Qwertyman No. 199: Making It about Themselves

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 25, 2026

NEVER IN our political history has a sitting Senate been held in such disrepute, been so reviled in public opinion than over the past two weeks. You’d think that the outrage over the leadership coup couldn’t be topped, but then came the obviously staged shooting and a fugitive’s escape—and then a lady senator’s histrionics over that fake attack.

What sticks in the craw—at least in mine—isn’t even the leadership turnover, or the assisted escape. We saw those coming, and even if we didn’t, they make cynical sense; of course they would do it. What’s extremely galling was having to listen to Pia Cayetano’s pained depiction of herself as a victim in the whole affair, terror-stricken and forlorn. 

Even accepting that her fear may have been genuine, she sounded shrill and shallow, peevish and petulant, completely unmindful of the deeper and more harrowing terrors ordinary Filipinos—people without staff, security, bulletproof SUVs, and generous salaries—have suffered, with far more courage and even grace. 

Terror and fear are givens in this country. Like many others of my age, I was shot at during the First Quarter Storm—at the Diliman Commune and at any number of rallies disrupted by the police and military. During martial law, I was beaten up as a political prisoner. Later, our home was raided early one morning by military agents hunting down “subversives” they thought were there, and our four-year-old daughter was interrogated by them. They were traumatic at the time, but they were nothing compared to the unspeakable torture my friends and comrades went through, the horrible deaths others suffered, the grief and loss sustained by those left behind. 

Multiply that by many thousands, not just under Marcos Sr. but under Rodrigo Duterte, and you’ll know what true terror feels like. Heard shots two doors down the hallway? Scary, yes, but Sen. Pia’s histrionics should have been directed at her mates who failed to warn her of the plan to spring Bato, which evidently at least some of them knew.

Pia Cayetano’s outburst, Robin Padilla’s posturing, Bato de la Rosa’s pop-up show, even Allan Cayetano’s propensity to fall on his knees and raise his arms to heaven—all gestures they had to know would only raise the political temperature—display a skill mastered by politicians, usually those with skeletons to hide: making it all about themselves, employing theatrics and embracing notoriety, effectively deflecting attention from the larger issues at hand.

What we’ve seen is but a preview of the spectacle to come. We can expect even more drama at the impeachment trial itself, on and off the Senate floor. More tears, more swearing, more gnashing of teeth, maybe even a scuffle or two. The public expects it, the theater of the Senate will provide it. 

It will become obvious at some point that it will no longer be Sara Duterte on trial, but the Senate itself—its credibility, its viability, and ultimately its utility and necessity as a political institution.

It should probably be clear by now that if we just go by the present numbers, VP Sara Duterte’s impeachment is dead in the Senate, was dead before it even started. More optimistic observers have opined that a conviction remains possible if some senators are persuaded—whether by the evidence or the pressure of public opinion—to change their minds, or even somehow vanish. 

I myself think that while a few conversions can be secured, the nine votes needed to keep Sara free and happy are locked in place. The shamelessness with which the current majority pulled off their coup on the eve of the impeachment court’s convening shows that these people are prepared to do anything—to run the country to the ground if necessary—to save their skins and even prosper again under a Sara administration. 

We Pinoys have hurtful words for this—walanghiya, kapal-mukha—and they’ve made the rounds of social media many times over, but these people are beyond hurting, impervious to all injury but to their power and their pockets.

These are the robed jurors who will sit through VP Sara’s trial and listen stoically to the litany of evidence detailing her crimes, none of which will matter to them. They will brazen it out to the end, confident that a resurgent Sara will rescue their political fortunes, and that a forgetful people will restore their reputations. They have no respect for the people’s intelligence, expecting us to swallow the preposterousness of these claims:

1. That the timing of the Senate leadership coup had nothing to do with the impeachment trial of VP Sara Duterte;

2. That Allan Peter Cayetano and Co. had no foreknowledge of Bato de la Rosa’s appearance at that key Senate session;

3. That the shooting incident had nothing to do with the escape of de la Rosa from the Senate with the assistance of Robin Padilla;

4. That no one in the Senate majority knew or knows of fugitive de la Rosa’s whereabouts.

And that’s why I can safely predict that no matter what they throw at her at the approaching trial, VP Sara’s hardcore Group of Nine—which will likely remain intact regardless of whether Sen. Sotto et al regain leadership of the Senate, as some expect to happen before too long—will guarantee her acquittal. If they think we can believe these fictions—or worse, don’t give a damn about what we think—then they’ll give Sara (and thereby themselves) a pass. That’s impunity on another level. 

Sen. Pia’s flare-up was reportedly provoked by Sen. Risa Hontiveros’ remark that it seemed that “nothing happened”—“walang nangyari”—in the wake of the Senate shooting. “But something did!” Pia insisted. 

I hope we can say the same at the end of the impeachment trial, but I’m not holding my breath. Against all my hopes, I’m afraid that walang mangyayari, and there’ll be at least nine senators who won’t be the least bit bothered.

Qwertyman No. 198: A Refuge of Scoundrels

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Qwertyman for Monday. May 18, 2026

THE MINUTE I saw the news on my phone last week that a Senate coup had just taken place with 13 senators voting to replace Tito Sotto as Senate President, I felt overcome by physical revulsion, like I wanted to throw up. Abysmal as it already is, Philippine politics had reached a new low. 

Democracy and justice had once again been hijacked by a crew of shameless opportunists whom we are paying P300,000 a month, plus many millions more in other emoluments, to screw us. Apart from funding this whole production, the Filipino people were fed a poorly scripted smoke-and-mirrors drama involving the surfacing of a fugitive from justice (or a ghost employee) for the sole purpose of casting one crucial vote, and then spiriting him away under a hail of bullets and hysterical screams of “We are under attack!”

I’m normally a pretty placid and I think level-headed person, mistrustful of conspiracies and averse to violence. But I have to admit, Father forgive me, that on that particular day I wished the attack were real—not to kill anyone but to strike fear into the hearts of politicians who’ve become impervious to the people’s wrath. I know, I know, it’s a sick and desperate idea, and as I’ve said before, nothing good ultimately ever comes out of violence. 

Still—and seriously now—it’s happened before, with deadly consequences, and not always for the right reasons. The most famous case was that of the five Puerto Rican nationalists who fired on members of the US Congress from the gallery while it was in session in 1954, injuring six, in their bid for Puerto Rican independence. Much worse, in 1993, Russian President Boris Yeltsin himself ordered the army to attack the parliament when it voted to remove him from office, resulting in almost 200 deaths around Moscow. The infamous January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol by a MAGA horde egged on by Donald Trump to foil Joe Biden’s proclamation was responsible for at least five deaths and many more casualties, not the least of which was American democracy itself.

