Qwertyman No. 91: 1968 Redux

Posted on April 29, 2024 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, April 29, 2024

A WAVE of pro-Palestinian protests has been sweeping American college campuses, prompting academic administrators and political leaders to push back and invoke their powers—including calling in the police—to curtail the demonstrations.

House Speaker Mike Johnson—a Trump ally and staunch supporter of Israel—probably spoke for his ilk when he told protesting students at Columbia to “Go back to class! Stop wasting your parents’ money!” He also called on Columbia University president Minouche Shafik—an Oxford Economics PhD and English baroness who also happens to have been born in Alexandria, Egypt to Muslim parents—to resign for not moving strongly enough against antisemitism on the Columbia campus, despite Shafik’s controversial suspension of pro-Palestine student groups earlier and her resort to police action, resulting in mass arrests.

The protests and the violent response to them threw me back to 1968, when the world’s streets from Chicago to Paris shook from the boots of students and workers marching against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and for women’s liberation. In the Philippines, student organizations such as the SCAUP and the newly formed SDK took up the same causes, on top of a resurgent nationalism. I was too young to have been part of these great movements then, although we marched in high school for “student power,” whatever that meant. I would get deeply involved as the decade turned, infected by the inescapable ferment in the air; in 1973 I would realize that protest had a price when I spent seven months in martial-law prison.

I’ve tried hard to think what it would be like to be 18 and a student today, what cause would drive me to the streets and to pitch a tent on the campus grass. While we Pinoys have our sympathies, Gaza seems too distant for us to mobilize for, and certainly we don’t lack for domestic issues to be bothered by, although our level of tolerance appears to have risen over time. In 1971, a 10-centavo increase in oil prices was enough for us to trigger the Diliman Commune; today we routinely wait for Tuesday’s inevitable announcement of gas price hikes and sigh.

Perhaps time and age do bring about shifts in perspective; some leftist firebrands of my youth have now become darlings of the right, and I myself have moved much closer to the center, ironically morphing from student activist to university official at the time of my retirement.

As that administrator—at a university where protesting is practically part of the curriculum—I can appreciate the bind Dr. Shafik now finds herself in, hemmed in from both left and right, with the complexity of her thinking and the brilliance of her own achievements reduced to a single issue: how to deal with students who won’t “go back to class and stop wasting their parents’ money,” as Speaker Johnson would have it, and will instead insist on their right to self-expression, whatever the cost. Aggressiveness, audacity, and even insolence will come with the territory. Persons in authority become natural targets of one’s rejection of things as they are; the preceding two generations are to be held immediately responsible for things gone wrong.

I recalled a time when UP students barged into Quezon Hall to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Regents to plead their cause. Some furniture was scuffed, but the president sat down with the students and discussed their demands. No one left happy, of course, but what had to be said on both sides was said. At another meeting later, someone asked if the students involved should have been sanctioned for what they did. I had to butt in to pour cold water on that notion, knowing that any punitive action would just worsen the problem. Open doors, I said, don’t shut them; this is UP—that kind of protest is what makes us UP, and our kind of engaged response is also what makes us UP.

Some will say that these outbursts are but cyclical, and that young people never learn, in repeating what their now-jaded seniors did way back when. But then the State never learns either, by responding to student protests today the way they did back in 1968, with shields and truncheons, effectively affirming everything the young suspect about elderly authority.

The Israel-Hamas war—now magnified, through many lenses, into an Israeli war on Palestinians—is a particularly thorny issue for American academia and for a public habituated to looking at the Jewish people as biblical heroes and historical victims. Gaza has turned that perception around for many, with the aggrieved now seen as the aggressors. In my column two weeks ago, I agreed with that re-evaluation, although I was careful to take the middle road and to condemn the excesses—committed for whatever reason—on both sides.

Not surprisingly, I quickly got blowback from both my pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian friends. War is always ugly, one said, and Israel has to do what it must to save itself; the Hamas attack on October 7 was overblown by propaganda, said another, and it was something that Israel had coming.

I still accept neither extreme; call me naïve and even Pollyannish, but I stand not with Israel nor with Palestine, but for peace and justice, which are not exclusive to one side, and can only be achieved by both working and living together. You can argue all the politics and the history you want, but there is absolutely no humane rationalization for the rape of women, the murder of children, and yes, even the killing of innocent men—not even the prospect of potentially saving more lives, the very argument behind the incineration of 200,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an act of war we all benefited from, but cannot call guiltless.

In a conflict as brutal and as polarizing as this one, “middle” never quite cuts it, and the excess of one will always be justified by the excess of the other. (To complicate my ambivalence, some issues do seem to have no middle, like Ukraine.) There have been no mass protests or demonstrations to advance my kind of moderation, and I don’t expect students, whether in Columbia or UP, to take to the streets flashing “peace” signs.

