Contest of Superlatives

We are a country engrossed with contests of superlatives. These superlatives mostly have something to do with size or length. So we have La Trinidad town’s biggest strawberry cake, Dagupan City’s longest bangus (milkfish) grill, and now Baguio City’s longest longganisa (meat sausage). Of course, we are not the first with this idea. Germany, for instance, has had its longest frankfurter.

The sponsors of these displays of the longest or the biggest have their reasons, apart from possibly landing in the Guinness Book of World Records or in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Through its giant strawberry cake, La Trinidad wants to showcase its strawberry crop. This is the same with Dagupan City, the source of the famous Bonuan bangus. The big guys in Baguio’s longanisa industry also wish to feature a recipe, which, they say, has been concocted since 1946.

By showcasing the longest or biggest, the sponsors seek to draw tourists who are expected to spend their money and help invigorate the local economy. Yes, we need all the gimmicks to help nourish our local economy. We need more guests to check in at our hotels, and to buy our vegetables, peanut brittle, brooms, wood carvings, and souvenir items.

This November, Benguet Province will hold its Adivay festival, which also falls during the province’s founding anniversary. The cutting edge of the Adivay festival is that Benguet people from the 13 towns can exhibit not only the biggest cabbage or squash or the longest cucumber, but also the most variety or diversity of crops.

As expected, the commercial farming towns of Buguias and Atok can come out with the biggest carrot or potato. But other upland towns, which have maintained their traditional crops, can display their wide diversity of sweet potato and other root crops; upland rice of all colors, aroma, texture, and taste; beans and other legumes; and other crops.

In fact, I encourage the provincial government to organize some kind of a competition that can promote diversity. Our diverse crops have been overrun by commercial mono-crops. As a result, our diverse traditional crops, which supply us with a wide array of vital minerals, vitamins, healthy carbohydrates and plant proteins, are under threat of disappearing.

As a child growing up in Kibungan town, I remember looking forward to feasting on a wide variety of native corn, which we would harvest by August. We had yellow, orange, white, violet and multi-colored corn, which would sustain us during the typhoon months. We also had yellow, orange, violet, and yellow-white camote or sweet potato. My grandparents’ rice terraces would also provide us with red, brown, white, and violet rice of all texture and aroma. And we had a wide variety of beans and legumes, which gave us proteins. Much of these diversified crops, including taro or yam, cassava, and bananas, were raised in our nem-a or upland swidden farm, our supermarket.

Unfortunately, much of these traditional food crops that sustained my youth are now, to a large extent, just part of my childhood memories. Much of these native food crops are gone and replaced with mono-crops. Cash-crop agriculture has ruined a more diversified traditional farming, which put a primacy on food self-sufficiency. In Kibungan, for example, the once diversified swidden farms have been replaced with a sea of sayote. Sayote farmers had to sell their sayote before they can buy other foods such as rice, which are mostly sourced from Baguio City.

So in a contest for superlatives, I would suggest something on the most diversified. We need diversity because, as they say, it takes all kinds to make this world.

Summers of Childhood

Now on school break, my two sons -- one of whom had just finished high school and the other a would-be high school senior -- have begun hunting for summer jobs. They tried inquiring from at least three fast food chains in town, but they were turned down. They were told they were too young to qualify for the minimum age 18 requirement. But they didn’t give up.

As of this writing, they were still seeking for a job to do this summer. A friend told us that we advice our sons to try inquiring at City Hall.

As a way of preparing himself psychologically for whatever job awaits him, my eldest son asked his mom: “What kind of job can they possibly offer at City Hall?” His mom said she had no idea but opined that maybe my son could help fix files, dust tables, and prepare coffee for some personnel. “Do you mean I’ll be doing that for eight hours five days a week for a month?” he asked. He couldn’t imagine himself doing something boring for eight hours daily for a month.

We don’t want him to develop a defeatist attitude towards something based on unfounded perception or imagined fears so we told him to try first before even judging whether that elusive summer job is boring or exciting.