In a saner frame of mind after many deep breaths, I’ll say that we’re not quite there yet with our legislature—the lower half of which at least performed its constitutional duty by impeaching a patently corrupt Vice President. His denials notwithstanding, new Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano knows very well in his bones—he should, at least during those photogenic moments when he falls on his knees to implore Divine Wisdom—that the impeachment and all the political and economic fortunes that ride on it were behind the coup. 

The second and crucial Senate phase of that hearing was due to begin today, May 18, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, under Cayetano, some issue (like the fitting of jurors’ robes and such) were to be raised to delay it further. After all, they now have the Supreme Court’s blessings to stretch “forthwith” from here to eternity, way beyond the limits of the people’s patience. I hold no high expectations for this trial, because if Cayetano’s bloc of 13 (or even make that 12) were to hold throughout, no amount of factual evidence will matter, at which point only some form of divine justice will save our democracy.

Indeed it may be time to revisit the wisdom of having a Senate at all, with such abundant proof of its profligacy, obstructionism, and opportunism. Its new and yet unfinished building alone—now reported to cost P30 billion, or ten times its original estimate—stands as a testament to wasteful folly, especially in the light of the privations ordinary citizens are going through in this period of economic crisis. There is nothing this Senate can do that a unicameral, party-based legislature can’t, and even if we keep electing the same set of crooks and jokers, at least it will be cheaper to maintain.

True, there are a few good men and women in the Senate who deserve their salaries and our continued support and respect. They now remain to mirror the conscience of the nation, to speak the truth to the record and for posterity. But they can also perform just as well in Congress, unless we elevate them to higher office. While in the Senate, they should stand their ground and refuse to validate such a spurious privilege as “protective custody,” which a despot like former President Rodrigo Duterte would have ignored without second thought. (He had even, let’s not forget, threatened to imprison senators in 2021 if they cited his Cabinet members for contempt.)

And what of the hapless and seemingly clueless Marcos administration? What has happened to the trillion-peso infrastructure mess, to the giant web of corruption that even the Sara Duterte impeachment is but a part of? If it were as driven and as inventive as its DDS adversaries, it could at least allow Bato de la Rosa to sneak out of hiding through his military and police connections and board a waiting plane (along with a mustachioed senator, please)—and then divert the plane to the Hague.

Senates and legislatures, of course, have never been havens of virtue. The Roman Senate was particularly notorious. Not only did over 40 senators stick a knife into Julius Caesar in 44 BC; even earlier, in 133 BC, senators murdered the tribune Tiberius on Capitoline Hill for proposing to give land to the poor—land that would have belonged to the patrician solons. The emperor Caligula thought so poorly of the Senate that he was said to have nominated his favorite horse Incitatus to become consul—effectively, Senate President. At least the Romans would have had a prized stallion to lead them; here we have asses.

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel,” wrote Samuel Johnson in 1775, and today, it’s the Philippine Senate that best lays claim to that distinction. Not all of those scoundrels are even fugitives.

Qwertyman No. 197: Cultural Lobotomy

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 11, 2026

OUR FRIEND Toym Imao, among our most talented and productive sculptors, also serves as dean of the UP College of Fine Arts where my wife Beng teaches art conservation. Lately, like many academic administrators, Toym’s been feeling embattled because of the lack of resources given to his college, whose buildings may look new and good on the outside but whose roofs leak, among other ailments and deficiencies. (At least they have a building; my home College of Arts and Letters is still a vagrant in Diliman, more than ten years after the Faculty Center burned down.) Beng—who envisions the creation of a formal art conservation program and center in UP to serve the country’s longstanding needs in this area—sometimes has to teach in the garage of our campus home for lack of table space in their department. 

Let me quote a few salient lines from Toym’s self-described “rant,” which he published online:

“When students are treated as customers (rather than our future), when education becomes a service (than a mission), and when institutions are driven by metrics, compliance, and efficiency, we lose something essential.

“We lose the art school as a space of imagination. As a space of critique and discourse. As a space where we form not just skills, but ways of thinking. A space of engagement and confrontation. A space to take risks and make mistakes in a nurturing environment.

“An art school is not a diploma factory, it is a well of souls, it is a spirit house. If we lose these purposes, we do not just weaken education. We weaken our culture, we lose our spirit as a nation.”

But now Toym & Co. are up against an even bigger enemy, beyond leaking roofs and bureaucratic indifference: a government-sponsored initiative to gut the humanities and to bleed it out of the college curriculum so young Filipinos could enter the workforce sooner. 

The comeuppance of certain pseudo-journalists aside, no issue stood out in our FB feeds over this past week as much as the widespread outrage over the Commission on Higher Education’s proposed “Reframed General Education” program, cutting required GE units from 36 down to 18. They’ll do this by shoehorning the old (and already much-compressed) arts and humanities courses into such brainy-sounding but essentially hollow subjects as “Data, Evidence, and Ethics in a Knowledge Society” (which sounds to me like a puffed-up way of saying “Don’t use AI to plagiarize and write your homework,” which I’ll bet is how it’s going to be taught).

It isn’t hard to imagine how this act of cultural lobotomy came about: the CHED people were given marching orders from the start to find a way of cramming some GE subjects into a three-year curriculum. Never mind what kind of chop suey recipe they would come up with—like mixing a smattering of Philippine history into a sludge of Rizal; just fit everything in three years, and all will be well. 

I’m not even going to discuss in detail how and why the CHED proposal is such a sad, silly, an even stupid solution to a problem that, to begin with, is ill-defined. You can look up the analyses of people more attuned to the theory of education than I am—aside from Toym Imao, experts like Profs. Antonio P. Contreras, Mark Joseph Calano, and Jose Wendell Capili have already written extensively about this, and about the necessity of the humanities in our formation as humans and citizens. 

I will, however, raise a few points and questions for further thought:

Is the problem employability, of not teaching our young the skills our workplaces require? Are the arts and humanities–including language and history—therefore excess baggage that workers don’t need to do their jobs well?

General education isn’t about creating unemployable artists. It’s about helping ordinary people think like artists do—creatively, intuitively, critically, out of the box, to find better viewpoints and solutions than numbers alone can provide. And speaking of unemployed artists, why not build up and support creative industries like South Korea and other countries do, to channel our natural abilities in design, performance, and expression into globally competitive endeavors?

And who and where are the synoptic geniuses who are going to teach these massively integrated courses? Instructors who have a hard time teaching even basic English, and whose own grasp of history and philosophy is tenuous at best?

