Qwertyman No. 131: A Relentless Questioner

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 3, 2025

I DON’T know if there’s a Marxist heaven, but if there is, then Dr. Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, who passed away recently, must be smiling up there because of the forthcoming launch of his book Notes from the Philippine Underground (UP Press, 2025).

It’s too bad that Dodong won’t be around to see the book and sign copies for his legions of friends and comrades—many of them like my wife Beng, who remember him as a dashing and persuasively articulate professor of Western Thought, despite the Cebuano-accented English he was sometimes laughed at for by the ignorant. He never became my teacher in college, and oddly enough—because I was out of UP Diliman for most of the time he was teaching there—I never really got to know him closely as an activist and ideologue.

I did know him as a boss—he took me in as his Vice President for Public Affairs when he was UP President—and in that capacity I learned to respect and admire him as a man who held firm to his principles while finding practical and effective solutions to UP’s problems. This was especially true of our campaign to revise the outdated UP Charter, which eventually succeeded under President Emerlinda Roman, but which he tenaciously pursued despite the insults of spiteful politicians. 

Throughout his adult life and to the last, Nemenzo remained a professed and unapologetic Marxist—a word that would seem Jurassic in these post-Soviet and Trumpian times, but which he saw and lived in a different light. 

As the preface to his book by Prof. Patricio “Jojo Abinales” explains, “Dodong’s engagement with Marxist theory wasn’t an academic exercise. For him, Marxism was a living, breathing framework—a summons to connect theory to the existing conditions of everyday life. He wasn’t content to theorize from a distance; with a scientific mind, he dug into the realities of Philippine society, always interrogating its dominant ideas, structures, and contradictions. His writings speak to this dual commitment: the rigor of his analysis is matched by an acute sensitivity to the concrete lives of real people whose struggles he sought to illuminate. He distrusted all dogma, and sought to validate all received knowledge.

“Francisco ‘Dodong’ Nemenzo’s life and work resist easy categorization. He was a Marxist thinker, a revolutionary activist, an inspiring academic leader, and a mentor to generations of scholars and radicals. But more than any of these roles, he was a relentless questioner of the world as he found it—and a passionate believer in its potential to be different, if not better.”

Indeed the book shows how sharp, even scathing, Dodong could be in his opinions of how his idea of Marxism remains relevant and useful despite how it has been misused by many of its adherents and misunderstood by its opponents. 

He writes: “We must struggle against their misconception of Marxist theory and practice (e.g., equating Marxism with Stalinism and totalitarianism) and point out that humanism is inherent in the Marxist worldview. Going through the basic documents of Filipino social democratic groups, it is obvious that, even as they try to distance themselves from Marxism, their analysis of present conditions and their historical roots is almost entirely based on a Marxist framework.” 

He acknowledges the flaws and failures of Marxist parties caught up in internal conflicts (Dodong himself was once ordered to be executed by the party he belonged to, ostensibly for treason): “Can people be blamed for suspecting that communists are motivated by cynical calculations of what would bring them tactical advantages? Their loud and monotonous protestations ring hollow in the absence of inner-party democracy. The authoritarian and repressive character of the regimes their comrades established wherever they gained the upper hand reinforced this impression. This stigma they must shake off; otherwise they would remain at the periphery in the continuing struggle for democracy.”

He is not without wry humor. Reflecting on the ultimate folly of a revolution being led by a highly secretive, centralized, and “conspiratorial” party, he notes: “This is difficult to implement in the Philippine cultural milieu. A code of silence—what the Russians call konspiratsiya and the Mafiosi call omerta—is impossible among people who take rumor-mongering as a favorite sport. Our irrepressible transparency is a weakness from one point of view but a virtue from another. Our legendary incapacity to keep secrets is probably the best guarantee that no conspiratorial group can stay in power long enough to consolidate a dictatorship.”

Even for those disinclined or even hostile toward the Left, Notes from the Philippine Underground offers many valuable insights from one of that movement’s “OGs,” in today’s youth-speak. Nemenzo may be highly critical but he remains ultimately hopeful that positive and deep social change will happen, if the Left learns from its mistakes and finds new ways to engage society. Listen:

“There have been many pseudo-united fronts put up by the vanguard party. They consist of party-led mass organizations that simply echo the party line. None ever grew into a genuine united front, although they did attract a few prominent individuals who had no organizational base whatsoever. Other organized groups are often suspicious of the party and wary of being reduced into instruments for policies they do not accept.

