Footnote to University of the Philippines

Footnote to University of the Philippines

Updated 11:23pm (Mla time) Nov 29, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 30, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


MY belated congratulations to Emerlinda Roman. She is the centennial president of the University of the Philippines (UP, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2008) after winning a closely contested fight last week. She was pitted against a Malacañang-sponsored candidate, Edgardo Espiritu. GMA apparently went all out to get Espiritu elected, though happily she did not have Benjamin Abalos to count the votes of the board of Regents. Which is all the sweeter for Roman's victory has become a victory for decency or good manners and right conduct.

She is also, not quite incidentally, the first woman president of UP. Well, there's no better way to signal the dawning of the new age, or at least the new UP century, than that a woman holds the key to this country's mind.

I am not from UP. Someone once asked me, "When did you graduate from UP?" and I answered, "Wrong on both counts." I studied at the Ateneo de Manila University but dropped out in my last semester, something I do not particularly encourage today's college students to do-different times, different chimes. But I've always felt close to UP. Most of my friends are from UP, and I taught there for a semester after running out of excuses to give my friend, Luis Teodoro, only to confirm to myself that I'm not cut out to be a teacher.

Several friends asked me the other week to plug for Roman when the contest was deadlocked at 6-6. I did not for a couple of reasons. The first was that the last time I did that, for Dodong Nemenzo in 1993, he lost to Emil Javier. Most of the candidates I've backed for as long as I can remember have lost for the simple reason that they are the best ones. The best candidates seldom win, especially in this country. I thought my endorsement of Roman might help Espiritu and deemed prudence the better part of valor.

The second was that I was rooting for Georgina Reyes, the former MassCom head. Of course, with her out of the running the other week, I'd have gladly thrown my support to Roman, but for Reason No. 1.

Every time the vote for UP president comes up, I keep hearing the idea that it's just a choice between a good administrator and a good academician, a good administrator being more preferable. Not at all. Good administrators are a dime a dozen, good academicians are rarer than water in drought. Good academicians being those who devote their lives to the pursuit of knowledge rather than money. I was about to say to the pursuit of knowledge rather than power, but I just remembered that knowledge is power, as Francis Bacon said, a thing emblazoned on the walls of some schools. But that is a concept that has been lost on the ex-academicians who have joined President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, in the same way that the concept of "Serve the people" has been lost on the ex-activists who have joined Ms Arroyo.

I told Georgina, when she solicited my views (and those of other media people) on what kind of vision the UP president ought to have, that I thought she or he should restore UP's role as a powerful voice in national affairs. That is not something a bureaucrat can do, that is something a scholar, or sage, can do. You may not like Dodong Nemenzo, or agree with what he does (some of my friends have no kind words to say about him), but he brings an intellectual stature to the position. Something that hasn't happened in a long time, the mentally (and integrity)-challenged apparently having gotten a lock on the UP presidency as much as the national one.

I said I remembered the time when UP debated ideas with the passion, or murderousness, with which people did matters of faith during the time of the Inquisition. I remembered the time when people wrote treatises and papers and did not just defend them before a panel of peers but before a public of students and teachers. I remembered the time when this country prized literature as it prizes the karaoke now, and writers in a drunken frenzy knocked on critics' doors and chased them with knives after getting a bad review. Arts and letters then were not just the stuff of grades, they were the stuff of life.

Indeed, I remembered the time when the UP Collegian was more than a college newspaper, it was the voice of the free press. Long before We Forum and Malaya, there was the Collegian whose masthead became the national cry: "Kung di tayo, sino pa? Kung di ngayon, kailan pa?" [If not we, then who? If not now, then when?] It captured perfectly the spirit of intellectual commitment. You can't have a deeper sense of personal responsibility and urgency than that. For which intellectual commitment, of course, several Collegian editors and their advisers ended up being detained or interrogated in Marcos' camps. But that was the time when UP represented more than just another school, it was a beacon in the wilderness.

I don't know why it shouldn't be so again. We are as much a wilderness today as we were in the past, even if the dangers that lurk there are of another kind. Though as far as threat of fascism is concerned, that is not entirely a thing of the past. The President has shown a scale of ambition not unlike Marcos', and an equal resolve to use whatever means possible to keep power. We were under de facto martial rule shortly after 9/11. But quite apart from that, there is the wilderness of a country going nowhere, or if it going anywhere at all, going backwards. Certainly the fact that a fifth of the population wants to leave the country must suggest new depths of dark and disquiet for us.

Other schools can afford bureaucrats for officials, whose visions do not go beyond how well they can raise funds and make their campuses bigger. UP cannot. It has far too much prestige and tradition to do so. Maybe Erlinda Roman can bring back the luster UP has lost, or improve on what Dodong has already done in that respect.

I wish her well.

No cause for celebration

No cause for celebration

Updated 11:09pm (Mla time) Nov 28, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 29, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


ANGELITO Nayan himself talked of God and the Bible. From both, he drew the strength to see himself through his ordeal, he said. He remembered one Bible verse in particular and repeatedly murmured it in the darkness: "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord; plans to prosper you and not harm you; plans to give you hope and a future."

Well, he also spoke of his captors showing no small amount of solicitousness-"Afghan hospitality," as he referred to it-toward them during their captivity. They got warm clothing for the cold and, except for the fact that a threat of harm lay upon their heads, did not particularly endure harsh conditions.

His experience, Nayan said, has only fanned his goodwill for the Afghan people. He hopes in particular that "democracy, peace and social justice will finally be the order of the day" for them.

I'm not knocking Nayan's discovery of God from the pit of darkness, or in the solitary vastness of the desert. No one who hasn't been kidnapped can truly appreciate the terrors that go with it. And abroad, too. One who has experienced the anxiety of being in a strange land can only imagine what it means to be a prisoner there. It doesn't get better because one works for the Foreign Service. There are no atheists in the trenches, goes a saying. There are no atheists in the company of kidnappers, too.

I am glad at least that Nayan's release has not been trotted out as a triumph of negotiation, the way Angelo de la Cruz's was. The latter had a crowd of jet-setting Filipino officials frantically flying to and from the Gulf countries for reasons only they knew. De la Cruz's captors were clear in what they wanted and had demonstrated earlier, via the beheadings of captives, they were not swayed by pleas and negotiations. They had one demand and one demand only, and that was for De la Cruz's country to pull out of Iraq. We did. Why the officials who came back with De la Cruz preened before the cameras as though they had accomplished something-well, this a country whose head is spun by spin.

What caused Nayan to be released, we do not know. Though by his own account, his captors were nowhere near to being their Iraqi counterparts in appetite for violence. His abduction in fact seems to have been fairly arbitrary: He and his companions were taken because they were UN workers who could be exchanged for their kidnappers' imprisoned brethren. Nayan just happened to be in the wrong place in the wrong time. His captors have easily settled for another UN worker.

That is not the case with Robert Tarongoy, who remains in the hands of his Iraqi captors to this day. The only accident in his case, like the only accident in De la Cruz's case, is that he and not another Filipino was kidnapped. Tarongoy dispels any lingering notion that De la Cruz's abduction was a fluke. Filipinos have become targets in Iraq and possibly elsewhere in the Gulf.

That is what makes Gloria Macapapal-Arroyo's order for the country to turn on the lights to greet Nayan, at the very least, premature. It insults Tarongoy and us. We still have a compatriot in the hands of kidnappers, and one who is not likely to come home telling stories about Iraqi hospitality. Indeed, if he comes home at all. His kidnappers have not been known to possess the merciful qualities of those who held Nayan. What they have been known for is their track record in carrying out their threats without compunction.

I'm not knocking Nayan's rediscovery of God and the Bible (like Daniel's) from the pit of captivity. But I am knocking another round of religious expostulation or breast-beating to greet Nayan's return. Nayan has every reason to turn pious and thankful, we do not. We have every reason only to turn furious and resentful. This is not an act of God or Fate that, like a storm or earthquake, we have managed to survive by dint of prayer or God's love. This is the direct result of our act of war against a people who have done us no harm, indeed have merely given some of our own people home and hearth. We cannot survive that other than by rescinding that act of war and apologizing to those we have injured so recklessly.

What do we do, throw a fiesta and congratulate ourselves every time a Filipino is released by his kidnappers in Iraq or elsewhere? We will have too many fiestas and broken backs from back-patting from the sheer number of Filipinos that stands to be kidnapped there. This isn't the end, this is just the beginning. Our acceptance of being chief anti-terrorist enforcer of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation guarantees it.

De la Cruz and Nayan, and certainly Tarongoy, are not a cause for joy, they are a cause for anger. They should never have been kidnapped to begin with-De la Cruz and Tarongoy above all-and would never have been kidnapped to begin with if their President had not forced them to wear a reflectorized sign on their backs that said, "Kidnap me." I don't know why the OFWs in particular, or the migrant groups that are representing them, are not taking to the streets like a flood to demand that their President stop shoving them in harm's way by playing the American stooge.

Nayan says he wishes the Afghan people well and looks to the time when they would have democracy, peace and social justice. Well, history has yet to record democracy, peace, or social justice emerging from the loins of occupation, or subjugation, or tyranny. "Imposed democracy" is a contradiction in terms. Winged lions have a better chance of being found in this world. You need not look far to see what happens when a colonial power occupies another country and ruthlessly pacifies it to build democracy. You need only look at the Philippines.

