Two-way street

Two-way street


Posted 10:31pm (Mla time) Feb 23, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 24, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I REMEMBER something a much disillusioned friend told me recently. He wasn't going to join another Edsa, he said. He had played an immense role in the two previous ones (he doesn't consider "Edsa 3" an Edsa at all, it is a complete misnomer, he says), only to see both yield bitter fruit. It was not unlike Christ's injunction not to sow seeds on barren ground, he said. For some reason, this country seems to offer only barren ground. You can't have a more potent seed than Edsa, it beats miracle rice any day, he said, but for some reason it keeps failing to grow here. Edsa has just become another word for futility.

I can understand his frustration. But I don't know that I can subscribe to his sentiments. Notwithstanding what my critics would like to believe, who imagine that my unrelenting campaign against the unrelenting iniquities of the current government is a sign of jadedness. The day I stop being angry is the day I start being cynical. Or the day I start growing old.

The fact that something doesn't turn out the way we expected doesn't make doing it unnecessary or not worth doing all over again. Or indeed, the fact that heroic action produces un-heroic results doesn't make heroism superfluous, or not worth embracing all over again. Human beings are not blessed with prescience, however some people like to think they are. We have only the gift of imagination and foresight, neither of which can always prepare us for impending tragedy. In any case, we also have the gift, or curse, of hope, which tends to drown out anxieties and propel us headlong to God-knows-what, believing things can, or should, be better than what they are.

The Revolution waged by Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio and Apolinario Mabini was not any less worth undertaking because it was appropriated by the elite and went for naught anyway because the Americans usurped their impending victory and turned their country into their colony. Rizal, Bonifacio and Mabini did what they had to do. They saw tyranny and fought it, they glimpsed freedom and reached for it, they dreamt of a better world and died for it. Or at least Rizal and Bonifacio did.

The same is true of the revolution waged by the student activists and those who took to the hills or burrowed underground in the 1970s. It was no less worth undertaking because it was appropriated by the elite and went for naught because its own leaders subverted it by their own predilection for repressing and stifling dissent, a fact they drove home with their killing fields. The sacrifices of those who died, many of them in the flush of youth, were not in vain. The phrase "Hindi ka nagiisa ," which accompanied Ninoy Aquino to his resting place, is far more prescient than we think. It can't just mean, you are not alone the victim of this tyranny, or you are not alone to lie there, we lie there with you. It can, and should, also mean, you are not alone to have taken a bullet in the head for raising a fist at tyranny, others did before you. Without the resistance before Aug. 21, 1983, there would have been no Edsa.

You'll hear some people say, "I have no regrets, if I had to do it all over again, I would." I am one of those who do say it. The reason is simple. At the very least, the reasons for which I took up the causes I did remain as valid today as they did then, however those causes themselves ended. You refuse to fight tyranny because you could always birth a worse one, you will see no end to tyranny. Worse, you will not move at all. Life is a risk even at its most calculated, every action contains as much the seed of destruction as it does of creation.

At the very most, that is because the sacrifices never really go for naught, however the cause for which they were made was thwarted. What made the struggle against Marcos possible was the struggle of Rizal, Bonifacio and Mabini against the Spanish and Americans. That was the inspiration that animated it. What made the two Edsas possible were the struggles that went before them as well. The late Renato Constantino's thesis in "The Philippines: A Past Revisited," now standard college history textbook, was that what made Rizal's and Bonifacio's revolution possible were all the failed uprisings against Spanish rule in the past. It is a very good thesis. What applies to Rizal's and Bonifacio's struggles apply to those that came after.

No, I don't mind joining another Edsa, and still another, if that is what it takes to pull this country by its bootstraps. Which in any case, as I keep saying, is not the easiest thing to mount: You don't just gather bodies in one place and call it Edsa. Truly, "Edsa 3" is a misnomer. What I do mind is that we, the people, keep going back to where we were after each Edsa, patting ourselves in the back for a job well done, assuming things will start getting better by themselves. What I do mind is that we, the people, keep falling back into mediocrity at the end of brilliance, lapsing into veteran smugness, telling stories about the "war" in the bar, leaving "others" to do the rest.

The work of Edsa does not end with Edsa, it just begins with Edsa. The problem has never been joining Edsa, the problem has always been fulfilling Edsa. We have no problems rising to heroic levels to defy tyranny, why can't we rise beyond ourselves to build a better country?

It's no small irony that we also call Edsa "people power" when it is the people who disappear after Edsa. Certainly, whose power disappears after Edsa, the ensuing government imposing its will on us rather than the other way around. Well, take it from its provenance: Edsa is a very long road.

It means nothing if we can't traverse the entire thing. Or turn it into a two-way street.

Ghosts

Ghosts


Posted 11:31pm (Mla time) Feb 22, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 23, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


HAMPTON Sides, author of "Ghost Soldiers," gives the movie version of his book a pat on the back. The movie is "The Great Raid," which stars Benjamin Bratt and our very own Cesar Montano. It tells of the daring rescue of American prisoners held by the Japanese in Cabanatuan during World War II. This happened at a time when the Japanese were being pushed back and had taken to executing their prisoners en masse. In all, some 500 Americans were saved by the raid, which involved 121 US Rangers and 80 Filipino guerrillas.

Sides was here a couple of weeks ago to speak at the University of Sto. Tomas during the commemoration of the end of Word War II. UST itself was one big internment camp during the Japanese Occupation. Talking about the movie that was based on his book, Sides said he was glad it hewed closely to the spirit of the original, which wasn't just to give tremendous credit to the Filipinos but to show the horrors of war. He said he was glad the movie didn't have the triumphalist air of many Hollywood World War II movies and the jingoistic one of much of those that sprouted after 9/11. "I was skeptical at first. But they did a good job. They showed that the Filipino guerrillas played a big role. And although the Cabanatuan mission was successful, the backside was dark. Why do we have wars? We come to the realization that war is a terrible thing."

It's a very good reminder from someone who, if he hasn't seen the horrors of war up close and personal, has at least done so up close by way of research. And a most timely one it is, given the parallel the Filipino audience in particular might draw between American and Filipino forces fighting side by side against the fascistic Japanese and American and Filipino forces fighting side by side against the terroristic Abu Sayyaf.

War is hell, not an action movie. In an action movie, one side is good and the other bad, one side is kind and the other cruel. In real life, it's not always so clear who's right or wrong, who's murderous and who's not. In an action movie, the faceless extras are machine-gunned en masse and get ketchup on their shirts. In real life, men, women and children get massacred and die in a huddle.

There is the other side of war, something that's glossed over, or rendered invisible, in action movies and jingoistic rhetoric. The other side of the Pacific War I've just caught glimpses of. The atrocities the Japanese wreaked on their Asian neighbors were real, as Alice Villadolid reminded us in her four-part series a couple of weeks ago to mark the 60th anniversary of the "Liberation of Manila." The retreating Japanese soldiers went on a killing spree, bayoneting everyone in sight or herding them into churches and burning them alive. But the atrocities inflicted on the Japanese by their enemies, as well indeed as on the Japanese people by their own government, were just as real. The Ground Zero sites in Hiroshima and Nagasaki-they are not called that, but they deserve the name more-are painful and eternal reminders of that.

But numbers numb the mind, they do not prick it. The one image I've gotten about the madness of war from the Japanese viewpoint has been supplied by Haruki Murakami's magnificent "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." The father of one of the characters there is a veterinarian who has been assigned to supervise a zoo in Manchuria. As the Chinese troops are driving them out toward the end of the war, he gets an order from his superiors to kill the animals. They can no longer feed them, and turning loose the tigers and other dangerous animals, which are famished and rattling their cages, poses a menace to the community.

Several pages follow about the difficulty and absurdity of massacring an entire zoo population. Particularly as carried out by a platoon that is trying to conserve bullets (the occupation force has run out of ammo, too). The result is both hilarious and poignant. Which is what war is all about, the hilarity issuing from unbelievable horror. People have been known to laugh their heads off hysterically at the height of torture.

There is yet one other image that has driven to me the horror of World War II from Japanese eyes, and that is Studio Ghibli's "The Grave of the Fireflies." Roger Ebert called it "one of the greatest war movies ever made." And the astounding thing about it is that it is an anime! One other critic added to Ebert's assessment, "live or animation."

Directed by Isao Takahata, "Grave" tells the story of a brother and sister who are orphaned during the War. The father is off fighting somewhere in the Pacific and the mother dies in an air raid. They live with a relative for a while, but run away after being routinely oppressed. They live in the outskirts of the city, in a cave, foraging for food variously from wild crops and the kindness of farmers. Both wild crops and the kindness of farmers dry up (it's everything the farmers can do to feed themselves), and the kids comfort themselves by telling stories while waiting for the war to end and their father to come home. The girl never sees the end of the war. She dies of hunger despite the frenzied effort of her older brother to find precious food and medicine.

