Miracles August 23, 2006

I SAW an interesting play at Peta last Saturday. In case you still don't know, Philippine Educational Theater Association (Peta) no longer mounts plays in Rajah Sulaiman, Fort Santiago, it has its own home now on Sunnyside Drive, Quezon City, near St. Luke's Hospital. The play was "Walang Himala," written by Rene Villanueva, Liza Magtoto and Janneke Agustin. It premiered last Saturday to an audience that included Cory Aquino and some of the members of her former Cabinet. They were not there by accident. They were invited there because the play dealt in part with the dreams of Edsa People Power.

But only in part. The play deals with the more general state of this beautiful and wretched country and how at one point the dazzling event that was Edsa People Power offered the hope of salvation, freedom, a better life, however people then chose to think of it. It deals as much with failed dreams as realized ones, as much with escapes as discoveries. The title "Walang Himala," of course, refers to the concept of Edsa as a miracle, not just in the sense of something that took place against all expectation but in the sense of a liberation from all oppression. There are no instant cures, the title suggests. But oddly enough, though it says that, the play, well, miraculously leaves you feeling hopeful.

The play has no single story line; what it has is a single theme. It brings together several strands, or the stories of several people who dreamed the dream of Edsa. There's the "katutubo" [indigenous person] who learns to fight rather than depend quite literally on his stars to stop being an underling. There's the fellow from Mindoro Island who once gazed in awe at the wonder of Edsa but is eventually forced to leave for Italy to fend for his family. He becomes the victim of his own success, exchanging food for soul, breaking his family up in the course of trying to keep it together. There's the activist couple who fled to China before martial law and came back to the Philippines after Edsa People Power I in 1986, fired up by its possibilities. The wife eventually discovers that more deeply liberating than the liberation of society is the liberation of self: from being a comrade, a helping hand, a nurse to her husband, she realizes she is her own person, too. And so on.

And there are their children, a seemingly lost generation not knowing what happened in the past or caring to. They find themselves at Edsa II in 2001 having to go through the struggle -- or being doomed to repeat history? -- all over again.

I like several things about the play. First off, I like the theme. The questions -- "What happened to Edsa?" "How did we fall this low after soaring that high?" -- most of us have asked at one time or another. Our answers, if we have given them at all, we have framed largely in political terms. For understandable reasons, particularly given these days when we find ourselves thrown back to the days before Edsa I, fighting a dictatorship all over again. One wrought richly ironically -- the stuff of which drama is made, notably of the Greek-tragedy variety -- by a beneficiary of another Edsa. But it's also nice to see the answers take on the form of the unraveling of human lives, or how the dreams of Edsa have unfolded for people personally. The answers, you find out, are many and varied, sorrowful and joyous, despairing and triumphant.

I like the sensibility as well. It's fairly modern, and one the MTV generation in particular (to whom this play is best pitched) will be at home with. The storytelling isn't linear, it's jagged -- the kind of jaggedness you'll find for example in Paul Anderson's "Magnolia," Paul Haggis' "Crash" or any of Quentin Tarantino's movies, where characters flit in and out, connected plot-wise to each other often only tangentially but each one contributing to telling a story bigger than themselves. The storytelling may be a little alien, or alienating, to an older generation (I kept wondering how the one last Saturday found it) but shouldn't be so to today's youth.

I like the tone. It blends myth and history (it's right there at the start in the conversation between Bernardo Carpio and Jose Rizal, the mythical savior of the Tagalogs and the historical liberator of the Filipinos), humor and pathos, flute and stars and cars and MTV. The scenes bounce off and build on each other, as in the comic one where the cops and the thief's mother talk of jail and punishment and the lyrical one where the katutubos talk of not having any words for crime and prison.

And I like the acting. Joy Soler is back after a hiatus of ages, and she's a joy to behold.

Not everything succeeds in the play however. It's nice to have many strands, which make for richness of tapestry, but you've also got to be a very good weaver to weave those things together. The threads don't always seem to mesh here. I thought the first part was full of possibility that the second part would explore more fully and put closure to. I don'texpect neat closure -- art, like life, doesn't always lend itself to that. But some parts went in rather stereotypical directions, as in the "balikbayan" [visiting overseas-based Filipino] who ended up in a "balikbayan box," or coffin. And the sum of the parts seemed smaller rather than bigger than the whole. Enough to make you feel somewhat "bitin," or unfulfilled -- not unlike the feeling Edsa itself leaves you with.

But its merits far outweigh its flaws. Do watch it -- it runs I think for several weekends more. Whether young or old (concepts that as you grow older tend to be as elusive as Edsa itself), you will come away from it with much to ponder. You might even find your increasingly despairing soul replenished by hope -- not the easy kind that comes from piety or platitude but the kind that comes from having glimpsed a truth or two from the tangle of life.

