make my day1

i
About the book "Make My Day":
"Make My Day" is the name of the column that Hilarion M. Henares Jr. wrote
daily for the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and is chosen as the title of his first book of
collected essays.
Larry Henares discovered that "the high and the mighty do not mind being feared,
do not mind being hated -- that is the price they pay on the way to riches and power. But
they hate to be made fun of and to be laughed at, because this lowers their self-esteem."
This discovery by a writer who was intimate with the powers-that-be as a friend, business
colleague and relative, financially independent enough to resist any bullying, and with a
unique talent to move people to tears and laughter -- gave birth one of the most unique
newspaper columns in journalistic history.
The first piece in this book about the small size of Major Jejomar Binay of
Makati, describing him as a tadpole born of constipation, and baptized with a drop of
water and a grain of salt, is a classic long remembered with belly-aching laughter.
Former Labor Secretary and now Senator Blas Ople is presented as a patriot but only
when he is drunk and watering potted plants in hotel lobbies. Vice President Doy Laurel
is pictured as a political bungler with a smile that is halfway between a snarl and a smirk.
Likewise, the readers are served with a Central Bank governor as a pompous ass, a
Defense Secretary as a duck with a penchant for self-destruction, and an economic
czarina as a screaming banshee who blows cigarette smoke at protagonists in TV debates.
Yet Henares can move his readers to shed tears unashamedly at the death of a
friend, as he did with Elvira and Tito Manahan, Lando Olalia, and Rrex Baquiran. His
hospital drama, "Maxicart! Maxicart!" is a classic long remembered by doctors. His
essays on the Filipino male as a lover, on The Kiss, the art of insult, the negro race, the
Great White Father -- all included in this volume -- are replete with original insights and
unparalleled mastery of subject and style.
The other books by Henares released simultaneously are entitled "Nice and
Nasty," "Cecilia My Love," and "Sweet and Sour."

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BOOK 1: MAKE MY DAY
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword by Dr. Alejandro R. Roces………………………………………..
iv
Chapter One: Personalities…………………………………………………... 001
1. Jojo Binay, the small boy of Makati………………………………. 001
Goodbye, Binay, I'll never see you again…………………………. 002
2. Come back to us, Elvira Manahan ……………………………….. 004
Maxicart! Maxicart!......................................................................... 007
Tito Manahan: holding back the dawn…………………………… 009
3. Blas Ople, the Great Inebriate…………………………………….. 011
Blast Ople, the Magnificent………………………………………… 014
4. “Doy Laurel is a louse!”……………………………………………. 016
Sadly, what are we to do with you, Doy?......................................... 019
5. Lando Olalia died, seeing life as it should be……………………... 022
6. Jobo: the ass is a noble creature…………………………………… 024
Insolent intrusion into Jobo's privacy…………………………….. 027
Without Jobo, economic disaster!.................................................... 029
7. Short and simple annals of Paz Cubero…………………………... 032
8. We like Winnie as a screaming banshee…………………………... 034
Winnie grabs microphones, bullies all…………………………...... 037
9. The humble roots of Johnny Ponce Enrile……………………....... 039
The waddling ducks of Johnny E………………………………….. 042
Shakespeare and the flawed greatness of Johnny………………... 047
10. Deciphering Lupita's speedtalk………………………………….. 048
11. Peace so precious it must be bought with our lives ……………. 051
12. Saint Scho's class of 1941………………………………………… 053
Chapter Two: The Contemporary Scene…………………………………… 060
13. Renaming the column……………………………………………. 060

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Readers, you make my day!............................................................ 061
To be born again………………………………………………….. 063
14. Aye, Aye, Aye walk with heroes…………………………………. 065
15. Dear Mr. Douglas Hicks................................................................. 068
16. Let's talk dirty: The Saga of Sex………………………………… 070
17. To be a Negro……………………………………………………… 076
18. In defense of the Filipino Male…………………………………… 079
19. The anatomy of a kiss…………………………………………….. 082
20. The intellectual art of giving insult……………………………… 084
21. Smiles of a Sabbath Day………………………………………….. 086
22. The Great White Father………………………………………….. 089
23. Bernie Villegas, wishing upon a star…………………………….. 092
24. Ateng: smiles and tears…………………………………………... 094
Chapter Three: That's Entertainment………………………………………. 095
25. Fading shadows on the wall……………………………………… 095
26. Rolando Tinio's Unfinished Symphony…………………………. 097
27. The secret of El Nido……………………………………………... 100
28. The mystery of Dog's Mead……………………………………… 103
Let the church bells ring, the Flip is greatest…………………… 106
Solution to the mystery of Dog's Mead…………………………. 108
End of Book……………………………………………………………………. 111

iv
FOREWORD by Alejandro R. Roces
I have known Larry Henares since our Grade School days in Ateneo, and up to now I still
don't know how I survived it. My first recollection of him is that of a boy wearing
mameloko, a child's suit with buttons attaching the shirt to the shorts, which to his
embarrassment and to his classmates' amusement, he was made to wear up to the first
year of high school. During all that time he went free of charge into the best theater in
town, the Ideal Theater, which my family owned.
We served together in the Cabinet of President Diosdado Macapagal, Larry as the
Chairman of the National Economic Council and myself as Secretary of the Department
of Education. In Cabinet meetings, Larry sat between the Press Secretary and the
Secretary of Defense, between the pen and the sword, and representing money and the
economy, he claimed to be mightier than both.
We were in our student days, both into engineering, I in University of Arizona,
and Larry in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But eventually we both drifted
into writing, both first in the venerable Manila Times, and much later I in Philippine Star
and he in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
He became the best investigative business writer the Philippines ever had, because
he was an well-awarded industrialist, businessman and economist in his own right, and
was a master in the analysis of financial statements and annual reports, and also because
every bigshot in government and the private sector seemed to have been his friend,
subordinate, associate or relative. His front page series on Meralco, PLDT, National
Steel, even the Moonies and the Born-Again, made history and moved the nation to react
decisively.
He is a writer unique in Philippine journalism, with a mastery of a wide range of
subjects, from economics, science, art, culture, history, religion to politics -- and he had
the analytical mind to produce original insights and fresh perspectives that astound even
as they inform, and a sense of humor that tickles and rubs raw our funnybones. He has a
unique style that ranged across the acidic M.L. Mencken, the hilarious P.G. Wodehouse
and Damon Runyon, the witty and sentimental Oscar Wilde, the master of surprises O.
Henry, and the master of paradoxes G.K. Chesterton.

v
He has the knack of making fun of oligarchs of the ruling class and giving them
nicknames that stick, such as Kulas Platypus, Small Dick, Lechon Drilon, Crocodile
Dundeeng, the Villainous Convexity of a Face, and Alopecic Misogamic Gynander -- and
that earned him implacable enemies among the high and the mighty. And he became by
far the most feared, and the most read columnist, according to all surveys, in the whole
country.
"Who else around here have I not yet offended?" he would announce with roofshaking
laughter, and would introduce me as his best friend. "Correction, please," I
would answer, "I am your ONLY friend."
Everyday we would walk before dawn, literally from the darkness into the light,
in rhythm with the universe, around the periphery of Dasmariñas Village, and entertain
each other. He would invariably ask me, "What was that joke you told me yesterday?
What was the punchline?" and when I tell him he would write in his column that I keep
repeating my corny jokes in a squeaky voice.
I once told him how I was circumcised in my youth, and there it was in his
column as part of an interesting article on the history of health practices in the desert and
the male rites of passage, with a remark that my thing looked like Buddy Gomez with a
bowtie. Wearing a hairpiece, he would describe my balding head as "denuded from the
Arctic Circle down to the Tropic of Cancer."
I am convinced that Larry Henares has a low life expectancy, and when a carful of
tough guys barred our way during one of our morning walks, I desperately distanced
myself from Larry, shouting, "He is Larry Henares, not me!'' And Larry answered, "No, I
am not Larry Henares, I am Anding Roces." I am now convinced that fraternizing with
Larry, I too have a low life expectancy.
As a matter of fact, I have already prepared my gravestone: "Lord God, please do
unto me / What I would do unto Thee / if I were the God of Moses / and You were
Alejandro Roces." But if Larry dies first, then relieved of being his only friend, I will
donate to him the gravestone and substitute Hilarion Henares for Alejandro Roces. Our
names rhyme, you know.
In the meantime, read this book, the second volume of his Make My Day series, a
collection of his early writings circa 1986 in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, and laugh, and

vi
weep, and gnash your teeth, as I did in the lifetime I spent with Larry Henares.
The blame for Larry Henares must rest entirely on the doctor who circumcised
him. The doctor should have preserved the prepuce and thrown Larry Henares away.
Alejandro R. Roces
Former Secretary of Education
And columnist, Philippine Star

1
Chapter One: Personalities
1. Jojo Binay, the Small Boy of Makati
One fine day, Mrs. Binay thought she had a tummy ache. Laboring mightily, she found
she gave birth to a little baby about the size of a tadpole. Her first words were
"Susmariosep!", which is the local version of the ejaculation "Jesus, Mary, Joseph!" And
that is why Jesus Jose Maria "Jejomar" Binay was so baptized. The good parish priest
picked him up with a tweezer, applied the holy water with an eyedropper, flicked him one
grain of salt, and made a Christian out of Jojo Binay.
Jojo's problem has always been his size. Inspite of all sorts of remedies, including
the liberal application of fertilizer inside his shoe (no, it was not cachichas), Jojo stopped
growing at the age of seven. Let's face it, when one is a shade over five feet and is the
smallest guy in the gang, he is apt to be the low man on the totem pole, the guy they send
out to deliver messages to girlfriends and buy cigarettes from the vendors. So passed the
youth of Jojo Binay.
* * *
When OIC Mayor Jojo Binay first met statuesque AuAu Pijuan Manotok, he
stretched his arm for a handshake, and was surprized to have AuAu press a peso coin
onto his palm with the words, "Poor little boy, here's something to buy lugaw with."
When in a grand gesture Jojo presented three roses to Isabel Wilson, the political
boss of Dasma, she said, "Hoy, bata, diez pesos lang ang bayad ko dian," thinking he was
one of the little boys selling flowers in the street corner.
When Nena Borromeo who is about 6 feet tall, was introduced to OIC Mayor
Jojo, she vainly scanned the horizon for his presence, until told to shift her gaze 90
degrees downward in the direction of her shoes, where she saw the mayor tugging at the
hem of her skirt for attention.
When Tessie Romulo got out of her car in front of the Makati Municipal Building,
she saw Jojo and said, "Psst, bantayan mo ang coche ko. Pag mawawalang hubcaps,

2
lagot ka sa akin!"
But the last straw was when Tini Pertierra, having broken her car suspension over
one of Makati's potholes and having endured to the limit the stink of Makati's uncollected
garbage, finally decided to go to the Mayor to give him hell. She chased him all over his
office, brandishing her chinelas, determined to give little Jojo the spanking he deserves.
* * *
I say it was the last straw because it was then that OIC Mayor Jojo Binay decided
to hire a gang of goons armed to the teeth with high powered weapons, to protect him
from the horde of housewives from the Ayala villages --- Belle Wilson, Tessie Romulo,
Tini Pertierra, Nena Borromeo, Helen Small, among others --- who decided that Jojo
belongs, not in the city hall, but in either Boy's Town or Welfareville.
The housewives of Makati complain of squatters by the railroad tracks who are
busily tearing down the walls erected by Imelda to shield them from Cristina Ford and
George Hamilton. The sight of those squatter shanties equally offend these matrons.
They complain about the mooncraters in the streets of Makati which wreak havoc
with their cars, and uncollected garbage which compete with their Chanel No. 5, and
object to the appointment of Mike Joseph as his assistant on barangay operations because
he is already being paid as barangay captain of San Lorenzo Village.
They decry Jojo's insensitiveness of the lesbian rape of Nina Sara, his indifference
to the prosecution of those who terrorized Namfrel volunteers during the elections, and
the murder of barangay captain William Marfori.
* * *
But give Jojo his due. When he took over Makati from the administration of
Yabut, it was broke. It could not even pay the P12 million owed to the Makati Medical
Center for Yabut's MIT (Makati Indigent Patients) bill. Today it's all paid up, and with
the help of volunteer Conchitina Sevilla Bernardo (would you believe she was the flower
girl at my wedding?), the Makati Health Program of Jojo for residents earning P5,000 a
year or less, is successfully being implemented. As a matter of fact, Jojo just advanced
P9.5 million for the program.
Then again Jojo has this Bigay Pagmamahal Foundation headed by his consultant

3
for social services, Marissa Chan, all financed by private donations, that gives relief for
typhoon victims, scholarships to poor students, aid to squatters, medicines to the needy,
and social services to the poor. This outreach program for the masa often brings
schoolchildren to the Municipio where they are given balloons, sandwiches and
entertainment.
Because he is such a small man, Jojo runs Makati like a small town. He delegates
most of his authority, and is often seen playing basketball with his employees, just like
the canto boy that he is, perhaps an anomaly among the bigwigs of the Makati business
district and the wealthy matrons in the villages... but in many ways, a good mayor to the
most of the people of Makati.
Goodbye, Binay, I'll never see you again!
EVEN as I push Sandiganbayan Justice Francis Garchitorena for Secretary of National
Defense, on the grounds that his wife is a nuclear scientist who can blast away pesky
army cliques as efficiently as Francis' front tooth, and that horsefaces have a certain
nobility of character -- I was informed that Mayor ``Susmariosep'' Binay is being favored
as the next Defense Secretary, even as the incumbent Eddie Ramos may move to the
Local Government and take charge of the Kabisig to advance his presidential ambitions.
Everybody knows Jojo Binay takes very seriously his role as Rambotito, the Littlest
Soldier of Cory, even as he carried a butt-less sawed-off Armalite on his back like
Charles Atlas, to rescue Channel 7 and Manila Hotel from the RAMboys. As Secretary
of Defense, Binay will most probably shout at General Rodolfo Biazon, his likely Chief
of Staff:
``General, when you are in my presence, stand up, chest out, and keep your eyes
straight up front!''
And the 6 ft. General will answer to his 4 ft. boss, ``Sir, if I have to stand up instead of
kneel down, if I keep my eyes straight instead of looking down, then I must say goodbye,
sir, for I'll never see you again!''

4
* * *
Indeed, Jojo Binay spent most of his life trying to avoid being trampled upon
underfoot, but it has its compensations. For one thing he gets to travel by plane at halfprice,
shop at the children's section of the department store, and sit at the little boy's high
chair at restaurants.
And unlike Justice Secretary Franklin Drilon whose massive overweight cannot be
dented by four full-sized bombs, no one will throw a bomb or a grenade at Jojo Binay
when a little firecracker will do the job as well.
But seriously we hasten to endorse Jojo Binay for the defense portfolio, for the same
reasons we endorsed Horseface.
First, he will restore civilian supremacy in a position formerly occupied by two
professionally trained soldiers, West Point graduates Rocky Ileto and Eddie Ramos.
Second, he will stop all the political talk, unseemly among military men, endorsing the
American position on the military bases.
Third, having been from the cause-oriented MABINI during martial law, he will
respect the rights of political dissenters, and refuse to salvage students, intellectuals,
priests, nuns, workers and peasants.
Lastly, adopting a nationalistic stance, he can inspire our fighting men with a vision of
their common purpose and common destiny with the rest of the Filipino people.
November 22, 1986; November 24, 1990, Philippine Daily Inquirer
2. Come back to us. Elvira Manahan
Come back to us, Elvira. The night is too long for thoughts that dare not dream of
sunrise. The night is too dark for eyes that cannot see the stars. You were the light of our
nights, like Scaramouche, "born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world is mad
(cuckoo, not angry)". Come back, Elvira.
Elvira died Tuesday at 6:55 PM in the Makati Med, shot in her own house by a
demented assassin. Two maids were killed. A third maid, Shiela, before falling into a

5
coma, identified the assailant as Jaime Balatbat, a handsome 6-foot 27-year-old realtor
who just sold the Manahan house to the Puyats for P8.5 million. According to Sheila,
Balatbat attacked the maids and Elvira, and shot them all in the head with a small
revolver.
Jaime Balatbat is the son of Ching Pojalte Balatbat, an agent of the realty firm of
Rod G. Valencia. Her husband, a hot-head and son of ex Secretary Marcelo Balatbat, was
hacked to death in a quarrel with his farm foreman.
* * *
Before Max Factor made every girl pretty, Manila could boast of only a few
beauties: Chona Recto, Susan Magalona, Pacita de los Reyes... and among the young ones
then, Nena Vargas of Assumption, Regina Abreu and Cecilia Lichauco of Sta.
Scholastica, and Elvira Ledesma of Holy Ghost.
We boys at the Ateneo used to drive to Holy Ghost after class hours just to watch
Elvira waiting for her car. There under the shade of a tree, she held court, regaling her
classmates by mimicking teachers and nuns. Her laughter was as infectious then as it was
to be in her TV "Two for the Road."
She broke our hearts when at 16 she married Armando "Mandy" Eduque (coach
Tito's brother) just before the end of the last war. She was pregnant when "liberation"
came; in Paco she and her husband were in an air-raid shelter, when Mandy suddenly
darted out to look for his favorite dog. His body was found two days later, shot dead by a
sniper.
A young girl I was to marry, Cecilia Lichauco, was also shot in the battle, and
when she opened her eyes in the Sto. Tomas hospital, she saw among her visiting friends,
Elvira telling jokes to brighten her day. Her son, Mandy Jr., says he was the matchmaker
between his mother and Dr. Tito Manahan, for it was when he was born that the attending
physician, Tito, met and fell in love with the lovely young widow.
* * *
In tribute to her beauty, there was an epidemic of babies baptized Elvira, among
them my own daughter Dr. Elvira Henares, one of those who attended her in her last
hours; Elvira Liboro (Yulo), daughter of Dr. Oscar Liboro; Elvira "Marvy" del Rosario of

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Trebel president Bert del Rosario; Elvira Araneta Buencamino of Luis Araneta, and her
own daughter Maria Elvira; Elvira Santo Niño Dayrit; Elvira Esguerra, and others.
With the help of a carefree and joyful way of life, as well as (by her own
admission) by the surgery of my cousin Dr. Amado Piamonte, Elvira Manahan managed
to keep young and beautiful at 59, that one can hardly believe she has four grown children
and nine grandchildren.
Probably her most memorable program was during one anniversary of her show,
when she had the topmost comedians in the Philippines trying to make her laugh ---
Subas Herrero and Noel Trinidad; Pepe Pimentel; Gary Lising and others --- and the only
one who made her laugh was Bert Marcelo.
* * *
Almost every week Elvira called me up to ask me what I thought of her coming
guests and what questions to ask to make them squirm. Only last week, she asked me to
be a guest in her show next Monday October 20th.
I appeared in her show several times, but I always had nightmares over what she
might do to me. I remember sometime in 1969, when she wanted to see the navel of a
gentleman guest, and practically pulled his pants down to do so, because of some silly
theory about the shape of one's navel. She was such a lovable nut.
In the beginning of time, when angels headed by St. Michael battled the fallen
angels under Lucifer, there were angels who stayed neutral. These angels not having
earned a place in heaven or in hell, were condemned to roam the earth forever as
malevolent witches, good fairy godmothers and mischievous leprechauns and elves.
"Elvira" is but another name for an elf, who like Puck in Shakespeare's
Midsummer Night's Dream, brings impish pranks and unexpected joys into our lives.
Our angel elf Elvira Manahan will be back --- in every lilt of laughter, in every
foolish nonsense, in every happy moment that brightens up our otherwise drab and
humorless world.

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Maxicart! Maxicart!
"Maxicart! Maxicart!" blared the paging system in the Makati Med Center. "All
cardiologists, proceed to emergency."
The Maxicart is a cart on wheels containing all the life saving devices and drugs
needed for emergency. When "Maxicart!" is heard over the paging system, all the interns,
the residents and the medical attendants, as well as doctors especializing in the vital
organs, rush to the emergency room in the basement.
This happened about two years ago when Dr. Tito Manahan, the Medical Director
of the Makati Med, collapsed with a massive heart attack in front of the elevator. He was
at once brought to the emergency room, where he was found undergoing life-threatening
ventricular fibrillations, a fluttering of the heart valve that usually is terminal.
Dra. Adoracion Nambayan Abad was there, and so were Dr. Benjamin
Alimurung, Dr. Dante Morales, and Dra. Juanita Zagala, the cardiologist of President
Marcos.
The resident doctor in attendance had to give Manahan who was still conscious, at
least four electric shocks, each a painful procedure that delivers 200 to 400 joules of
electrical energy to the heart, stimulating it to normalcy.
Fortunately, Tito Manahan's condition stabilized, and with painful electric burns
on his chest, he was taken into the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for a couple of weeks, then
up to the 9th floor suite where Elvira, his lovely wife, moved in an extra bed to keep him
company. Later Tito Manahan went to the United States to have a triple bypass heart
operation.
* * *
Last Tuesday morning, the Makati Med again echoed with an urgent "Maxicart!
Maxicart!" over its sound system. With all the doctors scrambling to the emergency
room, Elvira Manahan and her two maids were wheeled in, Elvira nearest the door, Shiela
next to her, and the other Teresita on the other side.
Elvira's face was swollen, her eyes popping out, blood all over her forehead, chest
and blue dress with flower applique. She was breathing in jerks, as in one of her

8
asthmatic attacks. The doctors in attendance began pumping her heart, inserting a tube
into her mouth, and an intravenous line into a vein in her right arm. Her heartbeat was
fast, about 120 beats a minute (the regular pulse rate is 70); her blood pressure was
140/50.
The big name doctors arrived: Dra. Paz Fores, the neuro surgeon Romeo H.
Gustilo, the neuro radiologist Benjamin Adapon who is the expert in the C.T. Scan; the
surgeon and Asst. Medical Director, Raul Fores; Dr. Renato Sibayan, Dr. Benjamin
Alimurung, Dra. Adoracion Nambayan Abad.
* * *
Romy Gustilo approached and held the hand of the victim, murmuring "Elvira,
Elvira..." and an intern nudged him to say, "Doctor, ito ang maid, nasa kabila si Elvira
Manahan." Romy ambled to the next bed where Elvira lay, while Raul Fores shouted for
everyone who was not needed to leave immediately.
Dr. Tito Manahan stood by helpless and in shock, just holding on to his wife,
while Dr. Adapon conducted a C.T. scan on Elvira's brain to determine the area of the
damage and the trajectory of the bullet. Elvira started to vomit something green, due to
the increasing pressure on her brain by blood flooding into her cranium. The bullet
entered near her right ear, and exited in a small hole on her left temple.
To their dismay, the doctors found massive damage to the frontal lobe, the part of
the brain nearest the brow where the intellectual faculties were located. They knew then
that if Elvira survived, she may walk around like a zombie, with no emotions, no
memory, no working intellect.
* * *
Elvira was wheeled into the Operating Room (O.R.) to stop the bleeding in her
brain. She was having a subdural hematoma, a flood of blood collecting under the
cranial vault, with resultant pressure on the brain. The first operation was to relieve the
pressure, and to decompress the swollen brain.
The operation was done, but the doctors did not completely close the wound. It
was at this point that Tito Manahan put a rosary in the hands of Elvira, then stood at the
foot of her bed, all pain and silent anguish. The other doctors stopped for a while, and

9
cried.
They wheeled Elvira Manahan back to where Dr. Adapon made another brain
scan, and then decided to bring her back to the operating room for the second operation.
Tito Manahan's blood pressure reached 300; Dra. Nambayan Abad who was watching
him, could hardly move, she was weeping.
Then the heart of Elvira Manahan stopped beating, and the next hour was spent in
pumping her heart, till at last at 6:55 PM, Dr. Manahan told the doctors to stop. Elvira
Manahan who was so full of life, was dead.
Tito Manahan: Holding back the dawn
THEY were opposites to the nth degree, Tito Manahan and Elvira Ledesma. He was
quiet and introspective, she was boisterous and extroverted. His smile was shy and silent,
her laugh was stereophonic, loud enough to shatter glass. He was an efficient dependable
workaholic, she was helter-skelter and funloving.
He was a doctor of medicine, an obstetrician; she was a clothes-horse, a
comedienne, a TV personality plus. He was a square, she was as nutty as a fruitcake.
They were so extreme in their disparate personalities that they needed each other
to bring balance, stability and normalcy into their lives.
In that sense, they were made for each other.
* * *
It was not always so.
From Ateneo, Tito Manahan went to the UP where he earned his doctor's degree,
and left for the USA to get his diplomate in John Hopkins. He was there when the War
started. Joining the US Medical Corps, he came back home with Dugout Dog ``I shall
return'' MacArthur. He had a sweetheart Conchita Sunico, once Miss Philippines, and
others like the beauteous Betty Magalona who had a crush on him.
From Holy Ghost College, Elvira entered the portals of Matrimony. In the last
days of the war, Elvira at 17 married Mandy Eduque of La Salle, at San Marcelino

10
Church, with reception at the Skyroom of the Jai-Alai, attended by Manila's elegant
society.
During the Battle of Manila, Mandy left the air-raid shelter to look for his dog,
and was killed by a sniper. When the war ended, Elvira was a widow, pregnant with
Mandy's child.
* * *
Elvira went to Dr. Tito Manahan for the delivery of her child, Mandy Eduque Jr.,
the Cupid who brought Tito and Elvira together. It was spontaneous combustion, an
implosion of fusing atoms in critical mass -- it was love at first sight.
Openly aggressive, Elvira would barge with great fanfare into the UST Hospital
where he worked, and embarrassed, he would sneak out the back stairs to avoid her loud
greeting.
Subtle and shy, Tito would visit Baby Mandy at Elvira's house on Haig St.,
Mandaluyong, just to see her and speak to her.
And the two of them attended dances at the Manila Hotel, handsome Tito in his
Army uniform, and beautiful Elvira bedecked like the Queen of Sheba.
* * *
They had a quiet wedding in the church on top of the hill on Blumentritt St., San
Juan. They rented a cute apartment from an American lady who was scandalized to see a
bouncing baby boy come with the newlyweds.
Tito teased Elvira for being such a provinciana, for falling flat on her face twice
in the same night in a New York ballroom, and for ordering in a fancy Spanish restaurant
``ropa sucia (dirty clothes)'' instead of ``ropa vieja (the left-over dish of cocido).''
He was successful, with an income 100 times what top executives made. In the
1950s he was delivering about 10 babies a day, and charging P800; that is P8,000 a day or
P200,000 a month at the time a Cabinet member earned P2,000 a month.
Everytime she gave birth, he would give her something precious. With Johnny, it
was a diamond pin and a ruby pin which interlocked to form a butterfly; with Bonggoy, it
was a beetle-shaped jade ring surrounded by diamonds. They had two other sons: Joselito
the youngest and Mandy Eduque the eldest whose only daughter Samantha was a favorite.

