The outrage at the memory

 

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

 

When nine justices of the Supreme Court voted two days ago in favor of the burial in the Libingan ng mga Bayani of the 27-year-old remains of the fallen dictator Ferdinand Marcos which were brought back from abroad in 1993, they insulted the memory of those who died fighting tyranny. They spat on the wounds of the tortured, they mocked the mothers whose sons and daughters disappeared in the night.

 

They belittled the efforts of those who spread out their bodies before thundering military tanks during the 1986 Edsa People Power Revolt that saw the fall of the tyrant. The justices who voted yes to the dictator’s burial in hallowed grounds for heroes chose to forget his reign of terror, they chose to belittle the freedom won for them by tens of thousands who fought, suffered and died.

They voted according to the law and their conscience. So did the five justices who voted no.

 

In 1992, when word spread that Marcos’ remains would be brought back to the country (Fidel Ramos was president then) and that the late dictator might be given honors, victims of martial rule protested. Still, the Marcoses succeeded in bringing back his body to his hometown in Ilocos Norte, where its wax likeness has been exposed for viewing all these years.

 

I interviewed victims of martial rule in 1992, and here were their sentiments then:

Princess Nemenzo: “At first I could not imagine Marcos coming back after we kicked him out. Later, I thought, we should have allowed him to come back while he was still alive so he could be made to answer for his  crimes and face the wrath of the people.

 

“Honor somebody who dishonored his country, massacred and looted his people? That would be a mockery. Marcos has carved a niche as the most corrupt and brutal of all. He should be quietly buried. Not in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. Why should he deserve that? His wartime exploits are even doubtful.”

 

Antonio Lacaba: “We cannot forgive that kind of person. Does Marcos deserve the honors? Go to the barrios, go to those who suffered. Ask them.”

 

Wilfredo Quijano, detained for almost 10 years: “Give him honors? I cannot even think of that because he victimized so many people. I was one of them. I was in high school when I became an activist. The military arrested me during a raid of a house in Butuan. In Camp Alagar soldiers mauled us, beat us with a piece of wood. We were made to drink urine. I don’t know whose urine it was. I took a sip and pretended to swallow it. We were interrogated, sabay suntok (and punched at the same time). I spent my 17th birthday in prison.”

 

Paula Romero, widowed mother of Henry Romero, a newspaperman who later joined the Ministry of Agrarian Reform (Henry is among the desaparecidos, the disappeared): “One day, they took him. After a week in detention, he was allowed home visits but accompanied by guards. I visited him every week even though I was not strong. I brought him food, pillows, a mosquito net. One day when I was sick, his guard named Villanueva came and told me, ‘Ang anak ninyo, wala na (Your son is gone).

 

“I searched for my son in camps in Pampanga and Tarlac. I consulted a fortune teller who said Henry was alive. Since he was no longer around to support me, I borrowed money to put up a sari-sari store.

 

“Naubusan na ako ng luha. Para akong nabibitin sa isang pisi, hindi ako makalapag. (I have run out of tears. It’s as if I am hanging suspended on a string and I cannot come down.) Should Marcos be given honors? I have nothing to say.” (She wipes away a tear.)

 

I have interviewed many victims these past many years—that is, after the dictator fled into exile—but I had also interviewed a good number during the martial law years. Thousands of stories will hopefully be archived in the soon-to-rise Memorial Museum and Library (as provided for in Republic Act No. 10368).

 

That we may NEVER FORGET.

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/99113/the-outrage-at-the-memory#ixzz4PYqBrYBW 
Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook

Read More

From conflict to commmunion

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

 

Oct. 31 was a special day for Lutherans and Roman Catholics. Pope Francis went to Lund, Sweden, for the joint Lutheran-Catholic ecumenical commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation led by Martin Luther in 1517 that marked a bitter schism.

 

What a bloody split that was, after Luther, German priest, monk and theologian of high intellect, pinned his “95 Theses” on a church door in Germany to dramatize his issues against the Catholic Church, many of them crying to be addressed, if not legitimate indeed. You can look it up on the Internet.

 

The Catholic Church got it straight in the face, and Luther was unceremoniously excommunicated. But his move created a divide so deep that things were never the same again. He had shaken the ramparts of an institution believed to be divinely ordained but so immovable and ruled by men with feet of clay.