And in mentioning that, I think I’ve put a finger on one difference between 1968 and 2024: “peaceniks” were neither pro-Saigon nor pro-Hanoi, although her critics were quick to paint Jane Fonda red; they just wanted America out of a war that was none of its business. There was an innocence to that that seems to have been lost in our hyper-informed and over-analyzed century. We feel compelled to choose with passion and precision, and are defined by our choices, from politics to sneakers.

Qwertyman No. 72: Bullets to Ballads

Posted on December 18, 2023 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, December 18, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A meaningful and peaceful Christmas to us all!

(Image from economist.com)

Qwertyman No. 71: A Breakthrough for Peace

Posted on December 11, 2023 by penmanila

Qwertyman for Monday, December 11, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Qwertyman No. 63: The Slaughter of Innocents

Posted on October 16, 2023 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, October 16, 2023

TWO SATURDAYS ago, my wife Beng and I sat enthralled as we watched a brilliant performance of the play “Anak Datu” at the CCP’s Black Box Theater. It was a play that, among other objectives, sought to trace the roots of the armed conflict in Mindanao to a series of massacres perpetrated by the military against Muslims just before and after the declaration of martial law. It began with the well-documented killings of young Tausug recruits being trained in Corregidor for an abortive invasion of Sabah in 1968 and went on to the less-known Malisbong massacre in Sultan Kudarat on September 24, 1974, in which 1,500 men were reportedly killed.

For us—and I’m sure for the packed crowd in the theater as well—it was a harrowing revelation. We had known about the troubles in Jolo and had followed the rise of the MNLF, but to most Manileños then and now, Mindanao was another country, tourist-pretty but woeful, home to exotic fruits, fabrics, and dances, but otherwise mired in poverty, corruption, and bloodshed. The play tries to break through those stereotypes even as it acknowledges the complexities of politics and culture as they apply to Mindanao, especially to people just trying to catch a breath of peace.

In pointed irony, earlier that same day on the other side of the world, Hamas militants had begun to mount an attack on Israel, eventually killing about 1,000 people and taking hundreds more hostage. In retaliation, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip and killed about as many. This nightmarish war of attrition is still continuing more than a week on, with no clear end in sight.

Like many Filipinos far from that war zone, all we could do was to mutter prayers for the dead, the displaced, and the suffering on both sides. On top of the war in Ukraine and natural disasters ravaging the planet, it seemed like the world was in the sorriest mess it had ever been since the Second World War, emerging from a pandemic only to destroy itself with more willful deliberation.

I know that some were not so generous as to seek or see a moral balance, and immediately identified with Israel, invoking the Bible, Washington, and common sense, especially with the reports and pictures of brave Filipino nurses standing their ground and being murdered by Hamas.

For certain, whatever and however long the history may be behind the legitimate grievances of Palestinians suffering under Israeli occupation, Hamas’ brutal assault on ordinary citizens will not win them any sympathy, at least in the Western media which we depend on for our news. We know that there has to be another side to the story, perhaps one just as terrifying, but we go with what we see. It could be argued that Hamas’ actions were the result of decades of oppression, like a man running amok; but this was cold premeditation, factoring in the inevitable retaliation it would provoke.

Still, with both Jews and Palestinians fighting for survival, we forget that not all Palestinians are Hamas, and that not all Israelis supported Netanyahu. The guns will drown out the voices of moderation in both camps, those who understand that there can be no real victors in these messy wars, only losers. Lives are lost, the truth is lost, our humanity is lost.

Countless posts on social media claim that the Lord has already taken a side in the conflict. But not being particularly devout, I remember only how often the Almighty’s name has been invoked to kill. The skeptic in me suspects that the Lord is, must be, indifferent, so we can use our own hearts and minds to sort things out; he will not play deus ex machina.

Nothing, not even quoted Scripture, will convince me that the slaughter of innocents in the name of God, Allah, or Yahweh is morally justified. It has happened, it happens, and will always happen because of our brutish nature, but that will be an explanation, not an excuse. The hard-nosed men in the war room will dismiss all this preciousness as so much sentimental handwringing, and raise the killer question: “If the enemy goes for your wife and daughter, won’t you go for theirs?” Revenge and retribution, an eye for an eye, will prevail over reason and compassion, often devalued as suicidal weakness.

Come to think of it, no one ever called the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in which over 100,000 people died—“massacres.” Most of them were ordinary citizens just going about their business, with little or no say in their country’s militarist policies. Instead, conventional political and military wisdom has always insisted that these deaths were necessary for other deaths—particularly American, in a projected invasion—to be averted. One hundred thousand innocent lives wiped off the face of the earth in a literal flash, and no one in power even blinked, because of course it was justified as the lesser evil, made more acceptable by the savagery unleashed by Japanese soldiers on their captive populations.

