Triumph December 7, 2006

THE triumph for sovereignty is patent.

People have called Judge Benjamin Pozon’s verdict finding Lance Cpl. Daniel Smith guilty of rape historic, and it is. Some of you are probably too young to remember it, but there was a time when we were completely powerless to do something about the abuses of American servicemen in this country.

That was the heyday of the US military bases in Clark and Subic, when Philippine governments were willing to look the other way each time American soldiers raped Filipino women or shot Filipino kids to death -- the latter immortalized by Nora Aunor in “Minsan May Isang Gamu-Gamo” with the words, “Hindi baboy ang kapatid ko!” -- for many reasons. Not the least of them being US aid and the more direct “aid” offered by the likes of “Gapo” to the countless prostitutes and musicians who flocked there.

The offenders were never brought to trial, they were spirited away in the glare of day (never mind in the dead of night), never to be heard of again. We don’t even know if they weren’t given medals in lieu of discharge for discharging themselves manfully, or showing exceptional courage amid the threat of venereal disease.

No American serviceman has yet been convicted of any serious crime in this country, let alone sentenced to 40 years in a local jail. I don’t know which is worse, the 40 years or the local jail. They have been pretty much free to pursue R and R by their own definition of it, constrained only by their consciences, which have been dulled by the very nature of their training and the guilt-cleansing agent called “anti-terrorism,” and the threat of having their knuckles rapped since bad behavior, such as rape, raises all sorts of questions about what anti-terrorism is and who it is meant to be anti.

You look at it from that perspective, and you truly appreciate the historicity of Pozon’s ruling. Indeed, you look at it from the perspective of this government’s own efforts to repeat the past, and you truly appreciate the depth of Pozon’s courage. Frankly, I didn’t expect the outcome to be like this. Ignacio Bunye says the ruling is “a triumph of impartial justice.” Well, the government he serves may not take credit for it. If it happened, it happened not because of but in spite of this government. Pozon’s ruling unleashes a veritable sea change in Philippine-American relations.

In one fell swoop, it redefines “special relations,” a term that has taken on garish connotations, “special,” in particular, meaning special treatment, if not special "siopao" dumpling. Before this, I had thought we were worse off than Okinawa. There, at least public protest compelled the local government to run after American servicemen accused of raping high school girls in particular, which was threatening to become an epidemic from official indifference, if not blindness. Pozon’s ruling sets things on a more even keel. Or at least it cranks up the rusty engine that could go there.

But more than a triumph for sovereignty, Pozon’s ruling is a triumph of justice.

That ultimately is what this is all about. This is not about “special relations,” this is not about women empowerment, this is not about people marching and governments hedging, however those things loom large in the background. It is about right and wrong. It is about righting wrongs. It is about giving justice to the aggrieved.

I must confess, too that as the trial wore on, I didn’t know the truth anymore. My only concern was that the process was carried out fair and square, which was something the newspeak justice secretary seemed determined to impair. I don’t know what kind of pressure was put on Pozon by all the interested parties in this case. I don’t know what kind of pressure he personally felt, real or imagined. But his ruling indicates that whatever weight was put on him or he personally felt, he fought it off magnificently.

His ruling is well thought out. It is at least well reasoned. Pozon rattles off the points that damn Smith -- if not to hell, at least to 40 years of local jail, and again I don’t know which is worse. Smith admitted to having sex with Nicole. Nicole was in no condition to have consensual sex given that she was right out of her mind from drink. Nicole struggled and resisted. The medical findings showed her to have suffered injuries consistent with forcible sex. There is no (reasonable) doubt about it: Smith raped “Nicole.”

Of course, Pozon’s ruling hasn’t pleased everybody, not those who wanted all of the accused freed, and not those who wanted all of them jailed. Speculation is rife that Smith, the youngest and lowest-ranking of the accused, might have been the victim of an initiation rite. Which seems to jibe with the original statement of the driver that Smith was egged on by his fellows with cries of “F--k! F--k! F--k!” But that wasn’t proven by the prosecution. Smith in any case deserves little sympathy: His fellows might have done him a disservice, but he did another human being an utter wrong. The real tragedy has not befallen him, it has befallen “Nicole.”

I’ll take Pozon’s judgment for what it is, and commend him from the bottom of my heart. I don’t know that Time Magazine would have cited him as one of Asia’s heroes—what he did would seem par for the course elsewhere. But for us, well, like the Supreme Court decisions thwarting iniquity, which would also be par for the course elsewhere, it is heroic in the extreme. We’ve another hero to look up to in these days when heroism seems to have become rarer than a traffic cop in rain. While at this, the courts seem to be on a roll. They’ve become the last bastion of courage in a time of cowardice. They’ve become the last vestige of sanity in a time of madness.

Pozon for one has just shown there’s still justice in this world. May his tribe increase.