There’s a lot of the “digital” in the “reframed” GE program, a nod to the pervasiveness of the Internet and AI in education. But the real challenge is not how to detect and use AI, but to be naturally intelligent: to think and reason for yourself without reaching for your phone.

Bad education isn’t going to fix a bad economy and bad governance. But a good education that teaches young people the difference between right and wrong and between good and bad—and only the humanities can do that—will help them elect good leaders who can then make the best decisions for our economic well-being. 

“We have to do something!” cried Beng, as always the more ardent activist between the two of us. “Let’s rally in front of CHED. Let’s show them how strongly we feel about this issue!”

Of course I’ll go march with Beng wherever she goes, but I suspect that in this day and age, rallies don’t work as well as they used to. You’ll shout yourselves hoarse telling your co-marchers things they already know, while the people inside the office go about making coffee and sharing BTS chismis. You might get on the evening news, in between a mugging and a fashion piece.

You have to find the people who can actually change policy, and exert pressure there. They’re in Congress and the Senate, which controls the pursestrings and can make state university presidents and agency heads mumble like marionettes at budget hearings.

The trouble is, even people you’d expect to know better don’t seem to know any better. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Basic Education  Committee while co-chairing the influential Edcom 2, is behind the push to cut college down to three years. His proposed Senate Bill 51 aiming for just that is the wind behind the CHED technical committee’s wings. That leaves us with Higher Education Committee Chair Loren Legarda, a staunch champion of the arts and culture, to bear the burden of our arguments in the arena where it matters.

She’ll have a lot of championing to do, against the likes of Sen. Robinhood Padilla, (mind you, the one in charge of constitutional amendments) who has opined that the job of opposition senators is, well, to oppose anything and everything. Indeed, the fact that we have people like him in the Senate is the best argument for a strong GE program—not just to educate them, but to make sure young Filipinos don’t vote donkeys (I’m using the kinder term here) into the Senate ever again.

Just thinking about it makes me want to put on my marching shoes, and I don’t care if Beng and I end up shouting into the wind. 

Qwertyman No. 196: Caught in the Crossfire

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Qwertyman for Monday, May 4, 2026

THIS IS a piece I dread writing, knowing that I am bound to say something over the next thousand words that will almost certainly offend, dismay, and even enrage some people who might have thought better of me otherwise. But I also feel that it will be a gross dereliction of the duty that comes with the privilege of being published on this page if I avoided commentary on one of the most painful headlines to have sprung up this past week. 

I am not a political scientist, a theorist, or a coffeeshop regular with access to backroom information, so as I often do, I will draw on personal memory and experience—on the distant but insistent past—to reflect on the present.

I refer, of course, to the recent deaths of 19 young Filipinos—two of them American citizens—at the hands of the Philippine military in Toboso, Negros Occidental in what the military described as an “armed encounter,” which a New People’s Army spokesman denounced as a “ruthless massacre” that included civilian students and activists embedded in the community.

It is not difficult for me to see how a bright young college student like Alyssa Alano would find herself in that far-off barangay, living with the locals and studying their way of life. I think she and her comrades knew the risks of being there and getting caught in the crossfire of a long-running war. Whether they believed or not in the armed struggle, they entered its deadly embrace. Even RJ Ledesma’s presence in a combat zone, I could understand. As an 18-year-old reporter at the Philippines Herald, I begged my editors to send me to Isabela, when we heard that a ship called the Karagatan had arrived to deliver arms to the NPA; I was certain it was a government plot (it was not) and wanted to discredit it. The desk sagely ignored me.

But one thing I can assume is that Alyssa & Co. were spurred by a genuine desire to serve the people, in that particular way, in that particular place and time. We may disagree with the methodology and certainly the results, but we can grant them the sincerity if not the nobility of their intentions. 

I recall a summer back in the early 1970s when I joined a cohort of UP Nationalist Corps members—mostly city-bred teenagers—in week-long “learn from the masses” trips to the countryside in Quezon and Bulacan where we lived with the common folk and subsisted on our purposely meager rations and whatever shrimp we could catch in the leech-infested river. There were no NPAs with us, nor did anyone indoctrinate us; we were there to realize our fundamental ignorance of and disconnection from the vast majority of our impoverished people. However, I have to admit that if the purpose of these sorties was to de-romanticize life in the countryside, to steer our perceptions away from Amorsolo’s gilded sunsets, the effect (at least on me) was the exact opposite. I came away even more convinced that struggle and sacrifice in the midst of suffering were heroic. The experience only confirmed what I had read in high school, in William Pomeroy’s The Forest, detailing the arduous treks of the old Huks in the mountains: I was looking at hard reality through a soft lyrical lens.

If I had not been arrested and imprisoned here in Manila in 1973, I would very possibly have gone on to the countryside, like many of my comrades did, and been killed within two weeks because of my sheer incompetence and ineptitude at guerrilla warfare, which most college boys and girls are simply not trained to do (and then again, quite a few learned and survived). 

And that perhaps was the most traumatic part of those times—receiving and viewing the horribly mangled bodies of our fallen friends, hearing the screaming at the UP Chapel over someone whose skull had been blown open: “That’s not him, that’s not him!” There was much criticism last week of someone’s use of “corned beef” to describe the Toboso dead as crassly inhuman, but I can confirm that it was a term we ourselves used—carne norte—for the bodies that came back shredded not even in hermetic body bags but in rice sacks.

Now we, too, have been caught in the crossfire, horrified by the wanton slaughter of our young but unsure of whom and what to believe in. An independent inquiry is absolutely called for, yes, to establish what happened, determine accountability, and define the rules of engagement in these circumstances. The brutality of that assault was barbaric in its execution. But exactly who are accountable, and what for?

I worry that these remarks could create more confusion than clarity. But sometimes we need to be unsettled or unmoored from our stoutest presumptions to begin to understand ourselves, and what we believe in, and why. One thing I’ve noticed about both extremes on the Left and Right is how certain they seem to be about everything, as if they had the whole universe and its rights and wrongs all figured out, and expect nothing less than absolute belief and compliance from their recruits and adherents. At one point in my life this was true of me; I could quote from Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book” chapter and verse, and lived by its tenets (or at least tried to, inevitably failing in matters of personal discipline).

As I grew older, I began to appreciate the value of doubt, and even of skepticism. Mao may have been a brilliant revolutionary, but he also became a fat and filthy sexual predator (whose tomb I even visited twice in Beijing). The organ that generations of idealistic young people venerated turned out to be as murderous and as cynical as its professed enemies. 

If I were asked to advise a granddaughter or a nephew in college how to fight for justice and freedom, and if that girl or boy seemed intent on joining the armed struggle, whether as an observer or combatant (note that the military does not distinguish between them), this is what I will probably say: “I cannot stop you from doing what you so fervently believe in, because I would have done the same thing in my time. But think about this, before you go: your time is different, and many things have changed. I know that poverty and injustice have not gone away, and may even have worsened. 

