It happened on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where every bridge is a checkpoint manned by young men in fatigues. Esmael Mangudadatu, Buluan vice mayor, threatened with violence, sending his wife Genalyn, his sister, his nieces and his lawyers to file his certificate of candidacy because he believed women would be safe. Esmael Mangudadatu, inviting a pack of journalists to cover the event, because he believed his family would be safe where the media were. Esmael Mangudadatu, answering the last phone call from a wife who told him they had been stopped by Datu Unsay Mayor Andal Ampatuan Jr.’s private army.

Witnesses say they heard the gunshots. “Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat,” says the barefoot man with the face browned by sun. He heard it, at ten in the morning. Ra-ta-ta-ta-tat. He says it did not last long.

A road, winding past clapboard carwashes and houses of crosshatched palm, bamboo fences trailing soft pink blossoms. A sky, blue, sweeping over sprawling green. A cliff-side, under a yellow sun. This is where they were found, men and women, Mangudadatu’s caravan of untouchables, bleeding into the dry earth, some still sitting inside the white vans with doors flung open. One by one, the others are dug out of a great gaping pit. Bodies, buried in tiers six deep, bloated huge and white, shirts browned by blood, pants bunched at the knees, faces like mashed clay. They unearth a UNTV van, a red Toyota Vios, a crumpled Tamaraw FX. The investigators offer what dignity they can. Newspapers are laid over faces, over crotches, over dirt-encrusted stomachs swollen to the size of overripe watermelons. Some of the dead once wrote for the papers covering their heads.

The flies flock over the bodies. A young man from UNTV stands over the six new corpses. He is looking for his friends, he says. When he finds them, he steps back and watches a drinking buddy wrapped in sheets of red plastic, secured by masking tape, hauled up on a stretcher. The smell of dead stretches down the hill. A backhoe sits at the bottom, one long arm stamped with “Province of Maguindanao.”

Witnesses say they saw armed men, more than 50, walking down the hill, off to the direction of Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao’s provincial capital—where the sprawling peach-and-pink mansions of Andal Ampatuan Sr. and his son Andal Jr. face each other on a street littered with soldiers, on the same street of the enormous peach-and-pink capitol building. It was the capitol where Presidential Adviser for Mindanao Jesus Dureza landed his two helicopters to pick up Andal Jr., the same Dureza who waited for Andal Jr. to “voluntarily come in for questioning.” Of the Ampatuans, Presidential Spokesperson Lorelei Fajardo says that “just because they’re in this situation doesn’t mean we will turn our backs on them,” as if this government has ever had any compunction about turning its back on allies. This is what an “appalled and outraged” president does when the last democratic institution is gunned down on a public road: she offers government helicopters and permits a suspect to ride a private plane, allows evidence to disappear while suspects twirl their guns, lets her executive secretary appeal to suspected murderers to “surrender to authorities” instead of insisting they be ripped out of their holes, and then she expects the nation to applaud her like her moronic deputies.

Fifty-seven (according to the Armed Forces of the Philippines) were murdered last Monday. Thirty of them belonged to the media, 30 men and women whose presence in this benighted country has become the one assurance that the worst will not happen. No guns will be drawn while a camera rolls, but even that safety is gone. Not once in the history of journalism has carnage like this happened to so many. There are no more rules, no lines left to cross. The government would like to give Andal Jr. his dignity, they want to make sure he is treated fairly, they trip over their own tangled lies for his sake. And yet there was no dignity left in the men and women found bloated and half-naked in Sitio Masalay, stripped of notebook and camera and wallet, stripped of face and name, until some unfortunate daughter recognizes Papa’s shirt or Mama’s pants.

Remember their names. Benjie Adolfo, Gold Star Daily. Henry Araneta, Radio dzRH. Mark Gilbert “Mac-Mac” Arriola, UNTV. Rubello Bataluna, Gold Star Daily. Arturo Betia, Periodico Ini. Romeo Jimmy Cabillo, Midland Review. Marites Cablitas, News Focus. Hannibal Cachuela, Punto News. John Caniban, Periodico Ini. Lea Dalmacio, Socsargen News. Noel Decina, Periodico Ini. Gina Dela Cruz, Saksi News, General Santos City. Eugene Dohillo, UNTV. Jhoy Duhay, Gold Star Daily. Santos Gatchalian, dxGO. Bienvenido Legarte Jr., Prontiera News. Lindo Lupogan, Mindanao Daily Gazette. Ernesto “Bart” Maravilla, Bombo Radyo. Rey Merisco, Periodico Ini, Koronadal City. Reynaldo “Bebot” Momay, Midland Review. Marife “Neneng” Montaño, Saksi News. Rosell Morales, News Focus. Victor Nuñez, UNTV. Ronnie Perante, Gold Star Daily. Joel Parcon, Prontiera News. Fernando “Rani” Razon, Periodico Ini. Alejandro “Bong” Reblando, Manila Bulletin. Napoleon Salaysay, Mindanao Gazette. Ian Subang, Socsargen Today. Andres “Andy” Teodoro, Central Mindanao Inquirer.

There were threats against the media in the days after the massacre. But on the day they ripped swollen bodies out of Ampatuan soil, there were photojournalists lining the crest of the cliff like an honor guard, long lenses glinting in the sun. There was a cameraman who stepped away from a tripod to wipe away tears, a veteran in an orange hat with an arm around an orphan. It was both tribute and promise.

This is what the men who fired those machine guns last Monday did not know: that there is no journalist today who will not stand for those who were lost. Remember what happened here, on a lonely hill in a quiet town, where a blue sky sweeps over sprawling green. Remember Ampatuan, and remember their names.

