I didn't like him | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 22, 2010

This was in one of those obscure islands in the middle of a strange seascape leading to a channel called Bucas Grande. It was lonely but beautiful, and its shores dove to depths of unimaginable life forms. But it was the journey going there that built the suspense.

There would be odds and ends of strange vegetation along the way, mangroves with a mighty hold, and just when the water turned deep green for you to think you were heading for perilous trenches, you’d see a man standing on knee-deep surface, holding on to a fishing rod.

The sea would turn calm sometimes, but just as suddenly would slap our outrigger and leave the engine with a muted drone. You’d see the water boil up, forming into pools of swirling bodies and swerve our boat in all directions.

In this boat, while the rest of the clique would tuck themselves in the small cover in the middle, there would be me and another man braving the cold rain in the open. To keep us warm, he’d nudge me with a bottle of gin, which we took turns in deep swig. Each time I took my shot, he’d laugh out loud, yell in the rain and give me a thumbs-up, “That’s my man!” Then we’d laugh, and it’d be his turn. I was fresh from college, and he was, well, some name in the public sphere already.

In the afternoon lull in the island, he’d suddenly slap my shoulder and summoned me to the outrigger. “You stay at the back, and just paddle,” he said and sat in front so he could steer our boat to wherever we wanted to go. “Don’t worry,” he said.

So I picked the wooden oar and dug into the greenish water. He did the same, and the boat moved swiftly into the open sea. This was a breath of fresh air and we cut through the tiny whirlpools along the way while the island behind retreated into a bluish hue. We were far from shore already, and in a moment, he fell silent and seemed restless. We were still moving on, and I stirred into the water just the same.

He held on to his oar and sat still, silent. I stopped, too, leaving our boat cuddled in the arch and sweep of the crossing currents, although it brought us farther into the open sea while the rain ate up every faint blue strip of land in sight. After a long pause, he turned to me, and said, “Do you know how to steer this thing back to the island?”

He’d tried steering the boat at the front rear to make a turn, but the swirling water made it impossible. I took his place, but just the same, we were moving further out, our souls being fed into the Pacific Ocean. Why not, I suggested, sit the other way around and sail the boat in reverse. He burst into laughter and threw me the thumbs-up again, “That’s my guy!” In a few minutes, we were back in the island drinking the rest of what remained in the bottle of gin and laughed our heart out.

I told him I was going to write a poem about what happened, and he said he couldn’t wait to read it. It was a brief vacation among friends, and we’d be back in the city. In the few occasions that we’d bump into each other, he’d always ask for the poem like a father would to a son about his report card, and I told him, I was still going to write it. I never really got down to writing it, and life’s strange currents pulled people apart.

Over a decade passed, and I grew to dislike the kind of politics he chose. He’d turn into a stranger I didn’t know. He’d be at the forefront defending a president I find so contemptible. Last week, I wanted to write something. There were a lot of things he said that I didn’t like, but I won’t name them now. But his life was quicker than my writing.

We now face this funny and painful rite of hauling out memories for the dear departed, and sure enough we’re all guilty of a few embellishments. That boat story is true, it is no allegory, even as it can be in many ways. I didn’t like him that much, but only because I didn’t know him that much. Cerge Remonde was real, still is, and deserving of all the fondness.

Alvin | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 19, 2010

I WAS in college when I first had a taste of real gin. By real, I mean, not the usual staple from the kanto store. Real, meaning the one that you buy in a real liquor store and needed a sizable pooling of the clique’s allowances. Although, don’t get me wrong, the other one, which had Amorsolo’s illustration of the fiery duel between a saint and the devil stamped on its torso, was still just as real. It was just usual staple. At that time, we were trying to become real men, and no longer boys.

It was my fellow staffer from the school paper, Allan Saballa, who took the first shot, while the rest of us watched him silently, awaiting for that singular facial twitch that indicated the rolling of fire in his throat. So we fell silent after he took a swig. He put the shot glass down, closed his eyes, grimaced tight, and froze. We waited. So how was it, we impatiently asked. After a long pause, Allan broke the silence, “It’s neither democracy nor communism!” We burst in laughter.

The sessions were rowdy. The whole time, we’d have a wide field to survey: politics, Dostoevsky, the US bases, the new campus queen who couldn’t spell, some stupid anti-communist youngsters, the Philippines Free Press to Levi’s 501. We thought ourselves a cut above the rest.

But there was that one person who stood out in that clique.

He didn’t drink, was prim and proper. Allan would tease him about not being able to get a girlfriend because, beside a girl, he just couldn’t stop talking about the US military bases, poverty, social justice, and end up with a dozing damsel at the other side of the table. But Allan would soon write about him in the paper, saying our good friend had the energy of five working committees rolled into one. At that time, we somehow knew our friend was going to be important someday.

