Silence

Silence


Posted 11:11pm (Mla time) Dec 29, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 30, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


(Conclusion) THE SECOND aspect, or guise, of silence is giving.

In giving, the giver does not draw attention to herself. She disappears in the act of giving. Obviously this does not refer to politicians who have not been known to give without benefit of a camera rolling or clicking away. For the true giver, however, whether she gives something wrought out of her hand, or whether she gives something of herself, she disappears, and the only thing that are left are the gift and the given.

It is a form of silence. Asking is a loud act that draws attention to oneself. This is what I want, this is what I need. You cannot get more clamorous and clangorous than that. Giving is a quiet act. It is an act that makes the giver anonymous, it is an act that renders the giver invisible. It is an act that wraps the giver in silence.

That, too, I find myself appreciating in the context of today's world, especially in light of globalization. The whole concept of globalization is really a selfish one in more ways than that it has been reduced nearly solely to the globalization of commodities and the turning of human beings into automatons who produce. It is so in that it is premised in the attitude of asking rather than giving. The one question those who enter it, or are sucked into its whirlpool, ask is not, "What can I give to the other peoples of the world?" It is, "What can I get from the other peoples of the world?" It is not, "What can I contribute to humanity?" It is, "What can I derive from humanity?"

Lastly--and this one was repeatedly suggested though it was never clearly highlighted--silence is the ability or willingness to raise questions rather than propose answers.

I have attended many media conferences, and I have always been assailed by the rush of people to come up with "concrete proposals" at the end of the day. I was in Barcelona some months ago for just such a conference, i.e., building communication bridges between Europe and Asia. And I remember saying exasperatedly to the young man who was moderating our group and was eager to regale the plenary session with a long list of what-to-do's that maybe we would do better to just see first what divided Europe and Asia communication-wise. That was to say, maybe we would do better just raising questions than supplying answers, whether at working committee or plenary level.

I have found--and this I can say with much conviction after a half century of life--that one insightful question is always worth a thousand answers. The answers tend to be blithe, or facile, or superficial anyway and are forgotten as soon as the conference is over. It is the insightful question that lives on and becomes the rallying point or battleground in forums.

The ability to ask questions partakes of silence, too. Giving answers is a loud act. It thunders forth to everyone whether they are willing to listen or not: "This is how I see things, this is how I want things done." Asking questions, like giving, is an act steeped in silence. It is self-effacing. It allows the one who is asking questions to fade in the process, leaving only his question hanging over everyone like a cloud, sometimes dark and ominous, sometimes bright and full of promise.

But more than this, the ability to ask questions is not just an ability to ask questions about the world, it is an ability to ask questions about oneself. It is the ability to ransack one's soul or submit it to the implacable terrors of a self-inquisition. I think it was our Muslim sister from America who pointed out that objectivity is nothing more than subjectivity expanded tremendously by travel and experience. You remain subjective at the end of the day, but you represent a broader subjectivity than the one you started out with.

That is premised however on openness, which is the ability to ask questions. When you start asking questions, you do not just learn to suspend judgment about the world, you cut the rope and let yourself fall. Maybe you'll crash to the ground, all your beliefs and theories about the world and your self-valuation exploding into a hundred pieces. Or maybe you'll soar to the heavens.

But this is the part where I will diverge from many of you. For me, this dimension of silence is allied not with the comfort of certainty, which religion offers, but with the flailing of doubt. Doubt is the one precious gift a journalist has, and doubt is the one faculty that I expect to be, or look forward to being, honed by silence.

You ask what we can do to make the global media better. I do not know. I can only speak for myself, which is perhaps not just the best place to start but the only place to. I can only say that having learned a new lesson in humility, or in silence, I am more resolutely willing to incorporate in my work a spirit of asking questions rather than proffering answers, an attitude of giving rather than demanding, a willingness to listen amid the din of doom and deadline.

The beginning of communication is not sound, it is silence. The one thing the three aspects of silence above have in common is the awareness or discovery of the other person. Listening is being aware of, or discovering, the other person. Giving is being aware of, or discovering, the other person. Asking questions is being aware of, or discovering, the other person.

In the end, silence is the awareness of, or discovery, of the other person. Which is the beginning of communication. Without the other person, there is no dialogue, there is only monologue. Without the other person, there is no communication, there is only self-indulgence. Without the other person, there is no love, there is only, well, that is what you do with yourself in the john.

But I have taxed your capacity to listen long enough. I will now practice what I preach and lapse into a long and deep silence.

Silence

Silence


Updated 01:32am (Mla time) Dec 29, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 29, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


(I wrote this in Italy a couple of months ago during a media conference. I'm sharing it with readers after getting a lot of pressure from friends to do so. It seems to have gotten rave reviews. It was one of those things that came easy, I wrote it fast with a lot of collateral sounds around me. If you're pious, you'll probably attribute it to tongues of fire. If you're not, like me, you'll attribute it to a desperate need to express things after not being able to do so for more than a week. Whatever. It's much shorter than the original. It's as good a way as any of saying Happy New Year.)

THE FIRST time I heard about this conference from my friend Billy Esposo, who invited me to it, I was intrigued by its title: Silence, Word and Light. I have been to many media conferences, not least in Europe, and I have heard the words "word" and "light" plentifully. I do not recall hearing the word "silence" in connection with them. It is a curious word, which at first glance does not seem to belong to the basket called communications. Yet over the last couple of days, I have learned to appreciate its significance. I have heard the speakers talk about the power of the word and the power of the light, but the one thing I have been impressed with is the power of silence.

Silence in connection with sound, or with word, is often used only by way of contrast. As in the "word welling out of silence" or "light breaking out of darkness." I am glad therefore that one of the speakers brought out the many dimensions or dialectics about silence and sound, light and darkness. From which one may draw the conclusion that silence, and indeed, darkness are not just the reverse or negative sides of sound and light but that they have a meaning or weight all their own.

My own appreciation of this comes neither from classical Western philosophy nor from Christian thought but from a Zen teaching. That teaching says that a window is nothing but empty space. You may put all sorts of frames to adorn them, but in the end a window is just an empty space. It may be a square, it may be a rectangle, it may be a circle, but it is a square or rectangle or circle of -- nothing.

But try living in a house without a window. It is not possible, or at least it is not bearable. Without a window, life is impossible. Without a window, life is unbearable.

This suggests that in some cases, emptiness can be pregnant with fullness. Nothingness can be pregnant with being. Absence can be pregnant with presence.

That is what silence is. It is a window in a house, or human being.

Less poetically or mystically, I have come to appreciate the power of silence from some of the things the speakers have said. They have not always presented it in the way I am presenting it, but I've gleaned it from their talks -- like a dog hearing sounds at subhuman decibel levels -- or from reading between the lines. I've learned that silence may manifest itself in three aspects.

The first is through listening. That is a monumental insight. It is the easiest thing to talk, it is the hardest thing to listen. You need go no further to find proof of it than that I am talking here. My only excuse is that I am doing so after listening intently to the speakers. Journalists are particularly notorious in talking. You cannot find a gathering of journalists where people are not talking, often all at the same time. It's all you can do to finish a story, or even a sentence, without someone jumping in to say his or her piece. Of course, that is true as well for non-government -- or civil society -- institutions, but that is another story.

I know of people who teach other people how to talk. I do not know of people who teach other people how to listen.

The willingness to listen is the key to all communication. I do not mean by this the willingness to listen to absolute bores or people who want to talk interminably, which this world is also full of. Even divine patience has its limits, and the patience of journalists is nowhere near to being divine, as well it should be. I mean by this "listening with one's heart," as some have put it. I mean by this an openness to other people's ideas or convictions, particularly those that challenge our own, or indeed that rattle them to their very roots. I mean by it listening to Muslims if you are a Christian, listening to an untouchable if you are touchable, listening to one who does not believe in God if you do.

I find myself appreciating the faculty of silence particularly in a world where information is growing at astonishing levels. The print medium is now hard put to compete with television and radio which are manufacturing news at intervals of every half hour, if not shorter. CNN, Fox News, the BBC, and other media are already doing so. It is not inconceivable that in this age of digital technology, it may soon be producing news at even shorter intervals, or even instantaneously, as soon as they are happening.

But rather that enlightening, this plethora of information is obfuscating. Rather than making sense of the confusing, this is making confusion out of sense. Rather than deepening our understanding of the world, this is giving us blithe, facile and superficial interpretations of the world. If not indeed substituting or superimposing an artificial world on the real or sensate one.

What we get is not the word, what we get is mindless chatter.

If you are a believer, it is enough to convince you that we are witnessing the modern version of the Tower of Babel, where the prideful are condemned to speak in different tongues. If you are a believer, you will probably believe that the cure to this lies in the rediscovery of God. I myself am convinced that the cure to this lies in the discovery of silence.

(To be concluded)

Touch of class

Touch of class


Updated 11:52pm (Mla time) Dec 27, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A10 of the December 28, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


OVER THE PAST couple of weeks, since Fernando Poe Jr. died, I've heard and read a lot of stories about Da King's generosity, a generosity matched only by a ferocious desire to remain anonymous in the face of it. He apparently forbade his fellow actors, whom he was with when he did the things he did, from talking about it. He specifically forbade his publicists from writing about it or making it known in any way. A proscription that extended even to when he ran for president. He refused to make his acts of giving known, though his publicists were naturally dying to broadcast them.

I don't know how much of the stories is true, but if only a tenth of it is so, then the man truly deserves to be sorely missed. He has shown decency over and above the call of duty. Which strikes a monumental contrast with the way we do things today.

His death seems to have released his friends from their vow of silence. Niño Muhlach was the one who suggested that FPJ might have suffered from stroke from exhausting himself while helping to prepare the goods to be given out to the storm victims of Quezon. Apparently, he had been thinking aloud to friends how the residents of Quezon were going to get by. What a time for the storms to have happened, he was heard to have said, which was just before Christmas. This was supposed to be the happiest time in this country. So he had done his bit, even lending a personal touch to the relief work by doing part of the physical work himself.

