Pinoy Penman

Manileño for October 2007


"LOVE" AND “Panfilo Lacson” are words you’ll be hard put to see, or for that matter use, in the same sentence. For some time now, this ex-police general turned senator has stood as the very symbol of toughness and tough-mindedness in Philippine society and politics, holding nothing and no one sacred, especially if they get in the way of his undisguised ambitions. He’s run once for President, and lost; there’s no doubt he’ll run again in 2010.

As Joseph Estrada’s police chief, Lacson fell into notoriety for his alleged involvement in the “Kuratong Baleleng” rubout—the summary and wholesale slaughter of robbery suspects in a parked van. Even nastier rumors have hounded Lacson dating back to his earlier days as a military officer under martial law, and implicating him in all manner of crimes, including kidnapping and murder.

Ever cool, Lacson has merely shrugged the charges off; none have stuck, at least in court. A dapper dresser in a tailored suit, Lacson flashes a boyish smile and speaks in an even, unexcited voice that belies the severity of the words it often bears. A recent plug on TV for a public affairs program has Lacson (in, let me point out, a cleverly spliced snippet) softly telling a fellow interviewee whom he suspects to have cheated him in the elections: “I’m not threatening you…. The world is round.”

In 2003, Lacson made himself the nemesis of the Arroyos, when he came out with his wickedly savage but funny expose against “First Gentleman” Mike Arroyo and the secret “Jose Pidal” account. Nothing came out of that except presidential brother-in-law’s subsequent admission that he was Jose Pidal, but Lacson had established himself as a politician not to trifle with.

So the word “fear,” I should say, goes better and more naturally with Lacson, who makes no secret of his hard-line stance on crime and defense and all things anti-Lacson. “Hate” is another word that sticks to him like gum. It came up again recently when, shortly after the opening of the new Senate, Sec. Lacson dropped a new bombshell when he revealed the personal testimony of Sgt. Vidal Doble, an Army intelligence agent who was at the center of the so-called “Hello, Garci” scandal of mid-2005.

That was when President Arroyo was supposedly caught on tape telling election commissioner Virgilio Garcillano to ensure her May 2004 victory by at least a million votes. The tape was secured through an illegal wiretap, which Doble clearly knew something about. But then he disappeared, claiming that he and his family had been threatened. With nothing proven against her, Arroyo survived an impeachment challenge, and her PR machine quickly tried to bury the “Hello, Garci” issue as stale news unworthy of reviving. “Let’s move on” has been Malacañang’s mantra since then.

Doble’s resurfacing under the sponsorship of Lacson has many Filipinos bothered. Predictably, GMA’s camp is screaming bloody murder; Arroyo has called Lacson a “titan of hate” and has pointedly reminded the Senate that it has 24 priority bills to pass, and no time to waste on muckraking. That last part strikes a responsive chord in quite a number of others—even those who are no fans of the Arroyo’s—who’ve grown tired of a Senate and Congress mired in endless and ultimately pointless hearings.

But there’s the problem, because the “Hello, Garci” scandal never got a proper hearing in the previous Senate, where Palace ally Joker Arroyo—then chair of the powerful blue-ribbon committee—effectively scuttled the inquiry. Nothing important was definitively established—which Malacañang took for vindication and closure.

Whether they’re scoundrels or not, Lacson and Doble have exhumed some very basic questions: Who wiretapped the President, and why? Who directed and authorized the wiretapping? Who else was bugged? Who has the resources to do these things? Can it happen again?

These questions raise issues of national security—aside from revealing the web of mistrust and deceit that must have underlain such operations, possibly within the administration itself. (Doble claimed, for example, that presidential favorite Mike Defensor was also an object of “Operation Lighthouse.”)

Is the matter worth pursuing—even if it distracts the Senate from its other, weightier tasks and responsibilities?

I believe so—and I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. The Senate can and should conduct a focused, efficient inquiry into Doble’s claims, and initiate legal proceedings against whoever may be found at fault, while devoting most of its time to those 24 bills.

