Stop the killers October 12, 2006

I HAD just talked about the killings of journalists and political activists in a gathering of Filipino press clubs in the United States when I read about the killing of Bishop Alberto Ramento of the Aglipayan Church in Tarlac City. My instincts, like those of Ramento’s kin and friends, told me the killing was a political one, notwithstanding that the cops were quick to say it was a simple case of robbery. Ramento had been stabbed several times and his room in his San Sebastian parish was missing articles.

My instincts were right. It was far too much coincidence that the bishop, who had figured prominently in anti-government activities such as a citizens’ initiative to investigate the cheating in the last elections, would end up the victim of a crude robbery. It happens all the time in detective stories and thrillers with a “twist” -- a high-profile murder turning out to have originated from low-profile causes, the sublime springing from the paralytic. But that is so rarely so in real life. In real life, people are killed for the most obvious reasons.

There were many holes in the police’s version to begin with. Ramento, though an archbishop of his church, or precisely because of it -- archbishops of Catholic churches are another matter entirely -- was not a rich man. He had no business being robbed. Moreover, the notion that a notorious gang operating in the area would settle for a DVD player and a ring, whose value lay only in its sentiment, strained credulity. The clincher was that Jovito Palparan’s favorite law enforcers, the Tarlac police, could actually catch the perpetrators in record time and even return the stolen goods. That did not just strain credulity, that snapped it like a dry twig.

As it turns out, based on the findings of a private fact-finding team headed by lawyer Rex Fernandez, Ramento was probably killed by a man who relished his assignment. Ramento’s wounds bore it out. This crime wasn’t done by someone, or some people, who was or were in a hurry to get away. This was done by someone who took his time. “The most evil thing,” says Fernandez, “is that he really intended to kill him (Ramento) and was proud of it.”

“Evil” is the word. The obscenity of it doesn’t just lie in the fact that persons of the cloth have now become fair game for murderers who more than likely carry with them an official mandate. The obscenity lies in the efficient, dispassionate, business-like way in which dissenters are being dispatched. The murder of Pablo Glean, Jejomar Binay’s security aide, already upped the ante on the mayhem, bringing it, as it did, right at the heart of the capital. The murder of the head of an entire church, the fifth biggest in the country, the Obispo Maximo of the Aglipayan Church, ups it even further. The graduation or up-scaling is happening methodically, systematically, implacably. And there’s little that stands in its path.

It is not hard to see why Ramento’s murderers didn’t mind including him in today’s mounting dead. They probably figured that like the members of the Bayan Muna party-list group and the countryside journalists, he wouldn’t be sorely missed. He was not a priest or, heaven forbid, a bishop, of the Catholic Church. He wasn’t Eraño Manalo or Mike Velarde who could command hordes at the snap of a finger. All he had by way of stature were his towering principles. That might have made him bigger than the others in the reckoning of God, but that made him so much smaller than the others in the reckoning of those who were out to do him evil, and did.

But that brings me to something even more evil, or obscene, than the killings themselves, systematic and methodical as they are, inexorably graduating and climbing up the ranks of dissenters as they do. That is the lack of ferocity with which we are greeting them. Of course, as Archbishop Angel Lagdameo says, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines, which he heads, has already condemned the political killings. But it has done so in the most pro forma, if not timid, of terms. Everyone can condemn the killings. Even Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who did so loudly in her Sona speech, notwithstanding that she is doing nothing to stop them. Indeed, notwithstanding that her hands are awash in the blood of the dead, completely subverting, as she did, her condemnation of the killings by holding up Palparan’s malefaction as worthy of universal emulation.

In this respect, the Catholic Church is no more and no less than the national media which have also condemned the killings of their own in the provinces but have brought no real pressure to bear on the authorities to catch -- not to speak of jailing -- the killers. Everyone can condemn the killings of journalists, too, even Arroyo, who did so repeatedly in her last sortie abroad.