“But I know of only three attempts at seriously establishing a real united front in this country: in the immediate postwar period, in the late 1960s, and very recently. They all collapsed because of sectarian methods of work. Sectarianism is the blight of all united front efforts everywhere….

“The Philippine movement has never been able to solve this dilemma. At the very moment when united front structures are set up, rivalries emerged. And intoxicated by short-term successes in expanding their mass organizations, the sectarians eventually prevailed.”

Pluralism, he suggests, is key: “Pluralism is a bourgeois liberal doctrine that ought to be preserved and enriched in the socialist revolution. It is not incompatible with socialism. The tension that arises through political competition would serve as a constant reminder that the party must earn the allegiance of the masses. Of course, no state would tolerate an opposition party that resorts to violent methods and solicits support from foreign powers. But this should never be an excuse for suppressing any opposition.”

Surely there will be blowback from those holding different views; expect the usual howl from UP bashers and red-taggers. But when that happens, even from the grave—or Marxist heaven—Dodong Nemenzo will have sparked the kind of discussion we direly need to find our way forward as a nation.

Qwertyman No. 130: A Family Business

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 27, 2025

“The Senate is not a family business,” posted my friend R. on Facebook, and I found myself nodding at what sounded like the patently obvious truth, which somehow seems to still elude our family-oriented countrymen.

Among the loudest alarms raised by the forthcoming midterm election is the likelihood that, once again, Filipino voters will be choosing people with the same surnames to add to what has become, over the decades, a cozy nest of clans. 

It isn’t just the Senate, of course, which is infected with dynastisis. From Congress down to the Sangguniang Kabataan where fledgling politicos learn to tweet, our entire political system has been one big and long-running Family Feud. Husbands, wives, and their kids serve as senator, congressman, governor, mayor, and councilor with utter shamelessness, claiming a form of manifest destiny contestable only by another family.

It’s gotten so bad that—surprise, surprise—Sen. Robinhood Padilla, last accused of doing little on the job but preening his mustache, filed SB 2730 last July against political dynasties (already in our Constitution, but lacking an enabling law). Citing a Harvard study (which always seems to bear more weight than common sense), Padilla said that political dynasties “persist and reproduce their power over time, undermining the effectiveness of institutional reforms in the process.” 

More informatively, Padilla noted that “A dataset of Philippine local elections from 1988 to 2019 showed the number of governors with at least one relative in office (dynasty) increased by almost 39 percentage points, from 41% in 1988 to 80% in 2019. The dynasty proportion of vice governors rose from 18% in 1988 to 68% in 2019. The percentage of mayors in the dynasty increased gradually from 26% in 1988 to 53% in 2019…. Political dynasties, in effect, have exhausted resources to attain economic and political dominance while at the same time compromising political competition and undermining accountability…. It is time to break the barriers preventing the best and the brightest from serving the Filipino people.”

Tell that to the Philippine Senate which, because it has only 24 members, magnifies the prevalence and persistence of dynastisis even more. 

One of the ways the US Senate differs from ours is the way it’s composed, with two senators from each of the 50 US states, which, in their federal system, gives equal weight to giant Texas and tiny Vermont. That should make it highly unlikely for two related people to be in the Senate at the same time, right? Well, sort of. As it turns out, in US history, two pairs of brothers actually served in the Senate together. One pair I’m pretty sure you never heard of—Theodore and Dwight Foster, who simultaneously represented Rhode Island and Massachusetts at the start of the 1800s. The next pairing didn’t happen until more than 150 years later—with Edward and Robert Kennedy representing Massachusetts and New York in the 1960s. 

Our Senate puts America’s to shame in that department. 

It helps, of course, to be related to a President, or to prepare oneself to be one. By my count, there have been five Aquinos in the Senate—Ninoy, Butz, Tessie, Noynoy, and Bam; four Marcoses—Ferdinand, Imelda, Bongbong, and Imee; four Estradas—Joseph, Loi, JV, and Jinggoy; three Roxases—Manuel, Gerry, and Mar; three Osmeñas—Serging, John, and Serge; three Laurels—Jose, Sotero, and Doy; and two Magsaysays—Gene and Jun. “Cong Dadong” Macapagal never became a senator, but his daughter Gloria did. Fidel Ramos’ contribution to the Senate was his sister Letty.

To these presidential surnames we have to add those of other political families such as the Dioknos, Tañadas, Kalaws, Angaras, Guingonas, Antoninos, Rectos, Pimentels, Revillas, Villars, Cayetanos, and possibly Tulfos. The Cebu Osmeñas—John and Sergio, Jr.—once served together in the Seventh Congress in the early 1970s; the Cayetanos—Pia and Alan—followed suit in the Fourteenth, in the late 2000s, and the Villars—Cynthia and Mark—in the current Nineteenth. 