One of our problems as a people is that we keep talking about “the truth” and about how it will set us free, but we just haven’t been willing to seek it out to the end, and to pay whatever its price may be. Twenty-four years after the Ninoy Aquino assassination, we still haven’t established who ordered it (and now, instead, the Arroyo administration is talking about granting amnesty to the soldiers serving time for the killing—although not one of them has fingered the mastermind). That’s why we haven’t matured politically—we operate on expediency and impunity.

As self-serving as Lacson’s expose might be, it can’t be any more shameless than the brazen misuse of power displayed in the Garci tapes. In the United States, such “lapses of judgment” have led to the downfall of Presidents and administrations. Here, they’ve led to worse than that: because of silence and apathy, wrongdoers have been emboldened. Notably, no one has been punished as a result of Garci, least of all Garcillano himself and the election officials he appeared to have connived with to produce the desired results; most were even promoted after the fact. Not only do we let sleeping dogs lie; we kill them.

We don’t have to like or love Panfilo Lacson for what he did this time. But if we truly love ourselves, we should be tough enough to get to the bottom of things, which is the best starting point for going up.

Manileño for September 2007


WE’VE ALL read about the troubles that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recently went through in connection with his reputed role in the firing of eight US attorneys who refused to play the political game. Even conservative Republicans disowned Gonzales, with a group called the American Freedom Agenda urging President Bush to fire him for “[presiding] over an unprecedented crippling of the Constitution's time-honored checks and balances…. He has engendered the suspicion that partisan politics trumps evenhanded law enforcement in the Department of Justice.”

Gonzales seems to have survived that firestorm for now—even as he acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in the messy business of the firings—but his situation reminds us Manileños of an even more atrocious holdover in another Department of Justice: ours.

Gonzales’ Filipino counterpart and near-namesake, Raul M. Gonzalez, would probably think of his Texan version as a mumbling, soft-headed weakling for even worrying about keeping politics out of the office. Time and again, our DOJ secretary has demonstrated a remarkable propensity for wearing his politics on his sleeve, with a candor that could only endear him to those to whom prudence, sensitivity, and circumspection are wasted niceties.

His official CV identifies him as “a lawyer of international stature” and a member of, among others, the Geneva-based Center for Independence of Judges and Lawyers, so surely he knows what independence means, and has been acting well within his interpretation of it—even if it sometimes means being mistaken for a loose cannon, even by some of his own mates in the ruling party.

He did all those partymates one better during the May elections by putting his money where his mouth was. On April 22, he publicly offered to give a P10,000 bonus to every barangay captain in Iloilo City, his old bailwick, who could deliver a 12-0 vote for the administration's senatorial candidates. So sincere and profound was his generosity that all a grateful Palace could do was acknowledge it: “It's up to him if he has resources. I don't see why we should fault him for that,” Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita told reporters questioning the propriety of the offer.

Ermita also saw no need to censure the DOJ chief for remarks he had made in connection with the recent murder of US Peace Corps volunteer Julia Campbell, who had been killed by a local man during a hike in Ifugao province. To Gonzalez, the “irresponsible” Campbell might as well have asked to be murdered. “Why would she walk alone in this remote mountain?” Gonzalez was quoted to have told reporters. “She was careless that she took a lonely walk in this deserted area.”

Even government prosecutors, apparently, can suffer from this kind of fatal misjudgment in Gonzalez’s dry eyes. When activist Jonas Burgos disappeared last April 28—reportedly after his abduction by military agents in a shopping mall—Senior State Prosecutor Emmanuel Velasco did the often-unthinkable: he did his job, went after those agents, and announced their names to the press.