Miracles have always been tricky business. You find them where you least expect them.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=16723

Not a small triumph August 22, 2006

I spoke at St. Luke's Hospital last Friday to a group of people who were either asthmatics or who had kids that were asthmatics. For some reason, the people who invited me thought I might be an inspiration for them – an ex-asthmatic who ended up not doing very badly in life.

It did make me recall my bouts with asthma when I was a kid. Life has a strange sense of humor and gave me a couple of afflictions that cartoonists often like to make fun of: asthma when I was a kid and gout when I became an adult. Asthma has gotten to be depicted as beggar's or sick man's opera, with all the wheezing or whistling sounds it produces, and gout, well, that's the fat man with the fatter toe imbibing wine and dining opulently, a cautionary tale of effect and cause. It's funny -- only of the asphyxiating or needling kind.

I became "suki" [regular customer] to a neighborhood doctor from repeated bouts with asthma. (A doctor at St. Luke's would tell me "suki" is the exact same word most asthmatics used to refer to themselves from their frequent visits to doctors and hospitals.) Then there were no powerful medicines to appease the wrathful gods of asthma, you had to flounder in the raging waters while clinging to the fragile raft of breath for days on end. That is the perfect image for it: Asthma gives you the sensation of drowning. Those who do die from asthma -- and there are still many -- might as well have drowned, on dry land.

I remember that sometime in Grade 1, during the season of rains, I had to quit school for a couple of months as a result of being kept to bed often. My parents didn't mind if I repeated the grade despite the drain on very scarce resources it entailed if that was what it took to keep me alive. At the end of those two months, the officials of my school agreed to see if I could catch up after the long absence. If I did, no need to repeat. Of course, I did. What can I say? "Buti na lang magaling ako."

Asthma had bad and good results on me. The bad included a slouch that I would learn later was not entirely the product of sloth. An X-ray would reveal I had a curvature at the top of my spine, the product of reclining on piles and piles of pillows, which is what an asthmatic does while in the throes of an attack. You cannot lie down flat on the bed, you'd drown. You sleep in a half-sitting position.

I was tempted to attribute my wretched voice to asthma, too, but I've heard asthmatics talk and sing, and many of them have pang-karaoke voices. Alas, I can only attribute my voice to bad luck.

Socially, it robbed me of the joys of summer and Christmas for a while. Summers were a time for the kids to go out and play at night, in particular what Tagalogs call "patintero" or what Bicolanos call "turubigan." The latter name owed to the lines of the squares in the game being made from water drawn from the canal. To hear the gleeful shouts of the other kids emanating from some part of the neighborhood while you languished in infantile detention was torture. It was the same thing with Christmas when the other kids roamed the streets caroling. I don't know that I would have improved the aesthetics of the cacophony of voices that rioted in the cold night (oh, yes, nights were still cold then), I do know I'd have known the meaning of Christmas.

The good was that I read and read and read. Of course, that wasn't all attributable to asthma, that was also attributable to personal inclination. Asthma, and the fact that a sleepy town like Naga offered little by way of diversion (no TV and the movie houses changed movies by eons), merely supplied the opportunity. My curiosity and the school library supplied the motive and means. Asthma as well drove me to introspection, compelling me to deal with the wonder and awe of that human phenomenon called breath.

The affliction disappeared as suddenly as it came -- sometime in Grade II or III, I'm not sure now when. I never tried exotic cures, though there was no dearth of people suggesting lizards, snakes and monkeys. What can one say? Asthma is dangerous to exotic animals. (That's the case with gout, too: you'll hear no end of bores telling how to deal with it when you are listening to music and imbibing gout-inducing spirits. What can I say? Gout is painful in more ways than one.) I did try playing basketball since all the kids in the school I went to did. I never learned the damn thing (to this day I can't dribble). But all that getting knocked down, which took the wind out of me, must have brought the wind back to me.

I don't really know that there's any inspiration to be drawn from surviving asthma any more than there is from surviving any affliction. Or the inspiration you can draw from the one applies to the other. I suppose it's how you deal with adversity that really matters, whether the adversity is genetic or social.

The doctor who spoke before me rattled off some of the people in history who had asthma but went on to do great things. One of them, to my surprise, was Beethoven. You do learn something every day. He was a very good example, I thought -- and told my audience-of someone who triumphed over adversity. Beethoven wasn't just an asthmatic, he was also deaf. How long he was an asthmatic I did not know, how long he was deaf I did know, which was pretty much during the height of his musical powers. You can't be more cursed than that, to be a musician and to be deaf. But Beethoven did not decide to slink into a (literal) silence, he decided albeit often irascibly to blow heaven's trumpets into this world. It was during his darkest moments that he composed his masterpiece, possibly the grandest music ever made on earth. That is the Ninth Symphony.