 

For church historians, the Reformation was a pivotal point in the history of Christendom that cannot be ignored. The Reformation was the harbinger of things to come—the rise of Protestantism and the Counter Reformation in the Catholic Church among them.

 

Over the decades after Vatican II (1960s), the Catholic Church has had so many occasions to sincerely say mea maxima culpa for the errors of the past and to seek forgiveness and hold out a hand in reconciliation. Pope John Paul II was a natural in this aspect. Still, it seems never enough. (The human weaknesses and sins of its individual shepherds—as in other religious institutions—are another story.)

 

Sweden, by the way, played a big part in the troubled years after the Reformation. Catholics in Sweden were persecuted and killed. “As recently as 1951, Catholics were barred from becoming doctors, teachers and nurses, and Catholic convents were banned until the 1970s,” said a report.

 

Last Monday night I watched the live, one-and-a-half-hour TV coverage of the Common Prayer Service at the Lund Cathedral where Pope Francis and his Lutheran counterparts took turns, within the liturgy, in expressing their hopes for more dialogue and unity. The statements were crisp and direct to the point. No long sermons. The reality that “what unites us is far greater than what divides us” was repeated several times. “From conflict to communion” was on everyone’s lips.

 

The liturgy, by the way, was decidedly multiracial and multilingual—and even multigender, with female Archbishop Antje Jackelen sharing the altar with the Pope and the male hierarchy. The two gave each other a peace embrace. (I googled: The Swedish Jackelen, 61, is married and a mother of two.) I spotted quite a number of women in Roman collars on the pews. This kept me smiling.

 

In a joint declaration, Pope Francis and Bishop Munib Younan, president of the Lutheran World Federation, said: “With gratitude we acknowledge that the Reformation helped give a greater centrality to sacred Scripture in the Church’s life.”

 

And addressing those in mixed marriages: “We experience the pain of those who share their whole lives, but cannot share God’s redeeming presence at the Eucharistic table. We long for this wound in the body of Christ to be healed. This is the goal of our ecumenical endeavors, which we wish to advance, also be renewing our commitment to theological dialogue.”

 

Dialogue already began 50 years ago, and in 1999 the Vatican and the Lutheran federation signed a joint declaration on “the doctrine of justification,” which is a core belief in God’s forgiveness of sins and which theme fired up Luther’s “95 Theses.”

 

“From Conflict to Communion: A Lutheran-Catholic Common Commemoration of the Reformation in 2017” is the title of the 93-page document that accompanied Pope Francis in his journey to Lutheran country. The foreword begins: “Martin Luther’s struggle with God drove and defined his whole life. The question, How can I find a gracious God? plagued him constantly. He found the gracious God in the gospel of Jesus Christ. True theology and the knowledge of God are in the crucified Christ. (“Heidelberg Disputation”)

 

“Conflict to Communion,” its framers say, “is a way whose goal we have not yet reached.”#

Read More

In an altered state of consciousness?

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

Was he hexed, or did he have too much MSG?

President Duterte’s hosts in China must have been hot under the collar for his unabashed display of eagerness to offer alliance to a bullying nation, and to prove it by dumping—in so many words—a longtime Philippine ally, the United States. He was practically doing cartwheels.

The Philippines’ head of state, standing on the world stage, announced extemporaneously to what seemed like a fawning crowd: “I announce my separation from the United States, both in the military… not social, but economics also.”

That must have been quite discomfiting even to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the members of the Philippine delegation, and, most of all, to Mr. Duterte’s compatriots back home and those in the diaspora. And in the United States as well.

“Ano raw?” “Unsa kuno?” Exclamations of disbelief from the perplexed, bewildered and befuddled came fast and furious. The men at the Department of Interpretation and Reinterpretation must have been falling all over themselves (onomatopoeically in Filipino, nagkandarapa; in Ilonggo, nagkinarankaran) to find euphemisms for that bombshell of a foreign policy statement.

Well, what do you know, so many hours later the President said: “It was not severance of ties” with the United States. A “rebalancing” was more like it, said his spokespersons. So what was that sindak statement all about? But then what’s new? This happens all the time—the reinterpretation and the recalibration.

If you were the Chinese—not that they were overeager to hear such an avowal of friendship from a neighbor they bully and about a realignment of alliances—how would you view someone who flip-flops and blows hot and cold? The Chinese have not hinted that they felt slighted by Mr. Duterte’s backtracking, or that they felt they were being toyed with for the world to see, by a foul-mouthed leader who is adored by the 16 million or so Filipinos who voted for him.