That alacrity did not sit well with his boss Gonzalez, who fired Velasco from the panel investigating the disappearance. “It's shooting from the hip,” the suddenly prudent secretary said. “It's not good for the government, it's not good for the [intelligence service], it's not good for the police, it's not good for the DOJ.” Whether it was good for Jonas Burgos remained to be seen, but it certainly was not good for Emmanuel Velasco, who received not only his walking papers but an anonymous death threat as well, promising to send him wherever Jonas was. Asked to comment on the threat to his subordinate, Gonzalez said: “I think he asked for it.”

It was hardly the first time and certainly not the last for Raul Gonzalez to prove what a jewel he has been in Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s crown. When Cory Aquino asked GMA to “make the supreme sacrifice of resigning” after being accused of cheating in the 2004 elections, Gonzalez hit back at Cory, telling her to mind her daughter Kris’ well-publicized troubles instead. When the so-called Human Security Act—which came into effect last July 15—raised the specter of journalists being bugged and arrested on charges of terrorism, Gonzalez could hardly contain his excitement over the new law’s police provisions. “So if there is a report, a clearly verified report that you (journalists) are a possible terrorist... I can petition the Court of Appeals to bug you,” Gonzalez told worried journalists.

For such eager faithfulness, Raul Gonzalez has been rewarded by GMA with the job he has held for the past three years. This, of course, is the same GMA who most recently appointed another of her staunchest allies, former Manila Mayor Lito Atienza, as the new environment and natural resources secretary—the same man responsible for the demolition of the Mehan Gardens and the historic Jai-Alai building and the threatened conversion of the Arroceros Forest Park into a building project.

Merciful Lord, is there a method to this madness? Perhaps. Soon after the abortive February “coup” that rocked the Arroyo administration, I asked a friend who was close to her why GMA didn’t let Gonzalez—such an obvious liability—go. “He makes her look good!” my friend said. And for those of us who keep complaining about GMA after voting her into power in 2004 over her seemingly unworthier opponents, Raul Gonzalez already has the answer: “You were asking for it!” So maybe we were.

Manileño for August 2007

LAST JUNE 18, with appropriate fanfare, the University of the Philippines formally launched its year-long countdown to the centennial it will be celebrating in 2008, 100 years after Governor-General Malcolm Forbes signed Act. No. 1870 establishing “in the City of Manila, or at the point he may deem most convenient, a university which shall be known by the designation of ‘University of the Philippines,’ the same being organized as a corporation under that name.”

At that launch, President Emerlinda Roman announced special activities and programs lined up for the centennial, including the UP Centennial Lecture Series and various Centennial competitions such as the Gawad Likhaan literary contest, the Centennial Songwriting Competition for Students, and Centennial Digital Film-making Contest for Students.

But even more important than the commemorative activities and festivities themselves will be the stock-taking that the country’s premier institution of higher learning will be undertaking these next twelve months, in preparation for its second century.

What exactly has UP achieved? What difference has it made in the life of the nation, the region, and the world? What more does it need to do and to have before it can truly become a world-class, 21st century university at par with the best of Asia, Europe, and the United States?

There’s no doubt that the more than 220,000 graduates UP produced this past century have made tremendous contributions to the lives of their countrymen and to their society. Many of them now live abroad, serving humanity at large. I won’t even begin to name the most illustrious and accomplished of these alumni, because this entire issue won’t be enough to contain them. There’ll be the whole year, in any case, to thump our chests. (And let’s not forget the flipside of this rosy picture: the fact that many of our country’s miseries have also been caused or exacerbated by some of UP’s most “outstanding” alumni, quite a number of whom have populated the Palace, the Congress, and other halls of power and privilege.)

While UP may rightfully have much to be proud of—and not to rain on its well-deserved parade—the sad fact is that its age has brought not only growth and maturity but also obsolescence, decrepitude, and backwardness in certain critical areas. It has a long way to go to come up to the level of, say, many universities in the California system, not to mention global academic leaders such as Harvard, the University of Tokyo, and the National University of Singapore. Every time I visit one of these places, I feel like a visitor from the past stepping into a time machine, getting a peek at how Diliman or Los Baños might look like in 20 years.

