WHOSE FAULT IS IT?
June 13, 2004 | 12:00am
As millions of young people troop again to the schools this season, these thoughts come to mind, thoughts which I would like to share not just with the youth and their teachers, but most of all, with the children of the very rich –they who are nurtured in our most expensive colleges. They are, after all, the future movers of this nation, now buried in the rubble created by their own parents.
Anding Roces who writes for the Star is a few months older than me. We were dining recently and as usual with ancients in their twilight, we reminisced about how it was. He was a guerrilla during the War and had lived with our barrio people. I have quite a few bitter memories of the Occupation, but I never carried a gun. One thing sure though, we were both matured too soon by that war which so sorely tested our generation. When we went on to college after that bloodletting, like so many young people our age we dreamed of an effulgent future for this country.
An aristocrat by birth, Anding had a privileged childhood. He also roamed the corridors of power when, during the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal, he was Secretary of Education. I never had such an exalted position but as a journalist, I did get to see how power operated. Though I was village born, there were occasions when I dined with the high and mighty. But Anding and I never forgot the swamp down there. And so as we were enjoying a princely meal (at his expense, of course) he asked that old tired question, why we were leaving a country in a more dismal bog than what it was when we were young.
Like I said, I sometimes leave the plebeian labyrinths of Ermita to go social climbing in the perfumed precinct of Makati: When the toniest Makati oasis, The Tower Club had just opened, J.J. Calero, the advertising tyro, invited me to speak there. I went early so I could case the joint; it is truly classy, compared with those staid, stuffy clubs in London. But its library did not have a single book on the Philippines, and when I looked at the brass plate that listed its founding members, I was not surprised – all were business nabobs. Not one educator or scientist, no general, no political thinker, least of all, a writer or cultural worker.
There, in its glaring microcosm, is one of the reasons why we were left behind by our neighbors, why we have not become the leading nation in the region which we were in the Fifties and the Sixties. Our elite as perceived by itself is composed only of moneyed people.
Now, the basics: the logic of business is profit; the logic of government is service. And the supreme logic of love of any sort, and particularly love of country is sacrifice.
Businessmen in government? The government as a business? Come now – this is a contradiction, just as the often repeated joke that military intelligence is a contradiction.
Go back to history, not the distant past, but the recent past. We have always been dazzled, for instance, by how Singapore developed in the last three decades, from the sleepy Binondo of the Fifties to the booming, bustling entrepot of the Eighties. How did this come about? Read Lee Kwan Yew’s autobiography and realize that Mr. Lee, Singapore’s former Prime Minister, is the personification of the noble philosopher-king, the man who had vision and political will. Moreover, he was assisted by intellectuals like Goh King Swee. They made a backwater naval base into what Singapore is today.
Bring to mind how the British empire developed, how the intellectuals of those two elite educational institutions of England, Oxford and Cambridge, the captains of industry, the British navy and the royalty formed alliances in those antique London clubs so that with a powerful navy, the British were able to extend the far reaches of their rule to Africa and Asia.
Ditto with Japan – a fairly recent example of how a backward and isolated country can modernize in one generation. Aside from having a disciplined populace and a samurai class turned business men, the Japanese had ideologues like the educator Yukichi Fukuzawa who formulated the guidelines for Japanese modernization: Western technology, Japanese spirit – a process that started with education and the release of the Japanese mind from its medieval cocoon.
When Japan was reduced to rubble in World War II, it was easy for it to resume its premier status and become the world’s second largest economy because the infrastructure was intact and already in place. Look at Japan–with only 20 percent of its land available for agriculture, with no mineral resources, no empire – and no sinews except its people.
Then look at us – and weep.
Teddy Benigno, the columnist of this paper, told me he had stopped accepting invitations to speak before Rotary clubs. And so have I – those businessmen want us for luncheon entertainment, then they go their old insouciant ways.