What can I say? Winning is never about overcoming others. It's always about overcoming yourself.
http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=16502

The usurper did it August 21, 2006

I’M GLAD THE FOLK OF OTHER COUNTRIES are still alive. By that, I don’t just mean that they are alive physically, though in these times of murder and mayhem that means a great deal already. I mean that they are alive in the sense that they can still see, hear, smell, taste and feel. That is something the folk of this country no longer seem able to do. Jovito Palparan says openly that anybody seen in the company of a suspected NPA can and will be shot to death along with him, and Filipinos no longer fill the air with angry shouts at that obscenity. There is only one thing worse than being dead. That is being dead while still being alive.

I’m glad the folk of other countries are still alive while being alive and have risen to damn it. “No one,” thunders Amnesty International, whose credentials for saying these things have been earned the hard way during the time of butterflies and dictators, “deserves to die for their political affiliation. It should be a deep embarrassment to the government that people in the Philippines cannot freely exercise their rights of political expression and association.”

The Uniting Church in Australia, the Methodist Church in America, and church leaders representing denominations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe and North America have also railed at the killings in angrier language. The Methodists have called on the US government “to bring pressure to bear upon Philippine authorities to respect civil liberties and human rights,” while the church leaders have expressed “shock and dismay” especially over the killing of church workers “by death squads that seem connected to powerful economic, military and political interests in the country.”

We’re back to the times of the butterflies and dictators when death squads roamed the earth freely and murdered people with impunity. With one difference: The death squads in the past did their jobs clandestinely and existed as shadowy paramilitary elements and vigilantes. Today’s death squads do their jobs openly and exist as legal entities, called the military and police. I really hope the presumptuous general Palparan, and his boss GMA, the presuming President, will one day be delivered to The Hague to answer for their crimes. One is tempted to say that they are war criminals, except that there is no war in this country other than that of their own cynical and murderous invention. They are just plain criminals, of an order that violates—no, insults—humanity.

The fools who constitute the majority of the House of Representatives, who blocked the impeachment bid against their favorite tyrant would say to a man and woman that there was nothing to connect their favorite tyrant to the killings. Well, there is still something worse than being dead while being alive, and that is being a congressman who has sold his soul to GMA. There is no worse state than this—and if they themselves cannot feel the misery of it, it is only because there is no feeling left in their bodies, or souls. Some day too they will reap the whirlwind in terms of the contempt of their countrymen, the infamy to hound their names and houses till kingdom come.

Nothing to connect GMA to the killings? You have to have lost all sense of sight, hearing, smell, taste and feeling to mouth that. At the very least, what is government there for? There’s nothing more ludicrous—the kind that kills when you laugh—than GMA cajoling the witnesses in the killings to come out so she might stop the mayhem. And what, unless the witnesses materialize—something she herself has discouraged by stopping witnesses against her from appearing before the Senate—she is freed from the duty, the responsibility, the imperative, to stop the mayhem? And what, so that the witnesses, who will then have implicated themselves as being in the company of suspected NPA members, will become target practice for Palparan?

We pay taxes so that government will serve us. The least of the service being for it to keep us alive, not to kill us. There’s nothing more ludicrous as well than Eduardo Ermita saying, “But what about the killings by the NPA?” Well, what about them? The human rights groups have condemned those killings as well. I know I have, repeatedly. More to the point, we do not pay taxes to the NPA, we pay taxes to the government. We do not owe allegiance to the NPA, we owe allegiance to the government. You want us to apply the same rules to the NPA as to government, let us pay taxes to the NPA, and let us owe allegiance to the NPA.

While at that, the NPA “killing fields” is a case of the NPA slaughtering its own comrades. The day Palparan slaughters his own comrades is the day I will praise him to high heavens. The day he slaughters himself is the day I will ask for his sainthood.

But GMA’s crime isn’t just one of omission or ineptitude, it’s one of commission or direct authorship. The only thing worse than the scale of the current mayhem—which surpasses even that of martial law: then there was at least a distinction, however often blurred, between combatant and non-combatant; today even NGOs and party lists are combatants—is the ease with which Palparan is able to justify it. He openly advocates the murder of the “enemy,” that category being what and how his diseased mind decrees it, and his boss does not reprimand him, his boss praises him before the nation, before the world, before heaven and earth, for a job well done. This is not sporadic or intermittent bloodletting, this is systematic and calculated bloodbath. This is not accident, this is policy. This is not violence most regrettable, this is murder most foul.

And pray, what, the butler did it?

