Qwertyman No. 92: The Return of the Old Normal

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, May 6, 2024

FEW WILL remember it, but yesterday, May 5, marked the first anniversary of the official end of the Covid-19 pandemic as a global health emergency, as announced by the World Health Organization. Of course it didn’t mean that Covid was over and gone—it would continue to mutate into thankfully less lethal variants—but the worst was over. It had infected more than 765 million people around the world, and killed almost 7 million of them; in the Philippines, as of last month’s latest figures, over 4 million of us caught Covid, and we lost more than 66,000 friends, family members, and neighbors to the disease.

It’s amazing what a difference a year makes. The pandemic rules had been relaxed long before May 5 last year, and much of 2023 and 0f the present year had been spent by us trying to get back to life as we knew it pre-Covid at a frenetic pace—engaging in that new term, “revenge travel,” buying new cars, building new homes, and as of last week, complaining about the infernal heat wave like it was the worst thing to have plagued us in decades (maybe it was—since Covid). For the most part, we seem to have willed Covid out of our minds, eager to replace its bitter memories with fresh and happy ones—an entirely human thing to do, to cocoon ourselves against the pain of loss. Are we in the “new normal,” or have we returned to the old?

I remember most vividly the paranoia that gripped the country during the pandemic’s early days—the first reports of people we knew dying horrible deaths in isolation, the terror following a sudden and suspicious onset of coughing and fever, the constant fear of carrying the virus home to the innocent and the infirm in one’s shoes, one’s clothes, one’s merest touch, the rapid disappearance of disinfectants and bread from the shelves, the inevitable closure of cinemas and restaurants, the anxious eyes peering above face masks and through face shields, the physical boundaries beyond which only a select few could cross—and, of course, the near-endless wailing of sirens announcing the imminence of death and dying. Unfamiliar words and phrases entered our vocabulary: co-morbidities, social distancing, quarantine, lockdown, ECQ, EECQ, RT-PCR, community pantry, antigen, remdesivir, hydroxychloroquine, Ivermectin, Sinovac (and anti-vaxx), etc.

Like many others, I lost friends to Covid, from very early on when no one knew what was really going on and what could be done to save patients who were turning up feverish and could hardly breathe. One of them was my own cardiologist, who reportedly assisted a patient whom he didn’t know carried the virus. Others were academics and senior officials returning from conferences overseas. Fortunately, no one in our families died of the disease, although many of us, myself included, later caught it at some point despite all precautions. When I did catch it, I have to admit that it was with a strange sense of relief, not only because I could now count myself a participant in a grand if horrible experience, and also because I imagined, perhaps foolishly, that I would be rewarded with some kind of immunity from further and worse infection.

Those of us who survived Covid hopefully did so with a more profound appreciation of the gift and value of life, and of the need to do good in the time we have left. But the 2022 elections only seemed to prove the power of political patronage, which became even more keenly felt during the pandemic, when local officials down to the barangays held sway over their constituents like never before. Covid sharpened the already stark contrast between rich and poor, from access to what were seen as the most effective vaccines to self-declared exemptions from certain restrictions like liquor-lubricated parties and literal hobnobbing. In the end, the virus didn’t discriminate, scything rich and poor alike, although the poor, living in cramped communities, were always more likely to fall ill and die.

What the public often failed to witness—and therefore can’t remember—were the stories of the frontliners who met Covid head-on and served as heroes behind the scenes. I’m now working with Dr. Olympia Malanyaon—a pediatric cardiologist who also served as Director of the Information, Publication, and Public Affairs Office of UP Manila—on a book she’s writing to document the efforts of UPM and of the Philippine General Hospital (which is part of UPM) to respond to the Covid crisis. The PGH, the country’s largest public hospital, was designated a Covid-referral hospital almost as soon as the pandemic broke, and its people found themselves in the vortex of an unprecedented medical and social crisis, and we want to tell their stories in this forthcoming book.

The word “hero” gets bandied around a bit too easily these days, but if there was a time for heroes to emerge, it was during the pandemic, when what used to be the most routine decisions (“Should I report for work today?”) could mean a matter of life and death. When the death toll mounted, many PGH staff resigned for fear of infecting their families, but many more stayed on, with nurses pulling 16-hour shifts and some doctors remaining on duty for as long as 30 hours.

Even utility workers recalled how pitiful the plight of the afflicted was. One said that “They had no one with them, not even when they died. They would be put into body bags, which could not be opened. Then they would be cremated the next day, without being seen by their families.” And then, the staff felt shunned by society when they went home as ordinary neighbors. “When we ordered at the fastfood, the guard shooed us away when he learned that we worked in the Covid unit,” recalled another. “I was very upset. It felt very degrading to work so hard, to line up for food when you got hungry, only to be turned away.”

Thankfully, the crisis also brought out the best in some other Filipinos, such as those who poured their time and money into community pantries that served the hardest hit. For a while back there, we saw and felt the glimmer of our inner heroes. It was a spirit that I hoped would be sustained into a broader and more enduring wave of change in 2022, but as the pandemic receded, we realized how much of the old normal yet remained.

Covid made us aware of the precariousness of our health as individuals. Looking forward to 2025, I wonder what it will take for our people to value their well-being as a society and as a nation.

(Image from Reuters/Lisa Marie David)

Penman No. 462: Exit This Gatekeeper

Posted on by
Reply

Penman for May 5, 2024



INDULGE ME this bit of self-reflection, which I suppose will also speak for many writers of my generation. After much thought, I have decided that I will no longer be judging literary competitions, having just completed my last one.

My first reason is that I’m 70, a good age at which to pause and plan out the rest of my life, however long or short that may be. (The life expectancy of a Filipino male today is 72, although actuarial science seems to think that if you’ve come this far, you’ll likely hang around for another ten years.)

There are just a few things I want to devote that time to—primarily, to write my own books (not books for others, so I’m also announcing that upon completion of my current commitments, I will desist from seeking or accepting book commissions—unless I fall into grave and sudden need.) I want to travel more with Beng and Demi while we can, look after Buboy’s growth, play poker all night twice a week, and enjoy my strange hobbies. I’ll teach for as long as I can—I’m enjoying my undergraduate class right now—but will limit my participation in workshops, conferences, festivals, seminars, etc. to the few I am committed to, like the UP Writers Workshop. 