“But if there is something that half a century of struggle has taught us, it is that violence, however justified, never really works; it will only be met with even greater violence, with tragic results for all. The harder battles to fight are right here—in the communities you know and can influence, for the issues that matter to them. You do not need to go far to reach the suffering and the underserved: they are around you, wherever you turn. 

“Fifty years ago we may have had little choice but to go underground; today we have civil society to embrace your causes. Call me defeatist, cowardly, or myopic, or even a comfort to the enemy; but I remain alive and fighting for truth, justice, and freedom the best ways I can, which include what I’m telling you now—the strongest weapons are in your hearts and minds, not in your hands.”

Penman No. 485: Forever Young—in Yearbooks

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Penman for Sunday, May 3, 2026

THERE’S SOMETHING terribly sad and yet also strangely soothing about thumbing through the pages of college and high school yearbooks from decades past. As a diehard UP alum and collector of UP memorabilia, I’ve accumulated a stack of yearbooks from the University of the Philippines called the Philippinensian (a name likely inspired by that from one of UP’s formative models, the University of Michigan’s Michiganensian). 

Going through them inevitably fills me with what I know to be a naïve longing for seemingly simpler times; the past gets rosier the farther we move away from it. But these images, imbued with innocence, still offer relief from today’s sordid realities. When I look at the youthful visages of such figures as Juan Ponce Enrile and Jose Ma. Sison, I am reminded that we had choices, and that, while indicative, college could be too soon to plot the full trajectory of our lives. Yearbooks are also, of course, an intellectual and social history of the university itself, balancing the frilly fun of a Cadena de Amor with the sonorous seriousness of editorial commentary.

The first issue of the Philippinensian came out in 1915, seven years after UP opened in 1908—occasioned, argued its editors, by the realization that “There has heretofore been little consolidation of interests on the part of students of the University and the so-called University spirit, which should be stronger here because of the maturer quality of the students enrolled, was subordinated to the college spirit.” (I was fortunate to find a copy of this maiden volume, once owned and signed by Guillermo Tolentino.) 

In 1928, the Philippinensian apparently assumed the name of UP Alpha. If you studied then at the College of Liberal Arts your professors would have been people like Maximo Kalaw, Conrado Benitez, H. Otley Beyer, Vidal Tan, Carlos P. Romulo, Maria Agoncillo, Paz Marquez Benitez, Manuel Bernabe, Jose P. Laurel, Marcial Lichauco, Mauro and Mendez, and Pura Santillan. The college’s editorialist expressed the tenuous hope that education would resolve the class struggle: “Far out in the villages away from cities reign ignorance, selfishness, suspicion, all things that a life of isolation and narrow-mindedness afford. We recognize the need for light in those nooks, that light which will add strength of vision to the eyes of the unlearned, which will make them see the invisible ties that unite hearts the world over. We are aware of the selfish exploitation of the poor by those who have greater cunning, and higher intelligence; but we believe that the broadening of the sympathies of the latter and the opening of their closed, hard hearts will banish away all suspicion and hatred that rend souls asunder.”

A decade later, the 1938 Philippinensian opened with a dedication to that year’s commencement speaker, Field Marshal Douglas A. MacArthur, followed by postcard-worthy shots of UP’s Manila campus, carefully curated to show off its best facets. The staging creates ironic if not tragic overtones, especially when taken with the photographs at book’s end of UP’s cadets in smart formation, many of whom would march into the maw of war in a few years. Padre Faura itself would be bombed to ruins, albeit with the Oblation statue still standing defiantly.

After the war, with school having been closed for a while and the whereabouts of hundreds of students and graduates unknown, the Philippinensian resumed in 1946 under the temporary banner of the UP Phoenix 1942-1946, to cover the lost years. The yearbook staff could only note that “Some letters [of invitation to the yearbook] were received postmarked ‘return to sender’ for various reasons: “addressee unknown,” “no such address,” “moved.” In many cases, the addresses were among those burned or shelled during the war. In a few cases, the graduates were already dead. But so long as there was a clue, no matter how unreliable, the staff did not fail to track it down, sending letters, again and again, to the same person, at different addresses.”

Among those who fortunately responded were Narita Manuel of San Andres, Manila, BSE 1942 (soon to marry a writer named NVM Gonzalez); Damiana Ligon Eugenio of Cabanatuan, Nueva Ecija, BSE 1942, cum laude(long before assuming the deanship of Philippine folkloric studies); and Renato Constantino of Manila, PhB 1946, cum laude, then already working for the Malacañang PR Office. (There were no privacy issues then, and one’s full address could be published at will.)

The closer we get to the present, the more familiar the names become, although their juvenile faces always come as a surprise. My mother Emy—who turns 98 next Sunday—was among those who first made the move from Padre Faura to Diliman. She appears as Emilia A. Yap, BSE, from Guinbirayan, Sta. Fe, Romblon, in the 1953 Philippinensian, a volume in which also appear such luminaries as Rafael M. Salas, Rony V. Diaz, Amelia Lapeña, Andrez Cristobal Cruz, Jose T. Joya, and Napoleon V. Abueva. For many alums, the ‘50s were UP’s golden age, and the yearbook reflects that; with the war over, it could claim that “The UP spirit is of beauty…. The tradition of looking for beauty everywhere, even where none is supposed to exist, is born… to temper an otherwise skeptical, cynical mind.”

But by the end of that decade, on the cusp of the ‘60s, and in the midst of the great debates between secular liberals and sectarian conservatives on campus, UP had to be ever reminded of its unique position as social critic. Introducing the 1958 Philippinensian marking UP’s golden jubilee, E. San Juan intoned that “Ours is an age of rebellion…. Man of the twentieth century… strives for a blessedness yet unbestowed, the blessedness incarnated in him as rebel-artist.” Petronilo Bn. Daroy would warn the following year that “It is at this point that we begin to see the estrangement of the university from the mainsprings of life, from the fact of the national reality. With politics controlling the focus and acting as guidepost from which the university must stand to gain its angle of vision, the reality that is revealed for inspection is necessarily fragmented and false.” 

UP’s vibrant social and cultural life continued, with the fraternities and sororities leading the way. The yearbooks lauded the smartest and the prettiest. But the dark clouds were gathering, and the mood was shifting. Writing in the 1966 Philippinensian, Temario C. Rivera began his essay with a stinging line: “Frivolity has always been the most vicious stigma of youth.” But, he concludes, invoking protests around the world, “The youth have finally come of age.”