What’s keeping us from world-class status? We’re not wanting for brains. That much, at least, we can be sure of. We know that because, wherever they’ve been put, UP alumni have risen to the challenge—in graduate programs in top foreign universities, in the world’s most advanced laboratories, in places and situations that have demanded first-rate intellection.

We are, however, lacking in the resources to do better and do more with the talents we have. While many facilities have been improved—such as the university’s Main Library and our physics and electronics labs—UP students still lack such 21st century basics as universal computer and Internet access.

Worse than not having the latest technology, we’re losing many of our best teachers—people we’ve invested years of training in, so their talents could be replicated in students; for all the world’s advances in computers, nothing still imparts knowledge and wisdom better than a good teacher, who will not only instruct but inspire. But because of dismal salaries—set by an antiquated Salary Standardization Law—UP has been giving up its best PhDs to private universities, to the private sector, and to better jobs abroad. (How dismal? The UP President makes about $700 a month; a full professor makes $600—and that’s before deductions.)

We tried to change this, chiefly through a new Charter that would allow us to develop resources we already had—such as the 25,000 hectares of land ceded to UP under various land grants—to augment our income and raise faculty salaries. We almost made it—the draft law passed the House—but the machinations of a petulant senator killed the bill in the Senate in 2004. Three more years and hundreds of hours of lobbying later, the UP Charter bill passed both houses, and went to Congress for ratification. More political theatrics and the lack of a quorum on the last day of the session killed the bill again.

UP’s leaders are pragmatic enough to know that the administration—any administration, for that matter—will never be able to give the university the proper budget it needs to become Asia’s Harvard. That’s why we’re moving away from a dependence on subsidies to a bit of fiscal autonomy.

As this university prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the best birthday gift it can receive is the support of the same lawmakers whose predecessors created it in 1908. If they can’t help us, at least they can let us help ourselves, for the sake of the next three or four generations of Filipinos.

Manileño for July 2007


This is old news to us local Pinoys by now, but I just had to wrap up the May election for our US-based kababayans.

BY THE time this column appears, the dust should have settled from the May 14, 2007 midterm election in the Philippines, and we should all have staggered back to our quiet and unexciting lives. I’m saying “should,” but something in me seriously doubts that this means it “will.”

As I write this, nearly three weeks after the election, the 12 winners of the race for the Senate have yet to be proclaimed by the Commission on Elections; a special election held in the province of Lanao del Sur was so fraught with irregularities—underaged voters, campaigners in the poll booths, people filling up ballots for others—that another, even more “special”, election was being mulled. Candidates of the administration’s “Team Unity” and of the self-explanatory “Genuine Opposition” were scrambling for the last two or three spots in the 12-person senatorial lineup, charging fraud and all manner of cheating.

At least 126 Filipinos died and 149 were wounded in election-related violence—figures that Philippine National Police Chief Oscar Calderon sounded almost relieved to report were “relatively low.” The worst of these incidents—one that brought hot tears to my eyes—involved the deaths of teacher Nellie Banaag and poll watcher Leticia Ramos, who were burned to death when armed men barged into their polling precinct in Batangas and then torched the place—all for a few ballot boxes.

The passions from this exercise will be sure to linger long after the Comelec officially makes up its mind about who won and who lost. But given the infernal slowness of the vote count—thanks to the Comelec’s own fraud-tainted and ultimately futile efforts to automate voting in the country—I think we better tote up our own list of winners and losers.

So what and what won in May 2007 in the Philippines—and conversely, who and what lost?