What we are is democratic in form, ridiculous in substance.

What do we do now?

What do we do now?

Updated 02:42am (Mla time) Nov 25, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 25, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


A LETTER-WRITER wrote to say things were truly getting out of hand in this country, with one scandal coming on top of the other, one crisis piling on top of the other. But the question, he said, was: What do we do now? How do we get out of the rut? We all know what the problem is, how do we solve it?

He is by no means the first one to ask that question. I've heard it many times, not least only recently from many Filipinos living in Italy who worried about the families they left behind. But my letter-writer put it more directly and by way of a challenge. His subtext was: You've written a great deal about the things assailing the country. Now, can you write about the things that could get this country going?

Well, first off, I don't know that we all know the problem and that it's just a question of finding the answers to it. The question itself, "What do we do now, how do we get out of the rut?" is part of the problem. It is symptomatic of a disease I call "the 'last two minutes' syndrome." We're like a basketball team that plays badly for 46 minutes and then resorts to heroic play during the last two minutes. We ask, "How do we get out of the rut?" only after gleefully allowing ourselves to fall into the rut.We do not lack for recent examples. I remember shortly before the elections replying to Joker Arroyo's proposition that Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is preferable to Fernando Poe Jr. because there is a constitutional remedy for dishonesty but not for stupidity. You cannot impeach a president for being feeble-minded. I asked why we had to wait for a constitutional remedy in future to solve our problems when we already had a perfectly normal and more efficient remedy at that very moment, which was voting for the candidate who was neither venal nor feeble-minded. Ms Arroyo and Poe were not the only presidential candidates in the elections. There were others who were far less morally or intellectually challenged.

The point is simple: Why we do have to dig a hole we have to heroically claw out of later when we do not need to dig a hole at all?

Yet another example was Ms Arroyo's use of public funds to campaign. The TV ads of the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office and Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. and the huge billboards paid for by government offices that mushroomed across the country proclaiming Ms Arroyo's good deeds were patently electioneering. That alone was ironclad proof of graft. Yet no one rose to protest it, certainly not civil society, which had helped oust Joseph Estrada precisely because of it. I kept harping on the implications of that silence, but that only rankled on the Arroyo supporters, or those who bought the line that she was the "lesser evil" in a fight between one evil and another.

At the very least, how can anyone who spent a fortune to win power possibly wield it to serve the people? At the very most, why shouldn't it spell the end of any effort to curb corruption in this country? You agree to corruption during the campaign -- using taxpayers' money to campaign is stealing -- why should you protest corruption in the aftermath? You've lost every right to.

What all this says is that the first thing we have to do to get out of the rut is to stop falling into it. The first thing we have to do to get out of the hole we find ourselves in is to stop digging one. An old adage says it well: Don't put off for tomorrow what you can do today. It's true. You can stop something wrong today, don't wait till tomorrow. Tomorrow, the disease would have turned into a plague.

I've heard some friends say the problem is that we've lost our capacity to feel outrage and the solution is rekindling it. I'm not knocking it. True enough, we seem to have factored the betrayal of public trust as part of life so that it no longer looms as a betrayal at all. Indeed, it's more than that we've learned to regard perfidy with indifference, it's that we've learned to regard those who rail against it either as naive or "negativistic." I remember again the political pundits who predicted Ms Arroyo was going to win the elections because she would pull no stops to do so, including lie, cheat and steal. Well, if so, why not protest it? Why accept it as fate? Why regard the expectation of it as political savvy?

I have only one caveat on rekindling outrage, and that is not just rekindling it but keeping it aflame. We've never had problems feeling outrage, as the two EDSA People Power uprisings show. We've always had problems sustaining it, as the aftermath of both EDSA People Power uprisings shows. We rise to heights of fury over a tyranny only to lapse into silence over its spawn. Contrary to rumor, anger is not kin to hypertension, it is kin to vigilance. It is not allied with old age, it is allied with youth. The day you stop being angry at wrongdoing is the day you start being cynical. It is no surprise this country has become cynical.

What we can do now is to stop asking, "What can we do now?" if by that is meant beginning on a clean slate and forgetting the iniquities that underlie our problems. I heard a great deal of that when Angelo de la Cruz was being held by his captors and only recently while Angelito Nayan and Robert Tarongoy were being held by their captors: "Let's stop the finger-pointing and fault-finding just ask ourselves what we can do now."

Well, I don't mind finger-pointing if there is a guilty party to point to and fault-finding if there is a fault to be found. We forget that Ms Arroyo helped in the invasion of Iraq and concentrate only in seeking the release of individual hostages, and we will have no end of hostages. We find fault with the fact that Ms Arroyo helped invade Iraq, and point the finger at her for following Bush willy-nilly, we change our stance on Iraq and assure that Filipinos in the Gulf will not be kidnapped again.

Two different attitudes, two different results.

Broke

Broke

Updated 01:09am (Mla time) Nov 22, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 22, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


"HERE is a land in which a few are spectacularly rich while the masses remain abjectly poor. Gleaming suburbia clashes with the squalor of the slums. Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here, too, are a people whose ambitions run high, but whose fulfillment is low and mainly restricted to the self-perpetuating elite. Here is a land of privilege and rank-a republic dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste."

The one who said this was not Ka Paeng or Ka Pepe, it was Benigno "Ninoy" Aquino. He said this in an article in 1968 in the US journal Foreign Affairs. This was typical of what politicians and radicals alike were saying before martial law, particularly to warn that the country was a "social volcano" all set to explode. Aquino himself suggested the way by which the explosion might be averted: "The wealth that the oligarchy rapaciously covets and hoards must get down to the masses in the form of roads, bridges and schools; these are what the tao understands as good or bad government."

I remarked in the book "Dead Aim": "Caught in the rapture of his eloquence, Aquino forgot that his in-laws owned a hacienda that stretched as far as the eye could see. And one that would remain untouched by land reform two decades later."

The past comes back to haunt. As indeed do Cory's own words, when she promised during the "snap elections" that the first thing she would do was subject Hacienda Luisita to land reform. What a difference a month makes, which was all the time it took from the "snap elections" to Cory replacing Marcos, which turned out to be a sea change not just in the political landscape of the nation but in the moral outlook of the new governors. That was all the time it took for Cory to forget her vow.

Hacienda Luisita will always be a festering sore. It will always be the symbol of the failure of Edsa to move the country from tyranny to democracy, if by democracy is also meant-as Ninoy argued-the pushing back of oligarchic rule. You can't have a more oligarchic rule than feudal rule, which takes place in Hacienda Luisita notwithstanding its seemingly capitalist conversion into an industrial enclave. All the conversion shows is that, as in the days of the feudal manor, serfs are owned by their landlords body and soul. They can be told to do anything, including to agree to "stock option." Their wellbeing is a matter of manorial beneficence. They have no more power to determine the future of Hacienda Luisita, or their share of its profits, than beggars have the power to determine the amount of alms they can get from prospective donors.

Noynoy Aquino says leftists goaded the workers in Hacienda Luisita, who have been complaining about their lot, to strike. Well, so what? At the very least, try goading workers who have no deep-seated grievance to strike and see how far you'll get-these days, particularly, when work is harder to come by than honesty in GMA's government. Maybe leftists goaded the workers in Hacienda Luisita to strike-I can believe it-but they could not have succeeded if the workers were not ripe for the goading.

At the very most, workers have a right to strike. One would imagine congressmen would know that. A strike is neither illegal nor immoral, it is sanctioned by the Constitution and enshrined in the tradition of the workers' movement. Only Lucio Tan and now Ninoy's namesake think it is not.

While at this, if leftists had not goaded workers, farmers, students and other sectors to mount national strikes, or "welgang bayan," during martial law, the Aquinos would not be there. It was the efforts of the leftists to goad Filipinos to fight sleep in the early years of martial law that assured they would be awake to react to the murder of Ninoy much later.

Cory cannot understand why the workers refuse to accept her offer of sympathy and prayers for the dead? Well, if I recall right, Cesar Virata had to scurry away from Sto. Domingo Church after conveying to her the sympathy and prayers of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos for the death of her husband. He feared being torn limb from limb. The sympathy and prayers of the one who caused you grief are never welcome. The life of Ninoy is not more important than the lives of the 14 workers who died in the blaze of gunfire from goons in the uniforms of cops and soldiers last Tuesday. Other than in oligarchic reckoning, which deems the lives of serfs as nothing compared to that of the lord of the manor.

"If it ain't broke," says Department of Agrarian Reform chief Rene Villa, "why fix it?" That is his reaction to calls for a review of the "stock option" plan.

What, the corpses of 14 workers strewn over a dusty road in Hacienda Luisita are not a sign something is broke? Again, maybe it's true leftists goaded the workers to strike. But as I wrote a long time ago, when Isidro Cari¤o, then the education secretary, said the same thing about the 3,000 public school teachers who went on strike against him, and vowed to hunt the goaders down, the words of leftists are nothing compared to the flailing of hunger. And hunger has no address.

But the 14 corpses lying on the ground point to something broke that's even bigger than that Hacienda Luisita hasn't been land-reformed. That is, that the foundations of democracy in this country are crumbling. No, more than that, that is, that the moral foundations of this country are crashing. Power has made people forget what it means to lose a loved one to tyranny.