That’s not to say that some members of these political clans were not deserving or distinguished. Many certainly were—in the right hands, a family tradition of public service sets high standards and expectations. Never mind the ancient Fosters, but I don’t think America minded having Ted and Bobby Kennedy in the Senate, with Ted serving continuously for an astounding 47 years until he died.

They have no term limits in America. We imposed ours in the 1987 Constitution—a well-meaning gesture meant to democratize our legislature, but which backfired and produced exactly what it wanted to avoid. Our political families quickly learned to adjust and do a merry-go-round, ensuring further that one member or other would occupy all spots in the wheel. What developed over the years was less a revitalization of the institution with bright new talents than a pooling and coagulation of old blood. 

So rather than an anti-dynasty law which seems to have little chance of passing a House full of dynasties anyway, perhaps we should revisit term limits, so we can retain the services of truly outstanding senators (like Franklin Drilon, for example) for life, rather than punish ourselves by replacing them with inferior siblings and cousins. 

There are and have been high-performing senators whom we don’t and shouldn’t mind serving over and over again, politicians with genuine and critical advocacies they have devoted their lives to. Our political history has been fortunate to have seen the likes of such men and women as Senators Claro M. Recto, Jose Diokno, Lorenzo Tañada, Raul Manglapus, Emmanuel Pelaez, Helena Benitez, Eva Estrada Kalaw, Juan Flavier, Rene Saguisag, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Edgardo Angara, just to speak of the departed.

Sadly our political realities preclude the truly poor from winning a Senate seat, and only extraordinary circumstances like EDSA can lift up capable and virtuous candidates of modest means such as Dr. Juan Flavier and Atty. Rene Saguisag to that exalted position. But their interests can be articulated and defended by men and women with the capacity and quality of mind and spirit to see beyond themselves. These are senators whom we expect to make laws that build a nation, rather than empower and enrich themselves and their progeny even further.

Qwertyman No. 129: The Punishment Theory

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 20, 2025

LOS ANGELES is burning as we speak, with raging fires consuming an area larger than the whole of San Francisco—or, in our terms, about seven times the size of Makati. I’m sure you’ve been just as horrified—and, let’s admit it, mesmerized—by the TV coverage showing huge swaths of what used to be thriving California communities crumbling in flames. 

Particularly compelling for onlookers is the awareness that many of those homes belong to Hollywood’s elite—people with millions of followers on social media but who, in their moments of personal distress (as in their divorces and run-ins with the law), often find it difficult to generate genuine sympathy. Not necessarily meaning to be unkind, pedestrians like us like to see the mighty (or their houses) falling; misery is a great democratizer. Even as the mansions of the rich go up in smoke, our first urge is to think that (a) they can always afford to build a new one, followed by (b) they’re just being punished for something they did wrong.

Indeed the “punishment theory” for the Great LA Fire has gained a lot of traction in social media, both within and outside the US. In Middle Eastern media, the fire was quickly seen as divine retribution for America’s support to Israel’s destruction of Gaza. As one Qatari journalist wrote, “The American aid squandered by the occupation [i.e., by Israel] in its Gaza war amounted to about $60 billion. The damage caused by the recent US fires has reached about $150 billion. Trump said a few days ago that he will bring hell upon the region, yet hell has arrived in the heart of the US, with hundreds of thousands of Americans displaced and thousands of homes and mansions lost. I trust in the vengeance and in the victory of the One and Only Almighty God.”

Not at all, said others—the fire had nothing to do with Israel but with Los Angeles, indeed California, itself. Again invoking the Almighty, Christian evangelicals rushed to proclaim the disaster “God’s punishment” for liberal licentiousness and its adherence to the false religion of “wokeness.” For being the land of hippies, Democrats, legalized marijuana, and Hollywood, California was now being chastised by an angry God. (Don’t believe it? Check Genesis 19:24-25, Amos 4:6-11—sayeth the FB and Reddit faithful. I myself suspect that if God was fair and a keen follower of American politics, he would’ve swept Mar-a-Lago away in a tsunami or a hurricane. But then I believe in an indifferent God who doesn’t take sides in wars or football games.)

