Tag Archives: Marcos

Qwertyman No. 220: Living with Evil

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 19, 2026

A YOUNGER friend messaged me last week to ask for some advice. Would it be wrong, he said, if he left the country in the event that the Dutertes returned to power? He was neither a political figure nor a tycoon, but just an ordinary middle-class citizen engaged in his own small business.

What revolted him was the thought of sharing space with millions of fellow Filipinos who, regardless of the Senate impeachment trials, still want a Duterte in the Palace.

In another era, until a few years ago, I would have told him, “Don’t. Stay here. Persevere. Endure. Fight on.” Instead, I found myself texting him back, “If that’s an option, why not? Might be time to give yourself a break.”

There’ll be many who’ll be unhappy with that reply, but can you really blame someone who believes that a Duterte restoration will be nothing short of a zombie apocalypse, and who’ll want to escape?

Me? I’ll probably take my own advice, stay put, and find a way to survive. (We do have an option—a daughter living in the States who’ll only be too happy to have us over, but who’s the crazy foreigner who wants to live in Trump’s America?)

I’m no Pollyanna, and maybe it’s just the Boomer stubbornness in me, but I haven’t given up on this country yet, despite all the aggravations we have to live with. Living with evil is what it is—the traffic, the pollution, the floods, the poverty, the injustice, they didn’t just happen; they’re part of the architecture of a State fashioned by morally corrupt and greedy people who couldn’t care less about others.

That’s pretty dismal, I know, and even more reason for my friend to flee. Still, there’s an upside to all this: if only because of the floods and traffic et al, our people seem to be waking up to the existential need to fight corruption, practice good governance, and educate our young so they’ll know and do better than we ever did.

Even the DDS comeback that terrifies my friend might not happen, or come apart with time.

I’ve long argued—and I could be whistling in the wind—that the DDS faithful are not a monolithic bloc. Yes, most of them come from Mindanao and the Visayas, but most are also poor, a more universal and distributed trait. (Don’t count the social media trolls and the hired help.) I suspect—or at least I hope—that many might yet be persuaded to reconsider their loyalties, likely less by any Kakampink logic than by their own harsh realization that they have been betrayed and even stolen from by their patrons.

Sadly, whoever wins in 2028, I think it will take at least two more generations for those learnings to take root. Our present principals have to vanish from the scene to refresh our political stock and spirit, which is why educating our youth today—in school or through the Senate hearings—is crucially important.

If the Dutertes prevail, it will be terrible, but the sky will not fall. We will find ways to keep our heads above the floodwaters; most of us will persevere, and some if not many will fight on.

My own best antidote to despair over our political fortunes is to remind myself that we survived martial law. Having said that, I should add that survival often involves some degree of acceptance, creative adaptation, compromise, and even complicity.

Again I recall Nick Joaquin’s observation that a few weeks after the Japanese marched into Manila, things uncannily returned to normal—not that we embraced the invaders, but had found reasons and ways to persist.

I know that the once much-vaunted word “resilience” has become almost pernicious in our appreciation of it today, but it’s no less true for all the beatings it’s taken.

In a poem about the Second World War, W. H. Auden describes this urge to maintain or feign normalcy amid chaos:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home.

The true danger lies in forgetting the big picture as we fuss over the details of daily routine and struggle. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has this marvelous episode from his novella “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” where his protagonist—a stonemason banished to the Soviet Gulag—is assigned to build a brick wall, a task he performs with great pride and precision, momentarily oblivious to the fact that he is reinforcing his own prison.

Last week’s tributes for and tirades against the late Cesar Virata again brought to fore the issue of complicity in an oppressive regime. He wasn’t alone. There was—and there remains—a small but vigorous resistance to dictatorship, but at least until EDSA, many of us learned to make our bed with Marcos and to lie in it.

Living with evil is a given part of the human condition, and it’s what we do in relation to it that ultimately defines us. There are those who would try to have as little to do with it as possible, and who would demand the same moral consistency of others, but it’s hard to avoid. It’s not some dark entity out there, or even a stranger across the hallway or in the seat next to you; it’s in you, that part of you that thinks killing drug suspects was a good idea.

What may ultimately bring us all together and move this country forward as a whole is the realization and acceptance of the fact that very few of us will come to the table with pure consciences and clean hands. Living with evil leaves stains, but even the stained come with valuable experience and insight.

Sometimes it’s not the obvious enemy, the ones most different from us, who bring the most pain and aggravation, but those closer to us, the ones we agree with on nearly everything—but who disdain and even demonize us for that ten percent we disagree on. Black or white suddenly counts less than shades of red or pink.

As Bertolt Brecht put it in his poem “To Those Born Later”:


Hatred, even of meanness
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Evil is more singleminded and less quarrelsome than the good. It is not so easily distracted; it does not forget. It will expand at all costs, seize every advantage, tolerate and even accept tactical differences, take and exploit whatever’s available.

If we can be as adept as evil and pitch as wide a tent, then the good in and among us might yet prevail.

Qwertyman No. 219: Notes on Cesar Virata (1930-2026)

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 12, 2026

FOR A personality so closely associated with the Marcos regime, it was inevitable that the obituaries following the passing last week of former Prime Minister Cesar Virata would reflect a broad range of opinion. 

The gentlest take on the man was that he was an honest, modest, and hardworking academic who found himself with an opportunity to help direct national economic policy, and who did his best, within a profligate bureaucracy, to mitigate economic catastrophe and sustain international support for the Philippines.

At the harshest extreme is his depiction as a complicit enabler of Marcosian martial law, a window-dresser for the regime, and ultimately an ineffectual technocrat—like others of his training and generation—who refused or failed to acknowledge the crimes of the regime he had been serving faithfully.

Those assessments came freely in social media last week, from friends I respect on either side. The variance told me as much about how we choose to remember history as how we choose what to forget, or at least to mediate after half a century, which probably tells more about us than about the other person.

I had several opportunities to meet with and to interview PM Virata, as he most likely would have wanted to be remembered, in the course of completing books to which he had something to contribute from his vast experience. We discussed mainly his life as an academic and as one of SGV’s early pillars, as well as being a member of Cavite’s prominent Aguinaldo and Virata clans. Inevitably—usually after the formal interviews, when he took me out to lunch for a more relaxed chat—he opened up about his life as a Marcos technocrat. He allowed me to take notes, from which I now share some interesting episodes and insights—edited for clarity—that might help complete whatever picture of the man we had in mind.

