Getting a US visa

JUNE 15, 2006. 9:20 A.M. Shaded by a small parasol from the fast heating morning sun, the guard handed back my all-important confirmation notice and courteously said: “Your schedule, sir, is at 9:30 yet. Come back after 10 minutes.”
Behind the concrete barricades I sought shelter under the canopy of those old balite – or are they banyan? – trees to while the time away. A heavily-jeweled lady, in the shade too, started a conversation: her schedule was 11:30 pa, she felt certain she’d have her visa renewed as she’d come back and did not go TNT on her trip to the States, “unlike some miserable folks abusing the hospitality of America.” I asked her how long was the visa given her? “Ten years, multiple entry.” And how many times had she used it? “Just once.” Okay. I wished her luck.
Exactly 9:30 I was told to go through Gate 3, where I had to pass a metal detector and place my bag through an X-ray machine, before taking my place at the end of long queue to a window marked “A-L surnames.”
Snatches of animated conversation eavesdropped along the line run the gamut from the spiritual to the illegal.
“I did not miss a single Wednesday in Baclaran praying the novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help for two months,” said a youngish matron pining for her first visa.
“My novena was to St. Jude,” replied an older one, adding that her supplication to the patron of impossible cases was prompted by her two previous rejections, err, denial of her request for a visa.
“The minimum three months is all I need,” said a thirty-something. She had no qualms in revealing her intent to stay in America, no matter the cost, “even marrying a bed-ridden octogenarian.”
“We have visas na. We frequent the US, you know. We’re here to apply for our baby,” a young couple bragged, an infant asleep in his father’s arm. On their turn at the window, the wife was horrified to find that her baby needed a photograph in his application.
“It was not stated in the requirements,” she tried to rationalize with the stern-looking American lady at the window.
“The slot for the photo is just too big for you to miss,” came the retort.
To her rescue, someone in the line said there were photographers just outside the guardhouse offering five-minute services. So, with her husband and baby, off she ran.
After 25 minutes, it was my turn at the window. Passport and visa application were checked, found in proper order and passed on to an assigned consular officer, I presumed. A numbered stub was given me with the instruction “Go to the pavilion and wait for your number to be called. Good day.”
A hundred others were waiting there seated on benches under a signboard “Waiting to be finger-scanned.” Instructions on the proper placement of the left and right index fingers on the scanner were posted all around to facilitate the process. Numbers were being called – in batches of five, and flashed on a lighted digital bar at the top of the door.
It was 11:00 A.M. when my number, 3184, was called. So with 3180 onto 3185, I entered an SRO consular office. Windows 1 and 2 were for finger-scanning, Windows 3 – 11 for the interview.
A scar on the left index finger of number 3183 warranted 20 minutes of questioning. It took another five minutes for the scanner in-charge to finish scribbling notes on a yellow post-it she affixed to 3183’s passport. “Denied ito,” I mused.
My own turn to be finger-scanned was a breeze. It did not take more than two minutes. And I got myself a seat after five minutes.
To pass the time, I engaged in a guessing game. At every flash of a number, I took a quick look at the visa applicant and deemed if a visa would be forthcoming or not.
Nine of ten, I was right in my judgment. Based not on psychological profiling but on mere observation. Two extreme types of character were denied visas: those who came in too weak – angst-ridden, nervous, fidgety, obsequious; and those who came in too strong – swaggering in confidence, obnoxious.
There was this business-type guy in coat and tie who, soon as he came to Window 4, pulled out the contents of his bulging attaché case – land titles, bank books, SEC papers, and laid them on the counter. The consular officer was not apparently impressed by this display of wealth as he promptly denied the application, without even asking him any question. Lesson: Don’t pre-empt the officer. Take out your supporting documents only when asked.
A matron made the sign of the cross when her number was called. She went to Window 6 as if she was ready to faint – ashen, trembling legs and all. She too was denied.
On Window 8, a group of three women and one lawyer-looking guy engaged the consular officer in a heated argument when one of the ladies was denied her application. Even after a new number was flashed for that window, the four refused to leave. A guard had to escort the four out of the office.
Pity those who would be assigned to Window 8, I told my seatmates. It would be rejection there henceforth.
Much to our chagrin, 3180-3185 were assigned there. And so it was as I said. It was hello and goodbye to 3180 in less than one minute. One question and it was all over for the rest. A denial, seemingly at face value, for 3183. Then, it was me.
“Good luck po,” 3185 called out after me.
“Good morning, Mister Caesar,” greeted the consular officer. It was 11:55. Of course I answered “Good morning too” and added “How’r you doing?”
Good, was the reply. As he scanned on his desktop what I presumed to be my application and some other data of my previous stay in the USA.
“So you were in the States last year?”
“Yes, and in the two previous years.”
“What was your longest stay?”
“Five months in 2000.”
“Why did you stay that long?”
“Had to seek refuge in the States and let things cool back home after an ambush that killed three of my friends.”
“Oh. Are you a travel writer? Did you write for newspapers when you were in the States?”
“I am a political and economic journalist. I did some writing when I was there for the newspapers here in the Philippines.”
“Would you like to avail yourself of a journalist visa so you can pursue your profession in the States?”
“I prefer a tourist visa. I go to the States for leisure not for work.”
“Okay. How about your wife, does she have a visa.”
“Yes. She was in the States in 1981, err, 2001.”
“Are you traveling with her?”
“Yes. It will be our first together.”
“Okay. Enjoy your trip. Here’s your yellow card. Make arrangements for your visa delivery at the pavilion.
“Thanks. Have a nice day.”
“Have a nice day too.”
At the Del Bros counter at the pavilion, I was making my delivery arrangements when 3185 came. She too got a visa. For three months to Guam. No, she won’t go TNT there. She told me she had an examination to take pursuant to her masteral degree.
June 19. 4:42 P.M. A Del Bros messenger in motorcycle delivered my passport. Affixed is a five-year multiple entry B1-B2 visa. Deng Pangilinan would have ejaculated: “God bless America!”

Remembering Wykes

The epitome of an officer and a gentleman. The quintessential cool. That is how I remember Reynaldo Wycoco, having had the privilege of working with him up close and personal for a few but fruitful years.
I first met him at the coffeeshop of the Mandarin Hotel in Makati sometime in September 1992 in a meeting with then Interior and Local Government Secretary Raffy Alunan. I presented before the chief information officers of the DILG-attached agencies a working paper on the need for a public affairs council to coordinate and integrate their information plans and programs for greater efficiency and effectiveness. Colonel Wykes was then chief of the PNP police community relations.
Being the most senior officer, he was offered by the Secretary to chair the proposed council. He politely declined. And to my great surprise, he recommended that I headed the council, being the principal proponent. I was serving as special assistant to the DILG Secretary that time. Thence, I practically had daily talks – in meetings or through the phone – with Wykes and then PNP PIO Supt. Cris Maralit on the ever-burning police issues.
The police then – as now – was raked in coals, its image seared and sooted. But no matter what, Wykes was the Iceman personified. Even when the Secretary blew his top. And yeah, not once did I hear him raise his voice. Even to errant cops or his erring staff.
The late Louis Beltran was a thorn on the Secretary’s side. A number of well-meaning friends of Tiyo Paeng – as we fondly called the Secretary then – tried to “soften” the hard-hitting journalist, but all failed. Wykes took me one morning to dzRH where Louis was having his broadcast. At the sight of Wykes, Louis told us to “tell Raffy to sleep well na.”
It was in the islands of Tawi-Tawi however that I got to know how cool Wykes really was. This was on a mission to reach out to “lost command” separatists in 1994. Governor Gerry Matba, an MNLF original commander, put on rickety boat a handful of his full-armed men along with us – Wykes, myself and Abet Bernardo, head of the National Reconciliation and Development Program – and spec to a remote island municipality where the lost command were holed up.
As we arrived long after dark, it was decided that we met the next morning. After a hearty dinner of grilled tuna and assorted fish and seaweed, we retired to our room in the mayor’s house.
Shortly before dawn, I was roused by Abet holding his Glock semi-automatic pistol.
“Gisingin mo si Wykes. Na set-up tayo,” he whispered.
Wykes – in pyjamas -- was his usual cool when I woke him up.
“Wala na si governor pati mga bata niya,” Abet apprised us of the situation, parting the curtain at our room to show a vacant sala where Matba and his security slept.
Wykes asked me to crawl and peek into the room where the mayor’s family slept. I saw the whole family there.
“Relax, wala silang balak sa atin. Hindi nila iiwan ang pamilya kung yayariin tayo. They can serve as our hostages,” Wykes assured us, and just to show everything was alright, he went out of the house – without a gun – where he found the governor cooking our breakfast.
At the negotiations with the lost command group, Wykes was all tact and patience in face of the near impossible demands. In the end though, more than fifty hardened fighters gave up an assortment of high-powered weapons, including AK-47s and RPGs and returned to the fold of the law.
It was this episode that Wykes had always in mind from then on whenever he introduced me to his friends and subordinates, saying: “Masikip ang pinagdaanan namin ni Bong.”
I joined Wykes in some other “missions of peace” in Sulu and Lanao and in the Cordilleras.
The first time we met after his assignment to the NBI, I asked him for his business card. He wrote at the back “Dear Bong, To an old friend and fellow crusader for peace, my best regards.”
To my gentle friend: Rest well in the bosom of our Father.
(COMMENTARY, Sun-Star Pampanga, Dec. 23, 2005)



.