But as was his wont, he had given strict orders for it not to be talked about. He would have visited Quezon, Muhlach said, except that he feared it would be given a political spin. He didn't like that, he wasn't like that.

I might have thought this was an exaggeration if I had not caught that report by Aladdin Bacolodan in the news. Bacolodan had gone to the place where FPJ spent his last moments on earth, the studio where he gasped his last while hosting a party. In a corner of the studio was a huge pile of goods that FPJ had been collecting, which reportedly cost him a pretty penny and which he meant to distribute to the typhoon victims. None of the goods carried a label, least of all FPJ's name, on them. The cartons were unmarked completely. Based on his interviews with people close to FPJ, Bacolodan reported that FPJ was like that: he refused to advertise himself when he gave.

A friend of mine, a musician personally testified to the simplicity of the man. In the 1970s, he recounted, FPJ bought a recording studio from Jose Mari Gonzalez to bail him out of dire straits, but didn't quite know what to do with it. So he got musicians to run the place, my friend among them. On occasion, he said, FPJ would drop by at night, beer in hand, and say, "Erap (he called everybody erap), pwede ba kong umistambay dito? [Do you mind if I hang around?]" Of course he didn't mind, my friend recalled laughing, it was his place. FPJ, my friend said, would look over his shoulders -- my friend would be making arrangements and preparing accompaniments to songs in a musical variety show -- which made him a little nervous. After a couple of hours, FPJ would shake his head and say, "That is all very complicated to me, you guys are geniuses." Then he would take his leave, "Mauna na ko, erap," and sneak out quietly.

The beer was something he had in common with Nick Joaquin. He was at least speaking out of conviction when he made that ad for San Miguel.

There are scores of stories like that, other people, high and low, but mainly low, swearing he was a good man. There were fellow actors he rescued from their quandaries, stuntmen whose hospital bills he paid for, and complete strangers, among them dwellers of slum areas, whom he visited regularly and gave to. All the waiters who knew him testify to the abundance of tips he gave, often borrowing money when he ran out of it after closing a bar down.

It's a blast of fresh air in a stale room. It's not just an Old World quirkiness or quaintness, it's an absolute blessing in a world given to egotism and self-advertisement. I remember only a few weeks ago seeing the host of one of those TV programs purporting to help the needy (I will not name her in deference to Christmas) descending on a hovel in a slum in Metro Manila with gifts. She wore a black T-shirt that had her name emblazoned on it, in case we forgot it, which is not that easy given her sheer ubiquity on TV and radio. A camera with blazing lights trailed after her while she spoke in unctuous tones, making sure no one overlooked her mission of charity there. If this country had snow, she would probably have rented a sleigh.

There ought to be a code of ethics for programs like this. Rosa Rosal did things a lot more subtly.

I remember as well Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's campaign ads -- they were campaign ads, paid for by our money through the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office -- showing her braving the floods, distributing relief goods and wearing a pained expression while beholding the swath of destruction left by a storm. Well, people who are genuinely assailed by the spectacle of horror do not make it a point to have themselves photographed in that state. They grieve silently, flailed by conscience and not framed by the camera. And they go on to do everything in their power to help the desperate-anonymously. There is no giving where the giver does not disappear in the act of giving. The other kind is just PR.

I don't know if FPJ would have made a good president. I do know that he would have given this boorish nation some lessons in good manners and right conduct. I do know he would have given this jaded nation a reason to believe the exalted shall be humbled and the humble exalted.

I do know he would have given our much-cheapened lives a touch of class.

Not quite the same

Not quite the same


Updated 11:42pm (Mla time) Dec 26, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 27, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


JOSEPH Estrada spoke bitterly at FPJ's wake. He said he and the departed shared an uncanny fate. Both of them began from humble beginnings and worked their way to the top of the heap by guts, talent and hard work. Both of them believed in the rule of law, and fought for it against elements that would destroy it, such as the "Big Four," a syndicate that once terrorized Manila and Caloocan, which they engaged in the Filipino version of the OK Corral. And both of them were laid low by the hand of treachery, Erap by an impeachment trial based on manufactured evidence and FPJ by an election that reeked of fraud.

Well, the comparison doesn't quite hold, and Erap does his bosom friend ill to have made it. Not all the tearful goodbye and hand-holding can make up for it. It insults the dead.

The one thing in fact that put me off in the riveting spectacle that was the FPJ wake, which I watched with the avidness of a fan throughout last week, was the sight of Erap, Imelda Marcos, Ernesto Maceda and the various creatures from the Marcos and Erap regimes that flocked to Sto. Domingo like vultures. It was a grim reminder of the company FPJ kept, which tainted his presidential bid.

In fact, the one big hope the FPJ camp held out for disbelievers was that FPJ would not go the route of Erap if he won. During the campaign, my movie-director friends hastened to assure me that would be the case, FPJ was not Erap, he would never allow himself to be swayed by Erap and company into the wrong path. That wasn't hard, they said, because he wasn't beholden to them. Though FPJ had done much to get Erap elected-by Erap's own avowal during the wake, FPJ gave up lucrative projects to campaign for him-he never once went to Malacanang to ask any favor. Much to Erap's chagrin.

No, my friends said, FPJ was not Erap. They were friends, but they were not the same. But looking at the faces, or masks, strewn along the front pews at the wake, I wondered if that would have happened. If FPJ would truly have been able to tame the ravenous appetites of his friends, or prevent them from ravaging his rule, when they were as eager to capitalize on his death as they were on his life.

No, FPJ and Erap might have been the best of friends, but the trajectory of their lives was different. While Erap was delivering his speech, I was reminded of an old movie of theirs, the first time I think they acted together, which was "Iyo ang Tondo, Akin ang Maynila." In the movie, they met in the big city and became fast friends after a brief fight, but went on to embark in opposite paths. FPJ went straight and Estrada went wayward. Estrada died in the end, but not without making a redemptive act and ruing a misspent life. Life imitated art-except for the part about making a redemptive act and ruing a misspent life. Erap has yet to do either.

The "rule of law" Erap invokes in his protest against his impeachment is not the "rule of law" FPJ's widow, Susan Roces, invokes in her protest against her husband being cheated. The first is the "rule of law" championed by Marcos, the kind where the law is used to thwart justice. The kind where legal technicalities rather than the spirit of fairness decide right and wrong. Four years ago this month, we saw that in full glory in the halls of the Senate turned impeachment court: Erap's battery of lawyers, using their collective shrewdness to mangle the truth the way Marcos' lawyers-and Marcos himself, who was a lawyer-used to. A collective shrewdness that failed to hide the truth in the end, ironically when applied most ferociously, which was to prevent the second envelope from being opened. It sparked the second Edsa. That was the true rule of law.

More ironically, the "rule of law" Erap invokes is the same "rule of law" Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo invokes to stop FPJ's protest dead in its tracks. It is the same "rule of law" that allowed GMA to bankrupt the treasury to campaign-because the courts ruled there was nothing wrong with it-and allowed the Comelec and Congress to rape the electoral process savagely like Paquito Diaz did with the hapless damsels in FPJ's movies-because the world, including civil society, stood by and applauded.

The "rule of law" FPJ's widow invokes is the other "rule of law," the law that is allied with justice, that sees with the eyes of love and anger what is right and what is wrong. Despite what the judges say, judges who are blind in ways that Lady Justice is not. Lady Justice is blind only to cash, the judges are blind to truth. Despite what government threatens, a government which exists only at the sufferance of the citizens, whose current tenuousness and fragility owe not to any threat of violence from the outside but to the corrosive effect of corruption and rottenness from the inside. Lies are the greatest destabilizing agents of all.

No, Erap can never be the fuel that drives FPJ's electoral protest along. Nor, heaven forbid, can he ever be the rallying point of any move to drive the country along. He does not represent progress, he represents retardation. He does not represent health, he represents sickness. There is only one person who can drive FPJ's electoral protest along, and that is Susan Roces. She has conducted herself amid her travails with a dignity few Filipinos, man or woman, can hope to match. I do not know that she can be the rallying point of any move to drive the country along, but I do know that she has class, which is more than can be said for all this country's self-proclaimed leaders put together. Self-proclaimed because we don't really know if they got elected.

Erap and FPJ didn't quite share the same directions in life. But who knows? Maybe Susan Roces and her husband would. With different results.

A very cruel year

A very cruel year


Updated 01:10am (Mla time) Dec 23, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 23, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


IT'S enough to take the word "merry" from Christmas, the spectacle of death ravaging the country. Even the Christmas songs seem a little tired this year. I heard some of them issuing from the church near where I live, and the good cheer they were trying to convey seemed thoroughly out of place. As were the lights that blinked from the windows of houses.

I guess there's no stopping Christmas in this country. And I guess we owe it to the kids to keep our spirits up despite the horrendous vexations we've had to face this year. But I wish we'd also teach them not to be oblivious of the pain around them and express Christmas spirit less in plunging into revelry and more in commiserating with others.

This year has been an especially cruel year. On a personal note, this year has seen the deaths of five members of my wife's family. Chief of them her father, my father-in-law, with whom I had shared many a drink and story. He died in Los Angeles last July. I had always thought he would live forever. He died at 91, an unripe old age where he was coming from. I saw him three years ago in the United States and he still remembered the lyrics of old songs to the word, and sang them enthusiastically with the aid of libation. After a battle with prostate cancer for almost a couple of decades, he finally said, heck, might as well go.

At about the time he was being buried, I ended up in St. Luke's Medical Center for an improbable affliction -- gallstones. I had never had the symptoms of gallstones before. I had never doubled up and gasped breathlessly from the pain of it. I had had cases of indigestion and gas, but that was it. But from out of the blue, it struck. I wrote about it at the time, or shortly after I had the operation. Which was pretty sudden: the thing began to bother me dawn of Sunday. By Monday I felt like I had landed in the torture chambers of the Inquisition. By the time they operated on me next day, the damn thing was about to burst. In the nick of time, as they say. My enemies would agree this has been a most cruel year.

