The Kapampangan

THERE IS much ado about the Kapampangan.
More than a tribe, the old Kapampangan prides himself as a separate race. Perhaps in bitter rebellion against the diminution of his once vast kingdom that was said to have stretched from the mouth of the Pasig in Tondo to the upper reaches of the Chico River in Cagayan Valley.
Mayhaps in a vicious reaction to the consequent waning of the primacy of his lingua franca which is now limited to just the province and the southern half of Tarlac, plus a single town in each of Pampanga’s contiguous provinces of Bataan, Bulacan and Nueva Ecija.
He may not be the distinct species that he likes to make of himself, but the Kapampanga unarguably stands out when ranged against his Filipino fellows. You will know the Kapampangan easily.
Food is his passion. A gourmand is the Kapampangan as he turns snails and frogs, dogs and field mice, pythons and cobras, locusts and mole crickets into exotic dishes rivaling ambrosia itself. And no meal for him without the attendant condiments of toyo, patis and aslam.
And who could love the pungent buro more other than the Kapampangan?
How the Kapampangan loves to party! Just about every occasion is a cause for celebration. A Kapampangan fiesta is unrivalled in the excesses of bacchanalia. The fattened calf or pig, even good old Bantay , get served on the Kapampangan table. Beer goes by the truckful. No money is no excuse to feast. E ka makapagtaó? Ala kang marine tau. Nananu ya itang mag-five-six king kantu? Feast for the day, all the year to the usurer.
Fashion is an everyday statement. In colleges and universities, the ubiquitous Kapampangan student is the one dressed to the nines but with barely a dime. Just about everywhere he is togged as though ever-ready to a party.
Dance is a religion. Even before the fad of disco and ballroom dancing, the Kapampangan has had – dating to the turn of the century, the 19th to the 20th pa – Circulo Fernandino in the capital town, Bachelor’s Club, later Thomasian in Sto. Tomas, Old Legs in Bacolor, Batubalani in Guagua, Maharajah in Macabebe, Now and Then in Minalin, and a host of other annual formal dances where the local crème de la crème shine in their best fineries.
Porma is his way of life. When a Kapampangan earns – even barely enough – the first thing he buys is a car, never a house. Why? Ninanu ka, malyari meng apidala-dalang pamorma ing bale?
Now you know the reason behind the labeling of the Kapampangan as mayabang. Part of this also is his “sugar mentality” raised, no doubt, in the province’s once fertile sugarlands. More than a sweet tooth and a diabetic constitution, the Kapampangan possesses a saccharine tongue.
Just you listen when he woos the object of his affection. Or eavesdrop to his whispers to the subject of his seduction. And wonder no more why the Kapampangan is a lahing sibuburian, if not a lahing pipikutan.
The Kapampangan’s mastery with words is manifested too in the number of cabalens in literature and in the media. Just about every newspaper in Manila has a Kapampangan for an editor, columnist, deskman or reporter.
Of course, there are the laughables about the Kapampangan.
When deadly H-fever epidemic was wreaking havoc in Metro Manila and elsewhere, it was joked about that Pampanga would be spared. Why? The Kapampangan has no H in his language, silly.
Which brings to mind that tongue-twister that landed me a grade of 70 in high-school Pilipino after I read it thus: Hako hay naiipan ng anging hamian hat hako’y napa-alak-ak, a-a-a-a-a.
Having not the letter H in the language is nothing to be ashamed of though. This is part of the Kapampangan’s Spanish heritage. Remember in lengua Español, the letter H is silent. O, nanu pang asabi mu?
Positivizing the negative is a Kapampangan attribute. Finding opportunity in adversity is imbued in the Kapampangan character. Yes, there was more than sloganeering or rhetorics in the late Governor Bren Z. Guiao’s E co magmalun, mibangun ya ing Pampanga immediately after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo. It was a call to the resiliency innate in the Kapampangan. Proven in time by the leaps and bounds the province has taken rising, then soaring from the Pinatubo’s ashes of devastation and despair.
There too was Governor Lito Lapid’s novel and noble meaning to the derogatory dugong aso imprinted in the Kapampangan psyche. This, when the uncolleged Lapid extolled it as the virtue of katapatan, of canine loyalty to an elder, to a superior, to a friend – before then President Fidel V. Ramos, credited for much of the salvation of Pampanga from obliteration and its subsequent rehabilitation and renewal.
Of course, there will be some debate on loyalty here, given the historical aberration of the Macabebes betraying Emilio Aguinaldo to the Americans in the second phase of the War of Philippine Independence. That, though, is another story.
For now, let us just be. Celebrate Kapampangan pride. And passion too. Luid ya ing Kapampangan.
(This piece is a reprint of my Zona Libre column in The Voice – December 6-12, 1998. Then as now, it is a relevant read for Pampanga Day.)