The voice of our gods

IT is the favorite ejaculation of my favorite mayor: Vox populi, vox dei, with, perhaps, the least idea of its etymology: from late 15th century, the Renaissance abloom, and Il Papa ’s sole proprietorship over God’s word challenged.
Most assuredly though, he – my mayor, knows full well the argumentative efficacy of his oracion, having invoked it at each of his questioned poll victories. Its potency proven most definitively in his unprecedented four terms – and still counting, making him a firm believer in the power of the vote, a firmer believer in the power of the Comelec, and the firmest believer, I would so presume, in the power of prayer.
So enshrined in our so-called democratic tradition is the sanctity of the ballot. From our youth, we were led to believe – and without question accept – the element of the divine in the exercise of suffrage. The curtained poll booth in the pre- and immediate post-Martial Law years even resembled a confessional. Thus, the affected infallibility of our election results: God speaking with the voice of his people. Blaspheming reprobate is he that dares question the word of God!
Vox populi, vox dei takes roots in the Book of Genesis, at the very instance of Creation itself, if I may advance so myself, neither knowing nor having read any priest, philosopher or political scientist having said it. (Let me know if I appropriated somebody’s statement so I can promptly and properly apologize.)
Read Genesis 1:26-27: “God said, “Let us make man in our image, to our likeness…So God created man in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
What is it that makes man, and woman – to be gender-correct – unlike all of creation, in the likeness of his Creator? Will and reason.
The exercise of our free will is that we most share with the Divine. As voting is an exercise of our free will and use of our reason, our choice thus corresponds with that of God: our voice becoming God’s.
The cynic that I have turned to be in things political now asks: Which god?
In the pursuit of our electoral exercises do we, as we should, to quote Baruch Spinoza, “… use in security all (our) endowments, mental and physical, and make free use of (our) reason”?
Reason, my ass. Reason is at its weakest when passion is at its strongest. This is borne in Philippine elections: always visceral, rarely, very, very rarely cerebral. There lies a chasm as unbridgeable as sin between man and God. So what voice of God do we talk about in election results?
Fettered on patronage, the electorate makes the vote a commodity to trade for some favor, given or promised, or to directly sell for cash. The outrageous outburst of Gouverneur Morris at the time of the infancy of the American nation comes of age: “Give the vote to the people who have no property, and they will sell them to the rich, who will be able to buy them.” Not only able but willing and raring to buy them.
Factored on popularity, the electoral choices tax the intellect of the gnat. Were a brain pool of the country’s elected officials established, it most surely would fit the head of a pin.
Fault not the elected. Damn the electorate. So we have clowns and idiots in the Houses, so we are clowns and idiots ourselves. An iteration ad nauseam: We just don’t deserve whom we elect. We are whom we elect. The booboisie, as H.L. Mencken put it, is us. And our vote, the “great right grossly abused, and has become, in practice, a grave wrong.”
Still, we adhere to the veracity of vox populi, vox dei.
But the voice of the people has become the voice – not of God – but of their gods. The lord of numbers, the lord of celluloid illusion, the god of goons, the glorious goddess of the tapes.
Aye, Alcuin, an English scholar and theologian of the 8th century is right: “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”
(Pampanga News, Jan. 6-Feb. 1, 2006)

Taiwan redux

TAIPEI – Travellers coming back to Manila after, say, ten years, are wont to exclaim the metropolis has not changed in their long absence: same place, same sights, constant, stagnant.
In stark contrast, Taipei – and for that matter, Taiwan – appears in a perpetual state of flux. A most pleasant discovery for this writer in the four days he and a host of other journalists spent going through the city and the island.
The gigantic pillars noted in a 2003 visit now support a four-lane elevated highway by-passing the Beitou Refuse Incineration Plant just across a river to the city suburbs.
An incineration plant so near a commercial and residential district makes the worst nightmare for some self-proclaimed environmental experts here. But Beitou has none of the fears factored in those nightmares. Not a trace of stench from the trucks that bring in the garbage to be fed to the incinerator. Not the slightest smell of burning trash. Not the merest trace of Pasudeco-like black, stinking, particle-laden smoke out of its concrete chimney: so massive that its top is rimmed by a fine-dining revolving restaurant and viewing deck from where one can look down at pockets of greens – orchards, rice paddies, vegetable patches and herbs fertilized with composted residual ash. Or one can look out far to the horizon through the smog-free skyline of the city dominated by Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building. Eat your heart out, Petronas.
Trash power
Beitou, which generates power sufficient to energize its contiguous communities, is run by the Department of Environmental Protection, Taiwan’s counterpart of Mike Defensor’s turf.
To Defensor’s utter shame though, timber licenses are unknown in Taiwan. On return from my October 2003 trip, I wrote in my Zona Libre column in The Voice:
“Green. That is the color of Taiwan. From the air, as well as on the ground. Clean. That is the order of things in Taiwan. From the streets to the squares.
New generation forests fill the hills and mountains. Rice paddies, vegetable patches, herbal gardens and orchards blanket the plains. Pristine blue rivers shine blinding bright in the sunlight. And glow in the moonlight.
Can’t help but wax romantic at Taiwan. And weep when we think of the Philippines.”
On this recent visit, Taiwan’s green has become even greener. Its clean, well, cleaner.
Green coal
Clean as coal. Oxymoronic. A contradiction in terms. A reality in Taiwan.
Co-generation plants dot both the urban areas and the countrysides of Taiwan. But the dreadful Dickensian scenario affixed to coal-fired power plants of blackened skies, acid rain and black lungs does not obtain here. Not the slightest trace of it. Not even in the imagination of the people in and around the plant sites.
A total negation of the dirty-coal-presumption is the Nan Ya complex in the Tao Yuan district of Taipei. At the core of the complex is a 57-megawatt co-generation plant which directly powers the adjacent Nan Ya High Tech and Nan Ya PC Board companies that produce highly sensitive computer components such as thin-film transistor liquid crystal displays, dynamic random access memory chips and wafers.
Dust, as well as particles from factory smoke, is known as the curse of semi-conductors and components. The two high-tech companies at Nan Ya would have long closed shop were the co-generation plant a dirty pollutant, so went the argument. The more telling argument for the plant though is Nan Ya PC Board is second in the world in its line of products. Indeed, one can’t argue with success.
And yes, Nan Ya complex is some 500 meters from the sprawling five-storey Tai Mall and lies well within a mixed industrial, commercial and residential community.
Yet another argument for clean coal is the co-generation plant powering a high-tech electronics and computer parts factory is the Hwa Ya Power Corp., 16 kilometers from Taipei.
Taiwan’s No. 1
Both the Nan Ya and Hwa Ya co-generation plants are subsidiaries of Formosa Plastics Group, the largest private enterprise in Taiwan with over 82,000 employees and investments in the United States, China and Indonesia. FPG is engaged in the whole gamut of products ranging from plastics and plasmas to PVCs, heavy industries, petrochemicals and refineries, power plants, electricity and steam, spandex and wafers, epoxy and fibers.
On 2,096 hectares of reclaimed land in Mailiao in Yunin county – some four-hour smooth ride south of Taipei – the Formosa Plastics Industrial Park with its flagship No. 6 Naphtha Cracker Project is a virtual industrial city with its own postal system.
Two power plants – thermal, with an output of 1.8 million kilowatt, and co-generation, producing 1.82 million kilowatt – provides for the power needs of the park and sells its excess electricity to the Taiwan Power Company. Aside from electricity, the co-generation plant generates steam, industrial water, ultra-pure water, nitrogen, oxygen and compressed air for use by project-related plants at the park.
A core value of the FPG is environmental protection which is manifest in the creation of the Nan Ya Environmental Engineering Center. . .
Of the total investment of US$19.2 billion at No. 6 Naphtha Project, US$3.82 billion – a cool 20 percent – is earmarked for environmental protection that subscribes to both national and international standards.
At all FPG co-generation plants, omnipresent is the chart for emission standards in advanced countries in terms of sulfur oxides (SOX) and nitrate oxides (NOX) at the unite of particles per million (PPM). For the USA, it is 600 SOX and 285 NOX; Germany and Switzerland, 140-100; New Zealand, 100-70; Taiwan, 300-250. At Formosa, it is the highest standard at 50-60.
The Philippine mean is reportedly 1000 SOX and 700 NOX.
Strictly implemented at the FPG co-generation plants is most advanced cleaning technology that includes: accurate furnace combustion design, selective catalyst reduction, installation of electrostatic precipitator, low NOX burner, flue gas desulphurisation, and closed ash and coal handling system. .
All these clean technology capped by the more advanced circulating fluidised bed type – not to mention its integrity as the Number One Company in Taiwan, the Formosa Plastics Group is investing in a very minuscule – by its Taiwan standards – 50 megawatt co-generation plant at the TIPCO complex in Mabalacat, Pampanga.
Ah, Mabalacat. Blacked-out Mabalacat. Can’t help but compare, however odiously, the town consigned – by the incompetent PELCO II – to the Dark Ages when one is regaled by the brightness of night even in the far-flung countryside of Taiwan. Even the North Luzon Expressway, for all its amenities, is still an embarrassment when compared to the expressways – not only well-paved, but also well-lighted – of Taiwan.
Power is a premium to development. Light is its symbol. (Isn’t light at the very core of Creation itself? As God Him- or Herself said?) Looking at the colourful Christmas-themed lights of Taipei 101, one can’t help but feel the bursting energy of Taiwan. And weep for one’s own benighted country.
(The author does not have any pretension at being an environmental expert. He writes only what he perceives.)
(Pampanga News, Dec. 22-28, 2005)


.

