Honeymoon

Honeymoon

June 29, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros

I DON'T know that honeymoons are the natural consequence of shotgun marriages. The kind where the groom is marched down the aisle under threat of his sojourn on earth being ended prematurely, or what is truly a fate worse than death having his reproductive abilities severely impaired. Or the kind where even before the groom can say "I do," the bride is shouting to the world, "We're married! We're married!" That is not conducive to improving the groom's disposition, not to speak of zest, for what is to come. What is honeymoon to some is ordeal to others.

"Honeymoon" of course is what Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's camp is asking from the media, from critics, from the public itself. "Truce" would be the better word, suggesting as it does the grudging cessation, or suspension, of hostility rather than the enthusiastic rush to embrace unwanted arms. But even a truce is earned, and is made only with an honorable enemy. Honorable is not the word that leaps to mind in association with the current government.



I remember while I was abroad getting a text message from a television group soliciting my comments on the "making of the president." Well, I thought the "unmaking of the nation" sounded like a better title, or had the better premises. The "making of a president" suggests brilliant strategy, "the unmaking of the nation" suggests the mugging of a people's will.

The perfect metaphor for the last election, and the one that is bound to hound the current government for years to come, is Ms Macapagal-Arroyo being proclaimed in the dead of night while the nation slept. It happened after J.V. Bautista took a last-ditch stand the day before to get Congress to pursue the counting, correctly arguing that the need for credible elections far outweighed the need for producing a president by the end of the month. Indeed superseded it entirely: The need to have a president at the right time cannot be more important than the need to have the right president.

To preempt protest, which in any case they were threatening to scuttle with mayhem, Ms Macapagal-Arroyo's allies in Congress trotted out a picture of her being proclaimed winner. Not unlike coup plotters who trot out photographs of a fait accompli takeover, complete with nervous smiles on the faces of the presumed victors.

There is a phrase associated with doing things furtively in the dark. That is "like a thief in the night." That is the well-known metaphor for death. But you don't have to take the phrase, "like a thief in the night," metaphorically at all, it resonates with very literal meanings.

There is another perfect metaphor for "the making of the (new) president." Which is the planned inauguration of Ms Macapagal-Arroyo in Cebu. I am glad they are doing that because it is a good reminder of what the elections were. It is an election that Ms Macapagal-Arroyo has won on the strength of a statistical improbability, which is a candidate doing far better in a province other than her own. Ms Macapagal-Arroyo has done better in Cebu than in Pampanga. No one has accomplished that feat before. Not Marcos, not Cory, not Ms Macapagal-Arroyo's own father Diosdado. And she did it while being exceedingly unpopular and after being embroiled in a move to oust Cebu's favorite son, Hilario Davide, as chief justice. Miracles never cease.

I suggest that during the inauguration, Ms Macapagal-Arroyo's friends in Cebu replace the motto of the presidential seal with, "What are we in power for?" It would make explicit what has always been implicit in Philippine governance, which is now the official way of determining the outcome of elections.

An eternity ago, when Fernando Poe Jr. offered to become president and offered to unite the country if he became one, I said in a column that unity was not the product of charisma or popularity or merely something that was willed. Unity was the product of shared dreams and expectations. The same might be said today with Ms Macapagal-Arroyo asking for a show of goodwill from the nation. What are we going to rally around, what are we going to aspire for?

Is it fighting corruption? Too late. The entire Ms Macapagal-Arroyo campaign was built on frittering away taxpayers' money for billboards and posters, which is corruption. Is it honest and transparent government? Too late. The very existence of Benjamin Abalos' Comelec is a living reminder of how the crest was won, which was neither honestly nor transparently. Is it listening to various voices and finding consensus for charting the future? Too late. The ganging up of the administration party in Congress to stifle dissenting voices during the count is not a display of openness. Is it respecting differences and bringing people together amid their diversity? Too late. Threatening protesters with arrest for "destabilizing" government does not respect differences. Hell, it doesn't even respect the Constitution, particularly the part that says Bill of Rights.

