Tag Archives: Kennedy

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.

Penman No. 406: Poets and Politicians

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Penman for Monday, February 1, 2021

NOBODY EXPECTED a 22-year-old poet named Amanda Gorman to be the runaway hit at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration last month, but there she was, bright and exuberant, delivering a clear and ringing message of hope in her now-famous “The Hill We Climb.” Once you have both grandmothers and teenagers quoting the same verses in their posts, you know that a chord has been struck, a nerve touched, in the national psyche.

Of course, that was another nation, not ours, but I’m sure many Filipinos exulted as well in that new beginning for America after four years of chaos, and not too secretly hoped for a similar return to civility and decency—indeed to optimism and intelligence—where they were. As a boy whose early education was steeped in Americana—nothing too strange in Filipino private schools of the 1960s—I grew up to become something of a junkie for American history and politics, which explains why, for the past three months, I followed every turn of the Trump-Biden saga as if it had anything to do with us (and inevitably, it will; when America burps or worse, we hear it).

There have just been four American presidents who had poets read at their inaugurals: John F. Kennedy in 1961, Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1997, Barack Obama in 2009 and 2013, and Joe Biden in 2021. Robert Frost read “A Gift Outright” for JFK; for Clinton, Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” in 1993 and Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope” in 1997; for Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, Elizabeth Alexander read “Praise Song for the Day” and in 2013, Richard Blanco read “One Today.” (Many thanks to poets.org for the information.)

As you can see from the titles alone, these poems were flush with positivity, as inaugurals should be. Why only Democrats brought poets along to their inaugurals seems something of a mystery—but then again maybe not, as poetry and the brand of culture it implies could be seen as “soft” by the gun-toting machos who typically vote Republican. 

There’s an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2012, when Mitt Romney was challenging Obama for the presidency, that faulted Romney for his rhetorical gaffes and asked if he could use a poet at his side. (Among his critics was a guy named Donald Trump who called Romney’s language “inartful.”) The Tribune noted that while “the world of poetry… is a liberal tradition,” there was also a smaller category of politically conservative poets—T. S. Eliot and Samuel Coleridge among them—that was still current, and had even been anthologized into a book called, unsurprisingly, The Conservative Poets, published by the University of Evansville Press in 2006. None of these featured poets made it to Trump’s inaugural in 2017.

Surely there must be parallels in our own political history—we even had a president, Carlos P. Garcia, who wrote poems called balak in his native Boholano, and Ferdinand Marcos retained a coterie of Palace poets to sing his and Meldy’s praises. These deserve longer commentary for another time.

Even as I admire Amanda Gorman’s achievement, and especially her delivery, I do have to say that, as a poem, “The Hill We Climb” was far from perfect for me—not that it matters much in the context of what the poem had to do. In modern poetry, we usually suggest that the poem be less direct, less declarative about its intentions, leaving the reader with a little puzzle to figure out. It’s the difference between saying “Nobody loves me like you do” and e. e. cummings writing “Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” 

But Amanda was engaged in what we might call public poetry, poetry meant to be almost immediately understood and appreciated by a live audience, so it had to be more obvious in its meaning. That’s why it worked, like a popular song whose refrain people can easily remember; note, too, the rap-like rhyming and rhythm of its lines. What’s important is that the poem connected and made sense of recent events in a way and on a level that news stories and editorials couldn’t, delivered by a young, black poet with a credibility that politicians could only dream of.

Speaking of politicians, I’ve long maintained that leaders incapable of tenderness and of acknowledging their vulnerability can’t be trusted. Poetry’s appeal to the emotions requires a certain sensitivity on the listener’s or reader’s part, but it also engages the mind in ways that force you to go beyond the literal and to make intuitive connections between this and that. Leaders shackled by their own simplistic “us vs. them” mindsets and their self-defensiveness can’t make those imaginative leaps, or appreciate the rich ambiguities of literature, stuck in their rigid dogmas.

This doesn’t mean that culturally literate leaders can’t be tough when they need to be; JFK stood up to Khruschev and the Soviets with a naval blockade when they tried to ship missiles to Cuba. We can only wish other national leaders would be so brave against their nations’ enemies, instead of picking on certain universities for letting their professors and students think and speak freely, which not incidentally are basic to the writing of great poetry.