Tag Archives: op-ed

Qwertyman No. 9: Fiction Counter-Fiction

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Qwertyman for October 3, 2022

(Photo from pond5.com)

“LADIES AND gentlemen, we have a problem.” Ma’am Ventura, no less than the Queen of Trolls herself, looked down the long table through her oversize Versace shades at her social media managers, who were nervously fixing their ties and tapping their Jinhao pens in anticipation of what she had to say. Their managers’ meetings usually didn’t start until ten p.m.—when the day’s news would have aired and they had the whole night to prepare for the next day’s barrage of posts—but today she had messaged them to come in at eight, apparently at the request of the mystery guest who sat to her left. He was, they were told, an important man, an opinion-maker like they were, only more visible.

He seemed fidgety himself, his eyes somewhat crossed and unfocused, as if he had had laser surgery in the belief that he would look better without glasses, but the operation had gone awfully wrong. Now he simply looked stunned and misplaced, and the others couldn’t be sure if he was smiling or grimacing. Ma’am Ventura had lit up one of her Dunhill Lights and the smoke was drifting past her visitor’s face but she wasn’t apologizing for it, which told her staff that she didn’t think he was that special after all, despite what she would say.

“We have a special guest with us tonight who’ll explain why. This is Mr. Rutherford or Rudy Tuklaw, and he comes from the Bureau.” Her mention of “the Bureau” drew some gasps. It was rumored to be a top-secret, off-the-books grouping of some of the President’s most rabid supporters and enforcers. Some brought money; some were paid. To Ma’am Ventura, Rudy looked like the paid kind. 

“Thank you all for being here,” Tuklaw said after clearing his throat, as if they had a choice. “In fact, we have more than one problem.” He brought out some folded newspapers from his bag and tossed them on the table to be handed around. “Look at these columnists—this one, and this one. There might be more I don’t know about yet. These people are a disgrace to journalism and should be weeded out!”

One of the managers, Nico, read one of the columns and began giggling, showing it to his seatmate Bruce. “You should read this piece about nuns playing poker,” he whispered. “It’s hilarious!”

“You think that’s funny?” Tuklaw said, becoming even more cross-eyed. “That’s fiction! These are supposed to be serious Op-Ed columns, but these guys are writing fiction!”

A young woman named Ms. Morales raised her hand and Ma’am Ventura nodded to acknowledge her. “May I ask—sir—exactly what’s wrong with that?” Ms. Morales liked fiction—not the boring Hemingway or Faulkner stuff her English teacher had force-fed them with, but real, honest fiction like Fifty Shades of Gray.

“Why? Because it’s not fair! These people are making fun of the President, of democracy, of sensible reform measures like the ‘report-your-subversive-sister’ law and the ‘no-car, no-garage’ law, and they’re getting away with it! You and I—all of you here—we’re engaged in a war of words with these low-life misfits. Granted, some of our methods are, uhm, unconventional—but even among combatants, there are rules of engagement. Like should beget like! If I write a column attacking you, well, then write a column attacking me—don’t hide behind this cowardly contrivance called fiction, which is all made up and contains not one smidgen of fact!”

“But if it’s all made up and totally without factual basis, then—why should we be worried—sir?” Ms. Morales pursued.

“That’s exactly it!” Tuklaw responded, sputtering. “They make no clear assertions, no claims to truth, so we can’t pin them down for anything.”

Another manager named Bruce had been staring at the piece before him for minutes. “I don’t get it. I’ve been trying to make sense of it, but—I don’t see anything funny here. I just don’t get it.”

Nico leapt at the chance to score a point. “Well, there you go! If Bruce can’t make heads or tails of it, then so will most people. People are stupid.” Bruce’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s why we use short posts like Twitter. That’s all most people can deal with. Nobody reads these—these novels!”

“Maybe you can do the same thing!” Ms. Morales said. “Give them a dose of their own medicine. Fiction counter-fiction!”

Rudy was about to say “I can’t” but pursed his lips and said instead, “I won’t. I refuse to dignify the form.” It rankled him that the column-stories, written in a breezy style, seemed like they had been done in fifteen minutes while he labored into the night on his own diatribes against the enemy, especially when he had to be more creative with his scenarios, which his principals expected. 

“So what do you want us to do, Mr. Tuklaw?” Ma’am Ventura mopped some of her ashes off the table with a wet napkin. She saw herself as the professional who produced the deliverables with cool and bankable efficiency for a specified sum, not a seething hack like her visitor who kept hoping to parlay his influence into some cushy appointment with a four-syllable title. She was receiving him out of sheer courtesy, and because she had always been curious to see what Rutherford Tuklaw was like in person. Now she knew. She blew more smoke into his face.

“I want you to destroy them—these—these jokers!” 

“Isn’t that the Bureau’s department, Mr. Tuklaw? They can make people go away.”

“I don’t mean that—yet—although it’s not a bad idea, at least to scare them. I mean, we could say, if I killed these idiots, emphasize IF, then show me some leniency, something like that.”

“So destroy them in words? On Facebook? And Twitter? Maybe even longer blog posts? Go after their families, their reputations, their sexuality, their food preferences—”

“Whatever, whatever—invent what you need. I just want them to squirm like—like the worms they are!” His legs were twisted around each other beneath the table.