Whatever, there seems to be a palpable compulsion here to go and punish the wicked, who have only themselves to blame for their calamities. Never mind that the fire has ravaged both Democrats and Republicans, blacks and whites, Christians and Muslims, Asians and Europeans, rich and poor. To those outside looking in, it’s the “other” whose tragedy we celebrate, with the innocents as collateral damage.

The word often trotted out in these situations is that old German standby, “Schadenfreude,” meaning the delight we take in the misfortunes of others. It’s all over social media when you read about the LA fires, almost to the point of gleefulness over a kind of divine justice befalling the deserving (most notably, that of a fellow named Keith Wasserman—an Elon Musk fan and Cybertruck owner who had railed against paying higher taxes, and was now begging for private firemen to save his home). 

Of course, there’s nothing like crisis to bring out both the best and the worst in people, from heroes to heels. Harder to read and more difficult to assess than these extremes is the slow and steady burn—rather than the raging inferno—in our societies.

All this talk of retribution leads me to an odd and totally unscientific theory about people. I wonder if, in fact, there’s a more proactive form of Schadenfreude that goes well beyond a smug snicker at the missteps of the perceived elite to an active courtship of their downfall.

I’m speaking not as a political scientist or sociologist, neither of which I am, but as a sometime playwright who likes to look into the darkest and strangest of human motivations. That’s normally the job of psychologists, for whom I have a healthy respect, but if psychologists could put all their patients together in a room and find a way to make sense of their nightlong chatter, then we playwrights and fictionists would be out of business.

Here’s how it goes: 

We get bad laws like the pork-laden GAA because we elect bad lawmakers. And we elect bad lawmakers because we fancy that voting for people we think we know (like entertainers and dynasts) makes us matter. With the vote being the only utterance left to the voiceless citizen, choosing the familiar becomes an act of assertion, of participation in national affairs. “He may be a lousy leader, but I put him there.” Call it the revenge of the bobotante, a term we Pinoys coined for supposedly ignorant or forgetful voters. My theory is, they’re more cunning and deliberate than we think.

Many MAGA voters didn’t so much vote for Trump the man as for the grievances they bore that he had the smarts to amplify and articulate. A convicted felon, habitual liar, bully, and egomaniac, Trump was after all the very antithesis of the righteous and virtuous leadership that evangelicals especially like to uphold (not that they don’t have their own crooks and pervs in their uppermost echelons). If they were true to themselves, even his most ardent supporters would have acknowledged—and looked past—his monstrously obvious character flaws.

They voted for him nonetheless, because—on top of the price of gas and groceries—he embraced and legitimized their consternation and disgust with a world gone far beyond their comfort zone, peopled by neighbors who don’t speak English, who have sex with the same pronouns, who kill their babies, and who run races against runners with different genitals (and go to their bathrooms). How could Donald J. Trump be worse than these? 

Today DJT takes his oath as America’s 47th, as Los Angeles continues to burn. I wonder who is being punished for what.

Qwertyman No. 128: Been There, Done That

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 13, 2025

I WAS trying my best to sound sober and diplomatic in last week’s column about Donald Trump’s impending return to the presidency of the world’s most powerful country, the United States of America, due to happen next Monday. I was still vacationing with family in California then, and didn’t want to get into an argument with some Americans (and Fil-Ams) who would’ve sent me packing home the moment they heard me raising a stink about their Chosen One.

The fact is—whether out of deference to my liberalism or just because of fatigue—few people I spoke with, whether from the left or right, seemed eager to talk about Trump, and it’s something I fully understand, and even appreciate. You can only hear and make so much commentary, most or all of which, at day’s end, will amount to nothing, except for more bruised or broken friendships.

Typical was a friend’s reaction from San Francisco: “Shrinking my world in the next four years to just my family and like-minded friends. (Just text me when the war has started!)”

I remembered what it was like in 2022 when our presidential candidate—who seemed (and was) superior to the alternative on all counts except financial capability—lost, and how distraught and upset we were, convinced that, surely, massive fraud accounted for her defeat. Even then, I opined—unpopularly, for sure—that despite the ever-present likelihood as in all Philippine elections that some electoral sleight-of-hand had taken place, more Filipino voters preferred the winner for their own reasons, disinformation and all. 

We’ve been living with and under that winner for almost three years now—and, perhaps surprisingly, we’ve all survived so far; the sky hasn’t fallen—yet. I did say then, like many other observers, that BBM was facing a fork in the road: to continue down the path to perdition that his parents took, or to boldly go up the hill of redemption. “Redemption” might not necessarily mean a full-blown admission of guilt in exchange for forgiveness of sins, or even the restitution of ill-gotten wealth, although all of the above would have been ideal if well-nigh impossible. I think most of us would have been pleasantly surprised if he simply led an honest, just, and competent administration, which is what all of us have been praying for.