Daily worship

THE GOLDEN rays of the early morning sun tenderly piercing the canopy of green swaying to the gentle wind: the shafts of light, a promise of a good day dawning.
The last drop of the evening dew on a blade of grass mirrors a minute world awakening.
Little butterflies in white and yellow fluttering, flitting from flower to flower, abloom wild in all of rainbow’s hues, untouched, untended – beauty at its primeval best.
From the choir loft of acacia branches, a chorus of birds sings a symphony of praise to a new day; the last strains of the cicadas’ vespers softly fading. Whistles in the wind, raining confetti from the majestic trees: the leaves wafting through the air, falling, touching the earth – in death one with the earth for a new life to rebirth. The eternal cycle unescaped.
God is great!
NOT ONLY on Sundays that a walk around the village green of Villa Victoria becomes an occasion for worship, an expression of faith, a celebration of life.
The human senses so get a feel of the elements of the Divine – magnificence, omniscience, omnipresence, beneficence – that one can only go in the total acceptance, nay, in the fullness of faith that “God is, and is ours.” Whence comes too the full realization that – as one philosopher put it – “The final end and purpose of every human being is the unitive knowledge of God’s being.”
Indeed an uplifting, if not a provoking thought. At my own open cathedral of trees, grass and birds though, philosophy is the last thing to bother oneself with.
There, it is all about man and his God in a truly person-to-Three-Person interaction. Without the trappings of rites and ceremonies. Without the aid of incense and candles. Without sermons, exhortations, ejaculations and damnations.
There, is but that quietude that sears the very soul.
There, I open up my worship with but a plea to my God to:
Touch – my mind O Lord, that I may think of you constantly;
My heart, and fill it with Your love;
My ears, that I may hear and listen to Your voice;
My eyes, that I may see Your loving kindness, in all of my fellowmen, in all of Your creation;
My nose, that I may breathe in your goodness.
Open my lips O Lord, that I may sing You praise.
And then, I get myself enveloped in His grace, not only to keep, but to love and live His commandments.
Amen.