Ninoy Aquino might have been talking of today when he said: "Here is a land consecrated to democracy but run by an entrenched plutocracy. Here is a land of privilege and rank-a republic dedicated to equality but mired in an archaic system of caste."

If that ain't broke, what is?

Good news

Good news

Updated 01:28am (Mla time) Nov 18, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the November 18, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


ERNESTO Magtoto had an interesting letter the other day. (Inquirer, Nov. 16, 2004) "During a TV interview, the President asked the media to help in easing the prevailing tension gripping the nation by discouraging rumor-mongering and cultivating the attitude of positivism.... The announcement ... indicated her desire to improve the situation. But was it prompted by the right motive? Or was it just an attempt to dissuade the media from asking questions about the improprieties in government and her inability to stop them...?

"Isn't suggesting positivism a bit premature and suspicious given the likelihood it could be used to evade accountability? Isn't evading those questions a sign of weakness in leadership, especially when transparency has been bannered as a standard of governance?"

I'm glad a reader has seen fit to point this out. I've been saying the same thing, though in far more strident terms, all this time. The appeal for the media not to contribute to rumor-mongering is misdirected. The media are not the biggest contributor to rumor-mongering, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is. At the very least, she is guilty of spreading the biggest rumor of all, which is that the country is in good shape and will have a merry Christmas this December. That is rumor of the same epic scale as the one Ferdinand Marcos propagated about Sept. 21, the anniversary of martial law, being a day of thanksgiving.

At the very most, well, take it from Dante Ang bagging a sweetheart deal to develop 2.5 hectares of Subic land. Ang, of course, is one of Ms Arroyo's "spinners," people who, in a perverse parody of Christ turning water into wine, turn bad news into good news, hell into heaven. Yet another "spinner" -- though he has never advertised himself as such -- is Mike Velarde, the self-anointed spreader of the Good News. He truly cannot see bad news anywhere, especially in presidents, turning from Joseph Estrada to Ms Arroyo with the ease with which the lustful go from bed to bed. In return for which he received the good news of the Pag-IBIG Fund giving him its biggest loan to date to build condominiums, praise the Lord, or Ms Arroyo, whoever comes first.

"Spin" is the word the foreign press has used to describe the Arroyo government's handling of news about the fallout between the United States and the Philippines following Ms Arroyo's pullout of troops in Iraq. "Spin" is the word the foreign press used to describe the Arroyo government's handling of news about an impending economic crisis. Spin is just another word for rumor-mongering. Well, journalists have yet another word for it, but it is not used in polite company.

But it's not just that Ms Arroyo's call for "positivism," as Magtoto puts it, is premature and suspicious, it's that it isn't positivism at all, if by that is meant producing a positive effect. Positive and negative are tricky concepts, as indeed are constructive and destructive, good and bad. That point cannot be sufficiently belabored.

There is nothing positive or constructive about seeing only the good when the bad festers like an infected wound. There is nothing positive or constructive about reporting that Ferdinand Marcos signed a presidential decree while ignoring the fact that a million people marched down the streets to accompany Ninoy Aquino to his grave. There is nothing positive or constructive about reporting that Estrada broke bread, or ate rice, with the poor in some hovel in Metro Manila while ignoring the fact that his cronies ate and drank and plotted themselves silly in the witching hours every day. And there is nothing positive about reporting how Ms Arroyo is resolute about pinning down Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia for corruption while ignoring that her husband managed to get away with being Jose Pidal and that she herself has managed to get away with plundering the public coffers to campaign.

These things are not positive and constructive, they are negative and destructive in the extreme. Indeed, these things are not good news, they are bad news of the worst sort. It is not "positivism," it is being stricken blind.

Of course, Ms Arroyo has her own agenda for asking media to "toe the line," in Magtoto's words. But I have heard many well-meaning readers or viewers as well suggest the same thing for many reasons, not least to improve the national image. I remember again the group in Singapore that protested the airing of the Philippine TV program "Probe" there on grounds that many of its episodes (pedophilia, child prostitution, garbage) portrayed Filipinos in an unflattering light. Well, it is not the job of journalists to improve the image of the country, it is their job to tell things reasonably accurately. The job of improving the country's image belongs to PR practitioners or spin doctors who, in these days particularly, are able to do it only by rumor-mongering. See above.

In the end, the judgments of positive or negative, constructive or destructive, are alien to journalism. The only judgment that can and should apply to it is truthful or deceitful. The only good news in fact is the one that tells the truth -- with the small letter "t", or what can be ascertained with reasonable diligence -- about life as it unfolds, whether tragic or comic, whether a source of grief or laughter.

I did say when I wrote about the "Probe" case that the group in Singapore was missing the point. The "Probe" reports, for all the seamy side of life in these parts that they exposed, did give the country a very good image. They did give Filipinos, in Singapore and elsewhere, a reason to be proud of their country. They did so by showing the world this country had a free press. Which was more than could be said for many parts of that world.

Untruth, even of the feel-good variety, has never been known to set people free. It can't be very good news to anyone.

Elegy

Elegy

Updated 01:48am (Mla time) Nov 17, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 17, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THE PICTURES of the train that flew off the tracks in Quezon province reminded me of my childhood. I spent it in Naga City, leaving for Manila only in my college years. At the time, the main mode of transportation going to and from Manila was the train, fondly called the Bicol Express. That is where the name of that concoction of coconut milk and chili comes from. The suggestion being that that insane dish (for those who do not like hot food) could only have come straight from hell or the Bicol region. A little of both, I guess.

Some travelers also took the South Road, but they were largely the intrepid ones. The bus fare was cheaper, but the journey took longer and was prey to all sorts of perils. Not least robbers, many a bus having been held up in the night, or sometimes in broad daylight. Every time I saw a Western, with a stagecoach being chased by bandits who wore black handkerchiefs over their mouths, I thought-with the aid of a wild childhood imagination-of what it must be like to take the bus down the South Road. The very name "South Road" sounded like "south of the border, down Mexico way," as the song went.

The train was the thing to take, the stations from Legazpi City to Manila teeming with crowds. Which, of course, like the pier, gave refuge to hustlers and scoundrels, some of whom usurped the seats in Economy and sold them to the desperate, who were those with infants or carried cartloads of baggage. The Bicol Express of course was nothing like the Orient Express -- it is certainly not so now -- it had nothing of its grandeur or comfort. The "Economy," which was all I could afford, resembled every inch the trains in India, where bedraggled humanity poured into every pore of space, making going to the john -- such as the cubicle in the corner of every other coach could be called that -- an exercise in gymnastics. "Economy" was a commentary on the movement you could make.

But though safer compared to the road trip, the train had its perils, too. The Visayan nightmare is a ship sinking at sea, the Bicolano nightmare is a train skidding and falling into a ravine. That was so particularly during bad weather and when the engineer happened to be a speed freak. I heard all sorts of stories about it when I was a kid. Of course it never happened frequently, but myth has a way of magnifying things. In any case, the overcrowded coaches, like the overcrowded cabins in boats, guaranteed that when it happened it would be a humongous tragedy, scores of dead being strewn all over the rocks among the coconut groves.

Even then, there was talk about unsavory characters ripping off portions of the tracks -- literally -- to sell as scrap metal. But it wasn't as bad as today. The train being the lifeblood of the region, or the railroad track being its main artery, it was patrolled dutifully by the police and train authorities. The culprits did not just risk the ire of the law, they risked the wrath of the community. Easy to be frowned upon by the law, it carried with it a romantic air, not so easy to be scorned by the community, it carried with it only a sentence to obscurity.

These thoughts rushed back to me when I saw the pictures on our front page of the train that looked like a snake that had twisted and coiled itself in spasms of death. The survivors said it was the gruesome handiwork of the engineer who had sped away while negotiating a curve, going at 70 kilometers per hour where he should be going at 20. It was a sharp curve that led down to a gully, made more dangerous by the absence of portions of the tracks, courtesy of not so very petty thieves. The survivors said the sensation before the train tore itself off the tracks and sent the coaches rolling on their sides again and again was that of a horse galloping wildly. The result was not unlike the fate that visited Christopher Reeve.

The disaster brought home all the horror stories I heard when I was a kid. It brought home as well some fairly recent memories, which I got from my last few visits to Naga City. That was the absolutely decrepit state of the Bicol Express. I saw a train lumber by one time. It was almost dusk, the sun blazing red before gasping its last, when the train chugged mournfully by, the sound it produced bereft of any sharp and metallic quality. I swear it issued a moan. It was the sound of creeping death.

Someone would tell me later only the impoverished and desperate took the train now. Everybody else took the bus, which now offered a variety of services and boasted a host of competing lines. I took one once and almost froze to death from the air-conditioning, a typical feature by the way of most buses in this country. This is a country that has a deep and dark longing for snow. But that is another story. There is nothing express about the Bicol Express now. A trip to Manila from Bicol could take anywhere from 15 to God knows how many hours, depending on the weather, the condition of track and train, and the extent of hangover of the pilot.