I’ll tell you where I was when it happened, because everyone does – I was in the office, I was in school, I was in the john when I heard – saying it, again and again, because saying it means you’re alive. I was in my apartment, and there was water swallowing cars in murky brown muck. I’ll say I was a writer first, and because I was I was out the door with a camera before I understood that flood meant I was being flooded, and the water rising in the hallways was water rising in my hallways. The water whipped sideways. Everything outside was a blur, like photos shot through foggy lenses. The maintenance man was banging at doors – get ready, get ready, it could still get worse.

It did, but it was the sort of worse that I’m grateful for, as I’ve seen what the Storm can do when it decides. I know what it did to my parents, when the waters rose past the roof of the house they lived in for 20 years, and they raced up a ladder in the rampaging wet, over a fence, across a neighbor’s lawn, carrying two toddler grandchildren and very much afraid. I know my mother cried when she came home and found nothing left, caught her washing tubes of old lipstick in the bathroom with a house falling apart around her, because washing the lipstick meant she had something left. I know what it did to my father, and I do not mean the mud on the one shirt he had left. That first day, I saw him attempting to sweep water out of the house with a wet broom. I know he was afraid he couldn’t protect his wife and the babies, and I know that he ran when the man I hired to clean the house hauled a pile of old muddy papers to the trash. My father has been collecting everything I’ve written since I started in another paper, column after column, two copies every Sunday, one cut carefully, to be pasted on pages of construction paper and slipped into a clear book, the other folded into a square, on the off chance he loses the other. Mud and water do terrible things to paper, but my father won’t let go. He’s still trying to wipe off the mud.

And still I know I’m grateful, because my mother is around to wash tubes of lipstick, and my father is here to shake his head at his falling roof and at his grandkids who tell him unhappily they want to go home. I am grateful I am not the girl who was kneeling beside a white sheet wrapped around the shape of a man, the girl in the backpack and ponytail who found out her daddy didn’t make it out of the water. I’ll tell you their stories now, because that’s what we do, we tell stories, all of us, to pretend that telling them makes sense of them. I’ll tell you about the thin-faced man who could not find his wife and four children when he came home, who told reporters, like a man professing faith in God, that he felt no worry, because he knew they were alive. Their bodies were found the next day.

There was the mother, whose soldier-son died while saving civilians from the flood. They gave her son a commendation and a flag. She said she’ll trade all the commendations in the world to have her son back. There was the man, whose tragedy was recorded on national television, who rode the tin roof of his house in the raging flood with his babies in a bucket and his wife beside him. They rose and fell with the waves, and when they reached the pass under the San Mateo bridge, the waves rose, and two small children and a mother fell.

I’ll tell you how it is, in Pinagbuhatan, Pasig, where walking means slipping into water up to your waist, water that creeps under shirt and skin. This is how it looks in a street corner in Pinagbuhatan, as the sun sets in a purpling blue sky, and food comes in a truck filled with soldiers and matrons and 17-year-old college students. The street fills, in a sudden crazed rush. Water splashes into face and hair and the blue plastic basins they carry to hold babies and hopefully, the plastic bag of rice and noodles and the rare fresh egg. Once a day this happens, and if they’re lucky, they get to stand by the side of an old electric post and compare the hefts of their precious bags. There are whispers that this-or-that woman took two bags, and terrible looks are sent in her direction. These are women whose husbands are tricycle drivers now pushing makeshift boats made of wood and water bottles, who go home every night to fight off the rust dotting their motorcycles. The last flood, knee-high, years ago, took a month to ebb away. They don’t know how long it will take, and they certainly don’t know how they will live. But they will laugh, and play chess on a soggy board, and comb each other’s hair and count lice and hold their babies close, because it could have been worse.

The first time I made it home after the flood, I took a cab whose driver asked me how bad it was, and if a cab could get through. I said it was bad. He saw the trees dripping with ripped plastic bags, surreal Christmas trees, decorated by mad elves. The driver shook his head, and I asked how he was. They stayed on a roof last night, he said. Not even their own roof, because their house was swept away. Where will you go, I asked. He doesn’t know, only that he has to work today. He’ll face it tonight. He laughed. That’s what my father did too, that day I came home. He pulled me out and showed me our old Volkswagen, decades old, a fixture in the street my parents would never – and I suspect, could never sell. It sat exactly where it was while every car on the road flipped belly up. It hunched on its corner, unmoving in 20 meters of water, and sat there the next morning covered in grime. My Dad said it was one stubborn jackass, and patted it on the hood, laughing – proud of one fat little car who shoved a rusty middle finger at the sky and refused to budge.

I do not know who to blame for this, but tonight I will go hug my father and kiss my mother and buy lollipops and shoes for my niece and nephew, and shove my own middle finger at the political gentlemen who are happily stamping their names on food packs, and at one in particular who claimed someone else’s donations were his while cameras rolled. But that’s another column. Today, I’m giving my Dad something to cut out.

I met him by accident, in a bar. There was music playing. The walls were green. It was dark, and loud, and crowded. There were laughing writers in long orange skirts and ponytailed old men sneaking sips from silver flasks of whiskey they snuck out of their pockets.

I remember being half-drunk, of weaving around tables on the way to the bathroom, of discovering my table empty of the boy I had decided I was in love with (I decide I am in love quite often).

And so I sat alone and closed my eyes and when I opened them again, there was a boy sitting across from me, a boy with a Jewish nose and Japanese eyes, who smiled and shook my hand and behaved as if there was nothing particularly odd about sipping iced tea talking to strange girls about the state of Philippine cinema. I don’t remember what he said, or what I said, or if I said anything at all. I did not remember his name the next morning, only that I was glad to have someone there.