Heritage of sin

DON Angel Pantaleon de Miranda, in his storied goodness, had only supremely sublime ends in founding Kuliat. Conversely – more aptly, perversely – Angeles, the city that rose out of Kuliat, was conceived and birthed from the loins of an occupying army. How the Don must have convulsed in his grave!
The epithetical “Sodom of the Pacific” summed up the city’s not so distant American past, and impacted in its present as well (Or as badly?).
Sin City has been so etched in the national psyche as an Angeles legacy that it simply cannot be buried in oblivion, not even by the thousand tons of Mt. Pinatubo ash and lahar that devastated the city. Or, if one may, phoenix-like it formed, flew and flourished from that very volcanic ash. Whichever, Sin City is there as ever in all its shameful – or should it be shameless? – ignominy. An unwanted but indefeasible heritage.
Heritage. The word is one hot issue these days, rising from the teapotted tempest that brewed out of the proposed city council resolution of the Honorable Jay Sangil to declare the Grand Palazzo Royale as a city heritage site. Precisely, the alderman argued, to focus on the good and the beautiful in the city and veer it away from its sin image. No fireworks were exchanged though in the council hearing at the Palazzo itself with learned members of the community opening their cultural and historical reservoir of knowledge that was greatly appreciated by all those present.
So, Grand Palazzo Royale may not fit the heritage tag but, in the words of Tourism Director Ronnie Tiotuico, more than qualifies as a “prime tourist attraction.” Interestingly, Tiotuico pointed out that the craftsmanship involved in the construction of the Palazzo, being a skill passed down from preceding generations, is by itself a heritage.
Presently though, a presumed (presumption mine) cultural cognoscente who was not present at the hearing came out in print with a scholarly disquisition on heritage. Thanks to his erudition, we barbarians whose comprehension of heritage was bounded by its dictionary definition of “property that can be inherited” were enlightened with the element of time, historical significance, cultural impact, and ethnic identity that make heritage… well, heritage.
In the practical application of this new-found learning, I am now inclined to lobby the city council to declare Fields Avenue as a city heritage site. It meets the qualifications of time, having been there for as long as anyone can remember; of historical significance – of world proportions at that, playing a pivotal, albeit leisurely, role in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, care-giving to battle-fatigued American GIs; of cultural impact, being the melting pot of Waray, Cebuano, Bicolano, Ilongo and Capampangan culture, pulchritude, even idiosyncracies, if not perversities; of ethnic identity, Fields Avenue is uniquely Angeles City’s.
A bonus, Fields Avenue has an international reputation, being the point of convergence of foreigners, no, make that a miniature United Nations in the city, with its share of just about every nationality: American, Australian, British, Belgian, Swiss, German, Japanese, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, whatever. To some others though, Fields Avenue could make the Interpol’s rogues’ gallery on the profiles of some of its habitués.
Yet another international factor for Fields Avenue is its having more hits in the Internet than the Angeles City and Pampanga websites combined. Then there was that spread – publicity, good or bad is still publicity – in the glossy GQ magazine late last year, indeed a crowning achievement for Angeles City’s famed avenue of the senses.
Even more qualified than Fields as a city heritage site is the Area, also uniquely Angeles City’s. Pre-war pa, it even holds some anthropological significance being the long-preferred locus of the rite of passage of Capampangan males. The Area easily coasted through the American Period, the Japanese Occupation, and the American Re-Occupation, and survived a number of conflagrations sparked by righteous religious vigilantism. The Area – it is privately acknowledged – even serves as a zone of peace: the combatants – policemen, army troopers, insurgents of all persuasions – laying down their arms there to lie down in the arms of its denizens.
Sin City forever. A fitting heritage for Angeles. Pronounce that the American way –
ein-jeh-less. Meaning, without angels, as in where there is sin there are no angels. Haven’t we read something to this effect somewhere? Yes, The Sinners of Angeles, magnum opus of the Capampangan writer I revere most, Tatang Katoks Tayag. Now, that’s one literary heritage Angelenos should be most proud of.
(Pampanga News, Feb. 2-8, 2006)

Vice as virtue: the paradox of prostitution

‘TIS pity she’s a whore.
I cast not the first stone here but I aspire to take a look at the ground touched by the Teacher’s finger.
Aye, nothing is sadder, nay, viler, to which any woman can damn herself than prostitution. The damning most often not of her own volition but inflicted upon her by circumstances way out of her control, at times even way beyond her ken.
The poor barrio lass lured by city lights, promised some restaurant job; the desgraciada banished from home needing to feed her bastardo; starvation in the resettlement sites; desperation in shantytown – lachrymose tales at the initial telling in the bar, dulled at their retelling in the brothel, and at the noisy karaoke, hardly touching to move the tear ducts. So, who has heard of any bargirl who wanted, really, really wanted to be one?
Yet, some poignancy still stirs in the jaded reality of prostitution. It takes but a little sensitivity to feel for the most exploited of women.
A brief passage on the subject from the English writer William Samuel Lilly, wrenches the soul: “All the dignity of womanhood gone; all interests in life, save those of purely animal nature, extinguished; not even the power of repentance left, in many cases, for a career of animalism has degraded them to the level of the animal and the moral sense is atrophied. No; in place of repentance, merely regrets when their physical charms have faded; when diseases incident to their calling have made a prey of them; when destitution and desolation stare them in the face.”
As true today as in 1899 when it was written, but, perhaps, for that part “all interests in life…extinguished.”
A rage to live, precisely, is the given rationalization for prostitution, well premised on argumentum ex necessite: To live, if it be necessary, to sell the body and pawn the very soul.
Indeed, what options has one “not so much born into this world but damned into it” to rise from the depths of a squalid existence? Deprived of the rudimentary requirements of education and bereft of the all-too-important social connections, too fragile or too lazy to be a menial, one’s easy path to economic emancipation is prostitution. No matter its sudden bend to a road to perdition.
Sex sells. It may well be the only commodity that breaks the law of supply and demand: supply being always available and demand never waning. Ever bullish would sex be in the stock market, were it listed and gone IPO.
Prostitution though is not pure, err, all economics.
The anthropological element being intrinsic to sex naturally gives a socio-cultural and – God forbid! – some salvational dimension to prostitution.
The manangs will surely cringe at this but even St. Augustine – perhaps drawing from his experience as a rogue before his conversion – said something to the effect that “to abolish courtesans would be to trouble everything with lusts.”
I just can’t recall if it is in his Soliloquium Animae ad Deum, or most probably in his philosophical treatise De Ordine where the foremost doctor of the Church said this.
So, they who just lie down and wait with open arms and open legs serve too a redemptive purpose?
Consider this paean to the prostitute of Irish essayist William E.H. Lecky in his 1872 History of European Morals: “That unhappy being herself the supreme type of vice, is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted, and not a few who, in the pride of their untempted chastity, think of her with an indignant shudder, would have known the agony and remorse of despair. On that one degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that have filled the world with shame. She remains, while creeds and civilizations rise and fall, the eternal priestess of humanity, blasted by the sins of the people.”
Prostitution – as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be. For prostitution as the oldest profession is the causation of sex as the oldest obsession – the single constant in human evolution
Taking cognizance of prostitution as a necessary evil then, it is for those in authority to regulate it and minimize, if not eradicate, its resultant rascalities.
And for all of us, to let go of our hypocrisies.
(Pampanga News, Feb. 9-15, 2006)

Blessed poverty

AT no season of the year is unchristian charity more practised than at Christmastime.
Hordes of do-gooders – notably politicians – make perfunctory swoops through resettlement sites, squatter areas and shantytowns bearing an assortment of stomach fillers packaged in Christmas tinsel stamped with their names in big, bold fonts. As though it came from their pockets and not from the public coffers they plundered or from some contractor they bled dry.
And what gift-giving would be complete, nay, would even be without the media pressed to cover the event?
So we’ve been dogmatised from our pre-first communion catechism class that gift-giving took off from the first Christmas example of the three magi whose anonymity – the Good Book did not identify them, remember? – spoke a lot about true charity, and a lot more about humility.
Though tradition named them, it did not tell of a gift of gold from Gaspar, myrrh from Melchor, or frankincense from Balthasar. Tradition travestied now in every gift gilded or etched with titled names, as in smoked ham from the honorable governor, pungent edam from the honorable congressman, crispy Ninoy from the honorable mayor. Honorific oxymorons, given the conduct of Philippine elections.
Rob the country blind the whole year. Give something for the noche buena table of the poor. And all is well with the Lord. Christian living, indeed!
At no season of the year is poverty most pronounced than at Christmastime. You just can’t escape it. Not in this so-called season of giving when, most naturally, beggars – in all shapes and sizes – go forth and multiply.
There’s the outstretched palm shoved at your face, nearly knocking your coffee mug as you watch the girls pass by Old Manila at SM. There’s the unshod kid with baby brother in tow tugging at your shirt as you line up for Dragon Gogo at KFC.
There’s the tap at your car window stalled at Dolores junction from a tabo-tapping tyke.
There’s the unending stream of carollers of all ages in two’s or three’s, singly or in gangs singing thanks for your five-peso kindness.
There too are the indigenous Aetas descended from Porac’s hills and the Badjaos way off their native Sulu Sea finding their way to your very doorstep, demanding food, clothes, money as though you were the very cause of their deprivation.
Ah, a new racket I noted this Christmas: “SEC-registered” religious and civic organizations from Kamuning, Quezon City and Tanay, Rizal going house-to-house at St. Jude Village with letters of solicitations for their “projects for the poor.” They could have simply saved on their bus fare and gave them to their poor.
The poor do indeed make an object lesson for Christmas. But not from the perspective of patronage politics where the poor are shamelessly dehumanised, reduced to utilitarian tools. Nor from the pharisaic (dis)compassion of wannabe Samaritans where mendicancy, instead of liberation –from poverty, that is – is instituted.
The poor make the very leitmotif of the season. Or have we forgotten how the Christ was born? Engrossed as we are in the commercialisation of Christmas, we define its meaning in the malls rather than in church, and much, much less in our hearts.
Only yesterday, a beggar knocked at my gate and asked in a guttural – read: non-Pampango – voice for a little share of the blessings God gave me this year. His jaw dropped when I told him that in his poverty he was more blessed than me. No, I did not mean that he did not have a house and cars to maintain, mortgages to pay, kids to send to college, job pressure, societal demands, etc. I meant a different kind of blessedness that is inherent in poverty. That is the spiritual kind.
Is it just me, or is it still a verity in Christian teaching that poverty liberates? That the poor, unfettered by material possession, have so much spiritual wealth that in the end, theirs is the kingdom of heaven?
(COMMENTARY, Sun-Star Pampanga, Dec. 28, 2005)