The United States has sent a representative to find out what exactly this “separation” is all about. No word yet from Russia’s President Vladimir Putin who, Mr. Duterte said, he also hoped to woo. While Asean countries are circumspect, Mr. Duterte seems to want to ingratiate himself with communist-led undemocratic governments. China, Russia and the Philippines against the world, he said. Why not include North Korea, too?

Who wants to be a vassal of America? But who wants to be a lapdog of China and Russia?

Manuel Quezon III, who wrote a column in the Inquirer before he joined the Aquino administration, recently wrote an insightful piece on what it was like to be part of the entourage of a visiting Philippine head of state in China—how the Chinese pulled out all the stops and flaunted their bigness (the towering guards, the halls, the furniture, etc.), making one feel like a pygmy amidst giants. All that could have some kind of hypnotic effect. An Inquirer banner photo last week showed the Chinese presenting basketball giant Yao Ming to Mr. Duterte.

Hitler did something similar in Nazi Germany, through film and other massive and mesmerizing displays of power and strength. As Filipinos would say, dinadaan sa laki at lakas.

The Chinese leadership wowed the President and his party. Did they also throw him into an altered state of consciousness that made him behave and speak the way he did while he was there? Am I kidding? No. In graduate school we had exercises in altered states of consciousness, including hypnosis as a tool to alter behavior.

Years ago, I did a series on “budol-budol” operations in which the unsuspecting victims are thrown into an altered state of consciousness and made to hand over to con men, without resistance, their heirloom jewelry and their life savings in the bank.

If you’re feeling spooked by all these even before Halloween, find an exorcist.

Have a meaningful All Saints and All Souls week ahead. #

Read More

Privately run prisons

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

 

Yes, there are privately-run prisons in the United States. They will soon see the end of their days. The idea has been tried, and it didn’t work. Might the idea have worked in the Philippines’ biggest, the New Bilibid Prisons, which the inmates practically run like it were their private fiefdom?

But I am getting ahead of myself.

 

Not quite as out-of-the-box as Bob Dylan’s 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature that sent the literati abuzz is the Nobel for economics that went to Oliver Hart, a Harvard economist, and Bengt Holmstrom of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two were awarded because of their study of business contracts, a subject matter that seems so mundane it would make Dylan’s oeuvre sound so far out in the ocean. The two men’s research conclusions about privatization and its implications have brought to light the desirability or undesirability of such arrangements.

 

Hart’s studies included prisons, education and even garbage collection. Are these services better or worse in government hands?  Are these better or worse if handled by private companies?

Several months ago the US Justice Department announced that it would phase out privately-owned and -run prisons for safety concerns. In our neck of the woods not many know that many US prisons are run by private parties; the common knowledge is that only the government runs the prisons. Whether badly or very badly there is no choice.

 

A US news report said stock prices for GEO Corp and Corrections Corporation of America, which are known to be “the largest publicly traded companies in the for-profit prison industry” are plummeting because of the justice department’s announcement that it would let its contracts with private prison companies expire.

 

The report also said the decision applies to federal prisons which account for a relatively small percentage of US prisoners. The majority of prisoners are in state-run prisons.

 

There have been exposés about these privately-run facilities described as a “private, for-profit prison racket.” Last year, Mother Jones magazine ran an article written by its reporter who worked as a guard at a private prison for four months. Read “The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery” by Vicky Pelaez for Global Research.

 

What is going on in Philippine prisons has been headline news these past weeks. Senate and House inquiries “in aid of legislation” (or “in aid of persecution,” as some say) have at least revealed—but only partly—the terrible rot in these facilities. The massive trade in illegal drugs, prostitution, wanton disregard for prison rules, powerful inmates lording it over and living luxurious lives in the facility—name it. Our jaws dropped when an inmate boasted at a House hearing about his five-star-hotel amenities, holding concerts, bringing in truckloads of beer, etc., making tons of money in the process.

 

Only after we had picked our jaws off the floor did we manage to ask: How long has this been going on? Of course we had seen the trailer of this sometime last year. But only recently did we get to see the full movie, so to speak, the plot more expanded, with blood and guts spilling outside prison walls even as we speak.