I have a better suggestion in lieu of a truce or a honeymoon, and that is increased vigilance. The threat of a Poe presidency is over, we are back to looking at a Ms Macapagal-Arroyo presidency that has yet to offer anything by way of making things better. Enough of that mindless chatter about putting things behind us and henceforth making only "constructive" and "positive" suggestions instead of "destructive" and "negative" ones. There is nothing constructive about abiding iniquity, there is nothing positive about affirming wrong. There is nothing destructive about remembering the sins of the past, there is nothing negative about criticizing the ills of the present. The best time for vigilance is not at the end of things, when things have gotten so bad we need an Edsa to crawl out of it. It is at the beginning of things when we can still prevent them from getting worse.

Honeymoons need one thing, and that is consent. The other kind is just sexual harassment.

Flight of Fancy

Flight of Fancy

June 28, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros

THE ONLY thing to be said for long flights is that you get to finish reading books in them. And, well, you get to have curious conversations.

"I noticed," said a Filipino when we landed in Amsterdam last week, "that you were reading 'The Da Vinci Code'." We were seated beside throughout the flight, and he now introduced himself to me as a doctor who was attending a medical forum in Barcelona. "I started reading the book myself," he went on, "but decided to put it down. I'm a member of Couples for Christ and a good Christian. I was afraid it would damage my faith."



Well, I have no wish to make people feel vulnerable, particularly while out of their comfort zone geographically and psychologically, so I just mumbled some words of sympathy. My first instinct though was to say, "Well, if it's a faith that has strong roots, it shouldn't blow down so easily." I might have added that what does not kill you will make you stronger. But that would have been a quote from someone Christendom also doesn't particularly like- Friedrich Nietzsche - the fellow better known for his aphorism, "God is dead." I wasn't sure modern philosophy wasn't taught at medical school.

The one comment I've been hearing about "The Da Vinci Code" is, "Oh, the attack against Opus Dei." Well, true enough it doesn't have flattering things to say about that group. It pretty much suggests Opus Dei is a direct descendant of the Inquisition, with its intolerant, harsh and self-mortifying ways, which includes our own favorite ritual during Lent, which is self-flagellation. Dan Brown does contrast Opus Dei with the more liberal wing of the papacy, which resulted in the group being (despite its apparent financial generosity, also called bribe, to the Vatican) dropped as a prelature of the Vatican some years ago.

But that is cold comfort to mainstream Christians, who will also have to deal with the book's scathing depiction of the history of Christianity. No, more than that, with the book's depiction of Christian doctrine, as handed down by the Church, which is that of a grand deception. The original Christians, the book asserts, did not believe in a divine Christ. In fact, not until Constantine, a leader driven by imperial ambition, came into the picture did the doctrine of a divine Christ arise. Constantine himself could have chosen another religion to unite the world under him - he had a few good ones arrayed before him - but quite presciently, like an astute stock speculator, picked the one on the rise. A divine Christ stood to command undying loyalty from believers more than a human one.

As it turned out, far more than Constantine reckoned. The Church, which became a pillar of imperium, defended the doctrine to the death - of those who did not believe. It burned heretics at the stake by the millions, which Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" also chronicles. (One critic calls "The Da Vinci Code" "Eco on speed" and it is so in some ways, it is mind trick after mind trick; "The Name of the Rose" though is vastly superior in sensibility.) Specifically - and this is the point worth noting - it burned women heretics by the millions. In the course of the Inquisition, no less than 5 million of them!

The nature of their heresy was often the mere fact that they showed themselves capable of thought. Christianity, at least after it became a state religion was the first systematic, organized and brutal pogrom of women, the book suggests. The reason for this was that it sought to obliterate all the ancient religions as potential rivals, and most of those "pagan" religions followed the worship of the "sacred feminine." The symbols of those religions, which were also the symbols of the female gods, were transmogrified in Christianity into symbols of the devil. With all its puritanical results: sex, sensuality and, ultimately, women are the source of all evil.