The point is to go beyond mere condemnation, “in the strongest terms,” the point is to raise an accusing finger at the true source of those killings, which is government itself. The point is for all the institutions of society -- the Church, the media, the legal community, civil society et al. -- that still believe that life is heaven’s gift, that the life of another person is as precious as one’s own, to hale Palparan, Norberto Gonzales and Arroyo herself into the court of public opinion at least, if not of law -- that will come later -- and bring them to justice. The point is to put the pulpit, the pages of newspapers and the bandwidths of radio and television, and the weight of judgment of the entire civilized world to bear on the perpetrators, telling them with the stern benignity of a magistrate that no one may get away with murder, least of all to defend an illegitimate rule.

All these institutions have already tolerated lying, cheating and stealing -- whining life goes on. Must they tolerate murder, too?

We want to stop the killings, let’s stop the killers.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=26159

Teaching by example October 11, 2006

I REMEMBER again something I had read about parenting ages ago. A parent who keeps saying no to a child will not necessarily teach the child to be disciplined and righteous. He or she will probably just end up teaching the kid to say no to everything. That is, to become stubborn and contrary.

The principle is as simple as it is profound: Example is the best teacher there is. How we teach is what we teach. A child hearing his parent telling him constantly not to do things will not learn not to do things. He will learn to constantly tell other people not to do things. Or put another way, he will learn how to act like his parent.

In various interviews, particularly by college kids doing their paper in English, I’ve always been asked how I’ve raised my kids, whether I’m strict or not, what values I’ve tried to drum into them. I’ve always replied that I’m no better or worse than any other parent in the lecturing department, but that if there’s a value I’ve harped on, it is honesty or fairness. Worse than deluding others is deluding yourself. But I’ve never been big on ramming that down their throats. For one reason: I figure that whatever lessons I want to impart to them I’d teach best by what I am and do. If I do not live a life that’s honest and decent, or at least that aspires toward it, nothing I say is going to make them so.

I remembered these things after reading that the clamor for investigating the cheating in the nursing exams has gotten louder and wider. I’m glad it has; there’s hope for this country yet. At least Filipinos can still be roused up by major-league acts of dishonesty.

But I don’t know why the “thorough investigation” that more and more public and academic officials are clamoring for should be limited to the cheating in the nursing exams. I don’t know why that “thorough investigation,” if it means to be thorough at all, shouldn’t be directed to all instances of monstrous acts of cheating in this country. Indeed, I don’t know why that “thorough investigation,” if it means to be investigative at all, shouldn’t aim to determine the participation, direct or indirect, active or passive, of the highest authorities of the land themselves in cheating in this country.

The point is simple: The highest officials of this country, public or private, secular or religious, are the parents or guardians of this country. What they are and do is what they say and preach. How they act is what they teach. If they lie, cheat and steal, there is no warning against lying, cheating and stealing they can sound to the public that will be heeded. If they aid, abet and find ways to justify lying, cheating and killing, there is no threat they can issue to the public that will deter them from lying, cheating and stealing as well.

I’ve said my piece about the example Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo has set by stealing the elections. Why should the nurses balk at trying to become bona fide nurses by answering leaked questions when the person claiming to be their bona fide President became so by counting votes from ballot boxes that were more leaky than the oil tanker that sank at the bottom of the sea near Guimaras? Why should the nurses agree to have the results of the exams rendered null and void because some of them cheated when the person claiming to be their President refuses to have the last elections declared null and void because she herself, with no small help from Garci, cheated the hell out of the voters?

But it isn’t just Arroyo who is setting a horrendous example there. I remember again Archbishop Ramon Arguelles’ breathtaking statement justifying the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines’ refusal to back the impeachment bid against Arroyo: “Talaga naman nandaya (si Arroyo).... Pero lahat naman nandaya e. Natalo lang ’yung iba sa dayaan.” [“Of course, Arroyo cheated. But everyone cheated anyway. It’s just that the others lost in the cheating.”]

