It was a lot of ground to cover in a week, but hey, it was loads better than stewing in Manila in this infernal heat. It also gave me a chance to meet with faculty members and students from our three Visayas campuses – many people forget or don’t realize that UP now comprises seven constituent universities spread out over a dozen campuses all over the country, including one in cyberspace, the UP Open University (also the only university I know to have two "universities" to its name).
I always welcome an opportunity to visit the Visayas – I’m Visayan myself, born within a stone’s throw of the sea on an island in Romblon – and especially Iloilo, if only for the chicken at Tatoy’s and the fresh fish at Breakthrough. An academic reason’s as good as any, and I truly enjoyed marching in those three graduations and pressing 1,300 hands. (Thank you, Chancellor Ida Siason, for the warm reception.) All the graduates still go up the stage for their diplomas in UP Visayas – a practice we’ve had to forgo in Diliman, which sends off 4,000 graduates on an afternoon in late April.
Some people hate pomp and ceremony, but there’s got to be a time in your life – your wedding might be another – when you submit yourself to the subliminal logic of arcane ritual, often our only link to the centuries past. There seems to be no reason why you can’t just get a piece of paper in the mail certifying to your academic training, instead of sitting in the sun for hours in a funny outfit, waiting for your name to be called. But I don’t think you slaved away for at least four years just to be sent home like Thursday was no different from Wednesday. Especially for young people in a hurry, those few hours they spend in their Monobloc chairs are a good time to figure where they’ve been and where they want to go next.
We never really forget Graduation Day – or the sad fact that we may never have gone to one. I certainly remember mine, because it took me 14 years to get there; it took five hours, but you never felt as pure and as hopeful as when the rays of the setting sun touched you on the shoulder in the amphitheater, washing everything around you in summer gold. The day after I returned from the Visayas, I took my chair onstage at the Diliman graduation, thinking how 20 years had slipped by so quickly. As the afternoon wore on, the fading sunlight gilded the tops of the dark trees and the Carillon tower; a hymn rose up to meet a plane soaring far overhead; a solitary star twinkled in the deepening sky. The moment glimmered briefly; then stayed forever.
I met him quite a few times, though I never knew him as intimately as other friends like Pete and Billy Lacaba, Greg Brillantes, Johnny Gatbonton, and Krip Yuson did. It became something of a joke how I had to be re-introduced to him every time we met. One of our most memorable encounters came early, back when I was an autograph-seeking groupie (which I still am). I stepped up to him during one writers’ workshop – the last one he guested at – cradling my considerable collection of Nick Joaquin books; I asked for his signature on all of them, and he very patiently obliged.
One item in particular caught his attention – an original Sunday Tribune Magazine from September 1937 where his very first poem (yes, he wrote fine poetry as well) was published. I had found it in a stack of old newspapers I’d bought from an old man in San Juan (what can I say? I was a pack rat even then), and was happy as a puppy to show it to Joaquin, whose eyes, I’d like to imagine, misted over. "I have a mind," he boomed, "not to give this back to you!" But he signed it anyway, and gave it back to me. (Now if I can only remember where I put that copy.…)
I ran into him again a few more times in the West Ave. office of Johnny Gatbonton, where a Thursday lunch group typically included NVM Gonzalez and Greg Brillantes; despite the abundance of sumptuous food, I could hardly eat in this company, which was just as well; listening in on the conversation was more fulfilling. In any case it was hard to get a word in edgewise if Nick was holding forth, bellowing and guffawing in three languages.
I admired him immensely for the quality of his prose, of course; but it was really his journalism, more than his fiction, that transfixed me. He had a knack for using his words – like the sun descending into the dark city (paraphrasing Baudelaire) – to "ennoble even the vilest of its creatures." He made filigree sculptures out of the commonest things.
I shared his passion for beer; the only difference was, he had all these masterpieces to show for it, while I have only my 40-inch gut.
One of the most convenient targets of these jokers has been Mercy Abad, whose Trends outfit conducts the actual surveys for SWS and Pulse Asia, among other clients. I know Mercy personally, and I can attest to the fact that, in terms of ability and integrity, she’s worth more than half the Congress put together (unfortunately I can’t easily say which half, as the bad eggs can be found in every corner of the place). For that matter, I’ve also known Mahar Mangahas of SWS and Pepe Miranda and Anna Tabunda of Pulse Asia to be nothing but upright and conscientious academics who – thankfully – are sharing their talent with their fellow Filipinos in more direct ways than classroom teaching.
Can statistics be manipulated? Of course they can – by the unscrupulous, or by people who’ll either read anything and everything into nothing, or refuse to face the obvious even if they’re looking at it in ten-foot letters.
Barring last-minute dramas, there’s one sure way the surveys can be proven "wrong": by massive cheating – which, ironically, will be resorted to by those who see themselves trailing badly behind in the polls.
Like lawyers, statisticians have had more than their fair share of jokes, such as Churchill’s famous "There are lies, there are damned lies, and there are statistics." Those favored by the stars can take their cue from a fellow named Andrew Lang, credited for this apt description of how some people rest on their numbers: "He used statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts – for support rather than illumination." On the other side of the equation, Mark Twain was supposed to have observed that "Figures don’t lie; liars figure."
In Sonny Alvarez we find a public servant who has paid his dues to politics as well and as fully as everyone else, but who has never yielded his vision of better things and a better life for all, especially the poorest. He could have enriched himself where and while he was in public office, but he keeps his home and office in a modest apartment in the soot-blackened heart of the city.
I never met a Cabinet officer from a non-academic background who did his homework so thoroughly, and who could expound so eloquently off the cuff on our most pernicious problems, and their often difficult solutions. It was his insistence on those solutions that led to his fall from grace, and only our gratitude can bring him back up where he deserves to be. Do your kids a favor, and save a space for him in your ballot. I know where he’ll be on mine.