11
* * *
We thought their marriage was doomed, because he was too busy being a doctor
and all the nurses and pregnant mothers fell in love with him; and because she was too
busy having fun without him, in show business and elegant society, where all men,
foreign and native, flirted openly with her.
Jealous of his patients, she once left him, only to come back because she couldn't
live without him. When Tito had a heart attack and triple heart bypass, Elvira devoted all
her time to caring for him.
After Elvira's tragic death, Tito had nothing left to live for, but we couldn't let him
go because he was part of our lives too, delivering more than 100,000 of our babies for
two generations. He gave us life as Elvira gave us laughter, and we gave them both our
love.
On December 6, he contracted hemorrhagic pancreatitis, a fatal disease by which
the enzymes of the pancreas destroy the surrounding organs. He wanted to die and join
Elvira for Christmas. On December 16, as the priest intoned the Amen of the Extreme
Unction, he expired, to the music of Silent Night.
* * *
Farewell, Tito Manahan, we cannot hold you back, anymore than we can hold
back the dawn, or youth, or love as it grows and changes. For the best things in life
are caught on the wing, and kept in some measure by letting them go.
Farewell, give our love to Elvira.
October 16/17, 1986: December 19, 1988, Philippine Daily Inquirer
3. Blas Ople, the Great Inebriate
Water is familiar to us as H2O, but this can also be written as H-OH. The OH is
called a hydroxyl and is a fundamental characteristic of alcohols. Among the alcohols the
most common are Methyl (CH3OH) and Ethyl (C2H5OH).
Methyl or wood alcohol is poisonous and renders one blind, and is recommended

12
for spiking the drinks of carpetbaggers and scallawags. Ethyl alcohol is made by
fermenting sugar, grain and fruits, and is the main ingredient for whisky, brandy, gin,
rum, champagne, vodka, wines and other alcoholic drinks.
Shakespeare described it as "an enemy you put into your mouth to steal away your
brains." In the Roaring 1920s, alcoholic drinks were actually forbidden by the United
States Constitution! On the other hand, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam sings: "Ah, my
Beloved, fill the Cup that clears Today of past Regrets and future Fears..." Edgar Allan
Poe could not write a single line of poetry unless uproariously drunk. Nor could W.C.
Fields perform his comic routines so well without several jiggers of whisky.
* * *
It is when Blas Ople is cold sober that we find him at his worst, kowtowing to the
merest American clerk in the Embassy, helping the Four Horsemen forge a Colonial
Constitution, shamelessly offering Americans military bases in exchange for their support
for his presidential bid. Ye winds, fan me, this man was once a Rectonian Nationalist!
Fortunately, Blas Ople fell under the spell of Bacchus, the god of Crapulence.
And in this state of inebriation, aside from watering potted plants at hotel lobbies and
chasing skirts along the corridors, he becomes his true self: a Comedian, Nationalist,
Humanist, Shining Knight, a Giant of a Man.
In this state of intoxication, Blas Ople is a stout defender of the Filipino.
In New Europe one day, Blas Ople and his side-kick Froilan Bacungan were
joined by an American newsman. As usual Blas was pointing a finger at Bacungan,
issuing orders, "Do this, Bac. Do that, Bac." And Bac, whom Blas describes as a born
slave, kept answering, "Yes, sir! Yes, sir!"
Then this American newsman started issuing instructions of his own, "Bac, my
friend, do this, do that," pointing a finger at Bacungan. Suddenly, Blas slapped the hand
of the American, saying, "You call him Bac again, you bastard, and I will wring your
neck! His name is MISTER Bacungan to you!"
* * *
The dislike of Blas for the white man is visceral, and often lands him into trouble.
In his befuddled state he often cannot make distinctions between a Russian and an

13
American. Not that it matters because he dislikes them both.
As President of the Philippine Soviet Friendship Society, he once made a speech
at Hilton, saying, "You Russians are as bad as the Americans. Someday the Chinese will
throw all of you into the sea." I apologized to the Tass reporter and said, "He is drunk,
you know." And the Russian answered, "In Russia, when a man is drunk, he does not
lie."
One day, he was having lunch with Rodney Tasker of the Far East Economic
Review, and Victor Laniauskas of the Reader's Digest. Blas Ople stood up and said:
"You American bastards have been mistreating negroes for hundreds of years, and
committing genocide on the poor Indians. You made our Samar a howling wilderness.
You are now facing the wrath of an avenging God. I am going to thrash you to within an
inch of your lives."
Rodney and Victor just happened to be karate experts, and they treated Blas to a
real Carnival side-show performance. First they held him by the feet, and swung him to
the ground like the Loop-the-Loop. Then they swung him around in a circle like The
Whip. Then they threw him across the room as if he were the Man on the Flying Trapeze.
As soon as he landed, Blas Ople got up, dusted off his clothes and said, "Had enough,
bastards? That will teach you guys a lesson!"
* * *
Then the time he castigated a group of Russians for the murder of the kulaks and
the invasion of Hungary, "Which one of you cowards is going to accept my challenge to a
fight?" A Russian 6 feet 5 inches, weighing 250 pounds of pure muscle stood up, and
sent our hero up at escape velocity into an orbit around the planet Venus. And that is how
our own Blas Ople became the first Filipino cosmonaut in history.
At one time, he was invited by Freddie Elizalde to his Forbes Park mansion for a
few drinks. Taking a look at the luxurious surroundings, Blas Ople said, "Freddie, you
Spanish shit, how many poor Filipinos have you driven to starvation in order to
accumulate all this wealth? You have exploited the masses long enough, I am going to
nail you to the wall!" Fortunately Blas couldn't hit Fred who is a good boxer, and settled
for tearing Fred's shirt to shreds.

14
Today as a sober colonial, Blas Ople is raising havoc among the nationalists in the
ConCom, helping the Four Horsemen to maneuver the ConCom into passing provisions
inimical to the interest of the Filipino people. How does one solve such a problem?
Easy. When he is not looking, just fill his coffee cup with something called Carlos
Primero.
Blast Ople the Magnificent
Don't you ever get a feeling that Blas Ople, the Loyal Opposition, is just playing a part in
some play or movie? Here, there and everywhere, you see this Incredible Bulk, looming
large before you, speaking in measured cadences, using kilometric words you hardly
understand, looking around after every word as if to let you know that you must be stupid
if you do not understand what he is talking about.
He reminds me somehow of John L. Lewis, the great leader of the United Mine
Workers, who supported Franklin Delano Roosevelt's bid for the presidency. During one
of the marathon miners' strikes that threatened the economy of the United States,
President Roosevelt was moved to utter to both the miners and the mine owners the curse
of Shakespeare's Mercutio: "A plague on both your houses!"
Who can ever forget that magnificent moment when John L. Lewis stood up to the
President and said in a stentorian voice and measured cadences: "It ill behooves one who
has supped at Labor's table and accepted the support of its numbers, to curse with fine
impartiality, both Labor and its adversaries with whom it is now locked in mortal
combat!"
* * *
That was John Llewellyn Lewis the Magnificent, sneering, sonorous, ironic,
megalomanic, and wonderful.
Yeah, this Blast Ople is playing the part of John L. Lewis ... he even looks like
him, the heavy mane, the bushy eyebrows, the pugnacious bulldog of a face, heavy set
body that looks bigger than it actually is ... even the way he speaks: a stereophonic

15
booming voice that shatters glass, the regimented words and phrases that march like
soldiers in a State Funeral procession, the oratorical pauses during which he scans the
audience for their reactions, the constant playing up to the peanut gallery, the deliberate
contriving of quotable quotes for tomorrow's newspaper.
The difference of course is that John L. Lewis was a scholar who quoted the Bible
all the time, while Blas Ople is a sciolist who quotes no other book than Roget's
Thesaurus, a compendium of synonyms and antonyms.
John L. Lewis the Magnificent was an Uncaged Lion. Blas Ople the Pompous is
an Exhibitionist Ape, the type in the Tarzan movie that thumps his chest and trumpets
nothing more meaningful than "Ugh, ugh".
* * *
There was a time, dear friends, when this shell of a man who kowtows to
Ambassador Bosworth and plays second fiddle to The Four Horsemen of the ConCom in
their efforts to forge a Colonial Constitution... there was a time when this hulk of a man
was a Rectonian Nationalist, a Defender of the Faith, a Keeper of the Flame.
He was, before politics and presidential ambitions petrified his brain and arrested
in their flight his intellectual growth and the trajectory of his mind --- he was an essayist
without equal, he painted pictures in people's minds of a nation rising from its knees to
greatness. He wrote of Thomas Mann's Patriotism of Humanity by which the compassion
of the strong keeps company with the dignity of the weak. He wrote of National Purpose
and Grand Designs and the national conceit that makes possible the impossible.
There was a time when Blas Ople was magnificent.
* * *
He was born in the obscure barrio of Sta. Maria, in the town of Hagonoy, in
Bulacan, the province of Gregorio del Pilar. His parents were impoverished peasants, so
when he graduated Valedictorian in his high school class, he did not even have shoes to
wear to the graduation ceremonies, and had to borrow a pair.
He could not even afford to go to college. He drifted to Manila where he worked
as a dock hand in the piers, while sleeping with friends. Then he was able to wangle a job
under Amante Bigornia, along with Amando Doronilla (now editor of Manila Chronicle)

16
in the public relations section of the Boy Scouts. Recognized as a man of letters, he was
given a column to write in the Daily Mirror, where he polished his craft under the great
editor Emilio Aguilar Cruz, or "Abe" in 2 syllables.
He became adviser on peasant and labor affairs to Ramon Magsaysay, then PR
adviser to Mayor Arsenio Lacson, Congressman Titong Roces, Mayor Villegas, and
Senator Ferdinand Marcos. He helped Labor Secretary Bernardino Abes set up the Land
Reform Code, the crowning glory of the Macapagal Administration.
He laid the theoretical basis for the Marcos Presidential Campaign and coming
administration, believing in his heart that Marcos was a Nationalist. Marcos betrayed
him. And he in turn betrayed the Nationalist Movement.
Even when he was young, he was a habitue of the bottle, and in his drunken
sprees he imagined himself a car racing champion, a famed guerilla leader, a poet and a
dramatic actor. In this state of inebriation, throughout his adult years, Blas Ople became
his true self: Nationalist, Humanist, a Shining Knight, and a Giant of a Man. But that is
another story.
September 12/15, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
4. "Doy is a louse!"
Salvador Laurel is admittedly the best looking among his brothers, probably the most
macho (this may be disputed by Jose Laurel Jr.), and the most accomplished, since he was
elected to the Senate along with Ninoy Aquino (I ran too but lost), and is now our Vice
President and Foreign Affairs Minister.
We always hesitated to criticize Doy, because we respected his father as a great
nationalist. By the same token we pretend Claro M. Recto's son does not exist. Then
again, the Laurels are a closely knit family who are all for one and one for all. To
criticize Doy means risking my friendship with compadre Teroy and never again to taste
Lorna's elegantly prepared dinners, never again to enjoy Celia's stage performances,
alienating another nationalist Pepito Junior, and having my ahijado Bobby's baby piss on

17
me for good measure. That is a high price to pay for saying Doy is a louse.
Oh what the heck, Doy is a louse.
******
We have this on the authority of one cabinet member, who intimates that Doy is a
third rate politician who is devious, overly ambitious beyond his depth, prone to
backroom maneuvers of doubtful propriety; who kowtows to Americans and Japanese;
who can't tell the truth without making it sound like a lie; who lives a life worthy to be
immortalized by Harold Robbins, and sports a smile that looks halfway between a smirk
and a snarl.
Now that is unkind, Doy is probably just naive. Ever since he acquiesced to be
the running mate of Cory, he has been outmaneuvered, outflanked, and outwitted by the
most inexperienced amateurs in Cory's political coterie. He was not only Vice President,
he was also appointed Prime Minister and Foreign Minister. As Prime Minister, he was
abolished; as Foreign Minister he was ignored.
Ambassadors are supposed to deal with the Philippine government through the
Foreign Ministry alone. The stuff-shirt Ambassador Stephen Bosworth feels it beneath
his dignity to deal with Doy, he deals directly with the President herself and no one else.
He sends his side-kick Phil Kaplan to deal with Doy instead. But Phil does not even
confine his dealings to Doy, no no, he bypasses Doy and goes direct to anyone in the
government he wants --- from the Four Horsemen and the great Poet of the ConCom, to
Minister Johnny Ponce Enrile himself.
Doy brought this upon himself. He was bitten by the Presidential bug and felt that
the only way to be president is to serve as glossal obturator to the American sigmoid
colon. Rejecting all his great father stood for, Doy began to make pro-American noises,
assuring the Americans they can have their bases because the Filipino people with the
help of the CIA will give it to them by referendum, and going to Washington and Tokyo
spouting the IMF line. The Americans and the Japanese do not even have to be nice to
Doy, they already got him by his balls.
******
While Doy Laurel ostensively got three positions, his Unido Party followers did

18
not get their share of the spoils. Unido boys Neptali Gonzalez, Bert Romulo and Ernie
Maceda got cabinet positions, but they make no bones about being more loyal to Cory
than to Doy. Glib fast-talking Luis Villafuerte who always gives us the impression he is
pulling a fast one, was put in a very temporary position as Reorganization Commissioner.
Wilson Gamboa lost the Ministry of Agrarian Reform, and was relegated to being Deputy
in the Defense Ministry where he is custodian of Greg Honasan's collection of snakes and
dried Muslim ears, and is occasionally used for target practice by Red Kapunan and Rex
Robles. Orly Mercado was hired as a park attendant at the Luneta.
Doy is more sinned against than sinning. He is actually convinced that it was his
sacrifice that paved the way for Cory's election, but no one else seems to share that view,
except maybe Rene Espina. Ever since he got elected, he has not issued a single
statement important enough to be noted by the press. His pro-American posturings has
been outshone by those of the ConCom, the Marcos Abandonados and Defense Ministry.
Desperate over his growing isolation from Cory, and the abandonment of all but a
faithful few of his lieutenants, Doy tried to make himself the bridge and the balance of
power in the rift between Cory and Johnny Ponce Enrile. As such he overstepped his
bounds by demanding on behalf of Enrile (amused), and ostensibly with the support of
Cardinal Sin (denied) and the American Embassy (ignored), a revamp of the cabinet that
included the ouster of Bobbit Sanchez, Rene Saguisag, Joker Arroyo and Teddyboy
Locsin. It is a measure of how low in their esteem Doy has fallen, that the Palace Guard
sent in to spar with him, not a man, but a boy. And the boy named Teddy with the ill
fitting blue suit and beady unblinking eyes, was able to put Doy thoroughly in his place
merely by exposing a grubby attempt on his part to be the chairman of a committee to sell
the Embassy properties in Tokyo.
Sic transit minister Americanorum.
Sadly, sadly ... what are we to do with you, Doy?

19
WHAT'S WRONG with this guy Doy Laurel?
Volunteering to "survey" the feelings of the Armed Forces, he harangues them
with pointed leading questions -- Do you want Cory to fire Joker? Teddyboy? Noel
Soriano? Do you favor amnesty for Honasan?
He never asked: Do you want Cory to fire Doy?
He did this once before, you know, riding in on people's pent-up emotions to
promote his sleazy ambitions for the presidency.
Last year, in the reconciliation meeting between President Cory and Defense
Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, Doy Laurel spoke out of turn, saying that the only way to
achieve reconciliation is to acquiesce to the demands of Cardinal Sin, the American
Ambassador and himself, crystallized in a ``previous top level meeting'' -- get rid of three
cabinet members, Aquilino Pimentel, Bobbit Sanchez and Joker Arroyo.
Cardinal Sin denied he ever made such demands, and went into his chapel to pray
for the soul of a fool.
Ambassador Bosworth maintained a pained and stony silence, and wished he
could stuff his shoes into the mouth of a fool.
The fool Doy Laurel just felt foolish.
These days, the fool is ever the fool, a louse as he ever was.
* * *
I have more mutual friends with Doy than most people I know. I genuinely respect
his father and brothers. In La Salle, he was the classmate of Ronnie Velasco, my brother,
and many others -- a class of machos where Doy is acknowledged to be the fastest with
the mostest.
If brother Teddy, the meanest cock in the Henares coop, takes his hat off to Doy,
then Doy is IT, better than that high-spending tourist Tony Gonzalez.
I asked our mutual friends, most of whom grew up with Doy, "Will you vote for
Doy?" Silence and a vigorous shaking of the head.
``Why not?'' Silence and a shrug of the shoulder.
Is Doy a thief, a crook? No...

20
Is he ugly, repugnant, abominable? No...
Is Doy an unmitigated liar? Not really...
Is Doy a hypocrite, a scoundrel, a con-man? No...
His calamansi smile that looks halfway between a snarl and a smirk? No, that's
the problem of his dentures...
Then why wouldn't you vote for him? I do not know .. but I will be damned if I
will vote for him.
Now that is the eternal dilemma of Doy. If he only knew why his friends won't
vote for him, then perhaps he can do something about it.
But he does not know, nobody knows, and that's his problem.
* * *
Well, I know the reason why, Doy. You have been a special study of mine for the
last two years, and I know. And being your friend, I will tell you.
I ran for the senate at the same time you and Ninoy Aquino did. I lost while you
and Ninoy won. Our mutual friends voted for you then, even if you were on the side of
Marcos. You were terrific in the senate, Doy, you were nationalistic ... you exposed the
secret protocols Carlos Romulo signed with the American Ambassador.
When I was chairman of the National Economic Council, I was approving all
proposals of American firms for US guarantees against political risk in the Philippines.
Imagine my chagrin when you exposed a secret agreement that bound the Philippine
government to compensate the US government for losses arising political risk! That
Romulo!
I admired you for that, Doy. You were okay, just like your papa and cuyas.
Even during martial law, still allied with Marcos, at least you and your brothers
maintained an independent posture, and in the end severed your connection with the
dictator.
You were still okay then, especially during the time of troubles after the
assassination of Ninoy Aquino.
* * *
I think you started to change when you entertained the notion of being nominated

21
for president. That's no sin, but when you began to kowtow to embassy officials and
make pro-American noises in order to get the support of the CIA and neanderthal
Americans, you took the fatal step to perdition.
But you gloried in it -- you hired an American Steve Thomas as security guard,
and our friend Roger Davis as your publicity man, so people would think you were
favored by the CIA.
The change from Mr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde occurred I believe when you announced
during the crucial time we expected to be presented a Cory-Doy ticket, that the deal was
off, and that come what may, you'd be a candidate for the presidency.
You were never a viable candidate. You were being used by the Americans to
extract a commitment from Cory on the American Bases, so Cory had to backtrack from
"Bases out in 1992!" to "I want to keep my options open." You were the cat's paw, Doy,
and you knew it.
* * *
After the revolution, Doy, you became not only vice-president, but also prime
minister and minister of foreign affairs -- three powerful positions, Doy -- while your
colleagues in the Unido got nothing, except Orly Mercado who was appointed Rizal Park
attendant. Your faithful Rene Espina gritted his teeth, acquired a couple more bags under
his eyes, and bolted to the opposition.
Then you came up with the idea of a Parallel Presidency, to have your own
official line organization all the way down to the barangay level, that will allow you to
exercise the powers of the presidency. Admit it, that was the idea of Bosworth and
Kaplan, right?
In effect you and your American friends implied that Cory as a housewife is not
competent to be president, that you Salvador Laurel should take over the reins of
government and assure the Americans of their bases and business monopolies.
Fortunately, Cory Aquino is no fool, and her advisers no push-overs for the
neanderthals.
You struck out on that one, Doy.
* * *

22
Poor Doy, even the lowest US embassy employees do not respect you as Foreign
Secretary. They totally bypass your office and directly deal with our highest officials,
against all rules of protocol.
Sadly, sadly, we ask Cory to relieve you of the Foreign Affairs portfolio.
What are we to do with you, Doy?
October 30, 1986; September 15, 1987, Philippine Daily Inquirer
5. Lando Olalia died, seeing Life as it should be
I have lived for over 40 years and I have seen Life as it is: Pain, Misery, Cruelty beyond
belief. I have heard the voices of God's noble creatures, moaning from bundles of filth in
the streets, I have seen my comrades fall in battle, or die more slowly by the lash. I held
them in my arms at the last moment. These are men who saw Life as it is, and they die
despairing, no glory, no brave Last Words, only their eyes filled with confusion,
questioning why. I do not think they were asking why they were dying, but why they had
ever lived.
When Life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too
practical is madness... to surrender dreams... to seek treasure where there is only trash...
Too much sanity may be madness. But maddest of all is to see Life as it is, and not as it
should be.
These are words spoken by Miguel Cervantes in the musical The Man from la
Mancha, who endeavored "to dream the impossible dream, to right the unrightable
wrong, to bear with unbearable sorrow, to reach the unreachable star."
* * *
Indeed to see Life as it should be is the dream of poets and philosophers, idealists
and saints.
Rolando M. Olalia died, killed by madmen, because he dared to see Life as it
should be. Because he saw it clearly like a shining Camelot on a hill. Because he saw a
nation that believed in its own greatness, beholden to no other country, with a self-reliant

23
economy, compassionate society, and grassroots democracy. Because to realize this goal,
he dedicated his mind, his heart, his soul, his life, and all he had, beyond all measure.
On October 15, barely a month before he was tortured and assassinated (Nov. 13,
1986), he spoke before the Rotary on the five objectives of Partido ng Bayan of which he
was chairman.
Firstly, it is committed to a nationalist, popular and democratic government,
dedicated to the interest of the Filipino people and not to the Americans, based on the
broadest participation of the masses, and committed to the interest of the poor and
dispossessed, the marginalized and the ignored.
Secondly, it is committed to a progressive, self-reliant economy, based on
industrialization and real land reform, equitable distribution of wealth, and state control
of multinational corporations.
Thirdly, it wants to develop a culture that is truly reflective of our experience as a
nation, rational, scientific, with full freedom of expression, a national language and
encouragement of cultural activity.
Fourthly, it is committed to a social policy whose basic purpose is the realization
of social justice, services to the poor and underprivileged, equitable distribution of the
benefits of economic growth; universal education up to high school, and scholarships on
college level; protection of minors, the aged and the disabled; support for sports; and
reform of criminals.
Fifthly, it is committed to an independent foreign policy, bilateral and multilateral
relations with all states on the basis of mutual respect and benefit; the removal of all US
bases; the promotion of a new international economic order; the abrogation of all onesided
treaties and agreements.
* * *
Olalia espoused the nationalist views of the late Claro M. Recto, and was never a
communist. Yet in the minds of Americans with low IQ, the witch hunters of the Army
and the Rightist extremists in the ConCom, Neda and the Finance Ministry --- the
carpetbaggers and scallawags, their hired hacks and paid pipers --- in such hebetudinous
minds as theirs, Lando Olalia was a communist because he cared for the poor and his

24
fellow Filipinos.
The Fascists and racists of this world never learn. In the gas ovens of Buchenwald
and Dachau, they thought they could lay to dust the entire Jewish race along with human
decency and dignity. With the murder of Martin Luther King, they thought they can
perpetuate their hegemony over the colored race, and fatten their bellies on the fruits of
slave labor. With the assassination of Ninoy Aquino, they thought they could perpetuate
the rule of Marcos, his tyranny and treason, his protection of foreign bases and foreign
monopolies. With the torture and death of Rolando Olalia, they think they can delay the
resurgence of national pride, the assertion of national sovereignty and economic
independence.
They never learn that the Jews, Martin Luther King, Ninoy Aquino and Rolando
Olalia, alive, were vulnerable because they were only human. Dead, they are invincible
because they have become a symbol and a rallying point, their crucifixion the crucible
from which come the resurrection and transfiguration.
And their martyrdom holds the promise and the fulfillment --- the end of Life as it
is with all its pain, misery and cruelty beyond belief --- and the realization of Life as it
really should be.
They never learn.
November 20, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
6. Jobo: the ass is a noble creature
ASS is only a three-letter word, but every time I use it to describe someone, the copy
editor reacts as if I wrote something obscene, and censors it. I do not see that it is any
worse than the words crook, leech, thief, sciolist, Sphincter Ani, or bar-sinister that have
so far escaped his blue pencil.
The Ass is a noble creature. When our Lord decided to enter Jerusalem in
triumph during Palm Sunday, did He ride on a horse, an elephant, a limousine? No, He
rode on an Ass, who cries out to my copy editor, in the words of G. K. Chesterton:

25
"Fool! I also had my hour;/ One far fierce hour and sweet;/ There was a shout
about my ears,/ And palms before my feet."
* * *
Abraham Lincoln once told a story before all his friends who came to his office
asking for a job, about an ancient king who went a-hunting with all his staff. He soon
met a farmer on the road, who told the king he should go home because it was going to
rain. But the king's astrologer insisted it would not rain, so the king proceeded to the
hunt, and in an hour was soaked in a heavy downpour. The king was so incensed that he
cut off his astrologer's head and offered the farmer the vacant office. The farmer refused
to accept the office, saying that his jackass was the one who predicted the rain, simply by
laying his ears back.
Lincoln concluded, "So the king appointed the jackass as the Court Astrologer.
Soon he realized it was the biggest mistake of his life."
Lincoln turned away to look at the papers on his desk, while the office seekers
leaned over to ask: "Mr. President, why was it a mistake?"
And Lincoln answered: "Because after that, every jackass in the country also
wanted a government job." How true, even now, Cory's government is full of them.
I am very sure that when the good Lord decides to go back to earth for his Second
Coming, he will choose our very own Manila to enter in triumph, not only because we
have plenty of palms to use as props, but also because of the multiplicity of choice in the
modes of transportation available: Jimmy Ongpin, Jobo Fernandez, Doy Laurel, Gringo
Honasan, Aquilino Pimentel, Stephen Bosworth, Fred Whiting, Arturo Tolentino, the
Guardians, abandonados, carpetbaggers, little brown brothers, and the most deserving of
them all, Blas Ople.
* * *
Speaking of noble creatures, Jobo Fernandez and Cesar Zalamea who came back
from a humdinger of an African Safari, reportedly spent a total of $100,000 for their
entire trip, paying some $20,000 for every animal they killed.
Why is it so expensive? In the first place, they have to hire a White Hunter and a
whole battalion of native carriers and bush-beaters. The native carriers carry their