In graduate school, I developed a keen and rather morbid interest in a genre of English Renaissance drama called “revenge tragedy” (think “Hamlet,” but there were many cruder, bloodier and frankly more entertaining examples). The object of all those plays was to show that “revengers” begin with a just cause, the victims of insufferable oppression and humiliation. But ultimately they prove little better than the beasts they seek to extinguish, wreaking havoc on the innocent. They cross a line, and lose all moral superiority.

That line is drawn somewhere in the sands of the Middle East, but just as importantly, it also crosses our conscience. When we recall how easy it was for many Filipinos—even those who professed to be devout Christians—to condone and even applaud extrajudicial killings, thinking that society was merely ridding itself of riff-raff, we see how righteousness and evil can so comfortably cohabit.

I have no easy and firm conclusions to draw from this most recent conflagration, and I feel that we have to look beyond the intricacies of history and politics for answers. Diplomats, scholars, and zealots have tried almost all the formulas at their disposal, to no avail—with the notable exception of the two-state policy, an elusive political solution that will come with its own challenges.

It may be that only the hopelessly naïve or the naively hopeful—and I plead guilty—still imagine that any kind of just and enduring peace can be achieved in these circumstances. But before or while we condemn barbarity elsewhere, we have our own hordes of howling ghosts to confront, coming out of the Chinese pogroms under the Spanish, Bud Dajo, Samar, Corregidor, Malisbong, Mendiola, Maguindanao, and Mamasapano, among others. Let more “Anak Datus” be written, to lift and save us from Facebook’s summary judgments.

(Image from broadway world.com)

Hindsight 14: Weaponizing the Youth

Posted on April 18, 2022 by penmanila

Hindsight for Monday, April 18, 2022

ONE OF the most troubling episodes of the war now raging in Ukraine happened a couple of weeks ago not in Kyiv or the eastern region—where ghastly atrocities have taken place—but in Penza, a city in western Russia. A 55-year-old teacher named Irina Gen was arrested after a student reportedly taped her remarks criticizing the Russian invasion; the student’s parents got the tape, and turned it in to the authorities, who went after Ms. Gen. She now faces up to ten years in prison for violating the newly minted law against “spreading fake news” about Russia. Earlier, in the city of Korsakov, students also filmed their English teacher Marina Dubrova, 57, for denouncing the war; she was arrested, fined, and disciplined.

That the Russian state is punishing its critics is nothing new. It’s reprehensible, but you expect nothing less from the place and the party that invented the gulag, that frozen desert of concentration camps where millions suffered and died over decades of political strife and repression, mainly under Joseph Stalin.

What I found particularly alarming was the role of students as informants, a virtual extension of the secret police that are the staple of repressive societies. This, too, is nothing new. Throughout modern history, despots have drawn on their nations’ youth to lend a semblance of energy and idealism to their authoritarianism, ensure a steady stream of cadres, and at worst, provide ample cannon fodder.

In Russia, the Komsomol rose up in 1918 to prepare people between 14 and 28 for membership in the Communist Party. Four years later, the Young Pioneers took in members between 9 and 14, and just to make sure no one who could walk and talk was left out, the Little Octobrists were organized in 1923 for the 7-9 crowd.

The Hitler Youth was preceded and prepared for by youth organizations that formed around themes like religion and traditional politics, and it was easy to reorient them toward Nazism. An all-male organization matched by the League of German Girls, the Hitler Youth focused on sports, military training, and political indoctrination, but they soon had to go far beyond marching in the streets and smashing Jewish storefronts. Running short of men, the Germans set up a division composed of Hitler Youth members 17 years and under, the 12th SS-Panzer Division Hitlerjugend. It went into battle for the first time on D-Day in June 1944; after a month, it had lost 60 percent of its strength to death and injury.

Chairman Mao relied on China’s teenage cadres—the Red Guards—to unleash the Cultural Revolution in 1966 against the so-called “Four Olds” (old customs, culture, habits, and ideas, which came to be personified in elderly scholars and teachers who were beaten to death or sent off to prison camps for “re-education”).

Under Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s martial law, the Kabataang Barangay was created by Presidential Decree 684 in 1975 to give the Filipino youth “a definite role and affording them ample opportunity to express their views.” That sounds innocuous enough, and indeed the KB would go on to engage in skills training, sports, sanitation, food production, crime prevention, and disaster relief, among other civic concerns, under the leadership of presidential daughter Imee.

At the same time it was clearly designed to offset leftist youth organizations like the Kabataang Makabayan and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan by drawing on the same membership pool and diverting their energies elsewhere—more specifically, into becoming the bearers and defenders of the New Society’s notions. (Full disclosure: I was an SDK member, but my younger siblings were KB.)

