo de Panay township, a residential and commercial development project master-planned by a Singaporean company and offering the most modern facilities and amenities to Capiz’s and Panay’s rising middle class. 

A mutual friend—the peripatetic Susan Claire Agbayani—introduced us to Hariette Ong Banzon and her husband Peter, the couple behind the Pueblo, who invited us to dinner at Cafe Terraza, their hilltop restaurant offering a panoramic view of the city far below. But before dinner, Hariette made sure to bring us to see the project dearest to her heart and now one of the city’s—indeed the island’s—most remarkable landmarks: the 132-foot statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, which Harriette commissioned following the miraculous cure of a relative. Hariette and Peter—incidentally both fellow PSHS alumni, so we had other memories to share—are people of faith and conscience, reflecting their values in their optimism about Roxas City’s prospects and the way they run their business.

For all the things we seek in this troubled world—a pocket of peace and quiet, good food, rejuvenation of body and soul, and friendly people—Roxas City has much to offer, and we can only give it our ultimate accolade: “We’ll be back!”

Qwertyman No. 67: Business with Culture in Iloilo

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 13, 2023

OVER THE past year, still eagerly emerging from our post-pandemic stupor, my wife Beng and I have been traveling up a storm, limiting ourselves to local destinations such as Bacolod, Virac, Davao, Roxas City, and Iloilo City. We chose these places because we’d never been there before—such as Virac and Roxas—or hadn’t visited for many years.

We were most impressed by the progress shown by Iloilo, whose transformation into a rapidly urbanizing metropolis I had begun to observe well before the pandemic. City and provincial officials, under the initial leadership and with the strong support of former Sen. Franklin Drilon, had managed to unite behind the key objectives of a continuing comprehensive development plan that has straddled several local and national administrations. 

All over the country, you hear about politicians achieving national prominence and power, even to the point of aspiring for the presidency—except that back in their home provinces, they did little or nothing for their constituents, and may even have lost the local vote to an outsider as a result. Drilon never ran for President—a job I think he would have performed excellently, if our voters were thinking rationally—but if he did then he could have counted on a near-solid Iloilo vote for never forgetting where he came from and ensuring Iloilo’s emergence as a model of city planning.

Any visitor to Iloilo cannot fail to be impressed by its dynamic growth, from the minute he or she steps off the plane in the city’s airport in Cabatuan, about 20 kilometers from downtown Iloilo. The long drive to the city down the wide, smooth highway is a virtual introduction to the city’s progress, with new malls, office buildings, car dealerships, hotels, construction depots, hospitals, and housing lining both sides of the road; new bridges and overpasses were rising here and there. A Grab car service just opened this year, our driver said, happy to be lifted by that rising economic tide.

The crown jewel of Iloilo’s renaissance is clearly the Iloilo River Esplanade, now stretching nine kilometers along both banks of the river in its expanded form. Designed by the celebrated architect Paulo Alcazaren, the Esplanade is what we Manileños want our Pasig riverbank to look like, in our dreams, but here in Iloilo, it’s been a reality for over a decade now. From early morning until after sunset, the Esplanade is filled with joggers, couples, families, and tourists who can also duck for a drink or a meal into one of the restaurants and cafes lining the walk. The river itself, once described as a septic tank into which the effluents of the city’s factories, slaughterhouse, and beer gardens drained, is clean and clear, fringed by a healthy belt of mangrove where we spotted egrets taking refuge. 

There’s a point of view that sees malls as the bane of urbanization and the death of small, artisanal businesses, and that’s been true in many places. It’s abundantly obvious that malls and mall culture have invaded Iloilo, with some negative consequences down the road. But so strong is local culture and tradition that it’s almost inconceivable that Iloilo will lose Tatoy’s, Breakthrough, Ted’s La Paz Batchoy, Panaderia de Molo, pancit molo, KBL, diwal, and all the other little things that make the city what it is. Indeed, instead of being pushed out, many of these institutions are now in the malls. At the plaza in front of Molo Cathedral, after a 3-km walk from our hotel via the Esplanade, we had breakfast of mini-bibingkas baked right before us the way they’d been done for decades.