26
baggages, their guns and ammunition, tables, chairs, French cuisine, rare table wines, and
everything else that is needed to bring the amenities of civilized living to the savage
jungles of Africa.
The bush beaters spread far and wide, encircling a large area where the poor
animals are supposed to be peacefully residing. They then start to beat the bushes,
scream, and make fearsome noises with pots and pans, with a view to driving the poor
animals to the place where Jobo and Cesar are sipping their wines, with natives fanning
them to keep them cool and to chase the flies away.
The scared jungle creatures, driven into panic by the bush beaters, are directed to
the spot where Jobo and Cesar are waiting for them with high-powered guns loaded with
dum-dum bullets that explode inside their bodies, and shock them into painful paralysis
and death.
* * *
If it happens, as it often does, that Jobo or Cesar miss their target, the White
Hunter standing behind them would shot and kill the animal. For denying the poor
animals even a small sporting chance to get back at their tormentors, the White Hunter is
paid $500 a day.
Then there is the expense of hiring a taxidermist to stuff the animals. One foot of
the elephant is chopped off to be made into a side-table with built-in ashtrays. The head
of the lion with its magnificent mane, as well as the antlers of the deer, are mounted to be
hung on the wall. Rabbits are skinned for their wives' fur coats (minks are for
girlfriends).
As if there is not enough blood being shed on this earth, Jobo and Cesar would
commit murder on poor creatures who are not even allowed to defend themselves. The
poor starving Africans are forbidden by their government to kill these animals for food,
under pain of being jailed for poaching, just so Jobo and Cesar can hunt them down for
sport.
Oh God, that we should live to see the day when two jackasses from our country
would dare touch a hair or hide of those we have come to love --- as friends of our
childhood in the Wonderful World of Walt Disney, as fellow creatures in the embrace of

27
Mother Earth --- Dumbo the elephant! Leo the lion! and the loving gentle deer Bambi!
Not to mention Bugs Bunny, Peter Wabbit and Thumper!
And pay for the dastardly act with $100,000 of our precious foreign currency!
An insolent intrusion into Jobo's privacy
Good old Jobo Fernandez at last gets off his high horse and reacts: "Having known you
since your exuberant and youthful days in M.I.T. but never being completely sure whether
the vitriol in your pen is intended to provoke laughter or to wound an animal named Jobo,
I hasten to write you this short note regarding your magnum opus of July 29, 1986 where
you reported on my so-called African Safari."
Oh yes, we were together in the East Coast, so many of us, in the years after the
war, the boys of Columbia and Fordham Universities in the New York, of Georgetown
University in Washington D.C., along with those from M.I.T. and Harvard in the Boston
area. We visited each other and were good friends --- Jobo Fernandez, Aureling
Montinola and Hadji Kalaw from Fordham and Harvard; Washington Sycip and the late
Leo Virata from Columbia; Sotero and Lorna Laurel, Beniting Legarda, Horace
Teehankee, Jovy Salonga, Dr. Victor Reyes and wife Edna; Mike and Greg Romulo, Mel
and sister Pearl Gamboa (Doromal), Fidel Ramos in Washington; and those from M.I.T.,
Fred Juinio, Pedro Picornell, Carling Arguelles, Victor Lim, Rene Grande, Freddie
Borromeo, and myself. In Wellesley College were Letty Ramos (Shahani) and Ana Yu
(Sycip); and in Catherine Gibbs were Helen Lichauco (Small) and Ming Martinez (now
wife of Fidel Ramos). I mention this because of that small group, six became cabinet
members, and the old gang seemed to have fallen apart in the storm of national
controversy.
* * *
Back to Jobo who complains, "The scenario of bush-beaters driving poor animals
towards hunters sipping their wines, reeks somehow of old tales I too have read, where
Eastern Majarajahs during Gunga Din and Kipling days enjoyed themselves in the

28
manner you described --- is a far cry from the reality of riding vehicles for 9 to 10 hours a
day over non-existent trails, in desert and bush country. You can imagine the damage
done to my ageing behind. Your imaginative story-telling makes it sound so much more
depraved ..."
You are a riot Jobo, I cannot stop laughing at the thought that your pompous ass
got the pounding it deserved. I wish you brought Jimmy and Bernie along with you. But
the bush-beater story really came from Ernest Hemingway and Ambassador Marcial
Lichauco, not from Rudyard Kipling. Seriously, Jobo, to wound an old friend --- never!
Just having a little fun at your expense, to counter the jokes being played on us by your
friends in the IMF, World Bank, and the American Embassy.
* * *
You just fell into the wrong company, Jobo. Instead of spending your time in the
waterholes of New York, or seeing the plays on Broadway like J.V. Cruz is doing, you
chose to join the annual ritual of Cesar Zalamea to assault Dumbo and Bambi. Last year
while the recession still raged and the economy reeled from twin devaluations, even
Imelda could not dissuade your friend Cesar from going to his Safari Hunt.
Jobo, ask Cesar to invite you to the PCIBank Building where the whole fourth
floor is taken up to store Cesar's trophies --- tigers, lions, elephants, zebras, deer,
antelopes, ant-eaters, polar bears, even penguins and sea lions. They say even the
pussycat he ran over with his Mercedes Benz is exhibited there. Someday a just and
avenging God will stuff Cesar Zalamea and add him to that collection.
Jobo continued: "Another small inaccuracy is the costing you have made of my
vacation... But accuracy regardless, many people would agree with me that your
wondering how I spend personal funds that may have been accumulated over 37 years of
business life, and over whose domain I need not fear inquiry, might be construed as a
somewhat insolent act of intrusion into my privacy. I would never dream of questioning
the cost to you of the special antenna and other equipment you use for communicating
worldwide with friends by short-wave which obviously is your particular source of
amusement."
* * *

29
Before the girls upstairs (Belle C., Sylvia M. and Letty M.) whose social
conscience and fingernails are sharper than mine, start to heave the kitchen sink at you,
Jobo, I shall pre-empt them by tweaking your nose ever so gently.
I spent a total of something like P200,000 on my antenna and radio equipment, a
pittance compared to the cost of a Safari, and I spent it in the 1970s before the economic
crisis. The real difference between us is that I am not a government official and you are
the Governor of the Central Bank. I am not called upon to serve as an example to the rest
of the nation, like President Cory Aquino who lives simply within her P8,000 a month
income, and does not flaunt her wealth at the time her fellow countrymen are losing jobs
and going into bankruptcy.
It is not an "insolent intrusion into (your) privacy" but legitimate public concern
that makes people wonder how come you and Cesar can get dollars to go on a Safari,
while the rest of us do not have the dollars to pay our debts or buy needed essentials.
Jobo, I hate myself when I get this way, I am sorry. You are not all that bad and I'll
prove that soon enough.
Without Jobo, economic disaster!
Jobo Fernandez is a man many people love to hate, because as one sour grape once said,
"He has more than any one man deserves: brains, magna cum laude; success beyond the
reach of ordinary men; more wealth than he can spend in ten lifetimes; good looks with a
magnificent body six feet tall; more vigor than a man ten years his junior; beautiful
women lusting after him; lesser men genuflecting every time he enters the room. When
God was distributing all these gifts, that pompous ass Jobo sneaked in when the Almighty
was not looking, and took more than he is entitled to."
My banker son, Atom, is quick to come to Jobo's defense, saying that without
him, our economy would have collapsed; and I agree with him.
In September 1983, after a meeting with the IMF in Washington, CB Governor
Jimmy Laya met with Filipino bankers in Pete Roa's restaurant. Among those who

30
attended were Romy Co of Allied Bank, Tony Ozaeta of PCIB, Danny Ursua of UCPB,
Andy Castillo of MetroBank, Eddie Go of China Bank, Joe Facundo of CitiTrust and
Jobo Fernandez of Far East Bank.
Laya announced that everything was A-Okay with the IMF; that the Philippines
would meet all maturing obligations at the end of the year; that Virata and he arranged for
a standby loan augmented by the unused standby credits of the current year; that no
devaluation nor loan restructuring was planned.
* * *
The bankers sighed with relief. That was Wednesday. By Saturday when they got
back to Manila, the peso was devalued from P11 per dollar to P14 per dollar, the Central
Bank stopped selling dollars, and a moratorium and re-structuring were in the offing.
Then the IMF discovered that the dollar reserves were overstated by $600 million. Laya
was lying!
It was a monetary crisis of gargantuan proportions. President Marcos transferred
Laya to the Education Ministry, and Jobo Fernandez assumed the Governorship of the
Central Bank.
Jobo Fernandez may have a false British accent that is laughable in London, but
among the yokel Americans, he made a good impression. He had to establish credibility
among foreigners who concluded that all Filipinos were "Layars", among them Hubert
Niess, the IMF proconsul, and his resident representative, Hiroyuki Hino, succeeded by
Peter Keller and recently by John Carlik. Then there was the Banker's Committee headed
by David Pflug of ManTrust, representing 463 creditors.
There was rampant dollar speculation that drove the dollar rate up from P11 to
P14 to P24 per dollar; a runaway inflation spiral of 60%; an overstated $600 million
foreign reserve that turned worse later; a 38% increase in money supply, then a P5 billion
CB advance for election purposes, way above what the IMF wanted. Bank runs began to
appear.
* * *
Jobo knew what he was doing, and he did it fast. First he issued Jobo Bills of
high interest rates, up to 42% per annum, for periods from one month to one year

31
maturity.` All of a sudden the dollar rate which was already P24.00 per dollar dropped to
P18.00 and stabilized at P20.00 per dollar.
These Jobo Bills sopped up the excess money supply, enticed dollar salters to
bring their dollars back to earn 42% interest instead of 11% abroad, discouraged
speculation on the peso (people taking a dollar position on the CRC prediction of
P24/dollar, lost money), and broke the back of the inflation spiral from a high of 60%
down to 3% per annums. When the public lost confidence and withdrew their deposits,
Jobo stepped in decisively, pumped in money where it was needed, arranged mergers,
closed down erring banks, and ensured the safety of deposits under PIDC insurance.
He pumped in P700 million into Banco Filipino, then closed it when he found that
related companies were getting the cash instead of the depositors (Tommy Aguirre says
this is a lie, and is suing Jobo). He closed the Philippine Veterans Bank, and tried to
resuscitate the Pacific Bank. He arranged that Royal Savings Bank be absorbed by
ComBank, and the Cavite Development Bank by the Far East Bank.
* * *
He nursed the banking system throughout the political upheavals during the
February Revolution --- the boycotts of the crony banks, the sequestration of CocoBank,
Allied Bank (Lucio Tan), Royal Traders and Republic Planters (Bobby Benedicto),
Security Bank (Rolly Gapud).
During the height of the Revolution from Saturday to Tuesday, Jobo personally
stayed in the Central Bank day and night to be sure its vaults were not raided; consulted
Manolo Morales of the Bankers Association. On Wednesday, the day after Marcos fled,
miraculously, the bank doors opened.
No man could have performed such miracles but Jobo Fernandez, the man we
love to hate. Oh hell, let him go on a safari hunt for a long awaited vacation with his sons
--- as long as Cesar Zalamea does not tag along. We owe him, he deserves it... even if he
is a pompous ass.
July 29, 1986; August 16/27, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer

32
7. The short and simple annals of Paz Cubero
She was born 30 years ago in an obscure town in Davao, the youngest of a family of six,
fathered by a poor tenant farmer, who moved to Cotabato and finally to Bohol where he
died. Her name is Paz "Pacing" Cubero, and she is our maid.
She looks like TV comedienne Debraliz Valasote, a little bit more buxom, and
several shades darker, with four missing front teeth, squat with magnificent muscles
packed into a 4 foot 7 inch frame.
All her life, she was always made to feel she was ugly. Fighting a growing sense
of isolation and loneliness, she wanted to belong, to be part of the family; fiercely loyal,
with unfailing good humor and the kind of cackling laughter Matutina has, but in lower
register; strong and efficient, unselfish and hardworking.
* * *
There were those who would mock her. "Hoy, pangit!!" shouted some
construction workers as she walked by, and she would rush home, get her sling-shot and
snipe at them.
She has her finer moments. Once we asked her to play a joke on my nephew
Teddyboy and his newlywed bride. On the wedding night, Pacing showed up at the
Manila Peninsula, as ridiculous a figure as could only be imagined --- with two pigtails
sticking out of her head, heavily lipsticked, 4 front teeth missing, and dressed in shorts,
undershirt and rubber shoes. Down the corridor, she knocked at the bridal suite, and as
Teddyboy opened the door, embraced him, wailing, "Bakit mo kami iniiwan? May lima
tayong anak naghihintay sa iyo!"
We saw her shed tears only twice in our lives. The first time was when my father
died; after an absence of some years, she suddenly showed up at the back of the church,
wailing aloud like a baby, as we rushed to keep her quiet.
The second was a tragi-comedy. One day we saw her on television, crying as if
the world was at an end, wailing and weeping and gnashing her teeth, appealing in
Cebuano for her mother to come back home, "Nanay, si Paz ito (sob! sob!). Na-ngita ko
nimo. Pa-uli na diri! (wah, wah, wah!)"

33
We watched her, laughing and crying at the same time. Many children run away
from home, but this is the first time we heard of a mother running away from her
children. It was ridiculously funny... and sad.
* * *
She had many boyfriends --- an employee at the Otis Elevator, a soldier, a security
guard --- but most of them, she found out, had wives and children. They never told her
she was beautiful; they said she was mabait, and that was music enough to her ears. And
there were times she'd fight back. Nam-bubuntal iyan, they would say of her.
There was one who was not married, a laborer of Magnolia, and to him she gave
herself for the first time, in what she now characterizes as a comedy of errors. Poor girl,
did you think it would be like in the movies --- all violins and violets, moonlight and
roses? Ah, be assured for all of the rest of humanity, the first time has always been a
comedy of errors!
She despaired of never being married, so one day, Pacing made a tremendous
decision. "Gusto kong magka-anak, pero ayaw kong mag asawa! (I want to have a child,
but not a husband)"
There was this asshole down the street, a real dirty old man 20 years her senior, a
servant of dubious nationality (Bombay Indian), with a reputation for forcing his
attentions on young maids. As a matter of fact, he just paid off a maid P12,000 to free
himself from a charge of rape. Pacing described him as "hindi marunong mag basa
(illiterate), hindi mabait (a louse), playboy (libertine), pero may itsura (goodlooking),
mataas (tall), dayuhan (foreigner), iresponsable (irresponsible) at mainit (sex-starved)."
It was this man Pacing chose to be the father of her child.
She left us to have her baby. It's a boy named Anthony, now six years of age,
handsome and bright and like Pacing, of gentle disposition. He does not know his own
father, and he carries his mother's name. Well, after an absence of four years, and to earn
money to send her child to school, she entrusted the boy to her sister and came back to
work for us.
* * *
In one of the most beautiful poems ever written, "Elegy Written in a Country

34
Churchyard", poet Thomas Gray wrote of such people as Pacing, some heart pregnant
with celestial fire... Chill penury repressed their noble rage,/ and froze the genial current
of the soul.
Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness in the desert air...
Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile,
The short and simple annals of the poor.
October 24, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
8. We like Winnie as a screaming banshee
There she was on Louie Beltran's program, NEDA Minister Winnie Monsod, and she was
acting like a lady, speaking only when spoken to, and giving others an equal chance to
speak. Oh my God, she was absolutely boring!
We like Winnie the way she always is, a rambunctious, vociferous female, who
has a habit of grabbing microphones, shouting down her opponents, and browbeating
them with the unreasoned premise and the twisted logic.
In a "Meet the Press" program, we found Winnie Monsod in action against Joe
Concepcion's twin, Raul a.k.a. Ronnie. Poor Ronnie, he never knew what hit him, being
used to a nice and quiet wife like Menchu. All of a sudden Winnie descended on him like
a screaming banshee, accusing him and his ilk of exploiting laborers and consumers,
because he opposes the IMF Import Liberalization Policy. Wow! It was fun!
* * *
Winnie's premise is that there is a basic conflict between the interest of the
consumers and that of the producers, and that this conflict must be resolved by the
government in favor of the consumers.
If Winnie were a storeowner competing against other stores for the patronage of

35
consumers, then perhaps she may be right in assuming that the consumer is always right.
But Winnie is not a storeowner, she is an economist, and as such she should have
a different perspective. As far as economists are concerned, EVERY ONE, every single
one of us 54 million Filipinos, IS A CONSUMER. We consume in order to exist. We
consume food, clothing, shelter, medicines and other items, in order to live.
We are all consumers, but among us consumers, there are those who produce, and
those who do not produce. To an economist, one who consumes but does not produce is
a PARASITE, a burden on the rest of the nation.
Therefore it is proper policy of government to encourage those who produce to
produce more, and those who do not produce to start producing.
* * *
For the standard of living of any person or any people is a coin of two sides: (1)
the PRICE of the things he buys, which should be as low as possible; and (2) the amount
of Money or PURCHASING POWER in his wallet, derived from the job he holds.
By IMF Import Liberalization, Winnie hopes to bring prices down, but she will
also succeed in depriving our people of the jobs they need to buy the goods necessary for
survival.
A free-for-all rumble is of greatest advantage to the biggest bully of the block. In
the same way, Free Trade is of greatest advantage to an industrial colossus among
backward nations.
To promote Free Trade, American cocktail cowboys and their surrogates in the
IMF, and Winnie Monsod in particular, are sanctimoniously spreading the gospel of the
"Law of Comparative Advantage" as if it were the Ten Commandments.
* * *
Stated simply, the Law of Comparative Advantage is this: Every nation should
concentrate on producing goods that it can by experience produce most cheaply,
exporting its surplus of such goods for other goods which it can produce only at a greater
cost.
Thus, the Law states, there would be "maximum division of labor" with each
nation producing the greatest output with the least effort, resulting in the highest possible

36
level of total world production and consumption.
Winnie Monsod offers this Law as a universal rule, applicable at all times, to all
places and under all conditions. And therein lies its fallacy.
In the first place, the Law assumes that there exists in all countries "full
employment of labor and material resources", so that a country which starts a new
industry would have to divert resources from other industries in which such resources are
already fully and efficiently employed.
But such is not the case with the Philippines. The Philippines has plenty of
unemployed workers who consume but do not produce, and cannot be put to good
purpose unless channeled into new industries. At the same time we have a wealth of raw
material resources which have not been tapped because we have no industries to make
use of them.
* * *
Secondly, the Law presumes that every country is of the same stage of
technological development from which to compete with equal chance of success. Free
Trade often means making ignorant babies compete with educated adults.
A Filipino entrepreneur is likely to have little management experience; his
laborers know little of machinery and of the rigid discipline of the factory. His factory
site lacks good roads, water, power, telephone; he often has to develop his own sources of
materials and his own marketing facilities --- all the "external economies" that are taken
for granted and available cheaply in industrial countries. He finds that needed capital and
credit are difficult and expensive to obtain because of the lack of institutions that can
mobilize savings --- if indeed savings can be mobilized in a country where most of the
people live from hand to mouth.
Winnie grabs microphones, bullies all

37
So much fun indeed watching NEDA minister Solita "Winnie" Monsod in every
TV and public forum, grabbing microphones and browbeating every male within sight, to
prove that the Import Liberalization Policy imposed upon us by the IMF and the
Americans, are really to protect the consumers and laborers against the rapacious greed of
producers, and to dismantle the "protection" extended to 30-year old infant industries.
What nobody ever gets to point out is that no consumer or labor group is really
backing up Winnie Monsod. Julie Amargo and the many consumer groups that in the
past gave hell to PLDT, Meralco, and other bloodsuckers, are ominously silent, or have
joined the forces against the Import Lib.
The KMU (Olalia) the TUCP (Herrera), the FFW (Johnny Tan) and other labor
unions have not marched to support Winnie. As a matter of fact, thousands of workers
and consumers have organized demonstrations in front of Malacanang against the Import
Lib.
Also the farmers' groups of all persuasions from Jimmy Tadeo to Jeremiah
Montemayor to Ka Luis Taruc object to the inclusion of yellow corn and other
agricultural products in the Import Lib, as an accommodation to U.S. agricultural surplus.
The cause oriented groups from BAYAN to BANDILA to NEPA, as well as
business groups such as the PCCI, and almost all student organizations, are up in arms
against the Import Liberalization, which they claim is unwarranted interference by the
IMF.
In the cabinet, Mitra (Agriculture), Concepcion (Trade), Sanchez (Labor),
Guingona (Audit), have expressed strong misgivings or objections to Import
Liberalization.
The only ones who stand with Winnie on this issue, significantly enough, are the
Three Stooges of the Americans, Jimmy Ongpin, Jobo Fernandez and Bernardo Villegas,
plus of course Fred Whiting the American Chamber, U.S. diplomats Steve Bosworth and
Phil Kaplan, and CIA agents Norbert Garrett and John Ettinger; and as many of European
ambassadors as they could muster in the cocktail circuit.
* * *

38
It is really so unfair. South Korea which has a $12 billion trade surplus with the
United States, forced by the Americans to liberalize the import of cigarets, imposed an
import quota of 1% of its entire $1.5 billion consumption. Also it bans the import of
IBM-PC computers by Koreans. Also it imposed a 68% ad valorem tariff duty on imports
of coconuts plus a Philippine import quota of only 4,000 tons a year, worth a mere
$750,000.
The Americans themselves are protecting their 150 year old steel industry by
imposing quantitative restrictions on imported steel; they do the same for their 100 year
old car industry with restraints against Japanese imports. They impose non-tariff
restrictions on our major exports: sugar, coconut oil, textiles, Philippine mahogany and
tuna fish. For American surrogates among our technocrats, American proconsuls and
spies to force us to do otherwise and open the country to the exploitation of American
imperialists, is rather unfair.
Prices are not the only criterion for economic development; job opportunities and
per capita income are even more important. Americans pay 50 cents or P10.00 for coke
which we buy at P1.25; pay 75 cents or P15.00 for cigarets we Filipinos buy for P6.50;
pay $2.95 or almost P60.00 for large Toblerone candy we pay P48.00 to eat. The
Americans pay more for what they consume, but hardly feel it because they have $12,700
per capita income, while we Filipinos only have a $604 per capita income. Instead of
catering to American demands for Import Liberalization, Winnie should concentrate on
creating more jobs and increasing the per-capita income.
* * *
The last time I appeared on television with NEDA Minister Winnie Monsod was
on a Monday Kapihan in Manila Hotel. Unforgivably I was very very late, and joined
Winnie, Trade Minister Joe Concepcion, U.P. President Ed Angara, DBP Chairman Jess
Estanislao, AmCham president Fred Whiting, and anchorman Gabby Mañalac, only five
minutes before the program ended, while Winnie was winding up a long peroration on
how industrialists have abused consumers the last 20 years.
Ever the gentleman, Gabby asked me to give a short comment. I hardly spoke
three sentences when Winnie grabbed the mike off Joe's hand and interrupted me, and

39
gave another lecture on the primacy of the consumer and the greed of industrialists. Well,
I was late and deserved to be humiliated. Gabby merely shrugged, ever the gentleman to
Winnie the lady.
But I have been watching a lot of programs lately with Winnie among the
panelists, and she comes across as a bad-tempered school marm, as if she was delivering
a class lecture and warning the students that if they do not agree, they will flunk the
course.
Blowing a windstorm of poisonous cigarette fumes to blind and suffocate her
opponents, blasting their ear-drums with a voice that can shatter glass at ten paces,
breaking their fingers with hammy fists that lock on a mike like a vise, threatening them
with a mean left hook that looks as if it could flatten any male within 20 seconds of the
first round, Winnie is a terror among males, and is unbeatable in TV debates on the
economy.
In view of this, a group of concerned citizens led by Alejandro Lichauco,
Alejandro Roces, Salvador Enriquez, Mariano Miranda and myself have organized "The
Benevolent and Protective Association for the Defense of Filipino males and an
Industrialized Economy".
And the membership oath is thus: "I swear, as God is my witness, that bananas
will grow commercially in the North Pole, and the fires of hell will freeze over into ice
glaciers, before I allow the Filipino male and the Philippine economy to suffer the fate of
Winnie's husband. So help me, God!"
August 13/14, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
9. The humble roots of Johnny E
In a small barrio in the sleepy coastal town of Gonzaga in the province of Cagayan, he
was born and baptized Juanito Furruganan, son of a peasant woman called Petra
Furruganan.
Juanito went to Aparri for his high school. He was good in math, wanted to be a

40
scientist, and earned extra money by tutoring the daughter of one of the richest men in
town. Rich bullies, consumed by jealousy, beat him up within an inch of his life.
He complained to the authorities who advised him to forget the incident, or get
thrown out of town. He felt outraged and betrayed; and it was this sense of injustice that
induced him to abandon science and take up law. He had not met his father who in turn
did not even know he existed. Juanito decided to go to Manila and confront his father.
To raise the transportation money, he worked as a road construction laborer and a
fisherman. Finally at the age of 19, he came to Manila.
I knew his father, one of the best corporate lawyers of his day, Don Alfonso Ponce
Enrile. He came to the house one day with his son Chito, and asked me to help get his
son into MIT where I was then recently graduated. He was a good friend of President
Manuel L. Quezon who induced him to run and serve as Assemblyman in the province of
Cagayan. It was in one of his campaign sorties that he met Petra Furruganan.
* * *
One look at Juanito Furruganan and Don Alfonso Ponce Enrile knew this was his
son. He is the spitting image of his father, he has the same broad toothy smile, lined
cheeks, rough-hewn Castilian features, and most of all an unruly lock of hair that kept
falling down his brow, and another that kept standing up at the back of his head.
He was a chip off the old block if there ever was one, and Don Alfonso, a gentle
person ever a gentleman, took him in as his son, made him work in the law firm, and sent
him to the best schools, Ateneo, U.P. Law School and Harvard.
His name is now Juan Ponce Enrile. He was already 28 years of age when he
passed the bar, and became a successful lawyer. One day, Rafael Salas recruited him to
campaign for Marcos, and the rest is history.
He is a paradox, a bundle of contradictions, a mystery wrapped around a riddle
inside an enigma.
Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, formerly Juanito Furruganan of Cagayan, is the only
peasant among the bourgeoisie and highfalutin in the higher councils of state, a real pied
noir (black foot), yet he has the ultra right-wing viewpoint of a true cacique.
* * *