Judging competitions doesn’t seem that much work (unless you’re a judge looking at over 100 stories) and of course it’s a signal honor to be asked to help pick the best of new writing. It remains a tremendous responsibility and privilege to be thankful for. You get to go up a stage, say some nice things about literature and writers, receive a modest fee, and feel somewhat useful and relevant. That’s all well and good.

When I transitioned from being an active literary combatant (that’s how many of us felt back then, with the likes of Rene Villanueva and Ed Maranan breathing down your neck) to a judge after getting my Palanca Hall of Fame plaque in 2000—I never joined a contest after that—I felt that I had turned a corner and found a kind of inner peace. It wasn’t that I had nothing more to prove; one illusion that local literary competitions encourage in the young is that winning them is the be-all and end-all of writing, when all they are is a formal pat on the back to get you started. The true challenge for the young or beginning writer is not to win prizes but to write and publish books that will be read and appreciated by others, that hopefully will matter, that will outlive you, that for better or worse you will be remembered for and remembered by; publication is the ultimate prize, readership the ultimate validation. So I went on to write books, teach, have fun, and discover wonderful things outside of writing and literature (yes, there are such bright and shiny marvels). 

Judging competitions seemed to be a good way of keeping a foot in  the door, so I’ve been doing a lot of that, also as a kind of payback for all the people before me who took their time to recognize and reward my efforts with a prize. At some point, I realized that the foremost reason I kept joining and judging the Palancas was because I wanted to be there on Awards Night, to enjoy the company of writers I admired (the piano-playing Greg Brillantes being one of them), and to feel good about being a writer on the one night of the year that they took center stage. The great luck of Hall of Famers is that they can now attend all the Awards Nights they want without having to work for it—so I won’t.

The most important reason is that I’ve already read enough, perhaps too much, for far too long, and it’s no longer healthy for me or for those I may be judging. Our literary community certainly doesn’t lack for younger people who can do this job as well as if not better than I can.  I’m still and always delighted to see brilliant new work emerge from the pile, but it’s getting harder—more laborious, more fatiguing, and ultimately more disheartening to be asking, “ls this the best they can do? Don’t people know what a good story is anymore?” Or have I become the problem?

The word “gatekeeping” has been going around much lately, evoking the image of a surly senior (a Boomer, for sure), out of touch and out of step, insisting that his students and young writers should write like him or like Hemingway, playing favorites, and slamming the door shut on entire genres he doesn’t like or understand. That sounds a lot like me, except that I’ve never expected or driven my students to write like me; they come to my classes with their own experiences, their own material, their own talents and insights, and  the best of them have written stories that are nothing like mine, except perhaps that they’re realist, because that’s the kind of fiction I best know and teach. I’ve always been open to other forms and genres, even if I hardly write in them (I think I’ve tried everything at least once), because the world would be a terribly boring place if we all wrote about everything the same way. Think of much of the political rhetoric going around these days, no matter which flag is being waved: labels and slogans—the shorthand of groupthink—have replaced and diminished personal narrative and reasoning. (As if people will care when you die if you were “correct” all the time; they will ask if you were good and kind.) This is also why I have long resigned from anything resembling organized ideology or religion, whose avatars often seem so, so sure of themselves and of what they’re saying to the point of arrogance. 

I value the doubt and ambiguity, the constant self-questioning (what can we be capable of, despite ourselves?) that are fiction’s domain. Fiction humbles us by exposing our infirmities, but it also exalts us by offering the possibility of redemption.

In the end, what I have always looked for in a prizewinning story, aside from being exceptionally well-written (smooth and stylish when it needs to be, tough and visceral when it needs to be) is that it be moving and memorable. It should burn a hole and leave a scar in my heart, my guts, and my memory. I can enjoy clever and inventive stories as much as anyone else, but if it’s a passing amusement, like a joke, it won’t leave much behind. Some of the most memorable stories I’ve  come across weren’t even what you’d call grand in a sonorous or elaborate way. They took place in small places within relatively short periods of time, and involved ordinary people in situations that brought out their extraordinariness (by which I don’t mean some blinding heroism, but a part of them, dark or light, they didn’t even know was there).

Too many of the thousands of stories I’ve had to read over the years have been poorly written, dull, and forgettable. That’s not even a complaint, just par for the course for any kind of open literary competition here or anywhere else. People can’t be blamed for hoping and trying with their graceless prose, and I’m sure that many have nursed precious ambitions of being published and read. Not to be snarky, but the problem here really isn’t so much a lack of writing talent than of self-awareness, the kind of honesty and humility that will tell you, in your heart of hearts, that you will never be a nuclear scientist or an F-1 driver. Unfortunately, literary self-awareness can happen only when one has a sense of what truly good writing is. 

But could it possible that I myself have fallen so far behind that I can no longer recognize the new “good,” or apply the “new standards,” whatever they may be? Could my notions of “good fiction,” however liberally applied, be standing in way of some young genius’ debut?

I’ll be holding on to those notions, but now only for myself. I’m not urging my fellow seniors to do the same; we all operate on different clocks and their patience could be longer than mine. Some might say “Good riddance” and the feeling could be mutual, but I depart this task with a light and happy heart, looking forward to producing new work that will be judged by others.

Email me at jose@dalisay.ph and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.

Qwertyman No. 91: 1968 Redux

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, April 29, 2024

A WAVE of pro-Palestinian protests has been sweeping American college campuses, prompting academic administrators and political leaders to push back and invoke their powers—including calling in the police—to curtail the demonstrations. 

House Speaker Mike Johnson—a Trump ally and staunch supporter of Israel—probably spoke for his ilk when he told protesting students at Columbia to “Go back to class! Stop wasting your parents’ money!” He also called on Columbia University president Minouche Shafik—an Oxford Economics PhD and English baroness who also happens to have been born in Alexandria, Egypt to Muslim parents—to resign for not moving strongly enough against antisemitism on the Columbia campus, despite Shafik’s controversial suspension of pro-Palestine student groups earlier and her resort to police action, resulting in mass arrests.

The protests and the violent response to them threw me back to 1968, when the world’s streets from Chicago to Paris shook from the boots of students and workers marching against the Vietnam War, for civil rights, and for women’s liberation. In the Philippines, student organizations such as the SCAUP and the newly formed SDK took up the same causes, on top of a resurgent nationalism. I was too young to have been part of these great movements then, although we marched in high school for “student power,” whatever that meant. I would get deeply involved as the decade turned, infected by the inescapable ferment in the air; in 1973 I would realize that protest had a price when I spent seven months in martial-law prison.