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Hero too, sort of December 6, 2006

YOU saw the pictures. the guy was cowering in shyness beside his apparently more illustrious peers. That was Efren “Bata” Reyes at the Time Asia Awards ceremonies in Hong Kong, while standing beside Cory Aquino, Eggie Apostol and Letty Magsanoc. He was the very picture of self-effacement.

“Why me?” he would ask with genuine befuddlement later on, a predicament he is not known to face at the billiard table, when he would find the most amazing answers to the most perplexing binds. Which has earned him the title, “The Magician,” a title he has lived up to over the years. The scene in Hong Kong however was another league altogether, for which he seemed entirely unprepared. Indeed, for which he personally felt he did not belong. To be ranked among Cory, Eggie and Letty and to be called a hero by no less than Time Magazine, that was more than he bargained for.

“Why me?” he said in Tagalog, a language that seemed out of place as well in the coat-and-tie and gown affair. “I have not done anything that made any impact on Asian life. I am just a simple man making a living in what I do best: playing billiards.”

Good question, and one I suppose that will be a subject of much debate in neighborhood stores where the Pilosopong Tasyos congregate to divine the ways of earth though the elixirs of hell.

Why Bata? Why one of the heroes of Asia? Why not just elevate him to the level of sports or entertainment heroes? Why not just turn him into something akin to a rock star or a film star? Why put him at par not just with Cory, Eggie and Letty but also with one of my literary heroes, Salman Rushdie? Who, apart from reinventing the Asian novel, as Time says, has reinvented Islam by being on Iran’s fanatics’ Death Row. Of course, some of my Indian friends swear he is not the most pleasant man in the world, but who cares? Artists and writers are excused from being so.

On the face of it, there truly seems nothing staggering in Bata’s accomplishments to thrust him into the pantheon of the gods. But that’s only on the face of it. Instinctively, I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Time’s decision. Part of the reason for it is that I am a Filipino and have thrilled to Bata’s exploits. But more than that, I am also a human being who may not always know greatness when he sees one but who has been known to know magic when he sees one. Bata is The Magician in more ways than one.

What sets Bata apart from Manny Pacquiao and puts him in league, even if a minor one, with Muhammad Ali, is what he has done outside of his game. There is little to admire in Pacman outside the ring -- he too is aptly named: He wants to gobble up everything in sight; his gambling is the stuff of legend, of the embarrassing kind. There is much to admire in Bata, like Ali, in and out of it.

If a hero is someone who has struggled against great odds and overcome them, then Bata has a good claim to being one. His provenance is well known by now. He was the cleaning boy of a small billiard hall (“hall” is such a grand term if you see the kind that thrives in the provinces) owned by his uncle, and had one of the tables for bed at night. But it wasn’t just that he was exposed to the game, in more ways than one, at so early an age. It was that he had an enormous talent for it. He saw possibilities in his mind that nobody else did. Think of the young Yehudi Menuhin, or a more recent prodigy, Anne-Sophie Mutter, seeing a Stradivarius for the first time, and you have an idea of what happened in that dingy pool hall in a dirt-poor town in Pampanga province.

Coming from these humble antecedents to winning the richest prize ever in pool in Reno, Nevada, last September, that is quite an amazing leap. As bucking adversity goes, it is nothing less than heroic.

If a hero is someone who inspires, then Bata has a better claim to being one. His antecedents were exceptionally humble not just because he was impoverished but because he played a game that fell under the upraised brow of society. What Bata wrought I glimpsed ironically in a joke told by a friend. Before, he said, when your parents asked you why you came home late and you answered that you had just been in the pool hall, you got a creaming in a language that in cartoon-balloon form would contain lightning bolts and swastikas. Today, when your parents ask you why you came home late and you answer that you had just been in the pool hall, you are told, “Ah, pagbutihin mo, anak." ["Ah, do it diligently, son.”]

None of this is a lesson in “Go far, be truant.” All of it merely says that there is no human preoccupation, other than crime, that is so lowly that it cannot be turned into an art. There is no profession that is so lowly you cannot take pride in it, and feel like a champion whether you end up having your arm raised by Michaela Tabb or not.

If a hero is someone who doesn’t just survive but prevail, someone who doesn’t just withstand pressure but shows grace under pressure, who doesn’t just lift life on his shoulders like Atlas the world but scratches his head when he misses with a glint of laughter in his eyes, then Bata has the best claim to being one. He hasn’t just made an amazing leap, he has shown an amazing grace. That’s what sets him apart from Pacquiao, notwithstanding that the latter is a rags-to-riches story, too. Bata hasn’t just played the game of pool brilliantly, he has played the game of life luminously.