Two years later, I had a phone call from my Rogue magazine editor, who told me my column’s layout was done, that I should call Alexis Tioseco, and I understood this as I should call an Alexis Tioseco about my column’s layout. And so I called Alexis, and he explained, very kindly, that he was not in fact a layout artist, that he was a columnist himself, and that he had written the article a page after mine.

I remember him reassuring me that I was not in fact an idiot, that he would be happy to meet me anyway even if he wasn’t a layout artist, and then he asked me to coffee because I was a writer and he was a writer and that he suspected we had very much we could talk about. It was only when I met him two days later that I remembered a boy with Japanese eyes who talked about film at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night.

He had brought a book to the coffee shop – John Berger, I think – and he read aloud from it, right there, at the center table of a Starbucks in Tomas Morato where young girls in short skirts and flip flops giggled over photos in their mobile phones, and clumps of television producers rambled about ratings and the Kim Chiu-Gerald Anderson onscreen tandem.

He read and read, an entire chapter’s worth, and I suspect he would have read on to the very end if the coffee shop hadn’t closed. He wasn’t that good a reader, was Alexis, spoke in a monotone and would begin from the beginning whenever he made mistakes and all I wanted was to eat my Oreo cheesecake.

And this line, he said, listen to this line. And he read it out loud, and I felt that quick ripple of jealousy a writer gets when they recognize a perfectly-written sentence they know they can never write themselves.

He lived five minutes away, and he couldn’t cook and I never would and so we wasted money on risottos and panna cottas and chili burgers, trawled the length of Morato for new restaurants, and we would argue and he would read and I would pretend to listen and once in a while there would be that one glowing sentence that I would write down.

I’ll tell you what I remember about Alexis. I did not know him best, or longest, only that I knew him, and cannot believe that he is gone. We agreed on very few things – that the only real pizzas were cheese pizzas, that there is such a thing as true love, and that Everyman Library published the best hardbound books.

He was a film critic who refused to write about “Juno” and “Slumdog Millionaire,” who waxed poetic about Lav Diaz and Raya Martin, who had the greatest faith that if he pushed hard enough and wrote strongly enough, the public would rise in a body and applaud the work of Ishmael Bernal and Mike de Leon.

He believed that independence in cinema was not measured only by who spent the money. He believed the Viva Hot Babes could not act, and could never be convinced otherwise. He believed in relationships, in replying to messages and keeping promises, and was the sort who pulled out battered copies of much-loved books out of his bag as Christmas presents.

I remember one night, near midnight, when I found myself locked out of my apartment. I called Alexis, and did not have to beg when he offered his couch. I spent the night in front of his television. He put on some obscure film and I smiled in halfhearted appreciation five minutes before I fell asleep. I woke up to see him sitting across me, watching expectantly, and grinning when he saw I was awake.

Then he put on another film – he said this was something he felt I would enjoy – and I promptly fell asleep. And he did it again, three more times that night, film after film. He never gave up even when I said I was a plebian who had great love for “Jerry Maguire.”

That was who Alexis was. He would speak to six students with just as much passion as in a television show with a national audience. And then he would speak of his other love: about Nika, the girl he fell in love with in Slovenia. She was coming to Manila, he said, she was going to live here, for him, because he couldn’t leave. He said she was beautiful and intelligent and that she was the one girl in the world for him. I saw him less when she came, but I saw him happiest too.

I write this to share what I know of him, of this boy with the Jewish nose and Japanese eyes and the great love for moving pictures, the same way every writer and filmmaker who knew him is doing now, because I don’t want all that he was stolen away. I know that he was funny and kind, that Nika was bright and brave. There was only one sentence in his yearbook: Alexis Tioseco wishes to leave the world a better place than it was before he came. I know that I will miss them, that the world will miss them, and that even if the world is a better place for their having lived in it, it is a sadder, lonelier place now that they are gone.

This was the last time I saw them, two weeks ago. I needed a film, in a hurry, for a show I was producing. Alexis had picked up the films for me. It was 11 at night. Five minutes, he messaged me. And I went down to the street and Nika opened the car door and stepped out in jeans and glasses and both of them laughing at the sight I must have made, standing in the middle of the street rumpled and unshowered. Sleep, Nika said. I want copies of those, Alexis said. And then she went back into the car and grinned at Alexis and he grinned back at her and they waved goodbye and now I have copies of those films and I don’t know what to do because Alexis is dead and Nika is gone and I do not understand why.

Let me take you to the court of this man we call chief justice, the gentleman who smiled at suggestions that he abandon his post as justice. “I must consult my advisers,” he says, his grandchildren of three and four and seven. How whimsical, some said. How charming, said others, the wisest man in the land bowing to three tots in a decision that will affect the fate of the nation. Others saw it for what it was not. It was not an outright refusal, as it should have been. It was not a reproof to those who dared assault the system he was meant to protect from even the echoes of this sort of rumor. It was an invitation—ask me, convince me, keep my name on the national headline. It was that same coyness that began the 2 million signature drive to “convince” Chief Justice Reynato Puno to run for the presidency, that gave credence to Sen. Ping Lacson’s posturing as a martyr willing to give up ambition for a higher cause, that had four-year-old party Ang Kapatiran raising their voices in hope and prayer.

More ominous is this: that this symbol of justice, of law and order, announced to all who would listen that the people should not pin their hopes on the legal system—the one bulwark at a time when there is little left to believe in—but instead pin their hopes on a moral system, on some vague notion of a moral revolution.