Almost halfway through his term, has any of that happened? Which path did BBM choose? Is it possible that he has been straddling both, or hopping from one to the other? Very interestingly, both in the US and here at home, I’ve been asked a lot of questions about BBM, and what I’ve told people is this: 

He’s made some very popular decisions, which has raised his acceptance if not approval among many; but he continues to run fast and loose with the way public money is used, seriously undermining whatever credibility he’s been building up. His positions on tokhang, China, and POGOs have generally gone over well (although criticisms persist that extrajudicial killings and political imprisonment have continued). Perhaps above all, he has politically profited immensely from his war with the Dutertes, deftly positioning himself as sober and presidential versus the theatrics and the crudity of the Dutertes, who have done themselves no favors. 

On the other hand, neither has the Marcos administration endeared itself to the people by brazenly abusing its fiscal authority with the problematic Maharlika Fund and its diversion of key departmental budgets into an election-year pork barrel for lawmakers. Just when you thought it had miraculously gotten its ethical notions right, the old wolf bares a greedy fang or two and reminds us that old habits die hard.

Which brings me back to America and its expectations of Trump 2.0. Unlike BBM who can at least claim a generation’s distance from his father, Donald Trump has only himself to be compared with, and anyone hoping to see a more sensible, more contemplative, and more compassionate Trump enter the White House after he won over the truly sensible, contemplative, and compassionate Kamala Harris is in for a rude reminder of the man America spat out in 2020. 

In the weeks before his second inauguration, the President-elect has already threatened to pressure Denmark into selling Greenland to the US, punish its closest neighbors Canada and Mexico with crippling tariffs, rename the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, and repossess the Panama Canal. As a Fil-Am friend of mine in Georgia says, “It’s like hiring a CEO to turn our ailing and cash-strapped business around, and on his first week he tells us his strategy is to buy three companies and rename our firm.” An old Turkish proverb puts it more colorfully: “When a clown moves into the palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.”

The lunacy of Trump’s ideas would be hilarious if he weren’t who he is, a man whose every fart is now taken as God’s own wisdom by his retinue of quaking sycophants. As a man incapable of accepting criticism and prone to doubling down on the certifiably wrong, President Trump will run his government as he is ruled by his ego, and for the sake of our relatives and friends in that country, we can only pray that America emerges whole and healthy enough in 2028 to find its way back to sanity and decency.

On Monday next, when the inmates officially take over the asylum in Washington, DC, we Pinoys will be watching with the smugness of people who’ve been there and done that. We have our own pot of troubles to worry about, our own idiots and idiocies to deal with—like our propensity to force people with the same surnames, grade-school diplomas, and missing morals to become Senators of the Republic. So help us God.

(Photo from msn.com)

Qwertyman No. 127: From St. Louis to San Diego

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Qwertyman for Monday, January 6, 2025

I’M WRITING this on New Year’s Day in San Diego, California, where we’ve been visiting our married daughter Demi, who’s been living and working here for the past seventeen years. It was our first Christmas in America in ten years, and our second visit since the pandemic ended. 

Last night, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, I watched a long and fascinating documentary on cable TV on the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which ran from April to December that year. We Filipinos recall that event for its importation of over 1,000 of our countrymen to demonstrate what “savagery” meant—specifically, through the public butchering and eating of dogs. 

That bloody sideshow raised an outcry even then among both Filipinos and Americans, a pain we still feel more than 120 years after. Lost to many of us as a result of that diversion was the magnificence of the fair in many other respects, especially in terms of advances in science and technology. Many necessities and amenities we associate with the 20th century—electrical lighting, wireless telegraphy, the X-ray machine, baby incubators, and tabletop stoves, among others—were first shown to the public at the fair. 

But the fair, above all, was meant to showcase American ascendancy in politics and culture and in military and industrial might. America had just defeated Spain and had become a global maritime power, and was eager to flex its muscle, so this triumphalism underscored the great urge at St. Louis to introduce the world to America, and America to the world.

Just a few days earlier, we came out to San Diego’s famous waterfront to watch a parade to celebrate the Holiday Bowl, a football game scheduled for the Christmas break, with floats, balloons, marching bands, and military vehicles. It was a moment of pure Americana, brimming with Christmas cheer. I did my best to keep politics out of my mind for that golden hour, but of course it was never far away—especially in San Diego, a border city that could soon find itself caught in the mass-deportation drama promised by the incoming Trump administration, which takes office in less than three weeks.