Politics and the rule of law

PRINCIPLED politics is a contradiction in terms: mutually exclusive, diametrically opposed, for in politics “no one acts on principles or reasons from them.”
There is that generalization arising from the fixity of our intellectual habits that deems the recurring characteristic trait of a segment of one species as representative of that species, if not of the whole genus. Thus, taken on the whole, politicians are “…the vilest and the narrowest of sycophants and courtiers that humanity has ever known; their sole end basely to flatter and develop all popular prejudices, which, for the rest, they but vaguely share, never having consecrated one minute of their lives to reflection and observation.”
And, Monsieur Leroy Beaullieu did not even live long enough to read of the Filipino politician, writing as he was of the French kind in the 1890s. So what’s the difference between a Filipino politician and dalag? One is a voracious filth-feeding bottom dweller. The other is a fish.
Expediency and convention, utility and interests – self-serving, vested interests, are the fundamental matters – I could not dare write principles here and desecrate the word – whence politics breeds.
In no single recent issue – political, naturally – are all the above “matters” instanced than in the ConCom-forged body of recommendations for Charter change submitted to the President. Need I elaborate?
Okay, Simplicio Simon: It is expedient – highly utilitarian too – to the embattled administration as it acts as a lightning rod to deflect the more pressing issues of colossal corruption, pervasive poverty and the question of legitimacy; convention – the well-worn ejaculation of “ the rule of law” at play here palliates the restive but un-militant sectors and soothes the indifferent mass, auguring well for GMA; and best of all, its No-El provision caters solely to the interests, and whets the insatiable appetites for pelf and power of the sitting politicians.
The rule of law. How many crimes have been inflicted upon the people in its name? To prevent anarchy in the streets and restore the rule of law, so Marcos’ proclaimed Martial Law. To prevent disruptive rallies and restore the rule of law, so Macapagal-Arroyo issued those EOs.
In the context of the impeachment complaint against the President, the “rule of law” that was invoked by a compliant, if not kowtowing Congress, in its railroading was a rule, yes, but not of Law. It was simply the rule of numbers.
Consider these universal givens:
Stripped to its essentials, Law is a “function of Reason,” as Aquinas put it. Kant furthered: “the expression of the Reason common to all.”
Law is “the rational or ethical will” of the body politic; “…the principal and most perfect branch of ethics,” as the British jurist Sir William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries.
Thus, in the foiled impeachment case, the subsumption of a moral inquiry, nay, its nullification on mere technicality, no matter how “legal,” is a travesty of Law. As factored in the above-given “truths.”
Aquinas, still in Summa Theologica: “Laws enacted by men are either just or unjust. If they are just, they have a binding force in the court of conscience from the Eternal Law, whence they are derived…Unjust laws are not binding in the court of conscience, except, perhaps, for the avoiding of scandal and turmoil.” Touche. But, really now, has conscience a place in Philippine political praxis?
The “rule of law” in its application hereabouts takes primary place among those that a forgotten jurist said were “…laws of comfort adopted by free agents in pursuit of their advantage.”
Time for us all to reflect on “the doctrine that the universe is governed in all things by Law, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power.”
And to those misnomered solons: “To interpret the Law, and to bring it into harmony with the varying conditions of human society is the highest task of the legislator.” Not to vote NO to impeachment.
(Pampanga News, Jan. 19-25, 2006)

No to reconciliation

IT is in the highest interest of the people of the City of San Fernando that Mayor Oscar S. Rodriguez and Third District Representative Dr. Reynaldo B. Aquino not reconcile.
Not now, that is. This is a printed iteration of my position on the issue Mayor Oca and Cong. Rey: Napapanahon na ba para magkasundo? tackled in the program Talking Points over San Fernando’s Infomax 8 channel last week.
Differences, nay, conflicts that dangerously tread on legal grounds cannot just be nonchalantly swept under the rug of reconciliation and then forgotten like nothing happened.
For one, a sudden reconciliation between Aquino and Rodriguez amid unresolved allegations of wrongdoing will foment thoughts of kutsabahan, of a partnership in corruption. Two, unresolved conflicts dangerously evolve into even more complex and complicated discords.
The Rodriguez camp fired the allegations that Aquino so mismanaged city hall that it was virtually bled dry during his watch – a measly P33 left in the supply funds, some dirty fingers dipped in the sacrosanct trust funds, unliquidated cash advances, etcetera. These need to be definitively resolved, not in the media where they have been amply ventilated, but – with the gravity of their ramifications – in the proper legal forum. Their resolution is a matter of duty for Rodriguez, a course of justice for Aquino, and in the interest of the Fernandino.
Then, there is the temporary restraining order the court granted Aquino on the P125-million loan the city government contracted with the Land Bank of the Philippines for the express purpose of erecting new school buildings, and rehabilitating the wet section of the old public market.
For this singular act, Aquino has been damned as “anti-poor, the enemy of public education, being of wealth and having been schooled in private institutions.”
Aquino was mongoose-quick in dodging those venomous strikes.
At a breakfast of burgers and fries Saturday last week with the Society of Pampanga Columnists, the congressman took more than the usual pains in presenting a pro-education platform as a personal commitment to the people not only of San Fernando but of the whole tersera distrito, to wit: more than 500 scholars in high school, vocational schools and colleges; his eponymous literacy program REY (Reading Enhancement for the Youth), school building construction, etc.
Says the doctor-legislator: “I am all for education. The TRO I sought is predicated on a legal question: That the special educational fund (SEF) cannot be used as a collateral. Not even for loans intended to benefit schools.”
Contrary to the opinion of the other panellists in the Infomax 8 show that the TRO has further disadvantaged the poor public school students, I hold the view that it had no detrimental effect.
A simple (-minded?) equation: If Aquino is right, then the city government will save a lot – no P125 million loan to pay translates to increase in the city coffers. If Rodriguez is right, then there will be 27 new school buildings all around the city.
Contrary to the fears of the other panellists that the Aquino-Rodriguez row would impair the growth of the city, it is my belief that it would even accelerate that growth.
Aquino and Rodriguez are perceived to be the best leaders the city ever had. Only the best therefore – perceivably – can come out of them. Aquino and Rodriguez in competition will be best for the city as one will try to outdo the other in performance, in the implementation of their respective development agenda for the city, in the extension of services to the Fernandino.
The requisite check-and-balance in clean governance comes in full effect here too, with one closely monitoring the other’s official – and even personal – transactions.
So do I aspire to see a perpetual conflict between Aquino and Rodriguez? No. Nothing, after all is permanent in this world. So they will reconcile. But hopefully only after a definitive resolution – a closure, if you may – of the allegations they threw at each other.
In this, and in other rows, political and otherwise, dialectics serves as a very good guide: Only after the thesis and its anti-thesis have clashed in a free, full and open encounter can the synthesis be realized.
As to those who rue the great cracks in, if not the end of, friendship between Aquino and Rodriguez, let me say this: There is no friendship to be sorry for. Aquino and Rodriguez were not friends. They were political allies.
Affirmed once more is that “truth so trite as long ago to have become a truism” – In politics, there are neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies, only permanent interests.
(Pampanga News, March 30-April 5, 2006)

Intimations of immortality

PLANT a tree, sire a child, write a book. Was it a Chinese sage who made this prescription for immortality?
Unimportant really as the adage has long been appropriated by the Rotary.
So, I’ve done all three – in excess too: hundreds of trees from Mount Arayat to the edges of the shoulders of MacArthur Highway to my own backyard, six bright kids and a grandson to boot, and three books so far. So, am I now immortal?
Thoughts, nay, apprehensions over one’s mortality are endemic to the Age of Aches when the knee joints creak, the fingers start stiffening, and it takes longer to get out of bed. And that makes just the easy part.
This too is the Age of Don’ts when the spice, the salt and the sweetness of life are deemed a forbidden lot. Unkindest, most insufferable of all though is the quenching of the once raging conflagration in one’s loins.
Comes to mind a now departed elder’s toilet lamentation over his lifeless member: “We were born together, why, in heaven’s name, did you die ahead of me?”
And that notice posted atop a urinal at a retirement home in Big Sur, California: “Your hose is short. Your pump is weak. Come a little closer or you’d pee on your feet.”
Machismo knows no surrender though, else it ain’t machismo. From the myth of the Spanish fly and the legend of the Korean bug, the search for the ultimate stiffening tonic stopped at Pfizer’s sterile lab. So the inevitable was defied. So manhood rejoiced at the resurrection. So comes now a novel entry in the coroner’s report: stiff staff in advanced state of rigormortis. Dropped dead ignominiously.
In the not so distant past, a politically incorrect chauvinistic take on the aging distaff side made the rounds: “When a woman finds herself unattractive to men, she turns to God.” Ah, how the churches filled with veiled manangs lighting votives to just about every saint to intercede their case with God in heaven.
Ah, how have times changed! O tempora! O mores! as Cicero ejaculated. At the first sign of the dreaded wrinkle or the initial lump of distressing cellulite, women now haste, not to the nearest church but to the spa, the centre, the clinic. Their hallowed velo traded for the doctored Belo.
Vanity of vanities, all the world is vanity. Can’t we just age gracefully? And meet our Creator as we are, most honestly, naturally, the least artificially?
Intimations of mortality generally spur too a frenzied accumulation if not an accounting of one’s worldly possession for a lasting life of ease and some guaranteed provisions to loved ones that one would leave behind.
It is not bad to prepare for the future of one’s progeny. It is supremely better to prepare for one’s future spiritually.
I remember the sudden death last year of one who amassed much material wealth in so short a period and immersed himself in the pleasures of the world. As I sat down to say a little prayer for him, I got the shudders when I opened the gospel for that day, Luke 12:13-21, The Parable of the Rich Man: “…I shall tear down my barns and build larger ones. There I shall store all my grain and other goods and I shall say to myself, “Now as for you, you have so many good things stored up for many years, rest, eat, drink, be merry!” But God said to him, “You fool, this night your life will be demanded of you; and the things you have prepared, to whom will they belong? Thus it shall be for the one who stores treasures for himself but is not rich in what matters to God.”
We give much account for worldly wealth. What shall we present for the divine audit?
In the divine scheme of things – and people, yes – heritage, legacy, what we leave behind, no matter how great, is not as important as what we take along. The purity of our soul. Then God have mercy on us all.
(COMMENTARY, Sun-Star Pampanga, Jan. 9, 2006)

The masa antithesis

Hindi mangmang ang masa. Sila’y pinagkaitan lamang ng tamang pagkakataon upang ganap na umusbong ang kanilang katalinuhan, ng akmang kaganapan upang malinang ang kanilang karunungan – pagkakataong pinigil ng hagkis ng kahirapan; kaganapang sinupil ng hataw ng pang-aapi’t pagsasamantala ng mga naghahari-hariang uri.
That “the incompetence of the masses is almost universal throughout the domains of political life…” is a fundamental fallacy in the bourgeois postulates on the people, as contrasted to the competently propertied People we wrote about last week.
The masa response: There is no inherent mass incompetence among the people: there is mass oppression, exploitation, and deprivation that caused incompetence.
Premium to the existence of class exploitative societies is the oppression of the people. Of the highest priority is the reduction of the people to their basic animal instincts, the deprivation of their natural rights as human beings, in order to best serve – in the bourgeois interest – their principal purpose as nothing more than tools of production.
Sa kaisipang elitista, ang masa ay kawan ng baka’t kalabaw na isinisingkaw sa mga bukirin, sa mga planta’t pabrika upang mabigyan tugon ang lahat ng mga pangangailangan, upang masustentuhan ang lahat ng luho at kapritso ng uring peti-burgis.
Tunay ka, kasama: Tamad na burgis na ayaw gumawa, sa pawis ng masa ay nagpapasasa.
Deprivation damns the people to incompetence, dispossessing them of the necessary knowledge and skills to rise above the lot pre-ordained for them by the ruling class.
Born poor. Live poor. Die poor. An animal existence. To the elite, that is the
masa destiny. A vicious cycle with neither definitive end nor fixed beginning.
Of that, it is not.
Incompetence, as we have stated, is reared upon deprivation which in turn is rooted in exploitation which spawns from oppression. To make possible the
elimination of incompetence among the people then, exploitation need to be uprooted.
Ang pagkapantay-pantay ng mga mamayan ang sandigan ng isang demokratikong estado. Ang mga kalakarang piyudal, pagbubusabos sa mga anak-pawis, paniniil sa mga anak-dalita ay walang puwang dito.
So government exists for the purpose of preserving the status quo. This does not cover though the preservation of the system of class exploitation.
Ang pagtaas sa antas ng pamumuhay ng mga mamamayan ay hindi lamang pangunahin kundi sagradong gampanin ng pamahalaan. Lakip nito ang pagbibigay puwang sa pinakamaliit at pinaka-aba mang mamamayan ng bahagi sa mga gawain at pagkilos na tuwirang tumitimo sa kanilang buhay. Anumang kaganapang taliwas dito ay isang kabalintunaan sa demokratikong estado.
The bourgeois thesis of governance as a monopoly of the propertied class has been – rightfully – long consigned to the dustbin of history.
There is though an emerging new elitism. This, the masa should fight with a determined populism.
(Pampanga News, March 23-29, 2006)

