Blast from the past December 28, 2006

THERE ARE four very good reasons why I'm sharing with you something Jose Rizal wrote more than a century ago. The first is that it is Rizal Day a couple of days from now, a day we would do well to remember with some gratefulness. I do not know why there should be any debate about whether Rizal or Andres Bonifacio should be the national hero. Both easily qualify as so. You can't get any more heroic than facing a firing squad for your beliefs at the prime of your life while
knowing you are by no means a mediocre specimen of your race.

Of course, some people prefer to show their gratitude by vowing on Rizal's Day not to cling to power, but doing so anyway, but that's another story.

The second is that, as this particular essay shows, Rizal was not at all the solemn type his paintings and statues show him to be. He had a mischievous wit to go with an acerbic pen. His satirical writings, of which this is a prime example, show him to be full of irreverence which, more than his diatribes, is what probably pissed off the Spaniards. I half suspect that the younger generation in particular would have a better appreciation of the man if his halo was tucked in the corner for a while.

The third is that Rizal, who had a sharp eye for the foibles of the indio, might as well be speaking to us directly in this essay. This piece has to do with a hypothetical indio debating with himself whether to side with the friars or the people opposing them, which is not unlike our times. His dilemma is one we can easily sympathize with, or laugh bitterly at in painful recognition.

The fourth and most important reason is that this is the time of year when my thoughts are neither suicidal nor homicidal but libational, when my arms turn to lead, and pounding on the keyboard to produce gems of wisdom takes on the aspect of one of the more serious labors of Hercules.

So Rizal to the rescue. The title of his piece is "Reflections of a Filipino," written sometime in 1884. This is a much cut-up version:

"What are the advantages of being anti-friar?

"Nothing really. The more I analyze it, the more I find it silly and imprudent. This thing of struggling so that the country may progress ... the country will progress or not, without me. What do I care if the coming generation enjoys more or less freedom than I? The point is the present. The point is that I, my Number One, do not have a bad time. A bird in hand is
worth two in the bush, says a proverb. Charity begins at home, says another. Here I have two proverbs in my favor and not even half a proverb against me ....

"What do I care if the friars do not want the education of the country? They must have a reason. I agree with them. Since I was a child, I had a hard time going to school and a harder time getting out of it ....

"That the friars oppose the teaching of Spanish, what is the matter with that? What do we need Spanish for? ... If it were Latin, I say good. The curate says God listens first to the prayers in Latin, which is why curates live in abundance and we Tagalogs are badly off. But Spanish? To understand the insults and swearing of the guardia civil? It is enough to understand the language of the butt of guns .... And what use is Spanish to us since we are forbidden to reply? ....

"They say the friars have many women and paramours, even married ones .... I say if one can have two, three, or four women, why should he not have them? Women are to blame. Besides there is something good about the curate. He does not let his paramours die of hunger, as many men do, but supports them, dresses them, and supports their families.... Frankly speaking, if I were a woman and had to prostitute myself, I would do so to a curate ....

"But what if the liberals win?

"History says that the Catholics took advantage of the night when the heretics were gathered in Paris on St. Bartholomew's Day and assassinated them .... What if the anti-friar Filipinos, fearing that the friars might do to them what they did in France, take heed of this lesson and do it first? Holy God! Misfortune of misfortunes! What would then become of me if I side with the friars?

"Every Filipino prisoner or exile opens the eyes of one hundred Filipinos and wins as many for his party. If they could hang all the Filipinos and leave only the friars and me to enjoy the country, that would be best. But then I will be the slave of all of them! What is to be done? Liberalism is a seed that never dies. Decidedly I will remain neutral. Virtue lies in the
middle ground.

"Yes, I will be neutral. What does it matter to me if vice or virtue should triumph if I will be on the side of the vanquished?

The point is to win. Wait for the figs to ripen and then gather them. See which party is going to win, and when they are intoning the hymn, join them and sing louder than the rest. I will insult the vanquished, make gestures, rant loudly so that the others will believe in my ardor and the sincerity of my convictions. Here's true wisdom! Let the fools and the Quixotes allow themselves to be killed so that their ideals may triumph ....

"Let the friars win, let the liberals win. I will come to an understanding afterward with the victors. What do I care about the native land, human dignity, progress, patriotism? All that is worthless if I have no money."