41
He reads Toynbee's tomes, Clausewitz, Mein Kampf and Das Kapital, yet he
speaks like Joe McCarthy, using terms like "waddling ducks" and "Communists in the
government" that are the staple mouthings of American CIA agents with low IQ.
He is one of the most intelligent of our leaders, yet he surrounds himself with nonintellectuals,
a brain-trust excised by frontal lobotomy. A humorless lawyer with a genius
for malapropisms, "Hurry up, man, step on the brakes!" A character with a contrived
beatific smile who collects dried ears of dead Muslims, and jumps off airplanes with
snakes around his neck. And God knows how many James Bond 007 types with license
to kill.
Kings must have their kingmakers. Marcos had his Blas Ople; Macapagal had his
Fenny Hechanova; Cory has her Joaquin Bernas. Enrile has no kingmaker, and that is
why he still is a questionable heir apparent.
He is the most popular man in Cory's cabinet, and is also the most feared. People
who admire him simply won't vote for him if he runs for the Presidency, because he lacks
a sense of humor to counterbalance an almost uncontrollable temper. The guy is simply
incapable of laughing at himself. His temper flares up as fast as it subsides, but he is
moved to do things that he probably regrets afterwards.
His voting power nationwide is in doubt; when he ran for the senate, despite
Marcos' help, he lost. But later, in 1979, Cagayan province which was the exclusive
preserve of such political warlords of the past as the Carags, Adurrus, Garduques and the
Dupayas, at last succumbed to the wiles of its most humble son Enrile, with the help of
Sigma Rho brod Boy Alfonso Reyno and the son of the governor, Atty. Tony Carag.
Johnny Ponce Enrile is a hard-working public servant. He is very very rich, but he
never flaunts his money, and is often seen in crumpled informal attire. Whenever he has
insurmountable problems, or is just physically exhausted, he goes back to Cayagan, where
he derives sustenance, rest and regeneration from his roots, among fishermen and farm
workers.
Here he is in his element, here he is Juanito Furruganan once again, here he loses
the suspicion and animosity he sometimes shows to his peers in Manila. Feasting on
ludong, the best fish in the world found only in the Cagayan River, Juanito practically

42
drips with the milk of human kindness. It is a sight to see, common people coming to
him with their problems. For Juanito has the ability to emphathize with his people, to
share their troubles, and really help them. It is a gift that will in time serve him well.
The waddling ducks of Johnny E.
"If it quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and looks like a duck, then by God,
it is a duck!" is a statement that has withstood the test of time.
We remember having heard it during the 1950s and 1960s, attributed to such
staunch anti-Communist cold warriors as Philippine Navy Captain Charlie Albert and
emblazoned in front page articles in the Manila Times. We have heard in the halls of
Congress in the House Committee on Anti-Filipino Activities under the redoubtable
Congressman Leonardo Perez. We have heard it from the lips of our greatest anti-
Communist hawk, Speaker Pro Tempore Salipada Pendatun.
Parenthetically, this is about the best time to tote out my favorite story (most
probably apochrypal) about the late Salipada Pendatun, who was a friend and a fellow
Liberal. After Martial Law was declared, Pendatun was seen in a street corner near
Malacanang, shouting, "Ize kriam, forsali hereh!"
He was arrested by the security forces of General Ver, who subjected him to third
degree, "Okay, Sali, come out with it. What were you mouthing? Is it Arabic? A secret
code? Password? Spy message? Revolutionary slogan? Damn it, Sali, write it down,
and we will have our experts decode and translate it!" Salipada Pendatun answered
through his bloodied lips, "Nagtitinda lamang ako. Ito ang sinabi ko: Ize kriam, forsali
hereh!," writing out the words: ICE CREAM FOR SALE HERE.
* * *
The Duck Statement was first uttered and chiefly attributed to Roy Cohn, the aide
of junior Senator Joseph McCarthy of the United States in the 1950s. Roy Cohn is an
American of Jewish descent.
People of Jewish descent are called many names. If he is born in Israel, he is

43
called a Sabra, after a prickly hardy plant native to the Middle East. If he is a citizen of
Israel, he is called an Israeli, not an Israelite which is what Jews of Israel were called
during Biblical times. If he is a nice guy who goes to the temple every Saturday, he is
called a Jew. But if he is obnoxious, the sleazy type with one eye bigger than the other
because his eye is always fitted with a magnifying glass to examine pawned jewelry --- if
he is a Fifth Avenue loan shark --- if he is loud, cowardly, greedy, selfish and vicious, he
is called a Kike.
Roy Cohn is definitely a Kike. This snake of a man who was loud in his
denunciations of Communists and unpatriotic Americans, when called upon to serve his
country in the Korean War, tried to exert the influence of his office to dodge the draft.
* * *
Roy Cohn's Duck Statement, in support of the Senator's McCarthyist witch hunts,
was interpreted to mean that anyone who espouses ideas closely identified with Socialism
or Marxism, no matter how remote the connection, must be a Communist. This is the
principle behind the McCarthyist tactic of "Guilt by Association".
Under such principle, according to Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy, Charlie
Chaplin must be a Communist or a Communist dupe because his movies and his Tramp
character have shown sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. His "Modern Times",
"City Lights", and "King in New York" were denounced as Communist propaganda.
Charlie Chaplin, the greatest creative artist the cinema ever produced, went into selfimposed
exile because of the attacks on his person.
Many other great Americans were accused of being communist Ducks: authors
Lillian Helman, Clifford Odet, Dalton Trumbo, even John Steinbeck who wrote the
gripping stories of displaced Oklahoma farmers (Okies) during the depression, in "The
Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men" (borrow them from any school library); Owen
Lattimore, Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Great Duck Hunt
did not end till 1954, when Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate and silenced
forever.
* * *
Here in the Philippines, Roy Cohn's Duck Statement was interpreted to mean that

44
anyone who disagrees with the Americans on any issue, is giving aid and comfort to the
Communists, is a Communist dupe or a real Communist.
By this token, Senator Claro M. Recto, the great nationalist, was pounced upon as
a Communist sympathizer. And so were Lorenzo Tañada, Jose Diokno, Alejandro
Lichauco, Renato Constantino, Hernando Abaya, Amado Hernandez, Leon Ma. Guerrero,
I.P. Soliongco, Chitang Guerrero Nakpil, Adrian Cristobal, Ernesto Granada, Blas Ople,
J.V. Cruz, and many others who at the time professed to love their country more than they
love Mother America. Marcos accused Ninoy Aquino of being a Communist duck.
The military intelligence agencies were marshaled to commit treason on their own
people, persecuting our own patriots and nationalists in behalf of a foreign power, by
smear, sneer, the secret dossier and the indignities of the loyalty check, while CIA agents
and Filipino colons rode high and mighty.
All of a sudden today in the 1980s, long after it has lost credibility and validity in
the United States as an aberration of CIA agents of low IQ, the Duck Statement crops up
again from the mouth of no less than the Minister of Defense, Juan Ponce Enrile.
* * *
According to the Book of Knowledge, in all the world there are 240 kinds of
water fowl, a term used to describe swans, geese and ducks. These are in the sub-order
Anseres of the order Anseriformes.
The swans, geese and ducks are mostly migratory, nesting in lands toward the
North Pole or South Pole and moving to warmer country during the winter. For this
reason, treaties are often made between nations concerning the birds, and international
agencies watch over their protection. Most waterfowl are quite large and good to eat, so
man has hunted, trapped and snared them for food and for sport for centuries. Others,
like Ambassador Stephen Bosworth, enjoy studying those birds as a hobby (bird
watching), because of their beauty, grace and interesting habits.
Being a bit of a bird watcher myself, specializing in cute chicks, fighting cocks
and mother hens, I am inclined to disagree with the Defense Minister when he says that
one who quacks like a duck, waddles like a duck and looks like a duck is in fact a duck.
It simply is not true, because there are many ducks who do not quack or waddle or look

45
like one.
* * *
There is the extinct pink-headed duck, which is as bald headed as Bernie Villegas,
and does not at all look like the full feathered Communist duck like JoeMa Sison. The
rare yellow billed bean looks more like the Cory's Crusaders than Communists. The five
protected species of North American ducks cannot be categorized as Communists. The
Canvas Back looks like Pilar Pilapil on the prowl for foreigners. The Redhead looks like
the wife of publisher Johnny Perez. The Bufflehead is a perfect description of Christian
Monsod. The Ruddy Duck looks like SSS Commissioner Cuisia after a day at the beach.
And the Wood Duck looks like the blockheads who run the local CIA, Norbert Garrett
and John Ettinger.
The Wood Ducks, by the way, nest in hollow trees or artificial nest boxes. The
nests may be a quarter of a mile away from water and as high as fifty feet from the
ground. When they are old enough, the mother calls the ducklings, which jump to the
ground, bounce when they hit, and follow her to water.
Most ducks and geese nest on the ground near water or on little islands of
vegetation in the water. The common Shelduck of Europe (which looks like Aquilino
Pimentel and his OICs) nests in burrows of foxes and rabbits, sometimes deepening the
chambers by digging. Well, Nene and his OICs do nest in someone else's offices, don't
they?
* * *
Ducks seek new spouses each year, which good Communists and the Opus Dei
rarely do. But I know a lot of business executives and government officials who do, like
Jun Cruz who must therefore be classified by Enrile as a Duck. Geese and swans are
different; like Joe and Anita Meily, they mate for life.
On the average, swans lay 4 to 5 eggs, geese 5 to 6 eggs, and ducks 8 to 12 eggs.
This only means that Shipping Magnate Mike Magsaysay with his 9 children (all girls) is
more of a duck than former CCP Supremo JoeMa Sison with his four children.
If the first nest is destroyed, ducks often make a second nest, like born-again
Christian Ray Orosa, who is therefore a Duck. Incubation takes about 28 days for ducks

46
and longer for geese and swans. The young of most species are able to run and swim
within a few hours after they are hatched. It is claimed that each successful nesting of the
wild duck could raise about 6 young in a good year. This makes Dolphy the prolific
father a real Ducky Duck.
* * *
Due to hunting, only 30% of the wild ducks live as much as a year. Without
accidental death, ducks generally live 20 years, geese 30 years, and swans 40 years.
Protected swans are reported to have lived more than 100 years. The ability to return to
their home nesting places is common among wild ducks and is one of the greatest
mysteries of nature. So you see, Johnny P.E., such green card holders as Jovy Salonga,
Raul Daza, Ernie Maceda, Martin Nievera and other migratory birds can also be classified
as Ducks.
The average air speed of ducks and geese is 40 to 50 miles per hour, but ducks
have flown 65 to 72 miles per hour when chased. A blue winged teal and a black duck
have been recorded as having traveled 200 miles a day.
A number of ducks do not migrate. Salvadori's Duck lives all year round on the
mountain streams of New Guinea. The Torrent Ducks on the rapid streams of the Andes
Mountains do not migrate. The Madagascar White Backed Duck cannot walk and is
seldom seen to fly, but dives very well. Flightless Steamer Ducks of South American use
their wings somewhat as the paddle of an old side-wheel steamer to help prop themselves
in the water. The Screamers, about the size of a a domestic turkey, frequent shallow
marsh waters, and fly high in the air in spiral circles, uttering a noisy cry till out of sight.
The Crested Screamers of Brazil are often tamed and trained to guard poultry from birds
of prey and other enemies.
Well, Minister Juan Ponce Enrile, here we have different ducks --- ducks that can
be tamed as guards and watch dogs ---
Ducks that do not quack, but whistle in the dark, and scream to high heaven ---
Ducks that do not waddle, but perch and strut like God Almighty ---
Ducks that are non-migratory to the extent that they will refuse to accompany
President Cory Aquino on her State Visit to Washington D.C. ---

47
By God, Johnny, you do not know it, but you are a Duck!!
Shakespeare and the flawed greatness of Johnny E.
They sent word to me that I should write about General Fidel Ramos instead, and I
answered that Eddie Ramos is so honest, so straightforward, so predictable, he is an
absolute bore.
I sent word to Enrile that I will write about him, whether he likes it or not, because
of all the Filipinos in this generation, he is the subject most fit for Shakespeare, a man of
destiny with feet of clay, a flawed greatness that is the stuff of tragic Shakespearean
characters.
For indeed Defense Minister Juan Ponce Enrile does seem like a tragic hero,
moved by events beyond his control, afflicted by a fatal flaw in his character that makes
him so magnificently self-destructive, he threatens to engulf all of us in a final tragic end.
What role is Johnny playing? Is he Richard III, an arch villain devoted to evil for
the pure pleasure of it, tortured by dreams, and finally defeated and killed in battle?
Or is he Othello, the tragic Moor, the great and simple soldier victimized by Iago?
And who is Iago --- Rene Cayetano? Goodness can be made the tools of evil,
Shakespeare shows, and when the evil is destroyed, much of the good is destroyed too.
Or is he Romeo, the star-crossed lover, the bewildered victim of love and fate?
Or Brutus the idealist who joins lesser men in a cause which to him alone is noble ---
with Bono Adaza as Cassius, with his base motives and practical sense --- with Joker
Arroyo playing Mark Antony, who knows how to sway the mob? --- all pitted against
each other in one of the greatest climaxes of history.
* * *
Or is Johnny playing the role of Macbeth, a good soldier who surrenders to the
powers of darkness? Who are the three witches whose predictions first lead
Macbeth/Enrile astray --- Greg Honasan, Red Capunan, Rex Robles? And Lady Macbeth,
who drives him to the crime --- who is she, Rene Cayetano?

48
Or is Enrile playing the role of Hamlet the melancholy Dane, disgusted with the
rottenness of life and obligated to set it right, a rational man pretending madness, whose
indecisiveness leads to a terrible bloodbath.
Who is his father ghost who asks revenge -- the Armed Forces? Whom does he
accuse of betraying his father --- Aquilino Pimentel and the whole Yellow Fever? No
other character offers so much to wonder at, and to puzzle over, as Hamlet/Enrile.
Is Johnny Ponce Enrile the tragic King Lear, in what is often said to be
Shakespeare's finest work? King Lear/Enrile is too old to be wise, rejects out of injured
pride one who loves him (Cory Aquino?) and throws himself upon the mercy of others
(the Armed Forces and the Americans), and there is no mercy there --- only black cruelty
and hatred. He recovers only by the care of his rejected daughter Cordelia/Cory, and he
lives to see her hanged.
As the evil marches forward to its doom (with the fury of King Lear's outcry to the
storm) --- there is upheaval and terrible waste impossible to describe. Even more than
that of Hamlet could it be said of this play that "the rest is silence."
Is this then to be our destiny as a nation, our legacy from our tragic hero Johnny
Ponce Enrile --- the final silence of the grave?
August 26, 1986; September 12, 1986; October 18, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
10. Deciphering Lupita's speed talk
I am MAURICE A. and with Larry's permission....
I shall inflict my grammar and syntax upon you. People say a society column is
elitist, decadent, and sociologically damaging, but puñeta, it is the only thing that really
sells the paper, right?
Well, it was one of those parties given by friends who ask you to bring along a
case of beer. Listen, I am no insulare, I am an Arab Shriek, so I decided to bring Manila
Beer instead of San Miguel, and this DON MIGUEL PEREZ RUBIO had the nerve to say
it tasted like the product of the bladder of LUCIO TAN.

49
I was met at the door by ERNEST RUFINO JR. our host, and his mother-in-law,
LILY PADILLA. It turned out this was an Everybody's Party of the Cory Media Bureau
and Cory's Crusaders to honor the return of LUPITA AQUINO KASHIWAHARA, our
leader during the campaign, wife of KEN K who wanted to be shot together with his
brother-in-law NINOY and GALMAN, and still resents the discrimination. It may have
been worth it to LUPITA if he kept up with the insurance payments, but he did not.
* * *
We asked LUPITA K what tremendous urgency brings her back to our shores, and
she answered, "Lrrycmhrt bblthlpCrypln hrcmngsttvstt thUntdStt!!" CHINGBEE
KALAW CUENCA wanted to know if LUPITA has learned Esperanto, and I answered
that LUPITA K is using Speed Talk. And there are only two ways to decipher what she
says: (1) learn Speed Hear, or (2) record her on as tape machine at 15 ips and play it back
at 3.75 ips.
I saw BILLY ESPOSO, all 3,000 lbs of him, sitting down and breaking his first
chair.
I met TEODORO BENIGNO JR., bureau chief of the Agence France Presse, in a
familiar ill-fitting blue suit, who said that he is retiring from the agency soon. Hey, where
is TEDDYBOY LOCSIN JR. who was our colleague in the Cory Media? Well, said
TEDDY B, "TEDDYBOY cannot come because I am using the only suit he has. I am
taking his place as Press Secretary come August 16, and the suit comes with the position.
I was chosen because of my 35 years experience in the news game, and because the
President cannot change her habit of calling her speech writer TEDDY B, and cannot say
RAUL CONTRERAS without distorting it into REAL CONTRARY."
* * *
TEDDYBOY will continue to serve in the Presidential Institute of Special
Studies, a sort of cerebral harem of ADRIAN CRISTOBAL in days past, where
TEDDYBOY is charged with thinking up new ways to irritate Minister JOHNNY
PONCE ENRILE.
There was ALBERTITO LOPEZ, as usual parading as a faithful husband, wearing
a halo and angel's wings far too small for his size, because he borrowed them from his

50
cousin OSCAR LOPEZ married to CONNIE RUFINO whose sister married JOHNNY
LITTON, who is about the size of ALBERTITO but who has nothing to lend him but a
couple of horns and a forked tail.
ALICE COLET VILLADOLID, my kabaleyan, the charming Presidential
Spokesperson, rabid feminist who starts her prayer with "In the name of the Parent, the
Offspring and the Sacred Ectoplasm, A-person," tells us of her talented offsprings,
TESSA who married a financial whiz and ANNIE who is having a ballet concert at the
CCP, to which BEN DAVID fresh from Washington DC murmurs "I wish she'd break a
leg, a standard theatrical greeting that means Good Luck, because I have not been paid
my salary for the past 2 months and I can't afford to pay for the tickets to see ALICE's
ANNIE."
* * *
LUPITA KASHIWAHARA, our honoree, was holding court in the other table,
with such brilliant observations as "Ykwcntdrstnd whCdsntfr thtsnmbtch," while BILLY
ESPOSO the Incredible Hulk sat down in front of her and broke his second chair.
Then there was CECILE GUIDOTE who recounted that when she was saying
goodbye to SONNY ALVAREZ before his escape from Martial Law, Father JAMES B.
REUTER, like the Jesuit that he is, sneaked up behind them and pronounced them man
and wife.
And there was the ever loquacious Sandigan Presiding Justice FRANCIS
GARCHITORENA, who complains that with the salary he gets from the government, he
could not even pay his dentist's bill, as a result of which he goes around whistling his way
through life with a missing front tooth. His mother, the sister of the venerable
MARIANO GARCHITORENA of Bicol, is now called Whistler's Mother, simply
because FRANCIS' windbag feeding into a wind tunnel that leads from his esophagus to
the gap of his front teeth sounds like a train whistle when he talks. In his court, he
learned to communicate his legal decisions: Symphony #40 by WOLFGANG
AMADEUS MOZART, for Not Guilty; Fifth Symphony of LUDWIG VAN
BEETHOVEN, for "let's cool him off in the freezer"; and Gotterdammerung by
RICHARD WAGNER, for "let's hang and burn the sonamabitch!"

51
* * *
The biggest problem of FRANCIS GARCHITORENA is a recurrent dream in
which he whistles in his sleep the song LILI MARLENE. His wife VICKY PINEDA
who has a doctorate's degree in nuclear physics and is much brighter than FRANCIS, has
expressed her dark suspicions upon FRANCIS' 12th nocturnal performance of LILI
MARLENE, and has already warned him that on the 13th, she will personally stuff a
critical mass of U-235 in his mouth and blow the rest of his front teeth away.
SERGE and CHING MONTINOLA were talking to the only TNT (tago na tago)
in the Philippines, PAUL AQUINO who is ensconced in his secret hide-out, still counting
paper clips. His sister TESSIE AQUINO ORETA and FRITZIE ARAGON joined us to
reminisce about NINOY. "Who is NINOY?" asked someone quite innocently, and
everyone kept quiet, and sad, and guilty for having forgotten so soon.
On the other side of the room, BILLY ESPOSO was about to sit on his third chair,
when the host ERNEST RUFINO JR. snatched the chair from under him, and regretted it
instantly. BILLY fell with a crash, cracked the marble floor, and shook the house to its
foundations.
The irrepressible LUPITA KASHIWAHARA let out the most brilliant remark of
the evening, "Lstnmtrdswhdnt wbrkupndghm!" which brought down the house and broke
up the party.
August 4, 1985, Philippine Daily Inquirer
11. Peace so precious it must be bought by our lives
When our favorite cousin Loretta Lichauco married Lt. Col. Rrex Baquiran, Ding
Lichauco and I registered a cry of pain: "Loretta, you married a Metrocom? a Storm
Trooper?"
Loretta smiled gently, "Boys, you will find this one to your satisfaction. He was
in jail for distributing pamphlets of Kabataang Makabayan."
* * *

52
On September 13th, our cousin Rrex Baquiran was abducted and murdered in the
fastnesses of the Cordillera Mountains. There is much speculation about the
circumstances surrounding his death and mutilation, who killed him and why.
Some people in the military, spoiling for another bloodbath, are eager to pin the
blame on the NPAs. The NPA is also trying to put the blame on either the military whose
lucrative checkpoints were abolished, or rival businessmen deprived of their monopolies,
or Rrex himself for having entered forbidden territory. But all these are irrelevant.
What matters in the final analysis is the Ultimate Purpose for which Rrex lived
and died.
Our cousin Rrex Baquiran was a soldier, but he was a different kind of soldier, for
he never killed or ever wanted to kill anyone. He was trained for war, but he was gentle,
he was a man of peace.
He belonged to the Kalinga tribe of the Cordilleras, bypassed by the rest of the
nation in its drive to catch up with the 20th century. He came down to learn, and then
brought the modern world to his people. He brought them seeds to plant --- coffee,
achuete --- then bought their produce at a price higher than middlemen offered, cleared
the many roadblocks and checkpoints that kept them from the market, then sold the
produce at a price less than middlemen were willing to sell.
He had such grandiose plans to teach them cooperative farming, not only in coffee
and achuete, but also in bananas and pepper, and to set up consumer's cooperatives so that
they may buy their commodities at the cheapest price.
He had the wisdom to realize that before his people can think and plan and dream,
they must first eat.
* * *
Long before President Corazon Aquino's peace initiative, Rrex Baquiran came
back to his native Kalinga to bring peace to his people, by acting as a bridge between the
dissidents and the armed forces, and among fractious members of his tribe. In his own
small way, he contributed to the cease-fire agreement that finally came about between
Conrado Balweg's rebel forces and the government of President Aquino.
If Rrex Baquiran was a mere victim of an atrocity committed by one faction of the

53
warring forces in the north --- if his death only serves to fan the flames of hatred and
revenge and bring more misery to his people, --- then his death will not have served the
purpose of his life.
He was a man of peace, and men of peace usually die violent deaths, as did Christ,
Rizal, Lincoln, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and Ninoy Aquino... as if to remind all of us
that peace is so precious that it must be purchased with our lives.
Our cousin Rrex Baquiran paid the price of peace with his life. If his death in
some way contributes to the peace initiative of President Corazon Aquino, if his death by
its very horror, makes our people recoil from the horrors of continued civil war, then his
wife and daughter and the rest of the family will be content.
For then, the life he led will have had some real meaning, and his death will not
have been in vain.
October 7, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
12. Saint Scho's class of 1941
Before the war, the elite Catholic Colleges in Manila came in pairs. The Jesuitic Ateneo
de Manila on Padre Faura was paired off with the Assumption Convent on Herran. The
sisters of Ateneans were conveniently enrolled in Assumption; and it was there where
among his sisters' friends, the Atenean picked the girl he eventually married.
By the same token, San Beda was paired off with the Holy Ghost (now Holy
Spirit) College on Mendiola Street. Also de la Salle College on Taft Avenue was paired
off with Sta. Scholastica's College a block away on Singalong Street. Sta. Teresa College
on San Marcelino was a sort of a free-fire zone, happy hunting ground for all. Maryknoll
College did not even exist.
But school rivalry was such that the college boys poached on each other's
territories. Pretty soon Ateneans were going to Sta. Scholastica to irritate the La Sallites,
and managed to get caught in the process. Jose Yulo Jr. and myself were trapped by two
pretty cousins in Saint Scho --- Regina "Nena" Abreu, and Cecilia Lichauco; and Moning