I'll say no more lest I spoil the potential reader's pleasure - never mind the actual believer's beliefs, that's his own lookout. I will just add that you will never look at Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Last Supper" the same way after you've read this book. The book says Da Vinci was one of the keepers of a sect that hewed to the original Christian teachings, and he kept the flame alive by putting all sorts of subliminal messages in his paintings. One of them, the mortal nature of Christ, he depicted by painting his wife beside him in "The Last Supper." I leave the reader to discover the identity of that wife. I must say however that the first thing I did was look up Da Vinci's painting of the "Last Supper" in a book while in Spain, and was bowled over to see that Christ indeed is seated beside a woman! There is absolutely no mistaking it.

Will that shake the faith of those who have it? Well, the book itself isn't against faith, or even the Christian faith itself. It is against faith, or the Christian faith, that has been intolerant, harsh, and truly, well, un-Christian. If I recall right, the Pope himself had occasion a couple of years ago to apologize for the agony and death Christianity wrought upon the world in the course of two millennia. If "The Da Vinci Code" is anything to go by though, I don't know why women shouldn't ask for a special apology while at it.

But the book is not without one final irony. Which is that the one thing that is giving Christian scholars sleepless nights - there's a whole spate of books answering the "Da Vinci Code" today - is, to borrow Quentin Tarantino's title, pulp fiction. That is what the book really is in the end, pulp fiction, though a vastly superior one. The Inquisition is dealt a death blow by commercialization? An irony to please Da Vinci himself.

Read in flight, some things end up being more than flights of fancy.

Around the World

Around the World

June 24, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros

I TOLD my friend, a journalist from Paris, that the last time I was in her city, which was the early 1990s, my impression was that the number of migrants there had grown tremendously. In the 1980s, you saw only a sea of white faces in the Metro. In 1993, you saw faces of different colors mingled among the white ones. She was surprised and said she hadn't noticed but had the same impression when she went to London. The number of migrants had positively exploded there. Well, the hardest thing to see is always what's under your nose.

She said there was still a sizable community of Filipinos in France who did domestic work. Though most of them were there illegally, they were being protected by their employers. The reason for it was not the French passion for liberty, equality and fraternity, it was the French passion for a bargain. The Filipino maids fetched half the price of regular babysitters. And they were by far more patient and caring.

I told my friend that when I was in Paris, I spoke to one of the maids, asking her if her French was now excellent. She said no, she just knew survival French. I asked her how she was able to communicate with the kids she was babysitting. She answered, "Oh, no problem, they've learned to speak Tagalog."

I told my friend, we would conquer the world someday by the principle of the hand that rocks the cradle. She found it very, very amusing.

* * *

Former Thai foreign minister Surin Pitsuwan, a Muslim, had an interesting story to tell. On the way to Barcelona from Frankfurt, he asked for the Muslim meal, which was provided by the airline. His aides to the right and left of him ordered the regular meal. When the meals came, his aides were served with metal spoon and fork. He was served with plastic spoon and fork. The same thing happened, he said, when he flew to Rome some years earlier. He asked for the Muslim meal, and they gave him plastic spoon and fork to go with the food.

When the stewardess came around, he asked her why this was so. She answered a little exasperatedly, as though it was self-explanatory: "Well, you asked for the Muslim meal."

A Dutch had the last word, however. After hearing the Thai say this, he said. "Next time you fly to Barcelona from Europe, take a Dutch airline from Amsterdam. You won't feel discriminated against. They won't give you plastic spoon and fork. They won't even give you spoon and fork. In fact, they won't serve you food at all!"

