Pinoy Penman

Manileño for December 2006


OVER THESE past few months, I’ve been privileged to be invited to small gatherings of Filipino-Americans all around the US and to give short talks to some of them about the current situation in the Philippines. I’ve been very happy to oblige these requests—although, being neither a political scientist, an economist, nor a diplomat, I’ve hastened to qualify my opinions as those of a journalist and otherwise as a creative writer who can afford to take the long view of things.

If you’ve followed this column to any significant extent, you’ll know what I’ve been telling people: that, basically, we have many serious and persistent problems to deal with—abject poverty, massive corruption, rank injustice, an administration fighting for its political life at all costs, and an opposition still too fractured and fatigued to make any great headway.

At the same time, I take care to emphasize that the situation is far from hopeless. There’s hope; there has to be. Even as I’m unhappy with our country’s leadership, and—like many Filipinos—believe that there are a few too many cheats and crooks in government, I also suspect that it may not be all that bad that we’re stuck for the moment with Mrs. Arroyo and her crew. While GMA may have bought some time to shore up her defenses and even go on the offensive, her opponents are also learning in the interim what it takes to wage a strategic political war beyond winning another week-long skirmish on EDSA.

She’s won some, and lost some: she pulled out of her “Hello, Garci” tailspin last July and warded off a coup last February. But the Supreme Court—manifesting a surprising independence—struck down her Executive Order prohibiting senior government and military officials from testifying before Congress without her permission. Even more surprisingly, it stonewalled a dubious “people’s initiative” that would have railroaded the Charter change Mrs. Arroyo has been very keen on. Next May’s midterm elections will be a telling and crucial test of how well Arroyo’s allies and her opponents have convinced the public at large to cast their lot with their camp.

But as engrossing and entertaining as it may be to dwell on Arroyo and her political fortunes, we have to remind ourselves that the future is much longer and larger than these next three years. Think beyond Arroyo; for better or for worse, she can’t hang on to power forever. It’s just as important to visualize what lies beyond the immediate horizon, to set targets for ourselves well beyond the turmoil of the medium term.

And what do we want to achieve? Nothing too impossible: a country of bright, able-bodied, industrious people for whom jobs exist at fair wages; where the laws are observed; where families can stay together; where children will not go unschooled, unfed, and unsheltered; where talent, merit, and virtue are recognized; where the most basic things work—buses, banks, faucets, clinics, classrooms, telephones.

What will it take to get these? First, the willingness of the many to press for the changes and reforms they require—changes not just in government but also the way we vote and how those votes are counted; changes in our perception of our country, from a hellhole to desert to a home to build; and changes in ourselves, from a mindset of just being the servitors and scavengers of the world to the designers and makers of great new things. They will also require the willingness of the few to yield many of their unearned privileges—or risk the periodic bouts of social violence that may never lead to a full-blown armed revolution (four decades of trying should tell us that we just don’t have the stomach for it) but will still hinder our efforts to move forward together as a nation.

In other words, we need a revolution—not a bloody, explosive one to decapitate the leadership, but a widespread and sustained campaign from the ground up, in several forms and phases, starting with elections and electoral reforms at the local level. By their very nature, national campaigns involve the kind of money that effectively shuts out truly worthy but under-funded candidates; citizens tend to feel a more personal stake in local elections, and basic changes may be difficult but not impossible to secure.

I’m betting on what we can call a revolution of expectations—and here, the people of our diaspora, including Filipinos in America, will have much to contribute. One in every ten Filipinos is working and living abroad, and many of them come home. These returning Filipinos are no longer the same ones that left the NAIA years earlier, many on the first plane ride of their lives. These are Filipinos who have experienced a better life in a better albeit imperfect world, who have seen what their own hands can build for others. These Filipinos will not be content to slink back into the old ways of their barangays; they will look for running water, cheap electricity, good schools, reliable transportation, and will look as well for leaders who can deliver on these expectations.

That’s the unintended payback from all those lonely years of hard labor in countries like the US, Singapore, and Dubai that I’m counting on—the natural and irrepressible desire of people for better things. Once we Filipinos realize what or who stands between us and the future we deserve, I think we can choose our leaders more wisely, if not become leaders ourselves.

Manileño for November 2006


WHEN HE visited the University of the Philippines late last September to attend a forum hosted by the Association of Political Science Majors, Armed Forces of the Philippines chief of staff Gen. Hermogenes Esperon Jr. was pelted with eggs and mud, reportedly by members of youth groups identified with the Left, as he was leaving.

Ironically enough, the forum was devoted to the topic of "Untamed Conflict and Arrested Development: Finding a Way Out of the Vicious Cycle", and speakers from different political persuasions were invited to participate in the discussion.