54
Osmeña was bagged by Dolly Ablaza. On the other hand, La Sallite valedictorian Jose
"Neno" Abreu retaliated by marrying Assumption's Lulu Campos, and Mandy Eduque,
the La Sallite brother of Tito Eduque, married the prettiest Holy Ghost student of all,
Elvira Ledesma. But Atenean Tito Manahan counterattacked and married Elvira the
second time around, and gave us the girl whose boisterous laughter tickles us pink on
TV's "Two For the Road" program.
* * *
Today we shall focus on one remarkable class of Sta. Scholastica, the class of
1941.
Every week, in Makati near the Guadalupe Church, they meet, the aging members
of Class 1941 of Sta. Scholastica, the last one to graduate just before the war --- 18
women, among them: Miss Amada Katigbak, the perennial valedictorian of the class;
Maria de los Angeles Manzano de los Reyes, whom everyone knows as Lita, the mother
of Ting Ting Cojuangco; Carmeling "Pichay" Crisologo, widow of Floring Crisologo, and
long time Governor of Ilocos Sur; Bebe Lammoglia Virata, widow of Commerce
Secretary Leonides Virata; Lourdes Segundo de Leon, daughter of the General, married to
Ricardo de Leon of the AG&P; Lucilla Martelino Diaz de Rivera, sister of Abdul Latif of
Jabidah fame;
Rosie Tomas Flor, a cousin of mine, whose family helped Marcos escape after the
Nalundasan murder; Eliza Felix Nicandro, wife of Honesto, special assistant to the CB
Governor; Dr. Dolly Ablaza Osmeña of Moning; Letty Lacson Montelibano of Freddie;
Consuelo Chanco Dominado; Pet Manotok Bocanegra, aunt of Tommy; Cecilia Singson
de Leon; Cora Sison Florendo; Ester Arzadon Filart; Elsa Uytiepo Torrejon; Azucena
Verzosa Alfo; Eufrosina Querol Nisce; Josefa Rivera Yuson; Angeles Mercado
Marasigan; Lydia Alcantara de la Paz, mother of the martyr Bobby de la Paz; and Rosario
Carlos Africa, cousin of Monching Cojuangco and wife of Oscar, the president of all our
telephone troubles.
* * *
Rosalinda Tomas, my second cousin, whose grandfather Laki Vicente Benito was
the half brother of my Bai Pelagia "Piao" Garcia, married Major Nilo Flor of the

55
Philippine Airforce. A brilliant pilot trained in Randolph Field and Clark where he
earned a "green card" for all-weather flying, he was aide-de-camp to General Pelagio
Cruz and subordinate of General Pedro Quezon Molina, he died in a useless tragedy in a
Catalina PBY plane crash near Senator Avelino's Samar hacienda, while ferrying spurious
ballots during the Quirino-Magsaysay election campaign.
Rosie's in-laws Leon and Victoria Flor, close relatives of Ferdinand Marcos, were
living in Bauang, La Union, when Assemblyman Nalundasan of Ilocos Norte was
assassinated while brushing his teeth. Victoria (Nana Toyang), a pharmacist, had a
Botica and a Bazaar, and was the exclusive distributor of Nestle products in that area.
The day of the Nalundasan murder, Ferdie and two companions arrived at the Flor
residence, all ragged and travel weary, and swearing the Flors to secrecy, asked help to
enable them to escape unnoticed to Manila. They hid inside a freightcar (bagon) that was
used for the transport of Nestlé products and coupled to the train going to Manila.
This secret escape enabled Marcos to establish an airtight alibi that he was
somewhere else at the time of the murder. He was exonerated by the Supreme Court
under Chief Justice Jose Laurel, father of Doy, in 1939; by 1972, he was our Emperor by
Martial Law.
* * *
Dona Josefa, the mother of Ferdie, never wanted to be reminded of this particular
incident, and probably had nightmares of what-might-have-been, had Nana Toyang Flor
not chosen to keep the secret of the bagon on that day when Nalundasan died with fresh
Colgate breath from a 22 caliber bullet in the brain. And proud Rosie Tomas, one of her
children, through all these years was buried in the Exchange Department of the Central
Bank, away from the sight of the Marcoses.
Rosie's father, Colonel Gabriel Tomas was a graduate of PMA in the 1920s, when
PMA was still Philippine Constabulary Academy, and the course was only two years
instead of four. But he stayed only 10 months in that school because he got second place
in a competitive examination to commission officers for the Mindanao Moro Campaigns.
Valedictorian all the way in grade school and high school in his hometown Solano in the
Enrile province of Cagayan, Col. Tomas was one of the many distinguished soldiers from

56
Cagayan: Eulogio Balao, Romeo Gatan, Willie Sotelo.
Serving in Mindanao, and as company commander in Mindoro, Tayabas, Cavite,
Pampanga, Dagupan and Tayug in Pangasinan, and in Manila, he wound up as the
Paymaster General of the Army in Bataan during the war. He ended up in the Death
March and in Capas with Marcos. His wife Narcisa and Josefa Marcos shared the same
room in Capas as they ministered to their men.
* * *
Bebe Lammoglia was one of the brightest in the class of 1941, and married the
brilliant Dr. Leonides Virata, who was in Columbia during the war; got an honorary
degree from Philippine Women's College (we teased him by calling him doctora); was
Vice president of Phil Am Life and taught Cesar Zalamea all he knows; succeeded me as
President of the Philippine Chamber of Industries; and then served as DBP Chairman and
the Secretary of Commerce.
Bebe is descended from Italian forebears, and as such is known to be a bit
quarrelsome. Every so often she waylays me with the accusation that at a definite time
and place she records in her notebook, I publicly remarked that she drove her husband to
drink by her constant nagging --- something I categorically deny upon the sacred honor of
my nephew's wife.
But one thing about Bebe, long before any of us had the nerve to tell Ferdinand
Marcos to his face that he is a louse, Bebe Lammoglia Virata dared. In July 1976, after
Leo Virata died, in a funeral mass attended by President Marcos, Bebe reportedly
responded to Marcos' brief remarks, by saying that her husband was an honest man who
did not dip his fingers in the public till, and that the administration of Marcos was
unworthy of her husband.
* * *
Good ole Ferdie almost did a backflip, and murmured angrily that Bebe was a
termagant, an impertinent termagant shrew. Imelda never forgave Bebe, and forbade her
from ever stepping into the Palace. If only for this, Bebe deserves the Legion of Honor
from Cory. She was the first woman to tick off the dictator. From then on every Filipina
had it in for Marcos, till finally Cory did him in.

57
Still angry at the Marcos Administration, on the way to his final burial place in
Cavite, where Finance Minister Cesar Virata and the rest of the clan awaited for some
funeral ceremony, Bebe reportedly told the driver of the funeral car to proceed ahead,
almost running over Cesar and leaving him by the side of the road, more speechless than
he usually is.
Later that year, Bebe complained: "Before Leo died, the banker Pablo Roman sent
us one roasted cow every Christmas; this year after Leo died, he sent us a chocolate cake.
Next year I bet he will just send us a muffin."
When Pablo Roman heard about this, he was offended and swore he'd rather die
than send Bebe even a muffin. God must have heard him because before Christmas
came, Pablo Roman did die a merciful death, leaving in his will not a single muffin for
Bebe Lammoglia Virata.
A few years ago, Bebe's elder brother who owned the Cucina Italiana where I
regularly got my lunch when I was at the NEC, now NEDA nearby in Padre Faura, died.
Bebe's family had a typical Italian funeral. Everybody quarreled with everyone else in
what turned out to be a riotous spaghetti fight.
* * *
Carmeling Pichay was one of the shyest in the class of 1941, but when she
married politician Floro Crisologo of Vigan, she became a outgoing politician herself
serving as Ilocos Sur Governor from 1963 to 1971.
Her husband Floring was in the guerrilla unit USAFFE/NL under Col. Volkmann,
together with Marcos and Antonio Raquiza. Floring representing Ilocos Sur, Antonio
Raquiza of Ilocos Norte, and Manuel Cases of La Union were the famous CRC Ilocano
troika in the Congress of the 1960s.
Floring was quite a fellow, he had a kind of boisterous camaraderie that disarms
and offends at the same time. I remember being in the foyer of Malacanang as Speaker
Laurel came down with his group, complaining that Marcos refused his urgent request.
Congressman Floring Crisologo, arrived in his car, asked what Laurel was complaining
about, and dragged him back upstairs. I was curious and I followed to see what will
happen.

58
Floring Crisologo burst into the office of Marcos together with Laurel and his
group. He said something in Ilocano, gesturing expansively towards Laurel, and insisting
that Marcos grant whatever it was Laurel wanted. Marcos was entertaining some foreign
visitors at the time, and was painfully embarrassed. But Floring just can not be denied,
and to get rid of him, Marcos gritted his teeth and acquiesced. That was what Floring
was, a friend who will go to any lengths to please a friend.
* * *
On October 18th, 1970, Carmeling's husband Floring was assassinated at high
mass in the Vigan Cathedral. As he stood up to receive communion, a gunman a pew
behind shot him twice at the back of the head, and escaped in the ensuing confusion.
Very much like the way Ninoy Aquino was killed.
The assassins were never caught, and it was rumored that the killing was ordered
by President Marcos and executed by hired killers of General Fabian Ver. The motive
according to the scuttlebutt was the leadership of Ilocandia which Floring challenging; or
that Floring was the type that would never accede to the planned Martial Law; or that
Floring was instituting a tobacco monopoly by blocking tobacco shipments from the north
and taxing them.
The talk about Tobacco Monopoly was a canard, according to Carmeling
Crisologo. Seventy percent of the tobacco grown in the Philippines were grown in Ilocos
Sur. The Crisologos merely wanted to see to it that the tax of some P600 per truckload
was collected by the BIR, because the Chinese buyers were evading the tax to hide the
amount of cigarettes they were making, which is also subject to a higher specific tax.
Secondly, the Crisologos, having borrowed P6 million from the DBP to set up a re-drying
plant, wanted to have the tobacco redried, and eventually made into cigarettes in Ilocos
Sur itself.
* * *
To attend the monthly luncheon of Saint Scho's Class of 1941 is tantamount to
visiting the Tower of Babel. Imagine a cacophony of shrieking voices, of such a pitch
that it will drive any man bananas. This intolerable nagging, eighteen of them at the same
time, is cruel torture to the tympanum, a gross violation of human rights.

59
The girls would listen to Lydia de la Paz, whose son Bobby de la Paz, a doctor
with agape for his fellowmen, went with his wife to Samar, to attend to the needs of the
poor, only to be shot in the head by military assassins, because he treated the wounded of
the NPA, as any doctor faithful to the Hippocratic Oath would do.
Lita de los Reyes would be complaining bitterly about the false rumors about her
daughter Ting Ting Cojuangco. Lourdes de Leon would repeat for the nth time the stories
about her American student brats at the International School, recounting with a sigh of
resignation that she retired from International School, only to take on another set of
American brats at the Brent School.
Lucille Diaz de Rivera in her own wheel chair would wonder what happened to
her brother Eddie Martelino, the handsome dashing adventurer who was assigned by
Marcos to head Operation Jabidah to invade Sabah, only to be exposed by Senator Ninoy
Aquino, who recounted how Muslims being trained in Corregidor were shot to prevent
the secret operation from being exposed. And Eddie was in the center of it all, no longer
our Eddie, but Abdul Latif, a converted Muslim with a harem of beauties. What
happened to Eddie? Rumors persist that he is still alive, his tongue cut out to keep him
from talking, and cruelly castrated for some unforgivable crime. Oh Martial Law, what
terrible crimes are perpetrated in thy name?
* * *
Dolly would complain about her husband Ramon M. Osmeña, Bebe Virata would
wish there were enough spaghetti for an Italian rumble, and everyone else would pick on
Rosario Africa for all their troubles with the PLDT of which her husband is the president.
There would the thousandth retelling of the story about their favorite teacher,
Sister Benita, daughter of the famous labor leader Isabelo de los Reyes, who taught them
in Spanish, punctuating her lecture with "Intendeis? Intendeis? (Do you understand?)".
And next day, no homework was submitted by the class, "But Sister Benita, did you not
say `in ten days'?
And so we leave the Class of 1941 of Sta. Scholastica, secure in the belief that in
spite of Jimmy Ongpin and the economic recession, life will go on its merry, weary way,
and that when day is done, the darkness will fall from the wings of the night, as the

60
feather is wafted downward from an eagle in its flight, and the cares that infest the day,
shall fold their tents like Arabs, and as silently steal away. As every one in the class of
1941 knows by heart, that is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
August 18, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
Chapter Two: The Contemporary Scene
13. Renaming the Column
My name is Teodoro V. and with the permission of Larry, I shall dole out over a cup of
caffeine, bite-sized bits of information laced with pre-masticated pre-digested opinions so
as to relieve the strain on your brain and help you avoid mental indigestion.
To begin the beguine, we need a new name for this column because it seems
Bullseye has been used by Ruther Batuigas for sometime in the Taglish tabloid Tempo.
We might as well have a contest, deadline to be the end of August, 1986.
The first one to suggest a good name for our column, with a persuasive
explanation for its adoption, will win a dinner for two, to be paid by our editor Louie
Beltran who earns a fortune just sneezing on television, or if he demurs, our publisher
will shell out the cash. At dinner, you will be joined by myself, my ever loving, and
Vilma Santos or Nora Aunor or Maricel Soriano or Sharon Cuneta or whoever we can get
to join, otherwise we shall have to be content with Winnie Monsod, who may join us,
bound, gagged and drugged to keep her from spoiling our dinner.
We kid you not. The contest is on. The names suggested so far are those that
have something to do with the female columnists above: Under the Saya, The View from
Under, or Looking Up. Then there are variations on the Bull: Bull-stool, Bovine Ordure,
Cow Dung. Come on, friends, you can think up something better.

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Readers, you make my day!
Readers, you really make my day. I receive hundreds of letters weekly, and I appreciate
the time, effort and stamps you have spent on my behalf. I cannot answer each of your
letters, but I read every one of them, believe me. And every so often I shall take time in
this column to answer.
Patricia Li, your suggestion "Word's Worth" that kept thundering in your head, is
probably an echo of the name William Wordsworth (not Longfellow who had
Wadsworth). Wordsworth is one of my favorite poets ... "I wandered lonely as a cloud "
... "She was a phantom of delight/ When first she gleamed upon my sight" ... And oh that
most beautiful ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY, "There was a time when
meadow, grove, and stream,/ The earth, and every common sight,/ To me did seem/
Apparelled in celestial light,/ The glory and freshness of a dream." Thank you, dear
Patricia, for bringing back the glory and freshness of a half-forgotten dream.
* * *
We received many more suggestions for our column name, the more delightful
ones being the naughty HEAVENS ABOVE and LOOK UP, YOUNG MAN (from "Light
Bulb"), and BELOW THE BELLE (Carlo Vidamo); the literary TEMPEST IN A
TEAPOT (Enrique Gomez), SOUND AND FURY (Shakespeare, Bernie Noriega), THE
NAKED TRUTH (Rafael Laurel, Noriega), OF MICE AND MEN (John Steinbeck, Mel
Juanico), EYE OF THE STORM (M. Juanico); the combative EYEBALL TO EYEBALL
(Alfredo Nem Singh), POINTBLANK (Arthur Ang, Jun Laserna, B. Noriega, Mel
Juanico), BROADSIDE (M. Juanico), SHOWDOWN (Olive Badong); and the
imaginative INSIGHTS (Joselito Manabat, Danilo Maravillas), LASER (Eluderio Salvo),
PINPOINTS (Jo Javier), FULCRUM (Ingo Molina), KALEIDOSCOPE (Nilda
Nepomoceno), SWEET AND SOUR (M. Juanico).
And old friend of mine wrote in, Manuel Sarabia, who suggested that I adopt the
title of my first book, WITH FERVOR BURNING (Alab ng Puso). I have written other
books since then, with titles lifted from the English version of the National Anthem: SUN

62
AND STARS ALIGHT, BEHOLD THE RADIANCE.
* * *
Thank you, Jose Torres, Melanie Dacanay, Tony Aires, Felipe Villena, Voltaire
Velasco, Apollo Faigao, Romeo Ruffy, and Mel Juanico for writing letters that are
interesting, literate, incisive, and delightful. Frank Hernandez, to hedge against the
collapse of the dollar, you should buy gold and diamonds. Heinz Thomann, I am not a
fighting cock enthusiast. Edgar Bacquiano, I will write soon on Anti-Trust laws. Tony
Oposa, Indalecio P. Soliongco is my hero too.
One can not please everyone, of course, so I have my share of hate mail, maybe
once or twice a month. I enjoy having them because it indicates that I am getting the goat
of people I do not like. But I do not want to give them the courtesy of an answer. Most
are obscene, and unsigned or using fake names, obviously American in origin. I am a
student of writing style; Filipinos have a malambing and passionate approach; Americans
are more direct, more slangy, and bastos. Filipinos never use such words as motherfucker,
nigger-lover, nor ever refer to sex with animals. Some Filipinos write such filth
too, but they are usually the faggot friends of Frank Jenista.
* * *
What is painful is that some close friends and relatives get offended every time I
write about Americans, some of them brood the whole day or get physically sick: my
relatives Jose "Peps" Bengson, Teresa Nieva, Renato Arevalo, Auntie Jessie Lichauco;
my friends and classmates, Manuel Cacho, Aureling Montinola, Vicente "Ting" and Nita
Lim, Freddie Borromeo, Rene Grande, Napoleon Rama. I am really sorry and my advice
to them is not to read my column and keep on being my friends.
But there are those who call up to say, "Larry, your column really makes my day!"
And their calls and letters make my day too: Larry Marquez, Jack Rodriguez, Michael
Adams, Amparing Martinez, Tony Miranda, Galileo Brion, Raul Roco, Raul Contreras,
Pete Picornell, Letty Shehani, Al Hernandez, Jose Mari Velez, Cesar Maloles, Tommy
Aguirre, Hadji Kalaw, Toti Mendoza, Telly Zulueta, Monching Mitra, Bishop Freddie
Escaler, even Dingdong Teehankee and Ting Phillips, and many others in the government
who may not want to be identified.

63
* * *
Then the members of the Mutual Admiration Society who make my day as I make
their day: Jullie Yap Daza, Domini T. Suarez, Corito Fiel; H.R. Villanueva, Candy
Quimpo, Gabby Manalac, Ninez Cacho Olivares; Alejandro Roces, Alejandro Lichauco,
Renato Constantino, Nick Joaquin, Chitang Guerrero Nakpil.
Thank you, dear reader, for making my day. That's why no more fancy, literary,
cute, naughty, or imaginative titles for our column. We shall call it, as most of you say
when you read it in the morning.... MAKE MY DAY!
In the pursuit of truth, justice, and national interest, I imagine myself confronting
that third-rate actor president as his finger reaches for the panic button that will start
World War III --- just like Clint Eastwood with my 44 magnum at his temple, murmuring,
"Go ahead Reagan, MAKE MY DAY ..."
You win, SONNY GUEVARA of Caloocan City, we will call you to arrange for
the prize. You, LIF A. ROA of Cabanatuan City, we'll cable you too to join us, because
my wife likes your letters.
To be born again
To have a new name is to born again and face a fresh future. Francis Marie Arouet
became Voltaire and sparked the French Revolution. Marcelo del Pilar became Plaridel
and helped launch the Philippine Revolution. Vladimir Ulyanov became Nikolai Lenin
and headed the Russian Revolution. Steamboat pilot Samuel Langhorne Clemens became
novelist Mark Twain; convict William Sidney Porter became short story writer O. Henry;
novelist poet Nick Joaquin became journalist Quijano de Manila. And Cassius Clay Jr.
became Mohammed Ali.
So we have a new name for our column: Make My Day. I started with a front
page column called Ways and Means for the Manila Times in the 1960s, then went into
hiatus in the 1970s during Martial Law; finally in the 1980s I wrote long pieces for almost
all the newspapers in town. One day, the woman who was to be my present publisher

64
said: "Larry, you write beautifully, just like Patrick Henry and Abraham Lincoln. Your
writings are being clipped, pasted in scrapbooks and used in declamation contests. But
Larry, who wants to read the Gettysburg Address everyday?"
* * *
Then she said: "Write for us. Leave Renato Constantino and Alejandro Lichauco
on Mt. Olympus to hurl the Jovian thunderbolts. Come down and stick pins into people,
tickle their funnybone, kick them in the groin and pat them on the back. Write about
people you know, grew up with, did business with --- people who are now guiding the
destiny of the nation. You are not just a witness, you are protagonist, not an observer but
a participant. You know who picks his nose in public, beats up his wife, or is a sex
deviate; you know every wart, every pimple, how they think, how they act. And Larry,
write for and about ordinary people; they are the ones who make history."
I used to think I was a voice in the wilderness. But hundreds of letters from
readers belie that. There is a whole new generation out there which has never known
what it is to be under a foreign master, a generation without an umbilical cord to the
colonial past.
I write every day one hundred lines of ordinary type, 64 characters per line, on a
old computer given to me by my son in 1977, carefully calculated to be read by a sleepy
eyed reader over one cup of coffee during breakfast.
* * *
"For ten minutes a day, Larry, over their breakfast," says Jack Rodriguez, "you
have the complete attention of some 300,000 readers. Yesterday, you were an occasional
treat, today you are a daily habit. Be careful what you write."
There is an element of sharp steel in the way I write, the better to excise the
colonial mentality that is the cancer of our nation. There is a lively sense of the
incongruous and the ridiculous, the better to bring out the essence of humanity in all of
us, our sense of humor, for we are the only animals who laugh. There is also the reaching
out for truth, virtue, justice and infinite beauty --- such are the manifestations of God
within consciousness of every man.
If some morning over a cup of coffee, while reading our column, you smile a

65
little, or let out a loud laugh, or shed a little tear for some unbearable sorrow, or grow
indignant and angry over some unrightable wrong ---
If you feel a little bit more compassionate towards your fellow human being, so
that you do not bargain too much with the little boy who sells you sampaguitas, because
an extra peso which means nothing to you, may mean an extra meal for him ---
If at such a time, you see the morning dew glistening like a hope and light of day
bursting out with new faith just beyond the local curve of earth, and are moved to
proclaim: "I am proud to be a Filipino!"
If our column contributes to these in the smallest way, then it shall have made
your day... and mine.
So go ahead, friends, MAKE MY DAY!
August 21, 1986; September 20/21, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
14. Aye, Aye, Aye walked with heroes
I shall write in the style of Max Sullivan and Charles Romulus. By God, I shall drop
names and write about myself!
To Lito Puyat and others who complain that I write too irreverently of their
patriarchs, I must explain that I have known these great legends personally when they
were alive and still human. I sat at their feet, learned and listened. And I respect them as
the real heroes of the Industrial Revolution.
Aye, Aye, Aye am younger than Jobo Fernandez and not much older than Jimmy
Ongpin, but I started much much earlier. I skipped grades, and by the time I was in
college, the Jesuits tried to keep me in the Boy Scouts while everyone was in ROTC.
Fresh from the United States, I was appointed by Salvador Araneta, as Dean of the
Graduate School of Feati University, where my students were much much older than
myself. I was also dean of the Lyceum University, where the venerable Senator Jose P.
Laurel beckoned me to his office for chats.
* * *

66
I chose Industry as my field of battle. That put me in the Philippine Chamber of
Industries where I served eight times as board member and twice as Vice President,
because I was too young to be President. But I was doing most of the writing and
speechifying and lobbying for laws to encourage industries. Eventually I became
president, after being voted by Business Writers Association as Young Businessman of
the Year and Industrial Leader of the Year.
Aye, Aye, Aye was dealing with my father's friends more than my own
contemporaries. Wash Sycip was a struggling accountant, while I dealt with his pop
Albino in China Bank, listening to his lectures on the Golden Rule. Jobo Fernandez was
assistant to Cory's father in the Philippine Bank of Commerce where my company was a
valued client, while I was consultant to his pop in the National Printing Co. I dealt with
Secretary of Finance Aurelio Montinola while Aureling was still learning the ropes at
Amon Trading.
I was consultant to Earl Carroll and Phil Am Life when Zalamea was a nonentity.
I set up Ysmael Steel with Mischa Zalevsky for the great Hemady himself and gave Dante
Santos his first real job. I set up Marcelo Steel for the great Jose Marcelo, pop of my
compadre George. I knew Harry S. Stonehill. At 30, I was manufacturing paint, ink,
carbon paper, pencils, chemicals.
* * *
Ask Amparo Martinez, ex-secretary to the legendary Don Andres Soriano, and she
will tell you I was a close friend of the old man. I was still in my twenties, but I could
breeze into his office unannounced, while the rest of his executives stood outside
nervously awaiting their turn, and asking me as I passed by to please to say a good word
for them, and to put him in a good mood. Before he died, Don Andres asked his son
Andy Junior to support me in every undertaking. To his credit, Andy who disliked my
nationalism, never stinted in that support, contributing generously to my campaign fund
when I run for the senate with Ninoy, and even helped me when I campaigned for
Salonga after the Plaza Miranda Bombing. I made Jovy Number One in that campaign
and he still has to thank me and the Sorianos.
In the same way, I was often called to the office of Don Gonzalo Puyat to discuss

67
the laws being considered by Congress. If his son Gil were alive he can tell you how
often I went to Don Gonzalo's office near Malacañang. Lito Puyat knew him as a
grandfather; I knew and respected him as an industrialist and entrepreneur, and not too
reverently.
Ramon Bagatsing and Bert Romulo can tell you I was a friend of Don Manolo
Elizalde, more than I was to Manda and Freddie. I rode more often with Don Toribio
Teodoro in his classic Rolls Royce, than I did with his son, compadre Frankie.
* * *
I knew President Manuel Quezon and President Emilio Aguinaldo, because they
always visited my grandfather on his birthday. I met General Douglas MacArthur and
Major Eisenhower when they used to consult my grandfather as the Chairman of the
House Committee on Defense. I knew Magsaysay and Carlos Garcia. J.V. Cruz and I
were together when Romulo was delivering his acceptance speech as presidential
nominee of the Partido Democrata, a speech we discovered was plagiarized from Adlai
Stevenson. I knew Claro M. Recto more than I care to know his son Raffy. I met
Sukarno of Indonesia, Chou En-Lai, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ingrid Bergman. President
Macapagal appointed me NEC Chairman when Mitra was an assistant to Mayor Villegas,
Maceda a councilor, Blas Ople a subversive, and Jimmy Ongpin was swatting flies in
Herb Allen's office.
I was ahead of my time. When my own generation finally caught up with me, I
spent most of the time attending the funerals of their fathers who were my colleagues. In
a sense I belong to the world of vanishing industrial empires --- of Toribio Teodoro, Jose
P. Marcelo, Sergio Bayan, P.E. Domingo, Filemon Rodriguez, Stonehill, Ysmael, del
Rosario brothers, Montinola, Lagdameo --- victims of the IMF, American Imperialism,
and Technoquacks. The present belongs to those who serve American multinationals ---
the bankers, corporate lawyers, colons and cronies.
Perhaps the reader may understand now why I am rough on Christian Monsod and
Bernie Villegas. I have walked with greater men.
September 22, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer

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15. Dear Mr. Douglas Hicks...
Dear Mr. Douglas Hicks, re your letter to the Editor:
Long ago I read a book written by Carlos Romulo, in which he recounted an
incident that happened just before the war. It was the story of a young Filipino waiter
who, when he saw a drunken American woman fall to the floor, scooped the woman up in
his arms. Thereupon the drunken woman shouted, "Take your filthy hands off me!"
slapping the young man again and again, while he stood there, tears in his eyes. Then
dramatically a few weeks later, this same young man went to Bataan and died for
democracy. How poignant, how heroic!
You know, Hicks, for years and years I imagined myself as the young man,
standing with tears in my eyes, while being slapped again and again by a drunken
American woman, and then going off to die somewhere in defense of American
democracy. Oh, the tears I shed!
* * *
I mention this, Hicks, because times have changed since then. We have become a
free and sovereign nation, and Filipinos are no longer little brown Americans.
I mention this, Hicks, because we Filipinos no longer welcome Americans passing
judgment on us. We welcome a nice argument yes, a debate yes, but for you to tell us
whether we act like good boys or not... that is something else. You are welcome as a
protagonist, not as a judge. Judgment we leave to God, or to respected Filipinos. And
not Bosworth: he passes judgment on us all the time, but he is not welcome to do it. But
when you and Bosworth do pass judgment on us, be prepared to have us pass judgment
on you as well.
I mention this, Hicks, because if an American drunken woman ever slapped a
Filipino today in the manner Romulo described, she probably will get her face kicked in.
* * *
You say I do not present both sides of the coin. Understand this, Hicks, I am not
the referee, I play on one side of the game. I am a partisan for the Filipino cause. And

69
why should you complain --- there are others who speak only for your side. The Four
Horsemen of the ConCom, all of them, are professional pro-Americans, i.e., it is their
profession, they make an honest living out of it.
You say I am so low as to make sexual innuendoes about Christine Bosworth.
You mean I wrote: "the cockfight starts. The crowd roars, a furious flurry of feathers and
in a few seconds it is all over, a dead cock is scooped up, and wads of money are
showered on the pit to settle the bets. To the uninitiated like you and me, Christine, it is
too short a climax, almost like an Interruptus or a Premature."
That's obscene, Hicks? Does it get you all excited and raring to rape? Not unless
you are a hick from Sheboygan where a school teacher was driven to suicide for having
an affair with a student; not unless you are a hillbilly from Tennessee, where pigs, horses
and even ducks (Sorry, Johnny!) are not safe.
If you have ever progressed from Grade Two Readers to books by Hemingway
and James Joyce, you may be surprised to learn that such "sexual" expressions are not
meant to offend but to provide vivid and earthy similes and metaphors.
Now that you mentioned it, Hicks, the jokes being circulated in the American
cocktail circuit --- the ones about Cory as a widow, and Winnie as a virago? Now those
are obscene and not at all nice, coming from guests who are enjoying our hospitality.
* * *
You imply we Filipinos steal but Americans do not. You are wrong, we learned
our thievery from your gangsters and crooks. You are worse, you betrayed our trust.
Dante describes hell as a spiral of 9 circles; in the fourth and last round of the ninth circle,
are the betrayers --- and in the vortex of hell is the most damned Judas who betrayed
Jesus with a kiss.
You say I am "out of the mainstream". You are gloating, Hicks, as Bosworth did
on TV. You may yet be surprised.
You call Ding Lichauco and by implication myself "Marxist Monopolists" ---
that's a contradiction in terms conceived by third rate minds, Hicks. For years we
nationalists have endured such inane insults from Americans as "Whatsa matta with
Henares? He's way out in left field!" or "Listen, we Americans pull outa heah, and you

70
brown monkeys will be back climbing trees!" Bernie Villegas started by saying that
anyone who disagrees with him or the IMF is a "Marxist dogmatist" --- and he meant me.
I paid him back in kind many times over, in more literate terms, and the alopecic
misogamic gynander lived to regret he started it. And so will you, sphincter ani.
Now, clip this column and send it to the folks back home, Hicks. You have just
been immortalized.
October 5, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
16. Let's talk dirty: The Saga of Sex
I made a dirty movie once upon a time, you know, a hardcore porno, a blue film, a
fighting fish. That was long before the Betamax mania, and long before Maria K. K.
became the Great Movie Censor.
My film, if I may say so, was a masterpiece, a dirty movie to end all dirty movies.
The film premiere, if I remember right, was held during the Stag Party for Jobo Fernandez
to prepare him for the state of wedded bliss. That was the first and last performance. For
the next day, my wife confiscated it, and burned it. I always resented that, for it deprived
the world of the fruit of my genius. Maria K. K. might have confiscated it today, but I am
sure she is liberal-minded enough not to have burned it. She would have kept it inside
the vault until contemporary moral standards caught up with it.
The film is gone, but the memory lingers on, as the song goes. In the interest of
posterity, in the hope that some film maker like Mike de Leon or Danny Zialcita remake it
for the edification of future generations, I shall sketch the story line and film treatment.
Ah, let's talk dirty, okay?
* * *
Seductive musical background accompanies the title frames. Comes now the first
frame, the title "Flames of Purple Passion", with a sub-title, "A Carnival of Carnal
Pleasures". The second frame contains the Dedication: "This film is sincerely dedicated
by Hilarion M. Henares Jr. to: Jose V. A. Cruz Jr., Aurelio Montinola Jr., Vicente Lim

71
Jr., Jose Yulo Jr., Carlos Romulo Jr., Jose Abreu Jr., Ramon M. Osmeña Jr., Felix K.
Maramba Jr., and Jose B. Fernandez Jr. --- to aid them in their efforts to bring forth the
next generation."
The children of Ambassador J.V. Cruz, of businessmen Aureling M., Ting L.,
Tiling Y., Baby R., Neno A., Moning O., Chamber of Commerce and Industry President
Fedi Maramba, and of the C.B. Governor Jobo Fernandez, may trace the beginning of
their existence to this beautiful movie.
The next frame contains the injunction: "WARNING: This movie must be shown
in a place secure from Police Raids." And the last title frame is the disclaimer, "Any
SIMILARITY between the characters herein depicted and those watching in the audience
is purely INTENTIONAL."
* * *
Then the movie starts. There on the screen in Wide Screen, Technicolor and
Stereophonic Sound, we see a huge pig boar making love furiously with a fat sow .... then
a handsome police dog sticking it out with a real bitch ... a couple of cats yowling out
their screams of love ... a cock making it with his coop of hens ... a huge bull and his
cows ... horses, rabbits, goldfishes, canaries, carabaos, all in various positions of intimacy
... all the copulating animals that the Bureau of Animal Husbandry and U. P. Los Baños
allowed me to film.
The first reactions were, "Baboy!", "Hayop na kabastusan!", "Ano ba yan?
Walang kalibugan?" .... but when The End came, the audience gave the film a standing
ovation. No kidding. For the theme of the movie is Human Sexuality as reflected in the
experiences of our fellow creatures in the plant and animal kingdom. And certainly the
film was more interesting than the usual tiresome views of the female perinea.
* * *
Here in the nonhuman world, sex is genetically` programmed, and is straight and
unadulterated. Nobody worries who is on top or who comes first or whether orgasms are
clitoral or vaginal. And if we pay attention closely, we may find that many of the
practices we condemn, the "crimes against nature", sex deviation, the "unnatural sex acts"
are quite natural in the nonhuman world. In the last analysis, Evolution favors whatever

72
strategy is needed to pass along genes and assure the preservation of the species,
according to our authority, biologist Mary Batten whom we herein quote and paraphrase.
The whole cast of nonhuman sex actors include creatures that change their sex
like Christine Jorgenson; those who give up their lives for love like Romeo and Juliet;
those who play sex con games, who deceive, seduce, and kill; cannibals, transvestites,
hermaphrodites, homosexual rapists, males with two penises; practitioners of menage a
trois, or three way sex; above all, those who show off their sex organs, boldly and
brazenly like a porn star.
* * *
Flowers are really the sex organs of a plant, enlarged, colored and perfumed in
order to attract. That is something to keep in mind when you send roses to your wife or
girlfriend; the roses you send reek of sex in the most blatant way. A flowering plant is a
creature in heat, and it bares its sex organs as boldly and brazenly as Marilyn Chambers.
And the florist who cuts the flower castrates the plant!
For most organisms, it takes only two, male and female, in order to mate. But for
plants, three is a necessity. Imagine trying to have sex without being able to move
around. Imagine if the object of your affections is rooted one kilometer away, and she
cannot move either. This is quite a problem, but one way plants solve this dilemma is to
enlist the services of a third creature --- bees, butterflies, wasps, monkeys, even rats --- in
a kind of three-way sex, or menage a trois. The idea is to get this third creature to bring
the plant's sperms (pollen) to the female part of the blossoms.
How do plants do this? Plants are the greatest manipulators of behavior. Most of
them offer food for sex, just like the executive who invites his officemate to an intimate
dinner. Plants offer nectar, a high carbohydrate food convertible to honey, to bees and
birds if they would participate in the mating game.
* * *
Other plants arouse the sexual appetite. Certain orchids, such as the Ophrys and
the Cryptostylus arouse male bees and wasps by mimicking not only the feel and
appearance of females but also their sexual odor. Attracted by what he thinks is a turnedon
female, a male finds himself in the ridiculous position of trying to mate with a flower.

73
But not as ridiculous as one character in Penthouse Forum who had a fetish of making it
with an overripe watermelon.
I remember how shocked the world was when a man from Denmark named
Christian Jorgenson announced that he went through a sex change operation to become a
female Christine Jorgenson. Today such operations are commonplace, but considered
unnatural and a little less than insane.
But sex change may be found among plants. Avocados for instance are not as
innocent as they seem. Every 24 hours they change sex in full view of anyone who
happens to be watching, but no one except the avocado knows the difference. Avocados
are of two types. The first type's flowers open as female in the morning, close in the
afternoon, then open as male in the next afternoon. The second type does exactly the
opposite. And the purpose is to prevent incest and insure diversity by guaranteeing that a
tree will be fertilized by pollen from another tree rather than from its own blossoms. This
is the biological equivalent of incest taboos found in almost all human societies.
* * *
Talk about seduction pads of playboy bachelors. The male bower birds, lacking
fancy tail feathers to attract mates, choose to build elaborate "bowers" on the ground, a
mating station where the polygynous male struts and sings as he tries to attract as many
females as possible. Once mating has occurred, the male, like many a human bachelor,
kicks out the female, and tidies up the bower for the next conquest. Not surprisingly, the
dullest looking male builds the most ornate, towering bower.
Those of you who visited the Louvre Museum in Paris have probably come upon a
Greek statue of Hermaphrodite, a creature with beautiful breasts and two sets of sexual
organs, male and female. That is a deviation from the sexual norm most people may find
bizarre, though conducive to self-sufficiency, self-reliance and Sariling Sikap. This
should be normal and advantageous for those who find it difficult to find mates, or live in
small isolated communities. Like the sea hare, for instance, a large marine snail with a
penis just to the right of its mouth and a vagina in the center of its back. Mating
combinations for this anatomical wonder vary from conventional male-female couplings
to orgiastic splendor that would titillate even the most sated hard-core porn aficionados

74
like you-know-who. Imagine a "daisy chain" of several participants, in which each snail
simultaneously performs both male and female functions. That's really the way to have
your cake and eat it too.
* * *
Transvestites are different from hermaphrodites and homosexuals. They are
males who have a fetish of wearing women's clothes but do not necessarily go for males
as homosexuals do. Consider the transvestite scorpion fly. Courtship etiquette among
these flies demands that the male hunt down a large tasty prey and present it to the
female. He has to risk his life exposing himself to predators as he hunts, but he is sure to
die a virgin if he has no gifts to give to those golddiggers. Now some opportunistic males
have found a way to do this without risking life and limb. Becoming transvestites and
pretending to be a female, these devious fellows grab a courting male's nuptial gift, and
fly off to offer it to a female of their own. It was discovered that these transvestites mate
more often than males who do their own hunting. Crime really pays among the scorpion
flies.
And Oral Sex, the usual fare of the porno film, is prevalent among the cichlids, a
species of tropical fish found in waters full of predators. As a protective strategy, the
female carries her eggs and hatches the young in her mouth till they could swim. The
problem of the male is how to fertilize the eggs in the female's mouth. Fortunately, the
males has orange dots on his tail that look exactly like the female's eggs. The crafty male
drags his fin over the sand, tricking the female into thinking she dropped some of her
precious cargo. As she instinctively tries to scoop it up, she gets a mouthful of sperm that
fertilize the real eggs in her mouth. Oral sex has become a necessity among these tropical
fish.
* * *
Talk about sex maniacs. The male lion was observed to have mated 157 times in
fifty-five hours, an average of once every twenty-one minutes. No wonder male lions
sleep so much, they need all the energy they can muster during their waking hours.
Female lions need repeated copulation to stimulate the release of eggs in the ovary.
Wolves do it like dogs do, but during the entire half-hour the male and female are locked

75
together, the male ejaculates approximately every minute. Now you know why a tireless
lover is called a Lion, and a persistent Romeo is called a Wolf.
Sex for human beings is easy and not dangerous unless you are caught messing
around with somebody's wife, but sex is no picnic for some creatures. The ordinary pussy
cat female lets out a bloodcurdling yowl when the male withdraws, and no wonder, since
the male's penis is covered with hard barbs, directed backward like fish hooks. Male
bedbugs and fleas have penises that are too short to reach the female vaginas, so they
simply stab the females in the back and ejaculate there. Sex is done by inoculation, and if
the female survives, the sperm reaches the egg by one of the most amazing journeys
known.
* * *
The Snake which is the embodiment of Evil is actually a pathetic creature when it
comes to sex. The male snake still plugged into the female, may suddenly experience a
female resistance so violent that his penis breaks off. Fortunately he has an extra penis as
a backup. A male with two penises is certainly a more interesting subject for a story than
Nick Joaquin's woman with two navels.
Great loves are born to die, as evidenced by the tragic romances of Romeo and
Juliet, Tristan and Isolde, Antony and Cleopatra. The nonhuman world has its examples.
Take the male angler fish, for whom finding a female is a matter of life and death,
because at an early age he loses his teeth and can no longer feed. So he attaches himself
like a parasite to a female twenty times his size. There he feeds on the female until his
mission is carried out. When the female's eggs are released, the male's sperm is
biochemically synchronized to follow. Then his body degenerates till in its final form, all
that remains is a kind of wart on the female's body. A heroic death for love.
And the praying mantis. If the male fails to jump on the female in just the right
way, she bites off his head and eats it --- giving him a headache from which he never
recovers. But his neuro-anatomy is such that losing his head only triggers a nervous
reflex that has him going through a postmortem sexual intercourse and orgasm. He
passes on his genes while he passes on. What a way to go! Decapitation as a cure for
impotence!

76
* * *
Then there is the tiny male fly called J. Nitida who guards the chastity of his mate
with his very life. After copulation, the female eats the male, leaving his sex organs
locked in place, to prevent others from entering. So you see, the chastity belt was not
invented by medieval knights going off to the wars. As a matter of fact, some insects,
rodents and snakes safeguard their sperms by sealing up the female sperm storage
chamber with copulatory plug, a gluey secretion from their own bodies.
And homosexual rape that goes on in our prisons, is common among Anthocorid
bugs as a result of fierce competition among males. The male rapist forces his own sperm
into the storage organ of another male while the victim is mating. When the latter
copulates again, he passes on his attacker's sperm and genes. Kinda like artificial
insemination, right?
Why do I tell you all these? According to Batten, "In the human world, love and
romance have long embellished sex, while fears and anxieties often overshadow it. At
various times in our history, many laws have attempted to define, restrict, condemn, and
even forbid such urges. By broadening our perspective on sex to include its biological
roots in the rest of the living world, we may achieve true sexual liberation. We can take
the guilt-ridden ghosts from the closet, sweep up the tangled web of Freudian fantasies,
and simply have fun!" Without being promiscuous, adulterous or irresponsible, it is
possible for us humans to simply enjoy sex. Why not, we may be the only animals who
can!
March 17, 1985, Philippine Daily Inquirer
17. To be a Negro
To be a Negro 700,000 years ago in the dusty plains of Africa, is to be the first creature
on earth to stand erect, with feet that had a supporting arch and fused balancing pads at
the base of the toes. "Man stands alone because he alone stands," said an anthropologist.
He had black melanin pigment to protect his skin from the sun's ultra violet rays,

77
developed an opposable thumb with which to make tools, and a large brain with which to
think and plan and dream. The Negro was the first of the Species Homo Sapiens, of the
Genus Homo, of the Family Homidiae, of the Order of Primates, of the Class of
Mammals, of the Group of Vertebrates.
To be a Negro then was to be the Father of the human race.
* * *
To be a Negro in the 15th century, in the Age of Discovery and the Colonialism, is
to be the common currency in the commercial traffic of slaves, to be kidnapped from his
home in Africa, and transported to the New World to serve and service the white man.
To be a Negro then was to be the object of the cruelest tyranny of all time, to be the
victim of man's worst inhumanity to man.
It was not until the end of the 18th century when the great nations of Europe,
among them Great Britain in 1772 and France after its Revolution in 1791, finally
abolished the abomination of human slavery.
But in the United States --- the land of the free and the home of the brave ---
arsenal of democracy, Christian defender of the Faith --- the ancestral abode of Steve
Bosworth, Phil Kaplan, Fred Whiting and all the Americans we Filipinos worship as
God's Chosen --- slavery was not abolished till almost a century later, after a great Civil
War, by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, followed by a
Constitutional Amendment in December, 1865. And the funny thing was that the Civil
War was not fought on the issue of the abolition of slavery, but on the issue of the Morrill
Tariff, and the extension of slavery into the Western territories. It was Abraham Lincoln's
sense of humanity that made him convert a grubby little war into a great war for the
liberation of human slaves. He paid for it with his life by an assassin's bullet on April 14,
1864.
To be a Negro in the United States 200 years later, is to be relegated to the back of
the bus as an inferior race, to be denied the right to vote and equal opportunity for
economic advancement, to be segregated into crowded ghettoes, and set upon by the
burning cross of Klu Klux Klan, the truncheons and shotguns of red-neck white-trash and
the mad dogs of white supremacy. To be a Negro is to fight back with the boycott and the

78
sit-in and Warren Supreme Court; with bloody non-violence in the university campus of
Mississippi, and in the streets of Atlanta, Georgia and Little Rock, Arkansas (pronounced
Ark'n-saw).
* * *
To be a Negro in USA today is to be the best in football, in basketball, in the
Olympics; in the entertainment circuit as singers, comedians, actors, composers. To be
Black is to be beautiful in the Philippines, especially if one's name is Norman.
To be a Negro in South Africa is to be in an instant replay of the Civil Rights
Movement, with Bishop Tutu and Mandela taking the place of Martin Luther King and
Malcolm X, with the same common enemy: the white man and his apartheid.
To be a Negro in Uganda and in Ethiopia is to live in the dark edges of human
society, hungry, scared, despairing, wondering not only why he is dying, but why he ever
lived.
To be a Negro in Nigeria is to be part of 91 million population, with 25 %
literacy; where in 1966, the Muslim Hausas massacred the Christian Ibos, who later
seceded and set up the Republic of Biafra, collapsing after 31 months of cruel bloodbath.
To be a Negro in Nigeria is to live under a succession of military governments ---
Col. Yakubu Gowon (1966-1975), Army Brig. Muritala Rufai Mohammed (1975,
assassinated), civilian rule under Alhaji Shehu Shagari (1979-1983), a military coup by
Maj. Gen. Mohammed Buhari (1983-1985), and then another by Maj. Gen. Ibrahim
Babangida (1985-?). In July 1984, two crates labelled diplomatic baggage in British
Stansted Airport, yielded a Nigerian exile Umaru Nikko in drugged stupor, ready to be
transported back to Nigeria for execution.
To be a Negro in the Nigerian Embassy is not to know enough English to realize
that references to negroes in my articles are to emphasize the common travail of both
negroes and Filipinos under the dominance of racist white men, and never were nor meant
to be a slur on the Negro race. Atiris kayon lasi.
November 12, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer

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18. In defense of the Filipino male
It really gets my gander up to be told that Johnny Litton, our ideal Filipino male, witty,
urbane, sophisticated, the stout defender of our gender, was bested by no less than the
movie actress Pilar Pilapil, on the subject of "Do foreigners make better mates for
Filipina women?" in Elvira Manahan's "Two For the Road" program. I checked and it is
not true; no female ever bested Oh Johnny Oh.
Totally surrounded by a bunch of veritable viragos, all married to foreigners ---
Sol Banshee, Lulu Boon, Gloria Holm, Lynn Deutch, Pilar Pilapil --- poor Johnny was
overwhelmed by sheer numbers, by sheer volume, and by sheer shrillness of voices honed
to perfection by constant nagging.
It remained for Pilar Pilapil to demolish Filipino manhood with the assertion that
Americans make better husbands and better providers than Filipinos. What could Johnny
Litton say? Unlike Pilar, he never had a Filipino husband nor an American one, so he
could not even argue from experience.
Being nationalistic and all that, I feel compelled to take up the cudgels for the
Filipino male. Like Johnny I cannot argue from experience, so I'll try to do so by logic.
* * *
A Filipina woman with only one husband has no basis of comparison, and should
keep quiet unless she has been making surveys among other men unauthorized by her
husband.
Most Filipina women in a position to make comparisons, usually have a Filipino
husband in their early twenties, and after the passage of years, finally marry an American
in their fifties. Now, a woman at 50 years is no longer the same woman she was at 21.
At 50 she is older, wiser, and willing to settle for a heck of a lot less than the man she
dreamed of at the age of 21. In other words, at the age of 50, a woman no longer wants a
male lover, she wants a meal ticket. It is unfair to make comparisons.
An American in the Philippines is practically guaranteed a good job and the best
business opportunities, no matter how low the level of his IQ, by virtue of government
policy and our colonial mentality. The American is a better provider and a better meal

80
ticket for a Filipina 50 years of age than we Filipinos can ever be. He is rich enough to
finance her shopping, without the energy to keep her awake at night.
* * *
Ah but at the age of 21, the Filipina woman is indeed lucky to get herself a
Filipino male. Filipinos take a bath daily, and that's better than the Saturday Night
Special usually practiced by denizens of cold climates where an extra coat of grime is
considered added protection from the ravages of winter.
Filipinos consider themselves on a higher level of evolution, being comparatively
hairless, and farther removed from the gorilla than foreigners who have hair all over their
bodies. Imagine having dandruff all over!
Filipinos have bigger brains in smaller bodies, which means they occupy less
space, eat less food, wear less clothing, use up less resources, and generally are more
economical to maintain than the Incredible Bulk that our foreign friends usually are.
With smaller appendages, it is easier for Filipinos to maintain the proper blood
pressure to engorge the blood vessels necessary to keep up the good work. J.V. Cruz
used to say that he found hard evidence of his manhood at the age of seven, and it did not
begin to subside till he reached the age of 27. He actually thought it was a permanent
condition.
* * *
Men, they say, are naturally polygamous, and women are naturally monogamous.
And how do the various cultures resolve such a contradiction?
To begin with I must categorically state for the benefit of my wife and my motherin-law,
that all this talk about the polygamous nature of the male, is pure hearsay from my
viewpoint since I am definitely monogamous. I can only proceed on the testimony of J.V.
Cruz, of course, that there is a basic contradiction between the polygamy of man and the
monogamy of woman.
How does the American male resolve this contradiction? He does so by a
"sequential" process (like the sequence of numbers in math), that is, he gets married, then
gets divorced, then gets married to another woman, then gets divorced, ad infinitum, till
libido and pocketbook can no longer sustain the process. The trouble with this sequential

81
process, is that it does not assure the female of any security of tenure and stability of
relationship, and as the years roll by, her bargaining posture with respect to the man is
diminished.
Also, as he gets older, the American male finds that he has to support all of his
wives on a cumulative basis. The process also assumes wrongly that the American is as
good in the beginning as he is at the end; as a consequence there is maldistribution of
resources, so that at the outset the supply of manhood is excess of the demand, and in the
end he can deliver a heck of a lot less than he thinks he can. It's a lousy arrangement.
* * *
The Chinese utilize the process of "integration" (like integral calculus). He
integrates. He marries several wives and keeps them all under one roof. There is number
one wife, number two, and so on, along a pecking order on the totem pole; I know a
Chinese who has a four-story house, where he keeps each of his four wives on separate
floors. The trouble with this integral process is that it does not solve the basic jealousy of
wives for each other. This leads to a lot of hairpulling and intrigue among the wives and
their children, leaving papa with a lot of gray hairs, and a lower life expectancy.
Ah, but the Filipino utilizes the process of "differentiation" (like differential
calculus). What's that? Well, he differentiates. He maintains all his girlfriends in
different houses, all unbeknownst to one another, so each of them thinks she is the one
and only. The advantages of this set-up are that (1) each of the girls feel secure and stable
in the relationship, (2) each of them is spared the pain of jealousy and envy, (3) each of
them can enjoy the company of the male at the highest peak of his manhood.
* * *
And from the sociological standpoint, in the absence of a strong labor movement,
the querida system serves well as an income leveler, an instrument by which our society
achieves equitable distribution of wealth.
I disapprove of all these of course because I am Catholic, monogamous, happily
married, and plain exhausted. The fact is that Filipina females, taken two or more at a
time, are simply too much and too good for any male, Filipino or foreign... with the
exception perhaps of J.V. Cruz and Johnny Litton.