In a few more years, the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune would erupt, and the last Philippinensian would come out in 1971; the last Cadena de Amor had taken place in 1968. Many of those street warriors, myself included, would live on to their seventies and eighties, brandishing canes and hostage to metformin.

But in these yearbook pages, full of faces brimming with hope and idealism, we remain forever young and forever free.

Qwertyman No. 195: Why Leni Should Run—Despite Herself

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 27, 2026

THE MOST important news for us Filipinos last week was the news that wasn’t: former Vice President and now Naga City Mayor Leni Robredo’s announcement that she was not going to run for president in 2028, and that she would be happy to seek another term in Naga’s city hall. 

She went on to provide a list of alternative contenders for the presidency—younger and also progressive political leaders whose principles and vision aligned with hers. The names included the usual suspects—chiefly Senators Risa Hontiveros, Kiko Pangilinan, and Bam Aquino, as well as, down the road, Mayors Joy Belmonte and Vico Sotto (when he comes of constitutional age). They’re all worthy and credible candidates, of course, all of whom I hold in high esteem; their only problem is, well, they’re not named Leni Robredo. 

Leni’s announcement was predictably met with profound dismay by her supporters, none louder than her former running mate Kiko Pangilinan, who said that “I believe Leni is in the best position to build the broadest and strongest unity.” Both Kiko and Liberal Party stalwart Leila de Lima voiced the hope that Leni would change her mind between now and 2028.

It’s a hope and a prayer that I—among many millions of others—certainly share. While I’d met her only a couple of times during the 2022 campaign, I came away much impressed by her leadership qualities and her sincerity. I was deeply disappointed when she lost the election, feeling that, once again, our people had voted against their own best interests, manipulated by falsehood, fear, and desperation. 

Leni’s midterm decision to run for mayor instead of senator also seemed a letdown for many. But now it clearly was, in hindsight, a brilliant one, insulating her from the toxicity of national politics while building up her credibility at and with the grassroots. National figures—including no less than her chief adversary, President Bongbong Marcos—have made pilgrimages to Naga to seek her out. She has lost nothing in terms of visibility and appeal.

This is why—watching this drama play out in what could be the third of five acts—I remain convinced that despite her pronouncements, Leni Robredo cannot and should not shut the door for good on another presidential campaign, because as Kiko Pangilinan himself emphasizes, literally no one is in a better position to unify and to lead the country out of the moral and economic morass we find ourselves in today. Her abilities are established, her reputation unsullied. Our nation and people need her more than she needs the presidency, which is probably the most persuasive argument that can be raised in favor of her candidacy that even she cannot deny.

The corrupt acts for which her successor and likely opponent, VP Sara Duterte, now faces impeachment are the best subsidiary reasons for her running. There can be no sharper contrast in terms of personal morality and executive capability than the performance of these two vice presidents, one just after the other, under similar circumstances, including virtual isolation within an antagonistic bureaucracy. 

Certainly any one of those named by Leni as capable alternatives will be better at managing the country than Sara, and will deserve our support. But this unfolding scenario calls for a head-to-head confrontation and comparison between the two leading protagonists—not just for the theatrics of it, but so that the paying audience—our people—can see and appreciate the difference with stark clarity: two women, two former VPs, two lawyers, two local executives, to which we can add two moral and ethical frameworks, two leadership and management styles, two visions of what makes for a just and progressive society. Can you just imagine the presidential debates? What could be more educational for the Filipino?

The cynics among us could opine that Leni just might be playing it coy, waiting for an inexorable tsunami of support to build up and raise her beyond all protestations. Hele hele bago quiere, as we often put it, or in a word, pakipot.

In the history of performative and traditional politics, that would of course be entirely possible. There is, in fact, something we can learn from the ancient Romans in this respect. There was a Roman political practice of recusatio—of an expressed reluctance to assume high office, which made its professor seem worthier in the public eye than one with the self-explanatory ambitio, an obvious lust for power. Recusatio could have been a show of genuine modesty (George Washington and Pope Francis famously did not expect or want to lead, but accepted the high responsibilities thrust upon them) or political theater (Julius Caesar had Mark Antony offer him the crown three times, refusing it to rising applause). 

The difference is that Leni Robredo is no traditional politician—or is very good at acting at not being one. She speaks sincerely—which, in this case of her rejection of national office, we wish for once that she would not. In her statement, Leni also warned against the Filipino’s tendency to find and repose their faith in a “savior” to cure the nation’s ills—a clear and instructive reference to our experience with strongman rule. We can understand that, and it’s a reminder worth keeping in mind. Leni’s election alone will not guarantee a better Filipino future.

But there again is why Leni should run, despite herself. Beyond her abounding individual qualifications and experience, beyond her as a person, Leni Robredo has become the embodiment of what we want to see in government: ability, yes, but also  integrity, accountability, selflessness, and devotion to public duty and the national interest. We will be voting not just for her but for the best versions of ourselves that we can yet become. She and younger examples like Vico make us believe that goodness and hope can yet win over evil and despair—and translate them into tangible and sustainable progress, beyond airy abstractions.

I believe myself that the Leni wave will happen—but not too soon; it should grow and crest at the right time, closer to 2028, perhaps both by design and desperation. The longer that the Sara saga plays out, amid our mounting economic woes and the apparent ineffectuality of the Marcos administration in dealing with the corruption issues it released from the Pandora’s box it opened, the stronger the need for Leni will become. 

The classic Roman model of the reluctant leader was Cincinnatus (519–430 BC), said to be a gentleman farmer whom the Senate called upon to leave his plow and to save the Roman army from a tribal assault—which he did, before returning to his farm after serving for fifteen days as dictator. Leni Robredo might well consider giving us those two weeks (all right, those six years); her farm in Naga will always be there.

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

Qwertyman No. 194: Holier Than the Pope

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 20, 2026

LIKE MANY people in the world today, I don’t consider myself particularly religious, in the sense of Mass-going, living by the Bible, and toeing Church doctrine. My wife and I do believe in a Supreme Being to whom we are all ultimately responsible, and pray every day and night to God for thanks and guidance in our daily life, but mistrust organized religion while continuing to admire and support such brave and progressive clerics like Fr. Flavie Villanueva in their pastoral work.

I grew up in the Catholic tradition, but l soon began to question and to argue with the Church’s positions on such flashpoints as the role of women, sexuality and reproductive rights, and its ties to authoritarian regimes, not to mention its untaxed wealth and the horrifying cases of sexual abuse.

I’m sure my estrangement is hardly an isolated case, but this isn’t about me as much as it is about the moral authority that, despite all our misgivings, the Catholic Church—and yes, other religions as well—can exert on our deeply troubled world, and how it can provide a welcome and more embracing alternative to the exclusionary politics of neofascist despots like Donald Trump.