He talks about “character,” as “who we are when no one is watching.” Who is this man, when nobody watched? He is the man who represented the Marcos government in the martial law years with Marcos’ solicitor general Estelito Mendoza, his mentor. He is the man who defended the 1973 constitution that extended the term of Ferdinand Marcos. He acted as both solicitor general and minister of justice in Mendoza’s stead at a time when many were lost and killed in the same fashion that those he stands for now were lost and killed. He is the man who has failed to inhibit himself repeatedly in cases involving his friends, including decisions that favored his erstwhile mentor. And he was conveniently on leave during the momentous decisions on the CPR (calibrated preemptive response), Proclamation 1017, and RA 464.

He said, in one of his many public appearances, that there are too many laws. He said that the problem is that there is a lack of morality.

Now he says he will not run, after shaking hands with activist priest Robert Reyes and listening to his appeals, after his long lectures on morality and claims to great character. He may be a good man, a moral man. But we do not need a man, moral or otherwise, or at least, moral by the standards of Puno himself. What we need is a judge of men, not one who has made himself so open to judgment.

Caparas’ story is one that comes straight from one of his hundreds of comic book dramas: the young man, poor but talented, dressed in a security guard’s uniform outside a building after night, scratching away at comic-strip dialogue in an old notebook. It would be safe to say that the conferment of the National Artist Award on this underdog may seem the very pinnacle of his life’s achievement, but what Dr. Jose Dalisay Jr. calls “the corruption of culture” may very well have destroyed decades of achievement for this man whose characters lived to fuel the imagination of a people.

Caparas has lashed out, calling all his critics elitists. He is thankful for this experience, because he has seen the height of society’s hypocrisy. He says that the elite are angry because a man from the masses broke into their territory. And so this is what Caparas is reduced to: an angry man, announcing his achievements, claiming his worth, carting photos of old drawings to prove to the English-speaking elitist that he is in fact an artiste of the highest degree – “other painters can’t do this!” –damning all other National Artists for writing their poems and English novels instead of producing films capable of filling movie theaters and comic books that fly off the shelves. It may be patent that he has no place in film or the visual arts –
no matter how many caricatures of Manoling Morato he produces at press conferences “to prove” that he can draw – but what is perhaps more ironic is that Caparas has turned himself into a raving elitist, only this time, his discrimination is against all things scholarly and academic.

“National Artist” means being known nationwide, says Caparas’ wife Donna Villa. It is a ridiculous presumption, and would exclude even the artists Caparas defends. It is not as if Muslim teenagers have occasion to admire Moreno’s evening gowns, and I would hesitate to ask the man on the street if he knows what Alvarez’s Peta means. And yet the award is not the white tower that Caparas styles himself as the challenger. The works of Nick Joaquin, Lino Brocka and many others have proved themselves both nationally significant and nationally recognized during their time. And yet to use the standards of Caparas is to protest that Willie Revillame and the Viva Hot Babes have not yet been considered National Artists.

Literature may have denied Caparas, the visual arts rejected him, but so were many others. There are many, many more giants of literature and film and the visual arts living today whose work demand recognition, and if someday Caparas’ name is nominated through the official process, as a luminary of literature, or of a new category altogether, it is certain that the public will accept his much-deserved achievement. Caparas, unlike his other equally controversial colleague, at least has the claim of having been legitimately nominated by the selection committee.

Alvarez, whose unlucky champion Eduardo Ermita damns her with faint praise – “she’s very good” – continues to wax indignant at the outcry over her nomination, one far more shameful than Caparas’, whose only mistake is a misguided sense of oppression. It is Alvarez who was never nominated in any of the categories for National Artist.

Critics have challenged her right to the award, arguing that her position as cultural adviser to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo now making the selections, as well as the executive director of the body screening the nominations, is fundamentally unethical.

The NCCA guidelines are clear in that NCCA and CCP board members, consultants, officers and staff are automatically disqualified from being nominated. I suspect the executive director of the NCCA falls under the category of NCCA and CCP officers and staff.

Alvarez’s one angry response ignores the guidelines completely, and only repeats, in shriller and shriller tones, that she had nothing to do with the actual selection, this in spite of National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera’s statement that it was Alvarez herself, as executive director of the NCCA, who had insisted on the President’s right to add names not discussed in the committee.

Alvarez laments the tempest her award has created. “It is unfortunate that our country is divided by politics. It is through arts that our people can be united. I pray that culture as the nourishing womb will eventually bond together our nation toward the betterment of our citizens.”

Beautiful words from one of the guardians of the country’s culture, ironic in the face of the events establishing just how little Ms Alvarez cares about the state of the arts – certainly not enough to put the reputation of the institution over her personal ambition. It is an attitude very much like that of the President she serves. And Caparas – the directorial hand behind such classics as “The Myrna Diones Story (Lord, Have Mercy!),” “Humanda Ka Mayor! (Bahala na ang Diyos),” “The Cecilia Masagca Story: Antipolo Massacre (Jesus Save Us!),” “The Vizconde Massacre Story (God Help Us!),” “The Untold Story: Vizconde Massacre 2 (God Have Mercy on Us!),” “Lipa Arandia Massacre (Lord Deliver Us from Evil/God Save the Babies!),” “The Maggie dela Riva Story (God … Why Me?),” “Victim No. 1: Delia Maga (Jesus, Pray for Us!)” and “The Marita Gonzaga Rape-Slay (In God We Trust!)” – may have discovered that to have President Arroyo in your corner ensures an ending far happier than having the ear of God. The Carlo J. Caparas story, if it ever gets produced, may very well have a different deity for its subheading.