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July 30, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
19. The anatomy of a kiss
I never saw my parents kiss each other on the lips. A buss on the cheek, a warm embrace,
good-natured bantering, muffled sounds behind closed doors that sounded in their turn
like quarrels, like debates, like whispered secrets and intoned prayers: those were
expressions of their love.
The first time I really saw a kiss was in a replica of a statue sculptured by the great
Rodin. The statue must have been around for a long time, but I never noticed it till my
voice cascaded down from high C to B flat minor, and my hair began to grow in the most
unlikely places.
The classic statue of "The Kiss" by Rodin, a man and a woman in their birthday
suits, bodies intertwined in what appeared to be Pilita Corrales twisted around herself,
and joined by the mouth, had a devastating effect on an adolescent at puberty, a sort of
sugar and spice and fireworks all imploding into the groin.
By the time I was a young man, watching Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman
performing a marathon 6-minute kiss in a Hitchcock movie, the magic was gone. I have
been inoculated, satiated, immuned.
* * *
The old movies being what they were, I thought The Kiss signalled the end of the
story, followed by a fade out and the frame "The End" accompanied by a climactic
symphonic coda. In the first wedding I attended, with the organ playing Mendelssohn,
my uncle Arturo "Unca Tong" Maramba kissed his bride Maria "Nay Maring" Henares,
and I gave out a cry of despair that resounded throughout the Bacolod Cathedral ...
because I was sure my uncle and auntie would ride off into the sunset and would never be
seen again.
The old movies being what they were, I first thought that The Kiss was the
exclusive prerogative of the white race, till the beautiful cinema star Rosa del Rosario got

83
her first screen kiss from Fernando Poe Sr., father of Ronnie. It was in a movie called
"Zamboanga" and the kiss was done underwater. I thought that Filipinos were obligated
to kiss under the H2O, and almost drowned my first girlfriend.
I had two memorable kisses in my life: my first real kiss behind the confessional
in Pasay Church with a girl named Connie Gonzalez; and something akin to a miracle on
a February 16th, when I first planted a kiss on the uncontrollably trembling lips of a 16-
year old girl, who became my wife, in Boston, beside a stairway that led way up to the
stars.
* * *
I remember having read somewhere, in the book "How Green is My Valley," a
vivid explanation of the anatomy of a kiss. I will try to reconstruct and paraphrase it here.
A kiss is strange, yet not strange. It is strange because it mixes silliness with
ecstasy, and there seems no good reason for it. Shaking of the hands should be enough to
convey what one feels.
Not really, for hands are too hard, too used to do other things, with too little nerve
endings, too far from the organs of taste and smell, too far from the brain, and too far
from the heart by the length of an arm.
To rub noses as Eskimos do, is better. But there is really nothing exciting about
the nose, it is a only piece of bone cartilage protruding out of the face, too cold during
winter, but useful in front of a sweet rose or a steaming boiled lobster.
The eyes are an inconvenience, for if we come too close they get crossed, and we
become four instead of two, a crowd instead of pleasant company. With the ears, nothing
is possible, so we are back to the mouth.
We kiss with the mouth because it is part of the head and of the organs of taste
and smell. It is the temple of the voice, the keeper of the breath, treasurer of tastes and
succulences, and home of the noble tongue.
And its portals are firm, yet soft, with a warmth and a ripeness, and in women, a
rosy tenderness, to the taste like wild strawberries. yet if the taste of kisses went, and
strawberries came the year round, half the joy would be gone from the world.
When we kiss and the mouth comes to mouth, in all its silliness, breath joins

84
breath, and taste joins taste, warmth is warmer still, and tongues commune in a soundless
language, and those things are said that cannot find a shape, have a name, or know a life
in the pitiful faults of ordinary speech. The Kiss is the language of Love.
* * *
And lastly, an anonymous verse to shame Shakespeare:
Before I heard the doctors tell
The dangers of a kiss,
I really thought that kissing you
Was happiness and bliss.
But now I know Biology,
So I sit and sigh and moan ---
Sixty million bacteria!
And I thought we were alone!
October 8, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
20. The intellectual art of giving insult
The aging, balding American, slightly decayed and preserved in alcohol, insulted me to
my face, "I've been thinking this over for two weeks ... I find your columns repulsive!"
And I answered, "Is that all?"
* * *
Filipinos do not take direct insults with grace, because they do not appreciate the
ancient art of giving insult, which is one of the greatest diversions of the intellectual
world. Sarcasm, Ridicule, Derision are part of the arsenal of a combative intellect, and
are in the great tradition of Disraeli and Gladstone, Abraham Lincoln, George Bernard
Shaw, Shakespeare, Winston Churchill and John Kennedy.
Shakespeare's Mercutio, when Tybalt asked "What wouldst you have with me?",
answered insultingly, "Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives."
Gladstone said of Disraeli: "The gentleman is inebriated by the exuberance of his

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own verbosity." Abe Lincoln was called an Ugly Baboon and Nigger Lover. Once, while
he was making a speech, a heckler kept waving a black doll in front of him, and Lincoln
addressed him thus: "Your baby, I presume?"
Winston Churchill who has been called a "pompous ass" by his political
opponents, was once told by Lady Astor, "If I were your wife, I'd poison your brandy!"
And Churchill answered, "If I were your husband, I'd gladly take the poisoned drink!"
When the beautiful movie star Gloria Swanson proposed to have a baby by writer
George Bernard Shaw, she explained, "What a child we'd have, with your brains and my
body." Shaw declined with this comment: "But suppose the child has your brains and my
body?"
And John Kennedy said of American Big Business during the steel strike: "My
father told me that businessmen were sons of bitches, but I never knew how true it till
now." In Philippine politics, we find two gems: one congressman (Soza) was called The
Magnificent Pipsqueak, and another (Leonie Perez?) was accused of having Diarrhea of
the Mouth.
My professor, Father Joseph Mulry S.J., God bless his soul, honored me with one
of his classic insults: "Henares! Did the idea I have been trying to convey to your
benighted mind, batter its way into that empty coconut shell you use for a head? Or has it
succeeded in penetrating that impregnable barrier of your skull, only to fall defunct, void
and useless into the soles of your feet?!"
There is wisdom in the saying "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words
can never hurt me." For barbed wit and veiled insults are acceptable substitutes for the
gun and the grenade. They are therapeutic catharsis for rage and frustration, a primal
scream to purge the bile out of the system. Beware of the quiet polite ones who bottle
their anger, they are the ones who shoot you at the back of your head.
* * *
"Is that all?" I asked the American, because after two weeks of intensive thinking,
I should think he could make up something more colorful, more incisive, more
imaginative, more insulting than the word "repulsive".
In Edmond Rostand's play "Cyrano de Bergerac", the hero who is burdened with

86
an enormous nose, was challenged to a duel by a man who dared to say, "Your nose ... is
rather large."
And Cyrano answered, "Is that all? Ah sir, you are too simple. You might have
said many things, why waste your opportunity? For example thus:
"If I had such a nose I would have it amputated! ... You must have a special cup to
drink with such a nose! ... It's a crag, it is a precipice, my God, it is a peninsula! ... When
it blows, the typhoon howls and the clouds darken. When it bleeds --- the Red Sea! ...
What a sign for some perfume shop!
"When are we going to unveil the monument? ... When you smoke, it's a chimney
on fire! ... Take care, a weight like that makes you top-heavy! ... Do you love birds so
much you give them that branch to perch on? ... Call that a nose? It is a blue cucumber!
"These, my dear sir, are what you might have said, if you had some tinge of letters
or wit. But wit you do not have an atom. And of letters, you need but three to write you
down --- ASS!"
That is why I say to my American friend, who I am afraid will ever be with us in
the Philippines because he has forgotten how to wash dishes and make up his own bed ---
who labored mightily with his miasmic brain for two whole weeks, and brought forth not
a mountain, but a mouse ---
"Is that all?"
November 1, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
21. Smiles of a Sabbath day
On the first day of my sabbatical, I checked into a Baguio hotel, and the front desk girl
Gina Oliva said, "The reservation is for mister and missus, is your wife with you?" Not
yet, I answered, "Can you provide me with one temporarily?"
Later my host Sir Knight of Rizal Conrado Puzon called up "Is everything
alright?" And I answered "Yes, and thanks for the girl that went with the room. I had a
wonderful afternoon!" There was a long silence at the end of the line, then "You are

87
joking, Mr. Henares, of course." Of course, I said.
Apparently, Conrado Puzon was not sure I was joking, so he showed up later to
check me out. I opened the door and greeted him, but his eyes were not on me. His eyes
widened as they discerned what appeared to be Ingrid Bergman just behind me. His jaws
dropped open, his eyes popped out, his knees buckled, and his voice crackled, "Mr.
Henares, in the name of God, Cardinal Sin and Jose Rizal ..."
"How do you do, Mr. Puzon," I said, "meet my wife, Cecilia."
* * *
On the second day of my sabbatical, I made a speech about Jose Rizal, Jimmy
Ongpin and Winnie Monsod, and of course the Four Horsemen and their Control, Dick
Holmes of the CIA --- all in relation to Rizal's dream of a nationalistic and industrialized
Philippines. After which I got a tremendous ovation, and a request for autographs, like
Gabby Concepcion.
I spoke on the same platform as Senator Raul Manglapus, Minister Rene
Saguisag, PUP president Nemesio Prudente, Professor Jose David Lapuz, Philconsa
president Froilan Bacungan and Deputy Minister Jose Ingles ... where the Armed Forces,
the Council of Trent and the CIA are not at all represented.
The rest of the day as well as the night before was spent with Nina Estrada Puyat
and her niece Linda Rodriguez Angeles. Nina, sister of Eva Kalaw, and a poet in her own
right, is my twin soul. My essays, as you readers may have noticed, are studded with
private jokes, obscure allusions and double intendres, by which I amuse myself, vent my
spleen and make my own day. Nina never fails to spot them; she keeps catching me with
my pants down, so to speak.
* * *
We had breakfast of Egg Benedict and strawberry waffle with our Tita Nuning
Cuyugan Oppen, mother of Gretchen Cojuangco (of Danding) and first cousin of my
wife's father Tomas Lichauco. The Lichaucos are not a family, they are a population.
Marrying Cecilia gave me a lot of cousins: Ding the nationalist economist, Esto the
brother-in-law of Ninoy, Deputy Minister Josie L, the Carloses of Resins Inc; Ernie and
Ernest Escaler, the Social Secretary Ching E, the whole de Leon clan from Pampanga

88
including Johnny (and wife Macaria Madrigal), Badoding, Oscar, Joe, Benny; Vic Sison,
Vening Jalandoni, Panacuchi; Ning and Father Nonong Arevalo, Ateta Gana; Teresa
Nieva, Tony Oppen, Danding and Gretchen Cojuangco, Tony Romualdez of the IMF,
Axel and Mila Brandner of Austria; Sister Marissa of Maryknoll, Helen Small of the
DBP, Ditas Lichauco the Queen of Sheba; Ambassador Marcial Lichauco, Kenneth Fung
Jr. of Hongkong, Rrex and Loretta Baquiran; and on the side of my wife's mother, Adolfo
and Albert Roensch, Neno and Goyito Abreu, Tiling and Nena Yulo, Pepito Bosch,
brother Tony and wife Elfe Brandeis of Germany; historian Charlie Qirino and his wife
Lizl. The Lichaucos are fabulous cooks; one specialty is the Malacañang Roll which they
gifted the Palace since the Spanish times, and of which my ex-future manugang Vilma
Santos ordered 20 this season. How's that for name dropping, which I am constantly
reminded, sells the paper.
* * *
And the evening of our Sabbath was spent with our compadres, Lorna and Teroy
Laurel and their children Jojo, Bobby, Chuck, Sally --- who embraced us warmly in spite
of my article "Doy is a louse". Teroy says I write with intelligence and style, but can be at
times "unnecessarily nasty", which is probably true. But what I dish out to others, I often
dish out to myself, referring to myself as a henpecked husband, a big mouth, an asshole.
I am nasty, `tis true, but only to a few, never unnecessarily, and almost always to
elicit a laugh. Mocking laughter, derision, calculated insults are the weapons of a
combative intellect; beware of the quiet and polite ones who put a bullet into the back of
your head. My tirades are never done in anger, they are calculated and calibrated, and in
my mind necessary to the building of a nationalistic, democratic, liberal, industrial
society.
You will notice, Winnie the Screaming Banshee behaves like a lady on television,
no longer grabbing microphones, shouting or blowing smoke in her opponents' faces.
Christian the Raging Bull no longer challenges nationalists to a fight. Blas the
Magnificent Inebriate thanked me for adding to the Ople Legend. Emperor Stuff-shirt
Bosworth no longer lectures to us. Enrile the Duck is not as pikon as before. Jojo Binay
rarely goes around with his army nowadays. Ed Sazon, Michael Adams and Fred

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Whiting turned out to be nice people. Only Jimmy O, Jobo and Bernie the Alopecic
remain a puzzlement, but give me time.
22. The Great White Father
Lean and ascetic, sharp deep-set eyes with bushy eyebrows, he looked like one of those
fire-breathing saints right out of the Middle Ages, leading the Children's Crusade into the
Holy Land. He was Father John P. Delaney, the first and greatest chaplain of the UP
campus, under whose aegis the UP Student Catholic Action (UPSCA) beat the be-jesus
out of all the fraternities in the turbulent 1950s.
He had gentle smiling eyes, soft voice, big hammy hands, with the face and
physique of heavyweight boxer. He was Father Walter B. Hogan, the founder of the
Federation of Free Farmers (still under Jeremiah Montemayor) and the Federation of Free
Workers (still under Juan C. Tan), whose forays into the picket line were studded with
placards carried by such future exploiters of the masses as Sixto Roxas III, Vicente
Jayme, Manuel Lim Jr., Luisito Sison, and many other Ateneans who held him in awe and
admiration.
Abrasive in manner and speech, a cruel glint in his eyes, inveterate party goer, he
was a racist who was thrown out of Cornell University for lectures telling the Negroes
they were biologically inferior to the whites. He was Father Michael McPhelin, head of
the Economics Department of Ateneo University, suspected CIA agent, a hanger-on at
Malacañang as some sort of Rasputin, and the beloved mentor of NEDA Director Vince
Valdepeñas.
* * *
Delaney, Hogan, McPhelin, all American Jesuits --- each was a Great White
Father who stamped his mark upon a whole generation of Filipinos. The beloved Father
Delaney was probably the first priest in the Philippines to say mass facing the audience
(there was a time all you could see was the priest's back) and in English rather than in
Latin; he was pastor not only to the UP students but to hundreds of eloping couples and

90
young marrieds on their first quarrel. "You're a wonderful priest, Father, but I seriously
wish you were a Filipino instead of an American," I once told him, and he answered with
deep hurt and anguish, "How much of myself do I have to give in order to be considered
one of you?"
The equally beloved Father Hogan raised an entire generation of capitalists with a
social conscience, but he angered powerful oligarchs who saw their own children
manning the picket lines against their own companies. Gabriel Daza, Fernando Sison and
Justice Manuel Lim, top executives of the A. Soriano companies, were shocked to see
their children Dave Daza, Luisito Sison and Manny Lim among the strikers, and looked
upon Father Hogan as a Svengali. Eventually Father Hogan was practically thrown out of
the country as persona non grata.
* * *
The first time I met Father McPhelin was as a young businessman just fresh out of
college invited to speak before the Ateneo Economic Society. He was the rudest person I
ever met, he kept interrupting me, making insulting remarks about the integrity and
competence of Filipino businessmen, and made no bones about his conviction that
American multinationals should be given free rein to exploit our country (Shades of
Bernie Villegas and Jess Estanislao!).
Finally, I spoke to him thus: "McPhelin, you have me at a disadvantage. In the
first place, you are a priest; that means God must be on your side. In the second place,
you are a Jesuit priest, which means that you are probably one of the most brilliant of
holy men. Above all, you are an American Jesuit priest, which makes you in the worst
and most ominous sense of the term, a Great White Father about whom we Ateneans and
Filipinos have a colonial mentality. But mark this, McPhelin, from here on, there will be
no public forum you will ever attend that I will not grace with my presence. And I
promise you when we meet in debate, I will wipe the floor with the two protuberances of
your ischia --- that is, with your butt!" He was shocked out of his wits at the first Pinoy
that ever talked back to him.
* * *
This big bully Father McPhelin browbeat an entire generation of Ateneo students

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into being Little Brown Brothers, without pride of race or faith in the Filipino. I hounded
him for years, challenging him to a debate, questioning him in the open forum period, till
he developed diarrhea at the very sight of me. Everywhere he went, he brought his
assistant with him, a nice harmless young man named Vicente Valdepeñas Jr.; and when
he saw me, he rushed out leaving poor Vince to face me as I complained: "Must I spend
the rest of my life debating with altar boys?" And golly I still am.
Going back to Father James Delaney whom my wife and I considered our very
good friend and counselor in our early married life, I answered his question thus: "With
all due respect to you, Father, you can never be a real Filipino, you will ever be the Great
White Father in our lives, the Tarzan, Superman and Lone Ranger who will take care of
us, and without whom we cannot survive. I sincerely think that this emotional
dependence is infinitely worse than all the good and wonderful things you are doing for
us, which in the last analysis, we must learn to do for ourselves."
Father Delaney remained a friend, but he never quite felt comfortable with me
around. It seemed sometimes that he was just playing a role, something like Ambassador
Stephen Bosworth, Vernon McAninch, and Lewis Burridge do when they take up their
White Man's Burden and lecture to us Filipinos on how we are supposed to think and
behave. And we accept the role as normal, even though we are aware that aside from
being Americans they are gifted with no particular brilliance of mind or nobility of
character, and are just engaged in the grubby business of advancing American interests.
Sept. 24, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
23. Bernie Villegas, wishing upon a star
Late in 1984, Bernie's CRC, and the Government ventured to make a prediction on what
was in store for us in the year 1985. The Economic Memorandum put out by the Central

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Bank and the NEDA predicted that the dollar rate will increase to P24/$; Bernie's CRC
agreed, and both were wrong. At the middle of 1985, the dollar rate was P18.65/$ and
edged up to P20 in December.
The same Economic Memorandum said the inflation rate will go down between
20% to 25%; Bernie's CRC predicted 35% to 40%. Both were off the mark, for at
midyear the inflation rate was about 30%, at year's end, 7% inflation rate.
The Government said that for 1985 the GNP will have Zero growth; the CRC
predicted that the GNP growth will be negative, from 1% to 2% below zero. At the end of
the year, it was 3% below zero, while all our Asian neighbors managed to post 3% to 7%
gains on the Gross National Product.
The Government in the same memorandum said that retail prices will increase
between 20% to 25%, while the CRC prophesied that it will increase by 35%. The retail
price actually dropped to about 8%.
* * *
What is absolutely amazing is that in June 1985, at midyear, both the government
and the Opus Dei have changed their minds, and "updated" their predictions for the whole
year 1985. That's like changing your racetrack bet when the horse race is halfway
finished. Or predicting the outcome of the basketball game at the last two minutes before
the final whistle. Not really cricket, but that is how soothsayers cut their losses.
Minister of Trade Roberto Ongpin in an interview declared that the Economic
Memorandum issued by the CB and the NEDA in November 1984 was NOT the official
position of the Philippine Government. The CRC and the Opus Dei in the same way
must have heard another chorus of angel voices telling them to revise their predictions for
1985.
So here are their predictions at midyear 1985 for the year-end 1985. Re the dollar
rate, Ongpin P18.50/$, CRC P21/$; actually it was P20/$. Re the Inflation Rate, Ongpin
predicted a surprising 5%, CRC a full 25%; actually it was 7%. Re the GNP Growth,
Ongpin foresaw a surprising 1.5% GAIN, while CRC an equally surprising 5% LOSS:
actually it was 3% loss. Re Retail Price Increase, Ongpin from 8% to 10%, CRC 25%;
actually it dropped to 8%.

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* * *
Our modern-day soothsayers unlike Nostradamus, do not give vague riddles or
predict events that happen after they die. The manghuhulas of the CRC and the
government make predictions that are quantified, clear and unequivocal, on events that
occur within a year. That is why they are so often wrong. In olden days they would have
been stoned, pushed off a cliff and burned at the stake many times over.
Why do otherwise normal and rational people keep making predictions that could
so easily prove to be wrong? Would it not be the better part of sanity to just urge the
Filipinos to do their best, and then wait for the outcome of such efforts a few months
hence? Why do they stick out their necks on a matter so fraught with uncertainty and
governed by so many factors much out of their control? Is it a case of masochism, an
invitation to public ridicule, an obsession for punishment and self-flagellation?
In the case of Economic Forecasting, considering such people as Bernie Villegas,
I believe it is a matter of Wishing upon a Star, the wish being father to the thought. Any
prediction if it is credible enough, tends to be self-fulfilling; this is what is called the
"Bandwagon Effect" or Heisenburg Principle. In science, it has been found that any
phenomenon observed tends to be affected by the very act of observation. In political
elections, any prediction that a certain candidate will win, tends to increase his chances of
winning.
* * *
When Bernie Villegas predicted that the dollar rate will rise to P50/$, it is because
he wished the rate to be P50/$. Whether it will happen or not depends on whether or not
the people believe in him. If they believe him, they will buy dollars at P14/$, and will
continue to buy the dollars until its price rises to P50/$.
When it was pointed out to Bernie that his prediction is ridiculous, unbelievable,
irresponsible, and probably the result of mathematical error, Bernie Villegas did a double
take and said that he meant that the dollar will go up only to P24/$. But Filipinos and his
American Multinational friends did not believe him either, so the dollar rate settled to
P18.50 per dollar, leaving our soothsayer Bernie far out on a limb.
Bernie Villegas and the CRC of Opus Dei started an epidemic of Wishful

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Thinking among such government officials as Prime Minister Cesar E.A. Virata, Minister
Roberto Ongpin, and NEDA Director General Vicente Valdepeñas, driving them to make
predictions of their own. But nobody believed them either, so none of their predictions
ever came true.
Why do such men, so respected in the community, insist on making jackasses of
themselves?
September 8, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
24. Ateng: smiles and tears
A yaya who stayed with the family for 28 years, rearing most of our children --- an
old maid baptized Honorata Zaragosa, whom we rebaptized Horonata Zagarosa, and call
"Ateng" --- was overheard giving advice to my eldest daughter in the matter of selecting a
husband. What she said deserves to be preserved for future generations.
Half the tears women shed in their lifetime, she said, are shed because of a
husband's infidelity or plain jealousy. "Ang mga babae talagang swapang sa lalake." Do
not therefore, she said, choose a man who is of the type other women will pursue all the
time. Chose the one-woman man who will love only you.
The other half of a woman's tears, Ateng said, are shed about money. If you do
not have enough of it so that you cannot enjoy security from hunger and the amenities of
civilized living, then your marriage is doomed. On the other hand, if you have so much
of it that you waste it in frivolity, that your husband throws it around to have a good time,
well, your marriage is doomed too. So marry a man who can support you in the manner
you are accustomed to, but who is not too rich that he will spoil you and your happiness.
One half of all the smiles women have in their lifetime, Ateng continued, are due
to sunny memories nurtured and kept for a rainy day. So, store up some good times with
the boyfriend; marry him with whom you share the happiest memories.
And the other half of a woman's smiles come from the knowledge that she has
contributed much to the happiness of others, of her husband, her children, and if she has a

95
heart big enough to love the rest of the world, then she is a thousand times blest. And
remember, as the wise Wizard of Oz once said, "Ultimately it is not how much you love
that matters, it is how much you are loved by others."
July 26, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
Chapter Three: That’s Entertainment
25. Fading shadows on the wall
The Motion Picture invented by Thomas Edison has unquestionably become the greatest
of all the performing arts, its stars more recognizable than history-makers and leaders of
nations. Its stories of love and hate, of heroism and cowardice orchestrated the emotions
of millions, moving them to war and peace, to crazy fads and tinseled dreams. It became
an instrument exploring the souls of men, making them see the splendor and the
meanness of the human spirit --- the towering heights it could attain and the miry depths
into which it could sink --- and ultimately, the Common Humanity of All Men.
The movie industry weathered a painful transition from silents to talkies in the
late 1920s, and lost half of its audience in an uneasy truce with a new medium called
television in the 1950s. By mid-1960s, in Hollywood as well as in Manila, the movie
industry, like Charlie Chaplin's tramp, had become a loser, a lonely figure waddling off
into the sunset.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner, Paramount, 20th Century, United Artists were
bought by New York conglomerates and confined to distribution, while movie
productions were done by small outfits and overpaid stars. RKO-Radio was bought by
Lucille Ball, once a contract player who made her fortune in a television series called "I
Love Lucy."
* * *

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By the late 1970s, the shadows that once flickered brightly on the wall, finally
faded away. What did it in irrevocably are High Taxes and the Betamax Revolution.
What happened to all those wonderful downtown theaters we used to patronize at
least once a week throughout most of our lives? The once great Ideal Theater, home of
MGM films, owned by the family of Anding Roces, does not exist anymore, its location
taken over by a Shoe Mart store. The mighty empire of Ernesto Rufino who up to the late
1950s, operated 78 % of all the first run movies in the Philippines, is no more: Avenue
and Ever theaters have been sold; Lyric Theater is now a parking lot; Capitol is reduced
to showing Chinese movies.
The ever smaller market for movies are catered to by a new group of theater
owners: Jorge Araneta (Nation, New Frontier, Ali Mall); Leonor de Leon (Coronet,
Diamond); Bobby Yang (Remar, Maxim, Miramar, Roxan, Odeon, Roben); Ayala (Quad,
Greenbelt; Rizal and Magallanes are out of business).
* * *
Ernie Rufino himself spread his risks by taking in his competitors as partners in
new corporations running the Quezon Theatrical (Quezon, Broadway, Greenhills),
Eastern Theater, Makati Cinema Square.
Movie theaters are now made for smaller audiences, and in clusters of two to four.
Less movie copies are imported or made, and these are shown in as many theaters at the
same time, with runners carrying movie reels from one theater to another.
What really doomed the movie industry is the Betamax Revolution. The video
recording industry actually started with a cumbersome machine made by Ampex
Corporation of Joe McMicking, part owner of Ayala Corporation and uncle of Enriquito
and Jaime Zobel. From this machine using 2-inch open reel tapes, the Japanese
eventually developed a 3/4 inch cassette called U-Matic, which is now the professional
standard for studio use. Then Sony developed a 1/2 inch home video cassette system
called Betamax, followed by Panasonic's VHS system. Only 18% of all home video
machines are Betamax; the overwhelming majority are VHS. Only in our country do
Betamaxes dominate.
* * *

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The advent of home video spelled disaster for the movies. For as low as P5.00,
half the price of a movie ticket, you can have a choice of many movie titles, see it at
home with the entire family, without parking problems, with time-out to go to the
bathroom or answer the telephone, without anyone putting his feet at the back of your
chair or spitting on you from the balcony, or picking a fight with you. Why go to the
movie theater and risk being trampled upon by movie fans, or stampeded and burned to
death during a fire?
As if that is not enough, the movie industry is being taxed to death. In effect, the
producer gets 30% of the gross for making the film, the theater owner 30% for the use of
his theater. The government gets 40% for doing nothing.
The cultural tax of 25 centavos is exacted from the Nora Aunor fan, and used to
subsidize Van Cliborn's performance at the CCP for the enjoyment of millionaire music
lovers like Jun Cruz and Jaime Zobel. Unfair!
The movie industry that could be an instrument for education, culture and
enlightenment is treated as a vice like horseracing and jai-alai, when it should be given
the priority we give to ballet, books and symphonies. That's really dung!
August 24, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
26. Rolando Tinio's Unfinished Symphony
In the original movie "The Fly", the hero had the arm and head of a fly. The new version
that will be shown soon has the hero, Jeff Goldblum, fusing genetically with a fly, with
more grotesque results. Goldblum, a very accomplished actor, interprets the human fly as
a slobbering, hunchbacked emaciated creature with loose leathery skin and acidic
salivatory squirt. Look hard at this creature with a curvature of the spine and the stance
of a praying mantis --- put on him a pair of John Lennon spectacles and the blinkers of a
sleepy-eyed owl --- then stab him with a ball point pen at the tip of his nose --- and what
do you have? A self-proclaimed genius --- actor, director, script writer --- till recently the
Artistic Director of the CCP Little Theater, Rolando Tinio.