De-pressed

“WERE it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter.”
Heel, ye maddened martial mongrels unleashed by Proclamation 1017. This is no advocacy for the downfall of the Macapagal-Arroyo government.
The greatest republican – and unarguably the greatest intellectual of America’s presidents – Thomas Jefferson paid that supreme tribute to the press – albeit prior to his presidency and subsequent rows with the first American muckraker, “that scurrilous scoundrel (James) Callender” – strong in his conviction that “To the press alone, checquered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.”
My free interpretation of Jefferson leads to the conclusion that the press is supreme over government in service to truth, liberty, and humanity itself, and, consequently, the press holds a moral ascendancy over government.
Considered from this high moral ground, the assault on media instanced in the raid and police occupation of the Daily Tribune offices, and the clear and present danger to press freedom poised by General Order No. 5, as enunciated by the police top dog, are an affront to liberty, a mockery to democracy, a disservice to humanity.
“Shock and awe” intended to induce a chilling effect on media appeared as the primary objective of PNP Chief Lomibao’s reading of the virtual riot act that is GO No. 5. Let me just remind Lomibao: “Shock and awe” was the US oplan for the Iraqi invasion. Look where it got the US. Neither shocked nor awed by the state-of-the-art US war materiel, Iraqi insurgents have, as of last count, sent home over 2,000 US troopers in sealed, starred-and-striped boxes.
For all the sensitive care with which the Palace factotums handled any discussion of the state of national emergency with the no-martial-law recurring refrain, still the martial slip showed in Lomibao’s take on GO No. 5. Did he not warn media to hew to “standards set by government” in the practice of journalism, or face dire consequences ranging from police take-over of media operations to closure?
The closure of media facilities – The Manila Times and ABS-CBN in 1972 – is standard martial law practice. So is the government setting the standards for media to follow in the exercise of their profession. It is not too distant in the past to forget the Marcosian Bureau of Standards for Mass Media (BSMM) that set as the highest standards of journalism practice the apotheosis of Apo Ferdie and the idolatry of Imelda the Beautiful.
So should the standards be now pegged at Gloria in excelsis?
“Overkill” was how former President Fidel V. Ramos termed Proclamation 1107. We are reminded here of Ninoy Aquino’s analogy on the declaration of Martial Law: “You don’t use a .45 to kill a fly.”
Seemingly a panicky over-reaction, the state of emergency negated all the proclaimed gains of the Macapagal-Arroyo administration, most especially in the area of economic stability. Witness how the strengthening peso tumbled vis-à-vis the dollar upon the issuance of 1107. Why, no less than the finance secretary was reported to have said that the state of emergency would have some non-positive impact on the economy.
The intent of a coup confided by one soldier to his very superior did not warrant a state of emergency for the whole country. Especially after the President herself assured the nation that everything was under control, her control. And we readily believe her. The disproportion though in the words uttered and the actions taken by the government leaves a chasm of credibility, nay, of incredulity.
Thus, even greater is the loss of the administration in the free market of ideas. By clamping down on the critical press, it showed its weakness to contend in the realm of reason, in the field of propaganda as well, despite its own formidable media machinery. By Proclamation 1107, the government compensated with brawn what it sorely lacked in brains, as it were.
A relevant read in these times – for the government to take heed and the press to find inspiration – is in Areopagitica (1644), John Milton’s greatest work of prose hailed as the greatest defense of the freedom of expression in all history: “And though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing or prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter.
For who knows not that Truth is strong, next to the Almighty. She needs no policies nor stratagems, nor licensing to make her victorious – those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her while she sleeps.”
So while the nation slept, the Daily Tribune was bound. We go on sleeping, we shall all be bound.
(Pampanga News, March 2-8, 2006)

No EDSA Revolution

I wrote it once and I write it again: EDSA I was no revolution.
Thus, in the remembered verses of a sophomoric piece I scratched on a cigarette pack amidst the euphoria after the dictator fled:
Wala.
Walang himagsikan sa EDSA.
Kumaripas ng takbo ang lahi ni Hudas,
Pumalit nama’y lipi ni Barabas.
Ano ang nabago?
Mukha.
Hindi prinsipiyo.
Adhika ng liderato: palawigin ang status quo –
Piyudal na agraryo, burukrata kapitalismo,
Bansa’y sakmal pa rin ng puting tsonggo.
Aklas bayan, pinagsamantalahan
Trahedya ni Bonifacio muling nagka-ganapan,
Imbing ilustrado ang nakinabang.
Wala.
Walang himagsikan sa EDSA.
Burgis, uring naghahari pa rin;
Ang masa, sa araw at gabi ay inaalipustang alipin.
History teaches that liberation is an essence of revolution. Liberation, so to speak, is the resultant purification from the crucible that is the revolution: effecting the transformation of the state of national existence to a level supreme over the pre-revolutionary one.
So, what has EDSA effected?
Ferdinand Marcos was ousted and long dead. But unburied and waiting for a Libingan ng mga Bayani redemption. The Marcos kin alive and lording it over as if they were never chased out of the country like frightened mongrels: Bongbong Marcos is long-serving governor; Imee Marcos is long-serving representative; and the Imeldific, a long surviving butterfly, metamorphosing from the political to the purely pasosyal kind.
The Marcos ill-gotten wealth? Used as high priced manure sown on infertile political grounds that yielded a miracle crop known as Ginintuang Masaganang Ani . That was GMA in 2004, dummy.
In effect, that wealth was – for the nation – a Paradise Lost in Marcos, a Paradise Regained immediately post-EDSA, and a Paradise Lost, Again circa GMA.
Revolutions impact most upon the political system. So what do we have?
All platitudes to New Politics wrought by EDSA fall flat on the merest glance at a House of Representatives personified in Jose de Venecia. Trapo as trapo can be, Joe de V makes the strongest argument against any change in the political system. Disabuse the mind, stop entertaining the parliamentary nostrum as a cure-all to the country’s ills. With Joe de V, no system of government will ever work for the nation.
No, EDSA was no revolution. See the economic landscape. So the poor did not remain poor. They became poorer and multiplied. The rich became fewer. And enormously richer. What is the equation of inequity now? Less than eight percent of the Philippine population controls more than 90 percent of its wealth? The euphemism haves and haves-not has rightfully yielded to the more appropriate have-all and have-none in our economic index.
So how much was the peso-dollar exchange at the twilight of the Marcos dictatorship? P12-$1? So how much is it now? 74 Wowoweed lives to the peso, as one wag put it.
Don’t get me wrong. I do not hanker for a return to the Marcos years. Why should I when traces of the worst of the dictatorship – calibrated pre-emptive response, militarization of the countryside, assault on press freedom and the stifling of legitimate dissent, extra-judicial killings, etc. – are clear and present occurrences in the GMA regime.
There, that is one more argument that, indeed, there was no revolution at EDSA. Not in 1986. Not in 2001. Wala. Walang pagbabago. Saan ang himagsikan dito?
(Pampanga News, Feb. 23 - March 1, 2006)

Creeping despotism

SO many months back, Malacañang flung the gauntlet that was EO 464 at the Senate, in abject contempt of the latter’s co-equal status in a republican state.
In as many months, EO 464 proved so potent an incantation to just about every government functionary called to the Senate that it rendered the senators uncharacteristically speechless, or meekly resigned to canceling public hearings. Apparently emboldened by the senators’ seeming sheepishness, Cabinet members and their factotums openly snub even the all-important yet routine hearings on their departments’ proposed 2006 budgets.
But for some calculated soundbytes and perfunctory printed noises from two or three senators – search me for the twenty one others – there was nothing of substance that immediately came out of the Senate.
Not a few citizens have gone to calling the Senate as a body of wimps. And hark back to the times of Recto, Tañada, and Diokno.
Towering intellectuals and nationalists all, theirs was the Senate that actualized the noblest elements of the national life, articulated the intellect of the nation, wielded the power of reason against the force of numbers, affirmed the “sanctity of right against the brutality of might”, preserved, protected and promoted the ethos of the Filipino.
Ours is a Senate of…oh, God, what grievous sin have we committed to deserve this punishment? Reductio ad absurdum no matter, the Senate – Drilon, Villar, Gordon, Pimentel, and the Joker as saving grace – still holds some promises. Ain’t hope spring eternal in the heart of the Wowoweed Filipino?
Gladness came to the heart with the news over the weekend that 17 senators have asked the Supreme Court for a temporary restraining order on EO 464. There’s still hope, indeed, Mang Juan.
With a House of Representatives cleaved, cowed and co-opted – some in the Opposition would deign corrupted – by the executive branch, the Senate – its infirmities notwithstanding – is called upon by the nation, if not by Providence, to rise above the vulgar plane of party politics and fulfill its primordial role in a republic: To “curb the propensity of a single numerous assembly to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions,” as The American Commonwealth plainly and so precisely enunciated.
EO 464 aside, the “impulse of sudden and violent passions” blew up too in the railroaded impeachment of Macapagal-Arroyo, the “Hello Garci” hearings, the fertilizer scam, the jueteng hearings, the Venable affair, etcetera. And lest we forget, the Gestapo-inspired calibrated pre-emptive response.
Passions the administration so arrogantly tried to contain with its rule of law and majesty of numbers in a House that caninely pandered to every wish of its mistress, salivating at the prospect of pork from her table.
House members filling the Cabinet – Andaya, Nachura and Puno, among the latest – comes to me though less as a payback for their solid support of the embattled Macapagal-Arroyo at the time of the impeachment than a call to a more important – to Malacañang, that is – mission: Charter Change.
With Puno recycled at DILG, expect the local government units to be reduced to a Cha-Cha chanting chorus. So they will, with utmost certainty, claim they hold the majority of the national constituency. Theirs though would be that majority described by Goethe as “…a few strong men who lead, some knaves who temporize and the weak multitude who follow, without the faintest idea of what they want.”
Millions of signatures from the yoked and herded masa , resolutions from all fawning LGUs, NGO collaborators and vested interest groups are set to be heaped upon the nation to tells us “what the Filipino people want.”
So we want to change our Constitution? So we want a parliamentary form of government? Spare us, Joe De V.
George Washington, for all his intellectual inferiority to Jefferson and Adams, did one over his first two successors. Finding resonance and relevance today in the Philippines is a passage from his farewell address: “The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one, and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”
(Pampanga News, Feb. 16-22, 2006)