After college, Allan would soon be setting up what is perhaps the most successful wine store in Cebu City. Today, our official gin-taster would be a first-rate wine connoisseur and businessman. I’d be caught between the academe and the press.

Our friend, on the other hand, confirmed our expectations.

He would soon be involved in various non-government organizations in the city. There were a hundred causes to pick, but he chose the one on governance—particularly, that concept that allowed the citizens a big role in the process.

Not a few communities in Cebu have seen the technology worked and transformed them. But later, ever the perpetual mover, he’d be traveling abroad and took wider causes, one of those was that of Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Su Kyi of Burma.

A few weeks ago, the old clique met up for coffee. It had been all over the papers that our friend was joining politics, particularly the BOPK council slate. I didn’t understand.

He’d been all over Europe and Asia, why should he sit in those boring sessions and be broadcast live in an equally boring cable channel. Seriously, I fear for my friend, and it has something to do with politics being a famished dragon that eats up just about anything.

But my friend writes me an email instead: “I want to believe that the time is ripe for us to engage from within, with the people backing us. I hope to bring my ideals and the people’s agenda in the formal halls of power, but mindful of the realities that this system could either make or break us.

“In the long years of my NGO involvement, I could humbly say that I have earned a better understanding of what the people truly need. I have come to internalize the issues through participatory mechanisms and processes which proved to be very effective in empowering communities. I hope to impart and hopefully institutionalize these participatory technologies when elected into office.”

I can imagine my friend Allan tasting some fine wine this time.

Political animal | Sunstar Cebu | Jan. 8, 2010

EACH time I remember Aristotle’s “man is a political animal,” I think that we should just delete the word “statesman” in the dictionary. How can a slimy, scaly reptile with a tail that curls up like a phallus and has the coarsest of ways, be a “statesman?” The concepts are incompatible.

Some praying mantis outside my window says that “statesmanlike” suggests “civility” or “diplomacy.” A statesman, says this poor underweight fellow on my window, usually finds himself starting his sentence with “With due respect…” or “I understand what you’re saying…however…” But those lines are too flat for the “political animal.” With unprecedented skill and savvy, the “animal” will say “Grrrrrr…you’re autistic!”

Seriously, the phrase “political gentleman” sounds like an oxymoron today. In the boiling pot of politics, the first casualty is civility. US President Harry Truman was right.

“A politician,” he says, “is a man who understands government, and the statesman is a politician who’s been dead for 15 years.”

When the recent SWS survey came out, Manny Villar brings his fat heart into a presidential debate and hits Noynoy Aquino with a diatribe about his lack of experience. Aquino says Villar has never come up front to point a finger at President Arroyo. And so on and so forth. You don’t get surprised.

In the stretch towards May, the political narrative will go as inflammatory as your tummy.

I’ve been reading US President Barack Obama’s memoir “Audacity of Hope” lately, and stumble on one of the many lessons he learned about the dynamics of politics and the press. He says, “Indeed, part of what makes the juxtaposition of competing press releases so alluring to reporters is that it feeds that old journalistic standby—personal conflict. It’s hard to deny that political civility has declined in the past decade, and that the parties differ sharply on major policy issues. But at least some of the decline in civility arises from the fact that, from the press’s perspective, civility is boring.”

A polite statement from a lethargic news source will barely make it on paper. A mayor who would call a press conference to declare that he is leaving his fate to God will have all the reporters scrambling out before he could even finish his sentence. But if a source shifts into attack mode, hands down, he’ll get the press mobbing him. Reporters, says Obama, will go out of their way to “stir up the pot” and provoke the source into making a bloated response.

“The spin, the amplification of conflict, the indiscriminate search for scandal and miscues—the cumulative impact of all this is to erode any agreed-upon standards for judging the truth,” says Obama.

One of the more interesting exchanges in our political narrative was the saga involving Governor Garcia and Mayor Osmeña. The latter called the governor “Tandang Zora,” and the former went on to emerge in a press con in a Zorro costume to sic a chicken figurine supposedly to dramatize that the mayor “chickened out” when the Province offered to buy a piece of land at the SRP. The exchanges, reinforced with interesting photographs, simply fell as ideal staple for the press.

This is pretty tricky though. The conduct of governance, which is supposed to be where the real meat is, gets waylaid along the way in exchange for the rather cosmetic caterwauling of spin. The nature of deadlines and drive for revenue, says Obama, makes the press hospitable to spin. The “political animal” could hypnotize the press into forgetting its didactic role.