Read

FROM his stint at the Angeles University Foundation to his transfer to the Holy Angel University, my inaanak Peter Alagos had badgered me for the essay I wrote on reading.
‘It would make a very good introduction to all my writing subjects,” said Sir Alagos.
Alas, much as I searched I could not find it among the yellowed clippings of my writings from the 1970s yet. In what could only be a joke of fate, the essay just materialized, not among my clippings but with my old clothes – serving as a cabinet liner.
Too bad, Peter has left the academe to work at the CDC. Just the same, here’s that piece that appeared in The Voice, April 18-24, 1999.
I CROSSED the Red Sea with Moses; joined Joshua in Jericho; played the harp and sang the psalms by the banks of Babylon pining for Zion.
In another instance, I stormed the Bastille with the Jacobins and watched Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lose their heads at the guillotine on orders of Robespierre. Later, I joined Napoleon from Austerlitz to the very gates of Moscow at the height of the Russian winter, went with him on exile in Elba, marched back to Paris and ultimately met his Waterloo, and on to St. Helena.
On the side, I had chats with the Prussian Clausewitz on the basic principle of krieg as “nothing more than the continuation of political intercourse with a mixture of other means.” The same subject of my conversations with Sun Tzu from whom I learned that the revered Mao was no more than his copycat in the art of war. Mao though put into definitive praxis Sun Tzu’s exegeses.
Of course, Old Niccolo is a constant traveling companion whose nuggets of wisdom are a guidepost in my political consultancies. A sampler: “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men he has about him.” And my favorite: “It is better to be impetuous than cautious, for Fortune is a woman, and it is necessary…to conquer her by force.”
Oh, how can I ever forget Nietzsche? He who declared that “God is dead.” He whose treatise on the ubermensch ­ -- “Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman, a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and not a down-going” – inspired Hitler’s aspiration to Aryan supremacy and spurred his final solution to his Jewish problem.
On the level of my nodding acquaintances are Santayana – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – Kierkegaard, Keats, Locke, Hobbs and Rosseau, and of course, the ancients: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics – Marcus Aurelius Antoninus and Seneca, the younger.
Marx, I met in high school. Das Kapital, I did not fully understand then. But the Manifesto was clear as day in its quest to create the workers’ Eden.
Marx always came along with Engels, and earlier on, there was Hegel – “The basis of the State is the power of Reason actualizing itself as Will” – Kind of heavy, di ba?
In high school too I met, heard and never quite forgot Cicero in his anti-Catiline discourses; rode with the Roman legions of my namesake Gaius Julius Caesar in the Gallic Wars; learned from Horace the art of poetry; and played a Trojan warrior in Virgil’s Aenead. All these in Latin yet.
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives instilled in me the nosiness to poke into the lives of people, famous and notorious. Hitler I knew from his father’s name Schicklgruber down to his single ball. And for a time too, I entertained the notion that he could have been a son of Jose Rizal, for his height and for the fact that his mother Klara Polzl was a chambermaid in some boarding houses in the Germany that Rizal visited. No, Rizal was not Hitler’s son, so the eminent historian Ambeth Ocampo wrote in one of his columns.
Ataturk, I joined in his battles for the hearts and minds of various tribes to nurse the birth of Turkey. Then on contemporary American plane were Chicago Bossman Daley; the rich, famous and notoriously spendthrift Ford; the reclusive Hughes; and the miserly Getty. Even the much maligned Quayle, Bush’s veep, had a life of redeeming social value too.
From the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf paid the greatest tribute to foot soldiers as the real heroes of war. This same sentiment is echoed in the accounts of the soldiers themselves from the Solomons to Iwo Jima, and onto Korea and ‘Nam.
Wars and remembrances of its horrors, poignancies and heroism and betrayals I all lived in Toland’s Hitler and The Rising Sun, as well as in individual battles from El Alamein to Normandy, to Remagen and the battle of the Bulge, and that is only for WW II.
There can be no full appreciation of the Palestinian problem unless one has immersed himself in the works of Wouk (The Hope), Uris (Hajj), and Lapierre (O Jerusalem).
It is in the last book that I learned of the pivotal role the Philippines played in the partition of Palestine in 1947 that ultimately birthed the state of Israel and spurred the hegira of the Palestinian Arabs.
The armchair revolutionary in me finds greatest fulfillment in living the American Revolution in Langguth’s Patriots; in the French Revolution via A Tale of Two Cities of Dickens, and the definitive History of Europe. Of course, I’ve just come back from the Sierra Maestra with Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
Renewal, re-living of American History studied in high school yet I found in the American chronicles of Vidal – Burr, Lincoln, 1876, Empire and Washington, DC . Doctorow also opened a window to America in his Ragtime, Welcome to Hard Times, and Billy Bathgate. Part of American history is the sexual revolution. And what could have captured it better than Talese’s Thy Neighbor’s Wife.
In crime, Puzo’s best selling The Godfather pales – for sheer impact – in comparison with Talese’s Honor Thy Father on the subject of the Mafia.
My passion for the printed page reaches the proportion of a conflagration with Citizen Hearst, the bio of the founding proponent of yellow journalism; The Kingdom and the Power, the history of the New York Times; Milton’s Areopagitica ; Lippman’s Liberty and News; and some works of Marx too.
Yes, Marx, from 1842 to 1847 considered himself primarily as a journalist, here’s Marx’s take on press freedom: “…the intellectual mirror in which a people sees itself, and self-viewing is the first condition of wisdom.”
Any journalist worth his name in ink should have made reading a lifelong passion. It does not take a journalist though to enjoy this, the most pleasant of all pastimes. For where else can one travel through time, assume multiple identities, explore the unknown, return to the past, zoom to the future – all in an instant, without any effort at all? And get the added bonus of increased knowledge, deeper understanding and heightened intellect. There is sheer joy in reading. Reading, ‘tis clichéd, is its own reward. So true, so very true.
So, what have you been reading lately? Me? It’s the Koran, Holy Bible, Dhammapada and the Bhagavad Gita for daily spiritual nutrient; the bios of Gandhi and Stalin for pleasure.
SEGUE to the present. My current reads are Huxley and God and The Confessions of St. Augustine at bedside. Lenin at my armchair.