Talk of poignant, this one pierces you in the heart with an ice pick.

Sides does well to remind us of what the Greek tragedians, notably Euripides, have been saying all this time but which we keep forgetting each time a rabble-rouser takes to the stage to talk of the glory to come from smiting the enemy. None of this is to say that we may not fight back when oppressed or defend ourselves when attacked. All of it is to say that war is a last resort, not a first option.

Pacifism is not soft-minded, it is tough-minded. You cannot find anything softer than putty than the brain of a toughie, or a warmonger.

A very good year

A very good year


Posted 10:26pm (Mla time) Feb 21, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 22, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I'VE seen the five Hollywood movies that have been nominated for Best Picture in the Oscars. Don't ask me how, Edu Manzano will not be very pleased with the answer. Those movies are "Aviator," "Finding Neverland," "Million Dollar Baby," "Ray" and "Sideways."

I read somewhere that the curious thing about these movies is that none of them has broken the $100-million dollar mark, a hallmark of many Oscar nominees and winners in the past. These are fairly quiet movies, which did not particularly cost a fortune to make. Who knows? Maybe Hollywood is growing up and improving the American taste--or at least dispelling the mania for bigness. Truly, size doesn't matter, not in this year's Oscars anyway.

It's going to be one hell of a fight in all categories. Interestingly, three of these five movies deal with real people--what we like to call "real-life movies"--which raises all sorts of intriguing questions. They are really more real than real, being interpretations of real people. They capture essences, or fleeting moments in lives. But I'll leave the matter at that rather than get embroiled in a philosophical discussion.

The three movies based on real people are "Aviator," Martin Scorsese's three-hour epic about pre-recluse, or pre-batty, Howard Hughes; "Finding Neverland," Marc Forster's re-imagining of how J.M. Barrie imagined Peter Pan; and "Ray," Taylor Hackford's paean to the late great Ray Charles. I was tempted to say, "late great bluesman," but Ray Charles always defied classification. He even sang country and, like every bit of music he did, turned it into something uniquely his own.

What can I say about the sudden preponderance of fantastic movies about fantastic persons? Truth is stranger than fiction, and fictionalized truth or reinvented life is even stranger than either of them.

It won't be easy judging these movies. Each of them has a charm of its own. "Aviator's" strength are Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. Both do a magnificent job of telling the story of a boy who never grew up--much like that other boy, the finder of Neverland. DiCaprio's boyish charm or adolescent volatility is perfect pitch. The movie's tone is serious and humorous at the same time, not unlike its subject, who demands to be taken seriously and lightly at the same time. It's my best bet to win Best Picture, as well indeed as to give Scorsese his long overdue recognition as Best Director. It's not just because of sentimental considerations--though Oscar judges have been to make up for the collective guilt of the industry by such gestures--it's also because the movie has a depth of ambition, again not unlike its subject, and succeeds famously.

"Finding Neverland" has Johnny Depp, one of the best actors in Hollywood today, as defiant of its ways as was Marlon Brando, with whom he appeared in "Don Juan DeMarco." And it has Kate Winslet, one of my favorite actresses, and not at all for "Titanic" (I fell in love with her in "Sense and Sensibility"). Like Depp, she isn't afraid to take risks, and has come out of them a winner. She's nominated for Best Actress in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and she's fantastic there, with a gushing spontaneity that makes you fall in love with her all over again. (That movie, by the way, is one of those curious ones people react to only in extreme ways: You either love it or you hate it. I loved it.) And "Finding Neverland" has Dustin Hoffmann in a supporting role, as Barrie's long-suffering, but devoted, producer. You will recall he was Captain Hook in Steven Spielberg's reinterpretation of "Peter Pan." Collectively, they give the movie its magic, the kind that suffuses unseen everyday life.

"Ray" may not win Best Picture, but it should make Jamie Foxx Best Actor. He leads the pack currently, for very good reason. All the hype is true: rarely has an actor gotten down pat the spirit and letter of the real person he is playing. Foxx collaborated with Charles in the making of this movie--it apparently took 10 years to prepare, unfortunately too long for Charles to be around when it finished--and it shows. The movie is a labor of love, and Foxx's performance is a work of art. You do not have to suspend disbelief for very long: Foxx is Ray Charles. Sinaniban, as we would say. He doesn't win Best Actor, I'd protest, too.

I don't know that Lynn Truss, author of "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," the best-selling book about punctuation, would approve of "Million Dollar Baby's" title. She disapproved of "Two Weeks Notice" for its lack of an apostrophe after "weeks." She might disapprove of the lack of a hyphen between "million" and "dollar." But the rest of it one can only approve of. This is easily Clint Eastwood's best movie after "Unforgiven," and the role he plays here is not unlike the one he did then. He has Morgan Freeman as his sidekick here, too, as in "Unforgiven." Freeman should win Best Supporting Actor here. His only competition, as I see it, is Thomas Haden Church in "Sideways."

"Sideways" I absolutely loved, and not just because it talks about life, love and wine, three of my favorite lifelong preoccupations, the last in its broad (formerly) and literal (currently) sense. The movie has a wonderful sensibility, funny and profound, philosophical and scatological, full of wit and ache. Frankly I can't understand why Paul Giamatti didn't get nominated for Best Actor. He essays a finely understated performance here as an ex-husband, future writer and present-day wine connoisseur. It revived my spirits about writing and made me curse gout, the one thing that prevents me from reviving my love affair with the spirits.

But enough said. It's been one very good year for movies, if not necessarily for wine.

Right and wrong

Right and wrong


Posted 10:29pm (Mla time) Feb 20, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 21, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I ASKED my sources last week about the St. Valentine's Day massacre. I couldn't understand how the Abu Sayyaf, which was reported to have claimed the deed, could have done it. Last we heard, they had pretty much been wiped off the face of the earth. They had lost their key people, they were on the run. How they could plant bombs in key cities and set them off simultaneously seemed to strain credulity.

On the other hand, if it had been the Moro National Liberation Front, or the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, why would they want to do it? Renewed hostilities with the government would merely fall in with the US caricature of the Philippines as a terrorist flashpoint and the government's anti-terrorist rhetoric, which it periodically raises to strident levels every time it loses points with the public. And it has been losing big, with foreign investors fleeing, the Germans at the head of them, the country being downgraded by foreign creditors, and the public incensed over a proposed VAT increase.

The bombings looked like a "wag the dog" scenario, or government producing a crisis the exact same way Mother Lily produces movies. As it turned out, it wasn't so at all. This was what I gathered:

The bombings were truly the handiwork of the Muslim groups. What triggered it was a sortie by government troops at nighttime in Patikul, generally held as an MNLF "area of control." A heated exchange ensued between the duly-elected councilor and the leader of the troops. Fearing for their safety, the soldiers opened fire, killing the councilor, his wife, his two children, and his brother. The councilor happened to be an in-law of a high-ranking MNLF official. The entire Muslim community protested the incident, to no avail. The official military version was that the troops had encountered a renegade band.

Fuming over the atrocity, the MNLF and its allies retaliated by raiding a military camp. Fuming further over their unrest being depicted as caused by the fate of Nur Misuari rather than by the atrocities wrought upon them by government-the military apparently routinely shelled civilian areas with mortar fire-the groups decided to give government "a taste of its own medicine." They bombed three key cities to make the rest of the country experience what they were experiencing.

I don't know how much of this is true. But even if it were so, it does not justify anything. At the very least, if the Muslim groups felt aggrieved and scorned and wanted to bring the war to the capital, they could have attacked Camps Aguinaldo and Crame. Doubtless, government and the media could still depict that as an act of terrorism, but it would at least be understandable, if not defensible. Why in God's, or Allah's, name massacre the innocent? The boy who died in Davao and the folk who were charred beyond recognition in a bus in Ayala never did anybody any harm.

As 9/11 shows, if massacring the innocent does anything, it is not to make the public see the original provocation, it is only to make the public see the results of the retaliation. It is not to make the public feel sympathy for the perpetrators, it is to make the public feel hatred for them. It is not to prevent the people, or their own, from being harmed further, it is to assure they would be so. Terrorism is always counterproductive. All it does is to silence the groups calling for sanity and give credence to those calling for unleashing the dogs of war.

But none of this as well justifies a knee-jerk anti-Muslim, or anti-Moro, campaign, couched in the language of anti-terrorism. None of this justifies escalating the conflict by painting the country as drowning in flames. Muslim Mindanao has been like this for decades-Elmer Jacinto, who topped the medical board exam, spoke of gunfire being background noise while their teacher taught in their high school in Basilan-and nobody has thought to say this. Escalating the conflict can only bode for more atrocity, the very thing that sparked the bombings to begin with.