I’ve tried hard to think what it would be like to be 18 and a student today, what cause would drive me to the streets and to pitch a tent on the campus grass. While we Pinoys have our sympathies, Gaza seems too distant for us to mobilize for, and certainly we don’t lack for domestic issues to be bothered by, although our level of tolerance appears to have risen over time. In 1971, a 10-centavo increase in oil prices was enough for us to trigger the Diliman Commune; today we routinely wait for Tuesday’s inevitable announcement of gas price hikes and sigh.

Perhaps time and age do bring about shifts in perspective; some leftist firebrands of my youth have now become darlings of the right, and I myself have moved much closer to the center, ironically morphing from student activist to university official at the time of my retirement.

As that administrator—at a university where protesting is practically part of the curriculum—I can appreciate the bind Dr. Shafik now finds herself in, hemmed in from both left and right, with the complexity of her thinking and the brilliance of her own achievements reduced to a single issue: how to deal with students who won’t “go back to class and stop wasting their parents’ money,” as Speaker Johnson would have it, and will instead insist on their right to self-expression, whatever the cost. Aggressiveness, audacity, and even insolence will come with the territory. Persons in authority become natural targets of one’s rejection of things as they are; the preceding two generations are to be held immediately responsible for things gone wrong. 

I recalled a time when UP students barged into Quezon Hall to interrupt a meeting of the Board of Regents to plead their cause. Some furniture was scuffed, but the president sat down with the students and discussed their demands. No one left happy, of course, but what had to be said on both sides was said. At another meeting later, someone asked if the students involved should have been sanctioned for what they did. I had to butt in to pour cold water on that notion, knowing that any punitive action would just worsen the problem. Open doors, I said, don’t shut them; this is UP—that kind of protest is what makes us UP, and our kind of engaged response is also what makes us UP.

Some will say that these outbursts are but cyclical, and that young people never learn, in repeating what their now-jaded seniors did way back when. But then the State never learns either, by responding to student protests today the way they did back in 1968, with shields and truncheons, effectively affirming everything the young suspect about elderly authority.

The Israel-Hamas war—now magnified, through many lenses, into an Israeli war on Palestinians—is a particularly thorny issue for American academia and for a public habituated to looking at the Jewish people as biblical heroes and historical victims. Gaza has turned that perception around for many, with the aggrieved now seen as the aggressors. In my column two weeks ago, I agreed with that re-evaluation, although I was careful to take the middle road and to condemn the excesses—committed for whatever reason—on both sides. 

Not surprisingly, I quickly got blowback from both my pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian friends. War is always ugly, one said, and Israel has to do what it must to save itself; the Hamas attack on October 7 was overblown by propaganda, said another, and it was something that Israel had coming. 

I still accept neither extreme; call me naïve and even Pollyannish, but I stand not with Israel nor with Palestine, but for peace and justice, which are not exclusive to one side, and can only be achieved by both working and living together. You can argue all the politics and the history you want, but there is absolutely no humane rationalization for the rape of women, the murder of children, and yes, even the killing of innocent men—not even the prospect of potentially saving more lives, the very argument behind the incineration of 200,000 Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an act of war we all benefited from, but cannot call guiltless.

In a conflict as brutal and as polarizing as this one, “middle” never quite cuts it, and the excess of one will always be justified by the excess of the other. (To complicate my ambivalence, some issues do seem to have no middle, like Ukraine.) There have been no mass protests or demonstrations to advance my kind of moderation, and I don’t expect students, whether in Columbia or UP, to take to the streets flashing “peace” signs. 

And in mentioning that, I think I’ve put a finger on one difference between 1968 and 2024: “peaceniks” were neither pro-Saigon nor pro-Hanoi, although her critics were quick to paint Jane Fonda red; they just wanted America out of a war that was none of its business. There was an innocence to that that seems to have been lost in our hyper-informed and over-analyzed century. We feel compelled to choose with passion and precision, and are defined by our choices, from politics to sneakers.

Qwertyman No. 90: Postscript to Masungi

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, April 22, 2024

SENATE PRESIDENT Pro Tempore and environmental champion Loren Legarda did the right and necessary thing last week when she called on the Bureau of Corrections to desist from building prisons or offices on land it supposedly owns in the Masungi Georeserve in Tanay, Rizal. 

For unfathomable reasons, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo awarded BuCor 270 hectares in 2006 for new headquarters and a New Bilibid Prison in the heart of Masungi, a protected area that has become an internationally recognized showcase of nature conservation. Following Legarda’s statement, Bucor officials have assured the public that it will not push through with its plans, and will instead just build facilities for a detachment of forest rangers who will protect Bucor’s lot.

That’s still not the best solution—which would be the revocation of the land grant, given that prisons have no place in Masungi or any protected area for that matter. But even a reprieve is welcome, as it buys time for the national government to take a long, hard look at what’s happening in Masungi, where the threat of new construction pales in comparison to what’s already been built there.

I first wrote about Masungi last January, when I visited the 3,000-hectare georeserve along the border of Tanay and Baras, Rizal. It’s a critical stretch of land that’s not only home to some of the country’s rarest and most threatened species such as the purple jade vine and Masungi microsnail—as well as 72 kinds of birds—but also helps protect Metro Manila from catastrophic flooding because of the watershed it sits on. 

The place has had a long and complicated history, from the time the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) tried to use it for employee housing in the early 1990s to 2017 when its care and supervision was entrusted to the Masungi Georeserve Foundation, Inc. (MGFI) by then DENR Secretary Gina Lopez. Well before and since then, Masungi’s caretakers have battled a host of threats, including landgrabbing by syndicates reportedly backed up by powerful people connected to the government. Aside from the BuCor’s plan to make a prison out of a natural Eden, a wind farm is being built on Masungi by a Singapore-owned company.

But beyond the quarries, resorts, and private houses that have sprung up on the reserve, MGFI president Ben Dumaliang’s main source of worry is the government itself—specifically, the DENR, or what he sees as its inexplicable indifference or even hostility to the foundation and its efforts to preserve and protect Masungi from parties hungry for its land.

I met with Ben recently and he explained to me how many times he had tried to approach DENR officials to get their support for the foundation’s work on the georeserve—an achievement that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Action Awards recognized in 2022—but how he has been repeatedly rebuffed, and even threatened with the cancellation of their management contract. “The secretary didn’t even congratulate us for our UN award,” he told me in a voice tinged with sadness and dismay. 