On martial law: “We didn’t know about the preparations for martial law. The President kept it to himself…. I was in the US when martial law was declared. I was attending a World Bank meeting. I went to my hotel room in DC, where we often stayed, although the actual meeting was at the Hilton. I got a call from one of the more senior Department of State reporters who had covered the negotiations on the Laurel-Langley Agreement. He said, ‘Don’t you know, Mr. Secretary, that martial law has been declared?’ I said no. That was around 4 pm because I had a 5 pm tennis game with Ambassador Suarez, who must also have been surprised, because he didn’t know, either. I thought of calling Joy, but she would have been asleep then, so we played our game and I waited until around 6 am to call her. When I did, the operator said, ‘All calls are suspended to the Philippines.’ Later, Alex Melchor and I were told to go to San Francisco and LA on our way home to tell the Filipinos and the consulate there about martial law. I still didn’t know what we were supposed to say. Eventually, when that same American reporter asked me for my reaction to martial law, what I said was, ‘Well, the Philippines just joined the rest of Asia,’ because everyone else around us had declared martial law—South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc.”

On the Aquino assassination: “August 21st, Ninoy was killed. I was at home in Philam that day. Joy was having a show in Makati, so I had lunch with my sister in Kalayaan. I went home and I fell asleep. I was woken up by my military aide, saying that Sen. Aquino had been killed and that the President would be making an announcement soon. We had a TV and a radio in my room and turned both of them on, but the President didn’t appear, just his photo. It turned out that he was about to have an operation. We were called to Malacañang, but when we got there, the guards told us not to approach the President, because he was all bundled up. He was really struggling and had to be helped to the elevator. We learned that he was going to have a kidney transplant! He did instruct us to pay our respects when Ninoy’s body arrived. We went to the house on Times Street but we weren’t allowed in, so I wrote a letter to Butz Aquino, who was the only one I knew then.”

On the Constitution: “I just learned recently that a Cabinet meeting was called right after martial law that I was not present at. The issue presented by the President to the Cabinet was that he had received a summons from the Supreme Court because there were petitions asking for martial law to be declared unconstitutional. There was a group that included the military and I think even Sec. Abad Santos who were in favor of declaring a revolutionary government. But the President did not accept this. He said, ‘How can you assert civilian authority over the military without a Constitution?’ He really believed in Atty. Estelito Mendoza, so he asked Mendoza to respond to the Supreme Court summons, and Mendoza said he’d try to argue that this was a political issue and not within the Court’s jurisdiction.”

On becoming Prime Minister: “The President kept me concurrently as Finance Minister, but my weakness really was that I wasn’t a politician, so I wanted Jose Roño, the Minister for Interior and Local Government, to be my deputy because he knew the local governments and politicians. At that time, Foreign Minister Romulo wanted to be the deputy PM. CPR said, ‘Look at Singapore, Rajaratnam serves as both deputy PM and foreign minister.’ I said, ‘Look, I’m not a politician and you’re away most of the time, so how will I operate? If there was more than one deputy prime minister, I’d probably nominate you, but there’s only one vacancy!’”

There was a lot more I learned from PM Virata, both about and outside of martial law, but there are some stories you realize are being told to you in confidence that are best kept that way. It’s a sad thing that the general tendency these days—especially in social media—is to reduce people to their politically posterized worst, discarding the innate complexity in every person. Maybe I’m too naïve and tolerant, but the fictionist in me looks for those complexities and ambiguities rather than bottomlines better left to accountants and scholars. 

One detail I do remember about Cesar Virata was that he was already dean of the UP School of Business Administration (which now bears his name) when his father Enrique, a professor of mathematics, was named Acting President of UP. Cesar resigned and joined SGV rather than put both of them in an awkward situation. I know his detractors might say that he could and should have exercised the same delicacy in his later positions in government, but that’s a longer argument for another time.

Qwertyman No. 218: A Dead Man’s Voice

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 5, 2026

TODAY I’M going to turn over this column to the voice of a long-dead man, and all because—when last week I picked up a book he had published in 1957—I thought he might as well have been writing in the present, so uncannily familiar were the vignettes he recounted from this country’s political life seven decades and more ago.

The man was George A. Malcolm (1881-1961), the first full-time dean of the University of the Philippines College of Law whose building now bears his name, and later an Associate Justice of the prewar Philippine Supreme Court. The book he authored was American Colonial Careerist (Boston: The Chrisopher Publishing House, 1957), a collection of his memoirs and impressions as a civil servant under the American colonial regime over most of that period.

I was drawn to the Malcolm book because I collect antiquarian Filipiniana, for one, and of course because of the UP connection, but also because Malcolm graduated from the University of Michigan (where I and many other Filipino scholars took their graduate degrees) and had long been intrigued by Ann Arbor’s contributions (positive and surely some negative ones as well) to Philippine education and government. Michigan also produced Dean Worcester, who would defend America’s paternalistic rule, and lawyer Clyde De Witt, who would practice in the Philippines and later set up an endowment for Filipino student-lawyers in Michigan that would support such legal luminaries as Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor Santiago, and Raphael Lotilla.

Because of his positions, Malcolm came to know and befriend nearly all the major Filipino and American politicians and leaders of the prewar period, and his book gives intimate and sometimes saucy sketches of them. Manuel L. Quezon, not surprisingly, dominates his memoirs. “The Filipino is a natural and consummate politician,” he writes. “The great Jefe of them all for three decades was Manuel L. Quezon. He was the spectacular figure who gave color to the scene. A close second to Quezon in astuteness, but lacking his dynamic personality, was Sergio Osmeña.” But he also adds that “Quezon dearly loved the trappings of office. He relished the glittering appellation, ‘Your Excellency.’… An added Quezonian touch was a red shoulder-sash and three foreign decorations—a medal attached to his left lapel and two blazing badges pinned on the right side of his coat above the hip.”

Further, Malcolm notes, “Quezon gave an early demonstration of a desire to see the world at the expense of the taxpayers. In the role of official delegate of the Philippines to the International Congress of Navigation, held in czarist Russia in 1908, the young Assemblyman arrived in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) after the Congress had already adjourned. The P34,000 set aside for this trip was trivial compared to the fabulous expense accounts entailed in paying for other pilgrimages all over the globe with a large entourage. Curiously, the Filipino people were rather proud of the impression their effulgent leader was making in foreign lands and rarely complained of his prodigality.” (One who did complain was a young UP student named Ferdinand Marcos, who railed against MLQ’s “extravagance.”)

But Quezon was hardly alone. Malcolm goes on to say that “Quirino filled the expensive shoes of Quezon, and even added frills of his own concoction. A P5,000 bed to case the President’s slumbers became the prize reference in political campaigns. An investigation conducted by an inquisitive Senate purported to reveal that Quirino had spent about a million pesos on four trips abroad. Journalist Teodoro M. Locsin cynically observed: ‘This is living.’”