I caught Gen. Edgar Aglipay and several top PNP officials being interviewed on TV, and they were saying the bombings ushered in a new phase of terrorism that would see violence spreading throughout the country. Yet government officials, who endorse this depiction, are first to bristle whenever the United States and other countries issue advisories against their nationals visiting this country. We suggest we are the next Belfast, Beirut, or Baghdad, and we fume that potential visitors refuse to buy the DOT ads proclaiming us to be the next paradise? It is not too late for talks to stop the madness.

Certainly, none of this justifies giving GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) emergency powers to deal with terrorism. She is the scariest person to give added powers to. That is by no means hypothetical, as the months immediately following 9/11 showed. She made us look at the world through the eyes of the National Security Council.

I'm glad that Joker Arroyo, like Nene Pimentel, has not lost his libertarian instincts, and has spoken out against the proposal to allow wiretapping, warrantless arrests, and the other things dear to Ping Lacson's and Alfredo Lim's heart. By themselves, these powers are dangerous, as those who experienced 9/11 themselves have learned over the last three years: The Homeland Security Act does not stop terror, it institutionalizes it. You put those powers in the hands of someone who, as Jovito Salonga says, has shown she would stop at nothing to remain in power, heaven help us. Those will not be used to fight terrorists, they will be used to fight critics. To this day Horacio "Boy" Morales continues to be tagged as a "destabilizer."

You do not compound a wrong by another wrong. The MNLF should have seen that. Let's make sure we do.

Real needs

Real needs


Posted 00:18am (Mla time) Feb 17, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 17, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


WHEN our son was still a child, my wife Tita took out a high school plan for him with Platinum Plans. We are not rich, and we were in especially bad shape then. We thought we would put our minds to rest on how to send him through school later on. The plan was small, insignificant even by the standards of the early 1990s, but it brought some psychological balm. No small thanks to the pat on the back you got from the company about doing well to secure your kid's future.

Years later, our kid and the plan matured -- our kid enough to go to high school, the plan not nearly enough to pay for his school bus. Inflation and the runaway cost of education had flattened the plan to the ground like a tsunami a village by the sea. Still, money was money and last year, Tita went out to get what paltry sum was due us. She went to the Platinum Plans office on Buendia Avenue, a gleaming structure that spoke of bedrock stability. She was asked to come back in a month to claim her check. She did, braving the traffic to get to Makati (we live in Quezon City). The processing was fast, the check was postdated. All was right with the world.

Or so it seemed. Shortly after Tita deposited the check, she was notified by the bank that it had bounced. She chalked this up to an oversight of the company and braved the traffic again to go back to the gleaming, bedrock-stable, edifice on Buendia. This time a crowd milled at the office. Most of the other petitioners (for that was how they looked) had substantial policies, some P100,000 or more. Some had come from as far away as Tuguegarao and Bicol. All had the same problem: their checks had bounced.

Only minor clerks were there to face them. My wife asked for the manager, but no one seemed to know where he was. The customer relations officer materialized after Tita refused to get into a waiting game with them and complained loudly. The officer was not apologetic, he was indifferent. The only reason he entertained Tita was that she had made a fuss. He disappeared after they spoke, leaving the others to wait.

The company issued a check. Again, Tita deposited it. Again, it bounced. Again, she braved traffic to get to the gleaming bedrock-stable edifice. Again, a crowd was there with the complaint that their checks had bounced. Again, clerks were there but no one entertained questions. The claimants were now boiling with anger.

By dint of threatening to call the media there and then, Tita got an official to face them and explain how they stood. The fellow said the good news was that they would now be paid in cash. The bad news was that only some of them would get paid, specifically the ones with smaller claims. The rest had to come back some other day. Groans and moans and curses issued from the throats of the crowd, but short of burning the place down (which they all wanted to do; only the thought they might never recover their money for their children's college kept them from doing so), they felt powerless to do anything.

Tita did get our cash after some time, a very small amount that one could only want to go through all this for because of what it represented. (We don't know if the others have.)

Tita has asked me to write this for some time now, believing the others are still there gnashing their teeth, their minds filled alternately with thoughts of despair and murder. The recent hullabaloo over pre-need companies has given me added reason to do so.

I don't know that Platinum Plans is typical of pre-need companies. The torrent of complaints against College Assurance Plan, stemming from its inability to meet claims, suggests it is so. Indeed, I suspect the problem is more widespread than supposed. Some senators have already spoken out against CAP in particular, saying its figures clearly show it is not in any position to pay its planholders, now or in the foreseeable future. The problem isn't just that, it is their sheer lack of transparency, or indeed lack of manners.

I caught Perfecto Yasay on ANC last week accusing Senators Mar Roxas and Serge Osmeña of being reckless to have depicted CAP the way they did. It amounted to killing the company, he said, as it stood to stampede planholders into its doors. Indeed, it stood to sow public distrust over pre-need companies. Gene Orejana, who was interviewing him, was rightly unsympathetic. He wasn't a policyholder himself, Orejana said, he had heard enough bad press about them from the start to want to be so. His question was: What do you do about the people who feel cheated of their life savings?

It is a very good question, and one echoed by Roxas himself in Tina Monzon-Palma's show on the same topic. This is one time I agree with Roxas 100 percent. To begin with, he said, the plan already reeks of a rip-off. Only 40 percent of what you give to the pre-need companies actually goes to meet your children's future education, 60 percent goes to agents' fees and company expenses. Quite apart from that-and this is the part I agree with entirely -- why is our perspective how to keep business protected? Why isn't our perspective how to protect the public?

It's the public that's completely exposed and vulnerable in all this, like nipa huts in a gathering storm. What this has spawned is an attitude from the companies that the public is there to be fleeced, there's precious little to prevent them from doing so, they can always buy their way out of a mess. Worse, what it has spawned is an attitude from the public of resignation, of looking to heaven and not to earth for justice or vengeance. This is one time I most assuredly approve of the latter. We do not have consumer rights in this country, and pre-need firms have merely served to drive home that fact.

That is what we need before anything else.

St. Valentine's Day massacre

St. Valentine's Day massacre


Posted 11:24pm (Mla time) Feb 15, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 16, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


THE IMAGES were grim and struck a contrast with the cheerfulness of the world. Throughout the day last Monday, all you heard on radio, saw on TV, and read in the newspapers were messages of love. The front pages carried pictures of the kiss-fest that had taken place at the Manila Bay area and other places in the country, Mayor Lito Atienza and wife at the head of them. The TV talk shows during the weekend were all about love, and even HBO and the other movie channels featured movies about love.

At the end of the day, all you saw were images of death.

The one I felt particularly outraged about was the footage of a boy being carried out of the bus terminal in Davao City. You could not see his face because the camera was behind the man who carried him in his arms to a police van. But you could see his legs dangling limply on the side. I do not know if he was the same boy who was reported to have died. I did see the part when ABS-CBN was talking to its Davao correspondent and the guy was getting word that an 11-year-old boy who had been taken bleeding to a hospital had just died. I thought of his parents and felt my blood boil.

More than any other image, that was the one that drove home to me the horror of what had happened. The wreckage of the bus that shattered from an explosion in Makati was grim too, as well as the appearance of those who survived the blast, their heads covered with bandages at the Makati Medical Center. Most of them were not lovers who were going out for a stroll, most of them were folk coming home tired and bedraggled from the day's labors. Those sights were grim, too, but none of them grimmer than that of the legs of a boy sticking out of the side of a man carrying him.

It drove home to me two things in particular. One was the thick veil that language puts before our eyes or minds. The words "war," "retaliation," "bombing," "attrition," "acts of violence," "terrorism," and even "massacre," are dangled before us and somehow the blood and spattered brains are swept away, somehow the screams of terror and cries of grief and lamentation are muted. That was what filled the newspapers and TV news days before the bombings, and that was what filled the newspapers and TV news after the bombings. Well, war and terrorism and retaliation mean nothing to those who fall in the line of fire and the people who love them. Tell those things to the parents of the kid who died. It's murder, the snuffing of a life, the life of your mother and father, brother and sister, son and daughter. The numbers do not matter, they do not contain the gravity of the deed. A dead boy does.