A bourgeois thesis

“AS regards the people, they will always be stupid and barbarous. They are oxen which require a yoke, a goad and some hay.”
Damnation from some disdainful despot from the ancien regime? Hardly. That was Voltaire, whose very thoughts were among those that ignited the French Revolution, whose very name impacts of the Age of Reason.
The people are distinctively different from the People: the former are the masses or the general population, rude, lacking in instruction, divorced from rational capacities as Mill wrote; the latter, those possessed of property, the faculties of ratiocination and culture.
They are the same People Jefferson wrote about in the Declaration of Independence as “…all men (are) created equal”, but, with the exclusion of women, the slaves, the indentured servants, and native Indians – all who did not hold, by right, any property, or who themselves were deemed as mere property.
It is a historical given that ownership of property is a foundation of civilization. With the existence of civilization hinged on the continuity of private property, the need therefore for an authority to ensure its protection birthed government. Thus, Aptheker: “the fundamental assumption of political theory: governments existed for the purpose of preserving private property and that therefore, the governors were the propertied and the governed were the propertyless.”
Or, as John Jay, the first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court succinctly put it: “Those who own the country, should govern it.”
Cry oligarchy!
An American scholar, F. Digby Baltzell answers: “Granted, all complex societies – aristocratic, democratic or totalitarian – are oligarchical in that few rule the many.”
Cry inequality!
French writer Benoist responds: “Inequality of value among men is a natural fact. And the practical consequence which spontaneously flows from it is this: Since inequality is a fact, equality ought not to be a right; since all men are not identical, all should not have the same powers as electors. No! Men are not equal to one another physically, morally, intellectually, or from any point of view of natural fact, and therefore they ought not to be so politically.”
The equality of all men in the body politic is but a manifest sophism that unfortunately became an accepted article of faith in a so-called democracy. So where has it led this country?
Self-government is the first pretension of democracy. In the individual man, wrote the English scholar Lilly, “self-government means the supremacy of the intellectual nature over the sensitive; the predominance of the moral over the animal self.”
Indeed, how can the people “carried by every storm of passion, by every wind of impulse, by every gust of emotion” then self-govern?
Aye, give the people the power to decide and they would “place preponderating political power in the unfittest hands.” See the jokes and the blokes, the “master-idol of the delusory realm” running roughshod in both Houses of Congress.
For, as Robert Michels wrote in 1915 yet: “The incompetence of the masses is almost universal throughout the domains of political life, and this constitutes the most solid foundation of the power of the leaders.”
Some of Mill’s advocacies on governance find the greatest merit: only taxpayers can vote – voting as a duty has the concomitant responsibility of paying taxes; an educational test for voting – a more stringent test for candidates, if I may add; all recipients of government aid barred from voting.
That is for the best. For, only the “gifted Few” have the right to govern, with their “collective mediocrity” the people are mere objects of government. Nothing more.
(Next week, the people’s antithesis)
(Pampanga News, Mar. 16-22, 2006)

Our Father

DICKENSIAN – the best, the worst – were the times when I met him.
From the eve of the First Quarter Storms to the declaration of Martial Law – the span of my formative years at the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary – recalled with chilling accuracy the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities: “…it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”
Come to think of it, ain’t these the very times we are currently damned in? Aye, that Irish saying is right: “There is no present, there is no future, only the past happening over and over again.”
So indeed it was the best and the worst of times for an adolescent being nurtured in religious scholasticism but at the same time voraciously feeding on the dialectics of Marx and Engels. A pedagogic contradiction: the Bible, Augustine and Aquinas on one hand, The Communist Manifesto, Lenin and Mao on the other – how I kept my sanity in that period, I still don’t know. Maybe I did cross over to the dark side, having lost the Faith then.
His counsel as my spiritual director – later he became our rector – on the inherent danger in flirting with agnosticism I hardly noticed, immersed as I was in historical and dialectical materialism.
I remember – now with much remorse – one time, in an instance of supreme arrogance, I dared him on the non-existence of God, my atheistic premise grounded on Nietzsche and Hegel. The good father did not indulge my intellectual conceit but kept on believing in me, praying and hoping for my ultimate renewal. This, even at the height of my apostasy.
“There is no God!” I shouted, the day the iron gates of the seminary – San Jose, where I moved to after graduating from MGCS – closed behind me.
One year and one summer after I left his care to propagate my own faith founded on the trinity of Marx-Lenin-Mao, Ferdinand Edralin Marcos issued Proclamation 1081.
Hunted by the military, I joined underground cells doing re-organization work. When school resumed, my name was among those blacklisted at the then-Assumption College – to be re-enrolled only after securing the all-important clearance from the Philippine Constabulary.
Lost, whom did I seek?
There was no second of hesitation on the good father when I asked for help. There was no I-told-you-so recrimination. Not even a brief parental sermon.
At the Pampanga PC Command he vouched for me as a character witness before a panel of interrogators whose viciousness would have made boy scouts out of Tomas de Torquemada’s inquisitors.
Forced out of the interrogation room, so there won’t be a witness to the romanza militar (euphemism for the physical and mental torture inflicted on captured or surrendered activists) I was to undertake, the good father appealed my case before the provincial commander, the dreaded Col. Isidoro de Guzman.
He did not exactly melt the heart of the colonel – later to earn infamy in the Escalante massacre – but he managed to secure my release.
The good father, in what could only be deemed as a leap of faith – in his God unquestionably, in me too, maybe – signed a document that said in part, “…in the event that subject activist-provocateur renew his connection with the Communist Party of the Philippines and its various fronts in the pursuit of rebellion; or undertake acts inimical to peace and order, or in gross violation of the provisions of Proclamation 1081 and other pertinent decrees, the signatory-custodian shall be held responsible and as liable…” with a proviso that in my stead, he would be placed in the PC stockade.
Did he tell me to change my ways? Did he impale in my conscience the gravity of my case, his implication in any instance of carelessness or recidivism on my part thereon?
No. From the Constabulary command, his mere request was for me to please accompany him to church.
Before the Blessed Sacrament, he knelt and silently prayed. He did not even ask me to pray with him. He just motioned me to sit near him.
By the side of the good father, in that darkened corner of the Metropolitan Cathedral, I wept. Washed by a torrent of tears was my rebirth, the renewal of my faith.
No spectacular drama presaged my epiphany, no blinding light, so to speak, shone on my own Damascus Gate. There were but flickering votives. And Apu Ceto.
To him, my father, my lifelong gratitude. And prayers.
(Pampanga News, March 9-15, 2006)

Customized image

CCO – what stands now for the Clark Customs Office had – in the distant American past and, yes in the early eco-zone present – meant Customs-Cowboy Operations. In reference to the storied collusion between certain customsmen and smugglers called cowboys, later euphemized as “Ninjas.”
It was this CCO that birthed the PX trade in Dau and Nepo Mart, once the principal income-earner in the Metro Clark areas. It was this CCO that flooded the local market with Ma-Ling.
I don’t know if it has anything to do with its spanking new office but a whiff of fresh air permeates the current CCO. For one, the cloak and dagger subterfuge of its operations is gone. There is transparency thereabouts.
The transfer of the Customs Clearance Area from Cargohaus to the Clark Customshouse impacted with computerization and the improvement of documentation procedures did wonders in cutting bureaucratic red tape with a one-stop shop for all transactions operating on 24/7. And like the Gordian Knot, wherever and whenever red tape is cut, efficiency and productivity ensue. For the CCO, this translated to a revenue collection of some P541 million in 2005, as against some P438 in 2004. A cool P100-M difference.
The collection in the first five months of 2006 point to an even improved net collection.
The improvement of Customs services also obtained at the Diosdado Macapagal International Airport. A customs mobile scanning unit is now in place there and manpower complement has been upgraded to cope with the increased number of flights.
How about the scourge for which the CCO earned its infamy in the past in – smuggling?
The diminished reports of smuggling attempts – one clear sign of collusion in the past – is now a definitive reflection of the no-nonsense campaign of the CCO. Again, the collection figures bear this out.
A foolproof indicator though of any illegal activity obtaining at the CCO is the number of customsmen frequenting pricey nightspots and spending like there’s no tomorrow for the devalued peso. There aren’t any, so we heard from Tony Mamac and company.
Still, the greatest standard against which the performance of the CCO is measured is in its relationship with its principal clients – the investors and locators at the Clark special economic zone.
Here the CCO, specifically its top honcho, District Collector Ronnie C. Silvestre, scored no less.
“For exemplary services to the Clark Special Economic Zone,” Silvestre was bestowed the President’s Award by the Clark Investors and Locators Association last January 31, 2006.
There is something about Silvestre that spells success, some sort of a touch of Midas.In his previous assignment, at the Port of Manila, collections exceeded targets by P324 million in January-May 2005, and recorded the biggest surplus in its history in 2004 with a whopping P2.588 billion!
In his earlier assignment at the FTI Customs Office, collections exceeded targets by P6.135 million from July-December 2002 and recorded a surplus of P13.87 million in 2003.
With Silvestre’s exemplary performance wherever he’s been assigned, we are most certain that the Clark special ecozone and the DMIA are in good hands.
(Pampanga News, June 22-28, 2006)