1. “Political maturity,” perhaps the buzz phrase of the season (aside from “political dynasty”, below). Several old political families—the Josons of Nueva Ecija, the Espinosas of Masbate—came crashing down in defeat; nascent ones—the Atienzas of Manila—were nipped in the bud. Popular movie stars like Cesar Montano and Richard Gomez went nowhere in their senatorial bids; most spectacularly, boxing champion Manny Pacquiao was kayoed by the tiny but seasoned politician Darlene Custodio on the congressional canvas. In Pampanga, a priest won the governorship over formidable, machine-backed opponents. So there were signs everywhere that Filipinos were finally waking up to more sensible ways of choosing their leaders than sheer name recall or a P100 bill.

2. Political dynasties. Yes, a few of them took it on the chin, but others survived handsomely, and new ones—like the Binays of Makati—were being built. If anything, this election will be remembered as the one that legitimized the practice of fielding full family slates for governor, congressman, mayor, and councilor, with family members often switching places once the incumbent has reached his or her limit of three terms.

3. The we-hate-GMA vote. For this, your barometer would have to be the Senate race, which has been more reliably a gauge of popular sentiments than a list of people eminently qualified to be Senators of the Republic. Our senators represent no specific constituencies except those of the mind and spirit, so they more or less show how we think and feel (in all manner of thought and feeling, of course, from the sublime to the ridiculous).

The vote was going 8-2-2 as of this writing, by both Comelec and Namfrel quick counts (well, as “quick” as three weeks can get): that’s eight for the opposition, two for the administration, and two independents. The two administration winners are hardly what you would call GMA fans: gadfly Joker Arroyo and latecomer Edgardo Angara (Erap Estrada’s Executive Secretary, in case you forget). The two independents are (or at least were) anti-GMA: incumbent Francis Pangilinan and former putschist Gringo Honasan. Pangilinan's victory we can understand—he’s worked hard for education, and it can’t hurt that he’s married to megastar Sharon Cuneta. While Honasan seems to have made some reconciliatory moves toward GMA, voters think it's just a ploy to keep out of jail.

4. The economy. Post-election reports had the economy growing by nearly 7% last year—the highest in almost two decades, buoyed up by OFW remittances, the outsourcing industry, and hot capital flowing in. While we can quibble over a percentage point or two and whether all that growth is being felt by the poor, there seems to be a general agreement that—just as the American experience proves the truism that economic growth can happen under extremely unpopular governments—there’s a boomlet going on in the Philippine economy.

President Arroyo’s people would of course attribute it to her stewardship, including the imposition of the highly unpopular expanded value-added tax (his support for which probably cost incumbent Ralph Recto his seat). The opposition would say it happened despite her, and that the record levels being achieved by the stock market and the peso reflect the confidence of investors in the robustness of our democracy, i.e., in the ability of the opposition to score signal victories without bringing the Republic down.

5. The administration. Where? In Congress and at the local levels, where pro-GMA forces control a vast majority of positions—not a great surprise, considering that she gave these localities the highest levels of Internal Revenue Allotments in recent history. The victory of Lakas-CMD and Kampi partisans in Congress secures GMA from a third impeachment vote and could keep her hopes of a constitutional shake-up and a post-2010 scenario alive—but watch for the jockeying between these two administration parties, which has already begun.

Who was the biggest loser, aside from GMA?

1. The party-list groups, especially those from the Left, which took a beating from a well-orchestrated smear campaign just before the elections; and

2. The Commission on Elections, probably the government office with the lowest credibility among the public at this point (challenged only by the Department of Justice, and then only because of the DOJ’s exemplarily slavish boss).

Ah, can’t wait for 2010. Aren’t Philippine elections just more exciting than their American counterparts?

Manileño for June 2007


THIS IS probably as familiar an experience as any for most readers of this magazine [the San Francisco-based Filipinas], but I never thought the time would come when our only child would come to live in the United States. It’s neither triumph nor tragedy, and I don’t mean to exult in nor to lament the fact. It’s just an objective condition that many Filipinos today are having to deal with—again, for all its supposed benefits and costs.