* * *

I met an Indian from Kerala who now teaches in a university in Toronto. He is a Mathematics professor who has done considerable research in, and has written a book about, the non-Western origins of Math. I told him I had read somewhere that Algebra originated from the East, specifically from Arab land, while geometry originated from the West. He said that both in fact had non-Western origins. Geometry originated from that part of Greece that was in Africa.

He did research as well among the aborigines of Australia to disprove the notion that primitive tribes had no mathematical sense. They did not have one in the conventional sense, he said, but they were amazing in the way they reckoned distances accurately, which they did by measuring length of journey, speed, the movement of the sun and stars, and the length of shadows, which was a nascent form of Geometry.

I asked him why Indians were so good at Math, even producing human calculators. Arguably, he said, the long history of civilization had to do with it. But quite apart from that, he said, Indians took a joy in numbers. That was so because they associated numbers with entertainment. As a kid, he said, he was given puzzles by his father to solve. A thing though, he said regretfully, that was now being pushed back by television. Kids no longer diverted themselves with mathematical puzzles.

In fact, he said, the unabridged "Kama Sutra" contained these elaborate puzzles. They were part of foreplay. Couples entertained themselves first by giving each other puzzles to solve "before getting down to serious business."

What can I say? Maybe you need Math to do those contortions.

The Spaniards have a joke about Generalissimo Franco, the dictator who ruled Spain from the early 1930s to 1978. While he was in his deathbed, a crowd of his followers gathered at the plaza facing his home and chanted, "Franco! Franco!" Hearing the chants, he asked one of his aides what the commotion was. His aide said with passionate loyalty: "They are for you, Generalismo. The people have come to say goodbye."

Franco lifted his head and asked: "Why? Where are they going?"

Talk about tyrants not knowing the meaning of leaving.

* * *

Josef says proudly he is Catalan. That is his identity. They have their own history, traditions and ways of doing things that are different from the rest of Spain. Of course, they are not separatist, like the Basque, but they are fiercely independent. The government of Catalunia is currently waging a battle to prevent the central government from skimming off its taxes. But Josef is also proud to belong to Spain, a country that is now advancing by leaps and bounds. "We have lot of catching up to do," he says. "Franco devastated us. While the rest of Western Europe charged ahead, we were left behind."

The advance is more than economic, it is also psychological. From the puritanical days of Franco, Spain now allows same-sex marriages in some parts.

Unfortunately, says Josef, a man in his early 30s, the youth of Spain no longer know about the Franco days, and what it took to get out of the rut. "We must be reminded," he said. "We must remember."

I thought of the aftermath of the Ferdinand Marcos days, and felt a tinge of bitterness.

Remembrance of Things Past

Remembrance of Things Past

June 23, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros

A FEW weeks ago, one youth asked me in a talk I gave: Where do we start? How do we begin to untie our tangle of problems? How do we go forward?

I said without hesitation that we go forward by going backward. We march ahead by retracing our steps.



The one thing we lack, which cannot be made up for by other things, is pride. It is the one thing other Asian countries have which has allowed them to forge ahead. It is the one thing that makes them come together when the chips are down, such as yield their dollars or not buy them when the local currency is floundering. It is the one thing we do not have, which has caused us to stagnate. It is the one thing that makes us think of ourselves first when the chips are down, clinging to our dollars or going on a dollar-buying spree when the peso is floundering.

Pride comes from a sense of having one's own. "God bless the child that's got his own," Billie Holiday sings in her famous song. She knew whereof she spoke: It came from the traumatic experience of being an African-American in America. God, or government, whichever came first, cursed the man that didn't get his own, and the black community took centuries to get its own, not least by losing some of its own, like Martin Luther King. It did so by finding its past. Alex Haley merely did his community the favor of putting into one word a process that had been taking place in their consciousness for some time: roots.

That is what we have to do: find our roots.