Whether my eldest son and his brother can find a job or not doesn’t matter at all for us parents -- at least for now. For one, they are just active teenage kids seeking for something on which to use their energies this summer. For us, the experience alone of our sons in looking for jobs is already part of their education.

Of course, the experience of hunting and finally landing a job will give the two kids some sense of fulfillment and triumph. As they get to learn something and get to meet and relate with other people in the process, they can say to themselves that they are ready to face adult responsibilities sooner or later when they have to stand on their own feet.

And if they finally get jobs, they will be doing something more productive other than just playing computer games at home, listening incessantly to hip-hop music and texting their friends. This will also definitely help reduce our electric bill.

On summer jobs, I would tell my kids that school break for me and my siblings was no break when we were in grade school and high school. School break meant sunrise to sundown work in the rice fields or in the nem-a or swidden farms. But somehow we found some ways to enjoy our childhood even in the midst of heavy toil, which the International Labor Organization may consider “child labor”. Hunting honey while tending our swidden farms and catching fish and lobsters while camping out in the rice fields were exciting experiences that still fill memories of my Kibungan childhood summers.

In fact, I can now liken my childhood excitement of learning that my bamboo trap had caught some lobsters and fish to the same feeling of ‘high’ each time a newspaper or news agency used an article I submitted.

Since I had to help procure my needs when I had to enroll in college, I also worked in a friend’s vegetable farm in Brookside village in Baguio and at La Trinidad valley right after my high school graduation. At that time I was paid P5 per day with free board and lodging. We worked from Monday through Saturday. Sometimes we had to work until morning of Sunday. Again, somehow I didn’t feel “kawawa” (pitiful) or abused at all. Learning to raise cabbage and potatoes actually became part of my education.

So if the printed word becomes irrelevant and I’m forced to choose another vocation, I can perhaps go back to my hometown. There, as I used to do during the summers of my youth, I’ll roll my sleeves, wear my straw hat, pick up my hoe, sow some seeds, and anticipate and share my sprouting seeds’ joy as they seek out and embrace the sunshine. (9April2006)

Dateline Granada: Something Spanish

Intricately arranged river stones dot most sidewalks of Granada, a historic and cultural center in southern Spain. Black and white river stones or pebbles are so arranged that they form shapes of flowers and hearts. Aside from the aesthetics of it all, the pebbled sidewalks ensure that pedestrians, especially the elderly, won’t slip while strolling to take a deep breath of the evening winter breeze.

From sidewalks and cobble stone-covered back streets, the new guest can immediately note the artistic and cultural wealth of this city of 350,000 people, many of them students and tourists. One can find something Arabic, Jewish, and Romanesque in the architecture of buildings and other structures. But the mix of all these is what makes it Spanish, in the same way that the mix of all our colonial architectures – from Spanish-designed stone churches to American-designed cities like Baguio -- makes us Filipino.

This is not surprising because Granada, which used to be the pre-historic home of native tribes who, along with other tribes in Southern Spain, the Romans first colonized. The Arabs came later, brought Islam, and gave the name Granada. But the Muslim city fell into the hands of Christian monarchs in 1492, at the hands of Queen Isabel of Castile and her husband Ferdinand Aragon.

The plazas or squares of Philippine lowland towns, which are surrounded by the munisipio and a cathedral, are definitely a legacy from Spain, our colonizer for almost 400 years. After every few blocks here in Granada is a square, complete with trees and hedge rows of bush plants, which also serves as the city’s breathing space.

As a convention center, Granada has built big modern buildings to accommodate international meetings such as the current fourth meeting of the UN Working Group on Article 8j of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Ongoing since Monday, the meeting ends on Jan. 27. Another meeting of the UN Working Group on Access and Benefit Sharing of genetic resources follows next Monday and ends until February 3.

But one thing unique about Granada is its restored historical buildings, which include not only the 14^th century Cathedral and the Royal Chapel where Isabel and Ferdinand’s remains lie buried. Also restored and currently being restored were centuries-old stone houses, some of which have carmenes or gardens on their roofs.