This morning we woke up to the news of at least ten people being killed and dozens more injured on the street in New Orleans by an ISIS sympathizer plowing into a crowd of New Year revelers. That could very easily have been us at the parade, and again I had to wonder if—despite all the bad press the Philippines gets, with some reason—the US was truly a safer place, given its new realities of normalized and often racist violence. 

It doesn’t even take a bearded terrorist to wreak havoc in American life; as of December 17 last year, 488 mass shootings had been recorded in the US, so often that they’ve become a news staple eliciting just about as much outrage and action as another mugging at Central Park. Anti-Asian violence—to include both physical assaults and verbal or online abuse—has been on the rise, with Southeast Asians reporting the highest number of threats, despite polls showing most Americans believing that anti-Asian-American attitudes are on the wane, post-pandemic. 

That’s not going to deter the hundreds of thousands of Pinoys who, like us, still need or want to visit America each year—mostly as tourists who just want to see Disneyland, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Empire State Building, aside from picking apples in Michigan, tasting wine in Napa Valley, and skiing in Colorado. The magic of an America we fantasized about—growing up watching Hollywood movies, listening to American songs, reading American books, and following American idols—remains powerfully attractive, enhanced by an image we retain of America as an innocent, benign, and giving place. This might be especially true of us Boomers who learned about snow and white Christmases long before we came across the real thing.

I doubt, of course, that our forebears who stood half-naked in their tribal garb for the delectation of the crowd in St. Louis saw anything so warm and fuzzy about America. Instead they saw curiosity, pity, and revulsion. American “innocence” was always a romantic illusion; America the Beautiful can turn on a dime to become America the Ugly.

When I put all these things together in my mind, I wonder if we 21st-century Filipinos identify more ourselves today with those “savages” on exhibit or with their onlookers, particularly those Pinoys who have crossed over to become Americans—in some cases, even “more American than the Americans,” as I’ve heard it said, proud of their assimilation into a mainstream moving farther than ever to the political right. 

As a teacher of American literature and society—who also studied, taught, and worked in the Midwestern heartland for many years—one thing I always remind my Filipino students is that there’s no such thing as a single, monolithic America, and that, whatever its current majorities might say, American society is diverse and ever more diversifying. To the American right, that’s the “great replacement theory” at work, the horrifying possibility that non-whites—the carnival freaks—are taking over the country, prompting the Trumpist turnaround from “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or DEI policies. To me, diversity offers both challenge and hope.

Out of respect for my hosts and friends here in San Diego—some of whom, for their own reasons, voted for Donald Trump—I’ve held my tongue for the time being, telling myself that it’s their country and their choice, although that choice will inevitably affect our lives halfway around the world. 

Among my liberal American friends, I sense an urge to disconnect at least temporarily from political reality and to go into passive resistance while they regroup. It’s a position that I can identify and sympathize with, as we sort out our options in the Philippines of 2025. We survived martial law; you’ll survive Donald Trump, I tell them. To survive may well be our best New Year’s resolution: against the aggravations and vexations of the world we’ve come into, survival is the best revenge.

Penman No. 470: A Collector’s Christmas

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Penman for Sunday, January 5, 2025

MY WIFE Beng and I in San Diego, California for our first Christmas in the US in ten years, visiting our daughter Demi and her husband Jerry. San Diego’s one of those perennially pleasant places where the weather seems to be perfect almost all year round. You don’t come here for a white Christmas—although there’s snow up in the mountains not too far from town. It’s still sunny and warm enough in late December for people to be going around in T-shirts and shorts in the daytime, but for us Pinoys who love to freeze, sweaters and jackets are de rigueur.

We’ve been coming here for twenty years now, and while San Diego is chockfull of attractions—this is, after all, where Comic-Con happens every July (been there, done that twice) and where the waterfront boasts a flotilla of historic ships from a life-size Spanish galleon to the USS Midway—I have to admit that the collector in me loves San Diego for its antique malls, flea markets, and thrift shops, of which scores can be found in the city and its suburbs. I’ve found many a prize piece in these places—such as a working gold-plated 1930s Hamilton “Curvex” watch in a basket marked “Any item $5”—which, for me, beats walking into a boutique and plunking down your credit card to pay full price.

I guess I’m a cheapskate at heart, which is why everywhere Beng and I have gone around the world, flea markets and thrift shops—aside from museums—are at the top of our to-do list. The thrill is even less in the purchase itself than in finding something old, beautiful, potentially valuable—and at a bargain. 