I would never have thought that the “Duterte Youth” meant something else, but it does; evidently, it’s just shorthand for “Duty to Energize the Republic through the Enlightenment of the Youth Sectoral Party-list Organization.” Organized in 2016 to support the Davao mayor’s presidential campaign and later his policies as President, the Duterte Youth have affected quasi-military black uniforms and fist salutes. Its leader, Ronald Cardema, reportedly brushed off comparisons with the Hitler Youth by pointing out that the Germans had no patent on the “youth” name, which he was therefore free to use. (Uhmm… okay.)

Adjudged too old to represent the youth in Congress (his wife Ducielle took over his slot), Cardema was appointed to head the National Youth Commission instead, from which perch he then directed “all pro-government youth leaders of our country… to report to the National Youth Commission all government scholars who are known in your area as anti-government youth leaders allied with the leftist CPP-NPA-NDF.”

I acknowledge how Pollyannish it would be to expect young people and even children to be shielded from the harsh and often cruel realities of today’s world. The war in Ukraine, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the pandemic are just the latest iterations of conflicts and crises that have turned 12-year-old boys into executioners in Sierra Leone and child miners in Bolivia, Madagascar, and, yes, the Philippines.

Their enlistment in political causes—of whatever orientation—is another form of maltreatment or abuse for which we have yet no name, but few governments or anti-government rebels will let them be. Their minds are soft and malleable, their fears obvious and manipulable, their rewards simple and cheap. With the right incentives and punishments, it can be easier to turn them into monsters or machines than to safeguard their innocence. They can be weaponized.

I’ve mentioned this in another column, but there’s a scene in the classic movie Cabaret, set in the Nazi period, where a handsome and bright-faced boy in a brown uniform begins to sing what seems to be an uplifting song about “the sun on the meadow.” But as it progresses we realize that it’s a fascist anthem which is picked up by ordinary folk with chilling alacrity. Watch this on Youtube (“Tomorrow Belongs to Me”) and then look at your son or nephew, or the children playing across the street. If you want, you could vote to have them marching and singing a similar tune in a couple of years.

Penman No. 403: Bad Times, Good Art?

Posted on December 23, 2020 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, December 21, 2020

IN MY last column, I wrote about how art and literature respond to times of great distress, like plagues and wars. My spoilsport proposition was that—against most expectations—crisis and chaos are not the best environments for great art, not just because the artists are too busy just trying to survive, but because it takes time, distance, and reflection to integrate, to re-order, the experience of falling apart.

Citing previous examples like Albert Camus’ The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, I said that this current pandemic will surely be the stuff of both bestsellers and ponderous novels, but the best writing about it will very likely not emerge for many more years, if not decades, to come.

If you need more proof, consider this: the best war stories were written long after the wars they dealt with. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, about the War of 1812, came out as a book in 1869. Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, about the Civil War, was published in 1895; World War I’s All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque in 1929; Kurt Vonnegut’s World War II-era Slaughterhouse Five in 1969; and Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam-era The Things They Carried in 1990.

That’s not to say that artists don’t or shouldn’t immediately respond to the tumult swirling around them. Something traumatic like plague and war can be both material for, and instigator of, great art.

The one outstanding example that comes to mind is Picasso’s Guernica, made in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. The story goes that Picasso was in Paris working on another commission when he heard about Franco’s bombing of the town of Guernica in April that year, whereupon he shifted his attention to producing the now-iconic antiwar painting, which he finished in five weeks.

Another oft-quoted story is that of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Symphony No. 6 in C Major, which came to be known as the “Leningrad Symphony,” was premiered in Russia during the siege of Leningrad by the Germans in July 1942, and became a kind of anthem of Soviet resistance. In the more cinematic retellings of this episode, it is said that the Germans realized they would lose the battle when they heard the symphony being played by a ragtag band of Russian musicians on the radio.

On the German side, there’s the story of the Berlin Philharmonic persisting in recording Brünnhilde’s Immolation Scene and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung despite the Allied forces knocking on Berlin’s gates in April 1945.

These examples, with their heroic if not tragic overtones, seem to suggest that in periods of great disorder and distress approaching chaos, artists of all kinds rise to the occasion and summon up their finest talents in the service of—and here one is tempted to say “humanity,” but I am more inclined to say “order,” which is inherent in every artist. The desire for justice, for example, is a form of outrage over the disturbance of some natural equilibrium, a sense of fairness, and bringing music into the battlefield is a willful imposition of structure and narrative into the cacophony of war. These creative outbursts in the middle of the fray are also affirmations of one’s higher consciousness, a civilized rejection of the easier option to submit to brutishness.