At about the same time this happened, my brother's wife, Milen, was operated on for a mass in her head. Fortunately, it proved benign and lodged between her brain and cranium, which made the operation a little less complicated. No head operation, as the doctor said, is ever uncomplicated. The operation proved a complete success, which is a strong argument for the existence of God.

Before these my wife lost an aunt on her father side and a cousin. The aunt died from disease, the cousin from a car accident, as he was driving his family home in Dumaguete on Easter Sunday. And not long after that, my wife lost a couple of other aunts, one also a sister of her father and the other a more distant one.

Friends have died, some have gotten seriously sick. All of the artists who died this year, which I wrote about some weeks ago, I knew personally. The only two I didn't know that well were George Canseco and Zeneida Amador, though I had met them at one time or another. But I did know Lito Tiongson, Ding Nolledo and Nick Joaquin well enough.

I had thought five was already too much when suddenly Fernando Poe Jr. slumped on the table one fine night while at a party and went on to meet his Maker. It was enough to convince a friend of mine that there was something to be said for my theory that artists died in pairs. Six to date. For reasons God only knows, artists seem the most endangered species in this country-politicians are the safest. At least from the threat of disease, not from the threat of bullets. From the threat of bullets, provincial journalists qualify for the dubious honor. This year saw a whole tribe of them slaughtered across the country.

Even before Fernando Poe Jr. could be carried to his final resting place, another tragedy struck. This time it was Jose de Venecia's daughter, KC, who perished in a blaze that hit his house. KC was trapped in the bathroom while the fire raged around her. Joe and Gina were inconsolable, and I can only offer my deepest condolences to them. There are no words to express how a parent must feel at this absolute loss.

Some weeks ago, I brought a musician friend to the University of Santo Tomas to the same doctor that operated on my sister-in-law. He needed a second opinion on his 10-year-old daughter who was diagnosed with cancer of the brain stem. The doctor, Ed Tan, a man whose brilliance is matched only by his magnanimity, reached his conclusion almost as soon as he saw the X-rays. It was brainstem glioma, he said, and unfortunately it was inoperable. It was not that uncommon, he said. It was a cancer cell that resided in some babies and for some reason tended to manifest itself at that age and in the brain stem. The doctor gently admonished my friend, as my friend broke into sobs, to just try to make the best with what time he has left with his kid. My heart broke.

Then, only a few weeks ago, three storms pounded the Prelature of Infanta, causing mountains to crumble and fall down on men, women and children. Especially children, their bones crushed by the logs that hurtled along with the loosed earth and floodwater. A priest died there, after rescuing a “barangay” [village] from impending doom. These deaths do not just elicit lament, they incite anger. The kids in particular would not be dead if the logs hadn't fallen down on them, and those logs would not have fallen down on them if the Department of Environment and Natural Resources had not given people the license to cut them. This tragedy was not wrought by the hand of God, it was wrought by the hand of greed.

On top of everything, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo became President this year. I did not say won as President. There's a difference.

This has been one very cruel year.

Filipino

Filipino


Updated 00:41am (Mla time) Dec 22, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



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


I FINALLY got to attend Fernando Poe Jr.'s wake last Sunday. Though I had seen and heard the sights and sounds in Sto. Domingo Church on TV, almost till they were coming out of my eyes and ears, I was not prepared for what I beheld.

The line of people queuing to pay their last respects to FPJ stretched from the gate of Sto. Domingo to several blocks away. I know that because I passed them down Quezon Avenue while looking for a place to park. Finding the task impossible, I turned around and headed back to my daughter's place in Roxas District. I left my car there and took a jeepney instead. I was glad I did. It didn't just make the journey to Sto. Domingo faster, it made the journey from one world to another possible.

It was certainly a different world from the one that surrounded Ninoy Aquino's wake. Both drew a huge crowd spontaneously, one that seemed to come from nowhere and was inexhaustible. But the smells were different.

Ninoy's wake resonated with grief and anger, the anger rising above the grief, which, almost unbidden, conjured the words, "Tama na, sobra na, palitan na!" FPJ's wake resonated as well with grief and anger, but with the grief rising above the anger, the crowd that gathered yoked together by a shared pain, an indescribable loss. No small thanks to Susan Roces, who demanded by personal example to rein in the political element. Maybe the explosion would come, but not from this. Not if the aggrieved widow could help it.

The physical smells were certainly worlds apart. The crowd that filed past Ninoy smelled of money and privilege, starch and cologne. The crowd that filed past FPJ smelled of earth and sandals, tenuous lives and fragile dreams. It was the rich and powerful with a sprinkling of the masa that turned out to grieve for Ninoy and curse the hand that dealt him a cruel blow. It was the poor and downtrodden with a sprinkling of the rich and powerful that turned out to grieve for FPJ and curse the hand that dealt him a cruel blow.

The crowd last Sunday waited patiently in line, those who had reached the church grounds getting balm for their pains with an old FPJ movie that played out from a telon that had been unfurled there. Maybe there were some diehard fans who had sought to escape life for a while by catching a glimpse of Da King as he lay lifeless inside the church. But they were the exception, not the rule. This was not a gaggle of giggly geese greeting tragedy with curiosity and laughter. These were folk that had to wake up the next day to drive the jeepney and ball the jack, spin the factory machines and pound the pavement to sell chicharon, and care for the babies while doing the laundry for themselves and others. These were people who had better things to do but who found nothing better that night than to say thank you to a man who had enriched their lives, defined the terms of their existence, and taught them to dream even as his own was snatched from him by a pickpocket who was not from Quiapo.

These were drivers and mechanics and clerks and dishwashers and waiters and students and public school teachers and housekeepers. These were ordinary folk. These were Filipinos.

I remembered again Susan Roces bitterly noting the irony of Malacañang offering to bury FPJ in the Libingan ng mga Bayani after making him out to be a non-Filipino. True, there could be no richer irony. I protested it early this year, provoking some of my friends to ask why I was defending FPJ when I balked at the thought of him becoming the president of this country. The answer was simple: it was injustice in the extreme. I might not have wanted him to become president, but I did not want him not to become president that way. Not all is fair in love and war.

If there was anyone who could justifiably claim to be the Filipino Everyman, it was FPJ. Mang Pandoy just happened to be poor and hungry, which is what physically the Filipino Everyman is. FPJ gave a face to the Filipino Everyman. For good or ill, he defined through the heroic roles he played the qualities Filipinos--though for the most part, male Filipinos--have aspired for: quietness, humility, physical, and moral strength.

Arguably, legal technicalities do play a part in the determination of a person's citizenship. But in this country particularly, where law is often used to justify iniquity, they are not the most important thing of all. In any case, the legal technicalities against FPJ were merely manufactured. But even if they weren't so, enforcing them would have meant blotting out from all memory the last half-century of popular culture in this country.

The great unwashed did not go to FPJ's wake to mourn a movie star, they did so to mourn someone who had walked by their side in the journey of life, much as he had done in his movies. They came to mourn a kuya, a constant companion, a good man. They came to mourn someone who had lived as unobtrusively heroically in life as he had done in the movies: someone who helped others without drawing attention to himself, someone who got way up the road but who never forgot where he started, someone who never tried to pass himself off as something he was not. They came to mourn Panday, one who helped to build hope in their lives and kept it standing amid the lashing winds.

They came to mourn some of the best of what it meant to be Filipino.

* * *

My deepest thanks to the musicians and graphic artists and production people who made our benefit for the storm victims last Monday a huge success. It will take a whole column to write about them. My deepest thanks as well to those who went there and supported the cause. Your reward is the joy, or sigh of relief, you will give others this Christmas. May the world be as generous to you in your hour of need.

Mere justice will do

Mere justice will do


Updated 00:09am (Mla time) Dec 21, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 21, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


FRANKLY, I can't understand what Malacañang meant to accomplish by proposing that Fernando Poe Jr. be turned into a national artist and/or be buried in Libingan ng mga Bayani. I got a lot of text messages from people, some of whom had been President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's supporters during the elections, saying she was looking more and more ridiculous trying everything to stem the tide of sympathy for Poe and an accompanying tide of antipathy toward her.

I could only agree. It only served to highlight the contrast between honesty and dishonesty, sincerity and insincerity, which was already forming in the public's mind, with government occupying the second part of the dichotomy. "Kaplastikan" was the word Susan Roces and several others used to describe those who materialized at the wake looking grief-stricken after stabbing Poe in the back during the elections. The word echoed deafeningly with the proposal to turn Poe into national artist and hero.

It doesn't appease enemies, it only pisses off friends. It only adds national artists and heroes, or the kin of national artists and heroes since most national artists and heroes are dead almost by definition, to the list of enemies.

I know Poe did a lot of movies, probably more than any other Filipino movie star, and I know that he captured the Filipino imagination by portraying characters his countrymen could relate to. When we were kids we spoke his name with reverence, far more than we did Erap's and Bernard Bonnin's (who portrayed Gagamba, Alyas Palos, Kapten Barbel, and other comic book heroes), and imagined ourselves to be him when we played our war, cowboy and other children's games. He was the quintessential Filipino hero: humble, soft-spoken, respectful of elders, but a veritable lion when pushed to the wall. And of course one possessed of heroic or magical abilities.

But I don't know that these things alone qualify anyone to become a national artist. Unfortunately, Poe was also trapped by his own popularity. He could not get past his heroic image and essay more complex, or indeed more real, characters. He couldn't even die in his movies without alienating his public. What endeared him to the public was also what distanced him from true art, the kind Erap and especially Dolphy ventured into when they became more established. One may have more of a case proposing Dolphy as national artist.

Let us honor Poe, but let us not dishonor Nick Joaquin, Lino Brocka and Antonio Molina.

Who knows? Maybe Malacañang threw the proposal as bait, hoping to enrage the artistic community should Poe's kin and friends bite. Well, they didn't.