It isn’t really the accolades that Ben and his team—which includes his two daughters and a corps of bright, young forest rangers and volunteers—are after. While they can bank on a deep wellspring of support from the public and most of the media—you can’t go to Masungi without being impressed by the extent and the inescapable beauty of the foundation’s reforestation efforts—they need resolute action from the DENR to enforce its own laws and rules. The cold-shoulder treatment he’s been getting has driven Ben to suspect that “rogue DENR officials” are behind the landgrabbing syndicates plaguing the reserve. 

“They see our foundation as the only hindrance to quarries, resorts, real estate, and many other deals in the protected area. Unfortunately for the environment and the public, these deals cause irreparable harm. Our presence, vigilance, and conservation work in the area have stalled, stopped, and derailed countless syndicates from pillaging the frontline forest that is being swallowed up by creeping urbanization and development,” says Ben.

I saw the irrefutable evidence of this massive encroachment myself on my visit there last January. A whole village—Sitio San Roque in Baras—sits and thrives where a forest should have been (and probably was). I saw a pool resort, mansion-like homes, shops, etc., all on land claimed by the residents to have been legally acquired under the Marcos-era PD 324, which granted free patents to land that it designated alienable and disposable. Ben points out that this is fraudulent, because PD 324 had long since been superseded and nullified by PD 705 and Proclamation 1636, which withdrew the land given out under PD 324 and protected it from settlement, disposition, and development. 

“The three big-time quarries totaling some 1,300 hectares misplaced in Masungi trace their roots also to the PD 324 scam,” Ben alleges. “The quarry owners justify their contracts with claims of private rights derived from PD 324. They were also fooled. They brazenly violate the prohibition against mining in protected areas of at least three laws—Proclamation 1636, the NIPAS Law, and the Mining Act.”

Ben wonders why, in the face of these strong legal arguments, the DENR hasn’t moved against the presumptive squatters in Masungi and has instead refused to meet with the foundation and work with it to defend and protect the georeserve. When I saw him recently, he brought up the same question I raised at the end of my previous column, which I’m asking again: “What do they have against us?” I think that deserves a clear, fair, and not incidentally overdue answer.

Qwertyman No. 89: The Country I Wanted to Love

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, April 15, 2024

FOURTEEN YEARS ago, I received a writing assignment that any journalist would have jumped at: to go with other media representatives on a week-long visit to Israel and to report on our observations. Although the trip was sponsored by the Israeli government, and therefore clearly a PR initiative, we were under no instructions as to what to write about, or how. Of course there were implicit or effective restrictions: our itinerary did not include visits to Gaza, the West Bank, or other Palestinian-controlled areas, and we had no interviews with Palestinians (interestingly, one of our companions, ABS-CBN’s Uma Khouny, was half-Filipino and half Arab-Israeli). 

As expected, we saw the best of Israel, the sites that any “Holy Land” tour would have included: the Temple Mount, the Holy Sepulchre, the Wailing Wall, the Dead Sea, Masada, the bazaars, and so on. We also visited a kibbutz and marveled at how its inhabitants could coax so much life and verdure out of barren desert. We were brought to a state-of-the-art facility where we drove an Israeli-made, 100%-electric car around a track (this was in 2010, mind you). Just outside Tel Aviv, we met children at a hospital where they had heart operations they couldn’t have afforded or gotten otherwise; these children included Palestinians, Angolans, Chinese, and yes, a Filipino. We watched  vibrant performances of contemporary Israeli dance and music. We were moved close to tears by a visit to the Holocaust exhibits at Yad Vashem.

We left deeply impressed by the Israel we had seen and experienced, and I reported as much in two “Penman” columns for the STAR. We were aware that we had not seen everything on our carefully curated tour, and we understood that there were simmering tensions behind the high walls that were rising all over the place to block off zones that the government might have considered unsafe, but there was a time for every story, and this time was our hosts’.

Israel did not even need to invite me to gain my sympathy. Like many Catholic boys in the 1960s, I grew up steeped in the belief that the Jews were God’s chosen people—why else would he have delivered them out of Egypt (a scene replayed over and over again in Technicolor on Holy Week) to the Promised Land? I read Leon Uris’ Exodus and enjoyed the movie version with its memorable theme, “This Land Is Mine.” I learned to sing “Hava Nagila,” and so did you.

Over the next decades I would watch countless documentaries on the Mossad and its exploits in capturing Adolf Eichmann, freeing the hostages at Entebbe, going after the leaders of Black September in the wake of the Munich Olympics massacre, and gathering intelligence leading to the Yom Kippur War. The eye-patched Moshe Dayan and the grandmotherly Golda Meir were both cinematically compelling. More than biblical heroes, Israelis and Jews represented the finest of human qualities—tenacity, ingenuity, resolve, courage, and imagination. Even beyond Israel, who could argue with the brilliance of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jascha Heifetz, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, and Marc Chagall? Never mind the Rothschilds and the Shylocks.

But now much of that luster has tragically vanished, lifted like so much vapor, in the wake of Israel’s invasion of Gaza and its horrific toll on human life. 

Like most onlookers from afar, I was appalled and outraged by Hamas’ attack on Israeli communities and citizens last October 7; subsequent reports of rapes and executions showed these assaults to have been premeditatedly barbaric, calculated to sow fear and terror in the enemy. No matter the history behind them, no matter the grievances that may have led to their unleashing, the violence committed especially against innocent civilians was brutish and repulsive.

Israel may have gained the moral high ground at that point in its pledge to avenge the victims, recover the hostages, and destroy Hamas, but it soon lost that superiority in its disproportionately savage invasion of Gaza. All its claims to sophistication and efficiency in waging war—the kind of surgical operation on display at Entebbe and elsewhere—went out the window in air strikes that have killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hapless children; even those who miraculously survive will forever bear the scars and trauma of this assault. To “weed out” Hamas, Netanyahu’s Israel has chosen to flatten and to destroy the whole garden. And as if the world were not watching, an Israeli commander even declared on TV that “There is no famine in Gaza.” 