Coming from one of the “istambay” who hang out in our neighborhood off-track betting station, that would have been dismaying. Coming from no less than an archbishop, that is reprehensible. One would imagine, as I said in a column in response to that, that the sheer prevalence of cheating would make us say in the face of the mother of all cheating that it was time we did something to make the cheating stop. Not say, “sige na lang” [just let it be], let is fester till kingdom come.

Indeed, it wasn’t just Arguelles who said so, it was Jose de Venecia and the other representatives who refused to impeach Arroyo who said so. Their official line was that there was no evidence of cheating in the elections -- by itself a blatant lie -- their unofficial one was that everyone cheats anyway. They went on to say that the country had more important things than cheating to think about, there was the future of the country to think about. As though any country that was built on a lie could possibly have any future.

If I recall right, many Filipinos were already asking last year what kind of world we were leaving the children with the open, brutish and widespread razing of moral values our own leaders had embarked on. Susan Roces asked that expressly when she delivered her “I see no contrition in your eyes” speech at Club Filipino. What lessons, she asked Arroyo and Mike Defensor, are we teaching the children?

Whatever they are, it’s not just the children who are learning them. Everybody is. The nurses are. By all means let us have a thorough investigation of the cheating in the nursing exam, as deep and as wide as is necessary to ferret out the authors of this heinous crime. As we are bound to find out however, the true culprits go beyond a few nursing officials and/or a review center and go way, way up to the very people who run this country.

What they are and what they do are what they teach. Example is the best teacher there is.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=25966

Cheating October 10, 2006

PANFILO LACSON says Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo does right to blow hot and cold on the issue of whether this year’s prospective nurses should retake the licensure exams or not. “It is a rare but welcome sign of good judgment on the part of Malacañang to stay on the side of prudence on the matter.”

Aquilino Pimentel says the opposite: “The President’s flip-flopping on the issue of the retake of the exam smacks of her wishy-washy approach in resolving controversies and her insensitivity to the ordeals of the nursing graduates whose future in their chosen career is now in limbo. Yesterday, she wanted to annul the exam. Today, she hedges. That is exactly what we see in her administration.”

They both miss the point.

Of course, the candidates ought to retake the exams. I argued this point the last time around. I agreed completely with the officials of University of Santo Tomas who had been heroically pushing for this course of action despite much adverse opinion, notably from the examinees themselves. Quite simply, the good outweighs the bad, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I can understand how those who passed the exams honestly would feel personally cheated at being made to take them all over again, if not indeed robbed of precious time and resources. But what choice is there? To not retake the exams is to bring the stigma of being a cheat, or the suspicion of it, on one’s head for the rest of one’s life. With the most devastating consequences for one’s future. No one will want to hire you anyway under those conditions, other than at exploitative rates.

Having just come from the United States, which is where many of the examinees dream of going, I do have some idea of the impact the news of the tainted licensure exams has had there. The Filipino community is monumentally dismayed by it. And what is monumental dismay to the Filipino community can easily be monumental distrust to the American hospitals. The successful examinees don’t retake the test, they will have their applications for work abroad scrutinized by their prospective employers more ferociously than their applications for visas by the US and British embassies.

That is so in particular in light of recent revelations that the cheating was more widespread than originally supposed. Indeed, widespread in more ways than one: It didn’t just occur as well in other parts of the country, like the cities of Tacloban and Davao, it occurred not just in a couple of sets in the five-set exam but in pretty much all of it. No one who has taken this exam, successfully or not, will ever be able to shed off the odor of scandal that suffuses it. In the end, the cost of “passing” this exam will be far more onerous than anyone of them can bear.

But which behooves the authorities to exert themselves to make sure that the culprits are truly caught and jailed for being the criminals that they are. They have not just robbed people, many of them from poor families, of their meager resources, they have robbed them of an even more meager future. This may not be a case where the innocent are rewarded or even spared, but must be a case where the guilty are punished and made an example of. We owe it to those who have been deeply harmed by this to do so.

