Fresh start

After ten years of being a columnist, and nine years of being an editorial writer for TODAY newspaper, the time has come to move on.

Starting on Monday, I will be a columnist and contributing editor to the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Escape to Manila

I received a copy of Frank Ephraim / Escape to Manila from the University of Illinois Press today. I’ll be writing a column about it, but this early on, let me say it’s a fascinating book about the Jewish community in Manila during World War 2, particularly the Jews who found refuge from Nazi persecution in the Philippines.

I wrote a column on the subject back in 1995, which should be in the articles section.

I am a bootlicker

This is the title of a manifesto of sorts I wrote for Poormojo’s Almanac(k), which is an online literary magazine which everyone should read.

The essay can be found here. Other pieces that have come out in Poormojo’s can be found here and here.

The clot thickens

There’s an old Charlie Chan joke that goes, the detective was looking at the body of a stab victim and observed, “ah, so, the clot thickens.”

Senate President Franklin Drilon who was a former Secretary of Justice, has observed that the birth certificate of Fernando Poe Jr. and his parent’s marriage certificate -both submitted by FPJ’s lawyers and not the National Archives director- indicates that FPJ’s parents married over a year after his birth.

Drilon says that this means that FPJ was born illegitimate, which, according to the commonly bruited-about opinion in legal circles, means FPJ, at birth, under the law posessed the citizenship of his mother. So FPJ by this reasoning was born an American citizen.

The question, says Drilon, is whether by his parent’s subsequent marriage, the presumption can be made that not only was FPJ legitimized, but that ex post facto FPJ’s citizenship was then affected, rendering him a natural-born Filipino citizen. It will be interesting to see what the lawyers have to say about this.

Apparently then, the whole issue isn’t going to go away anytime soon.

It’s official

Comelec denies plea to disqualify Poe – Jan. 23, 2004 has pronounced Fernando Poe, Jr. qualified for office. When all is said and done, the efforts to disqualify him will go down in political history as one of the most botched attempts to do a hatchet-job on a candidate since the effort to turn people against Marcos because of the Nalundasan case. Interesting comparison, that, actually: the Marcos case was based on rather compelling evidence; I still suspect there might have been a glimmer of truth to the Poe allegations. But in politics, facts are only as good as your ability to present them, and the messengers in this case looked like they should be shot.

ABS-CBNNEWS.COM reports the “forced leave,” of the Director of the National Archives. But the real big news is that the Commission on Elections is releasing its decision on the Fernando Poe, Jr. citizenship issue at 2 p.m. today. Rumor was that the division of the COMELEC in charge of the decision had resolved that FPJ is not a natural-born Filipino. Will the circus at the senate have changed things? There’s a cliffhanger for you!

Fun

create your own visited country map
or write about it on the open travel guide

A hell of a saying

Professor Felipe Miranda has a good column in the Star today. And not just because he’s remarkable dispassionate about my grandfather (though that was a pleasant surprise). Miranda often tends to be grim but when he’s playful, he manages to have a stronger wallop than when he’s just plain old serious.

I am tempted to write a column about my grandfather’s eternally (mis)quoted “I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans,” but I mention Quezon too often in my column as it is, so perhaps later today I’ll just get it off my chest with a rant here.

Devious and dumber

The coverage on ANC of the Senate Committee hearings featuring a shifty-eyed Director of the National Archives, was extremely frustrating. Those who didn’t sound stupid sounded ignorant, those who didn’t sound ignorant or stupid sounded disingenous, and so on.

Regardless of the truth -and the truth is something extremely subjective in the end, in any Senate inquiry- the fact is the Director of the National Archives came out looking like an extremely untrustworthy, scheming, if not patently dishonest, person.

The two senators Osmena asked pretty good questions. So did Senator Angara; Senator Pimentel is letting his orneryness get in the way of effective interrogation; I am just about ready to stop giving Senator Sotto the benefit of the doubt.

Manapat was effectively sandbagged by the Senators, and so what could have been a plausible explanation never got out; the senators kept tripping him up and kept zeroing in on the fact that no one but Manapat is to blame for the way a potentially cut-and-dried case has now become practically irredeemably tainted.

Manapat’s explanations, to those familiar with archives, archiving, the state of these in our country and public record keeping in this country in general, have the ring of plausability. But his personal history as an attack dog for the Ramos camp, his personal unpopularity, and his personal demeanor, torpedoed any chance for most people to give him the benefit of the doubt.

At this point it’s almost academic to wonder if there’s any chance the documents Manapat has are actually genuine. He has been tried and found wanting in the court of public opinion.

Would they die for him?

There’s a wesbite focusing on Fernando Poe, Jr. , particularly on the citizenship issue, with many columns by noted columnists being reproduced.

The question in my mind, though is: granted his supporters are angered by the citizenship issue, still, how many of them will actually go to the streets and man the barricades in case he’s disqualified?

On TV the other night the news featured an angry mob, but some of them were faces familiar from Marcos Loyalist and Estrada Loyalist rallies -the usual suspects, perhaps bused in, even paid. Granted every side utilizes paid hacks, the question remains, how many will go to the streets for FPJ?

This is a serious question and no one can give an informed answer. Media’s assumption is we would have a general uprising were FPJ disqualified. Is this merely media hype?

La Revolucion Filipina

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can read Apolinario Mabini’s La Revolucion Filipina here.

This is the parapgraph I referred to in my previous entry:

To sum it up, the Revolution failed because it was badly led; because its leader won his post by reprehensible rather than meritorious acts; because instead of supporting the men most useful to the people, he made them useless out of jealousy. Identifying the aggrandizement of the people with his own, he judged the worth of men not by their ability, character and patriotism but rather by their degree of friendship and kinship with him; and anxious to secure the readiness of his favorites to sacrifice themselves for him, he was tolerant even of their transgressions. Because he thus neglected the people forsook him; and forsaken by the people, he was bound to fall like a waxen idol melting in the heat of adversity. God grant we do not forget such a terrible lesson, learnt at the cost of untold suffering.

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