As to being proclaimed a hero, I know that Poe was a hero not just to the legions of folk he had helped in the movies but in real life. He was a savior to many of his friends, not the least of them the least of the people in show biz, or the ones who tend to be ignored in the division of spoils at the end of a movie. He was good to the crew, the stuntmen, the gofers, becoming "ninong" (godfather) at their weddings and baptisms, taking care of their hospital bills, and being there in their hour of need. He himself had started below, working as a stuntman before he worked his way up. He knew what it meant to be hungry.

But as I wrote only last week, about the six people who have just been added to the Wall of Remembrance in the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Lean Alejandro, Joe Burgos, Jun Celestial, Paula Malay, Laverne Mercado, Bobbit Sanchez), though heroes, are ordinary folk like us, they are also ordinary folk who have done extraordinary things by glimpsing the need to serve the people. Heroism is more than beneficence or generosity, it is courage and self-sacrifice. It is pushing back the limits of the possible. It is fighting tyranny, it is struggling to build a new world, even at cost to life and limb.

Let us honor Poe, but let us not dishonor Lean, Joe, Jun, Ayi, Laverne and Bobbit.

In any case, it is completely unnecessary. Poe's kin never sought it, and Poe himself would have been unhappy with it. He was an unpretentious man, his wife, Susan Roces, recalls. He was never one to make himself out as something he was not. He knew his limitations, which is more than can be said for others who are without accomplishment.

More to the point, it misses the point completely. It is giving a new pair of eyes to someone who is missing his feet. Unlike his chief rival in the elections, Poe never lacked attention or has been "kulang sa pansin." At least in the eyes of the public. For unlike his chief rival in the elections, too, Poe has lacked attention from the Comelec and Congress. Both took him to not exist at all, the first ignoring the gross violations of electoral rules being committed openly by his chief rival, the second railroading the count on the ground that this country would die if it did not have a new president soon. It forgot that this country would die sooner if it had the wrong president.

I do not know if Poe or Arroyo won the elections. But that is the problem precisely: we do not know who did. That the Comelec and Congress decreed Arroyo did so does not settle the question, it only unsettles our mind about the nature of the Comelec and Congress. Poe has every right to pursue his protest, and I hope his followers do so amid all talk that it would destabilize the country. The pursuit of truth has never destabilized a country, the defense of a lie has. Cory's quest for a recount after the snap elections did not destabilize the country, Marcos' defense of a crooked election and a moor crooked rule did so.

Ah, but it is no small irony that in this country death is the loudest whisper of all. To get listened to, you have to die first.

Never mind more accolades and honors for Poe. Mere justice will do.

Susan for president

Susan for president

Updated 11:53pm (Mla time) Dec 19, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 20, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


SUSAN Roces gave out two interviews last week that showed a contrast in moods. Both made me wonder what madness persuaded Fernando Poe Jr.'s handlers to take the tack they did during the campaign-keeping him and his wife away from the more serious public forums. I don't know how articulate FPJ is, but Susan Roces is obviously so.

Her interviews during the past week should also dispel the wrongheaded notion that Tagalog is inadequate to express thoughts and feelings. There are no inadequate languages, there are only inadequate speakers. Roces rose to heights of eloquence completely effortlessly during her interviews talking in Tagalog. What is eloquence anyway but speaking from the heart?

In the first interview, Roces was gracious in the extreme.

Yes, she said, she was still going to find joy this Christmas. That is how it has always been with her. She came from a poor family and learned early in life to make the best of what she had. When they were kids, every time someone in her family had a birthday and they didn't have money, they just bought a piece of cake. But they made sure to put a candle on it. Yes, she'll still celebrate Christmas. Her husband won't be there physically, but he'll still be there in spirit. She'll make the best of what she has.

FPJ, she said, never misrepresented himself when he ran for president. He never passed himself off as someone other than what he was. He was a school dropout who rose to the top of his profession through talent and hard work. He was a man with a good heart who had helped others before and wanted to help more. Better someone like that than people who used their heads only to oppress others.

She thought the crowd that tore to shreds the wreath sent by President Macapagal-Arroyo were wrong to do so. But she had no dominion over people's hearts. Her husband himself had been much affected by what happened in the elections. Someone is robbed of his money, he can always make it another day. Someone is robbed of his dreams, he is robbed of his life.

In the second interview, Roces was furious in the extreme. Probably out of tiredness, probably out of seeing all the people who had wronged them during the elections simulating commiseration, she lashed out. Particularly at the one TV station she believed had wronged them the most. She did not mince her words, reducing Karen Davila to tears. The reason people are not watching ABS-CBN news, she told Davila, was not only that it aired late but that it was false. Among others, it falsified the attendance in FPJ's campaign. "Why did you say nobody went to his rallies when you could see for yourself the crowds that pushed their way there?"

Roces said a good deal more, but it is by now widely known. It was shown in several networks that night-among them ABS-CBN-and was the headline of newspapers next day. She ended on a conciliatory note, however, saying if God could forgive, who was she not to?

Well, I myself was wondering how long it would take before she snapped at the sight of all the media that had slammed the door on her husband while he was alive and seeking to become a tenant of Malacañang; but were now pushing and shoving to get ahead of the line while her husband waited to occupy the cold earth. More than the elections, this was a test of epic proportions, and FPJ's widow passed it with flying colors. The colors of grief and anger. Whether contemplative or explosive, she looked eminently presidential.

That is so particularly if we define "presidential" by the one characteristic that should attend it but has been stripped from it these past years: honesty. Honesty is the one thing that has been defiled horrendously in this country, lying becoming a hallmark of presidential ambition, deception becoming the handmaiden of presidential conduct. Honesty is the one thing that has been cheapened violently in this country, pundits applauding demonstrations of unscrupulousness, calling it the height of political savvy, and self-proclaimed "empower-ers" of the people choosing to play the roles of blind court monkeys.

What made Roces look spectacularly presidential was just that: she was honest. A monumental irony for the fact that she is an actor, as was her husband. She and her husband had played many roles in their lives, but as it turned out, they had not forgotten to play themselves. She and her husband had played the role of bidas in their movies, but as it turned out they had never advertised themselves as such in real life. The day before Roces lambasted ABS-CBN, I saw Aladin Bacolodan touring FPJ's house and standing on a pile of relief goods that FPJ had been gathering to give to the typhoon victims. None of the goods carried his name. It was never his habit to do that, Bacolodan said. FPJ preferred to remain nameless when he gave.

These are gracious folk in these ungracious times. These are honest folk in these dishonest times. I don't know that honesty alone makes for a great president, but I do know it is the precondition for being one. Honesty in a president is the only assurance the citizen has he's not getting a raw deal, whether he agrees with her or not. No, it is his only assurance he has a president, and not a non-actor who's just playing the part.

What can I say? Susan for president.

* * *

Our concert for the typhoon victims is tonight at Conspiracy Café in Visayas Avenue. As of this writing, the artists are: Dong Abay, Cynthia Alexander, Johnny Alegre, Noli Aurillo, Joey Ayala, Bayang Barrios, Noel Cabangon, Cooky Chua, Mon David, Susan Fernandez, Gary Granada, Paolo Santos, Pido, Ria Villena, Chikoy Pura, Tots Tolentino. More will jam.

Give to the afflicted. You won't just be richer in spirit, you'll be richer in song.

Da King is dead, long live Da King

Da King is dead, long live Da King



Updated 03:03am (Mla time) Dec 16, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service


Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 16, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I HEARD about it last Sunday from a friend. Fernando Poe Jr. keeled over the night before and was rushed to St. Luke's. His condition was critical. While at the hospital, he had a seizure and went into a coma. By nightfall, he was on life support. It was just a question of when they would pull the plug.

This is a horrible year. At about the same time last Monday, our friend William Chua, a human rights lawyer and a partner in Haydee Yorac's law firm, also died. His death was not as sudden as FPJ's, but it was sudden by most other standards. He had a check-up early this year after feeling out of sorts, and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at a fairly advanced stage. He was given months to live. He died a couple of hours earlier than FPJ. He was 48.

But I'll put off my elegy for William and look at FPJ first. There is no small irony in FPJ going ahead of his buddy, Joseph Estrada. I remember writing several columns in jest before the 1998 elections saying the best position to run for was vice president. That was so, I said, because given Joseph Estrada's state of health and his propensity to ruin it some more by drink and lechon (I don't know if sleeping around ruins or improves health), I wasn't sure he would finish his term.

Little did I realize how true that would be, though for quite different reasons. Estrada would truly not finish his term, but not for failing health. Even less did I realize the vice president would take his place, only to proceed to ruin the health of her country.

But the bigger irony is that during the last elections people worried not over FPJ's health but over Raul Roco's. Roco had to fly to the United States in the thick of the campaign to seek emergency treatment for a recurrence of prostate cancer. I saw him last Saturday at the Bantayog ng mga Bayani, and he couldn't have been healthier or more energetic. He radiated amiability and good cheer.

In any case, I've never thought voting on the basis of a person's health was a wise thing to do. You want to vote wisely, vote on the basis of a person's mental and moral health, not his physical one. A good leader who serves for a short time is always preferable to a bad leader who serves for a long time. The first is bliss, the second is hell.

I don't know that I would have liked to have FPJ as my president. But I do know he was not the greater evil and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo the lesser one in the elections, which is how GMA sold herself. If the choice were merely between Arroyo and FPJ (and it was never so), I'd pick FPJ anytime. A person with a good heart who means well, however he doesn't know the first thing about government, is infinitely better than a person with a good head who means ill, however she sandpapers things with PR. Intelligence is not a boon to the nation if it resides in the head of a hustler. It is a bane to it.

I already said my piece there during the campaign, and it is to FPJ's credit that he never took the things I said against him against me. On the one occasion I spoke to him before the elections, he never brought it up. He only thanked me for saying that when I was a kid I thrilled to see him play Daniel Barrion in the movies. He didn't know too many people who still remembered Daniel Barrion, much less saw his movies about Daniel Barrion. Most people remembered only Asedillo and Ang Panday. He spoke softly, much as he did in his movies, before the thugs pushed him to the wall and he defended himself with fast gun and flying fists. He was a gracious man, a monumental virtue in these ungracious times.

