Obituaries

By Flor Lacanilao

After retiring from UP over 10 years ago, reading obituaries has become a daily habit. When I come across a death notice on somebody who died at 50 or 60, I am thankful to be healthy at 70 and, mind you, with my hair still mostly black. Obituaries of people who die at the age of 80 or 90 make me wish I would live as long.

My interest in obituaries led me to conduct a survey of the death notices published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer from March to December in 2004. The survey covered 1,075 death notices, 620 of which were for men and 455, for women. Though not based on random sampling, the “survey” came up with some interesting findings.

On the average, men died much younger than women—71 against 78 years old. In 230, or 21 percent, of the obituaries, the profession of the deceased was shown. Nuns had the longest lifespan, averaging 85 years. The priests came next with an average of 80 years, followed by the medical doctors with 75 years, the military officers with 73, lawyers with 72, and engineers with 70.

Doctors, who are supposed to have studied the human body, die younger than priests by an average of five years. The 67 doctors in the obituaries even included women who, on the average, live longer than men.

Our obituaries, unlike in other countries, greatly vary in size, suggesting social status (117 were large: one-fourth page and bigger; and 319 were small: the size of a calling card). The average age of the dead in the large obituaries was 75; in the small ones, 72.

Many death notices and those who announce the death anniversaries of their loved ones request readers to pray for the eternal repose of the souls of the departed, never mind if they have been dead for years. I wonder how many readers heed their call for prayers. And I doubt if one could appeal the fate of a soul denied of eternal rest on Judgment Day.

I think we should have valid reasons for doing things, if we are to move forward. Common practice and tradition are reasons hardly good enough to justify our actions.

Excerpted from “Highblood: Obituaries and reasons”
Philippine Daily Inquirer, 9 January 2005

Mindanao from Moro eyes

By Randy David

A useful starting point for any analysis of the problem in Mindanao is the recognition that the Philippine government is not, and indeed has never been, in full control of Muslim Mindanao. The ubiquitous checkpoints that dot the region, manned by forces belonging to traditional warlords and rebel groups, concretely attest to this. To all intents and purposes, Philippine laws and institutions have never defined the framework of political rule in these parts. Periodic elections conducted by national agencies may indicate membership in the Filipino polity. And the presence of state-run schools may suggest integration into the national culture. But this is largely an illusion.

What we have here is not a sovereign state that disintegrated because it failed in its functions. This is rather an example of a state that, from its inception, could not hold sway over a swath of land it regards as part of its territory. It has used all the violent means at the disposal of the state to pacify the Moro people—to no avail. The veneer of order that exists today in the region has been won mainly by coopting the local power-wielders, rather than by forming active citizens. This method worked for as long as the traditional warlords remained self-centered and divided. Things changed when young leaders from these communities sought to unify their ethnically segmented people under one Bangsamoro banner.

Two distinct but related processes have followed from this. The first is the complex internal struggle for leadership among the different elements of Moro land. This struggle continues. The existing ethnic faultlines (e.g. Tausug, Maguindanao Maranao, and Lumad) are compounded by inter-generational conflicts and the assertion of rival ideological visions (Moro secular nationalism vs. Moro religious nationalism). The second is the transformation of the Bangsamoro people’s relationship to the Filipino nation-state as a result of the realignments within their community. As the idea of a self-governing Moro nation took shape, secession from the Philippine Republic loomed as a possibility. Unable to ignore this prospect, the Philippine government has offered regional autonomy as a compromise. Yet, despite this, many Filipino leaders still do not appreciate the validity of the Moro quest.

The Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) under Nur Misuari became the first beneficiary of this accommodation. Misuari was installed as the first governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), an entity created by the 1987 Constitution. The ARMM was supposed to be an experiment in limited self-government by the Moro people, but from the start, it offered little promise of succeeding. Moreover, the incompetence and corruption in its leadership hobbled the new regional government. The ARMM’s failure under Misuari was taken as confirmation of the inability of an imagined Moro nation to govern itself.

A new Moro leadership under Hashim Salamat reframed the vision of a Bangsamoro state, giving birth to the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). Unlike the Misuari-centered MNLF, the MILF was more collective in its leadership. The organization continued to flourish after Salamat’s death, and earned the right to be the dominant voice of the Moro people. Meanwhile, ARMM passed on and became a plaything of traditional warlords, like the ruthless Ampatuans, who had no problem embracing the equally corrupt games of Manila’s politicians.

The MILF program was secessionist at the beginning. It specifically drew its vision of a desirable community from the core ethics of Islam. Basing itself in Maguindanao, it sharply distinguished itself from the Tausug-dominated MNLF. But what is truly remarkable about it is that in addition to the support it received from the Islamic countries, it managed to get the active backing of the United States. This gave it the standing and clout in the international stage that Misuari, in his heyday, never enjoyed.

Though it fell short of the dream of an independent state, the Moro “substate” concept that the MILF introduced into the 2008 Memorandum of Agreement on Ancestral Domain (MoA-AD) promised a more substantial autonomy than the MNLF got from the Ramos administration. Negotiators from both sides had worked on it for five years, hoping the agreement would be sealed before the end of the Arroyo term. Alas, the unpopularity of the Arroyo regime gave the whole enterprise the unwarranted stigma of a midnight deal being rushed. After the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, there was no choice but to abort it.