As to Pimentel’s point, of course, Arroyo has been flip-flopping, and of course that is what her administration has always been. Unless the issue has to do with her, in which case she acts with iron resolve: She bashes the heads of her enemies. But whether Arroyo has a tendency to flip-flop or act purposefully is not the issue here. The issue here, which stares us right in the face, is the breathtaking irony of Arroyo even thinking to want to intervene in this scandal. Indeed, saying that this thing has got to be dealt with because the honor and integrity of the country, if not the remittances of the new entrants to the overseas Filipino workforce, are at stake.

What is this a case of? This is a case of massive cheating. This is a case of people, in whose hands will be left the care of the sick and helpless, proposing to do so without (at least for those who did cheat) having the qualifications for it. Never mind the honor and integrity of the country, think of the poor bastards who will be placed under their tender mercies.

Well, what was the last presidential election all about? It was a case of massive cheating. It was a case of someone in whose hands would be left the care of a sick and dying country proposing to hurry it up to its grave. Never mind the nurses who might not add to the remittances Pidal means to loot because of the flawed exams. Mind only the 85 million or so Filipinos whose lives have just been made hell.

Can anything be more hysterically funny, or a brilliant if unwitting exercise in self-satire, than Arroyo telling the prospective nurses they have to take the exams again because many of them cheated in the last one? The same reasons for requiring new exams are the same reasons for requiring new elections. No, they are more than the same reasons. Far, far more. The stakes in elections are higher. The price to pay for cheating in elections is steeper. If this country cannot survive the reputation of having fake nurses, it will survive even less the reality of having a fake president.

I agree with all the reasons Prospero Pichay, Eduardo Ermita and Arroyo herself have trotted out for new exams. I agree that the honor, integrity and sanctity of the nation are at stake. I agree that it is necessary, urgent and pressing. Cheating impairs everything that is good and just in a country. The nurses must take the exams again.

We must vote for president again.

* * *

Tonight, the Stop the Killings bar tour stops at My Brother’s Mustache, Scout Tuason corner Scout Madriñan, Quezon City. Noel Cabangon, Chikoy Pura, Isha, and Susan Fernandez will be playing. Be there, don’t let anything stop you.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=25771

Misadventures in idioms October 9, 2006

WE HAD A HILARIOUS INCIDENT IN THE HOTEL where we were staying in Honolulu last week. “We” included a group of Filipinos who wrote for Filipino publications in the United States and me. My friends had rooms on the fourth floor while I had mine on the 19th. As it turned out, higher was better. The water at least flowed better, the pipes on the lower floors being intermittently clogged and producing not very pleasant effects on the toilets.

After repeated and increasingly strident pleas to the hotel manager for help, they finally got a plumber who, not surprisingly, turned out to be a Filipino. The hotel was full of them, from front desk clerks to cleaning persons. Tagalog and Ilocano words wafted in the lobby and corridors like wisps of cigarette smoke.

The Filipino plumber was in his 40s, and unlike most Filipinos there who were cheerful and eager to please, he was cross. My friends figured he was having a bad day. He banged and emitted low-register grumbling noises while he dredged up the toilet bowl as if to show he didn’t have an easy job but was doing it manfully. When he was almost done, one of my friends, Marlon, struck up a conversation with him—in English. He told him that they were transferring to the topmost floor anyway, but that it was good he was fixing things for the next occupant. He joked that he would be leaving him to the tender mercies of the room’s next “victim.”

The comment sent the plumber through the roof. He replied angrily that the hotel was not in the habit of victimizing customers. Certainly he did not take his duties lightly, the state of the hotel’s plumbing could not be held to reflect on him. Marlon’s roommates came to his rescue, telling the plumber with much amusement that Marlon was just teasing him.