“I am just a simple man making a living by doing what he does best.” Aren’t we all? But, as Bata shows, you can always do that miserably, complaining life is unfair, and asking why it can’t give you an even break. Or you can flash a toothless grin at it, and take it, win or lose, like a champion.

And live it, up or down, like -- a hero.

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Impending bloodbath December 5, 2006

IT’S Time magazine’s turn to express alarm over the killings. Or at least Andrew Marshall, a journalist based in Bangkok, its Nov. 27 issue essay writer, does.

Marshall begins by talking about his own experience. He personally knows people in the south who have been killed or are expecting to be killed. Ruby Sison, an activist friend of his, has it on good authority a contract has been made on her life. Her crime is continuing to keep the murders of journalists George and Maricel Vigo in the news. The Vigos were gunned down in broad daylight by men in motorcycles while on their way home to their five children. Thankfully, says Marshall, as he wrote his piece, Sison was still alive.

Well, if something should happen to her, it should damn this government to hell. For the threat to her life to be known to the world but death, like taxes, coming to her inevitably anyway -- that should say everything there is to say about the depths to which this country has plunged.

Marshall goes on:

“But the slaughter of reporters, leftists, lawyers, labor leaders, priests, students and human-rights workers in the Philippines continues with a fury that recalls the darkest days of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship… In August, in response to international concern, Arroyo set up the six-member Melo Commission to probe the killings. Some bereaved families doubt its independence and have refused to testify. This distrust is symptomatic of a profound loss of faith in Arroyo herself. She is an unpopular president, plagued by corruption scandals and slammed for her failure to improve living standards. Arroyo has condemned the killings, but she will not implicate the military -- even as it implicates itself. Col. Eduardo del Rosario, head of a military antiterrorist unit called Task Force Davao, admitted to Time earlier this year that ‘individual commanders’ might be responsible for the killings.”

In fact, it’s not just that that Arroyo is an unpopular president, plagued by corruption scandals. It is that she is an illegitimate president plagued by the “Hello Garci” tape. That is the wellspring of the killings. The only way a usurper can rule is by force, the only way a usurper can stop dissent is by stopping life. Remove Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and you stop the killings. The infernal equation is simple, the divine resolve is not.

Indeed, that is the very bad news amid the good news. The fulminations are coming from outside, not from inside. The international community has risen to condemn the killings, the local one has not. Over the past few months, we’ve seen, or heard, variously: The citizens of the European countries that Arroyo visited hound her with protests over the killings; the Joint Foreign Chambers of Commerce warn her that large-scale investments and wholesale murder do not mix; and now this from Time. Within this country, nothing. Or next to nothing. You do hear sporadic vituperations, notably from the kin of the dead, but that is all. It’s as if we don’t give a damn anymore and we’ve factored in wanton murder into our lot in life. And hope to extricate ourselves from everything by hopping on the next boat or plane, saying, “Bahala na kayo sa buhay 'nyo, such as you still have a life, or are alive, I’m gone.”

Hell, Willie Revillame found it so much easier to raise money for his legal defense against a wife who has accused him of abuse than we did to try to stop the killings with a musical outcry.

The silence carries a heavy price. Quite apart from the obvious one of more journalists and political activists being killed in future, there is the possibility of the killings spilling over into the elections next year. That was pointed out to me by my friend Dan de Padua, who’s in charge of the television station ABC5’s News and Public Affairs. It’s true. The only thing that can really stop killings of this scale is public outrage, and that not being there, what’s to prevent mayhem in the next elections from becoming mind-boggling?

As I write this, I’ve just seen our item (Nov. 30, p. 9) about the gunsmiths of Davao flourishing with candidates patronizing their wares in anticipation of next year’s elections. While this is a usual occurrence before elections, the prospect of "paltik" [homemade guns] spreading all over this country over the next few months faster than fake ballots has become far more sanguine (literally). The people who are directly in the line of fire here (again literally) are the party-list candidates. If ABC5’s documentary last Sept. 21 on Jovito Palparan’s doings is anything to go by, soldiers are being taught to see no distinction between Bayan Muna and other parties -- indeed to see all of them as the Enemy.

Quite apart from that, the other people who are likely to be in the line of fire here are the opposition candidates. Next year’s elections have all the makings of the 1971 elections and/or the recent US senatorial elections: The administration is headed for a debacle or epic proportions. It’s an election that is likely to have only one issue, who is Arroyo, in the same way that the 1971 elections had only one issue, who was Marcos, and in the same way that the recent US elections had only one issue, who was George W. Bush. The last two elections resulted in a massacre of administration candidates. Not so this May if the administration candidates, national and/or local, can massacre their rivals first -- completely non-figuratively. I said in previous columns that the opposition bets, to a man or woman, are likely to be proclaimed winners in next year’s elections, provided the votes are counted right. I have to qualify that with something more elemental: The opposition bets are likely to be proclaimed winners in next year’s elections, provided they are still alive.