The second is the truth, often buried in the thicket of war, that it is the innocent rather than the guilty who are the first victims of this stupidity, and that the pursuit of peace, however arduous and however it offends our instinct to lash out or strike back, remains not only the best option but the only one there really is. None of this may justify the escalation of the conflict in Mindanao, which cannot be solved by obliterating the groups that speak for the Muslims. The effort to obliterate them will not obliterate them, it will obliterate the ordinary Muslim folk who, like the rest of us, go home tired and bedraggled from the day's labors. Who, like the rest of us, have children. But which murder now will be hidden from view with the words, "deployment," "containment," preemptive strike." You won't see the limp form of a child dangling from his mother's arms who is beside herself with grief.

The reports say the Abu Sayyaf has owned up to the bombings, claiming they were their Valentine's Day gift to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. I take that as a provisional truth, until the Abu Sayyaf or the MILF or any other Muslim organization denies it or is able to disprove it. That may be the Abu Sayyaf's idea of humor, but it is not so the rest of the world's. I was tempted to say the civilized world's, but that is not so at all, it is the entire human species'. It is an obscenity, one that betrays all that we hold to be human. If the Abu Sayyaf did this, then they should be punished harshly, as their crime befits, not just by the government but by their Muslim brethren as well. They have wronged everyone, including those whose cause they presume to advance.

They have not weakened Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, they have strengthened her. They have justified her own acts of terrorism, done in the name of fighting it, wreaked here and abroad, in Muslim Mindanao and Iraq. They have made everyone forget the corruption in her government, the hypocrisy of her government's token concern for the public, the rottenness of her generals who steal from their own men and send them to their deaths. They have made Filipinos believe all over again in John Wayne, come with the US marines to rescue us from the jaws of death with night-vision and dark intent.

They have not strengthened the Muslim cause, they have weakened it. They have raised an anti-Muslim hysteria in many parts of the country, one that has died down over the years with the patent ability of Christians and Muslims to live peacefully and in a neighborly way also in many parts of the country. As 9/11 amply shows, terrorism is counterproductive. It does not bring sympathy to the cause it espouses, it brings opprobrium to it. It does not show the cause to be strong, it shows it to be cowardly-or no better than the tyranny it proposes to end.

They have not protected the Muslim community with the might of truth and principle, they have exposed it to the terrible march of fire and sword. The murder of the children will now truly be hidden by the black veil of fighting terrorism, ending savagery, keeping the peace.

They might as well have bombed their own.

Six

Six


Posted 00:42am (Mla time) Feb 15, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 15, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


(Concluded)

"THE GOD of Small Things" is one of those things that seem to be going nowhere until you reach the end when everything makes perfect sense. It shifts back and forth in time, uncoils its details like a snake, talks among many things -- about the ancientness and modern-ness of India, and the continuities and breaks between the generations. Everything seems to revolve around the drowning of an English girl who has come to visit a family in Kerala. But like the many manifestations of Shiva, it isn't quite all.

What it is in the end is -- a love story. One that defies more than the murderous enmity between feuding families, one that defies more than even death itself: One that defies the most ancient of India's taboos, which is for an upper class person, particularly a woman, bedding down with an Untouchable man. And its earthshaking consequences, which reveal the best and worst of India, the best and worst in human beings.

What raises "The God of Small Things" heads and shoulders above most things you've read is its language. It completely reinvents it. Here is writing where you truly cannot separate form and substance. The form is the substance, the language is the story. This is storytelling that grows in your brain while it tugs at your heart. I leave the reader to discover this magical experience all by herself.

Ha Jin's "Waiting" is a love story with a twist: It turns out to be the one thing St. Teresa de Avila warned against, which is an answered prayer. An answered prayer is often worse than unanswered one. Lin, a doctor in Mao's China, meets a young volunteer, Manna, and slowly -- this is China, nothing happens fast, except executions -- falls in love with her. There is only one problem: He is married. His marriage, of course, was arranged, but no matter, it is binding and carries with it all sorts of legal sanctions and political repercussions. So Lin waits, for what seems like forever. His application for divorce depends on his wife's consent, and his wife doesn't particularly care to give it. Not out of spite but out of not knowing where to go to afterward. Lin himself feels guilty: his wife took care of his ailing parents when he wasn't around, which was nearly all the time.

It's in the details you'll find the story, in the curious mating, or courtship, rituals invented by China and Mao. Love in the time of cholera finds its counterpart in love in the time of reconstruction. The twist happens toward the end: Lin does get his girl after a couple of decades or so, and discovers that love isn't all it's cranked up to be. Or that a man's reach should always truly exceed his grasp because what's grasped tends to cease to be heaven. Or "happily ever after" is a contradiction in terms. I'll leave things dangling there, or leave the reader's curiosity to push him to find out what happens.

A strange, luminous and dazzling piece of work is Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." I wouldn't be surprised if Murakami is soon short-listed among the Nobel nominees, he's a genius. "Wind-Up" is surreal without the verbal extravagance of the Latin American magic realists, without the ponderous detail of the Russian and American realists; philosophical without the abstract transcendentalism of the Asian mystics. The sensibility is at once uniquely Japanese and eerily universal (the collective unconscious?). The word that leaps to mind is "weird," but a kind of weirdness that isn't unpleasant, not unlike some Japanese anime. It's like looking at a common object and finding it the strangest thing in the world, recognizable and unfamiliar, the same thing but different at the same time.

A young man, Toru Okada, starts out by looking for a lost cat, he ends up by looking for his lost wife. Or a wife that left him because she fell for another man, or did she? Nothing is as it seems. His quest brings him to enter many worlds and see strange-familiar things, such as the postwar history of Japan and the eternal history of his soul. It's the kind of book that makes for easy and hard reading at the same time. You fly through it only to realize you haven't gone very far. Does he find his wife in the end? Well, it's part of the magic of the book that's not so easy to answer.

The last is one that has raised a furor over the last decades because of its outrageous theme. That is Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," a novel that has been dismissed as a glorification of pedophilia and hailed (as one critic puts it) as the only true love story of the 20th century. It's the story of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a pubescent girl, or since many will object to the word "love," becomes obsessed with her. It is a testament to Nabokov's genius, at least, that he is able to give a convincing argument for love. The book has been interpreted in every possible way, from satire to indulgence, and there's probably a grain of truth to much of it. Its literary stature though is indisputable and well earned. It's in the language, too, where you find the story, as tour de force as you can get, and from a Russian émigré writing in English yet. You certainly will not look at the world, or at human relationships, the same way again. You'll marvel at the vastness or mysteriousness of the human mind, or heart.

You can't get laid this Valentine, lay your head down with these. Of course, truth being stranger than fiction -- something you get to glimpse as you grow older -- you'll also find the best love stories right in front of you, in real life. I just spotted one recently in an item we had on our front page, in the union between two male comrades in the communist movement. Defiant love in the trenches: Now there's something waiting to be told.

But that is quite another story.

Six

Six


Posted 11:49pm (Mla time) Feb 13, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 14, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


"ROMEO and Juliet" remains possibly the most romantic love story ever, and has deservedly survived war and famine through the ages to gain that reputation. Franco Zeffirelli did right to cast the teenagers Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey in his version-possibly the best one, which too deservedly has earned its fame-of the star-crossed lovers. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to rise, or plunge, to those levels or selflessness or recklessness, defying adversity, opposition and death itself. It takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to exhibit such joy and exuberance, such physical immediacy and spiritual distance at the same time, while in the throes of that euphoria or affliction.

Well, it takes youth, or truly great love, or both, to fall in love at first sight, and surrender to it with such unyielding absoluteness. You get to be a little older, you get to sympathize (and empathize) with the worldlier Mercutio, or even the more cynical Athos in Alexandre Dumas' "The Three Musketeers," and look at the mating rituals of the birds and the bees with more amusement than awe.

But I leave you to discover the book and movie, or better still the stage presentation, at your leisure. Though you might want to check out, too, the books mentioned below. I don't know that they are the best books written about love, I do know they have made the strongest impression on me in that respect.

Foremost is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera." It's the one book that has been compared to his incomparable "One Hundred Years of Solitude." It's just as lyrical and far more romantic. I can say with much assurance, don't wait for the movie. The producers won't make it, this isn't the sort of thing that makes for a good one. Look what happened to "Catch-22." The movie, made by Mike Nichols, was horrible, though it starred Alan Arkin, one of my favorite actors, as Yossarian. Why anyone would think to turn Joseph Heller's magnificent anti-novel into a movie, well, there's a thin line between lunacy and genius. The book was genius, the movie was lunacy.

But I digress. In "Love in the Time of Cholera" (as far as I can recall, I read it years ago), a young man who fancies himself a poet falls in love with the daughter of a fairly rich man, woos her, goes to great lengths to do things for her. And just as she is on the verge of requiting his love, she changes her mind. And marries a man of more reasonable means. Devastated but resolute, young man vows to have her if he was to wait forever to do it. He does wait, bedding in the interim women left and right, but they do not count, he remains chaste in his mind, with his single-minded pursuit of-or waiting for-his one great love.