The world woke up last week to a series of posts from the American president threatening to destroy Iran’s 6,000-year-old civilization for good, warning Pope Leo XIV to stay out of politics, and posing in an AI-generated picture as Jesus Christ himself. The posts were so atrocious and deranged that even Trump’s faithful MAGA followers were revolted by them, and said so. His erstwhile media ally and drumbeater Tucker Carlson called him the “Antichrist.” Others expressed disbelief, confusion, and dismay over the posts, finally realizing what the rest of us already knew: the man is mad, megalomaniac, and cares for no one and nothing but himself. 

This is a man who, after decimating Iran’s leadership (which quickly bounced back) and killing 170 schoolchildren, declares the war “won,” says that gas prices are “not very high,” and—in the middle of the global economic shock he’s initiated—insists that the tacky ballroom he’s demolished a whole historic wing of the White House for is needed for “national security reasons,” aside from contemplating a monstrous “Arc de Trump” in the nation’s capital. Trump’s growing lunacy is obvious. He has become such a caricature of himself that he will be hard put to outdo his latest acts to keep hogging the headlines, which seems to be his chief preoccupation. 

But what fascinates and appalls me even more is the servile indifference to the truth with which his closest allies continue to defend him, torturing logic and common sense to make Trump seem like some kind of genius who understands something the rest of us don’t, praising the Emperor profusely for his new clothes. His Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, acknowledges that while gas and other prices are going through the roof, American consumers “feel good in their heart of hearts.” (Like many in Trump’s orbit, Bessent is a centimillionaire who doesn’t have to line up at the gas station or buy groceries at Walmart.)

More egregious was the defense of the boss by Vice President JD Vance, who cautioned Pope Leo against speaking out on Iran, saying that “I think it’s very, very important for the Pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology. If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things that I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.” For someone who only recently converted to Roman Catholicism, Vance sounds precociously learned to lecture the Pope on the theology of just war—a tenet first advanced by St. Augustine and later developed by St. Thomas Aquinas. (Pope Leo just happens to have headed the Augustinian order before becoming Pope, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the Augustinian concept of authority.) Trump’s posing as Jesus, Vance said, was “a joke.”

Trump, of course, is hardly alone in his dislike of the Pope and papal power. Monarchs and politicians have argued with the Vatican for centuries, from Henry VIII to Josef Stalin. (To be fair, many popes—especially during what was called the “pornocracy” early on—were notoriously lustful and corrupt.) All this reminds us of another president—Rodrigo Duterte—who called Pope Francis a “son of a whore” for causing a traffic problem during his visit to Manila in 2015. And why stop at the Pope? In June 2018, in a speech, Duterte called God a “stupid SOB.” Later that year, annoyed by the church’s opposition to his drug war, Duterte told a group of local leaders that their bishops were “useless fools… kill them!” His spokesmen Sal Panelo and Harry Roque tripped over themselves to emphasize that the President was speaking in “hyperbole”—a distinction that was lost to the cops who to0k his orders to kill thousands of drug suspects literally.

And again the real danger here is not just the catastrophic damage these despots bring to our societies and economies but to our mind and hearts, in the continuing acceptance and propagation of falsehood by the self-deluded, in the replacement of our hope and courage with fear, cynicism, and resignation.

But thanks to Donald Trump’s excesses such as his assault on Pope Leo, our sense of outrage seems to have been revived. Leo has categorically said that he is “not afraid of the Trump administration” and has deplored the world’s being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants.” Bravo!

There have been many recent reports of the resurgence of the Catholic Church in America and around the world, especially among the young—the result of a growing need for a moral center of authority where other centers like government have failed, the liberal reforms of Pope Francis, and the quiet but capable and inspiring stewardship of Pope Leo. I may not be a steadfast Catholic, but if Leo continues on the path of righteousness and resistance to tyranny, he can count me in his crusade for peace and justice. Donald Trump may yet turn out to be the best recruiter for the Catholic Church.

Qwertyman No. 193: Evil Incarnate

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 13, 2026

BACK IN the early days of martial law, when I went underground, among the books I read in our safehouse in Makati was William Shirer’s monumental The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a comprehensive account of Adolf Hitler’s and the Nazis’ rise to power. While academics have critiqued its journalistic treatment as not being scholarly enough, the 1960 work remains an important contribution to modern political history, if only as an eyewitness account, with Shirer having been stationed in Germany from 1934 to 1940. I was particularly intrigued by his thesis—since much debated—that the German people, from ordinary farmers and workers to the most powerful industrialists, enabled Germany’s descent into totalitarianism, stemming from their Lutheran deference to secular authority. 

That book and its implications for us, then just beginning to confront and comprehend dictatorship, instilled in me, as a playwright and fictionist, a fascination with complicity and collaboration. I also dug deeper into the history and culture of the Third Reich, particularly its propaganda. Even today, YouTube is rich with visual documentation of that dark period, from the burning of the Reichstag to the Nuremberg parades and, in that same city, the trials that laid bare a regime’s methodically murderous mind.

Its parallels to our time cannot be overemphasized. In the 1930s, the so-called “Hitler Myth” was sold by Nazi-leaning newspapers to promote Hitler as the restorer of German pride from the shame of Versailles and the economic ruin that followed the First World War. Germany could be great again. But Hitler also needed scapegoats to  blame for the country’s woes, and so he singled out the Jews and the Communists for that purpose. 

Like today’s American ICE, the Gestapo and the SS conducted raids to round up these enemies of the State, and Hitler launched wars to expand German territory and to proclaim the superiority of German arms. (When his troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, he proudly announced that “The German Wehrmacht is the strongest in the world!”) To celebrate his early victories and mythologize his legacy, Hitler planned to transform Berlin into Welthauptstadt Germania (World Capital Germany), invoking ancient Rome and Egypt to include a People’s Hall with a dome 16 times larger than St. Peter’s, a 100-meter Triumphal Arch, and a 120-meter-wide Avenue of Splendor for military marches. Donald Trump’s shameless renaming of the Kennedy Center and of a city airport in his own honor, his conversion of the historic East Wing into a ballroom, and his cheesy gilding of the White House furniture seem modest by comparison, but they betray the same Napoleonic grasp for imperial grandeur, though with much shorter reach. 

By the time the last prisoner walked out of the Nazis’ concentration camp, the Second World War had claimed 40 to 50 million lives in Europe alone, causing untold misery and devastation to the many more who survived.