In any case, none of our objections to his presidential bid may allow us to slip FPJ surreptitiously into the footnotes of history, as a cultural icon that made the mistake of plunging into politics in the twilight of his career. I say this in particular because I've heard a number of people say, "Buti na lang, FPJ didn't become president or else we would now have Noli de Castro, or worse, Loren Legarda, for president!"

Well, maybe that would be a worse pass, but that doesn't excuse the silence of the Edsa I and II forces, notably civil society, in the face of Arroyo bankrupting government to campaign. That doesn't excuse the silence of the Edsa I and II forces, notably civil society, in the face of the statistical improbability that was the Cebu results. That doesn't excuse the silence of the Edsa I and II forces, notably civil society, in the face of the blatant efforts of the Commission on Elections and Congress to substitute their will for that of the voting public.

And all this presumably to prevent the "greater evil" from becoming president. That succeeded only in assuring the greater evil truly would. A greater evil that includes the Edsa I and II forces, including civil society, conspiring to thwart the sovereign will. I don't know that FPJ, and not Arroyo, won the elections. I do know the process was raped thoroughly. I cannot fault the majority of Filipinos who, if Ibon and SWS are to be believed, are convinced the wrong president sits in Malacañang. I was not one of those who wanted FPJ to be president, but that is neither here nor there. How the people actually voted is the only thing that matters. That is what elections are for. That is what democracy is for.

What irony that FPJ should be felled at the very time he was buckling down for a long fight for recognition as the rightful tenant of the house by the Pasig. I'm glad at least his supporters are determined to pick up the cudgels for him. Meanwhile, I grieve with the rest of them and go to bury a president.

The King is dead, long live Da King.

* * *

Just a reminder: Our benefit for the victims of the storms is on Dec. 20 at Conspiracy Café along Visayas Avenue. We'll start early, at 8 p.m., nang makarami. Eight to sawa, of course.

Secrets

Secrets


Updated 02:23am (Mla time) Dec 15, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



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


LEE Hsien Loong, Lee Kuan Yew's son and the incumbent prime minister of Singapore, had some interesting things to say to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, Diosdado Macapagal's daughter and incumbent President of the Philippines, when he visited here last week. The secret of Singapore's success, he said, was three things: clean government, good pay for civil servants and the certainty of retribution for erring officials and employees.

True. Clean government is essential to progress. Example is the best teacher, something Lee Kuan Yew, however you disagree with his methods, has proven by his own conduct. There is no problem with a strict disciplinarian who punishes infractions severely, but there is a problem with a strict disciplinarian who does so while being personally given to the commission of the cardinal sins rather than the cardinal virtues. You can accuse Lee Kuan Yew of many things, but you cannot accuse him of ripping off his country.

There is no problem with a president vowing to punish wrongdoers harshly. But there is a problem with a President doing that who has vowed she would not run again on the ground she would only foment disunity if she does, who has bankrupted the treasury to campaign, who has borrowed more than two presidents combined and has only widespread hunger and the specter of an economic collapse to show for it. Example gives the fiercest lesson of all. A leader lies, cheats and steals, the citizens will lie, cheat and steal.

Civil servants do deserve better pay. But they may also not exist plentifully. I've been saying that about the police, the military and the civilian bureaucracy for a long time. They are bloated, they are a refuge for the corrupt and incompetent. We reduce their size to a tenth of what they are, and overnight we will experience a vast improvement in peace and order and efficiency in the delivery of services. At the very least, because there will be fewer bank robbers, murderers and crooks running around in khaki and barong Tagalog.

Then pay the remaining cops, soldiers and bureaucrats good wages. But only as a matter of justice, not as a matter of stopping corruption. No level of pay will stop corruption-greed is bottomless. Only a culture of honesty will, one that rewards good and punishes evil.

Which brings us to Lee's last point. In this country, every time a monumental iniquity happens, the universal call is to mete out the death penalty to the criminals. Well, the death penalty, or any penalty, including torture, won't mean anything if the criminals are not caught. Only recently, government officials have been shouting death to the "illegal loggers." In fact, it is not the "illegal loggers" who have wrought the deaths in Quezon, it is the legal ones. It was not the logs of the “kaingeros” and the Dumagats that tumbled on the folk that lived at the foot of the mountain, it was the logs of the legal loggers.

Joseph Estrada's trial has become a travesty. All it says is not that the crooked will be punished but that the clown will be caught. It does not warn public officials to be honest, it warns them to be careful.

Lee's comments are worth taking seriously. But I myself have always thought they were derivative problems in our context. Our not having a clean government, our not paying officials right, and our not punishing wrongdoers themselves owe to deeper problems, whose solutions Singapore also points to.

The first of these problems is a lack of sense of country. I've talked about this repeatedly. Corruption does happen in other countries. Indonesia has the dubious honor of having had a leader, Suharto, who topped Transparency International's list of most corrupt tyrants in the world (Ferdinand Marcos was only second). We keep envying Singapore for its ironfisted rule. Well, Thailand too has progressed by leaps and bounds and it isn't ruled by an iron fist. What Singapore and Thailand simply have in common are people who would not dream of being citizens of a country other than Singapore and Thailand.

The second I've also talked about repeatedly. Corruption riots because we do not have a sense of taxpayers' money. The money we give in taxes we regard as tribute or “balato,” something we part with grudgingly, never expecting them to come back in roads, bridges and services. We rough up pickpockets in the streets because we regard what they do as stealing. We don't do the same thing to public officials because we regard what they do as ROI, a return on (campaign) investment.

And finally, a sense of pride. Over the past several months, I've gotten a lot of irate mail from Filipinos demanding to know what I've got against nurses and caregivers. It's perfectly respectable work, why do I keep putting it down? My answer to this is that I'm not. I'm not putting down nurses and caregivers, I'm putting down the attitude that we can only be a nation of nurses and caregivers. An attitude to be found in our doctors agreeing to become so abroad, and in our educational system, which is being geared to produce an army of nurses and caregivers. We used to be second only to Japan in economic potential in the 1950s. Have we fallen so low?

Contrast that with the attitude of Singaporeans that says anything you can do, I can do better. You may find that attitude a little arrogant, but it's the kind of attitude that makes Singapore Airlines one of the best in the world, and that makes airline personnel chase after you when you've left something at the airport. I personally experienced the latter, while in a state of utter absentmindedness, and this wasn't after 9/11 either. They take pride in honesty. You do not become world-class by having the mentality of a parochial. You do not join the guests at the table by having the mentality of a servant.

Some secrets are not really that hard to fathom.

Heroes

Heroes



Updated 02:05am (Mla time) Dec 14, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service


Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 14, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


SIX more martyrs/heroes were added to the Wall of Remembrance last Saturday. They were Lean Alejandro, Joe Burgos, Jun Celestial, Paula Malay, Laverne Mercado and Bobbit Sanchez. Raul Roco, whom I saw at the Bantayog, quipped that if Bobbit had been there, he would probably have been amused by the idea that he was being immortalized as a hero. I agreed. I said if Bobbit had been there, he would probably have asked us to just join him for a drink.

That was the light part of things. The more serious, and insightful, part was supplied by Edita Burgos, widow of Joe. She gave a moving speech, saying the outpouring of sympathy and goodwill for her husband convinced her that Joe had only left this world in a physical sense. In all other senses, he was as present as the crowd that gathered to honor him.

I knew all of the six on the list, some more than the others. I met them at various points in my life, and my life has been the richer for it. Lean of course is well known; Gary Granada even wrote a rock musical about him. A dedicated activist and gifted communicator, he was one of the pillars of the protest movement during and after martial law. Ironically, he was felled by an assassin's bullet not during Ferdinand Marcos' time but during Cory Aquino's, in 1987, as he was coming home to Bayan headquarters after a press conference at the National Press Club. He was 27 when he died but his life was short only in the physical sense. It was long by the fullness with which he lived it.

Joe Burgos died last year, at 62, from cancer. He is the best known among the six, internationally as well as nationally. In 2000, to mark the end of the 20th century, the International Press Institute named him one of the 50 press freedom heroes in the world, a signal honor for him and the nation. For sheer courage and integrity, he had, and has, few peers. He it was who published Boni Gillego's expos‚ of Marcos' fake medals at a time when to even breathe a word of criticism against Marcos was to court mayhem. His newspapers, We Forum and Malaya, became a torch blazing in the journalistic darkness. Without them, we would not be enjoying our light today.

Jun Celestial I met only briefly in college. He was a student leader who was expelled for his activism. After martial law, he ran an underground student publication, using a mimeographing machine spirited from the student council of his school. He was "salvaged" by the military in Montalban in 1975. He was 25 when he died, but he lived a short time too only in the physical sense.

Ayi Malay is the other half of the formidable Malay tandem, the other half being her husband Armando. The last time I spoke with her was at the National Press Club. She was fuming over the idea, fomented by some writers, that Andres Bonifacio cringed and begged for his life when he was about to be executed. Nothing could be farther from the truth, Ayi said. Her researches showed the Great Plebeian was great not just in life but in death, showing only contempt for his executioners. That typified Ayi. She could be as passionate about the past as of the present. Toward the end of her days, she was still writing and learning new things.

Laverne Mercado I met only a few times at the National Council of Churches of the Philippines (NCCP). He was a tremendous orator, one who could move the walls themselves to tears. He it was who gave the Protestant churches a new face, different from the conservative one they had worn throughout the last century. He led the NCCP in the fight for freedom against martial law, opening the NCCP grounds to forums that exposed its abuses. He was detained in 1974 but was released shortly later in the wake of an international outcry. His shoes will be very hard to fill.