I won't reveal whether he gets her in the end. I just want to draw the reader's attention to the part where the young man falls in love for the first time. He is stricken badly, and the symptoms he exhibits are not unlike those of cholera. He is feverish and delusional, unable to sleep, unable to eat, retching and vomiting all the time. It is all his devoted mother can do to see him through his delirium tremens. It takes genius to write about this with poetry and humor at the same time. Marquez does so, in style.

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is a "bizarre love triangle" to use the title of a song that became popular in the '90s. Milan Kundera I really like. I can understand his ironic sensibility, his compassion and sarcasm, his love-hate relationship with the socialist utopia.

The triangle consists of Tereza, who comes from a world where everything seems trivial and who longs for depth and seriousness; Sabina, the painter, who comes from the plodding weight of political activism and longs for the soaring airiness of art; and Tomas, the doctor, who returns to Prague after the Russian invasion, longing to do something for his country and ends up being "remolded" into a cleaner of glass windows. The novel, of course, explores their relationships, in particular, as the above suggests, the many facets of weight and lightness, or indeed their paradoxical meanings or modes of being. Weight can often be very light, and lightness can often be very heavy.

Typically Kundera, we see the couple Tomas and Tereza (Sabina is the sometime mistress), toward the end of the book, keeping watch over their dying dog. How is that for a truly ironic, and dazzling, play at the many shades of lightness and heaviness?

This one you don't have to wait for the movie, it's been made-as far back as 1988. And quite a good one it is, too. Like all great movies from great books, this one doesn't rely faithfully on the original but goes on to create its own world while retaining the original's spirit and energy. It demands to be judged by its own terms and not by literary ones. The movie stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Juliette Binoche, and Lena Olin, and was directed by Philip Kaufman.

Olin is one hell of a sexy Sabina in this movie, which adds all sorts of reverberations to the antimonies physical-spiritual, trivial-substantial, light-heavy. Lightness can often truly crush you with its unbearable-ness. You want the gripping visuals and the stunning immediacy, watch the movie. You want the suppleness of language and the even more suppleness of thought, read the book. You can't lose either way. You win double if you do both.

Arundathi Roy is both enviable and unenviable. She it is who wrote "The God of Small Things," a brilliant first novel, as awe-inspiring a debut as "Catch-22." But she may well end up having the same problem as Heller, who was unable to write a second novel until well after a decade. How the hell do you top a work of genius?

But I leave that for tomorrow.

(To be concluded)

The point is justice

The point is justice


Posted 00:14am (Mla time) Feb 10, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 10, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


FRANKLY, I can't understand why Imelda Marcos should be elated at the recent US appeals court ruling saying it could not overturn the Philippine Supreme Court decision on their Swiss deposits. As Jovito Salonga pointed out the other day, the US court ruling had become moot and academic when in November 2003 the Philippine Supreme Court ruled to forfeit the $683-million Marcos Swiss deposits in favor of the Philippine government.

The government then apportioned the money as follows: (1) the bulk to go to agrarian reform, (2) a portion to go to attorney's fees, and (3) $150 million to the indemnification of the martial law torture victims. The US appeals court ruling doesn't change one bit of this. The torture victims will still be compensated for their (literal) pains, something Congress has been working on this past year or so.

Imelda's elation is incomprehensible-unless former peasant organizer and now Anakpawis Rep. Rafael Mariano is right to suspect that the former First Lady hopes to make a deal with the Arroyo government over a division of spoils, which this ruling presumably signals, or can be made to signal. A suspicion that may not be unfounded. Salonga noted that only last month, on Jan. 13, Imelda visited Malacañang for the first time since she fled the country and came away expressing support for the Arroyo administration.

Years ago, in 1993, the Presidential Commission on Good Government sought to strike a deal with the Marcoses, proposing a 75-25 sharing of the Marcos loot, the government to get the 75 percent and the Marcoses to get immunity in addition to the 25 percent. The Supreme Court voided the deal. The possibility that the Arroyo administration is reopening it, given particularly that it is cash-strapped and facing a fiscal crisis, looms large.

But whether or not there's a plot underlying Imelda's interpretation of the US court ruling, my unhappiness over all this is that the whole question of the remuneration of the victims has been lost in a blaze of legal fireworks. I do appreciate the fact that many years ago Robert Swift undertook, at much expense to himself though also with the expectation of much reward if he was successful, to prosecute the class suit in the United States against the Marcoses on behalf of the torture victims. But I remember that, from the start, I expressed the hope that the legal aspects of the case would not bury the moral, or indeed political, aspects of it.

The danger was there. The torture victims stood to be portrayed as money-mad, particularly where the talk boiled down to dollars and cents or how much went to whom. And they were, particularly when they began to squabble among themselves, having fallen into two rival groups. The ideological aspects of the division were lost on the media, the proprietary aspects of it were not, as both groups claimed to be the true representative of the victims. The media had a field day caricaturing the spat between those who believed in Robert Swift and those who did not.

I did, and do, think the torture victims ought to be compensated. I've always argued against the idea, put forward by many quarters particularly after the Supreme Court ruled to give the Marcos Swiss deposits to government, that since all Filipinos suffered during martial law, no single group has any special claim to the money in full or part. My position then, as now, is that the torture victims were not just victims, they were also heroes. They were tortured because they raised a fist against martial law, many of them well before it became fashionable-and safe-to do so. The least we can do for them is ease their pain -- nothing could ever pay for their monumental losses -- and pay tribute to their heroism literally by paying tribute to them. The torture victims do not owe government for designating a part of the Marcos loot to them, government owes it to them.

Quite apart from that, indemnifying the victims reminds this forgetful country forcefully of what took place during martial law. Martial law did not just rob the country of its money, it robbed the country of its people. Many of them the youth, who died shouting freedom in their loud and pure voices in places God and government forgot. Indemnifying the victims is seizing this country by the scruff of its neck and forcing it to look at itself through a mirror.

But I've always thought, and said, that for that to happen, the victims needed to raise the political and moral dimensions of their ordeal far higher than its financial and legal possibilities. Remuneration was gravy, not meat and potatoes. Elsewhere in the civilized world, or among countries that were once enslaved and struggled to regain their self-respect, the legal flows from the moral, law draws its strength from right and wrong. That is as it should be, the moral is the foundation of the legal, not the other way around. Look at the way the Jews have carried out their long and implacable search to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice. Of course, it has legal and financial aspects, too, but above all it is a moral quest. It resonates with right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.

The legal strength of quests like this depends on their moral force, not the other way around. In the case of the class suit of the torture victims of martial law, the law has become the ultimate arbiter of moral soundness, the scale upon which everything is weighed. Somehow you wonder, however the compensation turns out, however the courts judge partially or impartially, if Ferdinand Marcos isn't laughing beyond the grave, his favorite preoccupation of containing life in neat legal boxes finding loud echoes in all this.

Justice demands compensation, not compensation justice. You put the cart before the horse, you'll never move.

First stone

First stone


Posted 11:18pm (Mla time) Feb 08, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 9, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


RONNIE Amorado and Albert Alejo had quite a mouthful to say during the first Jesuit-sponsored anti-graft seminar last week. The seminar was part of the group's ongoing campaign against corruption, called "Ehem!", and was appropriately enough held at the Land Transportation Office, an agency that used to have a reputation, alongside the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Bureau of Customs and Bureau of Immigration, that truly induced coughs of "ehem," or less polite reactions from the public. Amorado is a professor at the Ateneo de Davao and Alejo is a Jesuit and the head of the Mindawan Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue of the same school.

The Catholic Church, which has been fulminating against the corrupt and ungodly, they said, should first look at itself. "The Catholic Church played a big role in corrupting the system," said Amorado. During Spanish times, the Church did little to fight official corruption, and even benefited greatly from it. "Remember, there was no separation then between church and state."

For his part, Alejo pointed out: "The Church teaches generosity and charity, but only in the form of donations to it, not in the form of paying taxes correctly ... (It) has given rise to the mentality that if a Christian has money to spare, he should give it to the Church rather than to the government."

It's good advice, the local Catholic Church learning to practice what it preaches. There's a whole history to show that the Church, though part of the solution, is also part of the problem -- probably more the second than the first. It's a Church, quite incidentally, that is itself cleaved into rich and poor, in part involuntarily -- some parishes are poorer than others, headed by parish priests who do not carry much clout among their superiors -- and in part voluntarily -- some priests (and bishops) believe that the task of Christianity is to build a Church of the Poor (or for the poor) and not a Church of the Rich (or for the rich). As with the society itself, the pocket of wealth and opulence at the top is matched by breathtaking deprivation below, a spectacular divide that doesn't suggest it holds on to values conducive to honesty, or indeed Christianity.