Courtesy of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity secretariat, I have just registered for a weekend free tour of the famed Alhambra, a series of palaces and gardens built under the Nazari Dynasty in the 14^th century. I anticipate that the tour can help me understand and know better the historical soul of this southern Spanish city of hospitable people, whose “hola” greetings help the weary and homesick visitor endure the mild assault of winter. (25January2006)

Interesting Times

We are under interesting times. Last September 19, Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a military coup. Last September 21, the Philippines commemorated the 34^th anniversary of the declaration of martial law by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. During martial law’s commemoration, the resounding lesson and message was for us not to fall into the trap of letting martial law reign all over again.

Amidst the continuing political killings, however, activists are saying the country is under an “undeclared martial law.” Despite the sermons on respecting human rights and sanctity of life that Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo got from many leaders in Europe during her recent state visit there, the political killings continue.

Political analyst Bobby Tuazon also cited the well-placed positions of former military officers in key cabinet posts. Tuazon thus asks whether the civilian bureaucracy under Ms Arroyo is now under militarist control.

During the commemoration of martial law last 21 September, which turned into a national protest against political killings and the legitimacy of Arroyo’s government, protesters have warned that Ms Arroyo will go the way of Thaksin if she continues “charting the same path of corruption and repression taken by both Marcos and Thaksin.”

In Baguio City, various groups, including the religious sector, from Northern Luzon gathered also for “unity and solidarity” to “urge all freedom-loving Filipinos to break silence into song and transform fear into a people’s movement for justice.”

Asked about hopes for peace and unity for this benighted land, Bishop Carlito Cenzon of the Baguio-Benguet Diocese told us that it was time for this country’s leadership to learn how to deal and relate with dissenters. Dissenters, he said, include political activists, critical journalists, and protesting workers and students. Allowing the free market of ideas, even dissenting opinions and hard-hitting criticisms, is the real essence of democracy, according to the good bishop. For him, respecting political dissent is one indicator of a healthy democracy.

Democracy, the bishop said, is participation of the people and by the people in governance for the common good. Curtailing democracy, he said, is courting chaos. Democracy can work only through more participation of various stakeholders, including dissenters. “Not through gold and guns,” he said.

As in Marcos’ martial law reign and during Joseph Estrada’s administration, journalists are now threatened with libel suits. Worse, some were shot to death. The National Union of Journalists in the Philippines reports that First Gentleman Miguel Arroyo has filed 42 libel suits against journalists, many of them veterans of Marcos martial law regime who celebrated their new-found freedom after EDSA I.

We are indeed under interesting and threatening times. And history seems to be repeating itself probably because we have yet to learn our lessons well. Or maybe we have refused to learn at all.

Tales from the Dark Side

September is not just the time when, to paraphrase a song, you will see me after summer is gone. September also marks those dark years in recent Philippine history when a man from Batac, Ilocos Norte proclaimed that he was destined by Divine Providence to rule and control our society.

I was not exactly a toddler when the late strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law on 21 September 1972. I was actually a high school student then. One thing I vividly remember about the first years of Marcos’ martial law reign was the Bagong Lipunan (New Society) hymn, which, as we sang it with gusto, would reverberate in our barrio high school prefab building.

The Bagong Lipunan hymn almost replaced the Pambansang Awit (National Anthem). We would sing it quite over and over – maybe at least six times a day. The first stanza goes: May bagong silang/ May bagong nabuhay/ Bagong bansa, bagong galaw/ Sa bagong lipunan/ Nagbabago ang lahat/ Tungo sa pag-unlad/ Kaya ating itanghal/ Bagong Lipunan. You can easily note that the common key word in almost every line is the word bago (new). The song talks about renewal – a new birth, a new nation, a new society, a new way of behaving, and new forms of action.