One has to understand the sense of frustration and betrayal that this has created within the ranks of the MILF. In a sense they are back to zero. For trusting in a process that, in the end, yielded nothing, their leaders have suffered a great loss in credibility. Now, we expect them to rein in the hotheads among their commanders, and threaten them with all-out war if they don’t behave. It is as if it were so easy to end this conflict by sheer military means. Can we even imagine the scale of the humanitarian disaster that will result from a total war in Mindanao?

No, because the arrogant voices that call for total war are typically the ones who do not know that the Philippine state has never effectively established itself in Muslim Mindanao. They remain ignorant of the historic injustices that have been committed against the Moro people. They see only the death of Filipino soldiers, not the pain of people who have been stripped of their lands.

armed women & children?

got this from the grapevine via the friend of an uncle of a family friend of a soldier who was wounded in the deadly clash in al barka.  allegedly, our soldiers did not, could not, fight back, not because they were ill-prepared for combat in mindanao, or because they felt bound by the ceasefire agreement, but because the muslim fighters / killers were mostly women and children, who were quite ruthless.  i hope it’s not true.

Armies of the Night

By Elmer Ordonez

OCTOBER 1967 saw a huge anti-Vietnam war march to the Pentagon in Washington, DC participated in by protesters from all over the United States as well as replicated in major cities across the nation. Novelist Norman Mailer joined the march and was roughed up by the riot police and arrested. After this experience he called up Harpers to say he was writing about it.

The following year Armies of the Night, a kind of documentary novel came out.

I commented on Mailer’s book in the 1969 UP writers workshop in Iloilo where resource person/critic Leonard Casper noted my “clairvoyance” in foretelling the new genre first tagged as “documentary novel, ” “non-fiction novel” or “history in a novel/the novel as history”—which today’s students of literature would call “creative non-fiction.”

The 60s practitioners of this new journalism are Truman Capote in his In Cold Blood (1965), about a berserk student’s shooting spree in a Texas university, Hunter S. Thompson in Hells Angels, (1966), about the notorious motorcycle gangs, and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968), about Ken Kesey and hippie counterculture. Mailer who gained early fame with his The Naked and the Dead (1948), (which includes his experience as a GI in Leyte during the Pacific War) would win the Pulitzer and the National Book award for Armies of the Night. Jerry Rubin called it the Bible of the anti-war movement. (Peter Manso, Mailer)

The First Quarter Storm demonstrations in 1970 would produce Jose Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, outstanding for its gripping reportage of the successive student and worker protest rallies. It is in the reading list of young activists to this day, a book icon reissued by Anvil.

In my last column on the destructive large scale mining in Surigao del Norte I alluded to the green “armies of the night” —the quiet legions fighting for clean water, clean air, environmental and cultural protection. Little did I realize then that the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, harassed by police with arrests and pepper spray for violations of odious laws, (e.g. no standing or smoking on side-walks) and belittled by establishment media like the New York Times, would spread rapidly across the globe. The OWS or Occupy Movement is against corporate greed symbolized by the bankers in the Lower Manhattan street and stock exchanges around the world. It has become anti-capitalism and anti-rich not only by the dispossessed and unemployed but those with jobs and professions. Intellectuals speak before its assemblies.

The state and corporate elites are said to be frightened by the Occupy movement. Hence, the attempts at suppression ranging from violent in cities where the protesters are small and vulnerable and less brutal in cities like New York where OWS protest is strong. The 2011 armies of the night may yet cause a reverse Fall of Berlin Wall syndrome—the decline of capitalism. In Taipeh the protesters sang the “Internationale.”

In the US there could be a rebirth of FDR’s New Deal which is socialist enough and therefore anathema to conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party followers. This will not be surprising since the entry of neo-liberal policies under the tag of globalization pushing privatization, deregulation, and liberalization has resulted in contractualization of labor, outsourcing of production and services, lowering of corporate taxes, debasing of labor unions, privatizing of medical care, reduction of social programs and security, and poverty all around.

The Occupy movement is enjoined by allies to have leaders and make clear their demands, but apparently the New York OWS assembly which has anarchist tendencies prefer consensus building and direct action to central leadership, and not to have specific demands. However, considering what the corporate world has inflicted on the working class, they want to tax the rich to create job programs and provide fully paid education, universal health care and social security, single payer health care among others.

In the Philippines, according to Bayan, 49 million Filipinos are poor, 36 million can not afford food, 15 million experience hunger, 11 million are jobless. Local participation in the global movement would escalate and the people’s struggle would intensify unless the lot of the masses is radically changed.

As it is, the West—Europe and the US—are in deep economic crisis, now seeking ironically China’s help for fiscal bailout. But China, its socialist regime having made capitalism work to its advantage, is itself experiencing the inevitable results of capitalism in the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, the underpayment of labor, unemployment, shoddy and toxic products, corruption in the bureaucracy and industry, and diminution of social security. The economic system shall have created many internal contradictions the regime may realize unbridled capitalism is self-defeating. One writer noted, China needs Marx and Mao at this time.

Hark, then, the armies of the night are abroad. Do you hear them sing in Taipeh, “Arise, ye wretched of the earth…” Or in Berlin (ironically?) Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”?