This has gone far beyond “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The Israelis have claimed buckets of Palestinian eyes and teeth for every one lost to an Israeli. They have exceeded even the Roman practice of decimation, by which every tenth man in a cohort was executed in punishment for the offenses of the lot; instead, ten Palestinians seem to have suffered for every Hamas member deemed at fault for the October 7 attack (the actual kill ratio has been 30 to 1). The supreme irony of it is that Israel has merely guaranteed that Hamas’ age-old causes and resentments will live on, and even prosper with global sympathy for Palestinian self-determination, as may have been Hamas’ game plan all along.

Of course, the State of Israel does not need our admiration and affection, and we understand that it is engaged in an existential fight for its life on many fronts, as it has been since its inception in varying degrees of intensity; the same can now be said for the Palestinians. My opinion as a distant Filipino commentator will change nothing (except perhaps preclude me from further invitations to deplane at Ben-Gurion airport). I realize that what I am saying here will please neither side of this conflict and their partisans, and I expect to receive mail to insist that I failed to see this and that and to justify the ferocity of their actions. I know that we are no longer watching a movie with a billowing theme song and clear heroes and villains. 

But I suspect I am not alone in expressing my great sadness over the turn taken by a country I wanted to love. I can only take refuge in thinking that not all Israelis are Netanyahus, and not all Palestinians are Hamas. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” I wonder if that line from Deuteronomy has its equivalent in the Torah, or the Koran for that matter.

Qwertyman No. 88: Wanted: Gentlemen

Posted on by
Reply

Qwertyman for Monday, April 8, 2024

A SHIPLOAD (let’s get that consonant right) of questions has been raised over the “gentleman’s agreement” alleged to have been entered into between former President Rodrigo Duterte and China’s Xi Jing Pin over the disputed Ayungin Shoal in the West Philippine Sea. China has suggested as much, complaining about the present administration’s “inaction” over what it apparently considered a done deal.

According to former Duterte spokesman (should we also call him “former human rights lawyer”?) Harry Roque, Duterte and Xi did pledge between them to “maintain the status quo” in the troubled zone, meaning, there would be no rebuilding or reinforcement of Philippine installations there—specifically referring, I suppose, to the hopelessly decrepit BRP Sierra Madre that has to be the sorriest and loneliest maritime outpost in the world. 

Chinese Coast Guard cutters have routinely tried to block Philippine vessels attempting to resupply the Sierra Madre. A month ago, four Filipino sailors were injured when they were water-cannoned by the Chinese, and their ship rammed. Our resupply ships have been running these Chinese gauntlets to reach the marines on the grounded Sierra Madre, which symbolically enforces our claim to the Spratly Islands, or that portion of it we call the Kalayaan Islands group. This was precisely the kind of situation that Duterte and Xi reportedly tried to avoid with their agreement.

Upon hearing his former colleague’s explosive revelations, former presidential counsel Salvador Panelo quickly went on the air to dismiss them as the fabrications of a publicity-seeker, assuring the public that Digong himself had denied the report. He added that his old boss would never have sold out the country that way. In fact, Panelo claimed, Duterte had brought up the Philippines’ arbitral victory against China at the Hague with Xi—a judgment Duterte had ironically threatened to toss into the wastebasket as nothing more than “a piece of paper.” Roque then went on to explain that the “gentleman’s agreement” covered not just Ayungin Shoal but the entire West Philippine Sea, enlarging its scope exponentially. If it was a lie to begin with, as Panelo suggested, well, the lie got much bigger.

This spectacle of two Duterte mouthpieces not just speaking at cross-purposes but putting each other down would be immensely entertaining if our national territory and patrimony weren’t at stake. It doesn’t really matter who between these two, uhm, gentlemen is right, or whom we end up believing. What’s clear is that either way, beyond token whimpers and some lip service to sovereignty, Duterte and his crew never did much to defend Philippine territorial and maritime rights in the WPS, debating with their local critics on the issue more than with the Chinese, even waging a vain effort to denigrate the Hague ruling and those who had fought so hard for it. 

Given the new administration’s popular pivot toward a more aggressive stance on China, we can understand if Duterte and his boys seem scrambling to be seen as having been patriots all along. Who knows, maybe they were, and maybe we poor kibitzers were just too dumb or too dense to see that. 

Remember when Duterte made that famous “wastebasket” remark in May 2016? Then-spokesman Roque tried to spin that by saying no, no, no, you have to “apply the proper construction” (his exact words) to that statement—meaning (hold your breath), “He really didn’t mean it that way. Instead, go back to his UN speech where he vowed to defend the Philippines against China. When he said ‘I’ll throw this into the wastebasket,’ he wasn’t speaking for himself, he was speaking from the point of view of the Chinese.”

Huh? Forgive me if I can’t wrap my non-lawyerly mind around this “proper construction,” let alone explain why a Philippine president should be expressing the Chinese view.

To help sort this mess out, Sen. Risa Hontiveros has called for a hearing to find out if, indeed, Duterte and Xi had, as the young ones put it, an “MU” over Ayungin and the WPS. Predictably, Panelo thinks this probe will be a “waste of time,” insisting that the reported “gentleman’s agreement” never happened. 

Another newspaper quotes an anonymous Chinese official saying, like Roque, that it did. Under the reported terms of the deal, China would allow the Philippines to resupply the BRP Sierra Madre for as long as it did not reinforce or rebuild the ship. (How the agreement supposedly applies to the entire WPS as Roque claims remains murky.)

One would think that a true, broader, and more meaningful “gentleman’s agreement” in the West Philippine Sea would involve the non-building of offensive structures and bases, the avoidance of violent confrontation, respect for our fishing rights, and freedom of navigation for all nations in international waters—all of which the Chinese have flouted with impunity. Instead—and if true—all our former president did was to ask the Chinese for permission to resupply our own aging and ailing vessel, in exchange for a promise to let it rot. Whether that’s treason or patriotism, you be the judge.

Pending further inquiry, I myself suspect that some kind of bargaining did take place, but I somehow doubt that it was a gentleman’s agreement. For that you’d need at least two gentlemen in the house.

Penman No. 461: A Parisian Interlude

Posted on by
1

Penman for Sunday, April 7, 2024

WHY IS it that just when you think you’ve begun to figure out a foreign city’s transport system, it’s time to come home? That happened again barely two weeks ago when my wife Beng and I flew to France for some speaking engagements in Paris and Le Havre. We were there for work, not tourism, and more work waited for us as well back home, so we couldn’t stay for as long as we would have wanted to. We’d been to Paris three times before and had done the obligatory Louvre and Eiffel Tower visits, but it almost seems criminal not to linger and loiter around such a beautiful city.