The event we celebrate a couple of days from now, of course, shows that that damned Rizal never had this dilemma. Or that if he had it at the point of death, he resolved it heroically—and poetically (remember "Mi Ultimo Adios"?), if not wittily. Ponder his words and hope to God (and him) we can find our way to having one truly happy new year next year.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40477

Good God December 27, 2006

LAST Friday, the Kapatiran party came out with a full-page ad in the Inquirer. The ad invited people to join it and run under its banner in the May elections. The brainchild of Gunless Society exponent Nandy Pacheco, Kapatiran pitches itself as the antithesis of trapo politics.

Its agenda is one any God-fearing, civic minded, or just plain decent person can subscribe to. The only thing in it that I think will be harder to push than ending corrupt politics is ending "sports whose main purpose is to inflict physical harm or violence on the opponent." I can't see Manny Pacquiao's legions of fans in this country harking to that cry.

I asked Pacheco how many candidates Kapatiran would be fielding this May and what positions they would be seeking. He answered with his usual fervor that he doesn't know that yet, and that is precisely the reason they are inviting potential candidates to the party. Their very process is anti-trapo. The trapo method is to start with individuals or personalities and build platforms from them. In Kapatiran, they start with the platform and draw believers to the fold.

The trapo system is for individuals or personalities to be bigger than their parties. The politicians who join those parties do not do so because they believe in what the parties stand for, they do so because they believe in what their standard-bearers can do for their careers. That is why they think nothing about switching parties. That weighs as much upon the conscience as changing clothes. In Kapatiran's case, the people who will join it have only their convictions to reward their decision. Kapatiran does not offer much by way of resources, but it offers much by way of principles.

Their candidates will not spend a fortune to run for public office. They are banking on the voters, with the help of the Church and other institutions that champion morality, to see that candidates who spend a fortune to win office will extract an even bigger fortune from them after they do. The Kapatiran candidates will merely offer honesty and good government, with their own reputations or life's work to commend their cause.

Quixotic quest? Batty idealism?

Maybe. But before we dismiss it as such, let us look a little at ourselves and see if the problem does not lie there. Indeed, let us look a little at our world and see if this project or experiment is the one that is standing on its head or we are. Elsewhere, the idea that parties come first before members is the most commonsensical thing in the world. Elsewhere, the notion purveyed by exponents of Cha-cha, which is that you can have a parliamentary system while having no real parties, or where parties follow the ambitions of individuals and not where individuals subscribe to the beliefs of parties, would be the battiest thing in the world. Here the opposite is true. Maybe we should ask ourselves if we haven't gotten so used to looking at things upside down that we keep finding quixotic, batty, or plain wrong the things that are really standing right side up.

We keep complaining that we have no choice but to choose between GMA and Erap. That is batty. This country has never lacked for alternatives. It is not even a question of wit, or the ability to discern them. It is merely a question of will, or the willingness to act on them. That was plain to see in the last elections. Why should the contest be reduced only to a choice between GMA and FPJ? There were other candidates, and far more moral ones. To this day, I believe Raul Roco would have made a good president, notwithstanding that he would have served all too briefly, and notwithstanding that his personality would not have endeared him to a lot of people.

But the self-styled political pundits said the others were not "winnable." Seemingly savvy, that in fact is standing the world on its head. What makes candidates "winnable" is that we want to vote for them. What makes candidates win is that we vote for them. We refuse to want to vote for a jerk, he does not become "winnable." We refuse to vote for a jerk, he does not win. Other of course than by calling up Garci and employing the services of Esperon. Candidates do not become winnable by an act of God or by something that inheres in their person. They become winnable because of a power we hold in our hands. That is the vote.

I've said it again and again: The only thing worse than being powerless is having the power but not using it. And the only thing worse than that is having the power but not seeing it.

Are projects like Kapatiran quixotic and batty? Or have we just become jaded or blind? The Church has a point when it talks of character change rather than Charter change. But that is so in a deeper sense than the bishops themselves allow. We do need to acknowledge our own contribution to the mess that is this country. We do need to start doing what is right if only to end what is wrong.

The problem about political alternatives is not unlike corruption. As I keep telling audiences, we all like to damn public officials for having no honest bone in their bodies and hope to God lightning strikes them where they stand. But come the baptism or wedding of our children, who do we get as their ninong and ninang? Do we get the upright public school teacher down the street who can barely make ends meet, or the barangay captain at the other end of the same street who everyone knows to be dedicated only to collecting tong from drivers and vendors? You pick the first and people will laugh at you and call you stupid.