This reminds me of Umberto Eco’s insightful description of how art works as “a minimum of order compatible with a maximum of chaos.” The artist’s impulse is to bring method into the madness, to see pattern and narrative in the mess of things.

Sometimes art has responded to war in the most striking ways. There was a very close relationship between Cubism and the development of military camouflage in the aftermath of World War I, with Cubism providing the inspiration for the abstraction of natural forms, culminating in the so-called “Dazzle” ships whose wild geometric designs, by the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, were meant less to hide ships than to confuse U-boat rangefinders.

But for all these illustrations of disorder as the handmaiden of great art, I suspect that they are exceptions, and that the more commonplace product is that enemy of good art, cliché.

Dystopic times invite posterization, where subjects can either be romanticized or demonized. There’s that overwhelming urge to settle for the literal or cartoonish depiction of the obvious, which would be hardship and pain, violence and sorrow, over and over again. I’ve often pointed out to my writing students—long before the pandemic—that the easiest thing to write is a lament about how terrible and unfair life is, and how awful one feels. Walk into any serious art gallery (real or virtual) and you’ll see that most works by young artists are predominantly dark and gloomy.

I’m not suggesting that we get all Pollyanish and paint an artificially happy world; but I do expect great art to be transcendent and complex, to move beyond the immediate and the literal and to remind us of the need for beauty and hope amid the suffering. Michelangelo did that with the Pieta, which is not only about a son’s passing but a mother’s deathless love.

Bad times and bad things may even prefigure or provoke some inner good, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke put it: “Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.”

Penman No. 341: War and Remembrance

Posted on February 21, 2019 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, February 18, 2019

FOR FILIPINOS, February is or should be a month of remembering, beyond the commercial confections of Valentine’s Day.

For people somewhat younger than me, February should recall the euphoria of EDSA 1986, and the forced departure of a dictatorship. For myself, the month marks the anniversary of the 1971 Diliman Commune, when we barricaded the university in symbolic resistance to what soon became the martial-law regime. For my parents’ generation, however, February can only mean the closure of the War in 1945, culminating in the bloody Battle of Manila that may have crushed the Japanese but also left 100,000 Filipinos dead in the most horrible ways and Manila thoroughly devastated.

Having been born nearly a decade after that war, I can only look back on it with both relief and, I must confess, morbid fascination, that curious wondering about what I might have done—or even if I would have survived—had I gone through that ordeal. I’ve written plays about the war, read as many books as I could, and visited war memorials, but never seem to have come around to answering how and why war can bring out both the best and the worst in us, sadly more often the latter.

This was much on my mind last week when I attended a lecture at the Ayala Museum by the American author James M. Scott, who was in town to promote his newest book, Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila(New York: W. W. Norton, 2018, 635 pp.). James had actually been introduced to me by email before his visit by mutual friends, so I was doubly interested in meeting the war historian, whose earlier book Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harborwas a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Before a packed crowd that included survivors of the war, James brought the audience back to a time when Manila was indeed the Pearl of the Orient and Asia’s most beautiful city, with wide, tree-lined boulevards and a cosmopolitan culture to complement its charms. The war would change all that, over a few dark years of death, suffering and famine. Despite putting up their bravest front, the city’s residents and the thousands of foreigners interned at Sto. Tomas were in desperate need of food, medicines, and, of course, freedom when the Americans—led by the famous but also famously flawed Gen. Douglas MacArthur—landed in Lingayen Gulf and rolled into Manila. In command of the Japanese defenders, Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita, the so-called Tiger of Malaya, had ordered Rear Adm. Sanji Iwabuchi to withdraw his forces—an order that Iwabuchi, a once-disgraced officer in need of redemption, had no intention of following (records would later show that the Japanese had made no plans for escape).

The stage was set for one of the most hard-fought and destructive battles of World War II. Instead of withdrawing, Iwabuchi directed his men to hold off the Americans with their guns, their swords, and if necessary their teeth. As the fight moved block by block south of the Pasig, the Japanese turned their retreat into wholesale slaughter; 200 Filipino men were beheaded in one house, women were raped scores of times at the Bayview Hotel, and babies were bayoneted; 41 victims were massacred in La Salle, many at the marble altar. Facing certain defeat, many Japanese committed ritual suicide—77 of them in one place over one night, with singing preceding the explosion of grenades. Iwabuchi slit his own belly. After 29 murderous days, the battle ended. Yamashita, who could have stopped his subordinate had he truly wanted to, was later tried and executed.

More than 16,000 Japanese soldiers died in the battle, against only about 1,000 Americans. (Contrary to popular belief, Korean conscripts did not figure in the massacres, says Scott.) MacArthur would lament the loss of his family’s Civil War memorabilia and his son’s baby book in his Manila Hotel suite. But as Scott emphasizes, Filipino families paid the dearest price, with over 100,000 civilians dead in one month.