But look at similar clubs in the United States – the Council of Foreign Relations, for instance, which has committees in all major American cities. These committees help shape American foreign policy because they are not merely social clubs – they have a purpose which transcends business – to help guide America’s path in international relations.
Yes, government needs to work closely with big business. Look at how the Bank of Japan, the Japanese Ministry of Finance, work hand in hand with the political factions and the Zaibatsus. Sure, there is corruption in Japan, in the United States, in the highly developed countries but that corruption is not pervasive, it has not seeped down to the lowest levels and oftentimes, it is what makes the country move fast and up – to wit, South Korea.
In the Fifties, when Malacanañg was easily accessible to any journalist who thought he had some ideas, I met Indonesia’s President Sukarno who was visiting. For all his international gallivanting, Sukarno as the founding leader of Indonesia had vision, not just for his country but for all of Southeast Asia. He was, himself, flawed and Indonesia under his iron and erratic rule, suffered. He said "We are this region’s biggest country – we deserve to lead."
I like repeating, in those days, Manila universities attracted students from the region. Elmer Ordoñez, then a teacher at Diliman had an idea which I shared – an intellectual journal, Comment, which he set up with O.D. Corpuz, Alejandrino Hufana, G. Burce Bunao and myself. It was supported by that maverick publisher Alberto D. Benipayo.
When I had my own resources, with the assistance of foundations and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, I set up in the mid-Sixties, my own journal, Solidarity, and a publishing house with the purpose of propagandizing for reforms and promote regional solidarity. If Indonesia was to lead economically and politically as enunciated by Sukarno, I surmised, we will lead culturally, intellectually. So the journal had a board of editors and contributors from writers and academics of the region. And shortly after, I also established an art gallery in the hope that I would help give our art a Filipino and Asian direction. This, at a time when there was only one other art gallery, Arturo Luz’s.
Then Ferdinand Marcos became president and our steady decline started. It is so easy to ascribe this decay to him but in truth it is not so. This country’s elite structure – and the United States – supported him. How then can the tiny nation-building project I started survive such a catastrophe? How can we Filipinos presume to lead when the exodus of our technocrats, our women as domestics, started?
Yet again, immediately after Cory Aquino set up a "revolutionary government" after Edsa I, I gathered our mandarins for a series of seminars outlining our basic problems and how they may be solved, and capped those meetings with a two-day conference attended by our prime movers to iron out an agenda for the 21st century. The conclusions and recommendations thus forged were distributed to media, to educators, to Congress and captains of industry.
My point: There is no shortage of vision in this country, or of skills to achieve such vision. But the elite did not act.
And why not? Simple – because they are Chinese, or Spaniards, Ilokanos and Cebuanos, or Moros. They are not Filipinos with a sense of nation.
They have no confidence in this country which has given them power and wealth. They may proclaim themselves as Filipinos – but they are disloyal to this country, and ungrateful to the millions who slave for them.
What could possibly change them or infuse them nationalist goals?
The schools that will mold the minds of their children, attune them with our heroic tradition.
And most of all, the cultural workers who will forge these diverse islands and tribes into a granite oneness of purpose.
No one among our leaders, our past presidents truly understand how important culture is in building this sense of nation, and from there, the indomitable will which makes supermen out of puny creatures, enabling them to build not just the biggest battleships or the fastest trains, but also a strong society which is the main engine for progress.
Of the past candidates in the last election, for instance, it was only Raul Roco with his background in literature who understood this function of the cultural worker.
Those folk dances, those stories and novels, the paintings, the original Pinoy music, those nipa huts and other structures built with our hands – oh so many things that cultural workers make to remind us of what we are – we may ignore them but all of these work cumulatively make us aware of what we are, what we have been, and most of all, remind us that we are a heroic people. Our history as reinterpreted and reinforced by our artists, as chanted in our schools, tells us we are strong.
