Back to Katoks' Sinners

WEDNESDAY, October 9, the Katipunan da ring Tagasaliksik at Talaturung Kapampangan held a tribute to Atty. Renato “Katoks” Tayag on the occasion of his 98^th birth anniversary.

Peter Alagos, president of the Pampanga Press Club, spoke at the event, in recognition of Tatang Katoks as among the early members of the PPC and his contributions to the community as a journalist and writer.

Peter told me that he quoted extensively from my writings on Tatang Katoks that comprised a chapter – “Knocking on Katoks’ Door” – in my book Of the Press (1999).

It is now my turn to pay my respects too to the man. Lifted now straight from that same book:

Back to Katok’s Sinners

This appeared in my column in The Angeles Sun issue of November 12-18, 1988.

Reading Katok’s Tayag’s twin volume The Angeles Story and The Sinners of Angeles roused multiple emotions in me, ranging from utter disappointment and disbelief to delirium and déjà vu.

Normally, I grapple intellectually with the author of any book I read. With Tatang Katoks however, I readily submitted to his every word. Having had the chance of personal think-feel interaction for at least three times with the man when he was still around. Now I feel empty and sorry for not having had the greater opportunity of more conversations with him.

Some 30 years ago after they were published, the concise tomes are as timely as now. One gets the feeling that one reads contemporary news in The Angeles Sun when one reads the books.

The demands for a cleaner market; proper garbage disposal; strict enforcement of sanitary, criminal and traffic laws; elimination of gambling, prostitution and other vices; honesty in government; and public works improvements are all as real today as when the same were asked by the 1953 Angeles Jaycees of the Honorable Abad Santos’ father, Apung Maneng, referred to now as the better of the Abad Santos mayors.

The spunk of these young men of 1953 unfortunately did not pass on to the genes of the current crop of Jaycees who seemingly think their Creed finds concretization only in traffic island beautification, once-a-year gift-giving and stirring orations for fallen fellows. What sez you, Fred de Leon?

Past and present parallelisms of politics in Angeles cover also newspapers and mediamen. Tatang Katoks’ exposés found print in Don Tomas San Pedro’s Luzon Courier. Current exposés of irregularities germinate from the pages of this paper (The Angeles Sun). Proof positive once more that mediapersons make a community’s conscience.

The above discussion is but a sampling of the back-to-the-future or past-present mix scenarios in the two books. There are a host of others.

The “abduction” of the image of Apung Mamacalulu during the Good Friday procession of 1928 has a direct bearing to the simmering Apo land ownership controversy. (During a talk with Apung Feleng Lazatin, The Sinners of Angeles cropped up when the intercession of the Grand Old Man on the Apu case was sought.)

At the start of this piece, I said I felt disappointed upon reading the books. The feeling came when The Sinners of Angeles blasted to smithereens a myth of sainthood for one man I put on a pedestal during my formative years at the Mater Boni Consilii Seminary in San Fernando.

Morning, noon and night, from Infima, Media, Suprema to Poetry class, I, with the rest of the community of priests and seminarians thanked the Good Lord fro the benevolence showered on God’s little people by one man whose very name was – to us – the synonym of the Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and above all, Charity.

Was I shocked upon reading Tatang Katoks’ account of the man’s “philosophy of self”! There goes another lie long embellished in half-truths.

It is said that the past teaches us lessons to practice in the present so that we will not fail in the future. One pundit even went on to say that “there is no present and no future, only the past happening over and over.” If only for this, Tatang Katoks; books should be made required reading for every Angeleno or anyone straying into the city. For his greater knowledge of Angeles’ past and deper understanding of the Angeleno’s present.

Postscript: My thanks to Abong Tayag for the books. They indeed  make up not only a collector’s item but an enriching nourishment to the Kapampangan soul.

Though non-fictionist, Tatng Katoks approximates the works of the great historical novelists like Gore Vidal in Burr and Empire and E.L. Doctorow in Ragtime. He so imbued the reader with the atmosphere of even long gone times that he – the reader – felt and breathed the same air, saw the same sights and heard the same sounds as the book characters did.

His chronicles about his beloved Base Town, Asia and his retrospective on Bataan are comparable to Gay Talese’s back-to-my-roots account in hi Unto the Sons.

Like Talese, another journalist who made his mark in literature, Tatang Katoks had that critical eye for detail and keen sense for drama that brought the broadest spectrum of color and the full range of emotions to his works.

This is most evident in his accounts of his China visits (At Home & Abroad). In 1964 at the dawn of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, capturing the rising revolutionary zeal of the young cadres that subsequently served as the vanguard of that upheaval; and in 1982 at the start of Deng Xiapo-ping’s revolutionary experimentation of a hitherto damned market economy that ultimately led to China as a key roler in the world economic stage.

­Tatang Katoks’ summed up the great chasm of a difference in those visits with: “In 1964 we met ideologues and politicians; in 1982 our hosts were bankers and men of finance.”

Prophetic too was Tatang Katoks’ vision of a Pax Americana in Southeast Asia. Notwithstanding the expulsion of the US bases from Subic and Clark in 1992.

In 1990, during my incumbency as PPC president, the club established the Renato “Katoks” Tayag Award of Excellence in High School Journalism and the Jose Luna Castro Award of Excellence in College Journalism to propagate the Kapampangan journalistic heritage among the young generation of writers.

At the awarding ceremonies, the honorees’ widows – Adoracion Suarez-Tayag and  Rosalinda Icban-Castro were the guests of honor and speakers.

Winner of the first Katoks Tayag Award was The Pampangan, official publication of the Pampanga High School, Tatang Katoks’ alma mater from where he graduated valedictorian in 1933.