A couple of months ago, I found myself winging my way to San Diego, to attend the wedding of our only daughter Demi to a nice young man she’d met online—welcome to love in the 21st century, folks. He’d come across her blog and left a comment, starting a correspondence that blossomed quickly into a digital romance. Jerry himself was a Filipino born in Rhode Island, a US Navy brat who’d traveled with his family back to the Philippines then to Italy and to Norfolk, VA, wherever his dad’s fleet and postings went.

Demi’s mother Beng and I were, of course, happy for the outcome; in another odd twist, Beng and I actually met Jerry during an earlier visit to San Diego even before Demi did, during which the papa quickly sized up the prospective manugang as a man of much more than satisfactory character.

For all this love story’s quirks, I suspect that it’s more typical these days than we think. Filipinos and Filipino-Americans are getting together in ways their grandparents would never have imagined possible, back when a letter took two weeks to cross the Pacific and a three-minute long-distance phone call, if you could even get through, cost you a week’s pay. Today—with the Internet and all its blessings (and occasional curses) such as Yahoo Messenger, Skype, MySpace, Blogger, and Google Earth—contacts and friendships (and let’s add incipient then full-blown romances) are more easily made.

What struck me on the flight home was how easy it had been for me to reconcile myself to the fact that our unica hija was now going to spend the rest of her life far away from us—she’d kept a room in our house until she was 32—and how, after the processing of papers and the wait of a few years, she was going to become an American citizen.

Well, is that so bad? Uhm, no—I guess not. I know a lot of Filipino parents who would kill to be in my position, and who would’ve programmed someone like Demi—smart, pretty, well-mannered (that’s the dad talking)—to find and land herself an American husband.

But I come from a generation that turned its back on the promise of America—something our own parents, born in “peacetime” and coming of age during “Liberation”—had emphatically embraced. Even from a distance, we knew America at its worst, the USA of Vietnam, segregation, the military-industrial complex, meddling in Latin America, and, of course, of the military bases in the Philippines and the abuses that happened in them. We rallied against “US imperialism” and its support for the “US-Marcos fascist dictatorship.” Was I now turning my back again on all that, as the proud papa of a newly-minted American daughter?

Again, I guess not. Some things have changed: America itself, and our perception of it. It will take more than a few columns to track those changes (as well as the ways some of America’s leaders apparently haven’t learned much from, say, Vietnam, and the Philippines before it), but I feel among the American people a profoundly challenged and awakened sense of responsibility to (and maybe even for) the rest of the world.

Our view of America has also become as many-sided and as complex as American life and society itself has grown. As I observed in another essay, yet to be published, “To Filipino youth, America is that place where iPods, Big Macs, Oakley sunglasses, and Nike Air Jordan shoes come from. From being reviled in the 1970s as the great imperialist Satan, America is cool again to many Filipinos—although George Bush’s heavy-handed ‘war on terror’ could change that perception.”

To my new in-laws—proud members of a tradition of service in and to the American military—that war on terror is a real and noble mission; that much I understand and respect. Bred in the contrarian tradition of her parents and the University of the Philippines, Demi is going to have to make her own adjustments to her new family and society. Whether she’ll vote Democrat or Republican is going to be her own business.

The only advice I could and had to give her was the same thing I wrote in this column a few months ago, in answer to the question that some Filipino-American students posed to me (in, of all places, also San Diego): “What can Filipino-Americans best do for the Philippines?” And my answer to that was, “Be good Americans—whatever that means.” Be fully engaged in the political and social life of America, and contribute what you can to the growth and well-being of America, keeping the growth and the well-being of other countries and peoples in mind. Help America and its leadership use their vast wealth and power wisely and responsibly.

To that mission, I’m glad to be able to contribute one precious thing: my daughter Demi, and everything we raised her to be.

Manileño for May 2007


BY THE time this column sees print [in the San Francisco-based Filipinas magazine], the Philippines’ own midterm election will have just been over, and we would have discovered how much closer we’ve come to political modernization—or how much farther we’ve strayed from it. By “modernization” I mean a functioning democracy that represents a true range of popular constituencies and concerns in the political leadership—as well as an electoral system that enables this democracy.