 

Privately-run prisons piqued my interest because these had to do with a Nobel laureate’s study of business contracts and also because the Nobel came at a time when the US Justice Department just announced that it was allowing its contracts with at least 13 private prisons to expire in the next five years. I could not help thinking about our own prisons which became “privately run” by the inmates while we were sleeping. Who were sleeping on the job?

 

In this era of privatized public services (water, for example) and having seen the difference between government-run and privately-run, give or take some downsides, privatizing prisons is an idea to try. Laugh me out of the room for saying it, but in this woebegone country where nothing (in prison) has worked, a failed scheme might.

 

Same for the vaunted new drug rehab facilities. Can the government run them well?

Read More

Cursing our mothers

Philippine Daily Inquirer/OPINION/by Ma. Ceres P. Doyo

 

The current joke now is that the Philippines should also be known as the “Republic of P.I.” Not for Philippine Islands, as our country was called during the American colonial era, but for “p***** ina,” the favorite cuss words of President Duterte who cannot go without them in his rambling speeches.

 

Translated into English, the phrase means “child of a whore” or “son of a b****.” If you add the word “mo,” it means you are one, but in English you don’t really add “You are a” to SOB.  So with or without mo, your mother is insulted just the same.

 

I don’t know how it is said in other Philippine languages and dialects but I know that in Iloilo, it is said in Spanish—that is, “hijo de p***” or “yudep***.” It has been further contracted or sanitized as “deputa” or “depuga,” the last one used as an expression of awe or amazement, as in “Depuga gid.” Another variation is “yude”-to praise or compliment. With this, the original meaning has been completely erased because it is not even a cuss word.

 

But to inflict pain or insult, there is nothing like the complete expletive in Spanish, uttered harshly and deliberately to insult the other person and his or her mother.

I have never heard my parents utter cuss words when I was growing up, but walls are not impermeable especially in the province, so I got to hear “bad words” used on some people. I got to know the Ilonggo (Hiligaynon) words for whore. Like most towns, ours had a menagerie of peculiar characters, their names appended with their particular disabilities or dishonorable preoccupations. For example: “Manuel Buang,” “Amin Kurog” or Estrella Padót.

 

But why does cursing have to dishonor mothers? In Ilocano the equivalent of “P.I.” refers to the mother’s birth canal, to say it rather clinically. Not about what she is but about the offspring that passed through it. The ultimate insult.

 

It is the opposite of what a woman said to Jesus as recounted in the Bible: “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the paps that gave you suck.”  The ultimate compliment.

 

Another variation of the mother-son insult is the “M.F.” cuss words which are of American origin. This time it is directed to the good-for-nothing son, but the mother is still in the picture. And both of them are being called sexual perverts.

 

Speaking of “M.F.,” there is an old joke about a Filipino family in America having a good time in a park. When the toddler began running, the concerned parents yelled, “Madapa ka (You might stumble)! Immediately, dagger looks were thrown their way.

 

Seriously now, the “P.I.” cuss has become so commonplace, popularized by no less than the President whose vocabulary is littered with it. Some of his defenders argue that it is just his manner of speaking, a verbal expression. One can even say that eventually, it will lose its original meaning and that it will just be a set of nonsense syllables that can add color to one’s limited vocabulary. I don’t think so. I shudder when I think that an insult to mothers will soon be as commonplace as “OMG” or “LOL.”

 

Some time ago someone posted on Facebook a cartoon which showed kids exclaiming “P.I.” enclosed in so many dialogue balloons.

 

Last Sunday the Catholic Church in the Philippines celebrated Indigenous Peoples (IP) Sunday. I could not help thinking whether in their pristine state in the forest primeval our IP communities had an equivalent of “P.I.” Did they deliver insults by referring to their enemies’ mothers? Did it get into their vocabulary?

 

The Old Testament has lots of stories about fornication and people committing sexual taboos, but later, in the new dispensation, didn’t Jesus save the woman caught in adultery from being stoned to death? (Emphasis on caught.) As the story goes, the woman was caught in flagrante delicto. She was not merely being falsely accused.

 

Last year while he was on the plane to (or from?) the Philippines, Pope Francis was asked about violence. He began by saying: “Curse my mother and expect a punch.” During the presidential campaign, Mr. Duterte did throw a “P.I” at the Pope for the traffic his visit had caused.#

 

Read more: http://opinion.inquirer.net/98152/cursing-our-mothers#ixzz4OSipNukG 
Follow us: @inquirerdotnet on Twitter | inquirerdotnet on Facebook

Read More