Marlon himself tried to placate him. He told him he was glad that he showed exceptional loyalty to his place of employment, which reflected well on Filipinos. “I know,” he said, “where you’re coming from.”

Instead of appeasing him, Marlon stoked the fires of his fury. The plumber became livid and turned on him wrathfully. Of course, he said, Marlon knew from his accent where he was coming from. He was coming from the Ilocos, and demanded to know why Marlon insisted on insulting his race.

There was no getting him out of it, his mind had locked on to the idea. My friends thought restraint was the better part of valor, and simply let loose an explosion of mirth as soon as he left the room. They laughed their insides out. Till the day I left, we were using the phrase on one another during conversations like a running gag. Each time somebody expressed an opinion about things, we’d say: “I know where you’re coming from.”

My friends “were coming from” various parts of the United States.

I told them I knew of a similar incident that happened to a friend of mine. This wasn’t apocryphal, I said, it really happened.

It was during martial law, and my friend, a journalist, was with an international church-based fact-finding team to investigate the massacre of some villagers in a far-flung area. I forget now which part in Mindanao it was. After visiting the site where the killings took place—the military claimed it was a battle with insurgents; the witnesses, who refused to be named, said it was a summary execution of suspects—my friend’s group hurried off to a nearby camp to dig up more details about the incident. That was risky business then, the provincial commander being lord and master of the countryside, who could summon even the mayor and governor like vassals. During the twilight years of martial law in particular, when this happened, the combat-fatigued and half-crazed officers were the last people you wanted to fraternize with, or posed unpleasant questions to.

My friend’s group was led to a room where they were told to wait for someone who would brief them. A stern-looking young captain came in and said the provincial commander was out, and he was there instead to answer questions. Asked to give the military side, he stuck to the story about an encounter between their men and the local insurgents. When my friend’s group said the wounds of the victims did not seem consistent with an encounter, the captain raised his voice and he said that as far as he was concerned the troops were telling the truth.

My friend asked who led the patrol. The captain answered that he was not in a position to answer that. My friend asked how many soldiers and rebels took part in the firefight. The captain answered that he was not in a position to answer that. My friend asked what he thought of the witnesses’ story that the victims had been rounded up from their houses and dragged away into the fields, from where they later heard shots. The captain answered that he was not in a position to answer that.

In exasperation, my friend said with a tinge of sarcasm: “Well, who is in a position to answer that? Who calls the shots here?”

The captain suddenly grew livid and turned on my friend. “Shots?” he asked angrily, “I didn’t hear any shots. We don’t shoot people here.”

It took some time before they could calm the captain down. But my friend’s comment ended the meeting right there and then. Fortunately, no one in my friend’s group remarked that the captain was fit to be tied.

What can I say? In this country, be more careful of your idioms than your insults. You could find yourself in very deep s—t. But that’s one idiom you really don’t want to take literally.

* * *

Tomorrow, the “Stop the Killings” bar tour moves to My Brother’s Mustache, Scout Tuason cor. Scout Madriñan, Quezon City. Noel Cabangon, Chikoy Pura, Isha and Susan Fernandez will be playing. Neither hell nor high water, typhoons nor brownouts, will stop the “Stop the Killings.”

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=25564

A man named Bolles October 5, 2006

A FILIPINO reporter from Chicago brought this to my attention after I spoke on the killings in the Philippines last weekend in Honolulu. You might want to look up the case of Don Bolles, he said, you might find it interesting. I did, and did.

The case of Don Bolles is now a watershed in American journalism. Bolles was a reporter of the Arizona Republic in the 1960s and 1970s. He specialized in ferreting out wrongdoing. Which took the form of organized crime, specifically as practiced by the Mafia, and corruption in high places, specifically as committed by state water and tax commissioners. He honed his investigative skills over the years, developing an uncanny ability to sniff out irregularities and finding proof for them. He was intrepid to the core, probably way up there as one of the leaders of “X-investigative journalism,” if there was such a category. Once, he gathered the names of around 200 Mafia members and their associates operating in Arizona and exposed them in an article.