Shocked, but not awed

“I AM a fervent believer in press freedom and the rule of law.”
Thus assured Her Excellency, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo even as she rued “that police procedures became a problem for media, even for a few hours” in the denouement of the farce Trillanes idiotically staged at the Manila Pen last Thursday.
The presidential statement reminded me of another president: No, not Marcos, dummy, but of the greatest intellectual among the American presidents – Thomas Jefferson.
“Were it left for 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.”
Jefferson paid that supreme tribute to the press 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 biased interpretation of Jefferson leads to the conclusion that the press is supreme over government in the service of truth, liberty and humanity itself. Consequently, the press holds a moral ascendancy over government.
Considered from this high moral ground, the assault on media during the arrest of Trillanes and his coup pals is a direct affront to liberty, a mockery to democracy and a disservice to humanity.
A columnist was right: It was not for “identification” that the mediapersons were taken to Camp Bagong Diwa but for “intimidation.” Given the handcuffs, verbal abuses and the holding area.
So the President is a “firm believer in press freedom and the rule of law.”
She is my president and I believe her. Only, there’s much too much action at the opposite end of her pronouncement.
Or have you forgotten of Proclamation 1017 in February last year that put the country into a de facto martial law? Of then PNP top centurion Arturo Lomibao reading the virtual riot act that was General Order No. 5?
For all the sensitive care with which Malacañang factotums handled any discussion of the state of emergency as a “no-martial-law” clone, still the martial slip showed in Lomibao’s take of GO No. 5. Did he not warn media to hew to “standards set by the government” in the practice of journalism, or face dire consequences ranging from police take-over of media establishments to outright closure?
Standard martial law practice is the closure of media facilities – ABS-CBN and The Manila Times got it flushed on the chin in 1972, and last year, it was the Daily Tribune.
Standard martial law practice too is the government setting standards for media to follow, as instanced by the Marcosian Bureau of Standards for Mass Media under a Department of Public Information that set as the highest norm of journalism practice the panegyric to Apo Ferdie and the idolatry of Imelda the Beautiful.
No, we do not hear of a re-issue of Proclamation 1017 and GO No. 5. Not as yet. But the video footages of our fellow mediapersons handcuffed and herded to a police camp do send chills up and down our spines.
This is yet another “shock and awe” to all media unleash by this administration that steadfastly remains a ”firm believer in press freedom and the rule of law.”
Shocked, truly am I. Angered though, not awed. Just like any mediaperson worth his byline.