My last column for the year is Let’s get loud.
In Adrian E. Cristobal, public man of letters; 75 by Lito Zulueta, he points out that the late Adrian Cristobal was a public intellectual, and he tries to compare and contrast public intellectuals elsewhere with our home-grown kind. I attempted a similar effort in Assessing Adrian, triggered, in part, by Conrado de Quiros own reading of a the man, who was his friend.
On a related note, see The Role of the Public Intellectual by Alan Lightman and The Future of the Public Intellectual: A Forum in The Nation.
May 2008 be as good for you as we all hope it will be for our country.
Technorati Tags: history, ideas, media, philippines, politics, society
Good reading must always be accompanied by good music. Now this is an awesome medley of some of my favorites! Plug in your Altec Lansings and try it…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4CzJe17__E
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL!!!Especially to you Manolo who’s passion for history, country, and life has awakened the sleeping patriot in me…all these years, I thought only money mattered…
Happy New Year Manolo, Ramrod and everyone reading this!
Happy New Year to you cvj,ramrod,all bloggers and of course Manolo.
Honestly, I am probably the most frustrated writer. In my younger days I’d join essay writing contests in school and I loved doing the formal and informal themes. I even joined the literary staff of THE CORPS magazine writing poems and short stories mostly war and love (corny stuff). When I got older I settled for poems and essays in the company newspaper, you know, purely amateur things but nevertheless quite a joy.
I remember cutting classes when I was in the sixth grade and even in high school also. While other kids cut class to play billiards, watch movies, or goof around in the public park, I’d be in my secret hideaway – the public library, gorging up on Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen, Herman Melville, Jack London, the Tom Swift Books, Hardy Boys, practically anything I could get my hand on. We didn’t have television in the house and my next door neighbor would close their window when I peeped in while perched on their favorite potted plant.
I visited the building that used to be the public library a about 3 months ago, the library is not there anymore, but the building still is – its been turned into a police station. One of my classmates is a policeman assigned there so when we got together that night I told him all about the old public library turned police station by the POLICE STATE and he laughed, “so thats where you’ve been going all that time? everybody thought you were in the HUNASAN again catching your favorite seafood.†“Nah, I do that after school hours!†Then we proceeded to partake of the sumptous feast of fresh seafood of the SUTUKIL.
PS, Remember that dreaded essay assignment teachers used to give us every year? In first year high school I gave it a little twist – “HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION OR THE SEXUAL AWAKENING OF RAMROD (of course, I put in my real name).” My teacher didn’t like it, the principal was horrified, my mother was embarassed, and my father laughed so hard that I felt insulted – it was not a comedy for pete’s sake!
happy new year, sir.
The wisdom of Adrian Cristobal will sorely be missed by a nation that badly needs an intellectual like him to crystallize issues and help the people sift through the thickening maze of information to understand what is true and what is false. What depresses me more is that with his loss, we are also seeing a nation populated by a growing number of uneducated people who can only watch with confusion at the unfolding events affecting their lives. This is the challenge for the likes of Manolo Quezon and Conrad de Quiros: to lift a great number of Filipinos from the morass of ignorance. Happy New Year!
the object of good education is wisdom – the ability to discern the good as well as the bad, and to know the difference. it is also the ability to go beyond narcissism and prejudice to attain “truth”.
happy new year to one and all!
Another great journalist from AHS crossed the “Pearly Gateâ€Â. Adrian Cristobal will be missed by Arellanites.
A blogger, arrested.
—-
Saudi Arabia’s most popular blogger, Fouad al-Farhan, has been detained for questioning, an Interior Ministry spokesman confirmed Monday. It was the first known arrest of an online critic in the kingdom.
Farhan, 32, who used his blog to criticize corruption and call for political reform, was detained “for violating rules not related to state security,” according to the spokesman, Maj. Gen. Mansour al-Turki, responding to repeated requests for comment with a brief cellphone text message.
Of course, there is the possibility that Adrian Cristobal first spends 20 or more years in purgatory……
happy new year po sa lahat!
Happy New Year Manolo. Thanks for showing me happines, rather that Happiness is a Majestic Ham. Loved your column on that too.
A Prosperous Happy New Year to all!
dear manolo,
ako i did not like adrian during martial law. but after martial law, we became friends.
he would always say, upon seeing me; “oh, here comes the great danton.”
then he would come to me and pinch my left nipple.
happy new year.
2008
* In Chinese communities around the world, eight is considered the most fortuitous of numbers, making it much coveted for addresses, phone numbers and bank accounts.
* If you’re Chinese–every fifth person in the world is–an eight not only portends prosperity but confidence and money worth even millions, depending where you are.
A prosperous new year to all!
i didn’t always agree with adrian (i used to read him in the inquirer) but yes we have lost a significant intellect. nonetheless i think he had become too much a part of the elite to qualify as a public intellectual.