“But let us also say that principles can be inherited. An outlook to serve the people can also be inherited. Getting a sense of what’s right and wrong and what distinguishes the two are learned and inherited from parents.”
--Benigno Noynoy Aquino III

Unbeatable | SunStar Cebu | Jan. 8, 2010

FIRST day in office, she climbed the Capitol building to check its leaking roof, leaving a circle of photojournalists and TV crew scrambling after her. She climbed the ladder, paused on the ledge while photographers scuttled for the best angle.

Right that moment, you knew the papers’ banner photo was made.

All she needed then was to drop a few sound bites. She told a group of reporters huddled around her that she wanted to “hit the ground running.” She knew exactly what to do on Day One.

Right then, the next day’s news was already written. Second day in office, she was headline in all newspapers in the city.

It could have been a case of mutual feeding—the source feeds what media want, and media oftentimes coax the source to do or say what they want. With the governor, however, media doesn’t need to give the cue. She herself understands how it works and knows exactly what to do at the right moment.

In less than a hundred days in her office, I found myself working for the governor and made an AVP of her first one hundred days, which we made as an introduction to her speech at the Provincial Board. The whole time, from video to speech, I remember the PB’s session hall falling into a kind of awe.

It must’ve been the first time the crowd felt like they were at the Oscar awards.

The point is, the governor is one person who understands how things work in the public sphere. In 2004, I made the photograph of her first-day sojourn on the Capitol’s roof the symbol of the new leadership, and used the tag-line “bag-ong panlantaw” or new vision. The image shows her on top of the building looking down, and quite eloquently, it says that up there, it was altogether a different view of Cebu.

You go to the towns with the governor and you will see how the people respond to her presence. Here is a common scenario: women would huddle around her and give her a hug, and say “Ka-gwapa man diay nimo, Maam, uy!” The governor knows exactly how to respond, “Ay, sus, maayo ra gyud nga nianhi ko kay wala ko kadungog ana didto sa siyudad!”

You will see everyone around in a jovial mood. You will see how amused the people are in the towns. Sometimes, kids would run up to her and she’d get her purse, take out a few coins and send them to a candy store. When she chances upon a carenderia, she’d take the ladle and get a taste of her favorite dinuguan or paklay, much to the surprise of everyone surrounding her.

These are little details that escape the rather formal demands of news. But apart from the deliberately new brand of governance the Province has taken all these years, those small bits are what matters most to the people in the towns.

Here is one governor who doesn’t look and act like a governor, in the traditional sense. In the middle of a conversation, she’d hop into an outrigger and paddle all the way underneath a decaying bridge to inspect it from below—much to the horror of her close-in security.

She’s a relentless mover, and she knows when to pick the right moments. One official commented about how the governor looked “so un-gubernatorial” for frequently wearing denims while at work. Well, the next few days, the governor would be wearing jeans the whole time in office and in the field. She’d wink an eye and smile at her staff upon seeing another official whose pants climbed way over his navel.

The contrast becomes too stark when you hold her personality against her detractors. I do not quite understand where the confidence of Vice Gov. Greg Sanchez comes from. He’s a good man, don’t get me wrong, but when he delivers a speech, he’d put half the town hall to sleep. On that front, you simply can’t beat the governor.

Suspension of disbelief | SunStar Cebu Dec. 29. 2009 | Meanwhile

DEAR readers: Assuming that you exist, you’re probably such a vanishing tribe, given the fugitive nature of this column. Let me use a cliché—that even while I was away, I was always thinking of you. Don’t laugh.

For instance, a few weeks ago, I was in some kind of toy train circumnavigating Disneyland Hong Kong. With all my pretensions at being cool, it was rather unsettling. In that kitschy ride, I began to think how erstwhile Maoist China, on the eve of the HK turnover years ago, could’ve dealt with what is probably the shining symbol of Western capitalism—reduced into the face of one cute mouse.

The first turn skirted a jungle, and in the thickets were pocket clearings that revealed elephants, zebras, and giraffes made of concrete. Some crude robotics made their heads sway and their ears stand. Tucked in the leafage were speakers secretly blaring the jungle’s ambient sound.

I felt both fear and sadness. The first one because, given the rate mankind is blotting out everything that breathes, zebras will be zeroes. The second is a result of the first. Right that moment I swore I’d write my two-cents worth and email it to Op Ed Bong Wenceslao immediately. That did not happen.

The following day, I took a walk to a news stand and bought an English-language newspaper for HK $6. The other papers were in Chinese, but I’m an heir to a lost ancestry. My Chinese is limited to counting one to ten.

One news item caught my attention, and it went by the headline: “First government-backed gay bar opens in mainland China.” No joke. And this was at the height of the Comelec rejection of party-list applicant Ang Ladlad back home, a country that takes pride in being a dogged disciple of American “democracy.”