It was a happy coincidence that, during our visit, UNESCO named Iloilo as the country’s first Creative City of Gastronomy, in recognition of its outstanding culinary culture and heritage. This was achieved by the city government under Mayor Jerry Treñas with the assistance of a team from UP Visayas’ College of Management that facilitated a workshop for the city’s food-industry leaders last May. Education remains one of the city’s strengths; its West Visayas State University College of Medicine is now one of the country’s top-ranked medical schools, aside from UPV’s commanding role in the region.

It was UPV Chancellor Clement Camposano who, after dinner in one of the many seafood restaurants that have cropped up in Leganes on the city’s outskirts, drove us around so we could appreciate the city by night. On our way to Molo, we passed through the new Megaworld/Festive Walk business district and were blown away by how smartly designed everything was; it was almost as if we were in Singapore or some such country. It was hard to believe that not too long ago, this was the old Iloilo airport in Mandurriao, and that the road we were traveling on had once been a runway. This is also where the Iloilo Convention Center is located, where the APEC 2015 summit was held (Drilon had negotiated the donation of the site from Andrew Tan, in exchange for the ICC’s being built there).

We returned to this place in the daytime to visit one of Iloilo’s most recent and also most impressive attractions: the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art or Ilomoca, a three-story showcase of both local and national talent. Ilomoca’s establishment in the middle of one of Iloilo’s CBDs demonstrates what seems to be the local formula for sustainability, the merging of the modern with the traditional, of business with culture. You can best see this in the majestic Consing mansion in front of the Molo Cathedral, which was bought by SM but tastefully renovated and transformed into its Kultura shop. There’s no doubt that modernization is coming to Iloilo in a big way, but its leaders are smart enough to know that the city’s appeal lies in what it has built over the past two centuries, which no money can buy.

You’d think that Iloilo has gotten this far just because of political patronage from Manila, but Iloilo was one of the 15 provinces that went for Leni Robredo in 2022. The city’s former mayor, Jed Mabilog, was hounded out of office by threats of tokhang under the previous administration, but the city seems to have weathered the political storms under Treñas, returning to his old job under the National Unity Party. What this tells me is that good local governance matters, whatever may be happening elsewhere. 

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

Qwertyman No. 66: Beyond Reportage

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 6, 2023

IT WAS probably fitting that I finished reading Patricia Evangelista’s highly acclaimed account of “murder in my country,” Some People Need Killing (Random House, 2023), over a holiday devoted to remembering the souls of the departed. I had received a pre-publication review copy from the publisher months ago under a strict embargo not to talk about it until its formal launch. As it happened, it lay under a pile of other books to be read until a flurry of posts and reviews reminded me that it was out in the open, and that the secret—not just the book, but also what it contained—could now be shared.

I can still recall the day—May 15, 2004—while we were celebrating Pahiyas in Lucban when I got the news on my phone that our representative to the English Speaking Union’s annual public speaking competition in London—a bright and pretty wisp of a teenager named Patricia Evangelista—had won the top prize. We were new to the ESU—subsequently we would produce two more global champions—and it was a grand way to announce to the world that we Filipinos could produce more than boxing heroes and beauty queens. Here was 18-year-old Patricia who could think on her feet and speak to issues of international importance, the poster child of Filipino intelligence and audacity, whose command of the English language led her to meeting no less than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in what amounted to a mini-coronation in recognition of her talent.

As magical as that moment was, I can only imagine how, in the months and years following, it must have begun to grate on the young Patricia to be asked to deliver her prizewinning speech in public forums over and over again, like a wind-up doll, and suffer the fate of prodigies who peak too soon. Surely that was just a beginning; surely there was more she could do—had to do—to outlive her Cinderella-like debut in London. 