Not so, Mr. Speaker. The usurper did it.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=16341

Elegy August 18, 2006

SOME tragedies leave you without words. You just keep asking, "Why?" Knowing there are no answers out there, finding little comfort in the thought, or platitude, heaven wanted it that way.
Such a tragedy was the deaths of Hazel Recheta-Calimag, Arnel Guiao and Ismael "Maeng" Cabugayan before the sun fell last Sunday. All worked for ABC-5 television. Hazel was a reporter, Arnel was a cameraman, and Maeng was a driver. They were coming back to Manila after burrowing for a week in Albay to cover the impending explosion of Mayon Volcano. Their replacements had arrived that morning, and they had left the shadow of the mountain shortly after lunch in a light and cheerful mood. Why wouldn't they? They were going home with "pasalubong" [arrival tokens' of pili nuts and other Bicol region stuff for their loved ones, one of the small perks of living the itinerant life of media workers.

It was in Pamplona, the town next to Naga City going Manila, where it happened. I know the place, I've driven there many times. It's a pleasant part of Camarines Sur province, full of lush greenery, something you see few and far between in the North Expressway, the sides of the road dotted with makeshift stands selling "Formosa" pineapples. The road itself is made of concrete that stretches straight ahead with very few curves.

It was a pleasant afternoon when Hazel, Arnel and Maeng got there. It had been drizzling, but the road wasn't wet. It was well before sunset and life went on as lazily in that part of the world on a late Sunday afternoon as it had done for as long as God and the folk of Pamplona could remember.

It was the last thing the three would see on earth.

There are several versions of the story: It happened on a lonely stretch there and nobody could say for sure what took place. The common thread seems to be that one of the tires in the Nissan Frontier the ABC crew was driving blew up, causing the driver to lose control of the wheel. Some say he was overtaking when it happened, others say he merely tried to avoid plowing into whatever lay on the right side of the road by swerving left. Whatever it was, the vehicle fell directly in the path of an oncoming bus. The impact of the collision drove the Nissan clear underneath the bus, killing the three probably instantly. Or at least our collective grief demands from heaven that they died instantly, without one tiny crack of time to feel pain.

I knew Hazel well -- having been lending a helping hand to ABC-5 for some months now -- but barely knew the other two. Arnel and Maeng I must have seen a few times in the covered parking lot of ABC-5, but never got to talk to them. Hazel I knew to take things in stride. She was one of the toiling media practitioners who were content to do their jobs as best they could. She got assigned to cover a story in any beat, she did it without fuss. She took life as life dealt it. She waited 14 years to have a child, reconciling herself to the often frugal ways of Providence until Providence finally gave generously. She gave birth to a girl a year ago. She was proud of her daughter. More than anything in this world, her daughter gave her a reason to live. She was 37 when she died last Sunday.

She got along very well with the world while she lived. The media people that flocked at her wake last Monday night didn't just go there to express solidarity with a kindred spirit or fallen comrade, they went there to say a tearful goodbye to a friend. What drove them there wasn't just the thought that it might have been them lying there but for a strange twist of fate, it was also the incomprehensible reality that someone they had laughed and cried with was in that state. Truly, you have to ask of heaven why.

Edward Navarrete and Erel Cabatbat, a news manager and reporter of ABC-5, would tell me later they got the hardest assignments of their lives that Sunday evening. It was to tell the families of Arnel and Maeng their husbands and fathers would not be coming home that night. Or ever. Erel would say: "Assign me to cover the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf, assign me to cover the anti-NPA war in Luzon, I'd sooner do that -- no, I'd volunteer for that -- than go through that night all over again." Arnel was 42 years old and Maeng 37. They were the breadwinners of their families. Arnel left two daughters (22 and 15) and a son (14) while Maeng left a boy (13) and girl (6). Unable to comprehend the news, Maeng's 6-year-old kept asking, so when was her "tatay" [father] coming home, he promised to be back that day.

There were the cares of the living to compound the tears for the dead. Edward would tell me Maeng's wife was so stunned at the news, all she could blurt out after a long moment of speechlessness was, "Paano na ang mga bata?" ["What will happen to the children?"] Work benefits go only so far. It's an agonized cry that I can only hope will reach the ears of benefactors and school officials who might want to pitch scholarships in the direction of the kids. Life hasn't been kind to them, maybe some people can.

I don't know that deaths of this kind will ever yield any sense, but if we must extract some meaning from them, like oil from dead earth or gold from the pit of it, it is probably some appreciation for what journalists do. More than soldiers, they're the ones who risk life and limb, shuttling to and fro in cars, trains and planes, rushing in the direction of fire where everybody else is running away from it, to tell the truth about life, such as truth or life can be told. They're the ones who, when they die in the line of duty -- never has that phrase sounded purer -- evoke John Donne's words with special force: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind./ And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;

It tolls for thee."

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=15646