Juan Ponce Enrile, M16 on his hip, crossing to Camp Crame protected by a horde of civilians. Ramos, carefully calm and unarmed, waiting for the bombs to fall, with a cigar at the corner of his mouth. Aquino, pale and resolute, as she is sworn President of the Republic of the Philippines

I curled up in libraries with tribute after tribute, built my thesis around their narratives. At the center was the lady in yellow, all shy smiles and big glasses. I knew what sort of country I lived in, and it is perhaps why I spent hours building altars to my saints, clutching at a memory – not even mine – of one bright day when the whole world watched the Filipino stand in triumph. And I remember that day, two years ago, when I went down from a bus at the Cojuangco- and Aquino-owned Hacienda Luisita, to see for myself if the saint in my imagination had the same clay feet as the men and women who ran my government.

I know how many men died during the massacre in 2005, know how the Aquino administration failed to give their farmers their due, know how much can be laid at the feet of a dead President and her family. I had thought it would be difficult to write this today, knowing what I know of Hacienda Luisita, looking over old interviews with Federico Laza, the father who saw his son shot before his eyes. I stood at the side of a dusty white avenue in Tarlac with him, across from the Las Haciendas de Luisita Golf Course while a handful of Japanese tourists swung their clubs. The air was dry and arid, and inside Balete, one of several military detachments stood surrounded by piles of sandbags, fenced with thin bamboo poles, hedged with twisted wire threaded with crimson blossoms of bougainvillea. Until now, Federico Laza asks for justice, and until now, the Aquinos rule Hacienda Luisita.

I write this a few hours after news of her passing, not as a tribute to a saint, but as a celebration of a hero. I’ll tell you who Corazon Aquino is, not the saint, but the woman who ran a national campaign in 1986 for the presidency against a dictator. It was her candidacy that brought together a splintered opposition, and whose inspiration had thousands across the nation stuffing their precious salaries into makeshift donation cans.

This is a woman, brought up to be a good wife and mother, who watched her husband as he suffered in prison, who took her children halfway around the world to start a new life with a persecuted husband, who saw him in his white suit leave for the Philippines knowing he could die.

This is the woman who came home to Times Street to see her husband’s face broken by bullets, who held the hands of her crying children, who armed herself, a reluctant fighter, to finish her husband’s last battle.

This is what a hero is – the man, or woman, who is confronted by the choice to do right, and who chooses it, not because of convenience, or power, or vengeance, but because it is right. People did not fill the streets of Edsa with bodies willing to die simply because they hated Marcos. They did because they believed in a woman who stepped forward when she was called, whose very ordinariness made her choice so much more.

It is raining, and Cory Aquino is dead.

In Jordan, 20-year-old Filipina OFW Jenelyn Bacaltos recovers from stomach stab wounds and slit wrists. Jenelyn left her Carigara, Leyte home for a two-year work contract. Her employers starved her during the three weeks she was under their employ. Her suicide attempt brought her to the attention of the Philippine Embassy. Hers is the second reported suicide attempt by a Filipina OFW in the span of a month.

In Manila, a young woman named Melissa Roxas continues to deny her affiliation to the New People’s Army. Party-list Rep. Jovito Palparan, known in human rights circles as the “Butcher of Southern Luzon,” has spent the last week attempting to prove Roxas’ ties to communist circles after she testified that the military had been behind her May 19 abduction and torture. It is one of the many times the military has attempted to justify abduction and torture with communist affiliation. In spite of its claims, the military has yet to file rebellion charges against Jonas Burgos, Melissa Roxas, Raymond Manalo and Karen Empeño and Sherlyn Cadapan.

In the United States, the American president lavishes praise on a glowing President Macapagal-Arroyo for her support for American human rights policies, especially with respect to the Philippines’ condemnation of abuses in Burma. “American human rights” apparently do not include Filipinos.

I write this to celebrate a hero, not a saint. Saints are touched by the hand of God, they do no wrong, they are faultless, full of the light of heaven – but they belong behind glass cases, painted eyes lit by Christmas lights, of little use in a country where every man is a sinner because he lives. Heroes make themselves. They are human, their faults are their own, and their extraordinariness is not in their perfection, but in their struggle. I’ll end this with what I wrote some time ago, about first discovering what happened in 1986.

I remember the two parallel lines in yellow chalk, on the blackboard right next to the fractions. Edsa, Ms Chua said, this is Edsa. I did not know what Edsa was at eight, so understand that my first conception of Epifanio de los Santo Avenue was not of a road, but of a battleground. Surrounded by tanks, crowded with soldiers, crammed with millions of brave fighters, led by a woman both saint and crusader, lover and mother.

And it was that woman, bright-smiled, soft-eyed Cory Aquino, who stayed in my mind’s eye at the ringing of the morning bell when the national anthem crackled through the school loudspeaker. Land of the morning, pearl of the east, cradle of the brave. The brave wore yellow in my imagination, yellow dresses and big glasses and had slim white hands. She loomed over my dreams long after Rainbow Brite ran out of magic stars, long after Prince Charming fell off his charger and Arthur stopped being the once and future king. It had all the flavor of magic—the ruthless enemy, the fate of the nation, the bold hero, the pure, white-flamed heroine, and most importantly, the necessary end: good triumphing over evil. And because it was real, it was possible.

Cory Aquino may be dead, but because she lived, I can write this today and believe that even if the dragons are still everywhere, the last dragon slayer is not dead.

“Let me say, in no uncertain terms: There will be elections in 2010. There’s your headline for tomorrow.”

In a country where we doubt even the sincerity of the half-naked 6-year-olds who beg for coins at car windows, there is no word for the sort of morons we must be to unconditionally believe the nation’s chief executive, who is guilty of some of the most dramatic lies in national memory. And yet, just as she announced last Friday that she promised elections, President Macapagal-Arroyo also issued a threat.