Collectors everywhere know the feeling—that tingle in your bones and at your fingertips when you step into a shop and scan the territory, and notice something in the hazy distance that seems to look like your obscure object of desire. As a collector of vintage fountain pens, I naturally gravitate toward small tubular shapes in black, silver, or gold—which was how, last March, I spotted and bagged a gold “safety” French-made pen from the early 1900s, sitting all by its lonesome at a table at the Porte de Vanves flea market in Paris, a 40-euro find for something easily worth five times as much. 

Everyone has his or her strategy, but mine has always been to do a quick march down and around the street or aisle, just to see what’s out there and to catch obvious standouts, before taking a more leisurely and more probing walk back, peering into corners and at the details of particular pieces. It pays to come early—flea markets open as early as 5 am—and we’ve been lucky to bag early-bird bargains at cock’s crow in a barn in Ohio and the flea market at Covent Garden in London.

Unfortunately, flea markets of this sort have yet to become a regular feature of Filipino life, unless we count the Bangkal used-goods market in Makati and the plethora of Japan-surplus stores that have sprung up around the country. 

Fortunately, there’s a global flea market that’s accessible to nearly everyone and which doesn’t even require you to fly overseas and deal with visas, airfares, and airports. That market is eBay, which I like to call the great equalizer, since anyone with an Internet connection and a bank account can tap into the millions of items that eBay has online at any given second.

To my great wonderment and not a little horror, I realized as I was writing this that I’ve been on eBay for 27 years now, having signed up with the website just three months after it changed its name to eBay from Auction Web in September 1997. My first buy was a 1950s Pelikan 140 fountain pen from Germany, and since then I’ve made almost 2,000 purchases covering all my collecting passions, from pens, typewriters, and Apple computers to antiquarian books, paintings, and clothes. (Clothes? Yes! If you’re a rather large man like me who has difficulty finding his size in local stores, you’ll have lots more choices on eBay for less as long as you’re sure of your shirt, blazer, pants, shoe, and hat sizes.) 

Shipping each item to Manila directly from the US or the UK (another eBay paradise) will be too costly, so what I and other experienced collectors do is to open an account with a forwarder like ShippingCart or Johnny Air Cargo, which gives you a local address, wait until the items pile up, and then ship them in a box to Manila. (Check with each shipper’s website for their specific insurance and customs policies.) I generally get my goods within two weeks of shipping them out.

I began by mentioning that we were in San Diego because this ties in with another twist to the Pinoy collector’s and shopper’s strategy: if you know you’re going to be in the US and will be staying with a relative or friend, you can have your eBay or Amazon items shipped to that address over, say, the preceding month, and bring everything home with you in the second suitcase you’re entitled to, saving a ton on air freight costs. 

This time around, to give you an idea of what my Christmas loot has been, I’ll be filling up a suitcase (or more likely my carry-on) with some small things of little commercial value but of great interest to hopeless hoarders like me. They’ll include:

– A copy of The Gentleman’s Magazine from April 1825, in which an article predicts that “It appears that Spain is likely to lose her possessions in the Eastern, as well as the Western world” because of rebellions and crimes in the Philippines as well as at home, including “ravages committed (in Catalonia) by wolves within the last twelve or fifteen months…. The last was a young girl who, on the 18th instant, was almost entirely devoured by the wolves” (which, according to the monks, were “animated by the souls of defunct Constitutionalists”);

– A first American edition of Paul Proust de la Gironiere’s Twenty Years in the Philippine Islands, published in New York in 1854;

– A lovely Art Nouveau rocker ink blotter from around 1915, once used to mop up excess ink from fountain pens; and

– A Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen in pearl and black from around 1929, once owned by a “Francis J. Keefe” whose identity will be another mystery to explore.

If Christmas was this bountiful, I can only imagine what the New Year will be like.

Penman No. 469: Seniors and Their Stories

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Penman for Sunday, December 8, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 30, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 125: The Young Dodong Nemenzo (1)

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 23, 2024

IT WAS with deep sadness that we received the news last week of the passing of Francisco “Dodong” Nemenzo, the staunch Marxist, nationalist, and former president of the University of the Philippines. My wife Beng and I are spending Christmas with our daughter in the US and being an all-UP family, we all knew Dodong and were much affected by his loss. Beng had been a student of Dodong’s at UP, and I was privileged to serve under him as his Vice President for Public Affairs twenty years ago. But long before this, I had met him as a student at the Philippine Science High School where his wife Princess taught us History; he came to pick her up in the afternoon in his Volkswagen Beetle whose door was emblazoned with the Bertrand Russell “peace” sign.