Drawing largely on first-person testimonies recorded soon after the events, the book is a searing account of the horrors of war; it was, says Scott, less a battlefield than a crime scene. A friend who read it told me she had to stop every once in a while to gather herself through her tears. The book takes note of subsequent judgments that the Americans bore as much responsibility for the destruction of Manila as did the Japanese, with their sustained bombardments of entrenched positions, but it’s the persistence of humanity—sustained by such organizations of war survivors as Memorare—that ultimately prevails.

Apart from many private acts of remorse, the Japanese government never formally apologized for their soldiers’ atrocities, and our own government’s recent removal of the comfort women’s statue shows how modern politics can obliterate the past better than a howitzer.

Such is the nature of today’s society—and of a generation obsessed with the present and the future—that many Filipinos can barely remember what happened five years ago, let alone 50, or 70. For some reason, our memories of conflict seem especially faint and fragile. Denial seems easier, revisionism even more attractive, so the despots who sent hundreds if not thousands to their graves and robbed us blind continue to live in mansions and be driven around in armored SUVs.

Meanwhile, we have James Scott’s anguished prose to ponder; I myself fear that if we disregard our liberties, the next Battle of Manila, we might inflict upon ourselves.

Penman No. 295: Writers in Wartime

Posted on March 26, 2018 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, March 26, 2018

I WAS busy a couple of weeks ago going through my library to see which books I could donate to a sale being conducted by our students to benefit worthwhile projects. I happily gave away about a hundred books and will be ready and willing to unload even more next time. But what inevitably happens when you sort out your effects like this is that long-forgotten objects turn up in the pile.

One such item that emerged from this recent overhaul was a thin journal of no more than 70 pages, the December 1943 issue of Philippine Review, published by the Manila Sinbun-sya and edited by Vicente Albano Pacis, with Angel C. Anden and Jose Luna Castro as associate editors. A little research shows that the Review didn’t last very long—it ran from March 1943 and closed down in December 1944. But during that brief lifetime, it managed to publish such later luminaries as Nick Joaquin, and apparently enjoyed quite a reputation (it was also edited for some time by Francisco “Mang Kiko” Icasiano, whose musings “From My Nipa Hut” graced the prewar Sunday Tribune Magazine).

Indeed, this issue of December 1943 contained not only short stories by Ligaya Victorio Reyes and Estrella Alfon Rivera, essays by Camilo Osias, Luis Montilla, and Federico Mangahas, and a translation of Mi Ultimo Adios by Juan Collas, but also a short commentary on the language of the Constitution by a 22-year-old Jovito R. Salonga, who had just been released from prison for his work in the underground.

It’s a fascinating window on literature in a time of war, what the politics of the moment can do to writers, and what coping strategies they employ. (My thoughts strayed quickly to a recent discussion online about Filipino writers and politics in these times of tokhang.) The issue opens with paid advertisements—mostly from Japanese companies like the Yokohama Specie Bank’s local branch—hailing “The Second Anniversary of the Outbreak of the Greater East Asia War” while at the same time greeting readers a “Merry Christmas!”

The Reyes and Alfon stories (“Christmas Visit” and “Jingle Bells”) speak of love and loss, acknowledging the sudden shift in the meaning of Christmas from that December of just two years ago to this one; both stories end with their protagonists weeping uncontrollably. The Reyes story can’t help falling back on old tropes, referring to “Gary Cooper.” So for the fictionists, at least, the transition remains sharp and painful, with metaphors to imply the darkening of the times.

Most of the essayists seem to have no such qualms. In his essay on “A Program of Enlightenment,” Camilo Osias (yes, he of the Philippine Readers series, and future Senate President) argues for a new culture “for all Filipinos under an independent Philippines,” one “characterized by a sound eclecticism in the choice of its elements—by the same careful eclecticism which the Japanese have observed in their cultural borrowings…. The cultural activities to be carried out shall emphasize the precedence of State, national, or social interests over those of the individual.”

For his part, the scholar Luis Montilla writes on the theme of “Rizal as an Orientalist,” and suggests that Rizal would have been sympathetic to Japanese motives had he been alive, even implying that this could be because Rizal was partly Japanese. In his footnotes, he quotes Austin Craig’s statement in 1940 that “I am putting the finishing touches to my Rizal genealogy, now being able to show Japanese blood as well as two Spanish and five Chinese ancestors. I have church or court certificates proving everything.”

Montilla concludes: “Having had his attention directed early to the abuses, calumnies, and indignities heaped unjustly upon his people by the white race, Rizal had to be, and was, the embodiment of a true Oriental…. Now, the duly authorized representatives of the great Japanese Empire have repeatedly assured the Filipinos that Japan has come to these shores not to subjugate the natives of the country, much less to absorb them, but to guide them in their regeneration as true Filipinos, and that when they… shall have been so rejuvenated as to be, as a nation, worthy of membership in the family of Oriental nations, they will regain their long lost independence (and fully realize) the supreme efforts put up by Rizal as an Oriental to help educate and re-Orientalize his people for their preservation and dignification as a race….”