The pelting incident left me wondering what the rules of engagement are, if any, in these civil (well, up to a point) encounters. Was the pelting good? Was it bad? In what way, and for whom? Can a reasonable argument be made for deliberate rudeness as a free expression of one’s beliefs? Was the pelting any worse than the systematic annihilation of activists alleged to have been perpetrated by the military? Has all civility gone out the window, or is it (as we thought in our time on the streets) a bourgeois affectation we can ill afford in such a dire situation?

Sure, one can argue, what’s manners when hundreds of people are being murdered left and right without so much as a by-your-leave? And where was the outrage when the lives of all those militants were snuffed out, allegedly if not presumably by agents of the military organization that Esperon now heads?

And then again, as the APSM put it later in a statement deploring the incident, “How do we create a culture of peace in the midst of these kinds of actions? How can we propose solutions to the protracted conflict in the country and the underdevelopment and suffering of our people when some groups do not know what it means to be civil?”

I didn’t imagine that a few broken eggs would spawn so many questions, but there they are—perhaps compounded by the fact that I personally know “Hermo” Esperon from way back, even as I’ve taken a different position on some basic political issues. As I mentioned in an interview I did with Gen. Esperon for this magazine, we went to the same high school, and I know him to be a decent and affable fellow. But that’s hardly an endorsement of his official position—a hard-line, take-no-prisoners approach to communist and military rebels alike.

Presuming I didn’t know him and despised his views, would I come up and shake his hand? Maybe not, if I can avoid it, and I probably would do my best to avoid it. Would I pelt him with an egg? Maybe not, either—but maybe only because I’m 52 now, and can think of more creative ways to be nettlesome.

Whoever threw that egg, I’m sure that creativity was the last thing on his or her mind. The pelting came out of anger and frustration, meant not to be witty but to be blunt.

I was about to make the argument that whether or not I agreed with the protestors, such boorish behavior had no place in the civilized society and discourse we all aspire to. Witness, for example, the politeness, the polish, and the panache with which seasoned politicians debate with one another in Britain’s House of Commons.

And then, on a whim, I looked up “pelted with eggs” on Google, and discovered that even the urbane British have hardly been beyond losing their cool in the heat of political warfare.

In May 2000, Prime Minister Tony Blair was pelted with condoms filled with purple flour as spoke in front of Parliament. In January 2001, a visit to Bristol netted him a rotten tomato on his back. In April 2004, his former spokesperson Alastair Campbell got the gooey egg treatment from students rallying, again in Bristol.

And, of course, who can forget how George W. Bush’s limousine got pelted with eggs on his inauguration? Closer to home, let’s remember how the First Quarter Storm was practically triggered by students tossing a wooden coffin at Ferdinand Marcos as he stepped out of Congress after delivering his SONA in January 1970.

These instances put Hermogenes Esperon, Jr. in good company, and make me wonder if a grand (though maybe not great) tradition now exists of throwing ridiculously non-lethal objects at—short of assassinating—the leader in putative democracies where the normal grievance processes seem to have failed.

To be fair—if that’s at all possible—to those who do the pelting, these acts are often more symbolic than literal, less an affront to the person than to the institution he or she represents, and to whatever that institution may have done. It could have been Esperon, or his predecessor or successor, and the sticky results would have been the same. (Or maybe not; even as he challenges his detractors to prove their charges, many believe him to have conspired with the Arroyo administration to rig the 2004 elections in Mindanao, lending a personal element to the ill will against him.)

I know that it’s hard to say “hate the person, but respect the institution” when you believe that that person dishonored the very same institution you’re supposed to respect. The courage and audacity of those who protest injustice in the face of overwhelming odds deserve our commendation.

But again—and this is one huge “but”—I still find myself asking what exactly the Left gained by chasing Esperon out of UP with a shower of yolk.

Media mileage? Certainly, but the general got off a good shot in his own defense by calling his ambushers “bad eggs.” The Left scored a point by proving its militancy—then lost it just as quickly by proving how intolerant it is of contrary opinion. I can’t help thinking some Muslims assailed the Pope (of whom I’m no blushing fan, either) for suggesting that Islam was a religion of violence—and then retaliated by reportedly killing a nun.

Personally, I would’ve found it more effective and more UP-like for the protestors to have staged a special “Oblation Run” for their super-macho guest: a sudden rush of male streakers and mooners, to show that—even while political murder and mayhem may be no laughing matter—we can still say what we want and be heard loud and clear without having to shut others up.

Manileño for October 2006


I WAS one of those people happy to see Joseph Estrada leave Malacañang Palace in January 2001 in the wake of reports and revelations about his scandalously un-presidential behavior. But where does the Arroyo government today get off stamping a recent documentary on Estrada with an “X” rating?