I say so from experience. I've written about this in the past, but I do not mind repeating it again and again. It was my brush with Philippine history, coming only during my college years, that changed my outlook forever. Before that, I knew more about George Washington and the cherry tree than about Jose Rizal and his slippers, courtesy of textbooks like "This Is Our Land, This is Our Home," which we read in elementary school. The "this" did not refer to the Philippines, it referred to America. The school was aptly called a parochial school. From hindsight, it wasn't just the fact that it was the parish school that made it so.

It was only in college that I encountered our own history, something that doesn't happen to other Asian nationals, who cannot escape their history even if they wanted to. That alone should show what is monumentally anomalous in this country. More ironically, my encounter with our own history did not come from school, it came from outside of it. It wasn't from the history courses I took, though I recall there was Rizal and a couple of other subjects in the early years, it was from the books I read at the time. And I read them only because of the influence of activism, which was raging in the campus then. It was a powerful influence, not least because it made history more than a matter of names and dates, which was how it was pretty much taught in school (it still is, if the complaints I hear these days, are true). It made it a matter of life and death.

I don't know what can take the place of activism to drive the youth today to these lengths. In past columns, I described the effect of that encounter as of someone who had been blind from birth and could see for the first time. When I wrote that, I hadn't yet read Oliver Sacks who showed in "An Anthropologist on Mars" that people who do see for the first time do not really see. They go through the process of learning to "see" with their eyes and not with their fingers. The correction is not a bad one. The sensation of first encountering the past -- our past -- remains overwhelming. But it truly takes time to take it in.

And it truly is the one thing that makes you proud to be Filipino. You do not have to invent a great civilization or great victories, you only have to know what happened. There is greatness enough there -- no, in abundance. And yes, there is triumph enough there, amid the defeats. The triumph of the spirit is always greater than the triumph of the sword. One is tempted to add that it is so because it lives forever, but there's the rub: in this country, it doesn't.

God bless the child that's got his own. That may seem like a strange thing to say in an era of globalization, which demands assimilation and integration and cooperation. But it is no contradiction at all, nor is it an anachronism. There is a difference between assimilating and being subsumed, between adapting and aping, between cooperating and surrendering.

To this day, I cannot forget a story told to me by a Filipino ad man in San Francisco. During a conference, he was astounded to see that American ad-makers produced entirely different ads for Mexican, Vietnamese, Italians and other minority groups in America, but not so for Filipinos, though Filipinos were the second biggest ethnic community in California, after the Mexicans. That was so, it turned out, because they considered the others to be separate markets and the Filipinos only to be a subset of the American one. Which is true: Filipinos are Americans even in their own country. That is not assimilation, that is subsumption; that is not adaptation, that is loss of identity; that is not cooperation, that is surrender.

No, nationalism is not an enemy of globalization, independence is not an enemy of interdependence, pride is not an enemy of getting along with others. It takes two to make a strong bond. That is true as much for nations as for spouses. It is two countries or peoples that are fiercely independent -- that have their pride and identities -- that create lasting unions. The rest is just mail-order marriages.

The way to that pride and independence and sense of country is for us to remember the past. That is not a luxury, that is a necessity. It does not just spell the difference between enlightenment and ignorance, it spells the difference between life and death.

Lobotomized

Lobotomized

June 22, 2004
By Condrado de Quiros

OLIVER Sacks has a case in "An Anthropologist on Mars" that might as well speak of our national condition.

Sacks is a neurologist but has the distinction of having his works translated into movies and plays. "Awakenings" is his more famous work; it brought Robert de Niro and Robin Williams together in the movie version. He is the author as well of "The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat," which was turned into a play. "An Anthropologist on Mars" chronicles several cases, all of which reveal the infinite wonders and mysteries of the human mind.

There is another case there, "To See and Not See," that was turned into the movie, titled "At First Sight," starring Val Kilmer. Though the movie was creditable, you have to go to Sacks to grasp one very fundamental point about that story. Which is that "sight" is a learned experience. People who have their sight restored after a lifetime of not having it do not automatically see. They just apprehend an incoherent jumble of stimuli. They have to learn to see to see.