We were there at the invitation of SciencesPo, France’s leading social sciences university, for a series of talks on Philippine literature and art. Along with France-based writer Criselda Yabes, I gave a reading as well at the Philippine embassy in Paris at the behest of our most gracious ambassador, Mme. Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, an avid amateur painter and supporter of Philippine culture. Our host at SciencesPo, Dr. Pauline Couteau, also arranged some events for us at their campus in Le Havre and sponsored a special screening of Lino Brocka’s classic “Maynila sa mga Kuko ng Liwanag” at the Entrepot Theater in Paris.

It was a hectic week that left these footloose septuagenarians exhausted but exhilarated at the same time, warmed up in France’s unseasonably chilly weather (often falling below 10C) by the enthusiasm of our new friends, both French and fellow Filipinos. 

Again, however, we had a sweet problem to deal with even before we flew to Paris: with such little time left on our schedule for more casual diversions, what places or experiences would we put on top of our list for our relaxation and amusement, given Paris’ almost inexhaustible offerings of wonder and delight?

Anthony Bourdain, bless his soul, famously advised short-term visitors to Paris not to make a mad dash to try and see everything all at once, but to just relax, have coffee, imbibe the neighborhood culture, stay in bed (and for those able and inclined, make love). Beng and I recalled, with both fondness and regret, how we had first seen Paris a quarter-century earlier from the back of a bus on a 99-pound budget tour from our base then in Norwich, England. The bus went by the city’s landmarks so fast that Beng missed Rodin because she was in the on-board restroom then. Subsequent visits afforded us a bit more time to see the Mona Lisa (of course) and to go up the Eiffel Tower (of course) but our happiest memories came, as Bourdain suggested, from just walking in the city gardens and along the Seine.

This time, we decided to do just two things with our limited free time: visit one museum, and hit the flea markets. This follows a pattern that Beng and I have observed over decades of traveling together, from Amsterdam, Barcelona, and London to New York, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The museums capture and preserve the glory of the past, and if you’re lucky, rather than pay for made-in-China miniatures at the museum gift shop, you can find some genuine article from that past in the flea market. 

Our choice of museum was easy: Paris has dozens of fantastic museums—and you’ll never, ever finish the entire Louvre in one visit—but the great one we’d never been to was the Musée d’Orsay, the former train station that’s become France’s cathedral of Impressionism. Finally, this time, in the few hours we had just before boarding the train to Le Havre, we managed to step into the Musée d’Orsay, and what a divine experience e that was, to find room after room filled by the masterworks of Renoir, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Degas, Redon, Courbet, and so on, like walking into a book of pictures. 

Understandably, hundreds of other people had the same idea, so the best time to visit may have been after 6 pm—the museum closes at 9:45—when admission rates are also cheaper. Not a few friends have remarked that they found the Musée d’Orsay much better than the Louvre, perhaps because of its relative compactness and its delivery of proven crowd-pleasers in its collection.

Our flea-market sorties proved just as wondrous, with the additional thrill of unpredictability, as each table will be different from the one before it and you need a quick, trained eye to spot the jewel in the junkyard. As flea-market addicts from decades back when we used to scour the yard sales and antique barns of the American Midwest for things we could drag home, Beng and I have developed a routine of scan-and-scrutinize, looking for our respective grails (old fountain pens for me, old bottles and costume jewelry for her).

We were lucky to be billeted near our first flea market, the one at Porte de Vanves, which has about a hundred dealers strung along a large city block selling all manner of goodies from 18th-century books and Christofle silverware to walking sticks and paintings. I searched in vain for that lost Juan Luna and that stray copy of the Fili (which Rizal finished in Paris), but the flea-market gods blessed me instead with an early 1900s “safety” fountain pen sheathed in gold, perfect in every way, lying all by its lonesome on a table of bric-a-brac. “Combien, madame?” I asked in my schoolboy French, my throat dry with anticipation. “Cinquante euros,” she said; it was easily worth five times that, but I gathered up all my courage and countered, “Quarante?” “Okay,” she said, “A quick “Merci!” and 40 euros later, I was a happy boy with a new toy—what could be a better memento of this short trip than a gorgeous century-old pen with the word “Paris” on its 18-carat nib?

Of course, this luck was not to be repeated on our visit to the big flea market of St. Ouen in Clignancourt—reputedly the largest of its kind in the world—a few hours before boarding the plane back for home, but we rewarded our labors with a late lunch in a Chinese restaurant. After a week of French cuisine, immersed in the grandeur of French art and culture, huge platefuls of Cantonese fried rice sounded just about right. It was as if we were being told, “You’ve had your Parisian interlude and your souvenirs, it’s time to go home.” Au revoir!

Qwertyman No. 87: A French Sojourn

Posted on by
4

Qwertyman for Monday, April 1, 2024

MY WIFE Beng and I were in France last week to give a series of lectures at the invitation of the Paris Institute of Political Studies, better known as SciencesPo. They don’t formally observe Holy Week in France (nor, for that matter, do many Filipinos to whom it’s simply come to mean “long weekend”). So we thought that it was the best time to come over and share some of our insights into Philippine literature, art, and politics with young French students as well as our countrymen in Paris, for whom I and fellow writer Cris Yabes, who’s based in France, gave a special reading at the Philippine embassy.

For those who’ve never heard of it—which won’t be too surprising given our Pinoy fixation on top American and British universities—SciencesPo (pronounced SEE-ansPO) is France’s leading university in the social sciences. It now has 14,000 students spread out over seven campuses across the country. Only 4,000 of those students are undergraduates; the rest are graduate students, including 350 taking their PhD. Unlike our universities, SciencesPo’s undergrads can finish in only three years, with their last year spent abroad. I was told that there are about 20 Filipino students currently enrolled at SciencesPo, and about half of its students come from overseas. As a public research university, SciencesPo is supported by the government through a private foundation, an arrangement that gives it a high degree of autonomy.

Founded in 1872, the university has served as the training ground for France’s political elite, producing five out of France’s eight presidents: Pompidou, Mitterand, Chirac, Hollande, and the incumbent Macron. Marcel Proust studied here for a year, and Christian Dior was a graduate.