The Church is easily the biggest landowner in this country, and continues to grow so. Though apparently with the application of less duress now than then, even if the importuning remains strident and incessant. I know of a group of Leyteños who built a shrine to their patron, the Sto. Niño, somewhere in the outskirts of Quezon City, and who heard no end of beseeching from the parish priest of the area for them to donate the property to the Church, the better for them presumably to be looked upon with favor by God.

During Spanish times, the friars acquired much land by threatening landowners at their deathbeds, not often subtly, with hellfire in the afterlife if they did not make up for their sins by lavish tokens of charity to God's representatives on earth. The landowners, who had in life lived up to Balzac's famous aphorism that a great crime always underlay a great wealth, and being generally spiritual cowards alongside being physical bullies, were not always loath to buy off God with part of their loot. To the weeping and gnashing of teeth of their prospective heirs who still had a while to go before they got into that state.

Amorado and Alejo's complaint that Church officials slept with the enemy, or kept their silence when resolute crooks were also generous donors, applies as much today as it did in the past. The selective perception was patent in Jaime Cardinal Sin's fulminations against Joseph Estrada -- and remonstrations with the Protestant, and, worse, tightfisted Fidel Ramos -- on one hand, and tolerance of Cory Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo even in the face of wholesale pillage on the other.

It wasn't Sin who upbraided Cory for replacing Marcos' cronies with her own, it was a newspaperman by the name of Chino Roces. Though much favored by Cory for his role in fighting Marcos, Roces used an occasion held to honor him to speak out stridently against the corruption that arose after Marcos' downfall. It did not endear him to his friends in Malacañang, but if you are a believer you have got to believe it earned him points in heaven. He died shortly afterward.

And it wasn't Sin who upbraided President Arroyo for burning people's money like a drunken sailor to campaign. He endorsed her, in fact, saying she was the moral choice. Patronage runs deep in this country, though it wasn't always clear who was patronizing whom in this case -- Arroyo Cardinal Sin or the other way around. Arroyo was a beneficiary of Edsa 2, and Cardinal Sin often looked like he was merely protecting an investment.

Amorado and Alejo are right to suggest that the Church looks at itself first before it looks at anybody with an eye to spotting malfeasance. But I would go further and extend the advice to all the institutions of this country that propose to exert moral suasion on the public. The advice applies as well to business, which too has been loudly railing against crookedness in public service but which cannot seem to spot its own ungodly practices (investing in power is still the best way to do business in this country) in its reckless pursuit of gain. The same is true of the media which have been exposing perfidy in high places but which too cannot seem to notice the extent to which they collude with the perfidious to advance their own interests. And the same is true of us, the public, as well, who revile public officials who steal but implore them on bended knees to act as “ninong” [godfather] or “ninang” [godmother] in the baptisms of our sons and the marriages of our daughters.

The Church does have something wise to say about all this, taken from the very mouth of its Lord and Master:

"Let him who is without sin cast the first stone."

Mirrors

Mirrors


Posted 10:49pm (Mla time) Feb 07, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 8, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


"SOME people have been asking me who've signed up with us, half-hoping I'd mention some big names. Well, we don't have big names. Who cares about big names?"

That was what Nandy Pacheco, a youthful idealist at 72, told me when I saw him last week. Pacheco isn't just the prime exponent of the Gunless Society in this country, he is the prime exponent of a new kind of politics in this country. He is the head of Kapatiran, a political party that was launched in 2003 but wasn't able to field candidates in the elections last year for lack of time -- and recruits.

It's not easy being an entrant to the cause, at least as far as the current expectations of people who want to go into politics go. To do so, you must first forswear the "pork barrel," the very reason people want to become congressman to begin with. The one has become almost synonymous with the other: Congressmen are people who hold on if not to the actual monies to be disbursed to their pet projects at least to the power to determine what those pet projects would be and who gets to carry them out. The last normally consists of friends and relations.

I'll just put down a few of the other controversial things the party stands for and expects members to obey religiously. Under "political platform": "abolish all forms of gambling, whether run by government or the private sector," "abolish the death penalty," "end fraternity violence in schools." Under "social dimension": "abolish the 'pork barrel' system," "make it a criminal offense for anyone to carry a gun or any other deadly weapon in public places," "end the practice of appointing former military officers as secretary of national defense," "disallow elected and appointed public officials from writing regular columns, acting in movies and TV shows, and acting as commentators or anchorpersons on radio and TV, and appearing on TV and radio commercials and print advertisements and billboards." There's more, but you get the drift.

Your first reaction is to smile bemusedly and wonder if you can count the prospective members of the group beyond the fingers of your hands. Your second reaction is to wonder why that is your first reaction. Because to see this as the product of naiveté or a loose hold on the realities of this society must eventually reflect on what you take to be sophistication and accept as the necessary conditions of your political or social life. Or put another way, to see this as a pipe dream is to show what you accept as the terms of your waking hours.

In fact, Kapatiran is another one of those trick mirrors this country is full of that seemingly reflect things in fantastic ways but really reveal huge kernels of truth in them. What makes Kapatiran for instance bizarre as a political party is that it acts as a political party in the sense that the truly democratic, or plain civilized, countries do, but which this country clearly does not.

In other countries, people join political parties. In this country, political parties join people. In other countries, political parties are bigger than their members; they have a life of their own that goes on long after individual members have come and gone. In this country members are bigger than their parties and parties rise and fall depending on the fortunes of those who head them. In other countries, voters vote for which political party can best deliver the things they need. In this country, voters vote for which candidate can best sing the songs they want. Now, which is really perverse -- a party like Pacheco's, or a politics like ours?

I've said it before: the thing that really needs changing is not this country's Charter but this country's party system. We never develop any real political party, one that stands for something other than a springboard for the ragged ambitions of a "presidentiable" or "prime-ministeriable," and no amount of Charter change will rescue us from silliness or despair. But that's another story.

As to Kapatiran's agenda, you may disagree with it, or some of it, but to see it as something totally unrealistic is again to wonder what you accept, or have come to accept, as possible. Why should we naturally find reasonable the idea that no politician in his right mind will run for anything other than personal gain, or in this case for the institutionalized tribute or “balato” known as pork barrel? Why should we not demand from public servants an overriding desire to render public service?

The Kapatiran motto is "Common good is common sense," and it does make sense. If I recall right, that was what Russell Crowe as John Nash proposed in "A Beautiful Mind": Everyone looks out for himself, everyone loses. Everyone looks after the group, everyone gets laid. What applies to getting laid as an individual applies to getting ahead as a nation. Well, if I recall right again, Nash was thought of as a crackpot. Which he partly was, but that, too, is another story.

You'll hear no end of groans and sighs from Filipinos today despairing of this country ever getting better. This country has become so miserable, the refrain goes, but there is no alternative in the horizon. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo sucks, but Joseph Estrada, who proposes to dislodge her in turn, does so even more. Well, alternatives are strange creatures. We've never really lacked for them, we've always had them. What we've always lacked is the wit to recognize them when they present themselves. Or this country has become so Alice-in-Wonderland-ish, so topsy-turvy, we find sanity parochial and hustling cosmopolitan. What we've always lacked is the will to do them, saying to ourselves life is impossible on this soil, only death flourishes. Better to live in America.

Who really is the crackpot in this case?

Shut up, shut up

Shut up, shut up


Posted 10:57pm (Mla time) Feb 06, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 7, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


DIDAGEN Dilangalen, current spokesperson of Joseph Estrada, had an interesting letter last Wednesday. (PDI, 2/2/05)

"Being one of those who speak with President Estrada on a regular basis," he says, "I can assure Conrado de Quiros that the former is in full control of his mental faculties when he states that he is ready to take up the cudgels for our countrymen who have lost hope in a better future under the current administration." Unfortunately, he says, too many Filipinos, including me, "blindly believe whatever the elite and the vested interest groups say about (Erap) or his administration."

There is no truth, he says, to what I said in a column that Edsa 1 and 2 were sparked by the people rising to end a tyranny. Erap, he says, was no tyrant. "(Erap) won the presidential elections with the widest margin ever recorded in Philippine electoral history...Contrary to De Quiros' claims, it was not the sovereign will of the people that led to President Estrada's ouster, but the will of the few who could not bear the thought of a President attending to the needs of the many above the caprices of a powerful few."

All the sins attributed to the Erap government, he says, riot even more in the GMA administration. Illegal gambling is everywhere, and the country currently ranks among the most corrupt in the world. "De Quiros should think about doing his share in stopping this hypocrisy."