“Anybody who questions our resolve on this critical issue is undermining our country’s commitment to a vibrant democracy.”

Ms Arroyo is perhaps uninformed on what constitutes a democracy. It is precisely that right to question – critically, consistently, fearlessly – that measures the vibrancy of a democracy. It flies in the face of logic for anyone to claim commitment to the upholding of a democratic state, and still persist on defining what issues can or cannot be questioned. It is the same twisted logic that had former Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez thundering in 2006 that the University of the Philippines should have its budget cut because “that school,” by constantly opposing government, is “degrading the national interest.”

Perhaps it is this administration’s unwillingness to be questioned – or to deny once questioned, as was demonstrated by Cerge Remonde and his valiant defense of the purity of the President’s breasts – that has permitted other competitors for the presidential post to do the same. I speak, of course, of the good Sen. Manuel Villar, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, the lone billionaire in the Senate, he of the rumored three public relations companies and four advertising agencies handling his campaign, whose heavy-handed financial bid for the 2010 presidency is eclipsed only by his campaign of national media avoidance. This, after all, is the gentleman accused of P400 million in graft in a Senate ethics complaint that his real estate empire had benefited from a C-5 road extension project in Parañaque City. The same gentleman snubbed his own Senate ethics hearing, and continues to refuse invitations to national forums.

There are those who say that the good senator is afraid of being asked tough questions regarding various controversies attributed to him. ANC, for example, invited Villar to its first leadership forum on May 11, an event televised worldwide. The senator sent his regrets saying he would be out of the country – and was later seen at the Supreme Court party of a retiring justice. He also declined the second forum invitation, again claiming to be traveling with his wife overseas. Offered another date, the senator still did not attend. The senator, however, is democratic in his refusals: he was also conspicuously absent last Thursday, when the Parish Pastoral Council on Good Governance gathered together all possible presidential aspirants at Plaza Miranda, in a forum that pushed through in spite of the crashing rain.

Perhaps he was “out of the country.”

Some forums, Villar says, are a waste of time. When finally waylaid by reporters, Villar criticized the format used in public forums, which he said focuses only on what the candidate plans to do and not on what he has already done – a misrepresentation that I believe many news anchors in various platforms would happily correct by interrogating Villar about his C-5 shenanigans.

Nacionalista spokesperson Gilbert Remulla says timing is everything. Villar, he says, is only waiting for the proper time to speak.

Villar has made no secret of his intent to run, a perfectly laudable decision compared to the coyness of his colleagues. Remulla says that the fact Villar does not appear at national forums does not mean he is not accountable. “Anytime, I’m willing to talk about my platform.” Villar sees no wrong in the deluge of commercials he has been flooding various networks, while discussing his successes at the by-invitation Valle Verde 4 country club. It leaves the rest of the country to settle for the questions entertainment host and talent manager Boy Abunda so happily poses in a recent commercial.

Remulla says that the senator is only choosing where to speak. It is an excuse that is illogical from the perspective of a candidate, whose goal, after all, is to reach as many of the country’s 50 million voting citizens in the next 11 months. I am certain that his small town forums give the impression the senator can shake hands, kiss babies, and relate with the masses, and it is not a bad thing, but frankly, it appears just as sincere as his millions-of-pesos worth commercials. Not because of the small forums, but because of his avoidance of the real questions. I do not know if Villar plans to advertise his way to Malacañang, but I do know that by dictating the reach of the forums he attends, and demanding the formula by which he should be questioned – Remulla says Villar is at his best on one-on-one interviews – Villar essentially dictates the questions that he should be asked. Given his track record, it is no surprise.

He claims that it is only in intimate, town hall-style meetings where he feels at home, away from the glaring lights of televised forums for 2010 presidential hopefuls. I suspect very few would accuse the man who hollered in the House of Representatives in 2000 while pounding a gavel as “shy.”

There is barely a year before the 2010 elections. Remulla – himself a former journalist – was correct when he said timing is everything. This is the time to ask for answers, to demand accountability, before another president hides behind the power of Malacañang, announcing that to ask questions is to challenge democracy.

Today I am conducting my own personal revolution. I will not write about the President’s breasts – although I do not know if technically they can be counted as physiologically hers, or if they should be included in her Statement of Assets and Liabilities, as I am told Asian Hospital footed the bill. I will not write about the very odd decision by a Caloocan judge, who dismissed a case on falsification of documents by a city accountant because the paperwork had “some semblance of truth.”

I will not, for example, jump on Senator Francis Escudero’s statement, when asked if he is running for President, whether he will not stoop down to the excuses that his colleagues have made on not declaring their candidacy.

He will not, for example, claim he is waiting for an endorsement (as they say Gilbert Teodoro is) or that he is waiting to accumulate the necessary P1 billion to campaign (as Manny Villar says is necessary) or announce that he is waiting for the masses to call him to serve (as Loren Legarda now claims).

No, Chiz says Chiz is different, he is simply “not going to think about running or not running,” will “simply go with the flow,” as if the decision to run a nation had the same importance as deciding whether to get Wendy’s over Jollibee. But that is not the point of this column, as you may suspect if you’ve read this far, there is no point, only writing.

Today I will not talk about politics, because although diving into sewage is not part of my job description, I seem to be wading in muck half the time. Let me tell you where I am. I am sitting on a couch stolen from my mother’s living room, and am happy to report the half-smashed chocolate bar I excavated from under the grimy blue cushion. The walls are green, the curtains are white, and the linoleum floor is ripped and stained from stoves thrown in temper and what appears to be radiator fluid. There are tricycles rampaging under the window. At the corner unit, a woman is drilling through her walls with a power saw for the third time this year. My ceiling is still dripping into the bright red bucket, saved from Jollibee takeout chicken, on my bed. It’s drip and rip and bang and boom, and there’s not enough onomatopoeia in the world to imitate the racket inside my head.