In all these, Hitler was supported by what we would call today the “billionaire elite”—familiar names that included Krupp, Thyssen, Bosch, and even a carmaker named Porsche. (A book should be written about carmakers—hello, Elon—and their politics. Henry Ford was rabidly anti-Semitic, even compiling his articles into a book titled The International Jew, and was admired for it by no less than Hitler, citing him in Mein Kampf as the example of a great anti-Jewish industrialist and awarding him in 1938 with the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.) Historian Alan Bullock would later excoriate the German right wing (hello, Republican Party) for forsaking “a true conservatism” and making Hitler their partner in a coalition government. 

If there was ever any doubt that Donald Trump is the closest reincarnation we have today of Adolf Hitler (and, to his erstwhile ally Tucker Carlson, the Antichrist), that should have been cast aside by Trump’s recent threat that “A whole civilization will die tonight” unless Iran yielded, alongside his earlier statements that Iran deserved to be bombed “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” and that ordinary Iranians would be happy to be bombed to secure their freedom. 

The horror of an American president making these outrageous pronouncements in utter ignorance of everything we value in (yes, let’s use his word) civilization—law, justice, culture, and common decency—is trumped (yes, let’s use that word) only by the continuing acceptance and magnification of his thoughts by a base on whose shoulders he rode to power. While some on the right finally denounced him as a “genocidal lunatic,” many others did not. Asked about the “civilization” quote, a Republican politician shrugged it off as “Trump just being Trump.” “Go into war to win,” said a MAGA supporter on Reddit. “Not drag it out like Vietnam. Y’all may not like the phrasing, but I like that he’s going into this with an ‘in to win at all costs’ perspective.”

The trouble is, the Iranian people whose freedoms Trump claims he champions (while decimating the same freedoms at home) are paying with their lives in bombings that don’t distinguish between Revolutionary Guards and dissidents. And we—7,000 kilometers away from Iran—are paying for those costs, much like the rest of the world that had nothing to do with Trump’s idiocy in launching a war he doesn’t know how to end. The rich will weather this storm like they always do, but mothers feeding their children with scraps of fish and jeepney drivers weeping at the end of a 14-hour workday are paying for a distant despot’s insatiable vanity. 

When I think on these, and look at our world today, I marvel, aghast, at how easily people continue to succumb to a form of mass hypnosis, of enthrallment to a strongman figure like Donald Trump or Rodrigo Duterte, of deluding themselves into believing that their hero’s extremism would save the planet from some imagined social menace (i.e., people unlike themselves, a.k.a. aliens) at all costs. 

What made Hitler and his horrific crimes possible? The assent and consent of his people, the initial indifference of the international community to his misdeeds, and the despot’s ability to weave lies stronger than the truth. Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump may be evil incarnate—but their enablers should be equally accountable to God and humanity.

Qwertyman No. 192: Apple@50 in a World@War

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Qwertyman for Monday, April 6, 2026

A REEL circulated recently online explaining the origins of the ubiquitous Internet symbol @ for “at,” tracing it back to medieval monks seeking a shortcut and to merchants using it to mean “at the rate of,” and then finally to a coding convention adopting it to link a computer user’s name to his or her domain or location.

I found it fascinating because I’m something of a geek, a failed scientist who had to switch from Engineering to English because I couldn’t hack the math, who ended up channeling his digital side (as opposed to the analog, which collects vintage fountain pens and antiquarian books) into a decades-long devotion to Apple computers and to nearly everything Apple produced. I even chaired the Philippine Macintosh Users Group (PhilMUG) back in the mid-1990s when the handful of us felt like early Christians in a pagan universe. We had monthly get-togethers in small restaurants to unbox the latest SCSI peripherals and discuss the newest features of System 8.0. I prided myself in the fact that I could strip and reassemble a PowerBook Duo practically blindfolded. 

I mention this because Apple has just marked its 50th anniversary, having been founded in 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne with a machine cobbled together in a garage. After slogging through its first decades as a distant competitor to the more popular Windows PC, Apple finally achieved global domination after coming out with such game-changers as the colorful iMac, the iPod that made you smile the minute you put your earphones on, the ultraportable iPad, and of course the indispensable iPhone. 

As industry observers noted early on, the genius of Steve Jobs and Apple wasn’t just in its products, but in creating the need for them; you didn’t know how irresistible the iPhone was until you held one. Apple and its passion for personal computing—not just the hardware but an entire lifestyle ecology that integrated communication and writing with music and photography—arguably changed the world, or at least hastened its evolution.

But enough of the proselytization. I’m not writing this piece to sell you another Mac, which God knows Apple doesn’t need another endorser for. Instead, that half-century of Apple that just went by gave me pause to wonder where all that early joy of tech has gone, and indeed where technology has led us and will yet take us. 

Like many early adopters, as we were called then, I recall the inimitable thrill of trying out a new machine, an operating system, or a program—something to make life and work easier and faster than before, another bold step into the future, a declaration of faith in the power of technology to transform life and indeed the world itself. New technology arrived with the presumption of goodness and optimism—that it would bring relief to global poverty and hunger, find a cure for cancer and other human ailments, improve education, and generate jobs for billions; it would draw more people into the circle of development, empower the oppressed, and induce social equity. With the advent of the Internet, more doors and barriers came crashing down. We could express ourselves publicly, bypass the traditional gatekeepers of information, challenge authority, build communities of common interest, expose falsehood and spread the truth, and create a truly transparent, interconnected, and progressive global society.

The kind of tools that Apple and its competitors produced were supposed to assist that project. They did—and again they did not. Instead of tearing down walls between people, the Internet raised new ones, behind the anonymity of which we could tear each other down. Computers and smartphones now facilitate disinformation, human trafficking, money laundering, and all manner of scamming.

Worst of all, technology has made it easier to wage war and kill people (like it always has). From Desert Storm back in the early 1990s to the present Iran War, military assaults and even mass slaughter have assumed the sanitizing cloak of an e-sport, a posture Trump and his war gamers have actively adopted, reducing casualties to memes. Indeed the US-Israeli attack on Iran has now been called “the first AI war,” as an article by Michael Brown on Forbes.com substantiates:

“When I became the Director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Pentagon in 2018, Project Maven was already underway. Long before LLMs, DIU was supporting Project Maven with several vendors to improve computer vision, an AI capability to distinguish among objects in satellite imagery to save analysts studying pixels…. That legacy led to Palantir’s Maven Smart System, today’s cornerstone of the U.S. military’s AI-powered operation. Maven fuses satellite imagery, drone video feeds, radar data, and signals intelligence into a single interface, allowing operators to classify targets, recommend weapons, and generate strike packages in near real time. The results have been staggering: more than 1,000 targets were struck in the first 24 hours of the campaign, a tempo that would have been unthinkable with purely human targeting processes. That tempo has been maintained with only 10% of the human analysts that would have previously been required to strike 1,000 targets daily.