That’s “government” in the form of the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB)—the latest incarnation of what used to be called, in plainer and perhaps more honest language, the Board of Censors—the watchdog and traffic cop of anything Filipinos watch and hear on public airwaves and screens.

With all due respect to liberal-minded friends on the board such as poet Alfred Yuson (who wasn’t part of this particular review panel) and film critic Mario Hernando (who cast the sole dissenting vote), I find the MTRCB an anachronism in a supposedly democratic and modern society. It’s one of the last few vestiges of martial law, having been created in 1985 by Ferdinand Marcos through Presidential Decree No. 1986 to control the airing of anti-government propaganda. Until a Supreme Court decision (and even so, a wobbly one, having been dispensed under martial law) turned against it, that new board almost managed to get the Lino Brocka scorcher “Kapit sa Patalim” banned, supposedly because it projected a negative image of Philippine society.

But it hasn’t been just Marcos. MTRCB members who tried to exercise some openness of mind have found themselves in for a nasty shock. Shortly after warming her seat in Malacañang, President Arroyo overturned a board decision allowing the screening of “Liveshow”—a film on Manila’s wild (and real) nightlife—prompting MTRCB chairman and scholar Nick Tiongson to resign.

Indeed, for the greater part of its institutional existence, the MTRCB and its predecessors have had a long and colorful history of banning, or attempting to ban, films that may have been controversial in their content and treatment but which had gained critical acclaim elsewhere. Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” got banned; Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” almost did. To its credit—as I mentioned in this column just a while back—the current MTRCB showed some nerve by allowing the screening of “The Da Vinci Code,” despite the loud (and uninformed—he hadn’t even seen the movie or read the book, by his own admission) urgings of Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita and some religious groups to have it banned.

And then the MTRCB just as quickly showed what a confused and confusing assemblage of voices it was by suspending an award-winning TV program (“I-Witness” on GMA-7) for airing a documentary that featured a 200-year-old folk ritual among women of Kalayaan, Laguna involving the use of wooden phalluses at weddings. “Distasteful and objectionable” was how MTRCB committee chairman Manuel Cases described the documentary, which showcased the research of dance scholar Ramon Obusan, recently named National Artist for Dance.

And now the MTRCB has given a documentary on the life of Estrada titled “Ang Mabuhay Para sa Masa” (To Live for the Masses) an X rating, effectively keeping it off TV screens. On what grounds, pray tell? Because it fell under restrictions sanctioning films that “threaten the political stability of the state; undermine the faith and confidence of the people in the government; [be] libelous or defamatory; [pertained] to matters that are sub judice in nature.” What the review board ostensibly found most objectionable was the documentary’s extro, which declared that “nalalapit na ang bagong umaga dahil sa lakas ng puwersa ng masa at muli nang babangon [a new day is dawning because of the power of the masses, and will rise again].”

Huh? Come again? “A new day is dawning because of the power of the masses.” That gets you banned?

As political rhetoric goes, it’s even trite and corny. But is it seditious or inflammatory? Will it drive sober (albeit unhappy) Filipinos to get off their movie seats and march to Malacañang shouting Erap’s name? Is it some kind of secret code, a la Al Qaeda, meant to spark an uprising among Erap’s unshod battalions?

For a government that’s been clucking about its stability—especially after a second impeachment motion in Congress that predictably failed—I can’t imagine what kind of service the banning of an Erap documentary can do, except to reveal just how nervous and insecure it really is. If there’s anything distasteful and objectionable in this whole affair, it’s this decision itself.

The fact is, the only reason many Pinoys think about Erap—some of them too wistfully—is because GMA hasn’t proven to be the redemptive replacement she was supposed to be. A “threat to the political stability of the State?” Try the fertilizer scam; try the mess in the military; try the ostentatious, devil-may-care behavior of those in power. Picking on a movie about your political enemy—in all likelihood a bad and lopsided production—isn’t going to score you any points for confidence and stability.

As for the MTRCB—whose members are all appointed by the President of the Philippines, so don’t tell me that politics had nothing to do with it—it’s time to change tack or close shop. (And please, my American friends, don’t even suggest that censorship is bad for Americans but okay for Filipinos.) Sure, in the United States, there’s a Motion Picture Association of America, which—in cooperation with the National Association of Theater Owners—gives the G, PG, PG-13, R, and NC-17 ratings that American moviegoers are familiar with. But the MPAA ratings are the result of a voluntary system set up by the industry to give parents and viewers a guide—not a legally enforceable judgment as to the quality, morality, or political volatility of a movie or TV program.

Of course, as my beer buddy Krip Yuson says, someone’s got to protect the children. I fully agree. Then let the MTRCB give descriptive—not prescriptive or proscriptive—ratings. And besides, we’re not small kids whose impressionable minds need to be shielded from stories about a talented and charismatic character who probably wined and womanized himself out of the presidency.