Indeed, presidential or not, the corruption we seem so upset about these days was already widespread. Malcolm observes that “Certain phases of the electoral process in the Philippines merit special attention. Aspirants for office have flagrantly and repeatedly flaunted the provision of the Electoral Code which specifies that no candidate shall spend for his campaign more than the total amount of the candidate. Yet, it is common information that a candidate for a seat in Congress, whose annual salary is P7,200, has been required to deposit P25,000 with party chieftains and has had to part with many more pesos in addition to have a fighting chance. In the 1953 presidential election, such sums as P2,000,000 were openly mentioned as needed by each of the three contending parties to finance their campaigns.

“Where did this money come from? The money came from candidates who bankrupted their patrimony and from the ‘big shots,’ in particular the sugar tycoons. Moreover, millions of pesos of the people’s money was drained out of the public treasury, generally for local ‘public works,’ to influence the people’s will…. Many phrases descriptive of Philippine politics have been scattered about. Merely as examples, I quote the words of an American publisher and a Filipino educator. Wrote Roy W. Howard, Philippine politics is ‘a great national pastime,’ with politicians “ten centavos a dozen.” Declared Mariano V. de los Santos, President of the University of Manila: ‘There is no activity in which we can engage where partisan politics does not seep in. Business, industry, agriculture, all are permeated by bad politics. Under such a climate, naturally politicians of all sorts thrive. But they thrive at the expense of the general welfare.’”

And where did many of these politicians come from? We go back to the UP College of Law and its poorer cousins which seem to have mushroomed all over the place:

“One potent reason why politics has come to play such a large part in the life of the people is the preference on the part of the youth for academic education. The result is a bumper crop of lawyers with no place to go except into the government service or into politics. It would inure to good government to have legally-trained and disciplined men and women in public life, if such exaggerated importance was not attached to the title of abogado in the Philippines.

“The College of Law, University of the Philippines, was organized to supply quality, not quantity, leaders. All to no avail. Law schools mushroomed all over the Islands. The Bar examinations became great sporting events, with candidates ready to mortgage their patrimony and sell their souls if only they could get passing grades. Yet when the six long years of study were passed and the Bar examination was hurdled, no clients awaited the embryo lawyers. Droves of half-baked parasites were superimposed on an already top-heavy governmental structure and a lean economy.”

Perhaps we need to bring the spirit of Justice Malcolm back in a séance as amicus curiae in the Senate impeachment trial.

Qwertyman No. 217: The Edjop Effect

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 28, 2026

I’LL GET right to the point: my wife Beng and I, along with a younger couple, caught one of the last few screenings of the movie “Edjop”—and we all emerged so moved, albeit in different ways, that we had to spend another hour-plus over coffee just to process what we saw. 

It wasn’t even a matter of “liking” or “not liking” the movie or director Katski Flores’ and scriptwriter Jade Castro’s treatment of the life of the martyred activist Edgar “Edjop” Jopson. Grappling with the broader contours of the story, we were in no mood to quibble over details gotten wrong (and yes, there were a few) or political lines blurred, as many subsequent reviews and critiques seem to have focused on, for their own good reasons.

For Beng and me, the impact was personal, having been activists ourselves who came of age during that tumultuous First Quarter Storm that Edjop—perhaps inadvertently—helped launch. We saw “Edjop” for what it likely set out to be—the story of a young middle-class idealist’s radicalization in an environment of gross injustice, poverty, and oppression. What made it particularly poignant—and this for me represented the film’s true strength, although others may have seen it as a needless diversion—was its framing as a father-daughter story, of a younger generation’s belated understanding and acceptance of their elders’ actions and even excesses. I found it well acted, especially the major roles.

Full disclosure: director Katski had interviewed me, among many others, even while the film project was just getting started, to get my views on Edjop. (She had, of course, other excellent sources, including Bing Pimentel’s books on the man and the period and Joe Cuaresma’s documentary.) I told Katski that I could contribute very little beyond impressions gained from one brief encounter with Edjop.

That encounter happened a few days before January 26, 1970—the date of Ferdinand Marcos’ State of the Nation Address at the old Senate building (now the National Museum), for which the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), which Edjop headed, was planning a massive protest rally. An organizational meeting for that rally was held somewhere in Quezon City, and for reasons I can no longer remember except possibly that I was already an activist at the Philippine Science High School, I was there, more of a kibitzer than anything.

I had just turned 16 a few days earlier. We had rallied in high school for local demands such as a new and larger building, but January 26 was going to be our first big exposure to national issues, and we took the lead from the NUSP, the so-called “moderates,” being then deeply mistrustful of the radical Left under the Kabataang Makabayan and Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (KM-SDK). I recall that meeting of senior NUSP leaders and their allies, and Edjop in a white shirt or barong. What struck me was his earnestness, his passionate belief in his cause, conveyed in an even voice and manner. 

We joined the January 26 rally, assembling on the grounds of the University of Sto. Tomas, bearing “J26M” armbands. We marched to the Senate where Marcos was speaking. I was too far from the entrance to follow everything, but I could see that the KM-SDK were also there in front, and I would later learn (though this account might yet be corrected) that Edjop had decided to terminate the rally early because things were turning ugly, but then SDK firebrand Gary Olivar, a formidable speaker, grabbed the microphone to agitate the crowd. Marcos emerged, a black cardboard coffin was thrown his way from somewhere, the security forces moved, and a melee ensued. We ran for our lives. The FQS had formally begun. 

We moderates were almost as indignant about the way the Left had hijacked the event as by the State’s brutal response; I stayed out of the January 30-31 protest rally that proved even more violent, but watched on the news as students were teargassed and truncheoned along Mendiola and Malacañang. I dreaded what lay ahead; I was due to graduate from high school that year. It should have been a time of hope, but I knew only that something was terribly wrong, that the future was going to be harsh, and that I was as confused as anyone about what to do and whom to follow.

As it turned out, history carried a very wry sense of irony—even humor, were the setting not so tragic.

Within that year, I entered UP and almost immediately joined the Nationalist Corps, the Philippine Collegian, and the Alpha Sigma fraternity. The Nationalist Corps became my entry point to the SDK, and now I saw the “clerico-fascist” moderates to be sorely misguided and wanting in revolutionary fervor. In Alpha Sigma, one of my fraternity brothers was none other than the Gary Olivar we blamed for the J26M fiasco; in the Collegian, our editor was another frat brod, Tony Tagamolila. 

As the decade moved on, I would be arrested and imprisoned, and upon my release, I would take on a writing job I needed—with the government. Tony Tagamolila would die in an encounter with the military in Panay. Gary Olivar would move to the US and study at Harvard (and much, much later would become PGMA’s spokesman).