And finally, well, I wrote about Bobbit when he died last year. His son Anthony, who represented him at the Bantayog, is right: Bobbit had a big heart but whose heart gave out in the end. I sorely miss him.

I'm glad that their names have been added to the Wall of Remembrance. It corrects two extremes in our concept of heroes. One is that heroes are people who are so removed from us they exist in such elevated planes and are beyond being reached by us. They are Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio and Apolinario Mabini, who occupy pantheons. Well, they do. But before they did, they were ordinary mortals like you and me, who drove themselves to extraordinary lengths. There is no sheen or aura that radiates from heroes, the sheen or aura comes from what they do. They are not demigods given to the world to do demigod-ic things, they are flesh and blood who know fear and grief, joy and laughter.

The second is the exact opposite, which is that heroes are a dime a dozen. That isn't so only from the looseness with which we use the word, referring among others to sports heroes. That is so as well from the capacity of this country to manufacture heroes by PR. The last two Edsas in particular had too many self-proclaimed heroes, burying in their wake the people who offered their lives to build a new world. True heroes never draw attention to their heroism, which unfortunately is an engraved invitation to scoundrels to propagate their myths. Unsung is the common lot of true heroes simply because they will not sing paeans to themselves. It is left for us to do so.

Serving the people, as all these six used to say, is its own reward. Well, honoring them is our own reward, too.

* * *

Update: So far, we have 13 musicians (and counting) for the Dec. 20 benefit at Conspiracy Café for the victims of the storms. Some visual artists are putting their works up for auction, the proceeds to go to the Prelature of Infanta. My thanks to those who have offered donations. I will keep you posted on developments in the next few days.

Ropes

Ropes


By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 13, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer




THE EULOGIES delivered during Fr. Cha Colendres' wake last week drove home one thing to me again-the heroism of the priests and laypeople who have built the Church of the Poor in Infanta. The real story about how Father Cha died is that he perished in a column of water full of logs that fell down on him and his assistant, Dionisio Cadungog, as they tried to make their way to Infanta by foot through the rice fields in the middle of the storm. But the things said about Father Cha during his wake showed me the original story, which was that he tied himself to a tree and threw the other end of the rope to a group of drowning folk, wasn't completely off the mark. It might not have been the story of his death, but it was the story of his life.

As well indeed as the lives-most of them happily still continuing ones-of the other priests and laity who have laid a stone or two in the edifice, or hillside shack, that is the church of Infanta. Chief of them Bishop Julio Labayen. The Church of the Poor owes in great part to him: he is its chief architect and stone-layer. It was his vision, determination, and self-sacrifice that raised it almost literally from the mud to what it now is today, a beacon in a windswept sea.

When Bishop Labayen and many of his priests came to the Prelature in the 1960s and 1970s, that part of the world was pretty much a land God forgot. Real got its electricity only in the late 1970s. Before that, one picnicked on the beach in the warm and breezy summer nights only by the light of the moon and stars. One really appreciated that light when winding one's way to one's cot after many swigs of lambanog, the kind made from nipa. People slept early. I remember a companion waking up in the middle of the night after having gone to bed early and demanding to know in the pitch darkness, "(Expletive) how long does a night take to end here?"

More to the point, going to Real was like taking a slow boat to Jolo, with the additional rigors of a land trip. It carried with it the same amount of hardship and uncertainty. The road after Siniloan was a narrow and dusty path that wound around the mountains. I recall that the trees in those mountains in the 1970s were tall and lush. In this Alice-in-Wonderland country, backwardness is often the poor's greatest defense. (The highway that came later wiped those trees out.) The buses that plied the route literally rumbled on, they creaked and groaned and sputtered. When they broke down, as they often did, people got down and walked the rest of the way. No one demanded to get his fare back on the ground of a contract not having been completed. One merely looked up to heaven and asked plaintively why.

It was into this world that Bishop Labayen, Fr. Nonong Pili, Fr. Boy Makabenta, Fr. Pites Bernardo, and others found themselves thrust decades ago. Father Pites died in the 1980s from a motorcycle accident, though some say the accident might have been staged by Marcos' henchmen. The others have their own stories to tell about the near-death experiences they had while building a church there. Father Boy nearly died there too one stormy night, when a flash flood swept him and his motorcycle away. He managed to survive only by straining mightily to tear off his raincoat, which was dragging him downward, and swimming to solid ground. For weeks after that, we called him the Incredible Hulk.

No, the story about Father Cha throwing a lifeline to drowning folk isn't entirely off the mark. But there is a twist here. There is another dimension I've since glimpsed, or that has tumbled into my brain like a flash flood, particularly after hearing Dionisio's story about what really happened. It was in fact Dionisio who tried to save Father Cha from the rampaging water, he was in front, he took the brunt of the onrushing water logs. Alas, he was hit badly and lost consciousness: it was no small miracle he himself survived. He still doesn't how he did.

But his experience drove home to me that the rope-throwing isn't exactly a one-way street. It isn't just Bishop Labayen and his priests who have thrown a lifeline to drowning folk, it is the folk of Quezon who have thrown a lifeline at a drowning Church. In the end, that is what the Church of the Poor really means. It is a reaffirmation of something deeply vital that has been forgotten over the centuries of religious life in this country. Which is that the Church is not the clergy or the Church officials who materialize from palaces on grand occasions in grand clothing; it is the folk themselves, often a little patronizingly treated, and not just called, a flock. It is the people who constitute the Church, as bone and blood and sinew constitute a body, and thought and feeling and ecstasy constitute the soul.

Bishop Labayen might have been the chief architect of the Church of the Poor in Infanta, but he had no small amount of help from everyone, not just the priests who took the journey with him on the rock-strewn road that wound around the mountains. All of them raised that Church, and all of them have kept that Church on its feet. Despite the lash of wind and rain, despite the yoke of hunger and martial law, despite the whims of God and government. A true Church beats in the heart of the storm- and greed-ravaged land, one that shows how faith can truly move mountains.

Government in fact is that too, or should be. It isn't the public officials who strut around while saying blindly the loggers are not to blame for the deaths in Quezon; it is the folk who seethe through their tears that well up in their eyes at seeing their children buried in the mud. Government is the people.

But the one that's there right now, you think of another kind of rope to throw to it. The one that tightens round the neck.

Correction

Correction

Updated 01:03am (Mla time) Dec 09, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 9, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I HAVE to make a correction. The story that came out in the news about Fr. Charlito Colendres wasn't exactly accurate. The truth is far richer and more dramatic. It takes nothing away from Father Cha's heroism. It only points to the heroism of a lesser-known figure, who was his companion, a convent assistant named Dionisio Cadungog.

Dionisio, a strapping youth born to poor folk and used to hard work, told this version of what happened during the last night of Father Cha's wake at Mt. Carmel last Monday.

Before night fell on Nov. 29, Father Cha and he hurried to Barangay Canugao. A fierce wind was already blowing then, accompanied by driving rain, which foretold of dire things to come. Father Cha worried about Barangay Canugao because it was a low-lying area that easily flooded. And by the looks of things, it wasn't going to be an ordinary storm. Before they left, Father Cha told Dionisio half-jokingly, "Eat your fill, we are going to have a long, long night."

It was 7 p.m. when they got to the barangay, the darkness broken only by shafts of light from fluorescent and kerosene lamps through windows. They banged on the doors of the houses and asked the people to board a couple of jeepneys and a 10-wheeler truck. The barangay was in grave danger, they said, the folk had to get to safer ground. It took a while to convince the people to go, many of them saying that if they left, they would die, too. They would have nothing to live on.

But by dint of pleading and cajoling, they finally persuaded the folk to pack up. While people were rushing to and from their houses to fish out their things, Dionisio noticed an infant who seemed to have been lost. He picked up the child and delivered it to a woman on one of the jeepneys, charging her with its care until its mother came along. When they were finally done, they lumbered on toward Infanta.

Shortly before they got there, they found their way blocked by rocks and mud and debris. But it was high ground, so they decided to camp at the sitio nearest there.

Not so Father Cha. He worried no end about kin who had come to visit him and whom he had left behind in Infanta. He could see the lights of the convent in the distance, which made the compulsion to reach it greater. He asked the sturdier men in their group if they would accompany him through the fields and make their way to Infanta by foot. By then the fields were already covered by water. The men replied that they were good swimmers but they would not risk wading through the fields in the dark. Father Cha thought about it, and decided to walk alone.

When he was but a few meters gone, Dionisio ran after him. Bahala na, he thought, but he would not leave the priest alone. Father Cha had brought along a 30-meter rope and they tied themselves to it so they wouldn't get separated. They hadn't gotten far when the water rose, climbing up to their chests with startling rapidity. It was no longer possible to go forward, but by then it was too late to turn back. They tied the other end of the rope to the wires of an electrical post that had toppled over and decided to wait for light or for the waters to ebb, whichever came first.

Then without warning, they heard a thunderous roar and before they knew it, a column of water fell on them. And along with the water, mud, debris and logs. Piles and piles of logs, raining on them with the force of hurled missiles. Instinctively, Dionisio, who was in front, tried to cover Father Cha with his body. But a log hit him in the ribs and as he pitched forward another grazed him in the head. While his head spun, he heard Father Cha cry out, "Save yourself!" And then he lost consciousness.

Dionisio woke up hours later imagining himself dead and floating with a bloated belly. His belly certainly gave that sensation. He realized he was alive only when he retched mud again and again. He was holding on to a log and standing on water that reached up to his neck. He tugged at the rope but felt no one there. He shouted Father Cha's name, but got no response. He was alone. Later, they would find Father Cha's body floating underneath the logs.

Dionisio loosed himself from the rope around his waist, and summoning whatever remained of his strength swam to a nearby coconut tree. He clung to it, and waited for daylight and salvation or a new avalanche of mud and water and death, whichever came first, too. He prayed. He asked forgiveness for his sins and prepared to meet his fate.