I’ll tell you why I write. I write because there are voices inside my head that knock at my temple and scratch at my ears, and typing pounds those words into a keyboard and out of my head. I write even if it means no more than 11 eggs in my refrigerator, two cans of tuna in my cupboard, and a fifty-peso thrift store wooden bust of a Hawaiian princess that sits staring from over my underwear drawer. I write because I am 23 in a country going mad, and if I do not write I cannot pretend I am not part of the madness. I write to know what I’m thinking, or not thinking, or pretend not to be thinking, and to make some sense out of the inanities and cruelties on the street where tricycles rocket back and forth. I write because arranging constellations of words on blank pages gives me an odd sort of thrill – the same thrill I get when I use a word like “constellation” – and because I do not know where to find mountain lions.

“Justice delayed is justice denied. What is my crime? Why is it that until now I’m still being prosecuted? Is this really how the justice system works in this country?” she asked. “I did so many projects for this country – the Heart Center, Lung Center, Kidney Center –
and I am being punished for it.”

The former first lady is not exaggerating when she speaks of the many projects attributed to her 20-year reign. In 1975, she built 14 luxury hotels for the International Monetary Fund Conference with $500 million in government loans, at a time when only $13 million was spent on public housing. The state-of-the-art Heart Center for Asia, of which she is proud of to this day, had a total of 100 beds and cost millions even when tuberculosis and malnutrition were the leading causes of death in Metro Manila. She defended her projects by claiming they were a source of national pride, “to show the world that see, we have a pretty face,” Katherine Ellison quoted her in her biography of Imelda.

“I just want to help this country,” she said in her recent press conference. “That’s my only goal: to help the poor. Just give me a chance – to love. But why are they doing this to me? I’m the one who’s guilty because I loved?”

In 1985, Imelda decided that the way to remove the hundreds of squatters obscuring her beautiful Manila landscape was to create incentives for them in the countryside. On a Cavite hilltop, she had installed hundreds of toilets, on the mistaken assumption that indoor plumbing was reason enough to stay on a deserted hunk of land without jobs or homes.

On her 80th birthday, Sofitel Hotel sponsored a grand celebration for the destitute, diamond-ringed former first lady. She did not, as she did in 1979, have a planeload of sand imported from Australia (for the opening of a beach resort) or have 3,000 laborers rebuild an entire seaside village at government expense (for her daughter Irene’s wedding). She did, however, have presidential hopefuls Bayani Fernando and Dick Gordon on hand to drink to her health, along with half-a-dozen former Supreme Court justices and two dozen con-ass (constituent assembly) voting congressmen, all happily clapping to Madame, who “glided down a red carpet, surrounded by little girls in white dresses carrying bouquets of roses and trailed by tuxedo-wearing violin and flute players who rendered her favorite love song.”

Just recently, former Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez suggested the immediate return of the Marcos jewels. Most cases for the return of the Marcos wealth, including the Imelda jewels, have been dismissed

In 1978, a Cartier representative in Hong Kong said Imelda Marcos had the world’s largest collection of gems. It is true that no court has pronounced the Imelda jewelry ill-gotten. It is also true that in most cases, the Aquino government – and subsequent administrations—failed to put in force proceedings.

Former Senator and former Marcos Minister of Information Francisco S. Tatad claims that Imelda’s ownership of the jewels stands uncontested – which may be the case, not because she owns them, but because we failed to acquire them when we could. Yet the possession of her jewels does not make her a “miracle of purity” as the brass plaque says under one of her many, many commissioned portraits. It makes her an 80-year-old woman who got away with some of the most reprehensible acts in world history, a woman responsible for a lost generation and whose continued vulgar display of wealth and power is a constant reminder of the weight of debt we continue to carry to this day.

When the Marcoses arrived in Hawaii in 1986, they had with them 32 boxes, crates, attaché cases, and leather Louis Vuitton and Gucci bags. According to US Customs records, there was a $58,286 tiara of pearls and diamonds; a $44,410 diamond-studded hair comb; a matched set of bracelet, earrings and brooch in sapphires, rubies and diamonds priced at $1,487,415; and an emerald and diamond pendant worth $74,825. One red russet suitcase alone held 93 pieces of jewelry, while other bags contained handguns, watches, and millions in freshly minted cash.

“You have to show them how to be a star,” she said once, when asked why she did not choose to be less extravagant for the sake of the public. “You have to show them how to be good, how to make beautiful things. You are some kind of model. This is very important, especially in a developing country. Everybody is in the gutter. Everyone’s poor. Don’t tell me we should go there and all look poor. It’s ridiculous.”

In an 80th birthday tribute, Tatad waxes eloquent over the Madame and says the media are harsh on Ms Marcos. He claims the courts are afraid of negative media opinion, that they are limited by the idea that it is not “politically correct” to approve of the woman who calls herself “my little people’s star and slave.”

For many years, all over the world, the fall of the Marcos dictatorship was a morality play: the vicious king and the vainglorious queen, the diamond-studded stiletto heel resting on a pile of rotting bodies, their reign of terror cut short by a people rising to revolution. And yet in this pearl of the Pacific, the deserving are rarely held accountable. Murderers are awarded offices in Congress, the blessing of convicted thieves determine the future of a would-be president, and a woman who had a newspaper’s distribution halted after it named her sixth most admired in the nation (Jesus Christ was No. 9) gets to announce to the national media decades later that she felt “vindicated,” and that all she wanted was “to devote myself to helping the Filipino people.”