What can I say? Dilangalen must have been limiting his reading fare lately to other columnists, which is why his literary skills still need polishing. I can assure him that his failure to read me on a consistent basis is his loss, not mine. But if he had taken to improving his mind by reading me, he would have known-as my enemies do, gnashing their teeth and sending not very veiled threats my way-that I have been doing more than my share in trying to "stop the hypocrisy."

I have no problem with his premise: I will go farther and say that no government has plunged decency to an all-time low since Marcos than the current one. But I have a problem with his solution. As I've also said in previous columns, the way out of the GMA (Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo) rut is not to go back to the Erap farce. The way out of this pass is to go forward, not backward.

It's time he gave the "Erap para sa mahirap" line a break. That line has been discredited long ago. There was little in Erap's rule that resonated with the masa, there was everything in it that reeked of elite. Or the worst form of elite, which was crony. You could not find a bigger crony then than Lucio Tan, who had government at his beck and call and who indeed conscripted Erap to mug labor-that is the masa, my dear Dilangalen-with an onerous 10-year cessation of collective bargaining. Fortunately, the PAL unions, Fasap chief of them, refused to buckle under.

As tyranny goes, if I recall right, the outcry against Erap jumped to another level, or took on a more strident note, with an act of tyranny in a committee convened to hear Chavit Singson's charges against Erap. A congressman prevented Singson from talking by repeatedly shouting-well, it wasn't "Shut up! Shut up!"-"Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!" The gagging of Singson produced the opposite effect, which was to make his voice roar. The congressman's name was Didagen Dilangalen.

It's true Erap won by the biggest electoral margin any president has had. But it's just as true that he lost the trust of the very people who voted for him. Dilangalen forgets the one thing that made Edsa 2 a popular revolt and not just an elite one. That was the impeachment trial, which gripped the public imagination to a point that it completely shoved aside the most popular telenovelas of the time. The TV sets in sidewalk eateries featured the impeachment trial, and restaurants and bars loudly asked patrons to watch the trial in the "big screen" and in air-conditioned luxury, much as they did the PBA games.

The trial, not unlike the telenovelas, was a morality play, a drama between good and evil, between the underworld bullies and the heroic underdogs, given a face by the "men in black," the de-campanilla lawyers in suits, arrayed in defense of Erap on one side, and on the other, the often inarticulate congressmen who had forgotten their lawyerly skills but who fought on, armed only with truth and courage. Guess whom the masa sided with.

If there is any valuable lesson in fact to be gotten from Edsa 1 and 2, it is simply this: No popular support, no Edsa.

To this day, I cannot understand why anyone would imagine it is the easiest thing in the world to mount an Edsa. The worry that we would be making a travesty of Edsa by having a 3 or 4 or 5 is simply unfounded. "People power" does not happen by chance, or by caprice or fiat. It happens at the end of a long process of the masa being goaded into action by a detestation of what is and a hope of what can be. The reason the opposition hasn't been able to mount one-though it has been desperately trying to-is not that it cannot get the elite to join them. It is that it cannot get the masa to do so.

For reasons that are patent. The opposition has no credibility. The problem precisely lies in the fact that though most Filipinos are deeply disgusted with the current government, as borne out by all the surveys, they are not able to find an alternative to it. That alternative is not, and cannot be, a return to the very thing the people-yes, the masa chief of them-rejected as anathema to them. The only way to go is forward, not backward.

Just one last thing: Dilangalen says he can assure me Erap is in full control of his mental faculties. Ah, but he presumes he is in the best position to know when someone is.

Grammatical deaths

Grammatical deaths


Posted 11:48pm (Mla time) Feb 02, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 3, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


I GOT the book last year from a friend, Vic Magdaraog, who sent it to me to help me recuperate from an operation. He thought I was still confined at St. Luke's after my doctor, and friend, Jiji Sison, took out my gall bladder. I wasn't. I was there for only three nights, I was anxious to get home, and did. But the book did help in my swift recovery at home, though it caused me no small amount of discomfiture chuckling out loud while the wound underneath my ribs, hidden by the sewn skin in that part of my body, healed.

The book is Lynne Truss' "Eats, Shoots & Leaves," which has the distinction of being the first book on punctuation to become a runaway bestseller in the British charts. Its success has little to do with British eccentricity-unless the eccentricity lies in their still reading books, a dying art across the globe-the book is just, well, delightful, to use a British word. It amuses while it enlightens.

The title comes from this story: "A panda walks into a café. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air. 'Why?' asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder. 'I'm a panda,' he says, at the door. 'Look it up.' The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

Strangely enough, some people I've shown this book to, or told the story to with the appropriate pauses, couldn't get the joke. I should have known that in a country that doesn't particularly care for grammar, and in an age that doesn't particularly pay heed to punctuation, it's not unusual for its point to be lost. I myself won't bother to explain it. Go figure.

Punctuation is important, Truss says, and she spends the rest of her book showing why in often hilarious ways. One of the things she upbraids is the title of the movie, "Two Weeks Notice." It's a title that can truly raise the hackles not just of sub-editors or copyreaders but also of anyone professing to be literate. Or don't you notice anything wrong with it? The correct phrase, of course, is "Two Weeks' Notice" -- apostrophe after "weeks." You wonder why none of its stars (Sandra Bullock, Hugh Grant) director (Marc Lawrence, also its writer), and staff from Warner Bros ever noticed the atrocity. The title, splashed on posters of the movie, went on to conquer the world.

Punctuation, Truss quotes a newspaper as saying, "is a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling." It's good manners, it's considerateness. If you don't punctuate your statements right, you make readers work harder. Or worse, you give them the wrong meanings. As this example shows: "A woman, without her man, is nothing." When you probably mean: "A woman: without her, man is nothing."

My sympathies are entirely with Truss not only because I edit or copy-read publications to supplement income and have seen first-hand the dramatic plunge in grammatical, not to speak of punctuation-al, IQ in these parts. I sympathize with her because I do know that these times are not hospitable to displays of this intelligence or politeness. Truss mentions the ravages on language brought about by the Internet, specifically the e-mail, and text-message sending via the cellular phone. I agree. That, too, I've seen firsthand: the dumbing of communication brought about by text messaging in particular.

I was one of those who resisted the cellular phone for a time, but gave in eventually. And discovered its many wonders in time. Truly, it does make it easier to meet-it's especially useful for me since I take the Metro Rail Transit to Makati City; I just refuse to drive all the way there. I was about to say it makes it easier as well to keep track of your kids but don't you notice that your kids' -- notably the teenage variety's -- cell phones always experience low bat whenever you're inquiring into their whereabouts at odd hours? But that's another story.

But text messaging has its drawbacks, for me too in particular. Which is that it has been encroaching into my writing, and threatening to overrun it. I used to write straight sentences, with the correct spelling and punctuation, in my text messages. But I've since found out that that takes time (I won't win any contest in rapid "texting") and occupies several pages. As with owning a cellular phone, I've given in to expedience too and begun "texting" the conventional way, which is in open defiance of grammatical convention.

I haven't gotten as far as writing "ba2", which was how our teenager made life miserable for me one time I was supposed to meet him in a building-it turned out his cryptic message meant "baba," or downstairs; I thought it was the name of a shop-but I have gotten as far as removing all vestiges of articles ("the" and "a" or "an"), obliterating vowels in words, erasing capital letters, and producing slabs of text without -- my monumental apologies to Ms Truss -- commas and periods. Indeed, on the whole talking like Johnny Weissmuller-"Me Tarzan, you Jane," or in "textese," "m trzn u jan"). I know it's horrible, and produces the nastier effect of making you tone deaf. Words are about rhythm and beat and cadence too, and those things evaporate in text messages.

I'm really hoping they get around to making cell phones, and PC's (note the apostrophe after "C"), receptive to verbal commands so we can stop using the keyboard to inflict more torture on language. Meanwhile, I guess I'll just have to sign up with the resistance Truss offers to lead to preserve the beauty, or integrity, of one of humankind's noblest inventions.

Till then, c u.

Heart and mind

Heart and mind


Posted 01:16am (Mla time) Feb 02, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 2, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer


IT'S not without drama, and some of the moments were perfectly moving. That was the spectacle of Iraqis voting in free elections for the first time since 1953, amid the mayhem wreaked by those opposed to them. The picture that appeared on our front page last Monday of an Iraqi woman holding her ID and ballot card as she prepared to vote in her city of Sadr said it all. I remember a similar picture I saw after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, of a woman lifting her veil for the first time in her life. These are great, almost epochal, changes.