And then he felt a strange sensation. He lost all sense of fear. He felt a calm descend on him. As he pondered his fate amid the buzzing in his ears and the fuzziness in his brain, he saw things with a shaft of clarity. Whatever happened to him now, he thought, his life had been worth something. Father Cha and he had saved more than a hundred lives the night before. If they hadn't gotten the folk of Barangay Canugao to leave for higher ground, those folk would now be in the same position he and Father Cha were.

His mind suddenly drifted to the lost infant he had spotted in the barangay, and wondered if its mother ever found it. He dozed off again.

When he woke up, a gray light was peeping in the east, and the water was almost gone.


* * *

We're putting up a small benefit concert for the victims of the storms on Dec. 20 at Conspiracy Café on Visayas Avenue. Cooky Chua and Ria Villena have offered to give up their December slot at Conspiracy and play. Other artists who have volunteered their services are (as of this writing): Bayang Barrios, Cynthia Alexander, Gary Granada, Joey Ayala, Mon David, Noel Cabangon, Noli Aurillo, Susan Fernandez. I expect more to follow; I haven't gotten in touch with the others yet. Gate is P100. But donations and pledges will be more than welcome.

Please come. Please help.

Giving

Giving

Updated 00:52am (Mla time) Dec 08, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



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


THE VARIOUS TV networks repeatedly mentioned it: how heartwarming it was to see people giving cash, goods and services without a thought. One station showed a relief center full of youth who had volunteered to help, packing things and generally putting order to the bedlam that is relief centers.

I agreed entirely. I had been going to Mt. Carmel church since last week and seen it too with my own eyes. Almost overnight a mountain of goods had arisen there from out of nowhere. By dint of word of mouth and text messages (finally the latter proved immensely useful, thank God for small miracles), people contributed from everywhere: sacks of rice, noodles, medicine, batteries, cooking pans. The back of the church turned into a veritable bazaar. There was a horde of volunteers, too, particularly youth who had decided to devote their sudden vacation to the pursuit of loftier things. There's a time for everything, as Ecclesiastes says. There's a time to Ragnarok and a time to sew the sacks (of rice).

It truly is heartwarming, and shows that we are not beyond hope or redemption as a people. It's always like this every time a disaster happens. And as disaster goes, what happened to Quezon Province last week is comparable only to the July-August floods of 1972 and the Mt. Pinatubo eruption of 1991 in scale of destruction. For some reason, disasters seem to bring out the best in us, the direr the catastrophe the more heroic our response. We rise as one to help others.

I've only three suggestions to add to the spirit of giving that fills us during these times.

The first is that we may do with rediscovering the spirit of humility along with it. I address that particularly to the networks, politicians and business associations that like to draw attention to their magnanimity. I find it irritating when TV hosts in particular take on the attitude that you find in the regular TV shows that offer to ease the pain of the needy and afflicted, one that half-expects the beneficiaries to fall on their knees and kiss the hand of their benefactors in eternal gratitude. That expectation being often realized in scenes that show precisely that, or at least that show the beneficiaries breaking into tears and with voices cracking profusely thanking their benefactors.

I'm not knocking gratitude. People ought to be grateful for being helped. But the givers can do as well with being more self-effacing. True giving is one where the giver disappears. The kind of giving where the giver looms larger than life is called PR. True giving is one that allows the recipient to cling to his dignity. And in any case, the victims in this case aren't all calling for charity, some are calling for help to bring them back on their feet. One farmer in Dingalan said it best: What they needed was seedlings to grow things with after they've cleared their fields of mud. A woman in Real also said she just needed a small amount for a new livelihood; she lost her tricycle to the floods.

But whether the need is for food or seedlings, medicine or capital, the enormousness of those needs must cow us to silence, or invisibility. Deacon Mario Van Loon, who's supervising the work in Mt. Carmel, suggests that enormousness when he says it will take at least half a year for the affected areas to raise themselves by their bootstraps. If there's any attitude to take here, it is that however you give, you can never give quite enough.

My second suggestion is for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and other officials to stop saying let us unite and rise over this. At the very least, it is superfluous. All you have to do is go to the relief centers to see the spontaneous outpouring of sympathy from everyone and their sincere desire to help the victims. This country has never had problems uniting when beset by a common threat or affliction. Like I said, disasters bring out the best in us. You do not have to cajole Filipinos to rise above themselves during these times.

But more than this, the call is insidious. It is premised, like the same call that attended the kidnapping of Angelo de la Cruz et al., on forgetting who caused the disaster and filling our minds only with feel-good thoughts. Why on earth would I want to unite with the loggers -- and the real criminals, to repeat, are the legal loggers and not the illegal ones -- and rise over this with them? It was their logs that tumbled down the mountain and mangled the children who slept the sleep of the innocent, dreaming of Christmas, and buried them in the mud. I do not want to unite with them, I want to haul their asses to court and seek justice for the dead.

My last suggestion is for all of us. There's nothing more breathtaking than seeing people tying themselves to a tree and jumping into the floodwaters to rescue the drowning. There's nothing more inspiring than seeing the youth toiling day and night in relief centers and people everywhere chipping in to help the hapless. There's nothing more satisfying than public officials, businessmen and the rich of Metro Manila rushing to send trucks and choppers and equipment to the afflicted areas to rescue the hungry and dying.

But why in God's name do we have to wait for disasters to do this? Why can't public officials and businessmen and the rich simply do this by not pillaging the treasury, by paying decent wages and distributing goods through land and asset reform? Why can't we rise to heights of selflessness, or show an ardent desire to help others, or serve the people, as the activists put it, other than through relief operations? Why can't we tie ourselves to a tree or post and throw the other end to a country that is being swept away by the rampaging waters?

There's one other property of giving. Like God, it has no beginning and it has no end.

The problem is legal logging

The problem is legal logging

Updated 11:33pm (Mla time) Dec 06, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the December 7, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I HEARD it in the news at the height of the storm, when Dingalan town yielded up corpses on the shore, along the riverbanks and down the slopes of mountains. A congressman proposed the death penalty for illegal loggers. Illegal logging, he said, was clearly a heinous crime. The people who dealt in it deserved nothing less than execution.

Some days later, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo herself admitted the deaths in Quezon province weren't just an act of God but an act of man, and called as well for harsh punishment to be meted out to illegal loggers. What happened in Quezon happened because the trees that sucked the water in the hilltops were gone, cut off by illegal loggers. While at that, she said the New People’s Army (NPA) was to blame for that pass. They were among, if the not the chief member, of the growing tribe of illegal loggers in the area. Having lost their funding from abroad and no longer able to compel local officials and businessmen to pay "revolutionary taxes," they had resorted to illegal logging.

Illegal logging was clearly the culprit, Representative Prospero Nograles said also. The problem lay simply in implementing our environmental laws, which are plentiful. If the authorities would only run after the illegal loggers, we would not be having problems with the environment. If only the cops and soldiers would confiscate the illegal logs coming their way, places like Real, Infanta and Dingalan would not have experienced the kind of devastation they just had.

Not at all.

Maybe the NPA has gone into illegal logging for the reasons President Arroyo and Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita cite -- that is not improbable. They went into counterfeiting in the 1980s, with disastrous results. But their contribution to the disappearance of the trees in this country, particularly in the Quezon and Aurora areas, is at best marginal. As is the contribution of the illegal loggers who operate in the wake of the legal ones. These are essentially small woodcutters who do not have the equipment to hew down big trees, let alone entire forests. Indeed, who often pay "royalties" (read tong) to the legal timber licensees to carry out their fringe “kaingin” and woodcutting activities.

Blaming the illegal loggers for what happened in Dingalan, Real and Infanta is like blaming the pickpockets in Cubao for the crime situation in Metro Manila. Running after the illegal loggers for the ferocious ravaging of this country is like running after the Muslims in Quiapo to solve the problem of piracy in Asia. It is selective perception of mind-boggling proportions. No, it is self-inflicted blindness.

The figures in Dingalan show so. It was the commercial loggers -- completely legal ones – who razed down its forests over the past several decades. When logging was temporarily stopped in 1995, after 50 years of relentless tree cutting, 90 percent of Dingalan’s forest cover had already disappeared. It had only 2 percent of its old-growth trees left. It did not help that Dingalan Bay became the site of US-RP war games over several years, an exercise that treated ecological conservation along with imaginary terrorists as the enemy.

As Jerome Ignacio of the IRDF reports, logging in the area was revived in 2000, when Joseph Estrada's goon in the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Antonio Cerilles, signed a "provisional Environmental Clearance Certificate" entitling Green Circle Properties and Resources to log on 27,851 hectares of land, with an annual allowable cutting volume of 22,645 cubic meters of wood from 447 hectares. This means more than 600 10-wheelers full of logs rumbling down the mountains every year. GCPR is the one company that has been responsible for stripping that place naked and by all the laws of God and man should be haled to court long ago for it.

This contravened, as Ignacio points out, an earlier DENR study that said Dingalan would be shooting itself in the head to cut more trees, though it said this of course in more scientific language. Cerilles' order stood till last week. It was not rescinded despite the furious importuning of folk from Dingalan, who have camped out on the DENR grounds on Visayas Avenue repeatedly, led by the former bishop of the prelature, Julio Labayen, himself. And it was not rescinded until Ms Arroyo beheld hundreds of bodies of men, women, and especially children, buried in the mud or floating in the sea. The product of monumental apathy and cynicism.

Illegal loggers? Wrong target, Ma'am. The criminals are perfectly legal ones.

The NPA does not have 10-wheeler trucks that pass with impunity through checkpoints, leaving behind only cigarette money for those manning them. Neither do the indigenous folk who have only their bare shoulders -- they don't even have carabaos -- to haul firewood to their clearings. What implementation and law enforcement are we talking about? How can you arrest and jail people who have permits to carry out their criminal activities?