Little did I know that Edjop himself had become radicalized and was performing far more dangerous tasks in Mindanao than most of us ever did even in Manila. His death fell like a rebuke to those who had doubted him. Meanwhile, I had resigned from my NEDA job to go back to UP to study and to teach, and by the time the Ninoy assassination and EDSA happened, I had become convinced—as I still am—that the middle road remains the most viable if not the only one forward. It seems that I’ve returned to Edjop’s NUSP. 

I don’t know what Edjop himself would think of our situation now, of another Marcos in Malacañang trying to face down a possibly even more vicious alternative, of a CPP fractured by internecine warfare, of a people too easily swayed by rumor and shadow. If the effect of Edjop—the movie and the man—is to make us think of where we ourselves stand today, then the effort of making this film will well have been worth it.

Qwertyman No. 208: Now and Forever

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 27, 2026

 

LATER TODAY, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. will be delivering his fifth—and second-to-the-last—State of the Nation Address (SONA). In anticipation of that event, I got invitations from several media networks last week to talk about how SONAs get made, and what I expected BBM to say today.

The invitations were likely prompted by someone’s discovery that I used to be a presidential speechwriter—a title that sounds grander than the job itself, which of course is a privilege in some respects (and presuming your principal isn’t a crook, perhaps more honored in the breach) but also in others a crushing chore.

As I must’ve noted in this corner at some point, in a past life, I wrote or drafted speeches for five presidents since my early twenties—for Marcos Sr., Cory Aquino, Fidel V. Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo—but it was FVR whom I served the longest, and frankly with the greatest satisfaction.

I wrote more than 600 speeches for him as part of a small crew of speechwriters that worked quietly off-site—the so-called West Avenue outfit headed by the late Johnny Gatbonton, my model and mentor in the craft. We operated all those years far from Malacañang—a deliberate choice, to isolate and insulate ourselves from Palace intrigue.

We produced tons of material on demand—there were days when I would write four speeches for occasions as diverse as a bridge inauguration, the Famas awards, a peace agreement signing, and a vin d’honneur, with little to go on—not even Google in those pre-Internet days—but my own wits. And yes, my training as a writer of fiction surely helped, along with a diploma in Development Economics that I picked up along the way. We learned quickly, and we delivered. (I never met FVR as a client when I was writing for him, although ironically, as I’ve related before, he was the guest speaker at the TOYM and Palanca awards when I was an awardee—and yes, bizarrely, I got assigned to write his speeches for those events. I never introduced myself to him as his speechwriter until we met again for a book interview shortly before he died. We had a good laugh then.)

The year’s biggest job, of course, was the SONA. Like I told my interviewers, at least in my experience, no single writer writes the SONA. It takes a bureaucratic barangay to produce one, which probably explains the chop-suey character of certain SONAs you’ve heard. Normally, presidential speeches are produced by the Presidential Management Staff, and the executive departments submit their list of accomplishments to the PMS for consolidation and construction into a SONA. (Under FVR, these inputs ended up with us, although of course the President literally always had the last word.) The President—or his or her chief advisers—might come up with a central theme or slogan, around which the rest of the address could be organized. In 1993, for example, it was “a level playing field” for FVR; ten years later, GMA trumpeted her “strong republic.”

My own sense of a good or ideal SONA is one that’s focused, clear, easy to understand, sincere, and above all hopeful and inspiring. It’s a tall order amidst uncertainty and despair, but it’s precisely when times are bad that people need to hear a message of hope—one they can believe in or at least hold the President to, despite their doubts and misgivings. But that’s just me, as a writer looking for stylistic coherence and a Churchillian sort of impact and memorability, rather than a laundry list of X number of bridges built and Y number of tourists brought in. Leave that to a technical appendix.

The fact is that SONAs are constitutionally mandated documents, a report of an administration’s accomplishments provided as a matter of public accountability. It began in America with George Washington and now continues as the State of the Union (SOTU). For over a century from Jefferson onward, the SOTU became just a written report submitted to Congress; Woodrow Wilson revived it as a speech, thinking that a president had to be seen and heard by the people. We Filipinos took up the practice—and also constitutionalized it—in 1935, with President Quezon focusing presciently on national defense. (Interestingly, he spoke before a unicameral assembly—no senators to complicate life then for a brief interlude.)

It used to be that no one seemed really that interested in SONAs. Even on January 26, 1970, when as a sixteener I marched with thousands of other students outside the Legislative Building to protest Ferdinand Marcos’ SONA and thereby unwittingly helped trigger the tumultuous First Quarter Storm, we neither knew nor cared what FM was saying inside. Today people watch SONAs for the fashion show and for the inevitable mayhem outside the Batasan.

But last year, BBM dropped a bomb at the SONA that I suspect even he didn’t realize was going to be that big. His “Mahiya naman kayo!” broadside against corruption set off a further and indeed continuing series of explosions, all the way to the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte, as well as a Kanagawa-sized wave of expectations that now hovers over the last two years of his administration.

So what will or should BBM talk about this afternoon? My short list:

1. An acknowledgment of the economic crisis our people are suffering, and an announcement of meaningful measures to bring some relief. Talk about horrendous power bills, jeepney drivers pulling 16-hour days, seniors collapsing at ayuda lines: this is reality for most Filipinos today.

           2. An update on his professed campaign against corruption; what next after the ill-conceived and underpowered Independent Commission on Infrastructure? Corruption bridges economics and politics, with public money being used by and for political power. I doubt that BBM will directly address Sara’s impeachment—best for him to stay above it and let the prosecution do its job—but it remains a corruption and accountability issue, and should be taken in that context.

            3. A resolve to pursue these priorities over his last two years. He won’t and can’t use the word “redemption”—a mountain of skepticism still stands in his way there—but I’m sure he’s aware that people are watching what he’ll do next. In the end, it won’t be speeches but deeds that will make the difference—but as he learned last year, a few words can make big things happen. If I were the President—which every presidential speechwriter has to fearlessly assume for a few hours—the best way to think of the next two years is to think of forever.

               

               

               

               

               

               

              Qwertyman No. 195: Why Leni Should Run—Despite Herself

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              Qwertyman for Monday, April 27, 2026

              THE MOST important news for us Filipinos last week was the news that wasn’t: former Vice President and now Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo’s announcement that she was not going to run for president in 2028, and that she would be happy to seek another term in Naga’s city hall. 

              She went on to provide a list of alternative contenders for the presidency—younger and also progressive political leaders whose principles and vision aligned with hers. The names included the usual suspects—chiefly Senators Risa Hontiveros, Kiko Pangilinan, and Bam Aquino, as well as, down the road, Mayors Joy Belmonte and Vico Sotto (when he comes of constitutional age). They’re all worthy and credible candidates, of course, all of whom I hold in high esteem; their only problem is, well, they’re not named Leni Robredo. 