Ms. Morales felt chirpy. “So we can use fiction, Mr. Tuklaw? I took up six units of Fiction Writing in UP!”

Tuklaw stared grimly at his knotted fingers on the table. “Like I said. Whatever!”

Hindsight No. 21: Mr. Secretary

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Hindsight for Monday, June 6, 2022

(Note: This could be the strangest thing you will ever see on an Op-Ed page, a new genre I’m going to call “editorial fiction,” observations of the current scene rendered as short stories. No direct references are intended.)

THE CALL came at a little past one in the morning, well after bedtime for George and his wife Trina. Trina stirred in their bed and pulled the blanket over her shoulder in a gesture of irritation, but as soon as she gathered whom George was speaking with, she froze and tried to capture every word that was being said, over the hum of the aircon and the occasional screech of late-night traffic along the boulevard twelve floors below. She had wanted a unit as close to the penthouse as they could get, but the price was just beyond their reach, so they settled for a 14th-floor corner suite—the 13th floor, of course, was non-existent for superstition’s sake—with a broad view of the bay on one side and a long thread of highway on the other, fading into the southern suburbs.

George should have been annoyed as well to have been called so late, but he was not. He had not even been asleep, having watched an episode of The Blacklist without paying too much attention to what Raymond Reddington was whispering into Elizabeth’s ear. He had been swilling his Cragganmore, not bothering with his usual routine of adding a few drops of water to unravel its complexity; his taste buds felt dull and flat. Life itself suddenly seemed tentative and purposeless. He had been staring at his phone for an hour, checking its battery status, thumbing through his messages to make sure he had not missed anything important. 

When the phone rang he had to gulp down the whisky with which he was simply wetting his throat, utterly without pleasure, but instantly he straightened up in bed and took the call, curling a conspiratorial palm over his mouth, as if a spy lived on the 15th floor.

“Good evening—good morning—sir!… Oh, no sir—I was still awake—I mean, I read the newspaper and was surprised to see my name there, but…. Yes, of course, I mean, I wasn’t expecting anything, since you know how I feel about—well, about… things, things that happened in the past…. The future, of course, the future, I agree…. I appreciate that, I honestly never imagined that I would be talking to—oh, no, sir, no ‘doctor’ or ‘professor,’ please, just call me George, George is fine, everybody calls me George…. Haha, yes, I’m older than you by four years, but you’re the president! Or will be—I mean, in a few weeks…. I’m deeply, deeply honored, sir, of course I am….Uhhh…. Sir, could you maybe give me some time, a couple of days, just to talk it over with Trina?”

At this point, Trina had dropped all pretenses of trying to sleep and was watching George intently, making words with her mouth that George couldn’t be bothered to read. But George looked in her direction and continued talking as if she wasn’t there. In the background, at the other end of the line, he could hear people laughing and shouting, and the pounding rhythm of a Village People tune. His friend Estoy who had texted him earlier to expect a call was probably there; Estoy had been a consistent flunker in college, but now he seemed unusually adept, even prescient. 

“Yes, sir, Trina, Katrina Palileo, the sorority sister of your cousin Angie…. Our two children are both in the States…. She’s retired now but still consults for—oh, no, no, I don’t think it will be a problem…. 48 hours, thank you, sir, I’ll talk to her and get back to you…. Many thanks again, sir, and good morning!”

George slumped into his bedside chair, threw his phone on the bed, and poured himself a fresh shot. He grinned at the hapless Trina, waiting for her to pop the question.

“So? So what did he say? Did you get the position?”

George tried to put on a straight face, without much success. “I said I would think about it—I said I would ask you first.”

“Idiot!” Trina said, laughing, and threw a pillow at him, almost hitting his shot glass. “You call him right back, right now, and tell him I approve! Of course I approve, 110 percent!” She picked up his phone and held it out to him. “Call him now, while he’s still awake, and before he changes his mind!”

George brushed the suggestion away, turning pensive. “No, no, I shouldn’t look too eager, like I really, really want it—”

“But you do, right? I mean—a week ago I never would have thought this would happen, but when your name came up in the news, I thought, oh my God, really?”

“That’s what I’m asking—why. Why me?”

“And why the hell not? Nobody knows the field more than you, you’ve published zillions of academic papers, people hold you in enormous respect, you’re better appreciated in London and Geneva than you are here, and you were never known to be his flunkey!”

“No,” said George, “I never was. That’s why I think he wants me. Maybe I could change things.” He looked at Trina, who was about forty pounds heavier than when they first met, across a barbed wire fence in martial-law prison. He himself had been thin as a rake, having had very little to eat in their Marikina safehouse. He took it as a blessing to have been arrested in a raid; there was more food in prison, and he would have died within a week of scaling the mountains. And there was Trina, whose pageboy bob had been replaced by shoulder-length curls dyed some shade of sunset. He couldn’t blame her for wanting to forget what she had gone through, and he never brought it up. To survive and to live well—that alone was sweet revenge.

“We used to talk a lot about the future—is this it? How did this happen?”