We will be missing the many memorial events that will surely be held in his honor these coming days, so I thought of recalling Dodong in a different way from what most of his colleagues and comrades will be speaking about him. More than ten years ago, I interviewed Dodong for a book I sadly have yet to finish, and he spoke with me about his life before he became the fighting ideologue everyone now remembers him to be. Let’s hear him in this abbreviated excerpt:

“We went back to Cebu after the war. Everything was still in turmoil. I enrolled at the Miraculous Medal School, a Catholic school, and completed my third and fourth grade there. By the time I reached fifth grade, Cebu Normal School was opened so I graduated from there. After sixth grade, I spent a year in the seminary in Cebu. That was my parents’ plan ever since I could remember. I was the only boy among three children, and the eldest. My parents were devout Catholics, and they considered it an honor when a member of the family became a priest or a nun. Since I was an only boy they wanted me to become a priest. I stayed there for only a year, and then I quit. That was probably the beginning of my radicalization. The seminary back then was run by Spanish or Vincentian priests who were supporters of Franco. They looked down on Filipinos and despised Rizal. 

“I went to the University of San Carlos. It was a Catholic school but my father was unhappy with the Science instruction. Our science textbook used the question-and-answer method and my father didn’t like that. He examined my notebooks every day and corrected what my teacher said. He got mad when we were taught creationism, and he lectured me on Darwin and evolution. I answered my teacher back and the principal reported me to my father for my heretical tendencies. My father decided to free me from this nonsense and transferred me to the Malayan Academy, a private non-sectarian school that had very good teachers. I finished near the bottom of my class, failing in Conduct and Tagalog. 

“I entered UP Diliman in 1953. The rule then was that you were exempted from the entrance exam if you had an average of 82, but my average was around 77 so I had to enroll in a summer institute that was like a backdoor into UP if you passed 6 units there. I didn’t know what course to take. My father didn’t want me to take up Law and wanted me to become a scientist like him, but I reckoned that if I did that, I would always be compared to him and come up short. So I chose a course called AB General. 

“The advising line was a mile long. Jose ‘Pepe’ Abueva, a friend of my father’s, passed by and saw me in the queue. He asked after me and I told him that I couldn’t think of a course I really wanted. He tried to sell me on Public Administration, but I didn’t like to serve in a bureaucracy. He said there’d be a lot of opportunities abroad, scholarships, and if I did well I could join the faculty. He had a lot of arguments, but the one that persuaded me was ‘If you join Public Ad right now, I’ll sign your Form 5 right away, and you won’t have to join this crowd.’ 

“That’s how I ended up in Public Ad. When the dean of Business Administration tried to recruit me and my (Pan Xenia fraternity) brod Gerry Sicat who was then in Foreign Service to go into Economics for our master’s, Pepe Abueva again swooped in and told me to take up an MPA instead, and to join the PA faculty immediately. So I became a faculty member in my senior year, just before my graduation, as an assistant instructor. I probably had the longest title in UP: ‘research assistant with the rank of assistant instructor, with authority to teach but no additional compensation.’ I really wanted to teach, but had no actual assignment. I only took over the classes of professors who went on leave. 

“I never joined the UP Student Catholic Action or UPSCA. Well, maybe for one year, but I was never active and then I got out of it. I joined only until I met an UPSCAn named Princess. We always met in Delaney Hall. We were together in the student council. She was representing Liberal Arts, I was representing Public Ad. I joined in 1955, my third year, along with Gerry Sicat, Manny Alba, and Jimmy Laya. I became a liberal and distanced myself from UPSCA. 

“I idolized (Philosophy professor) Ricardo Pascual. I was looking for a cause, but these liberals were just fighting for academic freedom with no purpose. It seemed empty. I was under the influence of Pascual for some time, but we had no advocacy. I joined a short course in Social Order at Ateneo on the papal encyclicals on labor. My liberalism and my growing social consciousness merged and I started reading Marx and Huberman on my own, to find out what we were fighting for. There were a couple of professors like Elmer Ordoñez and SV Epistola who according to Bill Pomeroy had already reached that level of consciousness, but when he left they became liberals, they weren’t really organized.” (To be continued)

(Photograph by Rick Rocamora, used with permission)

Qwertyman No. 124: In Sin and Error Pining

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 16, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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