How can people praise someone who was an active participant in the grand deception of the Marcos dictatorship? Who helped write its ideological and philosophical premises, and when needed, make the regime sophisticated and cosmopolitan by churning out glossy “literary journals” — and in the process attempting to hide its true nature: that of a brutal order that killed, imprisoned, exiled thousands of Filipinos? How can one give due respect to someone who may claim he loved Bonifacio for his nationalims but conveniently downplayed that the Great Plebian also fought against an autocratic order with features comparable to the dictatorship he served? Does death mean a near absolution of one’s sins to humanity? What ever happened to the once-famous slogan “no reconciliation without justice”, a phrase that — in my humble opinion — applies to everyone who were part of those 15 years of suffering and darkness?
P.S.
Adrian Cristobal during martial law was no public intellectual. He worked for the dictatorship, and thus was an intellectual-for-hire. The more interesting readings would probably the biography of Joseph Goebbels, or, if you want a writer, Ismael Kadare
One of the reasons why Cristobal was an underrated writer and intellectual, I suppose, but shouldn’t other have questioned have pressed him for an answer to his Martial Law past. One of my frustrations about our own culture that it prefers to sweep everything under the rug rather than taking the larger effort (mixed metaphor alert) of cleaning up the skeletons in our closet. How many times in public toilet do we see a turd full toilet bowl when we open it up. Filipinos find satisfaction in hiding the truth. Why did Cristobal cooperate with Marcos. Was it merely for financial and social gain?
“then he would come to me and pinch my left nipple.”
And why does he like to pinch other men’s nipples?
Yes, Adrian Cristobal worked for Marcos. But like Cesar Virata, the technocrat, in my humble opinion, Cristobal should be judged significantly according to what he has accomplished as a person, mainly as a writer and what he did for literature in this country. It is worth noting that like Virata, Cristobal still held the high esteem and respect of even their anti-Marcos colleagues after the dictatorship ended.
But by all means, let the final judgement include the fact he worked for the dictatorship. Who knows, maybe he would have turned out to be a greater author, or intellectual had he not worked for Marcos.
The fact that he did or did not opt to bail himself out when things were getting awry was maybe a tragedy not only for himself but for the country as well — for if you would read him, it is evident that the erudition or intellect was quite at the level of a Rizal and he just may be the last of the Pinoy Renaissance men.
Just maybe at some point in time, he played safe and lost integrity, which if a writer wanted to sound authentic all throughout, would have to guard zealously. That’s why I thought he probably never got around to writing or finishing that novel he wanted to write.
On another note, Equalizer, thanks for sharing that bit about 2008. Hope we all have a better year this 2008.
MLQ this post is off topic, but is relevant to the topic mostly discuss in your blog..if it is not be my quest and do whatever you decide proper..thanks…
From todays editorial and comments section of toronto star. just something to add what a Third World Country Is and we were such an Honorary one, according to the Wall Street Journal in the Mid 90s…
Welcome to Third World, U.S.A.
Jan 01, 2008 04:30 AM Arthur Donner
Doug Peters Toronto Star Editorial
“What we’re seeing (in the U.S.) isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: Income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite … It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.”
– Paul Krugman, New York Times, Feb. 27, 2006.
In the mid-1990s, the Wall Street Journal delivered the classic insult to this nation when it called Canada an honorary Third World country.
Indeed, at that time Canada’s economy was coming out of a period of relative difficulty.
Our balance of payments was shaky, the federal government had posted a long string of budget deficits and the Canadian dollar was weak.
Adding to these economic woes, as of the mid-1990s, Canada also had a long history of posting substantially higher inflation rates than in the United States.
Now, however, the trade and fiscal deficits situation has been turned on its head, with the United States incurring huge fiscal deficits and borrowing enormous amounts of foreign capital to balance its hefty international trade deficit. In fact, in a relatively short time span, the U.S. has become the largest debtor nation in the world.
And as Paul Krugman and many other economists have pointed out, U.S. income disparity is obscenely large and increasing, while higher education is not overcoming the polarization of income and the shrinking of the middle class.
The latter point is somewhat surprising, since most Western democracies see the elimination or reduction of economic inequality as a good idea. Indeed, it is a generally accepted principle that the underlying causes of economic inequality based on such non-economic differences as race, gender, or geography should also be minimized or eliminated.
In other words, there is a strong predilection in most Western countries to level the economic playing field as much as possible. This seems not to be the case in the United States.
The United Nations publishes a Human Development Index that ranks countries in terms of life expectancy, literacy, education and standard of living. The latest published data were based on 2005 statistics. The U.S., despite its vast wealth and power, placed only in the 12th position among industrial countries.
The top four countries were Iceland, Norway, Australia and Canada. These top four countries still pay some lip service to income distribution as an important economic and social goal.
Ironically, the U.S. today has many more features in common with Third World status than Canada ever did back in the mid-1990s.