For one moment, I wanted to roll the paper, take the next flight home and thump the heads of all proclaimed morality messiahs in our midst. I remember one national artist advising a gay writer to move on and write other things because there is a multitude of them that are larger than themes of gayness. The young writer said he wrote large because gay rights are a social justice issue.

Mainland China is funding the gay bar as a means to fight Aids.

Right that moment, I wanted to write, but failed.

I failed, but I did not notice, too, that the afternoon passed and I was well into the “wonderful world of Disney.” I simply forgot at some point that I was right in the navel of kitsch.

Some 3D orchestra banged its finale and sent Donald Duck in a trajectory and crashing into the wall. When the lights were on, we burst in laughter and awe to see him stuck with his limbs sticking out. Humbug, that’s what slapstick is, but the crazy duck’s act quite strangely had me.

Ah, so finally, I could write something down this Christmas.

I’ve been a wee bit flat myself being at odds with most things about the season. Except for one, and I noticed that despite the season’s surfeit, there is something to be said about giving, not only as a sort of spirit, but as a concrete, collective expression. Without this, we seem to be short of chances the entire year.

In a scale you could not ignore, Christmas seems to re-appropriate kindness and love into a social rite. If you lost the child in you, you have at least that sense of community to count yourself in. But I bet you will still find yourself snickering to see that crazy duck stuck on the wall. To rest, said one writer, is to suspend all your judgments of the world.

Indeed, the season does what Exupery did in his book—which is to constantly remind us that we were all children once. Merry Christmas and a happy new year!

Published in the Sun.Star Cebu newspaper on December 29, 2009.

Zeitgeist | Sun.Star Cebu | Dec. 4, 2009

THERE'S a rather esoteric study that goes by the title, “Dynamics of emotions in political game theory.” In one breath, you know it’s a crack at merging the disciplines of psychology, political science and mathematics.

The attempt pretty much succeeds—it had quantified emotions and systematically configured their contagiousness in a certain populace. The study, a joint effort of an eclectic clique of professors from the University of Berkeley, was able to draw a line between emotional response and political circumstances, something we know only too instinctively, but this time pinned down to the level of theory.

Someone raised an ante over an infomercial for its emotional overload, and one can’t help but find that rather naïve.

What can you say or do in a thirty-second TV ad, anyway, but drive the dagger into the hearts of voters?

The Democrats in the US learned their lesson well, and for the first time changed tack during the Barack Obama campaign.

Many credit his victory to the thousands of volunteers who walked the talk, but I think the value of emotions in the campaign was pretty much underrated. For years, the Democrats loaded their campaigns with policy debates, statistics and facts, and most often put an entire town hall to sleep.

Drew Westin, a clinical psychologist who doubles as a political strategist, found that despite how the Democrats’ belief are in line with most of the Americans’ feelings, the party repeatedly failed in translating that capital into electoral success.

Westin suggested during the campaign that the Democrats should better drop its “laundry list of issues,” and begin speaking in terms of passion.

Those single-worded campaign posters with Obama’s face make sense to me now. A friend of mine gave me a campaign shirt with the word “progress” under an image of Obama. The other posters also carried the word “change.” It was a matter of paring down otherwise complex issues into what feels right in the guts.

You listen to Obama’s speeches, and you’ll find how he cuts to the chase with what is household and basic, fanning the fire of the body politic with the simplest of words.

At home, this is the kind of tack we saw in most of our infomercials. But Westin added that there is no substitute for telling the truth in the “marketplace of emotions.” Nothing, he says, is more compelling than a candidate who is “genuine.”

So we have these theories—political game theory, emotions, and passion campaign—on the plate, but as Sigmund Freud said, “The theories are there, but it does not stop the world from happening.”

What possible emotions can hit the Filipinos right at the breadbasket? In the age of innocence, you think the elections are pretty much the turf of political scientists and forget that all the other fields that use every breathing human body as a specimen are just as valuable. Even literature, and all its discourse analyses on the grand narratives of good versus evil or the forgettable creation story of Malakas and Maganda.

You look around and these mythologies come alive in our political terrain.

Do they work? Of course, they do, which is why Greg Sanchez doesn’t quite fit in the scene of a creation story. You bet, the storyline, in all its mutations, will sell like a real road show in the proper season.

My friend Radel says some sort of spirit permeates in the course of history. I remember the term “zeitgeist,” which means “spirit of the times.” Zeitgeist you can add into the Berkeley boys’ theory, and you’ll find a way to make sense of why, despite how some candidates strain their neck in the political plunge, still fall behind the race.

That, while others are simply buoyed by zeitgeist.