              Leni’s announcement was predictably met with profound dismay by her supporters, none louder than her former running mate Kiko Pangilinan, who said that “I believe Leni is in the best position to build the broadest and strongest unity.” Both Kiko and Liberal Party stalwart Leila de Lima voiced the hope that Leni would change her mind between now and 2028.

              It’s a hope and a prayer that I—among many millions of others—certainly share. While I’d met her only a couple of times during the 2022 campaign, I came away much impressed by her leadership qualities and her sincerity. I was deeply disappointed when she lost the election, feeling that, once again, our people had voted against their own best interests, manipulated by falsehood, fear, and desperation. 

              Leni’s midterm decision to run for mayor instead of senator also seemed a letdown for many. But now it clearly was, in hindsight, a brilliant one, insulating her from the toxicity of national politics while building up her credibility at and with the grassroots. National figures—including no less than her chief adversary, President Bongbong Marcos—have made pilgrimages to Naga to seek her out. She has lost nothing in terms of visibility and appeal.

              This is why—watching this drama play out in what could be the third of five acts—I remain convinced that despite her pronouncements, Leni Robredo cannot and should not shut the door for good on another presidential campaign, because as Kiko Pangilinan himself emphasizes, literally no one is in a better position to unify and to lead the country out of the moral and economic morass we find ourselves in today. Her abilities are established, her reputation unsullied. Our nation and people need her more than she needs the presidency, which is probably the most persuasive argument that can be raised in favor of her candidacy that even she cannot deny.

              The corrupt acts for which her successor and likely opponent, VP Sara Duterte, now faces impeachment are the best subsidiary reasons for her running. There can be no sharper contrast in terms of personal morality and executive capability than the performance of these two vice presidents, one just after the other, under similar circumstances, including virtual isolation within an antagonistic bureaucracy. 

              Certainly any one of those named by Leni as capable alternatives will be better at managing the country than Sara, and will deserve our support. But this unfolding scenario calls for a head-to-head confrontation and comparison between the two leading protagonists—not just for the theatrics of it, but so that the paying audience—our people—can see and appreciate the difference with stark clarity: two women, two former VPs, two lawyers, two local executives, to which we can add two moral and ethical frameworks, two leadership and management styles, two visions of what makes for a just and progressive society. Can you just imagine the presidential debates? What could be more educational for the Filipino?

              The cynics among us could opine that Leni just might be playing it coy, waiting for an inexorable tsunami of support to build up and raise her beyond all protestations. Hele hele bago quiere, as we often put it, or in a word, pakipot.

              In the history of performative and traditional politics, that would of course be entirely possible. There is, in fact, something we can learn from the ancient Romans in this respect. There was a Roman political practice of recusatio—of an expressed reluctance to assume high office, which made its professor seem worthier in the public eye than one with the self-explanatory ambitio, an obvious lust for power. Recusatio could have been a show of genuine modesty (George Washington and Pope Francis famously did not expect or want to lead, but accepted the high responsibilities thrust upon them) or political theater (Julius Caesar had Mark Antony offer him the crown three times, refusing it to rising applause). 

              The difference is that Leni Robredo is no traditional politician—or is very good at acting at not being one. She speaks sincerely—which, in this case of her rejection of national office, we wish for once that she would not. In her statement, Leni also warned against the Filipino’s tendency to find and repose their faith in a “savior” to cure the nation’s ills—a clear and instructive reference to our experience with strongman rule. We can understand that, and it’s a reminder worth keeping in mind. Leni’s election alone will not guarantee a better Filipino future.

              But there again is why Leni should run, despite herself. Beyond her abounding individual qualifications and experience, beyond her as a person, Leni Robredo has become the embodiment of what we want to see in government: ability, yes, but also  integrity, accountability, selflessness, and devotion to public duty and the national interest. We will be voting not just for her but for the best versions of ourselves that we can yet become. She and younger examples like Vico make us believe that goodness and hope can yet win over evil and despair—and translate them into tangible and sustainable progress, beyond airy abstractions.

              I believe myself that the Leni wave will happen—but not too soon; it should grow and crest at the right time, closer to 2028, perhaps both by design and desperation. The longer that the Sara saga plays out, amid our mounting economic woes and the apparent ineffectuality of the Marcos administration in dealing with the corruption issues it released from the Pandora’s box it opened, the stronger the need for Leni will become. 

              The classic Roman model of the reluctant leader was Cincinnatus (519–430 BC), said to be a gentleman farmer whom the Senate called upon to leave his plow and to save the Roman army from a tribal assault—which he did, before returning to his farm after serving for fifteen days as dictator. Leni Robredo might well consider giving us those two weeks (all right, those six years); her farm in Naga will always be there.

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

              Qwertyman No. 186: Countering the Sara Saga

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              Qwertyman for Monday, February 23, 2026

              TO NO one’s great surprise—except perhaps for the “why now”—Vice President Sara Duterte publicly announced last week her plan to run for president in 2028. 

              I’ll leave the more informed and more nuanced readings of this event to the professional analysts, but from my pedestrian point of view, the timing’s the thing. By throwing down the gauntlet so early, more than two years before the actual election, VP Sara is leaving no doubt as to her intentions (which we all knew, already). 

              It doesn’t take a PhD in Political Science to see that, more importantly, with her impeachment being revived in the House, presumably to be raised to the Senate, she is serving notice to our notoriously opportunistic politicos that they better fall in step now—or else. The Dutertes still hold sway over vast swaths of political territory especially in the south, where pro-impeachment legislators can be easily picked off and punished in a Duterte restoration. When it comes down to a vote, the math will tell the story of who’s afraid of Sara Duterte.

              The question really is, what are we progressive-minded citizens and our leaders supposed to do? 

              Right now, the DDS side has one advantage over everyone else. It’s fighting for its life, with whatever power and influence it retains. With its patriarch in prison and his successor in peril for her political future, it has to go all-in on Sara’s candidacy or face even greater and perhaps permanent debilitation. That gives it a clarity of purpose that’s easier to translate to specific actions, to a tight script and playbook, than it is for the yet amorphous, once improbable, and still highly hypothetical Pinklawan-administration united front to agree on the most basic terms of coalition.

              I can sense the hand of AI in fleshing out the details of the aforementioned script, but as one recent DDS post puts it, here’s the winning scenario:

              “…. A story, the kind of story that does not need advertising, does not need media allies, does not need oligarch money, because it tells itself. A father who loved his country enough to die for it in a foreign prison. A daughter who loved her father enough to fly across the world to sit with him in chains. A people who loved them both enough to wait, and watch, and when the moment came.. to roar!!!