Prejudicial pride

KIMOSA. The playful pun says it all.
The invasion of the Mimosa Golf and Country Club by hordes upon hordes of Korean tourists – from south of the 38th Parallel we all presume – that began with the first flights of Aseana Airlines to Clark is finally over.
About to begin is the occupation of the Mimosa Golf and Country Club by citizens of the Land of the Morning Calm, NTM Jin Hung having won the bidding for Senor Don Jose Antonio Gonzales’ bank-pawned, CDC-sequestered crown jewels.
Ay caramba! Isn’t there an appeal of the Castillian to recoup his estate now pending before the Supreme Court? What if he wins? No, he won’t win?
Madre de Dios! The CDC Board of Directors has a gift of prophecy, manifest in their awarding Mimosa to NTM Jin Hung. That Antonio Ng and company did not even bother to wait it out shows that they are most certain that there is no sliver of a chance for the Don to reacquire his once enchanted fiefdom.
Sinverguenza! The paisano parian Antonio spiting the heredero Senor Don Antonio! Que pasa? Es verdad, malo esta nuevo orden del mundo.
Indeed, a new world order obtains at Mimosa, again Kimosa, to be more apt.
The lamentations of the Mimosa members suffering discrimination – more economic than racial – in their very own turf can make a case for violations of human rights.
A golfer who looks like Mabalacat Vice Mayor Crisostomo Garbo complains of being deprived the services of his favorite caddy girl. Why? She has reserved herself for Korean golfers. How come? A sober Ninoy Aquino makes a bogey to a smiling Benjamin Franklin on any day at the green. Yes, Garbito, Koreans tip in dollars not in won. As if you did not now.
Ah, this you know, as well as that other guy who is a spitting image of Bernie Cruz. The common request at the caddy shack by Korean golfers: “I want my caddy last night.” As I have yet to hear of night games in any of the three courses at Mimosa, I can only assume that that referred to a night-before short putt in a nineteenth hole. That is the caddy’s own, dummy.
Under CDC supervision, Mimosa has been ruled by Koreans. Rudely, claimed one local golfer whom I mistook for Tony Mamac. With NTM Jin Hung in full possession, greater discrimination at, if not a total shut out from the course is no baseless apprehension among the locals.
Thus, the Indios Bravos to the rescue of Filipino pride and honor. Senator Lito Lapid, Angeles Mayor Tarzan Lazatin and Mabalacat Mayor Boking Morales spearheading calls for a probe of allegations of rigging in the Mimosa deal.
The alleged disqualification on mere technicality – fifteen minutes late – of the other bidder, Avenue Asia, an American firm reportedly, smacked of pre-bid preference for the Korean bidder and prejudice against all others? The three officials believed so.
I don’t know how efficacious is Lapid’s proposal of a consortium of local businessmen-golfers to lease – not buy, for sheer lack of capital – Mimosa from CDC. I don’t know how the local golfers will take this.
What I do know, hearing it from a great number of them, is that Mimosa has to be taken out of the hands of CDC to save it from further ruination.
“For five years, we have been advocating for the privatization of Mimosa. This is to restore the course to its former glory as one of the best in the Asia-Pacific region, where even the likes of Tiger Woods came to play,” Mamac, the president of Mimosa members, stressed.
He lamented the mismanagement of the course by CDC after it took over from Gonzales owing to the latter’s financial woes with his creditor banks and Pagcor.
“Mimosa served as CDC’s milking cow. The sad thing is CDC did not take it to pasture, so to speak, failing miserably to maintain, much more upgrade it,” Mamac added.
Like other members, he believed that privatization will increase the value of Mimosa shares which at the time of Gonzales rose to as high as P1.5 million per share. Today, according to Mamac, it is down to a low of P200,000.
What if only the Koreans have the financial means to bail out Mimosa?
Pride takes the backseat then, Mamac said. “So long as our rights as members are upheld.” So there.
Still, the Senator wants his probe. While at it, may we suggest that His Honor expands his investigation to what we see as the creeping Koreanization of Angeles City.
While we have always welcomed foreign investors, there is something different with the Koreans. This is no racial prejudice. But a great many locals have observed that there is little benefit from the Korean invasion here.
Koreans patronize their own. They shop in Korean grocery stores, dine in Korean restaurants, wine in Korean nightclubs, stay in Korean hotels, relax in Korean spas, buy Korean cars. Very soon, they could be importing Korean GROs too. It won’t take long and we shall have a Korean mafia here too.
Ang maghahari-hari dito, kahit na sa krimen pa, dapat Pilipino. Ain’t we proud of ourselves?
(Pampanga News, June 15-21, 2006)

To Kingdom Come

DEPRESSING. Really depressing was all the news that came out of the idiot box Monday night June 5, the day schoolyear 2006-2007 opened.
There were the protest rallies of students and teachers against their own school principals in Quezon province and Taguig, for a lot of perceived misdemeanors and alleged malfeasances ranging from unauthorized collection of fees and the forced patronization of the school canteen to missing funds. That lingering shot of two schoolgirls carrying a basket of snacks to their room for sale to their classmates gives a new low to the commercialization of education in this country. It started with teachers doubling as Avon ladies, life-plan agents and Tupperware sales reps, then onto tapa, tocino and longganisa. Now this, tetra-packed juice and chichiria. By next year, it could be buchi and bananacue. Understand that Madam got a family to feed and school too.
In Sulu, ABS-CBN reported that at least two schools in Patikul town had not opened. There were no student enrollees, the residents having remained in some other towns they fled to two years ago to avoid getting into the murderous crossfire of the military and the Abu Sayyaf. In another school, the principal lamented the dearth of Arabic teachers.
In Bontoc, kids had to walk through a winding hilly trail for two hours to get to a school with no lights and toilet. And that is even the safe part. The trail turns to an impassable quagmire in the rainy season.
What hit me in the gut though was the crime story of the day. Two minors caught in a Paranaque police dragnet on known and suspected pickpockets, hold-uppers and snatchers that preyed on students. They robbed, they said, because they wanted to have money to resume schooling. One getting to Grade Four this year. Oh God!
Flash to National Capital Region Police Director Vidal Querol warning “huwag kayong manalbahe sa hanay ng mga estudyante” and unleashing a force of 5,000 policemen in Metro Manila to secure them. The students, not those in conflict with the law. Oh Good God!
And then comes the piece d’ resistance – the annual fare of dilapidated classrooms where there are classrooms, the “open-air universities” where there are no classrooms, the dilapidated desks and the lack of desks, the dilapidated books and the lack of books.
Truly, the dilapidated state of education in this country. That gets further dilapidation with the fielding of teachers in subjects they have not specialized in, as – again as reported by ABS-CBN –in a librarian and a home economics madam teaching mathematics.
Depressing. What solutions have this government offered to remedy this situation? The presidential tempered 100:1 classroom ratio that dissolved in an instant the over 6,000 needed rooms for this year and effectively solved the shortage? That one is truly worthy of a David Copperfield. Oh Dear God!
This administration has truly become magical. Remember the promise that if only we would be united and hold onto her, she would take us to the Enchanted Kingdom of the First World? No, I would not want to be a second rate, trying hard copycat of Conrado de Quiros here. So I would just say, at the rate things are going here – in education most especially – it is not to the Enchanted Kingdom that we are being delivered to. It is to Kingdom Come. And there is no fantasy here.
(Pampanga News, June 8-14, 2006)

Ambo and Bobet

MAKES me seem real old. Two of my juniors at the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary, circa 1970, are – within the span of three short months – princes of Mother Church. God be praised!
More than the element of time, what makes this event truly astounding is that Auxiliary Bishop Roberto Mallari and Auxiliary Bishop-Elect Pablo David were classmates. I don’t know how many in their batch survived the five years from Infima to Rhetorics at MGCS, but I do know that theirs was one class that produced at least four priests – Ambo and Bobet, Ted Valencia and Eric de Guzman. My apologies if I missed one or two more who made it. Familiar as I am only with the four, crossing paths from time to time with me never failing to kiss their blessed hands.
My batch – the “souls” that entered the gates in 1967 – set the record of entrants that has to this day remained unbroken – 67. Only 14 finished high school, four of whom did not belong to the originals. And only one made it all the way to ordination – Fr. Lorenzo Sarmiento, current pastor of St. Peter’s Parish in Apalit. With Among Larry we were luckier than some other batches that produced none.
Lucky with one priest out of a batch of 67! What with four in one batch that is not even half of ours? And two bishops to boot! God’s hand shows in this one. Only atheists will be blind to that. As they are to just about anything else.
Ambo and Bobet make a study in divergence as I know them, err as I perceive them. The public intellectual, Ambo makes a Thomas Aquinas to Bobet’s John Mary Vianney, the private, quiet worker in the Lord’s vineyard.
Ambo is into evangelization – as deputy head of the appropriately named AMANU (Capampangan for word) that is the Archdiocesan Media Apostolate Networks Unlimited, and co-host of Fr. Raul de los Santos and Fr. Deo Galang in the popular cable TV program Men of Light which takes the liturgy of the Word down to the daily grind of life.
Bobet is into pastoral ministry – as archdiocesan chaplain of the marriage encounter program that include, among a host of others, the Couples for Christ and its offsprings, the Singles for Christ, Handmaids of the Lord and the Youth for Christ
Both are much requested retreat and recollection masters and speakers. Where Ambo scorches the intellect, Bobet inflames the heart. Listening to them, one can not help but be touched, be moved, be closer – even be converted, if ye be a man of little or no faith – to Christ.
Ambo and Bobet. Mind and heart. A God-sent combination that will most surely produce a most bountiful harvest for the Church.
St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians read last Sunday – May 28, the day Ambo’s episcopal appointment was published – proved truly providential: “…And he gave some as apostles, others as prophets, others as evangelists, others as pastors and teachers, to equip the holy ones for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the extent of the full stature of Christ.” Three years back, Archbishop Paciano B. Aniceto was agonizing over the crisis that swept the Pampanga clergy, spawned by all those scandalous allegations of infidelity to their vows. We were in San Francisco, California in his biennial pastoral visit that time.
“Just think Among how much more trouble the Church would have been in had I become a priest,” I told him, only-half joking.
The Good Apu Ceto’s face so brightened that I thought he had an epiphany.
Ambo and Bobet. With them as auxiliaries, Apu Ceto would have no cause for agony. God is good!
(Pampanga News, June 1-7, 2006)