With that kind of elite status comes criticism and controversy, and SciencesPo has had its share over the years. Nevertheless, it remains high on the list of desirable universities, especially for students with plans of joining the French civil service, after further studies at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration. (At Inalco, another Fremch university, we were surprised to find eight Filipino-French students studying Filipino for their degree under Prof. Elisabeth Luquin, who studied in UP and speaks Filipino like a local.)

Beng and I gave presentations on the Philippines at SciencePo’s main campus in Paris—a sprawling complex comprising ten buildings in some of Paris’ most precious real estate—and I had an additional three sessions in Le Havre, where SciencePo’s campus focuses on Asian studies. Wherever we went, we could see signs of intellectual and political ferment; like their predecessors at the Sorbonne whom we admired for their militancy 60 years ago, SciencesPo students have protested and rallied over many causes from domestic violence to Gaza.

To be fair, these concerns have occupied much of the rest of France as well. In a country where street protests are a time-honored tradition that have a real bearing on political outcomes, differences of opinion can run deep and long, and controversy stalks nearly every issue, from the wearing of religious headgear to the extension of the retirement age. To “liberté, egalité, fraternité,” we must now add “identité,” the subject of identity so central to political discourse in many countries today, especially those with large and strong immigrant populations like America and France.

“Over the last few years, France has been torn by culture wars—a shift that was less the effect of American concepts imported into French universities, as many on France’s right claim, than of the long-term decline, beginning in the early 1980s, of class politics and alternatives to capitalism. In a post-ideological France, class struggle has been displaced onto the terrain of identity,” noted sociologist Daniel Zamora in an article for Catalyst in 2021. “Despite Macron’s professed disdain for identity politics, his alternative can scarcely be construed as anti-identitarian. Building on what we have in common, Macron argued, meant finding an answer to the question, ‘What does it mean to be French?’”

Identity, at least, was not in question when Cris Yabes and I gave our reading at the Philippine embassy, thanks to the invitation of Ambassador Junever “Jones” Mahilum-West, one of the most amiable, gracious, and artistically inclined ambassadors I’ve ever met. (She was very game as well, happy to hoist an IPA beer with my wife Beng after our talks.) To a fairly sizeable group from the Filipino community in Paris, Cris and I read pieces that had to do with our foreign relations, particularly in my case with our diaspora, which my second novel Soledad’s Sister (which has been published in French by Mercure de France) dealt with. 

In the conversations that followed, I learned that there are around 26,000 documented Filipinos in France, with perhaps just as many existing belowground, most of them domestic helpers. One of them, Zita Cabais, was a victim of human trafficking more than two decades ago, having been enticed to come to Europe with the promise of a visa and a good job. Instead she was brought to Hungary, from where she was led on foot through Europe to finally reach France, whereupon her employer confiscated her passport, effectively holding her hostage. But unlike many other DH’s, Zita fought back, sued her employer, and succeeded. Since legalized, she now works for organizations devoted to fighting human trafficking. (The path to legalization is reportedly shorter in France, but knowing the French language is a prerequisite.)

One unexpected highlight of our visit was running into a group of Filipino seamen in our hotel in Le Havre, prior to my lecture. Beng and I had just come down for breakfast when we heard the familiar chatter of Filipinos at a nearby table. We came up to them and introduced ourselves, and we had a lively conversation during which they explained that they were still waiting for their ship to dock because of the bad weather. I’d met and chatted with seamen like them before in Hamburg and in Christchurch, among other places; as a writer and as a Filipino, I take it as a pleasant obligation.

Competition, they said, was driving them to accept shorter four-month stints at sea. “We barely break even, and it’s a tough life at sea, but we have no choice, since our families depend on us.” Part of my lecture that day was going to be about our Filipino notion of the hero as martyr, of Christ-like sacrifice for the common good. I suddenly realized that it was Good Friday. We had our smiling selfies taken, and they seemed proud to stand with UP professors, but it was Beng and I who felt honored to be there with them.

Qwertyman No. 86: The Real Pasaways

Posted on by
3

Qwertyman for Monday, March 25, 2024

THE LOCAL Internet came down hard last week on an anonymous teacher who was caught on livestream giving her students a scorching tongue-lashing for what she claimed was their lack of respect and discipline. Almost hysterical, Teacher X called them good-for-nothings without a future. Predictably, netizens deplored her derogatory language, which they equated with child abuse, and called on the Department of Education to investigate the incident and impose some disciplinary measure on the teacher concerned.

I agree that Ma’am seems to have gone overboard in expressing her displeasure over her students’ misbehavior, and that she could have been more circumspect in her choice of words. I’m certain that DepEd—which happens to be headed by someone who doesn’t mince words herself when it comes to court sheriffs—will use her case to remind teachers of the need for exemplary behavior, if not some sweetness and light, in classroom management. 

At the same time, having been a teacher myself for forty years, I can imagine and understand the exasperation that must have gone into a titanic diatribe like that. I’ve never taught in elementary or high school, where these aggravations come in spades on both sides of the teacher’s table, but I’ve heard and read enough to know what a cauldron of high emotions a Filipino classroom can be in the worst of circumstances. 

Let’s pack a room meant for twenty students with twice that number or even more, with the heat from a tin roof bearing down on everyone (or, in another season, rain leaking down onto desks and textbooks). The teacher recites her lesson in a funereal monotone, expecting her students (who keep themselves awake by sneaking glances at TikTok on their phones) to regurgitate what she has just said: “Class, how do you pronounce a-DO-le-scent?” 

Not that she truly cares what they say, because her mind’s on the box of chocolates she has to buy for the supervisor whose signature she needs for her salary loan. She’ll spend half that loan on a fence around her garden to keep the roaming pigs and pissing drunks away, and the other half on a new cellphone because her arch-rival Mrs. Buenafe has one that can take selfies without the blemishes. Maybe, if she took better pictures of herself, she could win back her husband Temyong from that tramp in Trece Martires.

Just then a fight breaks out at the back of the room because Etoy has dropped a ballpen to sneak a look at Corito’s underwear, in full view of Corito’s alleged boyfriend Mikmik. “Stop that, quiet, gademet, you imbecile a-DO-lescents, I order you to behave or I’ll squeeze your little balls until they pop! You have no future, you worthless pasaways! You’re going to rot in this living hell they call a classroom!”

Now, when Teacher X says “You have no future,” I take it to mean that Ma’am has read the Edcom II report on the sad state of Philippine education, which puts our young learners practically at the cellar of global achievement. Unless some systemic reforms are put in place by the same DepEd that will now trumpet the virtues of better decorum in the classroom, we might as well have cursed those kids that caused Teacher X to blow her top—and by “curse” I don’t mean the use of foul language, but rather a hex such as a witch might put on some unfortunate soul. 