“Yet the system’s limitations are equally revealing. Maven’s overall accuracy hovers around 60 percent, compared to 84 percent for human analysts. Palantir’s CTO nonetheless declared it ‘the first large-scale combat operation driven by AI,’ a characterization that raises questions about the ethics of AI-driven targeting and the adequacy of civilian protection safeguards.”

Of course it would be unfair to lay responsibility for this on the doorstep of Apple or other tech giants today—barring those who, unlike Anthropic, have actively lent their resources to Trump’s war machine. The companies known to have supported Israel’s military capabilities include Palantir, Microsoft, Google, IBM, and G42 (and yes, that’s according to AI). While the biblical prophets called for swords to be beaten into plowshares, somebody found a way to turn high tech’s plowshares into guns and missiles. 

And then again, as the gun rights advocates always say, “Guns don’t kill—people do.” With some people being so stupid and devoid of conscience, why should we even wonder if and when AI will work better than the human brain? That already happened, more than fifty years ago.

Email me at jdalisay@mac.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.ph.

Penman No. 484: The Romance of Retro

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Penman for Sunday, April 5, 2026

LATE LAST month, over two frenetic days at the Fairmont Hotel in Makati, more than 3,000 attendees crowded into a ballroom and the corridor outside for the sixth iteration of the Manila Pen Show since 2018. Not only did dozens of dealers and vendors coming from as far away as Russia and Turkey offer trays and tables full of pens, inks, and other writing paraphernalia. Seminar rooms were packed full of people learning how to adjust nibs, use fountain pens for painting, and master calligraphic strokes. What was most obvious and rather surprising was that the vast majority of attendees weren’t old fogeys like me who grew up with fountain pens, but young professionals and students eager to get their first Sailor, Pilot, or Pelikan—or even a five-figure Montblanc or Nakaya. 

The MPS is run by the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines, a group of enthusiasts that began with 20 people in our front yard in 2008. Now FPN-P counts 16,000 members online, from the Philippines and parts beyond—and if you think most of those people are idle lurkers, wrong: more than 9,000 of them participate actively on FPN-P’s Facebook page. And again, here’s the killer factoid: the group’s median age is somewhere between the late 20s and early 30s, clearly marking a demographic shift in the hobby from my fellow dinosaurs to the young bucks.

And it isn’t just pens. Everywhere around the world, young people are picking up and using typewriters, mechanical watches, film cameras, vinyl records, and pretty much anything older than they or even their parents are. They’re even wearing (after actively hunting down and paying big money for) torn jeans and ratty flannel shirts from the 1950s.

The romance of retro is definitely in the air. Whether it’s old tech or vintage clothing, the urge to try something old is palpably present, and “palpable” may be apt, because much of this fascination, according to the experts, has to do with the sense of touch. 

Beth McGroarty, the research director at the Global Wellness Institute, argues that “studies show that people are hardwired for things like touch from infancy,” and frames the analog revival as “a rebellion against that shapeless, disembodied, throwaway digital world of screens, and a hunger for physical objects and tools that are touchable.” 

That’s certainly true for fountain pens, which are as tactile as tools can get, and with which users establish intimate relationships. The act of writing with a pen represents the completion, commitment, and communication of an idea, a thought that starts from the writer’s brain, and gets processed by the writer’s emotions as it travels to his or her fingertips. The pen’s nib and ink commit the thought to paper and give it permanency, but also mediates it—you can often tell what the writer’s mood is by the shape and the sharpness and the fluidity of the written word. For young people growing up with keyboards, cursors, and block letters on an indifferent screen, nothing could be more different, because more personal, more “Me!”

That’s true even for typewriters, which—thanks largely to Manila-based repairman Gerald Cha and the Filipino Typewriter Collectors group on Facebook (yes, I’m also one of the organizers)—have attracted many young enthusiasts. They seem to be little more than clunky pre-computers at first glance—metal machines using greasy ink ribbons without “delete” buttons and no connection to the Internet—but it’s precisely this isolation that’s become its main draw for young users.

According to Walid and Joujou of Mr & Mrs Vintage Typewriters in the UK, who have restored thousands of machines over the past decade, the soaring interest has been driven by what they call “a craving for authenticity and quiet.” Now “quiet” isn’t a word you normally associate with the clackety-clack of an Underwood or a Remington. But take typing as a rejection of digital noise, which is what the many thousands of typewriter collectors around the world profess to like about their Olympias and Olivettis—complete disconnection from the outside world, replaced by total focus on what you’re typing, which you can’t simply erase without making a mess. Handwriting and typing demand deliberation.

So does, for that matter, film photography, to which young people are returning in droves, as if film were some holy membrane to be treated with respect if not awe (an attitude encouraged by the eye-watering price of film plus processing). I have a good friend who, like many millennials, turned away from megapixels and pocketable phone cameras to embrace expired Tri-X and clunky RB67s. I’d kid him about spending a fortune on his new passion and for thinking every shot through before pressing the shutter button—the mark of the classic photographer, a la Henri Cartier Bresson in wait of the “decisive moment”—only to send the roll through for digital conversion. But I can understand his commitment, because it’s about more than photography; it’s a decision to take fuller control over sensors and algorithms, to almost literally stamp one’s vision over the image, in defiance of AI, putting natural beauty over artificial prettiness.

And then there’s the element of what researchers call “meta-nostalgia,” a longing to capture and reinterpret the past on one’s own terms. In a world hurtling forward into the void, the imagined past offers clarity and security, if only because it already happened. Writing with a pen—especially a vintage one that your Lolo or Lola might have exchange love letters with—returns us to a fantasy of innocence (forgetting, of course, that someone like Josef Stalin signed death warrants with a tiny Pelikan 100–the pen beneath the Leica in the pic above). 

But returning to pens, it was clear from the MPS that this wasn’t a jump back to the ‘40s or ‘50s, except for the few of us who specialize in that period. The “kids,” as Beng and I like to call them, were buying pens to play with, employing a raft of designer inks that not only sheened but shimmered, most definitely no longer your Lolo’s reliable blue-black Quink. They also brought and bought journals, cases, stamps, washi tapes, and such accessories as make not just a hobby but indeed an industry. 

Retro is back with a vengeance, and as we oldies—the so-called “OGs”—sat back and marveled at what the young ones were willing to spend on what we used to think of as no more than writing tools, one of them came up to us with a flashy pen and said, “In fifty years, this will be vintage!” Indeed. Sooner or later, we’ll all belong to the past, and as today’s Gen Z’ers are beginning to realize, it can be far more fun and comforting than the uncertain future.

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