I was no longer fond of singing the Bagong Lipunan hymn in the early 1980s when, during a human rights public forum, the late lawyer Arthur Galace shared a story about that hymn. One day soldiers of Marcos came to a village somewhere in northern Philippines. To welcome the arriving soldiers, the villagers sang what the soldiers thought was a spoof of the Bagong Lipunan hymn. The villagers sang: May gagong silang/ May gagong nabuhay/ Gagong bansa, gagong galaw/ Sa Gagong Lipunan… The soldiers were not pleased so their commander reprimanded the village chieftain, warning him that the whole community could be arrested and thrown into military stockades. So the chieftain asked the military commander, “Gakit?”

The villagers, the commander finally learned, didn’t have a “b” in their dialect. Their “b” was “g.”

True or not, the story was one of the likes of Galace’s way of actually coping with the pains and fears during the martial law regime. Humor was actually one way by which many Filipinos coped with the excesses and abuses of that regime, which was ruled by the barrels of guns. It was a regime, which jailed and tortured critics. Many others were summarily killed while others were abducted and disappeared without a trace.

Close to home, it was during the martial law regime when politicians, accompanied by M-16 rifle-welding soldiers, practically grabbed the lands of poor villagers in Taloy, Tuba. It was the martial law regime which snuffed out the life of Macliing Dulag, a Kalinga tribal chief opposed to a series of World Bank-funded mega-dam projects along the Chico River.

Despite the pains the martial law regime brought about, Filipinos kept their sanity through their humor.

One slogan of Marcos’ dictatorship was “isang bansa, isang diwa (one nation, one thought).” But some wag spoofed this into “isang ganso, isang hiwa (one goose, one slice).”

The state-controlled airwaves during those years would also repetitiously hammer into listeners the mailed-fist regime’s slogan, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, disiplina ang kailangan (Discipline is needed for the country to move forward).” But a naughty radio commentator parodied the slogan, saying, “Sa ikauunlad ng bayan, bisekleta ang kailangan (We need bicycles for the country to move forward).” The radio commentator was reportedly punished. He was made to bike around an oval until he got exhausted.

And there were those agitating chants from the militants. One famous chant sang to the tune of the “London Bridge” nursery rhyme was, “US-Marcos falling down, falling down, falling down/ US-Marcos falling down, with First Lady.” This was quite famous after the 21 August 1983 assassination of Sen. Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino.

At that time all media outfits – from broadcast to print – were state-controlled. So everything the public heard or read were, as Imelda Marcos would push, only “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

Many Filipinos would buy the newspapers but they just read the cartoons and answered the crossword puzzles. One time human rights lawyer Rene Saguisag commented that no one could believe the state-controlled newspapers because they couldn’t even be accurate with their dates.

Some Filipinos came out with alternative means to disseminate information. One alternative small paper was called Sick of the Times, which printed humor-wrapped critiques of the Marcos regime. In its first issue, it announced that it was “Volume One, Only One.” After some time, another issue appeared, and it was “Volume One, Another One.” Both issues were sold out. It was too bad I didn’t keep copies of the two volumes, which should have been a highly priced memento of that period. But keeping something like these could cost your life because Marcos’ military intelligence agents even considered as “subversive” the tapes of the Asin folk-rock band.

There were other stories, both painful and humorous, from those dark years of Marcos’ martial law dictatorship. Many of those who were born not just yesterday helped battle the dictatorship. Four regimes after the Marcoses’ downfall in February 1986, however, the country still has to get out of the rut. Given the current state of things, we note with sadness that tyranny still reigns, threatening to resurrect those tales from one of the dark sides of the country’s history, which was Marcos’ regime.

September 11 to Remember

September 11 is a significant date to remember. Some remember it with mourning and grief. But some remember it with triumph. Others remember it as the first day of the rest of their lives.

The most recent memory of a September 11 event was the series of coordinated and well-planned attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001. That Tuesday morning attack, also often referred to as 9/11, surprised the world’s lone super-power. The world’s super cop was practically caught flatfooted. The account of what happened that fateful morning is now recorded in the Wikipedia free online encyclopedia.