              “The grandmaster played his greatest game not from the presidential palace. Not from the campaign trail. Not from a position of power and comfort.

              “He played it from a cell. With nothing but his mind, his daughter, and his unbroken faith in the Filipino people.

              “And when Sara Duterte raises her right hand in 2028 when the Philippines renders its verdict on everything that has happened, everything that was done to them, everything they endured and refused to surrender — Rodrigo Duterte will not be there to see it. Or maybe he will, we do not know.

              “But he will have made it happen.”

              I commented on this post by saying “I wonder what the AI prompt was,” because it displays the kind of verbal cadence, the dramatic buildup employing sentence fragments, the repetition for emphasis, so common to AI-assisted compositions. 

              But AI or not, it does create the kind of simple but spinnable story that appeals to soft-minded and soft-hearted voters, drawing on a long and deep Pinoy tradition of melodrama that sanctifies the api, the unjustly oppressed. The day before Sara’s announcement, Digong had played his part by casting himself in a letter to the International Criminal Court as a man “old, tired, and frail,” prepared to “die in prison” with his “heart and soul (always remaining) in the Philippines.”

              Those of us who know better lost no time pointing out the hypocrisy of the old man’s demand for the “respect” he never showed his political enemies and tokhang victims, and we can all go to sleep convinced of his guilt and wishing for his expectation to be realized. But the truth, in a sense, is almost irrelevant now in what will be a war of narratives, which Sara hopes to win. 

              From her side of the story, her father is already lost—and therein lies his political value, as sacrificial martyr, which can only rise should he in fact perish in prison or appear even more “old, tired, and frail” closer to 2028. Her impeachment, if it happens, will also amplify her kaapihan. Her disqualification from running for public office will require another step—a separate vote in the Senate, as far as I know (do correct me if I’m wrong)—or at least a separate and possibly concurrent criminal conviction. She could also resign before impeachment, surfacing the unresolved question of whether she can still be impeached and disqualified after. Clearly, if the point is to appear at a constant disadvantage to project persecution, Sara will not want for options.

              And she shouldn’t, because if we believe in her guilt as much as we do in her father’s, then the only way forward is forceful prosecution, the awa factor be damned. Criminal convictions for both will provide a definitive conclusion. But on the safe assumption that nothing in this country, including some Supreme Court decisions, is ever truly final, it remains possible that Sara Duterte will be on the ticket in 2028. 

              Whatever kind of opposition emerges to contest the DDS will need a powerful counter-narrative to the Sara saga—which, I suspect, will wear thin as the evidence of criminal wrongdoing piles up against the Dutertes at the Hague and in Manila. 

              An ascendant story could emerge from someone who has her own underdog story to tell—of being diminished and marginalized in Digong’s regime, but of serving nobly nonetheless—and, more significantly, of keeping herself busy all this time far from messy Manila, improving the lives of her constituents in concrete and tangible ways. 

              I think we all know who that person is, and what a compelling and positive comeback story she can offer, against the vengefulness and the sordidness of the successor who turned her office into a junk-food dispensary.

              Qwertyman No. 181: Another FQS?

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              Qwertyman for Monday, January 19, 2026

              I’M WRITING this piece on my 72nd birthday, so I hope you’ll indulge me if I revert to the memory of another January 56 years ago. On the afternoon of January 26, 1970, I milled with thousands of other young students on the campus of the University of Sto. Tomas, the staging ground for a large contingent of demonstrators marching to the Legislative Building near the Luneta (now the National Museum). President Ferdinand Marcos was going to deliver his State of the Nation Address, and a mass action had been called to protest a host of issues, from Marcos’ increasingly authoritarian rule to rising prices, militarization, corruption, and Philippine subservience to American interests.

              I had just turned 16, and was a senior and an activist at the Philippine Science High School. But I was no radical—not yet; I stood under the banner of the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), among so-called “moderates” led by Edgar Jopson, derided by FM as the “grocer’s son” and later to become a revolutionary martyr. Unlike the far-Left Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK, which I would soon join) who were railing against “imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism,” the NUSP’s cause sounded much more tangible albeit modest: a non-partisan 1971 Constitutional Convention.

              What happened next that afternoon, when both groups of protesters converged at the Senate, would change Philippine political history. The moderates had paid for the rental of the protest mikes and loudspeakers, and wanted to pack up early, but the radicals literally seized the paraphernalia—and figuratively seized the day—launching into a verbal offensive that soon turned physical. Then a young journalist covering the event, Jose “Pete” Lacaba provides the reportage:

              “Where the demonstration leaders stood, emblems of the enemy were prominently displayed: a cardboard coffin representing the death of democracy at the hands of the goonstabulary in the last elections; a cardboard crocodile, painted green, symbolizing congressmen greedy for allowances; a paper effigy of Ferdinand Marcos. When the President stepped out of Congress, the effigy was set on fire and, according to report, the coffin was pushed toward him, the crocodile hurled at him. From my position down on the street, I saw only the burning of the effigy—a singularly undramatic incident, since it took the effigy so long to catch fire. I could not even see the President and could only deduce the fact of his coming out of Congress from the commotion at the doors, the sudden radiance created by dozens of flashbulbs bursting simultaneously, and the rise in the streets of the cry: “MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet!”

              “Things got so confused at this point that I cannot honestly say which came first: the pebbles flying or the cops charging. I remember only the cops rushing down the steps of Congress, pushing aside the demonstration leaders, and jumping down to the streets, straight into the mass of demonstrators. The cops flailed away, the demonstrators scattered. The cops gave chase to anything that moved, clubbed anyone who resisted, and hauled off those they caught up with. The demonstrators who got as far as the sidewalk that led to the Muni golf links started to pick up pebbles and rocks with which they pelted the police. Very soon, placards had turned into missiles, and the sound of broken glass punctuated the yelling: soft-drink bottles were flying, too. The effigy was down on the ground, still burning.”

              The January 26 rally and the trouble that erupted would lead to the January 30-31 demos that would prove even more violent, and what would become the First Quarter Storm or the FQS was born. “First quarter” would turn out to describe not only the beginning of 1970 but of the decade itself, as the start of 1971 would prove just as incendiary, with the establishment of the Diliman Commune (and of course, now as a UP freshman, I was there). It seemed that the entire country was politically on fire, with protests mounting by the week, and it would all culminate in what everyone predicted: the declaration of martial law in September 1972. 

              It took another 14 years and another “first quarter storm”—the tumultuous months of January and February 1986, following the snap election—to depose Marcos. Fifteen years later in 2001, on another January, yet another president, Joseph Estrada, would be hounded out of office over issues of corruption.