Frankly, I cannot understand how we have left the Bicol Express to rot in this way. I still think the officials who ripped off the Philippine National Railways should be made to ride trains running at 70 kph in sharp curves where portions of the tracks have been ripped off by miscreants as their punishment. But they are not just the ones to blame here. Elsewhere in the world, trains remain the main mode of land transport, for good reason. They are the fastest and most efficient way of transporting people and cows from one place to another.

Maybe this tragedy, for all the grief and bereavement it has cost many families in my favorite region, will drive home the point. There is something else that died there, or at least is gasping its last. I don't know, maybe we can still do something about it.

Mysterious ways

Mysterious ways

Updated 10:19pm (Mla time) Nov 15, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 15, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I WAS one of those who read about Faye Nicole San Juan in the Internet and was moved by her experience. The article I read compared the fate that befell her with the triumphant visit of Jasmine Trias to this country. Trias, the article said, was feted right and left for landing a place in the "American Idol" contest while San Juan was ignored right and left despite her far more remarkable accomplishments. Those accomplishments included winning first prize in the Intercontinental Science Quiz Net in Australia in September last year and earlier landing among the top five in the Mathematics for Young Asians competition in Indonesia.

Other articles recalled San Juan's ordeal in more detail. Apparently, she and her mother, Cathy, were swindled by a fellow Filipino when they got to Brisbane, and the older San Juan had to pawn some of her belongings to get them to the competition site. Even then, they had to walk a couple of kilometers in the end. Apparently, too, Faye got no support from the Department of Science and Technology (DoST) despite qualifying for the competition and no help from the Philippine Embassy in Canberra during their trying times. As a result, they sought help from the Japanese Embassy, which turned them down.

Their story took off with their church, the Bread of Life Ministries, backing it up and asking government and country to give San Juan her due. I myself was ready to give it. I agreed completely with the article I read earlier complaining about our warped sense of priorities, giving more importance to entertainment than to education, to glitter than to learning.

Alas, as it turned out, it was an elaborate hoax, as elaborate as the anti-Filipino remarks attributed to Art Bell that circulated in the Internet and got the goat of many Filipinos. The Bread of Life Ministries has "determined that the story is not true" and said it would issue a public apology soon. It attributed the hoax to the wild imaginings of Cathy San Juan. "Our heart goes out to a child like Faye whose mother has deep emotional problems."

The Australian Embassy will not confirm whether it issued a visa or not to the San Juans, saying visas are confidential, it does not give out information on that matter. But the Bureau of Immigration says it has no record of either Faye or Cathy leaving the country at anytime from September to December last year. The Japanese Embassy as well denies it received any request for help from the San Juans. So barring a dramatic twist, that's pretty much end of story, at least as far as its veracity goes.

But it remains an ongoing one for me at least in other respects. I can imagine why the DoST and the Department of Foreign Affairs should bristle at the suggestion they did nothing to help the deserving. It is a sensitive point, quite apart from being an unfair charge. With this government resolutely showing a warped sense of priorities (its most recent one is Pag-IBIG Fund's issuance of its largest loan to date to Mike Velarde, in aid of producing condo units), while all its other contributors have to fall in line for a paltry one, government agencies can ill-afford more patent demonstrations of it. Its officials certainly cannot afford so, this government too having a predilection for sacrificing lambs to draw attention away from the vultures in Malacañang.

But this notwithstanding, I can't find myself tremendously oppressed by what Cathy San Juan has done. This is not to encourage people to mount deceptions of any kind, whatever their intentions. But San Juan's delusions at least have the saving grace of originating from noteworthy aspirations. At the heart of them lies a desire for her daughter to rise to heights of academic accomplishment, or to be perceived by the public as having done so. Cathy did not dream of, or manufacture a story, about her daughter having outdone Jasmine Trias and won in a bigger singing contest somewhere in the world. She dreamed of, and manufactured a story about, her daughter winning a contest in science and math somewhere in the world.

Maybe she deserves therapy, or even the straitjacket. But what does that say for the rest of the country where the desperate pin their hopes of getting out of the rut by dint of fist or voice (boxing or singing) rather than by dint of science and math, book and learning?

The San Juan case is truly not unlike the Art Bell hoax. Though the latter was a hoax (the real Bell, a perfect radio host, never uttered the anti-Filipino remarks), it did in some perverse, or trick-mirror, sort of way compel us to reexamine ourselves. The things said about us in that prank -- that we lack identity or national pride, that we like to latch on to the achievements of other peoples instead of toiling to build our own -- do have a disturbing ring of truth in them.

So it is about the suggestion that this country has a warped sense of priorities, throwing ardent support behind entertainment rather than education, the banal rather than the lofty, glitter rather than gold. It more than carries a ring of truth to it, it roars deafeningly. You need not go far to see examples of it. The President herself shows it relentlessly, as when she dropped by the wake of Rico Yan, a minor movie star who managed to enthrall the nation by dying in his sleep, but failed to do the same thing at the wake of Lucio San Pedro, a National Artist who toiled all his life through music to awaken the dying Filipino spirit. What does that say about the President's sensibilities, quite apart from order of priorities?

Of course, a fabricated victory in a science and math contest abroad is not the best way to drive home the point. But we would not do badly to reflect on it. Truth, like God, works in the most mysterious ways.

Pleasing everyone

Pleasing everyone

Updated 11:12pm (Mla time) Nov 14, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 15, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I'M glad to be back after being abroad for a couple of weeks. The one thing I followed with attention was the abduction of two of our compatriots in the Middle East. Angelito Nayan, along with a couple of other United Nations workers, was taken by Afghan rebels in Afghanistan. The rebels demanded the release of their comrades by the Afghan government. Robert Tarongoy, along with five employees of the Saudi Arabian Trading and Constructing Co. (a Nepalese, an American and three Iraqis), was snatched by gunmen in Iraq. Their captors demanded $12 million for the American and $10 million for Tarongoy.

US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone says this is the fruit of giving in to terrorists, which the Philippines did to get Angelo de la Cruz out of his fix. "When you make concessions to the kidnappers, you invite more kidnappings. They will identify your country or state as giving in and then you get more of the same."

Not at all. Depends on the kidnappers and what they want.

That's true if you're dealing with ordinary kidnappers like the Abu Sayyaf. And it is a testament only to the propensity of government to blow things out of proportion-the better to justify its inability to solve criminality-that it depicted it as a terrorist organization. It is nothing of the kind. It is a criminal gang masquerading as a militant Muslim faction. It is no better than the other kidnap groups that stalk this country. The only difference is that other kidnap groups specialize on the Chinese while the Abu Sayyaf specializes on foreigners.

You pay ransom to free their hostages and they will target you again and again. All you have to do is talk to the Chinese victims. At least those of them who have not yet left the country, or those of them who have not hired, well, let us just say professionals, to bring their abductors to leave this world.

And that's true if what the kidnappers want is something you cannot possibly give. It's not true if all the kidnappers want is merely for you to leave them the hell alone.

Neither was the case in the abduction of De la Cruz, and neither is the case in the abduction of Nayan and Tarongoy. In the case of De la Cruz, neither were the abductors ordinary criminals nor was their demand-for the Philippines to pull out its troops from Iraq-unreasonable. In the case of Tarongoy, the demand of $10 million might suggest his kidnappers are less ideologically motivated, but that is dispelled by the fact that they released the Nepalese and two Iraqis immediately. A case of ay mali. The demand for ransom they reserved for the American and Tarongoy.

What this suggests is that the reason Arab militants-call them terrorists or call them freedom fighters, one man's patriot is another man's tormentor-continue to kidnap Filipinos is that they see the Philippine government not as one to give in so easily to them, but as one not to give up so easily on George W. Bush. Or put another way, the reason Arab rebels continue to kidnap Filipinos is not because the Philippine government bows down to those who hold its nationals hostage but because it continues to help the United States hold their country hostage.

You need no further proof of that than that none of the victims of the Arab kidnappers has so far been Malaysians, Indonesians, Thais, Vietnamese, Sri Lankans, Chinese, Indians, who are to be found plentifully in their countries as well. Three Filipinos in the space of a few months rule out the idea of coincidence completely. I did say before that the only accident in the case of De la Cruz was that it was he and not another Filipino who was kidnapped. But it was no accident that a Filipino was kidnapped. Nor will it be an accident that more Filipinos will be kidnapped in the future.

The solution is simple: Put as wide a berth between us and Bush's war and apologize to the Iraqis whose only crime against us was to give many of our countrymen home and hearth. That isn't just practical, that is moral. We should never have joined the war in the first place. It was an immoral war done for immoral reasons and wrought with immoral haste. And one that stood to devastate this country enormously, as the Economist warned shortly before the war. The one member of the "coalition of the willing" that stood to reap the whirlwind, it said, was the Philippines which had several million workers in the Middle East. We are seeing that bitter harvest today.

Being tough is a virtue only when it is backed by reason and conscience. We can be tough, and that is by declaring we will have nothing to do with Bush's war in Iraq and by standing our ground on that score. Why should our friendship with America rest on playing the stooge, or being uto-uto at this cost? That is not friendship, that is insanity.

Can anything be more idiotic than that we have to ban our nationals from working in Iraq? Other Asian countries do not have such a ban, they do not have to. They do not have to worry that their nationals will be kidnapped. What do we do now, ban our workers from going to Afghanistan as well? Or to Saudi Arabia and Jordan, if Filipinos are kidnapped there? Where will the ban end?