Philippine education is full of pasaways, many of them more than ten or even fifteen years old. Some have been in the system for so long that they have mastered its ways and means (e.g., how to make good money off bad textbooks) to a level of proficiency worthy of a doctorate. Secretaries of Education come and go—some more lamented than others—but these pasaways remain, as they do in certain bureaus dealing with government revenues, because they ensure continuity, which everyone but the occasional and hopelessly naive reformer appreciates. They may even be well-mannered, with the nicest smiles and mildest dispositions you ever saw, because of their contentment with the world as it is and their philosophical acceptance of human frailty.

This brings to mind another kind of pasaway, a certain man of God—no, make that Son of God—who has steadfastly refused to honor a summons by a Senate committee looking into sex trafficking, of which this pastor has been accused, among other crimes and misdemeanors. Let me judged by the proper court, he has argued through his lawyers, although—if he is who he claims to be—then no one but God the Father will qualify for that privilege.

God must have been a prolific babymaker, because this prosperous preacher is but one of many around the world proclaiming themselves to be Sons of God. Nearly all have landed in some kind of trouble with the law, usually in matters of sex and money, paltry and mundane emoluments that Sons of God seem to feel especially entitled to, in partial recompense for the heavy burdens of divinity.

Someone should have assured our good pastor that the Senate is a decorous institution, exceedingly kind to its guests, as a recent hearing involving police officials being questioned by a former police official showed. A senator who walked out of that hearing out of disgust over the “babying” shown the witnesses by their inquisitor now himself stands accused of discourtesy. Notwithstanding the presence of a chairperson known for her intolerance of untruths, our Son of God can surely count on the professed and unshakeable friendship of some of her honorable colleagues to shelter him from the slings and arrows of earthly justice. We are a much kinder people than that apoplectic teacher might suggest.

Qwertyman No. 85: Epilogue to a Novel

Posted on by
4

Qwertyman for Monday, March 18, 2024

IT WAS in 1986, shortly after EDSA and my arrival in the US for my graduate studies, that I began thinking about what would eventually become my master’s thesis and my first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place. It was published by Anvil in 1992 when I came home to resume teaching after completing my PhD. 

For those who’ve never heard of it, the novel is a semi-autobiographical account of coming of age during the Marcos years, from the point of view of a Filipino who makes the traditional journey from island to metropolis to the world at large, becoming, in the process, a kind of political chameleon. 

I had sent the first draft directly to several US publishers—my first try at getting a book published abroad—and one of them, Alfred Knopf, responded. They were interested, they said, but they needed some revisions. I knew very little about the book publishing industry then; I had no agent, wasn’t sure what lay ahead, and was in a hurry to see my book out, so I passed on Knopf—which turned out to be a titan in literary publishing—and went with Anvil, which had barely just opened.

I haven’t regretted that decision, although the Knopf deal, had it pushed through, would have been a tremendous break, not just for myself but for Philippine literature as a whole. I could understand that after EDSA, US publishing was hungry for books from and about the Philippines, so that opportunity was there, but I was also impatient to be read as a novelist by my fellow Filipinos, after having written short stories and plays. 

Anvil published the book in many printings and editions over the next two decades, as it got on the syllabi of college teachers who were looking for a novel in English on martial law, alongside Lualhati Bautista’s iconic Dekada 70. This has been my greatest reward and satisfaction from this book—knowing that somehow, it helped some of my countrymen understand what they went through.

It took a while for the novel to gain some traction overseas. In 2010, it was published in the US by Schaffner Press in a dual edition with my second novel, Soledad’s Sister. In 2012, it was translated into Spanish by Maria Alcaraz and published in Barcelona by Libros del Asteroide under the title Pasando el rato en un pais calido.

A few months ago, I received the happy news from my publisher Anvil that Killing Time was being picked up by the German publisher of Soledad’s Sister, which had apparently been doing well in the German market. So now the book is being translated into German, hopefully for a launch by Transit Verlag in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair this October, leading up to our big Frankfurt Guest of Honor year in 2025.

But I didn’t write this column just to tell you about the story of a book—rather, I wanted to say something about the story of its story.

In a message to Anvil a few days ago, my German publisher requested that I write a short epilogue to the novel, given that it’s been more than 30 years since it first came out, and that many things have happened since to the world and the Philippines—the Internet, Trump, and fake news, among others. 

So I sat down and wrote the short piece below, which I’m sharing with you since it’s highly unlikely that you’ll come across, or understand, the German translation of this epilogue if and when the new edition comes out. Here goes:

I began writing this novel in 1986, shortly after the downfall of the Marcos regime. That happened because of a massive uprising in Manila’s streets that made headlines and became a kind of model for peaceful anti-authoritarian movements worldwide. I proudly took part in that revolt, and felt the euphoria of liberation after more than a decade of martial law. It was a moment I would often return to and savor as the Iron Curtain fell and as various and largely non-violent revolutions took place elsewhere, including the Arab Spring.

I thought then that the best thing I could do was to write a novel that would try and explain how and why people fell under the spell of a dictatorship, as they did under Nazi Germany—not sparing myself, having been complicit in its later actions as an employee of the regime. I wrote it—in English—in America, mainly to fulfill my graduate school requirements, but also to celebrate our hard-won victory and share the good news with the world.

Almost four decades later, the seemingly unthinkable has happened: the right is back in power, not only in the Philippines but in many places we had thought to be reformed democracies. The optimism sweeping the planet toward the end of the 20th century has given way to a darkening horizon, a hardening of hearts, a closing of minds. Our most basic freedoms and values are under stiff and unrelenting assault, from forces we now realize had never really been vanquished but had merely been lying in wait, biding their time, seeking an opportunity for revival amidst the excesses of late capitalism.

And once again I am hearing the siren song of despotism, and see the eyes of people glazing over in the desperate desire for quick relief from their troubles, for quick salvation. I hear the march of boots, to which many young citizens—their ears plugged by loud music—seem indifferent. Even among many of their elders is a renascent yearning for the simple discipline of strongman rule.

I see all these and I wonder if I should write a sequel, an update for the new century, but what would be the point of repetition? My novel was supposed to be about the past. Why is it so suddenly pertinent again?