Ninteen men, who were said to be from al-Qaeda, hijacked four commercial passenger jet airliners, with each team including a trained pilot. Two planes (United Airlines Flight 175 and American Airlines Flight 11) crashed into the World Trade Center, also known as the Twin Towers, in New York City, one plane into each tower. Within two hours, the towering symbols of America’s economic power collapsed.

The pilot of the third team crashed a plane into the Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia. Passengers and members of the flight crew on the fourth aircraft attempted to retake control of their plane from the hijackers. That plane crashed into a field near the town of Shanksville in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania. Excluding the 19 hijackers, a confirmed 2,973 people died and another 24 remain listed as missing as a result of these attacks during which passenger jets, for the first time in history, were used as weapons.

The world, including the Philippines, mourned the attack because some of the casualties were Filipinos. But while others mourned, some of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world cheered the hijackers. For them, it was time for America, who invented the phrase “collateral damage” and who has been applying it on hapless people in some powerless Third World nations, to learn its lesson and to get some dose of the kind of medicine it has been prescribing for its own overt and covert wars.

Humiliated and outraged, America’s George W. Bush unleashed his rage on Afghanistan and, later, on Iraq. Afghanistan, which was said to be sheltering the al-Qaeda, was bombed and flattened and sent back to the Stone Age. The attack on Afghanistan exacted more “collateral damage” than the casualties of 9/11 in America. After Afghanistan, America’s Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair shifted to Iraq, which, they said, was concealing “weapons of mass destruction.” Both guys even got the UN’s approval for their war on Iraq. It turned out later, however, that the supposed weapons of mass destruction were weapons of mass deception and that the war on Iraq was about oil.

After 9/11, Bush wanted to count on his allies in the world for support on what he called the war on terror. Saying “either you are with us or against us,” he called on other leaders of the world to support that war. Among the first to respond to Mr. Bush’s call was Ms. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who even offered the country’s ports as refueling stations for America’s warships if need be. Ms Arroyo’s support for Bush’s wars on Afghanistan and Iraq made Arroyo, as one critic put it, “Washington’s little drummer girl in Asia.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Bush’s war on terror didn’t make the world safer. The war has endangered not only the US, but also its allies such as Spain, UK and the Philippines. There was the series of coordinated bombings against the commuter train system of Madrid on the morning of 11 March 2004, which killed 191 people and wounded over 1700. There were other bombings in retaliation to Mr Bush’s war on terror, exacting more collateral damage in Bali, Morocco, Istanbul and elsewhere.

Bush has tried to demonize Osama bin Laden, picturing him as a creature with horns and a thorny tail. But in many sidewalk shops in Bangkok, the portrait of a handsome bin Laden with the charisma of a Che Guevarra is painted on T-shirts for sale, along with other idols of some youth such as Bob Marley and, of course, Che Guevarra. So we are in a world where one person’s demon is another person’s legendary hero. And that is how the world has become after 9/11.

September 11, however, is remembered in a different light elsewhere. For some simple folk in far northern Philippines, whose lives revolve around sowing their seeds and reaping the fruits of their toil, September 11 is a day of hope. It was September 11, 2002 when the indigenous Mabaka folk of Apayao Province, for example, stopped living literally in the dark.

On the evening of that day, the Mabaka folk for the first time switched on their electric bulbs and bade goodbye to their kerosene lamps. Thanks to a 7.5 kilowatt-microhydro power plant, which a UN agency, a development NGO, and the Catholic Church supported. And thanks specially also to the determination and perseverance of Mabaka folk themselves. They had to haul on their shoulders iron bars, cement, pipes, and other materials and equipment from the nearest road because their home community of Buneg is a seven-to-eight-hour hike from the nearest road. All members of the community – men, women, and children – all coordinated to dig canals, haul stones and sand to help build their dream of seeing the light from Thomas Alva Edison’s invention.

Each September 11 since four years ago, the Mabaka folk would gather around their community in celebration to dance their traditional tadek to the tune of gongs as their way of thanking the heavens. So while the rest of the world’s peoples mourn 9/11, the Mabaka folk celebrate September 11 as that day when they have seen the light, both literally and from a much deeper sense.