98
* * *
Rolando Tinio may not be the best actor (I like Joonee Gamboa), or the best
director (Zenaida Amador is my cup of tea), or the best translator of classics into Pilipino
(Soc Rodrigo is still the best for me) ...
But as an amalgam of actor, director and scriptwriter, Rollie is a recognized
genius --- the genius that is Rollie is much greater than the sum of his parts, just like
Charlie Chaplin. But Genius has its quirks, and Rollie's is an almost pathological
involvement with his audience.
Remember Doris Nuval who threw a smoke bomb at Marcos in the Cultural
Center? Well, the Mad Bomber became so because as a student of Maryknoll, she came
to see one of Rollie's plays with a friend and arrived late. Whereupon Rollie stopped the
play, lifted her friend and threw her bodily across the room, saying that anyone arriving
late, better come equipped with angel wings. Doris never forgot that incident, and
decided later in life that if Rollie Tinio can do that to her friend, well she can do the
something similar to President Marcos.
Freddie Santos, one of our better stage actors (Repertory's "Morning at Seven",
"Annie"), was just aching to get back to the stage. Since he lost weight and had a face
lift, he has been sidetracked into directing concerts, choreography, and production
consultancy to budding stars such as Raymond Lauchengco, Gino Padilla and the Tux
Octet.
Freddie wanted to mark his stage comeback playing Marat in "The Promise" by
Anton Chekov, as translated into Pilipino by Rolando Tinio and retitled, "Kawawang
Marat." There were to be 12 performances over two week-ends, with 6 played by
understudies and 6 by the main actors. It was a three character play starring Freddie
Santos, Rolando Tinio and Ella Luansing.
In Sunday's last performance in the CCP Little Theater, about the end of the
second act, a dramatic part of the play when everyone is supposed to be moved to tears ---
somebody giggled, followed by a ripple of giggles among the audience.
That often happens among movie audiences, to the confusion of psychologists.
After all we love to watch tearjerkers, so why do we giggle through our tears? Chitang

99
Guerrero Napkil once opined that we do so because we become self-conscious and
embarrassed by our own vulnerability to maudlin scenes.
Anyway that was what happened in the middle of the play "Kawawang Marat" of
Rollie Tinio. And Rollie acted true to form. He stopped his emoting, turned to the
audience and yelled, "Putang ina ninyo! If you are not cultured enough to appreciate our
play, get the hell out!"
Pandemonium. Most of the audience left, except for three rows being harangued
by a student, "Tang ina, pare! Are we going to stand for that? Ininsulto tayo! Halina
kayo, alis na tayo!"
An older man went up the stage and yelled, "Putang Ina, galing pa ako sa
Pampanga para manood nito. Kasi magaling raw itong dula. Tapusin ninyo ito, putang
ina!" On the other hand there was the little sweet lady who argued, "But we were not
unruly, we were quiet, we came to see the play."
A couple went backstage to talk Rollie Tinio into continuing the play, saying, "We
had nothing to do with the giggling!" And Rollie shouted, "It's your fault! It was your
job to shut them up!" Then he locked himself in his room, refused to come out, and for
all we know, is still there.
* * *
What happened to Freddie Santos and his much vaunted stage comeback, for
which he hired an expensive publicist? Out of the 6 scheduled performances for Freddie,
he acted in only 4; and out of the four, only 2 were completed. He was shattered. He was
stunned.
The last time he was seen, Freddie was walking around like a zombie, with glazed
eyes, emoting the lines he was prevented from delivering by Rolando Tinio's untimely
tantrum.
October 10, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
27. The Secret of El Nido
Among the exclusive circle of trained scuba divers, there is a special kind of comradeship

100
akin to those who served in war combat together. It is a bond that is cemented by a
common love for the sea, a cold and silent world full of strange denizens; and the dangers
shared when confronting sharks, sting rays and the bends.
In Christmas 1978, such a group found themselves on the ship "The Lady of the
Sea" owned by the Hizons of Bacolod, dreaming of their own special diving boat,
outfitted to the needs of scuba divers from all over the world. Mr. Keisaduro Homma
promised a ready market of divers from Japan. The Filipino group headed by Aurea
Yamsuan, mostly kids in their twenties, promised to operate the boat and bring the divers
to the most interesting places in the Philippines. Mr. Riyusaki from "Do Sports Plaza" in
Japan promised to introduce the group to people from Nissin Sugar Co. who may be
interested to finance the project.
It turned out that the son of the owner of Nissan Sugar, Tametaka Morinaga, was a
Harvard boy with an obsession for scuba diving, that Nissan had a subsidiary company
called Ten Knots Japan, a travel agency interested in financing the boat in exchange for
being exclusive General Sales Agents for Japan. A old boat was remodelled and outfitted
for them by Cesscraft, a Filipino boat builder in Parañaque, and renamed "Via Mare",
started operation in December 1979.
* * *
Business was so good that Aurea and her group were chartering many other boats
to serve their growing clientele from Japan and other countries, bringing them first to the
sea coast of Batangas, then Mindoro, Palawan and Sulu Sea. In August 1981 while with
"The Lady of the Sea", the flagship "Via Mare" ran aground in Sulu and sank. Again the
group clustered together in the "Lady of the Sea," wept, and planned a new venture that
was unsinkable: a beach resort for divers.
Homma remembered that in one of his trips with Aqua Venture (owned by Danny
and Ben Sarmiento), the propeller of the ship was entangled with weeds, and the ship
limped into what turned out to be a beautiful bay with virgin corals and white beaches,
with high rise islands close to each other, as in the Norway fjords. It is called El Nido in
Bacuit Bay.
Aurea also remembered that one Japanese television crew making a documentary

101
on the Philippines, shot footages of the same area that was shown on NTV, the largest
network in Japan. With scuba tourism thriving and Ten Knots Japan making money
promoting diving tours in the Philippines, it was not hard to convince Nissan Sugar to
finance the building of a resort on El Nido.
Aurea Yamsuan the Dragon Lady and her group were simply lucky. They found a
Japanese group who liked them, trusted them, shared their enthusiasms, and profited from
their venture. Thus the Ten Knots Philippines was born, with the Aurea and her friends
owning 70% and the Japanese group now represented by Homma owning 30%.
* * *
With the insurance of "Via Mare" and new financing from Nissan Sugar, the
Dragon Lady went to El Nido to negotiate for a stretch of beach 1.3 hectares in area. In
any small town in the Philippines, there is the church, the municipio and the big Chinese
store clustered around the plaza and school area.
The church is the abode of the parish priest, the prince of souls; the municipio, of
the mayor and the justice of the peace, the latter being the real king of the town, the
implacable dispenser of justice beholden to no one except the gods in Manila. The mayor
alas needs the citizens' votes, and is more often than not, the servant of the people. But
the Chinese store is the headquarters of the Godfather of the town, the lender of funds, the
giver of all things, the Chinese storeowner, in this case, Mr. Ellis Lim. And it is Mr. Lim
with whom Aurea must deal to get her beach.
Imagine a six-foot Chinese perpetually clad in an advertising T-shirt, pajama
bottoms (alternately maroon, dark green and dark blue), baseball cap and rubber slippers,
hair plastered down with pomade like George Raft and Jimmy Ongpin, and a Limahong
goatee. Godfather Ellis Lim hates two things in life: leather shoes and airconditioning.
He is called "Baculao", the gorilla, sometimes King Kong, and everyone loves and
respects him.
Ranged opposite this giant of a man, is a wisp of a girl only 5 feet 3/4 inches (the
3/4 means all the difference to her). Aurea the Dragon Lady knows Ellis does not own
the property, but she allows him to buy it from others and sell it to her, thus gaining a
valuable friend and ally. Thus did they bargain, a ritual as complicated as the mating

102
dance of the red-breasted robin, till at last Aurea had her property.
* * *
Sometime in 1984, in Mandarin Hotel, a wisp of a girl introduced herself to MP
Ramon Mitra, assemblyman from Palawan, as owner of a resort in his province. She
invited him to El Nido. It was however a year later after a Tourism Convention in Puerto
Princesa when MP Mitra finally got to see El Nido along with his wife Cecile and three
children, as the guests of the Dragon Lady. This year, Mitra went back there with his
wife and 2 children; this time they paid their way.
I went to the El Nido Beach Resort in order to ferret out for myself the secret of El
Nido, the subject of so many stories and legends. Information emanating from obscure
sources made His Immenseness Louie Cardinal Beltran write of it as Manchurian prison
camp; I, Hilarious Hen, was told that it was the center of gold trading and sunken treasure
hunt of a Japanese adventurer.
I brought along my ever-loving wife, just to be sure she does not suspect me of
going with someone else. And we brought our two daughters, one to take care of my
wife's bum leg, and the other to take care of my bum stomach.
Others have been there before us -- Helen Small and Tetchie Lao Velasquez
(widow of Col. Jimmy), Stephen and Maris Kinyon (big boss of Manufacturers Hanover
Trust and his big boss), oldtimer Jack Manning and wife Carlyne --- and were all
impressed with its resort facilities. When we got here, we found two bankers (from
UCPB and BPI), a lawyer and the French Ambassador enjoying the place.
* * *
It is a resort like any other --- with nipa hut cottages, centralized toilet facilities, a
souvenir shop, a seafood restaurant, bancas and other facilities --- with one big difference.
It is clean, so clean you can eat off the floor of the toilet. It provides clean fun for the
family; there are no sex tours; no backpacking tourists frolicking naked on the sand; no
hippies directing the angle of their dangle to water the plants; no cigarette butts or plastic
containers or broken bottles to clutter the landscape; no human stools or rotten garbage or
animal corpses to float in front of your diving mask. Cleanliness that is next to godliness,
is the real secret of El Nido.

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How about Homma, the nephew of the Butcher of Bataan, the gold king and
seeker of sunken treasure? Now a team from Radio ng Bayan (Roger Lagasca, Bert Cruz
and Malou Liwanag) under my friend Jose Mari Gonzalez, OIC of the Bureau of
Broadcasting, is now investigating a report that in the mainland is a Homma operation
involving the illegal exports of quail eggs, lapu-lapu, shrimp and prawn fries, and logs.
As soon as they report their findings, we all be happy to print what they uncover.
In the meantime, Keisaduro Homma continues to be the mystery man, still back in
Japan, and as far as we are concerned, he is grist for the tourist mill, a legend to be
nurtured and exxagerated ... like the Loch Ness monster of Scotland, the Abominable
Snowman of the Himalayas, and the little dwarfs of Leo Parrungao.
July 26, 1986, Philippine Daily Inquirer
28. The mystery of Dog's Mead, challenge to geniuses
Well, put on your thinking caps, m'hearties, here's a real challenge hurled at you by Mr.
William F. Meldrum of Belleville, Illinois. He came across this puzzle 25 years ago, and
it is a humdinger.
I specially print it here because I want to challenge all the geniuses who read the
Inquirer to take a crack at it. These of course include Finance Minister Jimmy Ongpin,
NEDA Minister Solita Monsod, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse --- Christian
Monsod, Bernie Villegas, Ricardo Romulo and Jose Bengson Jr. No alibis now, this
should take less than three hours for guys with ordinary IQ; and no cheating, no asking
assistants to do it for you. We also invite college students with knowledge of Algebra
and Logic. Let's see what school can come up with the right answers the fastest.
Everyone can participate except my immediate family, and employees of the Inquirer.
Whoever submits the right answer the soonest, as evidenced by the postmark, will
win P500.00 cash and a dinner for two with a celebrity. The answer must include all
calculations, and all logic premises and conclusions.
Well, I solved it in two hours, and so can Cory who is a genius. Winnie should do

104
it in 20 hours, and her husband in 20 years. Bernie and Jimmy will solve it when bananas
start to grow in the North Pole. But how about the rest of you?
Keep a copy of this puzzle on file, and every so often I will give you some hints.
* * *
The famous old English puzzle is called Dog's Mead. Although it relates to a
farmer, his family, and his land, it involves a good deal of college algebra and logic. The
problem is to find the age of Mrs. Groosby, Farmer Dunk's mother-in-law. And you must
NOT assume the puzzle was invented this year.
You'll need to know that there are 20 English shillings to the pound sterling, that
an acre is 4840 square yards, and that a rood is a quarter of an acre.
All these hints also help: One number in the puzzle is the area of Dog's Mead in
roods, but it relates to something in the puzzle quite different from that area. One of the
numbers across is the same as one of the numbers down. So here you are. THERE ARE
NO FRACTIONS INVOLVED; ALL ANSWERS ARE IN WHOLE SIGNIFICANT
NUMBERS; NO PRECEDING ZEROS.
ACROSS
1. Area of Dog's Mead in square yards.
5. Age of Farmer Dunk's daughter, Martha.
6. The difference between the length and breadth of Dog's Mead in yards.
7. The number of roods in Dog's Mead times number nine down.
8. The year when little Piggly came into occupation by the Dunk Family.
10. Farmer Dunk's age.
11. The year when Farmer Dunk's youngest child, Mary, was born.
14. Perimeter of Dog's Mead in yards.
15. The cube of Farmer Dunk's walking speed in miles per hour.
16. Number fifteen across minus number nine down.
DOWN
1. The value of Dog's Mead in shillings per acre.
2. The square of Mrs. Groosby's age.
3. The age of Mary.

105
4. The value of Dog's Mead in pounds sterling.
6. The age of Farmer Dunk's first born, Edward, who will be twice as old as Mary next
year.
7. The square, in yards, of the breadth of Dog's Mead.
8. The number of minutes Farmer Dunk needs to walk one and one-third times around
Dog's Mead.
10. Ten across times nine down.
12. One more than the sum of the digits in the second column down.
13. Length of tenure, in years, of Little Piggly by the Dunk family.
{ORIGINAL CROSSWORD PUZZLE WITH B as a Blank Square, and X as a Blacked
Out Square; the rest are the numbers across and down}
1 B 2 3 B X 4
B X 5 B X 6 B
B X B X 7 B B
X 8 B 9 B X X
10 B X 11 B 12 13
B X X X 14 B B
15 B X 16 B X B
Let church bells ring, the Flip is the greatest

106
Let the air resound with the peal of church bells, the blare of bugles and the rumble of
drums. Let our hearts swell with pride, for we Filipinos are indeed the best people on
earth!
The Dog's Mead Puzzle which appeared in an American computer magazine in
October 1981 was so puzzling that no answers were received for two months, and the
magazine never printed the right answer. I printed it in my column on October 20, 1986;
and answers were received in the afternoon of the same day plus those postmarked the
same day. Fourteen were received and of those four had the right answers.
Then I received an avalanche of 51 answers postmarked the next day October 21,
and of these more than half or 35 had the right answers. It is unbelievable, we must be a
race of geniuses. Now you know why I am so inordinately proud to be a Filipino. In MIT
where I studied and which is the toughest college in the whole world (we have to solve
every problem starting from Newton's Laws; no other formulas allowed), we Filipinos
were always in the upper 10% of the class. Yes, even Federico V. Borromeo, really, I
swear, on my honor, ask Renato Grande if you do not believe me. Freddie likes
Americans, but he is an exception to most morons who do, he has brains, honest.
* * *
There were several foreigners who submitted answers; none of them won except
one who appears to be an Indian. I will not say any more, since I just joined the SPCA,
the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Americans.
Among the schools involved, the University of the Philippines won hands down.
No one among the winners acknowledged Ateneo or La Salle or San Beda or Letran as
their college. Perhaps it is true that those with Catholic education do not respond to
challenges because they are used to being spoon-fed. I am glad I went to U.P. too.
We have four winners. There is Mariglo Ledesma Ilowa, a 16 year old, first year
Biology student in U.P. Diliman, residing in 7-B Duplex, C.V. Francisco St., PK
Amorsolo, UP Campus, Diliman, QC 3008. Then there is Aldan Sapit, an 18 year old,
3rd year student in U.P. Engineering, residing in 47 San Marcos Street, Navotas. Then
we have Mary Rose S. de la Cruz, 3rd year student in Computer Science, U.P. Diliman,

107
no home address either. And last but not least, R. Rafael Reyes, a graduate in
Communications, no school indicated, who took only 9 units of college math, residing in
125 or 117 Hon. Gregorio Roxas Street, Quezon City.
Congratulations, I wish I could give each of you P500, but if I did I would have to
survive on tilapia for the rest of the month. We will have all of you for dinner or lunch,
and leave it to you to decide whether the prize money be divided or raffled.
We requested our editor, His Immenseness Cardinal Beltran, for a donation from
his TV show which pays him a price of a Mercedes for every growl. He growled at us,
and expected us to pay him instead, and that was that.
* * *
Among those who had the right answers on October 21, one has no name and the
other 34 are, in alphabetical order: Gregorio Aguilar; Joseph Martin Asunsion; Juveno K.
Austria; Caesar Augustus Blanco; Allan Paul Briones; Lauro Daez; Nelly Daileg; Guido
David; Magnolia Cecilia Dayrit; Leopoldo Denorte; Ma. Carmen Echevarria; R. Erwin
Elevazo; Honorio Estrella Jr.; Percival Myles Garcia; Ishwar Gopichand; Ma. Carolina
Lanuzo; Reynaldo Lesaca; Leonardo Liongson; Jose L. Lopez; Marcel Julius Lopez;
Connie Madarang; Ma. Clarissa Navata; Reuel Inchoco Obar; Rolando de la Paz; Orville
Ponce; Eduardo Quema; Carlito A. Reyes; Celso Roque; M.L. Salvador; Hector
Tabilisma; Elizabeth J. Tan; Jose Tiangco; Arturo Villasor; Bernardo Viray.
Of those with the right answers, 10 indicated they were from UP; one from
Philippine Science High School; one from Mapua; one from Pamantasan ng Lungsod ng
Maynila; one from Bicol University; one from Meralco Foundation Institute; one from
SGV Development; the rest gave no indication where they are from.
The most common mistake happened in 10 Across, Farmer Dunk's age. There are
two possibilities, 62 and 72. But Dunk had a 45 year old son, and it is more likely that he
was 27 rather than 17 when he sired his first-born. Besides, we said that one of the
numbers across is the same as one of the numbers down; and we could only refer to 14
Across and 10 Down, both 792. The correct answer follows:
{CROSSWORD WITH SOLUTION WITH X as a Blacked Out Square, and the 12

108
POINT numbers representing the correct solution. The 10 POINT numbers in
SUPERSCRIPT at the left upper corner of the appropriate square are the original
numberings of Across and Down}
13 8 27 32 0 X 41
5 X 53 2 X 64 4
5 X 9 X 73 5 2
X 81 6 1 90 X X
107 2 X 111 9 121 133
9 X X X 147 9 2
152 7 X 161 6 X 5
Solution to the Mystery of Dog's Mead
15 across = the cube of Farmer Dunk's walking speed in miles per hour. Since
this number has two digits, the speed must be either 3 or 4 mph, because 2 cube is 8 and 5
cube is 125. For 8 down, the speed must be converted to yards per minute. 4 mph is
117.33 yards per minute which involves fractions; therefore the speed is 3 mph or 88
ypm, and 15 across is 3 cube or 27.
Because 8 across and 11 across involve dates in years, each with 4 digits, it stands
to reason, since we have not reached the year 2000 AD, that these two numbers start with
a one, the dates being anytime between 1000 AD to 1986 AD. In which case, 9 down is
X1 where X is the unknown digit.
16 across = 15 across minus 9 down, or 27 - X1, could only be 16 with X being 1.
16 across is 16 and 9 down is 11.
10 down = 10 across times 9 down. Since 10 down ends in 2 and 9 down is 11,
then 10 across must also end in 2 (XX2 = X2 x 11, where X is unknown digit). So with 8
across being 1XXX, and 10 across being X2, then 8 down is 12, the number of minutes
Father Dunk needs to walk one and one-third times around Dog's Mead.

109
* * *
As we said, the walking speed of Farmer Dunk is 3 mph or 88 yards per minute.
In 12 minutes (8 down), Dunk would walk 1056 yards, which is 1 1/3 times the perimeter
of Dog's Mead. 1056 divided by 1 1/3 is the perimeter, 792 yards. 14 across is 792, the
perimeter of Dog's Mead in yards.
One length plus one breadth of Dog's Mead is half of the perimeter (792, 14
across), or 396. Since the breadth is less than the length, the breadth must be less than
half of 396, or less than 198. 7 down, the square of the breadth, is a 5-digit number
ending with a 76, or XXX76. What number squared = XXX76? It must be a number
ending in 6 and less than 198. It must be either 196, 186, 176, 166, 156, 146, 136, 126,
116, or 106, all of which when squared will produce a 5-digit number ending in 6. But
only two of them, 176 and 126, when squared, will produce a 5-digit number ending in
76. Taking into consideration 6 across which is two digits and is the difference between
the length and breadth, we find that if the breadth is 126, the length is 270 and the
difference is 144 which has 3 digits. The breadth is then 176, the length 220, and the
difference is 44. 7 down is 30,976 the square of the breadth (176), and 6 across is 44, the
difference between the breadth and the length.
So 1 across is 3,8720 square yards, the area of Dog's Mead in square yards,
computed by multiplying the length (220) and the breadth (176). Since 1 acre = 4840
square yards, the area of Dog's Mead is 8 acres. And since 1 acre = 4 roods, then the area
is also 32 roods. 7 across is 352, which is the number of roods (32) in Dog's Mead times
9 down (11). This completes 6 down which is 45, the age of Farmer Dunk's first born,
Edward, who will be twice as old as Mary next year. Edward will be 46 and Mary will be
23 next year, and 3 down is 22, present age of Mary.
1 down, the value of Dog's Mead in shillings per acre, is a 3-digit number starting
with 3, or 3XX. 4 down, the value of Dog's Mead in pounds sterling, is a 3-digit number
ending in 42, or X42. Since there are 20 shillings in a pound sterling, then 4 down times
20 divided by 8 acres equals 1 down. X42 times 20 divided by 8 = 3XX. By trying X42
as 142, 242, 342, etc., we find that the only numbers possible are X42=142 and
3XX=355. 1 down is 142, the value of Dog's Mead in shillings per acre, and 4 down is

110
355, the value of Dog's Mead in pounds sterling.
* * *
A clue states that one number in the puzzle pertains to the area of Dog's Mead in
roods, which was computed to be 32, which in turn could be 10 across, the age of Farmer
Dunk, or 5 across, the age of Farmer Dunk's daughter Martha. Farmer Dunk cannot be 32
since he has a 45 year old son. So 5 across is 32, the age of Farmer Dunk's daughter
Martha.
2 down, the square of Mrs. Groosby's age, is a 4 digit number beginning with 73,
or 73XX. The square of 7300 is near 85 (whose square is 7225); we try 86 (whose square
is 7396), and 87 (whose square is 7569). Therefore 2 down is 7396, the square of 86, the
age of Mrs. Groosby, the mother-in-law of Farmer Dunk. This completes 8 across which
is 1610 the year Little Piggly where Dog's Mead is, came into occupation by the Dunk
family.
12 down is one more than the sum of all the digits of the second column down
which is composed of 8, 1, 2 (12 being 8 down) and 7. The sum of the digits is them
8+1+2+7= 18. 12 down is 19, one more than the sum of all the digits of the second
column down.
13 down is the length of tenure, in years, of Little Piggly by the Dunk Family, the
number being X2X. Since the occupation of Piggly was in 1610, then the years of tenure
should be about 300 years, so 13 down should be 32X, and therefore 191X, 11 across is
now 1913, the year when Farmer Dunk's youngest child, Mary, was born.
* * *
Since Mary is now 22 years and she was born 1913, then the present year, the year
of the puzzle is 1913+22 or 1935. The length of tenure in years of the Dunk family in
Little Piggly, is 1935-1610 or 325 years. 13 down is 325.
Lastly, 10 across is X2, which multiplied by 9 down (11) should equal 10 down,
XX2. 10 across can only be 72 or 62, with 10 down 792 or 682 respectively. We pick 72
as the age of Farmer Dunk, because with a son 45 years of age, he was more likely 27
years than 17 years of age when he sired his first born. But the clincher is in the clue that
"one of the numbers across is the same as one of the numbers down." And this could only

111
refer to 14 across and 10 down, both of which should be 792. 10 across is 72, Farmer
Dunk's age, and 10 down is 792, which is 10 across (72) times 9 down (11).
Mrs. Groosby, the mother-in-law, is 86 years of age; the Farmer Dunk, 72; of his
children, Edward is 45, Martha is 32, and Mary is 22.
Some solutions were done by guess-work and trial-and error. The above solution
is what Cory, the math whiz, would have done. Easy, no? Eat your heart out, Small
Dick.
October 20/27, 1986; November 7, 1986, Philippine Inquirer
End of the Book