I do know Nandy Pacheco has been called many names. Well, I guess he deserves it. He is guilty of the most heinous crime in this country today: He is guilty of decency. And, worse, wanting to spread it.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40301

You December 26, 2006

THAT was a very interesting Person of the Year that Time Magazine chose this year. I couldn’t agree more.

That Person of the Year is “You.” You, the individual reader, the individual person, the individual occupier of space on this planet, are Time’s choice as the one living being that had the greatest impact on the world this year. Traditional wisdom, which owes to Thomas Carlyle, says the history of the world is just the biography of great men. Not so, says Time. Or no longer so today.

“Look at 2006… and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing….”

Thomas Friedman already noted this development in his 2002 book “Longitudes and Attitudes.” He posited that to understand 9/11, you had to understand the broad canvas behind it. That broad canvas was what was happening to the nation-state. Three things in particular, he said, had changed dramatically.

The first was the relation between nation-states. We have only one superpower left, which is the United States, which has to deal with a host of small nation-states. The second was the relation between nation-states and global markets, or economic globalization. And the third was the relationship between nation-states and individuals.

“Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously rewired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. Whether by enabling people to use the Internet to communicate instantly at almost no cost over vast distances, or by enabling them to use the Web to transfer money to obtain weapons designs that normally would have to be controlled by states … globalization can be an incredible force-multiplier for individuals. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by the state.”

I myself have been writing about this from quite another perspective, which is the digital revolution. Its enormous impact I saw during Edsa People Power II. To this day, I maintain that one of the most critical factors that took Joseph Estrada out was the Filipino community abroad, which made their sentiments known through the e-mail and cellular phone. The volume of e-mail that landed in the Inquirer Online at that time was phenomenal. Unlike Edsa People Power I, which reduced the Filipinos abroad largely to spectators, Edsa People Power II elevated the Filipinos abroad to the status of active participants. That was so because of the new technology, which allowed them to take part in the dramatic events in this country in real time, or near-real time. They might as well have been here, if in virtual form.

That technology has made even more tremendous strides since then. The prediction that TV, communications and computers would soon merge has come true. Tomorrow is today, as witness the cellular phones that can receive TV signals and do computing work.

Since Edsa People Power II I’ve been repeatedly saying that the new technology will alter profoundly our concept of news -- and sooner than we think. Online News, in particular, has added whole new meanings to the word “interactive.” “News” is no longer an etched-in-tablet, handed-down-from-heaven, final word on the subject. It is something completely correctable -- and correctable almost as soon as it sees life online. You will get an instant reaction on it, from grateful or irate readers. What makes Wikipedia truly wondrous isn’t just that it is one colossal encyclopedia freely available to everyone. It is that its version of the “truth” can be changed anytime. In fact, it actively encourages readers to send additions and corrections to its entries.

I’ve been telling NGOs all this time that at no time has their work become more viable. Traditional sources of authority are being subverted every day by a technology that is allowing more and more people to have more say in how things are run, or ought to be run. Of course, that includes them: their own authority is being subverted by a technology that is allowing individuals with a computer and a telephone to unburden themselves of their 10 cents’ worth on any issue that takes their fancy.

The last suggests the downside to all this. As Time notes, “Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom” and “some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.” And as Friedman suggests, you can use the Web as much to foment iniquity as end tyranny, as much to hatch terrorist plots as stop plots to mount dictatorships.

But I’m personally hopeful, and not a little excited, about democracy coming out ahead rather than behind from these developments. Democracy itself is like that, too: it allows crackpots, as much as sages, to have their say on how things ought to be. But collective wisdom has been known to drown out collective madness in the end, which is still what makes the worst democracy better than the best dictatorship.

Democracy has always meant a strong people, not a strong government; a strong citizenry, not a strong republic. If that’s the case, then I’m hopeful that with the strengthening of the individual voice today we may yet survive our corrupt leaders and obscene dancers (not the strip-teasers, the Cha-cha-ers) and become a truly strong and free nation. The future doesn’t lie with them, they just know how to lie. It lies with:

You.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40205

God bless the child December 25, 2006

SOME YEARS AGO, I REMEMBER GETTING A letter from an irate reader protesting something I wrote about Christmas, intimating that her wrath was the least I should worry about: a more fiery fate awaited me in the afterlife. What got her goat was my depiction of the Nativity. I said that the true magic of Christmas lay in that the Savior or Redeemer—as Christians take Jesus Christ to be—was born not in finery but in filth, not in glorious pomp but in abject poverty.