The deaths in Dingalan, Real and Infanta were not wrought by the hand of God, they were wrought by the hand of greed. We want to stop these tragedies from happening -- and by God it's time we did -- we stop kidding ourselves that the problem is illegal loggers. That is not the problem. The problem is the refusal of this government to recognize that this country's ecosystem, which was already fragile to begin with, has become brittle from unrelenting abuse. The problem is a corrupt government, particularly in the form of officials in the DENR, who turn criminality into rationality, who turn law into an instrument of murder. The problem is commercial logging, which remains unabated to this day, its logs raining death on those who live at the foot of the mountains in the howling wind.

The problem is not illegal loggers, it is legal loggers. The bodies of the dead should indict them to hell.

Death

Death

Updated 11:04pm (Mla time) Dec 05, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 6, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


LAST Wednesday, we woke up violently to the news that the parish priest of Infanta had drowned in the floods. The parish priest of Infanta is my brother-in-law, my wife's brother, Francisco, whom everyone calls Father Boy. The last time we were in Infanta was in April when he was installed as that town's parish priest. It was a summer's day, the sun fretted and gave the beach-where we repaired to afterwards-a shimmering glow. The sense of warmth was enlivened in no small way by folk taking liberal swigs of fiery lambanog in the makeshift huts underneath the coconut trees.

The news about Father Boy was wrong, but the real news was no less tragic. A priest did die in the flood. He was Fr. Charlito Colendres, the chancellor of the Prelature of Infanta for the last two years. Father Cha's heroism was recounted and extolled in the Inquirer last week. He had tied one end of a rope to a tree and had thrown the other end to people caught in a flash flood when he himself was swept away by the rampaging water. The survivors would later remark that Father Cha died on the very day we celebrate National Heroes Day. But it was no great comfort to his folks, who waited at Mt. Carmel for days for his body to be airlifted to Manila. No chopper could land in Infanta at that time. The place teemed with knee-high mud and debris.

I know how a mudslide in Real looks like. We were there once in the early 1980s, and a storm had swirled there. When it cleared next day, a group of us headed home by bus. At the time, a trip to and from Real took anywhere from nine to 15 hours, depending on the weather and the state of the bus, which was invariably decrepit. The road after Siniloan going to Real was rough and narrow, winding around the mountains. An hour after we left Real, we found our way blocked by a landslide. The rains had loosened a part of the cliff beside the road. Rocks and branches lay half buried in the mud. Nothing could pass through, certainly not a bus.

The bus could do nothing but turn back, the driver telling those who wished to go ahead there was only one way they could do so. That was to walk several kilometers up to a clearing in the mountain where another bus waited. We did. My daughter Miranda was still a kid then and I carried her up on my shoulders while we trudged on slippery mud for what seemed like eternity. When the rain fell in a torrent, we took shelter among the huts that dotted the road intermittently. You could see the mud and rock and branches being washed down the road into the ravines. When we finally got to the clearing, I felt like I had gone through war.

I remembered that ordeal when I saw the footage on TV about what had happened to Real, Infanta and Dingalan. And multiplied it a thousand times. What we went through was nothing compared to this. This was tragedy of indescribable proportions. For days on end, I would hear keening on TV, from those who had lost home, hearth and loved ones. Bodies were strewn everywhere, most of them children. One news crew fished out Christmas lights from the thick mud in Dingalan, driving home the full extent of the tragedy. Christmas is a season expressly reserved for children-indeed when all of Christendom sees the world through the eyes of a child again. The bodies of the children were mangled and torn, like plastic dolls. They had been pummeled by rock, earth and rolling logs. The logs lay everywhere too, incontrovertible evidence of a heinous crime.

My daughter, Miranda, who reported on Polilio, was awed by the devastation. Bodies had washed up to shore in that island, probably coming all the way from Real, delivered there by the tides. There were precious few animals left in Polilio, which lay off Quezon, right on the Pacific Ocean. Left outside beyond the pale of shelter, the carabaos, goats and pigs had perished in the lash of wind and rain.

I felt a personal sense of loss. I had known these places for some time, I had been going there since the 1970s and seen them grow, or deteriorate, over the years. The storm drove home again how utterly vulnerable that part of the world is to natural and human calamities. Lying at the eastern seaboard of this archipelago, it is the fist line of defense against the not very pacific upheavals of the Pacific. Lying in the throes of poverty, moreover, it has very little defense against these ravages. The completion of the highway going there has not lessened the misery, it has increased it through more frenzied logging. That is the human calamity that afflicts Dingalan, Infanta and Real today. The tragedy that visited those places last week wasn't wrought by the hand of God, it was wrought by the hand of greed.

But I will put off my anger for tomorrow. Today, I mean only to grieve for the people of Quezon and be one with them. How can a season of life so swiftly turn into a season of death? I mean only to extol the heroism of Father Cha and all the religious and lay workers who have tied themselves to a tree and thrown the other end of a rope to people drowning in the rampaging water. It is a testament to their fortitude and the mercy of the God they serve that none of them has been swept away, other than in the physical sense of it. That is all my source of hope in this season of death, that death shall have no dominion, as Dylan Thomas puts it.

By his own death, Father Cha has done just that. He has given us hope life will shoot out through the rubble.

* * *

I've gotten a lot of text messages from people who want to contribute goods and services but do not quite know whom to give them to. One very good place is Mt. Carmel Shrine on Broadway, New Manila. Their Tel. No. is 7245938, local 114. Or you can call or text Sister Zenia, 0919-6366127. I'm helping there, too.

Cruel year

Cruel year

Updated 11:40pm (Mla time) Dec 01, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the December 2, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THIS year has been another cruel year for the arts.

First it was Wilfrido "Ding" Nolledo, who died of pancreatic cancer in San Fernando Valley, California. Few may know him, especially today when literature has been replaced by karaoke, but there was a time, before martial law, when his name rang loudly along with Nick Joaquin, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Bienvenido Santos, and other local literary greats. When he died, he was in the midst of finishing another novel, entitled "A Cappella Dawn." We are truly impoverished, though I imagine it is fortune enough for us to have it even in that form.

We met briefly before martial law in Asia-Philippines Leader and worked together, also all too briefly, in the Daily Globe before he decided to pack his bags for the US in 1989. He was a quiet and intense person, though quick to smile or laugh. He looked at the world with the eyes of a child, reveling in its wonders and awed by its tragedies. He was sorry to go, he said before he left, but having to work for a living was cutting into the time he lived to work--writing. I wished him all the best in the world, and meant it.

Then last May, it was Nick Joaquin who went, dying in his sleep shortly before the elections. Who knows? Maybe he did not want to live long enough to see the results. It would not have been unlike him to register his protest that way. But he had not been himself since Ding died. Ding was his protégé and good friend, and the cruelty of fate must have taken its toll on his stout heart. Nick was a devoted Christian, however he wrote about the pagan wellsprings of Christianity in this country, but even believers have been known to disbelieve life's unbelievable twists. He withdrew from the world to share the company of shadows in his home.

Alas, as it turned out, permanently. Billy Lacaba had been telling me we had a date with him to repair to a piano bar for no other reason than to toast life. We never quite got a common time to do it, until too late. Much later, Billy, his brother Pete and I went to the place, and as the singer sang Cole Porter to the lilting strains of a piano, Billy sighed and said he had done his duty. We toasted to Nick. I thought again what a monumental loss he was.

Last month, it was Lito Tiongson, playwright and filmmaker. He was a committed activist who never forgot the motto, "Serve the people," and yoked his art to that end. His films and documentaries easily show so: "Hubad na Gubat" "No Time for Crying," "Mendiola Massacre," "Beyond the Walls of Prison," "Lean," "Fragments," "Batas Militar." Like Ding, he too was beset by cancer. He was diagnosed with lymphoma early this year, and though he struggled valiantly against it, as he always had against oppression, he eventually succumbed to it.

Lito and I worked in Eggie Apostol's projects on martial law on its 25th anniversary. Lito did the documentary part, I did the book part. A good deal of the material I used in the book, particularly the descriptions about the rallies and demonstrations, I got from the footage in the documentary. Lito proved by his life and work that "committed artist" is not a contradiction in terms. He proved that activism does not impede art (though it can do so when done mindlessly), it advances it. He is another great loss to the community, the artistic and national community apart from the activist one.

Then only a couple of weeks ago, George Canseco passed away as well, from cancer of the liver. Canseco, of course, is the more widely known--or at least his works are. He composed more than 300 songs in his lifetime, many of them now classics, some of them staples in weddings. "Ikaw," "Ngayon at Kailanman," and "Paano Ba Ang Mangarap" are but some of them. His songs have been sung by all the major pop singers in this country, bar none. He was a candidate for National Artist for Music before he died, and it would be a shame if they do not bestow it on him (as on Levi Celerio) however posthumously.

I met Canseco a couple of times in TV talk shows, and on both occasions he was advocating changing the name of the country from "Philippines" to "Maharlika." Seemingly a facetious thing, it reflected his intense pride as a Filipino and his belief that Filipino artistry was second to none. He certainly proved both well justified.

And now Zeneida Amador. Amador I only met a few times, and barely exchanged anything but nods with. But I did hear from her a few times in letters, on the occasions she expressed her appreciation for things I had written, and on the occasions she invited me to watch Repertory.

I remember something the late Rolando Tinio said some time before he too died many years ago at age 60. He and Amador started out seemingly at cross-purposes, Rolando doing Tagalog plays with the aim of raising mass awareness and appreciation of theater and Zeneida doing English-language plays with a literate audience in mind. Rolando translating Shakespeare and Puccini into Tagalog, Zeneida having actors speak with American and English accents. Armed with sharp tongues and caustic wits, they now and then let them fly in the direction of each other.

But in the end they became very good friends. The reason was easy, said Rolando. In the end, the directions they pursued did not greatly matter. They were not different, they were the same. They were linked by the strongest of bonds, which was a common devotion to art, a common passion for theater. They were perfectionists, who earned the eternal gratitude of their wards for the hell they put them through to get to heaven. Amador, like Tinio, will be sorely missed for generations to come.

Same question I asked a couple of years ago when we had artists also dying in droves: Why artists, God? Why not politicians?