The media are not harsh. They are not harsh enough, if young children reach out to touch the skirts of the statuesque woman with a diadem of glittering stars in her hair, if Bayani Fernando can announce with pride that his goal is to create Imelda Marcos’ City of Man, if senators dance at her birthday and friends publish odes to her beauty and bravery on the front pages of national dailies.

His Daddy says Franco was expressive. “I’m happy,” Franco would say, when the sun was bright. And sometimes, on days that the world did not behave according to the plans of a three-year-old man, “I’m sad.”

Franco’s Daddy is missing his Franco, the funny, soft-cheeked baby who drowned in the dark one bright afternoon in May.

“I’m sad,” says Franco’s daddy. “I’m very sad.” And then he is quiet as he presses his palms to his eyes.

It happened on a Saturday, what Franco announced as “a sunny day.” Franco’s whole family was going to the beach, his parents and grandparents and aunt and uncle and cousins and his nanny Bambi and his nine-year-old brother Paolo. They were riding a boat from the Batangas port to Puerto Gallera, the first big family trip for Franco. There were barkers selling tickets. They carried passenger bags to the M/B Commando 6, whose bamboo outriggers sprawled from both sides. They said the boat could carry a hundred thirty. Franco’s Daddy did not worry. Franco’s mama counted just 90. They did not know the boat could seat only 45.

Franco’s Daddy says it reminded him of a ride in a jeepney –shoulder to shoulder, one row facing another. They sat apart because of the crowd, Franco with his nanny, his Mama, his cousin and big brother, then Franco’s Daddy with the grandparents, and the uncle and his family on the other end.

The boat rose and fell, flew against the waves, rising and falling and rising and falling again.

It was a long ride. An hour passed. People were seasick. There was still no land in sight. The waves were rough. And then there was a sound, bamboo breaking, the outrigger on the right side of the boat disappearing into the water.

It was quick. Water poured in. The makeshift tarpaulin walls, sewn clumsily to deflect sea spray, trapped dozens inside. The boat overturned. Franco’s Daddy was smashed by the wild waves. He took a deep breath before the water dragged him. He forced his way up. Swallowed water. Broke surface. Found the boat, hung on to the side.

There were people calling out. Paolo had been trapped, and dove down to swim his way out. The whole family was accounted for, all except Franco’s grandmother, his one-and-a-half-year-old cousin Anton – and Franco.

Franco’s Daddy does not remember how he found his mother –whether she floated to the surface, or if someone pushed her lifeless body to him. The waves battered his side of the boat. He clung to the barnacles of the boat, fighting to keep his dead mother from the sea. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t swim, the waves plastered him against the boat’s hull.

They found Anton. It was Franco’s Daddy who held the baby boy with the staring eyes, who pumped and pumped and pumped the small chest, who couldn’t understand how so much water could have filled such a small body. He knew his nephew was gone. He pumped. He thought of his own baby boy, and was helpless where he was. It was Franco’s Mama, Monique, clinging to the other side of the boat, who dove into the water and could not find her Franco.

They found Franco’s nanny, and sat her on the hull. She was screaming for Franco.

Two boats passed. Those inside saw the orange jackets, the submerged boat and the half-naked men who waved their shirts frantically. They did not stop. They did not offer lifejackets. They raced on, and while they did, people died.

Monique asked for a knife, a mask, anything to help her hunt for her boy. The crewmen could not help – they clung to the sides of the ship. Some could not swim. The captain seemed dazed. Monique asked a man to step on the edge of the tarpaulin to keep it open, so she could slip inside and look for her son. The man inched away.

Rescue came, M/B Commando boats owned by the same men who ran the overturned boat. Somebody else was holding Anton. The new crew allowed the passengers to board, then began snatching up floating passenger bags.

And this was when Franco’s daddy got angry. People, there are people under the boat. My son could be in there. Leave the bags alone.

It was a long time before anything happened.

Finally the crew righted the boat. They found Franco, and sent him to his Daddy floating on a life vest. His eyes were like Anton’s.

They hugged him, Franco’s daddy and Monique. They hugged him and pumped his chest. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Twenty. They knew it was too late.

It was a sunny day.

They held Franco on the boat to Puerto Gallera, held him on the way to a makeshift hospital where onlookers crowded the small room and clucked over the dead little boy. Franco’s daddy sent away the onlookers. Just a little dignity, he asked. Please, let my son have some dignity.

The helicopters came. Franco’s family rode first, carrying their dead.

Franco’s brother Paolo asked his Mama if it was a dream. “I want to wake up now.”

“I’m sorry,” said his crying Mama, “I wish it were.”

In the Walt Disney movie “Cars,” the young, full-of-himself racecar Lightning McQueen finds himself in the backward town of Radiator Springs. It’s where he meets Mater, a rusty old truck with a redneck accent whose one dream was to ride a helicopter. “Cars” was Franco’s favorite movie. He wanted to go up a helicopter too.

His daddy held him as the helicopter took off, held the little boy with blind eyes and cold hands, told him, “Franco, here’s your helicopter ride.” Only it was too late for Franco, and too late for his daddy to show him how the world looked from the clouds.

It is Father’s Day. Three weeks ago, Franco’s daddy had two sons. Now there is only one, a boy named Paolo who asks for his baby brother to be brought back.

This story is a gift from Franco’s Daddy, to every father on Father’s Day. Ask him, and no matter how many times he’s told it, he will tell you about a little boy with a mischievous smile who danced on his high chair and clapped when he saw cars. Remember Franco, he says. Remember this, and hold on to your Franco.