There is the devil to pay for the silence.

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Devil to pay December 4, 2006

“REMING” WAS A SUPERSTORM. IT MIGHT not have been so for residents of Metro Manila whom it thankfully spared, but it was a superstorm for other parts of the country, notably Albay. Poor Bicol! Barely had its folk gotten back on their feet from “Milenyo” when “Reming” came round to knock them down all over again.

Science Undersecretary Graciano Yumul gave us a score to appreciate Nature gone berserk in this wise: “You want to know how strong (Reming) is? We have a radar station in Virac (Catanduanes). We had to close it down. That station is made of solid concrete.”
As I write this, more than a couple of hundred bodies have been buried by mudflows from Mayon. Reminds you of the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo. What killed the once fertile plain surrounding it was not the explosion itself, it was the rains that drowned the fields in volcanic debris.

It’s enough to make you think God is punishing Bicolanos for having leaders like their representatives in Congress who like to invoke God to perpetrate iniquity. Indeed it’s enough to make you think God is punishing us generally for having people in Malacañang who love to say God made it a point to put them there. But it’s a strange God that would punish the sacrilegious by sending boils and plagues, or storms and landslides, at others and not at them. A lightning bolt or two aimed in their direction should do the trick.

It’s also enough to make you think supernatural signs like these appear in truly dark times. I recall that shortly before Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in September 1972, the country experienced a precursor of it in two months of unrelenting rain—in July and August of that year. It turned the outskirts of Greater Manila into a parody of Venice. You had to take a banca to traverse areas where roads used to be. The plains of Central Luzon, the country’s breadbasket, or rice granary, were underwater for weeks, the water in some parts being chest-deep. Imelda led a procession with the Santo Niño at the helm, asking for divine intercession to end the plague. Alas, heaven was deaf to entreaty.

Not so hell. A month or so later, Marcos declared martial law.

But, no, there’s a more scientific explanation for all this, and it’s scarier than hell. Or haven’t you wondered why the storms that have been visiting us lately—and other countries as well, including the developed ones, indeed including the United States—have become more frequent and more vicious? We’ve already had three supertyphoons this year alone, and the last two have produced catastrophic effects. I’ve heard folk complain about Pagasa, saying it misjudged things again with its shrill advisories. Well, thank your lucky stars Reming proved less than Milenyo to Manila. Better to err on the side of caution. I still remember how it was the other Christmas when moans and groans emanated from the pit of Infanta in the season of joy and merrymaking. Infanta was buried in mud and stone when the treeless mountains crumbled from the battering of a superstorm. Or, indeed, when huge piles of logs broke free and tumbled down on the sleeping folk below.

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” supplies the explanation: The earth’s icecaps are melting, and every year water levels are rising. They’re not just rising, they’re getting warmer. And the warmer they get, the more plentiful and angrier the storms they brew. The United States hasn’t just reaped “Katrina,” it has reaped completely literally the whirlwind in the form of tornadoes. It set the record for the number of tornadoes in 2004, which was 1,117. Japan also set a record for typhoons that year. As did many parts of the world for various calamities, including floods to rival the one in the Bible. For the first time ever, a hurricane hit the South Atlantic, a thing theretofore thought impossible by scientists. It was also at the end of that year that a monster storm hit Infanta, and an even bigger monster tsunami hit Aceh and neighboring parts.

The storms are getting more vicious because of that same warming of the oceans. Before they hit land, they hit the warm water surrounding it. That jacks up their wind velocity and increases their moisture content, scientific ways of saying the storms start blowing like crazy and the heavens weep uncontrollably upon the earth. The results are enough to make you religious. We may bring out all the religious icons we want in processions, but none of them will stop heaven’s fury. Absolutely terrifyingly, we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet. Nature is bound to go more berserk in years to come. If ever any writing on the wall foretelling doom was plain to see, this is it.

What to do about this? I’m not knocking prayer, but God has been known to help those who help themselves. Those who don’t help themselves He has been known to sigh while stepping on their fingers clutching the Ark, “Sayang, I gave you a brain pa.” Gore himself proposes that the world pressure his country to commit to the Kyoto Protocol, which calls on all countries—the United States foremost, it being the No. 1 culprit—to curb carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Yet another reason to bitterly rue the fact that Bush won and Gore lost the 2000 US elections.

Gore has other proposals on how we may individually give CPR to a drowning planet. But I’ll leave the reader to watch the docu itself. I think it’s still showing in some commercial theaters, but I don’t mind you getting the DVD version from your local neighborhood pirate—get it any which way you can and distribute it. One is tempted to say don’t wait for tomorrow when you see the planet in spasms. But the spasms are happening right now. We are watching a planet at the start of its death throes.

Tomorrow is today. Tomorrow will be “The Day After Tomorrow.”

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