She put her arms around him and pulled him back to bed. “You think too much,” Trina said, and planted a wet kiss on his cheek. “Congratulations and good night, Mr. Secretary! Let’s call the kids in the morning!”

Out the window, the lights of a tanker flickered on the pitch-black bay, the only way to tell that there was a horizon.

Hindsight No. 1: A Time for Telling

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Hindsight for Monday, January 17, 2022

IT WAS with great shock and sadness that I received the news of Manong Frankie Sionil Jose’s passing two Fridays ago; my recollections of him appeared online later that day. But just as jarring a surprise was a call I later received from Millet Mananquil, my editor in the Lifestyle section, and then from Doreen Yu, our Op-Ed editor, informing me that I had been chosen to take over FSJ’s column-space on this page.

It was a great privilege, of course, and I accepted it gratefully. But it also carried with it an awesome responsibility—to be honest, to be fair, to know enough about an issue to speak with some legitimacy about it, and also to be modest and open-minded enough to remember one’s inescapable fallibility. I don’t think that last one’s going to be a problem, because I’ve made mistakes often enough to know that—well, I make mistakes, some of which may have hurt people badly.

But last Saturday I turned 68, and with that age comes a keener sense of doing right, of accountability for one’s choices and judgments, as well as a greater tolerance for the shortcomings of others, though not of evil or of wrong itself. I intend to maintain those bearings in this new capacity.

Some readers may wonder how a Lifestyle writer like me—obsessed with fountain pens, old books, Broadway showtunes, and digital gadgetry—ends up doing op-ed, which seems a far more serious and consequential calling. A brief self-introduction might be in order.

I dropped out of UP as an engineering freshman in 1971 and, against all odds (not having spent one day in Journalism class, and being all of 18), landed a job as a features writer and general assignments reporter with the Philippines Herald in 1972. My first task was to fill up half the Features page every day—something that schooled me forever on the importance of deadlines and of resourcefulness, because I had to come up with the topics on my own. I moved to Taliba as a suburban correspondent; was arrested for my activism shortly after martial law was declared; spent seven months in prison; and upon my release joined the information staff of the National Economic and Development Authority, where I would work for the next ten years, picking up a diploma in Development Economics along the way.

I returned to school, finished up my academics all the way to a PhD (more for teaching than for my writing), and taught full-time while writing stories and film scripts. In the mid-1990s, thanks to my friend and now fellow-columnist Jarius Bondoc, I was hired as an editorial writer for the newly opened newspaper TODAY. Being busy with other aspects of management, our boss Teddyboy Locsin trusted me to do about three editorials a week, including the newspaper’s very first one. 

I discovered that opinion writing was exhilarating—but also, again, fraught with responsibility. It got to the point that I found myself wishing I could write something less driven by analysis and conscience—small things like my rickety VW Beetle, double-knit pants, and my love of crabs, instead of ponderous topics like prison reform, the defense budget, and Philippines 2000. (I still have 113 editorials that I wrote on my hard drive.) So I asked for—and got—a Lifestyle column called “Barfly” on the back page, which helped me decompress and kept me sane, reminding me that life was much more than politics and that beauty and fun were as important as anything else to happiness.

I’m going to keep that escape valve open—I’ve promised Millet that I’ll continue contributing my “Penman” column every now and then—but I’ll approach this new task with the loftiness of mind that it deserves (although you’ll excuse me if I sometimes prefer to take a more comic tack, as the best criticism is often served up with a smile). 

Unfortunately I’m not a political insider; I don’t make the rounds of kapihans and have become something of a happy recluse over the Covid lockdowns. You’ll see my politics soon enough—unabashedly liberal (with a small L), middle-force, intensely uncomfortable with both Right and Left extremes. (I came out of the Left and worked briefly for the Right as a sometime speechwriter for five Presidents—but not the last two.) I thank God every night for my family’s safety and for our blessings and for the well-being of others, but I’ve had my differences with Church dogma and would rather spend my Sundays reflecting on human frailty and redemption by reading a book or writing a story.

But I do have a deep and abiding love of history, of which I have so much more to learn. This is why I’m keeping FSJ’s “Hindsight” for this column’s title. (When I returned to UP to resume my undergraduate studies, I dithered between English and History, and chose English only because I was likely to finish it sooner). I agree with Manong Frankie, among many others, that one of the greatest obstacles to our nationhood is the fact that we have a very poor memory—much less an understanding—of our past. We’re reaping the bitter fruit of that amnesia now, in the prospect of electing a dictator’s son to the presidency, a full half-century after the father plunged this country into political and moral darkness by declaring martial law to perpetuate himself in power.

There—it’s when vexatious thoughts like that cross my mind that my fingers begin to itch and I want to editorialize, the complete opposite of my impulse as a fictionist to show and not tell. (I often begin my fiction-writing classes by comparing an editorial on, say, justice for the poor with a short story dealing with the same concern, but without once mentioning “justice,” “poverty,” and such abstractions.) But even as I remain a fictionist at heart, there’s a time for telling, for gathering up the threads of an unfolding narrative and declaring, in plain language, what they mean. That’s what I hope to do.