Not too long ago, I was asked again at a Makati dinner with three of this country’s most powerful men who have the wherewithal to lift this country from the dung heap because they have billions.
Whose fault is it?
I pointed a finger to the three of them, and said, "You – because you sent your money abroad."
And I added, it is also my fault, my generation’s fault, because I did not shout loud enough and long enough.
My fault, I repeated to myself with remorse, because I merely wrote and wrote and did not act.
An aristocrat by birth, Anding had a privileged childhood. He also roamed the corridors of power when, during the presidency of Diosdado Macapagal, he was Secretary of Education. I never had such an exalted position but as a journalist, I did get to see how power operated. Though I was village born, there were occasions when I dined with the high and mighty. But Anding and I never forgot the swamp down there. And so as we were enjoying a princely meal (at his expense, of course) he asked that old tired question, why we were leaving a country in a more dismal bog than what it was when we were young.
Like I said, I sometimes leave the plebeian labyrinths of Ermita to go social climbing in the perfumed precinct of Makati: When the toniest Makati oasis, The Tower Club had just opened, J.J. Calero, the advertising tyro, invited me to speak there. I went early so I could case the joint; it is truly classy, compared with those staid, stuffy clubs in London. But its library did not have a single book on the Philippines, and when I looked at the brass plate that listed its founding members, I was not surprised – all were business nabobs. Not one educator or scientist, no general, no political thinker, least of all, a writer or cultural worker.
There, in its glaring microcosm, is one of the reasons why we were left behind by our neighbors, why we have not become the leading nation in the region which we were in the Fifties and the Sixties. Our elite as perceived by itself is composed only of moneyed people.
Now, the basics: the logic of business is profit; the logic of government is service. And the supreme logic of love of any sort, and particularly love of country is sacrifice.
Businessmen in government? The government as a business? Come now – this is a contradiction, just as the often repeated joke that military intelligence is a contradiction.
Go back to history, not the distant past, but the recent past. We have always been dazzled, for instance, by how Singapore developed in the last three decades, from the sleepy Binondo of the Fifties to the booming, bustling entrepot of the Eighties. How did this come about? Read Lee Kwan Yew’s autobiography and realize that Mr. Lee, Singapore’s former Prime Minister, is the personification of the noble philosopher-king, the man who had vision and political will. Moreover, he was assisted by intellectuals like Goh King Swee. They made a backwater naval base into what Singapore is today.
Bring to mind how the British empire developed, how the intellectuals of those two elite educational institutions of England, Oxford and Cambridge, the captains of industry, the British navy and the royalty formed alliances in those antique London clubs so that with a powerful navy, the British were able to extend the far reaches of their rule to Africa and Asia.
Ditto with Japan – a fairly recent example of how a backward and isolated country can modernize in one generation. Aside from having a disciplined populace and a samurai class turned business men, the Japanese had ideologues like the educator Yukichi Fukuzawa who formulated the guidelines for Japanese modernization: Western technology, Japanese spirit – a process that started with education and the release of the Japanese mind from its medieval cocoon.
When Japan was reduced to rubble in World War II, it was easy for it to resume its premier status and become the world’s second largest economy because the infrastructure was intact and already in place. Look at Japan–with only 20 percent of its land available for agriculture, with no mineral resources, no empire – and no sinews except its people.
Then look at us – and weep.
Teddy Benigno, the columnist of this paper, told me he had stopped accepting invitations to speak before Rotary clubs. And so have I – those businessmen want us for luncheon entertainment, then they go their old insouciant ways.
But look at similar clubs in the United States – the Council of Foreign Relations, for instance, which has committees in all major American cities. These committees help shape American foreign policy because they are not merely social clubs – they have a purpose which transcends business – to help guide America’s path in international relations.
Yes, government needs to work closely with big business. Look at how the Bank of Japan, the Japanese Ministry of Finance, work hand in hand with the political factions and the Zaibatsus. Sure, there is corruption in Japan, in the United States, in the highly developed countries but that corruption is not pervasive, it has not seeped down to the lowest levels and oftentimes, it is what makes the country move fast and up – to wit, South Korea.