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo was repeatedly warned about the dangers of being Bush's sidekick in Asia, it was an invitation to being kicked in the side. Does it take a brain surgeon to see that, with all our OFWs in the Gulf? She did not listen, she went on to cajole the banana countries of the world to unite behind the war. Now she is in a quandary, and both the Americans and the Arabs are pissed off with her.

The old saying says it all: You try to please everyone, you'll end up pleasing no one.

Well, maybe masochists and Filipinos, but that's another story.

Here and there again

Here and there again

Updated 05:11am (Mla time) Nov 11, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the November 11, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


A SIGN at an airport lavatory in Kuwait, or what we like to call "comfort room," says: "Huwag po nating aksayahin ang tubig. Ang tubig ay mahalaga. Ang tubig ay buhay."

Yes, it's in Tagalog. It means: "Please don't waste water. Water is vital. Water is life." The sign is in Arabic and English as well. The Tagalog obviously comes from the influence of the Filipinos in Kuwait who have become an entire community over the years. The plane I took to Italy had a good-sized crowd of overseas Filipino workers, in great part women, who hopped off at the Kuwaiti airport.

One of the fellows in our group (we were on our way to attend a media conference in Rome) wondered if we made the same plea in our toilets in this country. I said I think I've seen the same sign somewhere except for one thing: Elsewhere in the world, we put up the sign in Tagalog. Here, we put up the sign in English.


* * *

At the same airport, where we waited in a bedraggled state for what seemed like an eternity, some of us amused ourselves by looking over the DVDs in the duty-free shops. The DVDs were original and sold for a fortune. But there was something in common between those DVDs and the ones sold here, as one of us observed wryly: "Pati ba naman dito, nagbebenta ang mga Muslim ng DVD ]Even here, the Muslims sell DVDs]."

I made the mistake in Spain and I made the mistake in Italy again. I forgot to qualify my order for coffee. I just said caffé, and the result was that I was given a small cup with a syrupy liquid at the bottom of it. For Spaniards and Italians, this is coffee, the other kind, "cafe Americano," like most things American from the European viewpoint being the diluted kind, or the pale replica of the real thing.

The Italian (or Spanish) coffee isn't drunk slowly, it is taken like a shot of whisky or brandy, in one gulp. With much the same effect. You feel a rush of adrenaline in your body and your cheeks flush. If you're trying to shake off the vapors of sleep, this is the thing for you. If you're trying to avoid a heart attack, try something else. I ordered another one, and it wasn't because I was trying to commit suicide.

After a while, you do get used to the stuff. After a while you get to understand why your Italian host feels oppressed in the early morning dragging his carcass to the cafeteria while fog rolls down the hills and finding the kind of coffee you order in Starbucks, the brewed variety in metal thermos. For him that is not coffee, that is something from hell.

I myself got to taste an excellent version of the real thing in Loppiano. It was made by several youths spending time in the community for their formation years. What clinched the deal was the sweetener they put into the thick brew. It was made from the liquid left by the coffee in the pot mixed with brown sugar, or whipped up the way you make whipped cream, slowly stirred round and round until the whole thing became sticky. Teaspoonfuls of it are then put into the individual cups. The result is a glimpse of heaven. In more ways than one for diabetics.


* * *

I was about to say it's as close to a glimpse of heaven as you'll get, but that's not true at all. Not by a long mile, or vine. The Italian genius is everywhere in evidence, and much of it is to be found in their discovery of la dolce vita. A great deal of what makes their vita dolce is their wine.

For sheer plenitude and taste, their wine has few peers. Well, the French will probably debate the point, but that's another story. Where we lived in Loppiano, there was always wine on the table, made by the community itself, from grapes grown organically. It was served during lunch and dinner. The red was magnificent. The white, well, let us just say it blended well with the chicken.

The first time I partook of the red, which was at dinner at the end of a journey that took nearly a full day with its stopovers, I felt like a man espying an oasis at the end of the desert. The first sips confirmed it wasn't a mirage. I told our hosts it tasted like young wine, not unlike the Beaujolais the French serve here during their spring festival. They said it came from the harvest last year. Well, it must have been a good year. Or sometimes some young things are just as good as aged ones.

From the sheer plenitude of the wine, our hosts always kept pressing us to take home the bottles that were left unconsumed. What can I say? I am a very courteous guest and do not like to disappoint my hosts. Happily, as I write this, my royal affliction, gout, hasn't visited me yet. Maybe there's something truly miraculous about this place.


* * *

Or maybe it's the walking. We were sufficiently forewarned before we came to Italy that we would do a lot of walking. I did not need the warning, previous excursions into this part of the world had told me it would be so. I had brought along old shoes, which, as the proverbial saying goes, are God's gift to walking. Only the first day offered tribulation. I hadn't done a great deal of walking in some time (it was my favorite pastime until my royal affliction made a mess of it). But I soon rediscovered the knack for it and, despite a bad left knee, was climbing up and down the winding roads with reasonably professional ease.

There is only one problem with walking in Italy. It is that the roads are terribly narrow, leaving the sides of the road where you can walk even narrower. That would not be a problem except that Italian drivers have not discovered the concept of slowing down. I think their cars are perpetually set to fifth gear, even when negotiating sharp curves.

It's enough to make me believe that the original sin did not begin when Eve gave Adam the apple. I think it began when someone gave an Italian the steering wheel.

Still, sense of country

Still, sense of country

Updated 00:44am (Mla time) Nov 10, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 10, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


LET me be clear about a few things.

To begin with, like I've been saying since I revived the question of "sense of country" in several columns (I wrote about it in a series of columns some years ago, which sparked no small amount of debate, to go by the flood of letters that came my way), I can understand why people leave this country. But I make a distinction, as Barry Gutierrez does, between overseas Filipino workers who are driven to go abroad out of necessity and the better-off residents who do so by choice. Gutierrez is the University of the Philippines assistant professor who went back to his job after studying in the United States and despite the importuning of friends and relations to stay. Gutierrez wrote to say he did not particularly feel deprived living in a small apartment and taking a jeepney to work.

It's easy to see why impoverished Filipinos would want to work abroad as maids and truck drivers. They have to survive. They don't do it, they're dead, or their families are. There's precious little work available in the country and farming no longer offers a reasonable livelihood, no small thanks to the flood of imports wreaking havoc on local production.

I can still understand why even the better-off residents want to leave the country. The better-off are getting worse off today. And with the specter of hunger and economic collapse looming in the distance, the option of living abroad becomes more tempting by the day. But compared to the OFWs, I find their reasons a little more questionable. Surely there is always the option of living simply, as Gutierrez shows, and improving your mind? Surely that's better than working your ass off day in and day out and finding meaning in consumerism?

The argument, of course, is that it is individual choice. Fair enough. But what isn't fair enough is imagining that the choice, whether made out of despair or hope, out of necessity or expectation, understandable or not, has no deleterious impact on the country. I can understand that Filipinos, rich or poor, want to leave this country for all sorts of reasons. I cannot understand why we should think that taken as a whole that will not devastate the country.

Again, the argument there is that other countries do it and are none the worse for wear. The Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Indians leave their country and live abroad too, and their countries are not devastated by it. Ah, but there's the rub. There is a monumental difference between us and them.

That difference is that their citizens' decision to live abroad is an individual choice, ours is a near-collective one. This is not without basis. Other countries are not experiencing a Diaspora, where a fifth of the population has openly expressed a desire to leave it. Which probably represents only those who can, not those who cannot but want to. We are. For us, rich or poor, leaving the country is not a last resort, it is a preferred option. That is so for the rich, who studied abroad, whose children studied abroad, and who own properties abroad. That is so for the members of the middle class who want better jobs and who want their children to become American citizens. That is so even for the poor, who as in whole towns in the provinces of Pampanga in Tarlac have sold the farms and carabaos for a crack at overseas work.

A generalization? Yes, but one amply supported by evidence. Quantitatively and qualitatively, the departure of the nationals of other Asian countries from their shores is different from ours.

The current Diaspora is not the disease itself but a symptom of the disease. The disease itself is lack of a sense of country, which has assailed this country from Independence Day, a point of demarcation redolent with irony. We have not lacked for a compelling need to live elsewhere (that is borne out by studies of the attitudes of elementary public school pupils) and become citizens of other countries (American, Japanese, Saudi, in that order, as of the early 1990s). The leaving or finding a reason to leave is just the symptom of the disease. The disease is wanting to leave and never lacking a reason for it.

The straitened circumstances today have not caused the Diaspora, they have merely exacerbated it or given it impetus. Indeed, our straitened circumstances today are the product of wanting to leave and become citizens of another country. The difference between us and our Southeast Asian neighbors, nearly all of whom have gotten far in life, is not that our neighbors have disciplinarian or heavy-handed governments. It is that they have a sense of country. Nowhere is our lack of it more patent than that our elite does not only routinely pillage this country but stashes the loot abroad. Easy to leave your country to the dogs when you have no intention of being there at the end of the day.