Yet for all this, much of the world may be forgiven for having a skeptical, if not cynical, view of the elections in Iraq. "This is democracy," AP quotes an elderly Iraqi woman in a black abaya, who is holding up her thumb stained with purple to show that she voted amid smoke and gunfire. Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi himself says, "(This is) the first time the Iraqis will determine their destiny."

Well, yes and no.

The yes is patent. Free elections are a boon to a nation, particularly where they are taken seriously. And nothing can be more serious than people defying threat to life and limb to be able to vote. We had that, too, almost two decades ago this year, during the "snap election" of January 1986, people trooping to the polls amid the threat of violence from Ferdinand Marcos' henchmen.

But the no is just as patent as the yes. If the Iraqi elections truly represented democracy, the first thing the Iraqis would be deciding, well before whom they want their prime minister to be, is whom they want to run their country. The first question they should be answering, well before whether or not they want their interim prime minister to remain in power, is whether or not they want the Americans to remain in their country. That is the one question staring not just Iraq but the world in the face, but that is the one question the Iraq elections are not asking.

The essence of democracy is freedom. No freedom, no democracy. The concept of freedom at the margins, or a limited freedom within the confines of occupation, is not democracy, it is hypocrisy. A longer chain does not make for democracy, it only makes going to the prison john easier.

The concept of an "imposed democracy" is a contradiction in terms. One country cannot invade another and force democracy down the throats of its citizens. Democracy doesn't thrive in those conditions, only resentment does. Not least because history has yet to record a country that invaded another at great cost to itself in life and money for altruistic ends. On the contrary, history records those invasions to arise from selfish motives and result in a tyranny worse than the one they end. Indeed, even if the occupation were wrought for altruistic motives, democracy would still not sprout from it like skeletons from the Hydra's teeth. Democracy is choice, or it is nothing at all. One country determining what is good for another is not freedom, it is fiat.

You do not have to look very far to see what happens when you "impose democracy." The Philippines is Exhibit A. The reasons George W. Bush used to justify invading Iraq were the same reasons William McKinley used to justify invading the Philippines (Bush has quietly dropped any reference to weapons of mass destruction, which has become embarrassing). That is the "White Man's Burden," also called "manifest destiny," which is the duty of countries like America to bring civilization to the uncivilized. That that is a monumental presumption, of course, never occurred to them. Gandhi said it best. When asked, "What do you think of Western civilization?" he answered, "I think it would be a very good idea."

The result of American rule in the Philippines has been to produce a schizophrenic country, a country that is democratic in form but autocratic in substance, a country that is free and egalitarian in ritual but is slavish and iniquitous in essence. It is a country that enjoys free elections and a free press, which may not be sneered at -- they are true harbingers of democracy. The worst elections, one where the choice is limited to “trapos” [traditional politicians] or entertainers, are better than no elections at all. And the most cantankerous press is better than a muzzled one. To see the virtues of the first, one need only compare martial law with what went after. The worst of what went after is still better than the best of martial law.

But this same country is one that is unequal in the extreme and free only to obey Washington's bidding. It is a country where pockets of affluence float in a sea of utter destitution. It is a country where one set of law applies to the rich and another to the poor. It is a country where taxes take on the aspect of tribute, or “balato,” to public officials, and where public officials are free to collect them as their due. It is a country that, so long as it has free elections and a free press, feels free to oppress its people, who respond by fleeing to other shores.

It is the logical consequence of "imposing democracy." It is the contradictory result of a contradiction in terms. You teach someone the meaning of liberty after enslaving him, and he will learn the meaning of liberty only with his head and not with his heart. You teach someone the meaning of equality after oppressing him and he will learn only the formal properties of equality and not its substance. You teach someone the meaning of fraternity after making him a stranger in his own country, and he will learn only to say the word "brother" and not mean it.

The other choice is to resist. They now call the Iraqis who are fighting the American occupation of their country troublemakers and terrorists. That's what they called Sakay, too.

Kalbaryo

Kalbaryo


Posted 10:52pm (Mla time) Jan 31, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service



Editor's Note: Published on page A12 of the February 01, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.


I WAS one of those who applauded what Darwin Calvario did, and I am happy that he has reaped the rewards of his honesty. Calvario is the tricycle driver from Gen. Santos City whose deed has now become part of urban legend, the legend of cab/ jeepney/ tricycle drivers and post office clerks returning money they find in their premises.

Calvario's case is a little more dramatic. Not least because of his name, which as our correspondent, Aquiles Zonio noted, is cruelly apt. Calvario lives a life of Calvary: he is as poor as a church (or mosque?) mouse and cannot afford an operation for his two-year-old son who suffers from an anus that isn't open. The results of that affliction you see in the picture that appeared on page 6 of our Saturday issue: His belly is bloated.

One day a couple of weeks ago, Fate dropped on Calvario a magnificent gift. It took the form of a bag he found on his tricycle containing P270,000 in checks and P26,000 in cash. The money could easily pay for the operation and leave something extra for him and his family. His fellow tricycle drivers advised him not to look a gift horse in the mouth and use the money to good purpose. But Calvario refused. Against the prodding of his fellows and the pounding of his needs, he decided to seek out the identity of Fate.

Next day, he went to Radyo Bombo to report it. And soon enough, Fate came rushing in in the form of Sarah Joe, a businesswoman. The grateful Joe immediately gave Calvario P6,000 and a sack of rice.

Calvario's honesty also did not go unnoticed by the wider public, and soon enough well-wishes, and more importantly cash and tangible rewards, began streaming his way. The mayor pledged to pay for his son's operation, but a doctor topped this by saying he would do the operation for free. The PCSO, GMA Network's Kapuso Foundation and ABS-CBN's Bantay Bata all dropped by and expressed their willingness to help. Truly, one good deed deserves another.

What drove Calvario's story home to me was that at the time it was reported, something else was on our front page that played out as stark contrast. While Calvario was desperately trying to return money he himself badly needed, other people were desperately trying to steal money they did not particularly need. That was the bill to raise the value-added tax (VAT) from 10 percent to 12 percent, which Congress had just passed and was being protested by various groups in the streets. Malacañang itself was busy defending it, saying the new VAT would not affect the poor, only the rich and middle class.

My reason for saying the people who were desperately mounting this theft did not particularly need this money comes from two things.

The first is that no new taxes are needed. All government has to do to raise more money is collect taxes right. The booksellers who are protesting the inclusion of books in VAT have pointed this out: "In 2003, the National Tax Research Center estimated a loss of P127 billion a year from uncollected taxes and VAT from 1998-2002, or a total of P635 billion over five years. In 2002, a Department of Finance study estimated an even larger loss of P243 billion a year if uncollected excise, documentary stamp, interest withholding, fringe benefits, gross receipts and insurance taxes were included. Of the NTRC yearly loss estimate, P41.6 billion, one-third of uncollected taxes, was from uncollected VAT. "

What this means is that the principle behind the new VAT is simply that if you can't collect from the rich, you might as well shake down the poor (and middle class). It's Robin Hood -- in reverse.

The second reason is more patent. The new taxes will not go to improve the plight of the country, it will go to improve the fortunes of public officials, not the least of them the members of Congress who rushed to approve it. As a friend of mine who works in Congress told me recently, the place has become a piggery, populated by swine who can only think pork. In the past, representatives at least made the pretense of justifying appropriation. These days, they do not bother, they just grab everything they can lay their hands on. It's sheer effrontery ("garapalan na"), he said. My friend was particularly worried that at the rate congressmen and other officials were depreciating virtue, which was faster than the peso, the public might take it into its head to stop paying taxes.

Indeed, the way things are, government should be thanking its lucky stars Filipinos are still paying taxes. The last thing it should be thinking of is new ways to fleece them. Remember the phrase, "tama na, sobra na"? The third part is, "palitan na."

Frankly, I don't know why we like to think the poor are naturally lazy and dishonest, which is why they are poor, when this country resolutely shows the opposite is true. The rich are so, which is why they are rich.

If Calvario had not returned the money and been found out, which was more than likely since spending for an operation isn't exactly inconspicuous, he would have been called a thief or a crook, and sent to jail for God, or the hanging judge, knows how long. Yet a group of officials steals several billion pesos from the taxpayers to give to a fly-by-night company to computerize balloting, and the computerization never takes place, and we do not call them crooks, we call them the Comelec. And reward them by giving them more powers to supervise “mano-mano” [manual] counting, and thereby to cheat in addition to stealing. A group of officials steals more billions from the taxpayers by making deals with tycoons and big corporations, and we do not call them thieves, we call them the Bureau of Internal Revenue. And reward them by giving them more powers to collect from the poor, thereby also covering up their inefficiency and crookedness.

Easy to see who's the Kalbaryo ng Bayan.