Was I reading a display of what might be called cultural collaboration? Not knowing these writers and the circumstances under which they worked, I have to withhold my judgment, keeping in mind as well that there was good reason for many Filipinos—after centuries of white-man rule—to accept the invading Japanese as liberators. But I felt much educated by these articles, which also reminded me of how our printed words define us, rightly or wrongly, long after we’re gone. They just might turn up in a dusty corner of someone’s bookshelf.

Penman No. 265: Photography as Propaganda

Posted on August 21, 2017 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, August 21, 2017

I HAVE a cabinet in my home office where I keep shelves of my most valued books—first editions, signed copies, antiquarian volumes, and such. One shelf is occupied by a special mini-collection of books from the turn of the 20^th century, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, most of them having to do with what we’ve come to call the Philippine-American War. Bearing titles like War in the Philippines and Life of Dewey, Under MacArthur in Luzon, and An Army Boy in the Philippines, the books purport to chronicle—“celebrate” might be the better term—the occupation of the Philippines by the United States from 1898 onward.

I picked up many of these books more than 20 years ago when I was a graduate student in the American Midwest and on the prowl for Philippine-related material in used bookstores and flea markets. When eBay came along, I found many more, and was pleased to secure a few, often for less than $20 plus shipping.

While old, these books weren’t necessarily rare, because they must have been printed in the high tens or hundreds of thousands as a form of patriotic propaganda that straddled journalism and popular entertainment. Often written in a triumphal tone and exulting in the victory of America—then a rising naval and imperial power—over decrepit Spain, they blended into travelogues exploring the US’ new possessions—Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines—turning a military project into a story of adventure in exotic lands.

These stories—and their accompanying illustrations—were very much on my mind last week when Beng and I attended a fascinating lecture at Ateneo de Manila University by an expert who had made that dark period (which few Americans and, sadly, just as few Filipinos seem to remember) part of her academic specialty. Dr. Nerissa Balce was in Manila to read from and talk about her book Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive (AdMU Press, 2017; U of Michigan Press, 2016), and we thought it was a good opportunity to catch up with and learn from an old friend (she married my Trivial Pursuit antagonist, the poet Fidelito Cortes).

After working as a journalist in Manila, Nerissa went to the University of California-Berkeley for a PhD in Ethnic Studies, took a postdoc at the University of Oregon, and taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst before joining the State University of New York-Stony Brook’s Department of Asian and Asian American Studies.

Through photographs and a refreshingly lucid lecture shorn of much of the academic jargon that often renders these presentations impenetrable to many listeners—even fellow professors like me—Nerissa showed how American photographers who were (to use a later term) embedded with the US military forces used their work to celebrate but then also obliquely if unintentionally criticize the violence of a colonial war. Photographs, she would argue in her book, have a life of their own, once taken and published; they may have been originally meant to depict the power of one side over another, and the abject position of the presumptive loser in the conflict, but seen or used a different way, they can convey other messages, like the subject’s insistent humanity or resistance.

I’d seen many such images in my books from that war; one of them—F. Tennyson Neely’s Fighting in the Philippines—typically portrays American soldiers towering angularly over the slack corpses of Filipino “insurgents” (as our fighters would be referred to for the longest time) as Filipino gravediggers prepare to bury their compatriots. This was what Washington wanted the American public to see: visual proof of American power and dominance. It must have been effective propaganda, especially when accompanied by narratives explaining America’s “civilizing” mission.

But, as Nerissa and other scholars point out, the very same photographs proved useful to those opposed to America’s imperial expansion. The Anti-Imperialist League published a collection of antiwar poems using a picture of a corpse-filled trench as its frontispiece. “The different political uses for the same photograph suggest the paradoxical power of the photographic image, and how photographs can celebrate as well as expose the violence of colonialism and war.” She goes beyond the battlefield to discuss how the empire shaped our image, and how that image, in a way, shaped the empire. Pictures of native women doing embroidery suggested a colony stabilizing into happy domesticity under a benign regime.

I’m not a historian, but if you want a reasonably reliable account of that period, read Brian McAllister Linn’s The Philippine War 1899-1902 (The University Press of Kansas, 2000); to see how that war was waged on the cultural front, Balce’s book makes a great companion piece. In this present time when, more than ever, pictures speak louder than words, and dead men’s bodies have begun to pile up again, we’d have to wonder what new empire is growing out of the shadows.