Good for Congress, best for city hall

A Bloomberg as mayor of New York City underscores a global trend in urban politics – corporate governance.
A dynast as mayor wherever emphasizes a downtrend, a return to the fiefdom of a colonial past. Present and past. Progress and retrogression. North and South. The developed and the Third World. Diametrically opposed options obtaining in Philippine politics, with the downside ever prevailing, given the pre-eminence of patronage in the choice of candidates.
I was swamped by these torrents of thought listening to Reghis Romero II confirming his intention to run in the 2007 elections. He readily makes the best choice in any electoral contest. Even if only for his name – minus the h – translating to the Latin “of the king.” But for his patrician bearing though, there is no haughty aristocracy in Romero. He makes the consummate corporate man.
Over a sumptuous lunch with the Society of Pampanga Columnists and other mediamen at Fortune Restaurant-Balibago, Thursday last week, Romero fielded all questions running the gamut of politics, economics and social issues with the confidence of a double-Ph.D professor lecturing a bunch of undergrads.
Comparisons are always odious, so it is said. But Ed Aguilar of this paper too could not help but crack: “Tune ping pibarilan ing agwat nang Reghis kareng kikinakinaking a manungkulan.”
Romero has etched his name in stone – in both literal and figurative sense – being the chairman of the board of the hugely successful eponymous R-II Builders Group of Companies.
To the urban poor of Manila’s Tondo, Romero is the “miracle man” for having transformed the world-(in)famous Smokey Mountain from the quintessence of urban blight to a model of human habitat.
The miracle did not end there. No, Romero did not do a Moses-parting-the-Red-Sea with nothing more than his deep faith in Yahweh and his staff. With modern technology learned from the water-logged Dutch and Danes, Romero reclaimed land from the depths of Manila Bay, and there – ala Botticelli’s Venus rising from the sea – rose the Manila Harbour Centre, the country’s premier seaport complex that can rival the best Asia can offer.
Romero’s latest venture is Philippine Ecology Systems Inc., a response to the ever-growing solid waste problem of ever-growing cities, with an initial sanitary landfill project in the Malabon-Navotas area.
With that, Romero has improved on the philosophy of erection – “In order to build, you have to destroy” – by adding a clean-up component to it, an environmental requisite that should go a long way in helping heal Mother Earth.
Impressive as Romero’s credentials already are, still there is much, much more to admire and to believe in the man. His keen sense of nationalism imbued with the life and teachings of Jose Rizal is awe-inspiring. A surge of nationalism in one’s bloodstream always ensues from listening to Romero speaking of the national hero. No wonder then of the Knights of Rizal mushrooming in all corners of the land.
What about his Abu Sayyaf interlude? So what about it? Romero proved himself every inch a caballero fleeing the embattled bandits’ refuge not by his lonesome but taking along his friend and a young boy to safety and freedom. In a situation even less perilous, not even that life-threatening as the one Romero was damned in, who would not go for self-preservation first, and forget the others?
True grit inheres in Romero’s character.
There is no question, not even an iota of doubt, that Romero will make the best elected leader. On that proposition, all the mediamen are agreed. The question that remains is for which position should Romero aspire.
A straw vote of those at lunch was taken: nine for mayor, four for congressman, and two abstentions – whichever.
There, it is to the best interest of Angeles City that Romero should run – and win – the mayorship.
(Pampanga News, May 25-31, 2006)

Ask not

“THEY are dreaming.”
That was the instant reaction of some people at the Clark Development Corp. and in the local media to the news report of a P10.5 billion “quest” of nine Tarlac villages from the Bases Conversion Development Authority .
But theirs is a noble dream – every cent of the P10.5 billion has been earmarked for accelerated development of their barangays which fall within the territory of Camp O’Donnell, the culminating point of the infamous Death March that commenced in Mariveles, Bataan, wound up at the train station in San Fernando, Pampanga and proceeded by rail to the Capas concentration camp.
O’Donnell has since been renamed Barangay Cristo Rey, transformed from a US military installation to a resettlement site for the victims of the Mt. Pinatubo eruptions. But – says its chair, Kennedy S. Molina, most emphatically – “is, by all means, still a former military camp of the United States of America, and therefore (along with the other eight contiguous barangays) entitled to undergo accelerated development.”
Theirs is not an empty dream too, founded on the spirit and letter of the law, specifically Section 2 of RA 7227 – as quoted in their joint resolution, thus: “…the policy of the government to accelerate the sound and balanced conversion into alternative productive uses of the Clark and Subic military reservations and their extension camps (John Hay Station, Wallace Air Station, O’Donnell Transmitter Stations, San Miguel Naval Communications and Capas Relay Stations), to raise funds by the sale of portions of Metro Manila military camps, and to apply said funds as provided herein for the development and conversion to productive use of the lands covered under the 1947 Military Bases Agreement between the Philippines and the United States of America, as amended.”
But ain’t the Metro Manila camps – notably Fort Bonifacio – been sold long ago? The proceeds from the sale long gone to God knows where.
So, what dreams come true for the chiefs of Barangays Cristo Rey, Aranguren, Manlapig, Lawy, Sta. Lucia, Patling, Sta. Juliana, Bueno and Maruglo we don’t know, given the financial strait the whole Philippine Republic – not just the BCDA – is damned in.
Whatever, may the BCDA or the government spare the village chiefs’ leader of a paraphrased quote from his namesake: “Ask not what you can get from your government but ask what you can give your government.”
That would be Kennedy’s – Molina’s not JFK’s – worst nightmare.
*************
SO THE PUBLIC MAY KNOW AND FOR WHATEVER PURPOSE IT MAY SERVE.
I HAVE formally renounced my membership in the Pampanga Press Club which I joined in 1979 during the incumbency of Papa Toy Soto and had served in various capacities, from secretary to director to president in 1990 and chairman in 1991, and back to perennial director. The history of the club and the fables and foibles of its members formed the nucleus of my first book – Of the Press (1999).
In my letter of renunciation to PPC President Lino Sanchez dated May 17, 2006, effective this week the press club can no longer be held in any way responsible and/or accountable for my actions, as a journalist or as a private individual. Equally, I can no longer be held accountable and/or responsible for any act of the press club or any or all of its members.
(Pampanga News, May 18-24, 2006)

Marking Pampanga

A STRIDE in the right direction is the Pampanga tourism MTV launched recently.
No, I did not get to see the six-minute capsule of the best the province has to offer in festivals and food, in sights and sighs, in recreation and rest. Those who were there at the Lakeshore launch were bewitched and bedazzled by the “world-class” quality of the MTV. I can only agree. Knowing – even without seeing – that indeed, Pampanga has what it takes to be a principal tourist destination.
I have scaled Mt. Arayat twice in my youth – as a Media and Suprema seminarian at the Mater Boni Consilii Seminary; planted hundreds of seedlings at its slope as a government employee; refreshed at its cool waters as an excursionist.
Last year, I huffed and puffed climbing Brobdingnagian rocks to reach Miyamit Falls in Porac, then roller-coastered aboard Fidelis Arcenas’ souped-up Land Cruiser through the galudgud asu trail to the Porac summit, for a spectacular photo-op with Gov. Mark Lapid, Mayor Quiel Gamboa, CDC President–CEO Tony Ng, communications magnate Dennis Uy, along with the media boys backdropped by the crags, the streams and the lahar deposits of the seven mountains. I look forward to a return visit this month, taking the Pasig-Potrero trail this time, with a side trip to the hot springs.
The Mt. Pinatubo crater I reached also last year, but through the Calangitan trail in Capas, Tarlac. This trek was faithfully documented by artist-photographer Borj Meneses of CDC and duly recognized with a Certificate of Conquest signed by the DOT’s Ronnie Tiotuico and Mayor Rey Catacutan.
Mt. Pinatubo’s backside though – reminiscent of the mountains in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – I already beheld earlier in Porac.
I am no stranger to the Candaba Swamp, be it migrant bird season or during its annual inundation. Nature’s paradox of the beauty of life and the poetry of death induces a contemplative pause at Mayor Jerry Pelayo’s retreat.
Pampanga is one big festival. Hot Air Balloon at Clark in February, the spectacle of actual crucifixions and bloody penitents by the hundreds during the Holy Week in San Fernando – and now Angeles too, the Easter Sunday salubong and procession in Sto. Tomas, Santacruzan and the town fiestas in May, Piyestang Tugak in San Fernando, Tigtigan, Terakan king Dalan in Angeles in October, Binulo Festival in Porac in November, Sisig Festival in Angeles, Caracol in Sasmuan, the Giant Lantern Festival in San Fernando, and Aguman Sanduk in Minalin in December. A mouthful – and those are only the ones I have experienced.
Pampanga is rich in antiquities too – the churches of Lubao, Bacolor, Betis, Minalin, San Luis, are as much a testament to the Age of Faith as to the innate craftsmanship of the Capampangan. A celebration of which is manifest in the baroque Grand Palazzo Royale of master craftsman Perto Cruz.
The Archdiocesan Museum, the Capampangan Museum in Clark and the Center for Capampangan Studies at Holy Angel University are an attraction all their own – not only to those into anthropological studies but to plain folks like you and me, wanting to know a little more about our own history as a distinct people.
Clark makes one whole package – the airport, the recreation estates, hotels and golf courses, the casinos and restaurants, even the mothballed Expo Filipino. For the historical buffs, there are the cemeteries – for veterans and their pets too, the historical landmarks and buildings.
There is more to Pampanga than all these I mouthed so far. The Capitol’s MTV has said as much. And it can only do so much. Marking Pampanga as a tourist destination, for one.
Now, the next thing to do is to take it from there. All tourism stakeholders unite! The hoteliers and restaurateurs, local government units and travel agents, the entertainment circle – from Fields Avenue down Balibago to the acoustic joints of San Fernando have to band – and bond – together to package the province. Not only as a seasonal stop but a year-round destination.
Pampanga, to iterate, has everything that satiates the realm of the senses. Pampanga is at the crossroads of traffic – in trade, in commerce, in tourism, in – literally – transportation.
The coming of the budget flights at Clark is a boon to making Pampanga a major tourism destination.
All that remains is for all of us to get our act together. Mark that up as priority one.