Nowhere moreover is the harm to the country wreaked by our collective and spontaneous physical outpouring into the world than in the near-complete erosion of national pride and the cheapening of the country's self-image. The national motto is not "The Filipino is second to none," it is "Beggars cannot be choosers." I have no problems with our impoverished folk seeking economic relief abroad by being the "toilet bowl cleaners of the world," as I put it once, to violent reactions from some sectors. But I have a monumental problem with our reconciling ourselves to the fact that that is our national destiny or mission in life. Which is becoming progressively so: The entire educational system is being reengineered to accommodate the transmogrification of the Filipino from doctor and architect to nurse and caregiver. It's the tail wagging the dog.

The way I see it, our choice is a simple one. We either discover a sense of country, or we cease to be one.

Letters

Letters

Updated 10:42pm (Mla time) Nov 08, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the November 9, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


MY views on the Filipino Diaspora seem to have touched new raw nerves out there. Here are three interesting letters I've gotten in the e-mail. The first comes from here, the second from France, the third from the United States.

From Alona A. Laplana of Makati City:

"Reading your articles 'Alarm bell' and 'Again, sense of country' produced a lump in my throat. I do not know that as a Filipino, I am perceived by other nationalities as one without a culture. I have lived in this country for all of my 40 years. I am trying to raise my children in the fashion we were raised by our parents: courteous especially to elders, considerate of other people, always striving to be good, putting God in all that we do.

"If these values are not what you call culture, then what is culture? Is it the clothes we wear? Only very few Chinese or Koreans wear their traditional costumes. Is it in the food we eat? We still have lechon, dinuguan, balut, etc.

"It is unfair to accuse the Filipino of lacking a sense of country just because he wants to get a decent paying job abroad, something that is hard to find at home. And what is so wrong about adopting the culture of a country where you are able to survive and eventually earn a respectable life?

"Perhaps adaptability is our culture. We can still be Filipino in a Britney Spears outfit. Even the Chinese wear coat and tie in their formal functions. We should be happy that in the Philippines the barong Tagalog remains the formal wear even among expats. Our fondness for Japanese cars is just economics-they're practical. Why should that be taken against us?

"Culture evolves. Even Rome changes. If we are happy that some foreigners have chosen to live in the Philippines, why shouldn't we be happy that some of our kababayans have also chosen to like and live in other countries?"

From Dodie Quimpo of Paris:

"The absence of national identity that you have eloquently described in your column 'Alarm Bell' last Sept. 29 has long preoccupied my mind. You brought it up of course in the light of Filipinos' vulnerability to 'trick mirror' hoaxes and bashing. I would put the question in a much higher and significant context.

"Absence of national identity, to my mind, constitutes the central question that determines the future of the country and of Filipinos. In our younger days, the nationalist movements of the '60s and '70s gave us hope for the Philippines.

"I believed then that the struggle against the Marcos dictatorship and US neo-colonialism would also bring forth the rebirth of a national identity that has long been denied to us by centuries of colonial rule. But the pages of history have turned. Apparently, that nationalist movement has not taken root nor matured.

"And today the forces of globalization have swept all corners of the world. It has multiplied the debts and intensified the poverty of much of the peoples and countries of the world while building up a new Roman empire. In forcing a unipolar world order that serves the super rich, globalization inevitably tramples on the rights and cultures of nations and people. The weakest among them would perish.

"In the Philippines, the winds of globalization have intensified the Diaspora of Filipinos. It has plunged the country into a quagmire of debt, poverty, hunger and corruption. Is it too late for the Filipino nation? No home, no history, no identity. Then the Filipino nation is doomed to perish."

From Marvin Carlos of Woodside, New York:

"The spam e-mail attributed to Art Bell was really just done by someone with too much free time.

"I agree with you on the part about the elite: "True enough, as Enwistle says, the Filipino Diaspora helps the elite keep the status quo. But far more than that, it frees the elite from being threatened by the collapse of the country. People have wondered why government officials do not seem to be alarmed by the brewing crisis, which, if some financial experts are to be believed, will make us lucky to end up like Argentina. Well, they can always leave the country."

"I have to disagree with you on other points ... 'In other countries, leaving home for a job abroad is the last resort, here it is the first. It is not a compulsion, it is a dream. It is not an act of desperation, it is an act of ambition.'

"I need to ask you: How do you know about other countries (or ours for that matter) to be so absolute? I offer that like most things in the world, it's in shades of grey. Please desist from using so much drama in your literature. I've worked with a lot of people from other countries here in the United States, and most of them are here for reasons in between desperation and ambition. I've had Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese friends who've decided to stay in the United States for good. Those who did go home did so because they found opportunities back home. Those people I knew back in California were the well-educated type -- artists, scientists-turned-engineers, business people, etc.

"I don't see why those things should matter -- what you say about your countrymen, what the phony Art Bell writer says about Pinoys, or whatever bigoted or self-important feedback on Filipinos is said every day. There may be some shades of truth in it, but I wouldn't read or listen to it and then feel a sense of epiphany or shame about myself and my racial identity afterwards. And I don't like how you set up specific people as examples. Case in point is the medical board topnotcher. If the board topnotcher doctor-turned-orderly were my relative or friend, I would encourage him to go back on the path of practicing medicine (and maybe that's what he's after in time). But I wouldn't make him out as a national embarrassment. I certainly don't think anyone enjoys being showcased as a Filipino poster child of national betrayal."

Winners, losers

Winners, losers

Updated 11:49pm (Mla time) Nov 07, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 8, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


CNN had an interesting feature shortly before the US elections. It asked Iraqi residents whom they preferred to be the new American president. Most of those interviewed were indifferent to the exercise, saying a win by John Kerry wasn't likely to change anything. But most felt bitter toward George W. Bush, saying they had no great love for him, he had destroyed their country. Saddam Hussein, they said, had ruled monstrously, but that was nothing compared to what Bush was doing to Iraq.

One old man was positively furious. He could barely breathe as he spouted his anger before the camera. Who cared about the American elections, he fumed. Why did they have to be forced to want one American president or another to rule them? Why didn't the Americans just go away and leave his country alone?

It was a very good reminder that however monumentally fateful the US elections were for the world-CNN had an ad saying exactly that-it was first and last a political exercise that had to do with Americans and solely with Americans. The interests of the world, as Americans saw them, were not going to decree who would win in those elections, the interests of Americans, as Americans saw them, were.

The analysts themselves showed so, not by the answers they gave but by the questions they asked. One said a day before the elections that Bush was leading Kerry on the issue of who could best deal with Iraq. The debates notwithstanding, most Americans felt Bush was the more decisive on that issue. Though you never know, he said. The Osama bin Laden tapes had had an unexpected effect. It reminded Americans that he was still around to threaten them. He, in fact, was the author of 9/11 and not Saddam Hussein. That raised a host of questions about Bush's real capacity to deal with terrorism.

But the very issue itself of who could better deal with Iraq showed exactly the kind of perspective the American voters had in choosing who was going to lead them. Despite America's global dominance, despite its claims to have the moral authority to democratize the world, it looked at things from a narrow and parochial viewpoint. Elsewhere in that world, the question was not who between Bush and Kerry could better deal with Iraq, it was whom between Bush and Kerry Iraq could better deal with. Iraq did not pose a problem for America until America invaded it. Why America has to deal with Iraq, only Americans can say. Why Iraq has to deal with America, all the world can say. As the old man in the CNN feature cried with wrathful eloquence, why don't the Americans just go away and leave his country alone?

"Fear versus anger" was how the analysts said the elections would go, and clearly fear won. I was beside myself with dismay and bitterness learning from CNN-on the morning of Wednesday in a sleepy Italian town called Loppiano-how Bush had taken the elections by a narrow margin. I had seen the figures shortly before the exercise and knew it was going to be close. But I had hoped it would go the way of the German elections, with Gerhardt Schroeder stealing the thunder from his rival, Edmund Stoiber, by taking a stand against an impending American invasion of Iraq.

Kerry himself had shown the folly of that tack a year and a half after it took place. He had won all three debates. Alas, the American voters are not like the German voters. America took great care to make sure another Hitler would not rise in Germany by ingraining among Germans a culture of peace. It forgot to do it right at home among Americans.

The way the elections went is a reminder of yet another fundamental thing, which is that America is not one nation but two. It is not just the nation of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Martin Luther King, it is the nation of William McKinley, Randolph Hearst, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon and George Bush. It is not just the nation of the Bill of Rights and a free press, it is the nation of Guantanamo and Fox News. It is not just the nation of the Founding Fathers and libertarianism, it is the nation of lost sons and imperialism.

Americans stood at the same crossroads more than a century ago when they were asked to choose between clinging to their democratic tradition and embarking on an imperial venture-the imperial venture being to seize the Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines. The League of Anti-Imperialists, as it called itself, to which Mark Twain belonged, did a magnificent job showing the folly of imperialism. It did not merely stand to devastate the nations America would occupy, Twain and the others argued, it stood to devastate America itself. It stood to destroy the very foundations of democracy, which had stood for more than a century already at that time, which had made America a beacon to the world.

At the time the choice was between greed and reason-the business interests in the United States making a case before the US Congress about the enormous economic benefits to come from taking the path of colonialism. But it was, too, in many ways a case of fear versus anger. It was Randolph Hearst, the spiritual forefather of Fox News, who supplied the fear, often with absolute cynicism. He it was who replied to a cable from his photographer informing him that nothing was happening in Cuba: "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." Fear won then.