While we can’t predict the outcome—particularly in the Senate, where the 12 seats at stake are generally seen to be a litmus test of President Arroyo’s hold on political power—it should be fairly though sadly safe to say that nothing much will have moved forward in May 2007 in Philippine politics. The same old families will remain in power—and perhaps emerge even more deeply entrenched; the marginalized will remain marginalized; and the elections themselves will likely have been marred by fraud and intimidation, as they have been for ages.

What leads me to these dismal prognostications?

First off, the opportunistic nature of our political parties—which configured themselves not around ideology but “winnability”—guaranteed slates that offered no ideas beyond the fuzziest notions of “unity” and “opposition”, peppered with comfortable surnames and token newbies. The bottom line was, we didn’t know exactly what we were voting for. Were we just being anti-GMA, or pro-Erap, or pro-GMA, etc.?

Maybe that’s what a midterm election is for—to serve as a referendum on the incumbent administration, just as the 2006 election in the US sent a message to Washington about Iraq—but the simple clarity of that idea was infernally muddled by rampant turncoatism: the appearance of Erap stalwarts on the administration ticket and, conversely, of former GMA allies in the opposition. So what, particularly, were we holding a referendum on?

There were at least two opportunities we missed to make this election materially different from all those that came before it.

One, it could have been automated to some extent, at least in preparation for the nationwide application of poll automation in 2010. But instead of giving it a fair shot—as people like Sen. Richard Gordon pushed for—the Commission on Elections simply threw up its hands, and said it had no time left to do anything.

While it’s certainly not foolproof, automation remains our best means of reducing fraud and evening up the chances between big and cash-rich parties and independent candidates on the level of the vote count, where most of the cheating in Philippine elections has traditionally taken place. (Unfortunately, our first serious effort at poll automation seems to have been scuttled by a billion-peso procurement scandal that now has several Comelec officials in the dock.)

Another chance the Comelec blew was to show that it had the common sense and the impartiality to recognize, respect, and uphold the spirit of the party-list system, which was meant to help offset the vise-like stranglehold of traditional parties and politicians on representation in Congress. That failure was most manifest in the Comelec’s decision to disqualify Ang Ladlad—a group of gay and lesbian activists that had achieved national visibility in the media and had taken firm positions on issues of national import—from party-list accreditation.

The Comelec’s position was that Ladlad had no capability to organize a nationwide campaign, could not prove that it could command a national membership, and could not prove that homosexuals were marginalized in society—an assertion that flies in the face of a basic truth in societies everywhere, that gays and lesbians exist and even thrive across geographical, economic, and social boundaries. Whatever we feel about gays and gayness, they’re there, most likely in larger numbers than we suspect. And equally true is the fact that even while they’re there—making tangible and valuable contributions to society—they continue to be discriminated against in many ways, and thus certainly qualify (not that they would wish to) for the status of the marginalized.

But perhaps the most far-reaching impact of this May election was its shameless embrace of political dynasties, on both sides of the fence.

Never mind the Senate race, where at least half a dozen candidates were related to serving or former senators; take a look at the results of elections for mayor, congressman, and governor—and see how many of the “newbies” replaced their spouses, parents, or siblings (who likely didn’t go off into the political sunset, but rather took over whatever positions their successors had been occupying). Rather than bring a fixed conclusion to the rule of a few families over a country of 80 million people, term limits have merely encouraged an endless merry-go-round among relatives dragooned into serving the political survival and economic well-being of the feudal family.

This time around, the parties didn’t even bother to make the standard assertion that more and newer players in the political arena makes for better democracy. What now passes for political wisdom is that, just maybe, the Philippines is indeed better served by families who have invested generations in “public service.” And if you believe that, then you do deserve another Marcos, another Estrada, and another Macapagal, and all their consequences.