In the Fifties, when Malacanañg was easily accessible to any journalist who thought he had some ideas, I met Indonesia’s President Sukarno who was visiting. For all his international gallivanting, Sukarno as the founding leader of Indonesia had vision, not just for his country but for all of Southeast Asia. He was, himself, flawed and Indonesia under his iron and erratic rule, suffered. He said "We are this region’s biggest country – we deserve to lead."
I like repeating, in those days, Manila universities attracted students from the region. Elmer Ordoñez, then a teacher at Diliman had an idea which I shared – an intellectual journal, Comment, which he set up with O.D. Corpuz, Alejandrino Hufana, G. Burce Bunao and myself. It was supported by that maverick publisher Alberto D. Benipayo.
When I had my own resources, with the assistance of foundations and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, I set up in the mid-Sixties, my own journal, Solidarity, and a publishing house with the purpose of propagandizing for reforms and promote regional solidarity. If Indonesia was to lead economically and politically as enunciated by Sukarno, I surmised, we will lead culturally, intellectually. So the journal had a board of editors and contributors from writers and academics of the region. And shortly after, I also established an art gallery in the hope that I would help give our art a Filipino and Asian direction. This, at a time when there was only one other art gallery, Arturo Luz’s.
Then Ferdinand Marcos became president and our steady decline started. It is so easy to ascribe this decay to him but in truth it is not so. This country’s elite structure – and the United States – supported him. How then can the tiny nation-building project I started survive such a catastrophe? How can we Filipinos presume to lead when the exodus of our technocrats, our women as domestics, started?
Yet again, immediately after Cory Aquino set up a "revolutionary government" after Edsa I, I gathered our mandarins for a series of seminars outlining our basic problems and how they may be solved, and capped those meetings with a two-day conference attended by our prime movers to iron out an agenda for the 21st century. The conclusions and recommendations thus forged were distributed to media, to educators, to Congress and captains of industry.
My point: There is no shortage of vision in this country, or of skills to achieve such vision. But the elite did not act.
And why not? Simple – because they are Chinese, or Spaniards, Ilokanos and Cebuanos, or Moros. They are not Filipinos with a sense of nation.
They have no confidence in this country which has given them power and wealth. They may proclaim themselves as Filipinos – but they are disloyal to this country, and ungrateful to the millions who slave for them.
What could possibly change them or infuse them nationalist goals?
The schools that will mold the minds of their children, attune them with our heroic tradition.
And most of all, the cultural workers who will forge these diverse islands and tribes into a granite oneness of purpose.
No one among our leaders, our past presidents truly understand how important culture is in building this sense of nation, and from there, the indomitable will which makes supermen out of puny creatures, enabling them to build not just the biggest battleships or the fastest trains, but also a strong society which is the main engine for progress.
Of the past candidates in the last election, for instance, it was only Raul Roco with his background in literature who understood this function of the cultural worker.
Those folk dances, those stories and novels, the paintings, the original Pinoy music, those nipa huts and other structures built with our hands – oh so many things that cultural workers make to remind us of what we are – we may ignore them but all of these work cumulatively make us aware of what we are, what we have been, and most of all, remind us that we are a heroic people. Our history as reinterpreted and reinforced by our artists, as chanted in our schools, tells us we are strong.
Not too long ago, I was asked again at a Makati dinner with three of this country’s most powerful men who have the wherewithal to lift this country from the dung heap because they have billions.
Whose fault is it?
I pointed a finger to the three of them, and said, "You – because you sent your money abroad."
And I added, it is also my fault, my generation’s fault, because I did not shout loud enough and long enough.
My fault, I repeated to myself with remorse, because I merely wrote and wrote and did not act.
BrandSpace Articles
<
>