But I digress. As I was saying, there's a case in "Anthropologist" that struck me as symptomatic of our national condition. That is "The Last Hippie," the case of a man who has lost his capacity to remember. Greg was a hippie in the 1960s, took a lot of drugs, and joined the Hare Krishna. While still in his youth, he started having vision problems, which his fellows attributed to his developing a higher consciousness. The higher consciousness proved to be a benign tumor in his head which, left untreated for years, grew to the size of an orange and destroyed his frontal lobe completely.

The function of the frontal lobe used to be largely unknown in the past. Prison authorities used to recommend lobotomy, or the surgical removal of the frontal lobe, for violent inmates because they had the effect of inducing pacific behavior. That was so, as it turned out, because it removed a person's memory altogether. The practice was banned later on as a result of that discovery. It was worse than capital punishment.

Sacks describes Greg thus: "[He was] in effect confined to a single moment -- 'the present' -- uninformed by any sense of the past (or future).... Some sense of ongoing, or 'next,' is always with us. But this sense of movement, of happening, Greg lacked; he seemed immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless, moment. And whereas for the rest of us the present is given meaning and depth by the past (hence, it becomes the 'remembered present'), as well as being given potential and tension by the future, for Greg, it was flat and (in its meager way) complete. The living-in-the-moment... was so manifestly pathological."

Those are exactly the same pathological symptoms found in us as a people or nation. For all practical purposes, Sacks could be describing us. We are in effect confined to a single moment -- the present -- uninformed by any sense of the past or future. Sacks writes elsewhere that Greg forgets a story that is told to him after five minutes. He starts by modifying details until he tells a different story altogether.

That is how we relate to our past too, even if you convert minutes to days. We forget events almost as soon as they happen. We start out by modifying details until we end up telling a different story altogether. What we remember of the past, if we do at all, has very little to do with what happened. Our history is largely myth, or biography, produced by those who have the means -- and motive -- to hire mythmakers and biographers.

Some sense of ongoing, or "next," is always present with most countries. But this sense of movement, of happening, we lack; we seem immured, without knowing it, in a motionless, timeless, moment. It's not just a matter of lack of expectation, or lack of caring about the future, it's the lack of knowing there's one. There are other ways of putting it: We do not row, we just float. We do not look for a cure, we learn to live with the disease. Or my own favorite: We do not make love or war, we just make do. Even "bahala na" [come what may] doesn't quite capture the attitude. "Bahala na" at least implies a resignation, or surrender, based on faith in providence, or Bathala. Our attitude is just taking things as they come. The world demands caregivers, we give caregivers. Stimulus, response -- that is all.

Whereas for the rest of the world, the present is given meaning and depth by the past as well as given potential and tension by the future, for us it is flat and, in its meager way, complete. We live in the moment, by the moment, for the moment.

I don't know why we have become this way, though I've always thought it had to do with the sheer length of colonial subjugation. I don't know any other Asian country that has been a colony longer, though I do know many that have endured harsher rule. Though this sounds more like the stuff of science fiction than Sacks, the colonial rulers removed all traces of the past from the national consciousness and implanted a new memory upon it, one best exemplified by shibboleths like "Bataan," "Corregidor" and "I shall return," which stir zombie-like responses from us. But the other side of the equation is that we internalized the condition (human beings react to trauma by burying it deep in the subconscious) and began to perpetuate it ourselves. We can't remember anything outside of five minutes, or five days, or five weeks to be charitable. We keep repeating the same mistakes again and again and again.

Is there hope for a country that is lobotomized? I don't know. Sacks did offer a glimpse of it, Greg responding enthusiastically to a Grateful Dead concert and being "human" once again if only for a night. But right now, all I can hear for us is the name of Jerry Garcia's band.