              What is it about these first quarters that provoke such firestorms? And do we still have it in us to begin the year on a note of political resolve?

              I’ve been worried, like many of us, that the Christmas break, the congressional recess, and intervening issues may have sucked the steam out of the public outrage that boiled over the flood-control scam last year, and lulled the government into thinking that the worst was over and that we could all just settle back into the old routine: let the Ombudsman and the courts do their job, etc. 

              What’s worse is if we fall into that mindset, too. The budget deliberations, the Cabral death mystery, the Leviste files, the Barzaga antics, and even a traffic violation episode have all seemed to be distractions from our laser-sharp focus on bringing the crooks to justice. But in fact, they’re all of one piece: demanding better and honest government, the overarching issue we need to press.

              And just as the radicals seized the initiative from the moderates 56 years ago, FM’s son, PBBM, can still seize the day by going against all expectations, even against his own nature, and finishing what he may have inadvertently begun: weeding out corruption in government. Never mind the motive—reviving his sagging poll numbers, saving his skin, redeeming the Marcos name, or leaving a worthy legacy behind. He has little choice, if he and his family are to survive. 

              There are immediate and concrete steps he can take to achieve this:

              1. Activate the Independent People’s Commission. The people are waiting for his next move in this respect; get the enabling law passed and the job done.

              2. Impeach VP Sara Duterte. The grounds haven’t changed, and the urgency can only increase as 2028 approaches.

              3. Revamp the Cabinet, but replace the non-performers. PBBM knows who they are as well as the public—especially the publicity-seekers whose departments haven’t delivered.

              4. Find Atong Ang, Zaldy Co, Harry Roque, etc. and jail the big fish—including political allies. It’s hard to believe that with billions in intelligence funds, the administration can’t track and nail these highly visible fugitives down. Justice is perception.

              Do these, and maybe we’ll avoid the generational kind of flare-up and meltdown that followed January 26, 1970.

              Qwertyman No. 176: Remembering CAB (1929-2025)

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              Qwertyman for Monday, December 15, 2025

              THE DEATH last week at the age of 95 of Cesar Augusto Buenaventura—known to his friends and associates as CAB—marked the passing of yet another member of that golden generation of Filipinos who lived through the Second World War and almost literally built and shaped Philippine industry and society in its aftermath. An engineer by training, CAB was also a management pioneer, a business leader, a civil libertarian, and a valued adviser to presidents. (As a former member of the UP Board of Regents, CAB would often text me for news about goings-on in Diliman, concerned as ever with the state of Philippine higher education and of UP’s role in it.)

              I had the privilege of writing a yet-unpublished biography of the Buenaventura siblings (Cesar was followed by social worker Elisa, lawyer Chito, and banker Paeng). And while Cesar chose to self-publish his own three-volume biography a few years ago (I Have a Story to Tell), the original draft has many interesting anecdotes worth sharing with young Filipinos who barely know their economic history. Let me pull up this except you can keep in mind the next time you gas up at a Shell station, visit the UP Chapel, or see a DMCI building.

              As soon as he graduated from UP in 1950, Cesar started looking for a job, and almost immediately found one with a man who would become an important influence in his life and a titan in the Philippine construction industry, David M. Consunji. Right after the war, Consunji began building houses—a skill then in high demand in the war-ravaged city—competing on the principle of “price plus quality.” David also made sure that he got the best people and paid them the best wages. And so a strapping 21-year-old named Cesar Buenaventura, fresh out of college, strode into Consunji’s office and got his first job, as Consunji himself recounts:

              “In 1951, I hired my very first engineer, Cesar Buenaventura. He was then a young civil engineering graduate from UP who was waiting for the results of the board exams he had just taken. It was my brother Raul, his classmate in UP, who told him to see me because I was starting my own construction company. I thought he was very capable so I hired Cesar. 

              “Soon after, we started doing our own projects, and among Cesar’s first assignments were three houses we were building in Forbes Park. Forbes was not yet a posh village then; land there was selling at just P4.00 to P6.00 per square meter. After that, Cesar and I did some more houses. I made Cesar the cost engineer and field engineer for our various other projects. He also took care of the payroll, which amounted to P15,000 to P20,000 a week.

              “It was in the Laguna College project that Cesar took on greater responsibilities. While we were doing the plans, Cesar said, ‘Don’t bother hiring a structural engineer, I’ll do it. I asked him if he was sure he could do it and he said ‘Yes.’ Every time I would see him, long after the building was finished, I would tell him that it was still standing intact, even after several earthquakes, without a single crack on a wall.

              “Cesar was my very first assistant, and even then, I could see that he would go far. I wanted him to stay with us, but he decided to go to the United States for graduate studies in 1952.”

              (Upon returning from Lehigh University with his MS in Civil Engineering), Cesar rejoined Consunji for some work on the UP Chapel, which had been designed by a young architect named Leandro Locsin. Locsin had impressed Fr. Delaney with a small church he had designed in Victorias, and now he took on what would become one of his signature pieces, the UP Chapel. Fred Juinio served as structural engineer, with Dave Consunji as the builder. 

              But armed with his Lehigh degree and eager to make full use of his new learning, Cesar could now consider more options. And the offers came. UP, for one, wanted him to teach, and was willing to pay him P400 a month. But a big petroleum company offered him P300 more, with his salary to be raised upon completing probation as an executive trainee. In 1956, Cesar went with Shell—a decision that would define the rest of his professional life.

              In 1975, Cesar Buenaventura achieved what no other Filipino had up to that point by becoming president of Shell Philippines and Chief Executive Officer of the Shell Group of Companies.

              Cesar’s rise to the helmsmanship of Shell also got the attention of someone in great need of executive talent: Ferdinand E. Marcos, president of the Philippines and, at that time, the country’s martial-law ruler. With the global oil crisis still hurting the Philippines in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war, Marcos put up the Philippine National Oil Company to explore for oil and develop alternative energy sources, and was scouting for the right man to head it. His eye fell on Cesar, who had just stepped up to the Shell presidency; surely such a man had the skills and the vision to head the new PNOC. Marcos had Buenaventura called to Malacañang. 

              While he may have been honored to be offered the position, Cesar remembered his father’s admonition against serving in government. He went to see Marcos in the Palace. Luckily, before Marcos could make his pitch and demand Cesar’s commitment, a phone call from the First Lady, who was in New York, interrupted the conversation. Cesar used that break to gather his wits and to come up with the argument that such a move to government would be premature, coming so soon after his appointment as the first Filipino head of a major multinational company. Cesar suggested that he could serve the country’s interests better if he were able to persuade Shell to search for oil in the Philippines—which they eventually did. Marcos did not press the point, and Cesar was spared.