His articles catapulted him to the top of the heap, making him a member of the journalism elite. But success came with a terrible price. He started getting death threats, and after a while he took precautions against them. Every day, he taped the hood of his car with a Scotch tape to make sure his engine hadn’t been tampered with. Legend has it he eventually got tired of doing it and so paid the price. On the day he left his hood untouched, his car exploded from a bomb in downtown Arizona.

The truth wasn’t less dramatic. It was his eighth wedding anniversary that day, June 2, 1976, and he and his wife had planned to go out after work. But that noon, he got a call from an informant about a crooked land deal involving top state officials. He left a note on his typewriter saying he would be going to a hotel downtown and would be back at 1:30 p.m. He got to the Hotel Clarendon past noon and spoke with someone on the phone. After that, he went back to his car in the parking lot near the hotel and started the engine. As he was backing out, his car exploded.

Six sticks of dynamite had been planted underneath it and set off by remote. Even if he had taped the hood of his car that day, he would still have died.

The murder set off a tidal wave of grief and anger not just in Arizona but across the land. If his murderers had thought to cow the media and the community, they thought wrong. Mourning swiftly turned to outrage. The American media community came together and in a magnificent, unprecedented, and never-to-be-repeated show of solidarity, 38 journalists from 28 newspapers and TV stations mounted a collective effort to pursue the story Bolles began. Some were paid for by their organizations, others did it on their own time. They were headed by one of my favorite writers, Bob Greene. The result of their efforts was a 23-part series that appeared in newspapers across the country. The national attention forced the Arizona legislature to put public deals under a microscope. It also wiped out Mafia activity in Arizona.

The killers were apprehended and brought to justice. On June 13 that year, 11 days after Bolles’ car exploded, police arrested John Harvey Adamson, a racing-dog owner. He admitted planting the bomb, turned state witness and pointed to two others, Max Dunlap, a Phoenix contractor, and James Robison, as being part of the plot. The following year, Dunlap and Robison were found guilty and sentenced to death.

Next year, Bolles will be honored with a place in the Newseum in Washington, D.C., when it reopens. It is a museum dedicated to recollecting the life and work of outstanding journalists. Since the nation’s journalists descended on Arizona to finish what Bolles began, no journalist has been murdered in America.

I don’t know why we can’t take off from that lead. I don’t know why our national media can’t bestir itself and go beyond token condemnations of the murders of the journalists in the countryside -- which, to repeat, is where they are happening -- and form a team from the different newspapers, TV and radio stations to investigate the murder of at least one journalist who was patently doing his job. Preferably with the backing of our organizations -- we can forget government intervention, we will be hindered, not helped, by it -- and the moral, if not financial, backing of the international media and human rights organizations. I don’t know why we can’t publish or air our findings locally and internationally and make the killers at least morally reprehensible and at most legally indictable.

I don’t know why we can’t put up a small-scale equivalent of a Newseum to extol the virtues of the heroic dead and, better still, to provide subsidy for those they left behind. Alongside putting the fear of God and global censure in the hearts of malefactors, it should help to put inspiration in the minds of those who are in the profession or dream of being so.

The point is to show the warlords, drug and gambling lords, and overbearing lords in public office, civilian, military and police, who are responsible for a great many of these killings that those killings can be epically counterproductive. That those killings carry with them a huge price tag. That with the help of the national and international media, their illegal activities can at least be severely curbed, if not wiped off the face of the earth.

I grant it’s not easy. Nothing good is, in this country more than others. But I don’t know how much longer we can survive, physically and spiritually, with unrelenting proof that doon po sa amin” -- where we live -- good is always punished and evil rewarded. There is only one thing worse than being dead, as I keep saying.

That is being dead while being alive.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=24852