[Photo from philstar.com]

Penman No. 199: A Bell from Bauang

Posted on May 9, 2016 by penmanila

Penman for Monday, April 25, 2016

SANTIAGO “SONNY” Busa is one of the most remarkable people I’ve met. I was introduced to him when I spent some time in Washington, DC on a fellowship a couple of years ago, and from the very first time we sat down for a chat in the backyard of his home in the DC suburb of Annandale, Virginia, we hit it off. He possesses a hilarious, self-deprecating wit, is fascinated by history, and speaks, among other languages, Spanish, Ethiopian and Chinese. Ironically, though born in Eastern Samar—he was practically just a baby when his family moved to the US—Sonny doesn’t speak Filipino (or, we keep joking, pretends not to, so he can listen in on what everyone is saying).

A retired diplomat who served as consul general at the American embassy in Manila, among other postings some years ago, Sonny had also been a US Army Ranger and parachutist, and taught International Relations at his alma mater, West Point. For all that, he’s a flaming liberal (like me), doesn’t believe in keeping an armory or packing a .45 to feel masculine or secure, and devotes much of his time to promoting the Philippines and Philippine concerns in America along with his lovely wife Ceres. Last year, he was a key figure in the commemoration of the Bataan Death March in New Mexico, where 5,000 soldiers and civilians marched across the desert for more than 26 miles—and they’ve been doing this for 27 years now!

But Sonny’s recent messages gave me a special reason to smile. He’s been a staunch advocate for the return of the three bells taken as war trophies by American troops from Balangiga, Samar in 1901—two bells remain in a “Trophy Park” in a military base in Wyoming, and another is in a military museum in South Korea. Despite the strenuous efforts of both Filipino and American activists to have those bells returned, it hasn’t happened yet.

As it turns out, the Balangiga bells weren’t alone. In 1899, during the Philippine-American War (which the Americans insisted on calling an “insurgency” for the longest time), a Lieutenant Tom Berry took a bell from the Church of St. Peter and Paul in Bauang, La Union and shipped it to America, where it languished for over three decades in some Army warehouse. In 1933, the same soldier—now General Berry, the superintendent of West Point—had the bell taken out of storage to be displayed at the Catholic chapel of the academy.

Last January, acting on an inquiry from Fr. Ronald Raymund Chan of the Diocese of San Fernando, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen, Jr.—the current superintendent of West Point and a friend of Sonny’s—wrote Fr. Chan back to say that “The bell currently displayed on the grounds of our Catholic Chapel here is apparently the bell in question. According to our own records, the markings on the bell itself matches all the descriptions you provided. While we have been honored to guard and display this bell for the past several decades, we would be glad to return the bell to its rightful home. We are currently in the process of making arrangements for the return of the bell to your Parish.”

Aside presumably from Fr. Chan and the people of Bauang, no one was happier about this outcome than Sonny Busa, who had married Ceres in that chapel in 1977 in a military wedding, and had looked with fondness at the bell every time he visited the academy. He alerted me and some friends about the San Pedro bell last February, but asked us to keep quiet about it for the meanwhile until the return arrangements were finalized, fearing that Americans opposed to the return of any war booty—especially the Balangiga bells—would torpedo the move.

Last month, on the 29^th, the send-off finally took place at West Point, with Sonny Busa, Philippine Consul General in New York Mario de Leon, and prominent members of the Filipino community in attendance. Another good friend of Sonny and mine, the Filipino-American historian Sharon Delmendo, stood as both proud witness and photographer. Another special participant was Filipino exchange Cadet Don Dalisay—to whom I would be glad to claim a relation, because Sonny says that he’s at the top of all his classes at West Point.

Dalisay Bell.jpg

In his message to me, Sonny—who had been put in charge of the turnover ceremony—emphasized that Gen. Caslen had “ordered the bell returned to La Union because it belongs in its rightful home. West Point above all stands for high morals in all that it does and teaches and keeping looted war booty is not part of its ethic. The people of La Union are hyper-excited and have already built a display stand. Once the bell arrives it will be big news in the whole of the Philippines as you can imagine.”

That truly is wonderful news, Sonny, and many thanks from your kababayans for your tireless efforts to help right the wrongs of the past and to remind us of our precious heritage.

But sadly—as I write this on the eve of one of the most important and contentious elections of our modern history—I fear that too many of us have forgotten how valuable our democracy is, and what artifacts like the San Pedro bell stand for. At war with ourselves and with foreign invaders long gone, we seem far too willing to squander our votes on mindless whimsy and puerile petulance.

I so desperately pray we can prove ourselves deserving of that bell, Sonny. How hollow its ring would be otherwise—a death knell for sanity and decency, rather than the vibrant peal of freedom.

(Photos by Sharon Delmendo and Sonny Busa)

Pinoy Penman 3.0

The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Tag Archives: war