As it has now. I did say before that the dumbest voters are not to be found in the Philippines, they are to be found in America. The difference is that our dumbness results only in self-flagellation-look at what President Macapagal-Arroyo is doing to us; while their dumbness results in flagellating others-look at what Bush is doing to the world.

Fear has just won in America. Well, may the world tremble in its wake.

Bad news, good news

Bad news, good news

Updated 11:39pm (Mla time) Nov 03, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 4, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THE BAD news is the U-turn slots that now abound in Metro Manila streets. Well, they are not entirely bad news. They are good news in some places but bad news in others. The bad news is turning them into a one-size-fits-all thing. This is one size that most assuredly does not fit all.

I remember that I praised Bayani Fernando, chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, the first time he experimented with them in some parts of Metro Manila. One of those parts was the corner of West Avenue and the EDSA highway. When there was an intersection there, traffic on West Avenue leading to EDSA was a nightmare. Particularly during rush hours, a long queue of vehicles would be stewing there, on bad days going all the way back to Baler Street, which is several corners away. The worse news was that the intersection in West Avenue and Baler itself was home to monstrous traffic.

As usually happens when traffic mounts in intersections, idiots would usurp the opposite lane, a practice benignly known as "counter-flow" but which produces the most malignant results. The problem there is that the drivers on the opposite lane do exactly the same thing. There is still one other problem there, and that is that the traffic cops or aides, who do not want to suffer the inconvenience of enforcing the rules, allow them to go ahead of the others. A gridlock is prevented at the cost of rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.

That used to happen routinely in West Avenue. Then when Fernando closed the intersection at West Avenue and EDSA and put a U-turn slot on EDSA, the traffic cleared. The change was dramatic. Suddenly, there was no pile of cars filling the air with smog from idling engines and drivers driving their passengers nuts and their blood pressures up from their cursing. Suddenly you could get from one end of West Avenue to the other in record time.

It would have been good news if Fernando had left it at that, or used the concept of U-turns judiciously. He did not. The horror stories have since piled up as fast as vehicles in or near the U-turn slots. I personally have seen the kind of mess it can do at the intersection of Quezon Avenue and EDSA. To cross EDSA from Quezon Avenue, you now have to turn right and take the U-turn slots in EDSA.

The problem with this is that the U-turns are located underneath an overpass. Only a narrow strip of road is left to traffic, the overpass hogging a good portion of EDSA. For those going straight ahead in the direction of the Cubao area in Quezon City, the situation is constant bedlam. With the jeeps parked in front of McDonald's and a horde pushing its way to the U-turn slot, you have to thread through the eye of a needle. On bad days, which are when the rains come, the traffic there is enough to try the patience of a saint.

The way things are, the old system where you waited your turn before traffic lights was absolute bliss. Frankly, I don't know why it hasn't been restored yet. The contrast between then and now is patent.

It's a variation of the Peter Principle. That principle, if I recall, states that in a bureaucratic situation, people tend to rise to a level of incompetence. The higher up you go, the more you reach a point where you are likely to prove incompetent. That is the case with the U-turn slots. The more they grow, the more they rise to a level of inefficiency. A U-turn slot by itself is not a bad idea. By plethora, it has become so.

Real artists, and bureaucrats, know when to stop. You don't know when to stop, well, you've seen the fate of those who refuse to give up the microphone in karaoke bars and insist on singing "My Way."

* * *

The good news is what's happened to our common parking lot. I've written about it several times in the past. The horrendous practice has been parking cars right in front of other cars. The argument for it being that the cars blocking the ones rightly parked on the slots are on neutral and can be pushed away. But over time, the illegally parked cars have rioted like weeds and formed whole queues, so that at night there is no space left to push them away. And even if there were, who wants to be pushing cars away particularly in the rain?

I had pretty much given up on it, my constant and angry remonstrations falling on deaf ears. I had cajoled, I had threatened, I had warned-the last time by saying that if someone had an emergency one night, he or she would be dead before their folk could clear a path for their cars, if at all, to bring them to a hospital. To no avail.

Then suddenly things changed. I don't know if that tragedy happened, heaven forbid it did. I don't know if my repeated expostulations and those of others finally worked. But a sign on the gates one day some weeks ago said the practice would not be tolerated anymore. At the end of the week, it said, the guards would no longer allow cars to park in front of other cars.

The guards did enforce it. Came the appointed day, they refused to allow cars to park in front of other cars. A simple exercise of will but one that gave the sensation of something dramatic. It was a blast of air in a stale room, or of sanity in a mental asylum. There were holdouts, of course, drivers who would be arguing with the guards to let them in. The guards would say they were just following orders -- I never thought those words would sound like music -- they could lose their jobs if they didn't. After some time, the holdouts gave up.

I've always said our parking lot was a microcosm of this country, a lesson in how small mistakes lead up to bigger ones. All it takes is one idiot to do something wrong and the rest follows till you have a whole mess. The exception becomes the rule, the rule the exception. Sanity becomes perversity, and perversity sanity.

Well, we've just untangled it. Maybe there's hope for the country yet.

World-class

World-class

Updated 11:20pm (Mla time) Nov 02, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on Page A14 of the November 3, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


WHEN I was in high school, I imagined that to write for all times and climes, one had to write about timeless and universal things. In literary pursuits, in particular, that meant using indefinite settings instead of specific ones, general experiences instead of personal ones, and universal themes instead of particular ones. That meant writing not about the concerns of your time, which would be relevant only for your generation, but about concerns that spanned centuries, which would be relevant for generations to come.

Happily, I had no lack of teachers and mentors who disabused me of the thought and showed me that the very opposite was true. The greatest writers wrote for their own time and place, the greatest writers wrote about their time and place. You can't separate Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky from the Russia of their day, you can't separate James Joyce and William Butler Yeats from the Ireland of their day, and you can't separate William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald from the America of their day. What made their works powerful was that they spoke about experiences quite unlike any other, experiences that provide insights into the human condition as it unraveled in all its pain and splendor.

What made their works universal and timeless was precisely the fact that they were rooted in time and place. It gave them weight and immediacy, to which we responded strongly. In their particular experiences, we recognized ourselves and our common humanity. The people in the stories were different from you and me, yet somehow they were not so different from you and me. The sentiments in the poems were different from ours, yet somehow they were not so different from ours.

The lesson was clear, though paradoxical: The universal was to be found in the particular. The immortal was to be found in the temporal. The "human condition" was to be found in the plight of individuals. God's creation was to be found in a grain of sand.

I remembered this in light of something that's not literary at all. I've been interviewed by a number of students of late (it's the end of the semester, I guess) and the one question that keeps cropping up is why we should be concerned about history and tradition and identity in this age of globalization. Isn't the Filipino blessed rather than cursed by having no sense of history, tradition and identity? Isn't the Filipino blessed rather than cursed by being able, or driven, to live abroad, becoming a citizen of no particular country but of the world? Isn't the Filipino blessed rather than cursed by being a chameleon, by being able to adapt to whatever circumstance he finds himself in, turning himself into an Arab or an American at least in ways if not appearance?

Not at all. It's the same fallacy as the one that says to be able to grip the imagination of the world, you have to write about Everyman instead of a man, you have to write about humanity instead of Juan de la Cruz. You not only will not impress the world that way, you won't get listened to. The world listens only to people who have something to say, and the people who have something to say have something to say about their time in place. What applies to writing applies to living. A fellow who aspires to be accepted everywhere will end up being accepted nowhere. A fellow who strives only to belong will stick out like a sore thumb.

I know some Filipinos in the United States who try to make their kids more American than they are by keeping the history and language of their country of origin away from them. Or such as of their country's history and language as they themselves know, which is often little. They forget that America is a land of immigrants -- Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Africans (forcibly taken from their continent and turned into slaves) -- all of whom are fiercely proud of their roots. They are no less Americans because they are also Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and so on. In fact, they are more so: What makes them Americans is that they have something to bring, or contribute, to the "new world" from the old ones they came from. You do not become a Filipino-American by systematically destroying the Filipino in you.

It's not that we don't have an identity and culture, it's that that identity and culture are slipping away from us more and more. One reason for it is our disinclination, or refusal, to look at the past. We have probably the poorest sense of history in all of Asia. Or at least our history: I half suspect our senators and congressmen will more easily pass a quiz in American history than Philippine history.

But the bigger reason is the smug belief that in these days of globalization, national cultures or characters mean little anymore. That in these days of globalization, homogeneity and sameness are in, multiplicity and differences are out. That in these days of rapid changes and global villages, our strength lies in our amorphousness and ability to blend in the woodwork.

Not so. You may not like Lee Kuan Yew, but he has a point when he says that to succeed in today's world, you have to have a strong sense of independence. He has a point when he says that to be accepted by the world, you have to do things your own way. He has a point when he says to succeed in a regime of globalization, you have to think in terms of how much you can contribute and not just how much you can hope to get. It's a paradox only in the same way that great writing is a paradox: The big is in the small, the universal is in the particular, the global is in the local.

It's no small irony that we kill ourselves in karaoke bars singing "My Way," when doing things our way is the last thing we think about, or want to do.