I described in some detail what the Three Kings might have seen at the end of their journey that dark night. There was nothing peaceful and calm about that night, it was a wintry night, the winds howling and the dogs baying fearfully in a land God seemed to have forgotten. Proof of that was that the inns were full, weary travelers resting their bones with the aid of liberal libations. That was why the innkeepers turned away the two strangers who knocked on their doors, the woman heavy with child. The ragged appearance of the two, which suggested they could not afford the inn rates, did not help any.

Proof too that it was cold as hell was that the owner of the barn that housed the animals did not bestir himself that night to check on the condition of the animals, if not the barn itself. There is no mention in the Nativity story of Joseph having knocked on the door of the shepherd to ask permission to seek shelter there. We can only guess at the smells that assaulted the Three Kings as they made their way inside: We may safely assume they were nowhere near the pungent smell of pine and grass suggested by belens and Christmas trees.

And the sight they beheld! They would have seen a couple in tattered rags not unlike the indigenous folk that descend on Metro Manila during the holidays, being turned away angrily by shops and restaurants. They would have seen a newborn child covered with hay and straw and whatever was to be found there to keep him warm. I doubt they would have seen a beam of light coming from heaven, or the fabled Star, setting the child aglow. I doubt they would have heard an angelic chorus break from the clouds and set the scene afire. Maybe, they might have espied a little drummer boy in a corner singing, “I am a poor boy too parampampampam… I have no gifts to bring to lay before a king parampampampam,” which he did in fact have. But that’s another story.

In short, there would have been no external divine or cinematic special effects to show the Three Kings that they had not trekked in vain or were being epically delusional. For them to be possessed of the certainty they were in the presence of divinity, for them to fall on their knees on ground full of animal leavings and lay out before the child their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh, ah, but they themselves must have received the gift of insight, the gift of sight. That is what thrills me no end about the Christmas story.

But for some reason, my reader took rather violent exception to this, and like I said unleashed upon me apocalyptic visions to visit my sacrilege. She was unshakeable in her conviction that the world as we knew it was radically transformed at the moment of Christ’s birth, so that He no longer wore swaddling clothes, if He wore any at all, but was garbed in regal raiment not unlike the one found in various icons of the Sto. Niño. She was certain angelic voices filled the air, if not to form the strain of Handel’s “Messiah” or any recognizable Christmas carol, at least to fill the human ear with the most heavenly tintinnabulations.

Well, to each his own. From quite another angle, there’s that part in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” somewhere near the end, that is not unlike what I’m saying. They finally reach the place where the Holy Grail lies, but the problem is that there isn’t just one grail but a whole slew of grails. Drinking water from the right cup brings everlasting life and from the wrong one instant death. The villain chooses the most regal among the cups, one befitting a king, drinks from it and crumbles to dust. Jones picks a shabby cup tucked in one obscure corner and brings life back to his father.

It’s the gift of insight, or plainly the gift of sight, that makes us see divinity, that gives us the spark of divinity. And that is the even greater magic of the Christmas story because I figure that that gift of sight or insight simply came from the Three Kings suddenly looking at the world from the eyes of a child. Not unlike those possessed by the child they beheld. Magically, the Three Kings became the Three Wise Men by looking at the world with the wonder-filled or awe-stricken eyes of the little drummer boy.

It is no small irony in that we are a nation that is especially fond of the Christ-child, celebrating the Sto. Niño with near-fanatical passion, and yet unable to see things with the eyes of that Child. We are a people who are easily waylaid by appearances, who prefer porma to essence, ritual to practice, wearing finery to Mass and murdering our fellows with impunity afterward; who assess the world through the greed-filled eyes of “adults” rather than with the simplicity of the innocent. We garb the Sto. Niño in royal robes and do not see the street children strewn on sidewalks, who dream of heaven through the fumes of rugby. Well, the Sto. Niño was born in a state not unlike them, too.

I don’t know, but I half-suspect we’ll never find heaven by scanning around for the special effects. I don’t know if it’s there in the Bible, but I seem to recall that Jesus Christ said something once to the effect that only those who become like a child again will enter the Kingdom of God.

Take it from Billie Holiday too: God bless the child.

Merry Christmas everyone.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=40087