              Yet more of Cesar’s friends would join Marcos’s Cabinet: David Consunji, as Secretary and later Minister of Public Works, Transportation, and Communication, then by Dean Fred Juinio in the same post, followed much later by Totoy Dans, when the Cabinet post was divided into two departments—Public Works, and Transportation and Communications. Consunji labored mightily to fight corruption in that notoriously graft-ridden department, only to find himself unceremoniously removed for refusing to play along. Dans followed the same straight and narrow path when took on the job in 1979, but he would later be, in Cesar’s eyes, unjustly vilified for his association with Marcos, even if he hadn’t enriched himself. 

              So instead of taking what could have been a personally and politically costly detour into the Marcos government, Cesar Buenaventura managed to stay on at his beloved Shell, in a position he would hold with distinction for the next 14 years. 

              Qwertyman No. 174: Doing the Doable

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              Qwertyman for Monday, December 1, 2025

              AS NOT a few placards in yesterday’s big anti-corruption march would have said, both President Bongbong Marcos and VP Sara Duterte should resign, along with everyone in public office implicated in the flood-control scandal and all the other shenanigans that have come to light over the past couple of months. 

              That probably means half the government, but given the current public mood, the more the better, to give the nation a chance to rebuild itself on new foundations of moral rectitude and accountability. At least that’s the long view, supported by the Left among other parties who think that anything short of a national reset will simply paper over the problems and guarantee their comeback. 

              It all sounds good, and it does make sense—except that, as we all know, it ain’t gonna happen. 

              It’s about as realistic as the expectation that BBM will fall to his knees, own up to the Marcos billions, and ship all that money back to the Philippines on a FedEx plane for mass distribution, any more than VP Sara will admit to her father’s drug-fueled bloodlust, seek forgiveness of all the tokhang victims, and forsake her presidential ambitions. Let’s face it: the Marcos and Duterte dragons will be clawing at each other all the way to 2028. Meanwhile, what are we mere mortals supposed to do or to hope for? 

              In the very least, we can ignore the DDS calls for BBM to step down and for Sara to take over, because there’s even less appetite for that than the Both-Resign demand. The Dutertes want to make hay of the moment, but the sun isn’t exactly shining on them. Despite their strong and well-funded social media efforts, the DDS camp seems pretty much in disarray, with Digong in jail, Sara in limbo until February (it tells me something that they approved the OVP’s 2026 budget in full—it’s for the office, not VP Sara, although she doesn’t seem to know the difference), Bato de la Rosa suddenly scarce, and their shot at a junta takeover badly misfiring. 

              (The ICC’s predictable decision not to grant his interim release could in fact prove to be an ironic win. Digong at this point is useful only as emotional capital for Sara’s survival and triumph. His camp, I suspect, secretly wants him to stay in The Hague as a symbol of the Marcoses’ unforgivable perfidy. Bringing him back home will mean having to take care of a grumpy old man whose greatest ability—cursing—isn’t helping him much in his present situation; he was never a Leila de Lima, and certainly no Ninoy Aquino.)

              All the players’ moves are interesting in this grand melodrama. I frankly can’t trust the Left, either, to show the way forward. Like a religion (did I hear someone say “Iglesia ni Cristo”?), the Left likes to flaunt its moral ascendancy—to “virtue-signal,” in today’s parlance—and its rock-solid grasp of the global and local situation from the Marxist standpoint. And yet it gets all tone-deaf and cross-eyed when it comes to picking its horses—ditching EDSA, but backing billionaire capitalist Manny Villar and then pseudo-nationalist and butcher Rodrigo Duterte for the presidency (should we even mention slaughtering comrades it deemed wayward in the Ahos campaign?). 

              Interestingly, the INC also supported Duterte in 2016, and then BBM and Sara Duterte in 2022. While adopting some progressive liberals like Franklin Drilon, Risa Hontiveros, and more recently Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan into its senatorial slate, it has also flexed its machinery behind Duterte surrogates Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa, as well as corruption-tainted Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada. During its last mass rally last November 25 for “peace, transparency, and accountability,” however, it was careful to distance itself from recent calls for BBM’s resignation. In other words, the INC is the perfect straddler, the seguristathat makes sure it will survive and prosper under any administration, reportedly to secure key government appointments for its favored nominees.

              That leaves us and our own wits, which—considering everyone’s else’s brain fog—might yet prove the most trustworthy.

              In the realm of the doable, I want to see heads roll—as close to the top as the situation will allow. One way of looking at this, and strangely enough, is that the Filipino people aside, the party with the greatest stake in seeing this anti-corruption campaign through to the end (i.e., just short of the Palace) is PBBM himself. Having opened this Pandora’s box, he well knows that the only way he can keep his own head and hold sway over 2028 is to catch all those demons he released. I don’t know about you, but right now I’m desperate enough to let BBM finish his term in relative peace if he achieves nothing else than the herculean task of cleaning up the stables.

              VP Sara’s impeachment trial should resume in February and will be a more efficient and definitive way to shut her out for good. But we have loads of senators, congressmen, department secretaries and undersecretaries, and lesser flunkies all caught up in this mess who should be held to account for their thievery. Hold the big bosses, the ultimate signatories, accountable, sure. But don’t let the second- and third-level enablers and functionaries off, because the message needs to be sent that complicity won’t pay—and that your sponsors will ditch you when things get too hot.

              I want to see our courts work, overtime, to expedite the prosecution of these corruption cases. No pussyfooting, please, no Maguindanao massacre here. Let’s put a quick and decisive end to the kind of legalistic foolishness that lets a senator off the hook for a P30-million “private contribution,” with the judgment rendered by the Comelec commissioner who had previously served as that senator’s lawyer. How the heck can that be allowed to happen? What ethical universe are we in? The same goes for former Ombudsman Samuel Martires’ “forgetting” why he had kept secret his decision junking his predecessor’s carefully crafted case against Sen. Joel Villanueva. 

              If the Comelec accepts Sen. Rodante Marcoleta’s ridiculous excuse that he kept millions of political donations off his report of campaign expenses because they were meant to be “secret,” then we should launch a million-people march not just against the likes of Marcoleta but also specifically against the Comelec to hound those charlatans out of office. That commissioner who couldn’t find the shame to recuse himself from his former client’s case should be impeached if he doesn’t resign.

              I have no problem with people marching and screaming “Marcos, Duterte, resign!”, because we have billions of reasons to be upset with both. But I hope that doesn’t keep us from going after immediate and tangible if less-than-perfect results. Look at it this way—gut the body, and you’ve effectively chopped off the head.

              (Photo from rappler.com)