Unity

Unity

Updated 11:23pm (Mla time) Nov 01, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the November 2, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I SAW an interesting ad in this newspaper last week, one that will probably run again and again in the coming weeks. The ad, close to a page in Across the Nation, featured a clean-shaven Angelo de la Cruz (I almost did not recognize him because he was so, a far cry from his bedraggled and unshaven face on TV when he appeared with hooded figures behind him some months ago) with some words of thanks and a plea for his countrymen. His message said (this is a rough English translation of the original Tagalog):"I wish... that in facing the looming national financial crisis, we come together again in the spirit of unity, which was the key to my being saved in Iraq. I wish to thank everyone who rescued me from a bitter fate: Our great and merciful God, our nation's leaders, and all those who stormed the gate of heaven with their entreaties. We gave a shining example to the world. Rich and poor, Muslim and Christian, rebel and soldier. All of you begged my captors to spare me, and they did. I hope we can show the same unity in the face of the grievous financial crisis that threatens us. So that we can prosper and no longer need to go abroad to earn a living."

The ad was produced by Rotary International.

I don't know if De la Cruz actually wrote those words, or even expressed those sentiments. I can imagine he is thankful, I can imagine he is appreciative of the outpouring of concern and goodwill that went his way during his ordeal. But I can't imagine him saying those things. The computation, or the adding two and two together, which is that Angelo de la Cruz's past ordeal equals Juan de la Cruz's future one, seems to have been done elsewhere. But let us forget these misgivings and agree that he did say these things. I still have a problem with it. That problem is simple. It is that Angelo de la Cruz was not saved by unity.

He was not saved by the Filipinos coming together and sending their lamentations to heaven. He was not saved by Christians and Muslims appearing on television and begging his captors to release him in the name of whatever divinity they believed in or were doing their beheadings for. He was not saved by the droves of Filipino officials who went to Iraq and Saudi Arabia and other exotic locations, and who brought Angelo's wife along with them at some point, presumably to negotiate with his captors.

He was saved by one thing and one thing only: that was his government bowing to his captors' demands.

That is what George W. Bush and the Heritage Foundation are so pissed off about. I myself have praised that decision as the right one even if it came from the wrong motives. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo did not do it out of the goodness of her heart or probably even to save De la Cruz. She did it out of a need to appease a people who were not convinced she won the elections (they would say so explicitly later to the Ibon and the SWS research groups). She did it not to save De la Cruz from a beheading but herself from an uprising. Had De la Cruz ended up dead, she would have, too, politically at least.

Quite simply, the saving of De la Cruz was not another case of EDSA People Power, where the nation rose resplendently and added whole new meanings to the struggle to end tyranny. What makes the ad worrisome, notwithstanding its feel-good sentiments, is that it perpetuates ignorance and forgetfulness. It makes people forget first and last why De la Cruz was kidnapped in the first place. It was no accident he was. Or if there was any accident at all, it was only that he and not another Filipino was kidnapped and threatened with beheading. You do not see the Iraqis kidnapping the French, the Germans and the Chinese. You see them kidnapping the Americans, the British and the Japanese. What distinguishes these two groups? The first did not support the Iraq invasion, the second did.

Unity is not a bad thing. But unity without understanding is. Why should De la Cruz thank the President who saved him only after putting him in harm's way? Why should De la Cruz thank everyone who rose to endorse-or at least did not protest -- the one thing that guaranteed OFWs would be kidnapped and threatened with beheading as surely as day follows night?

If this is the case with De la Cruz, it is even more so with the fiscal crisis. Unity is not a bad thing, but it is if it means uniting behind the very people who brought on the crisis to begin with. Like De la Cruz's kidnapping, this crisis wouldn't be there if this government had not borrowed more than the last two presidencies combined and have only the specter of hunger overrunning the land to show for it. I have no problems with uniting with the rest of my countrymen to oust a tyrant. I have every problem uniting behind a government to solve a problem it itself created for selfish ends. I have no problem scrimping and saving to add to the kitty that will help ease the pangs of those who are hungry. I have a problem giving a single centavo to a government that caused them to be hungry.

The solution to the fiscal crisis is not unity. It is removing crooks from public office. The solution to economic collapse is not rising as one and storming the gate of heaven itself with our prayers. It is compelling those who stole our money to campaign for a second term and who masquerade as Jose Pidal to return it. If we need to unite at all, it is only to unite to demand an explanation for why we should not be storming the gates of Malacañang even now for bringing us to this pass. You do not see the other Southeast Asian countries beset by hunger and a looming economic catastrophe. You see only us.

Unity with understanding produces people power. Joining others out of ignorance produces only herds and lynch mobs. The first ends tyrannies, the second mounts them.

More pots, more kettles

More pots, more kettles

Updated 00:28am (Mla time) Nov 01, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 1, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


WHAT is Angelo Reyes doing telling the congressmen to leave his mother alone? Who dragged his mother into the picture in the first place? Didn't he tell the Inquirer his sudden increase in bank deposits over the last couple of years owed to his converting his mother's assets into a joint account? He should thank the Inquirer it did not interview his mother who might have asked who gave him permission for it.

But the people in this government aren't just jacking up the ante on corruption, they're jacking up the ante on bad manners and wrong conduct. Even brothers and mothers are now fair game.

Comes now Lt. Gen. Edilberto Adan, the Armed Forces of the Philippines spokesperson, telling the world also to leave the AFP well enough alone. Miriam Defensor-Santiago's expose on the Mafia-like "Gang of 12" that's ripping off P2 billion a year from his favorite institution, Adan says, is hurting the institution itself, quite apart from the generals' wives whom Santiago has implicated in the scam. The accusation, he says, "only strengthens the enemies of the state and poisons the minds of the soldiers. It's as if the sacrifices they made for 30 years or so in the service went for naught. For a soldier, that hurts."

Not at all. It's not the minds of the soldiers Adan should worry about, it's their feet. It's their feet that are being poisoned-from wearing worn-out boots. That's what the Oakwood mutineers at least were saying, which was why they mutinied in the first place: the corruption on top was hurting the foot soldier where it hurt most-his feet. The Oakwood mutiny itself or its aftermath must suggest that Adan's worries come too little too late. The soldiers' minds have long been poisoned. The young officers may now only dream of becoming old officers and turn from mutinous to rich. The rank and file may now only burn with envy.

As to the institution being damaged beyond repair, that is not the fault of Santiago, or those who exposed Maj. Gen. Carlos Garcia, it is the fault of Garcia and ilk. The messenger is not to blame for the bad news, the makers of the bad news are to blame for the bad news. In fact, the expose of shenanigans in the AFP shouldn't strengthen its enemies, it should strengthen the AFP, by ridding it of scoundrels. It's a fallacy to imagine an institution is saved by covering up its stench, as Emile Zola showed with dazzling clarity in the case of the French military, which sought to preserve its honor by condemning one of its officers, Alfred Dreyfus, to rot in jail rather than admit it wrongly accused him of treason. Of course, GMA likes to do it too-she tried to jail Acsa Ramirez instead of admitting she made a mistake-and gets away with it.

What hurts the soldier is not having his superiors exposed for corruption, it is having his feet exposed to sharp stones. What hurts the solider is that after 30 years in the service, all he has to show are blisters on his heels.

But while at this, I don't know why the AFP doesn't turn the tables on their civilian tormentors. And for the same reason: to strengthen government by ridding it of its dregs. Whatever happened to its intelligence funds? The generals ripped them off too to a point the AFP has no intelligence left?

Santiago herself has a husband and brother who are not beyond suspicion. And she presents a spectacle not unlike that of Iggy Arroyo when she thunders forth against corruption. Wasn't she the same person who most ardently defended Erap from charges of it, despite a pile of evidence that would drown the tallest basketball player in the country? She even ordered three spectators in the gallery out for distracting her from that folly. I know the pot is right to call the kettle black-the kettle is black-but surely there is such a thing as looking at a mirror?

While at this, I don't know why the AFP doesn't turn the tables on the very people prosecuting them, who are the congressmen. It's almost incredible how this country's spin doctors are able to spin the public's head around in less time than it takes to say Jose Pidal. It wasn't too long ago when the country's attention was riveted to the congressmen's pork, as a result of warnings about an impending collapse of the economy. The beleaguered congressmen then were crying, "Why only us, why not look at GMA's pork, too?" And they didn't mean her husband. How could we have allowed them to slip away in the night?

Still while at this, I don't know why the AFP doesn't train its guns, figuratively speaking, of course, on GMA herself. Quite incidentally, the reason I'm not so sure the leak on Garcia was made by the CIA is that if the Bush government was pissed off at GMA, why did it rake muck on the AFP? It diverts attention from GMA, who has yet to answer for the queen's ransom she spent to get reelected-the generals should know something about that-which makes the "Gang of 12" look like a ragtag gang of hoodlums compared to the real Mafia. How many times will she get away with murder, figuratively speaking, too?

None of this, to repeat a point I've made before, means Garcia and ilk should not be put behind bars. It means all the other guilty parties should too, in proportion to their crimes. Justice is universal or not at all. That doesn't mean turning all the guilty free, that means turning all the guilty in.

The spectacle of Erap only languishing under house arrest for thievery has already become a travesty. It is no longer inspiring, it is depressing. It doesn't say, "be honest," it says, "be careful." It doesn't say, "don't get loot," it says, "don't get caught."