I would see some of that when she enrolled in my undergraduate Fiction Writing class in UP. I knew who she was and made sure to give her no special treatment—indeed to lean even a little harder on her, knowing she had what it took—but she got a “1.0” all the same, one of the few I ever gave. I can’t claim to have taught her much how to write imaginatively—her own reading had likely primed her for that—but I can’t pretend not to be proud of what she turned out to be, my pride tempered only by fatherly concern.

Today, almost 20 years later, the sometime ingénue returns to the global stage as a hard-bitten, chain-smoking investigative reporter—a “trauma journalist,” in her own words, very possibly one of the world’s best yet again. But there is no real prize, no princely reward, for this kind of distinction, only pain and sorrow which—subdued too many times as a matter of professional discipline—exact their toll on the body and spirit. Patricia has had to suffer that to be able to tell her story as clearly as she could, unimpeded by the hand-wringing and the preachiness that often accompany such exposés of grave misconduct. 

This is not a review of the book’s explosive investigation into the thousands of extrajudicial killings that happened under the Duterte regime—that’s been done very capably by others, and is already the subject of international inquiry. The book will deserve all the journalistic accolades coming its way as an exemplar of excellent reportage. 

I will not even quote from the book, as there are simply too many quotable paragraphs to choose from. Rather, I want to note, from my privileged perspective and for the benefit of younger writers, how Patricia works with language to best serve the truth. Quite apart from its journalistic merits, Some People Need Killing is one of the best textbooks out there for what we now call “creative nonfiction,” a compound of reportage, memoir, history, and fictional technique. Indeed, beyond reportage, the book is a long personal essay in which the author is inextricably part of the story, a significant step away from the impersonal and largely mythic “objectivity” that we associate with traditional journalism.

Probing murder after ghastly murder—sometimes even coming on-scene to prevent one—Patricia is both chronicler and agent, witness perhaps not to the killing itself but to the larger crime of its planning and the exoneration of its perpetrators. Handling the most sensitive and dangerous of material, she draws on more than skill to tell her story; she demonstrates raw courage, an increasingly rare quality among journalists easily seduced and silenced by pragmatism. She names names, which surely will bear consequences both ways. 

I’ve often remarked in my lectures that the most endangered writers in this country are neither the poets nor the novelists, but the journalists who cannot hide behind metaphor and simile to tell the truth. We fictionists make artful lies which governments rarely have the intelligence or the patience to grapple with. Journalists live in the literal world inhabited as well by cops and crooks; what’s interesting is how the flimsy but oft-repeated fictions of “killed while resisting arrest,” so pervasive in this book, emerge from that reality.

Evangelista’s overarching technique is one of narrative restraint, informed by an English major’s awareness of how language and reality shape each other. She constantly parses the perversions of language—how words like disappear, salvage, encounter, verification, and even her own name assume different uses and meanings over time, in specific contexts. She knows—as I remind my students—that for dramatic effect, less is often more, that short sentences and blunt, single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words rather than the long, Latinate ones favored by lawyers hit closer to the gut and heart.

She is keenly aware of the power of irony—of professed liberals supporting EJK, of a morally ascendant Noynoy Aquino showing little empathy for ordinary folk, of her own journalist-grandfather affixing his signature to a petition supporting the older Marcos, and of communal complicity in the reign of terror. She uses people’s own words against them, quoting from the record. She avoids direct editorializing, or speaking in lofty generalizations like “justice” and “civil liberties,” and instead, in the best noir tradition, sees “sagging two-story tenement buildings (that) opened into dirt roads layered with garbage and last week’s rotten Happy Meal.”

After I had finished the book, I woke up at 4 am from a nightmare about running shirtless down a wet, earthen road. I was lucky. Patricia Evangelista lived through it, and I don’t even know if she’s woken up yet. Have we?

(Image from Rappler.com)