What is usually meant by a Third World economy? A half-century ago, the term was associated with the economically underdeveloped countries of Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania. The common characteristics of these Third World countries were high levels of poverty, income inequality, high birth rates and an economic dependence upon the advanced countries. Third World countries were simply not as industrialized or technologically advanced as Western countries.
But what are some of the distinguishing characteristics of contemporary Third World countries? They go beyond these nations’ fiscal position or undue concentration on natural resource exports.
The glaring features today include poverty, lack of democratic institutions, controlling oligarchies and the unequal distribution of income and wealth. In other words, the few enjoy a rich lifestyle while the many share subpar incomes and poverty.
Another characteristic of Third World countries is that a major portion of their fiscal expenditures is allocated to the military. In many Third World countries, the military is controlled by an elite or a small collection of the wealthy.
Finally, in many Third World countries one finds that leadership is passed from one generation to the next, often via a close relative.
Guess what country we are talking about now?
Arthur Donner and Doug Peters are Toronto-based economists.
Happy New Year sir!
Not all people who worked under the Marcos dictatorship were necessarily as bad as the regime. Many of them believed they were joining a radical effort to reform society and make the Philippines a better nation. We have to remember that the key personalities who overthrew Marcos were also close to him. If we have to judge Adrian with regard to his association to Marcos, we might ask: Did he enrich himself as a consequence of his closeness to Marcos? Did he stick it out with Marcos to the end, especially when the abuses and corruption grew worse? I am certain that Adrian had a noble motive in mind for working with Marcos in the early years.
To narrow down evaluating people’s service to the dictatorship to just a question is enrichment (as Boy suggests) is, I think, a bit narrow-minded. What is more scary is if people like Cristobal really believed working with Marcos was like “joining a radical effort to refom society nd make the Philippines a better nation.” That’s a more scary possibility since if this is the case, then these folks really believed that autocracy was the road to progress.
And when the crunch came and Marcos was really exposed as a charlatan, a crook and a human rights violators, these folks — including Virata by the way, Madonna — stuck with the regime, increasingly putrid as it was.
As for Cristobal being on the same level as Rizal, I humbly disagree with Madonna: Rizal was not only versed in both science and literature, he was a polyglot, a Filipino cosmopolitan, and one whose criticism of Spanish colonial rule, catalyzed its downfall. Cristobal wrote essays, poems, and a book on Bonifacio (I doubt if he knows any language apart from Tagalog, English, Spanish — perhaps). And for 15 years, he was a devoted ideologue of the dictatorship. This was no Rennaissance man…
eek…”of enrichment pala” not “is enrichment…” Apologies, small keyboard
I only vaguely understand Adrian Cristobal’s participation in the Marcos’ admin so i am unable to judge either way. I agree with Boy Mejorada that not all of those who participated in the Marcos regime should be judged harshly. For example, Blas Ople was with Marcos till the end but that should not detract from his being credited as one of the architects (for better or for worse) of labor migration as our ongoing (and only viable) economic development (if you can use that term) strategy.
I also agree with Jojo that personal enrichment should not be the sole criteria for condeming a Marcos-collaborator. In the case of Cesar Virata, i cannot understand why he is still held in esteem when he (along with Jobo Fernandez) is one of the enablers of our IMF-engineered economic collapse. Looking back, Larry Henares was right in pointing out that the IMF-WB has been a greater evil than Danding Cojuangco (who is evil nonetheless).
I suppose Adrian Cristobal should be judged the same way as Teddy Boy Locsin will be judged, talented writers and intellectuals who were/are either ideologically misguided (at best) or made of weaker moral fiber allowing themselves to be used as tools of corrupt leaders (Marcos and Macapagal-Arroyo respectively).
On ERAP-for-President deja vu….
Erap Estrada — like that rapist Jalosjosis — is a convicted felon. The pardon should give Estrada and Jalosjos the right to vote (and to own firearms). BUT…. but one would expect that the both of them will be barred from holding a mayoral, governor-, congressman- or higher public office. Oh, the CBCP can fast track either to be priests, then bishops… or they can join the evangelicals and be “born-again”… even form a church of their very own… but the conviction should bar them from public office.
Actually to raise this discussion on Cristobal to another level, and as per CVJ’s point, it may be time for those of us interested in history to engage in a thorough evaluation of martial law – not merely in terms of the corruption it perpetrated, nor its brutality, but also in the way it explained itself to the public. And here we will have to go into the intellectual culture that the dictatorship nurtured, as represented by from the historians at UP who ghost-wrote Marcos’ Tadhana compendium to the likes of Cristobal who did the propaganda for the regime. I can think of a few people who could undertake the latter, and one of them would be Manolo.
Still, having lived through martial law, and seeing all these intellectuals sell their souls to a dictatorship that destroyed and killed many of my fellow Mindanawons, I cannot get myself to tag someone a Rennaissance man. These folks lied for the dictatorship, and defended it with passion. They should — like the torturers, the cronies, Imelda — be made to account for their misdeeds. Otherwise we will never have closure from those 15 dark years.
personal enrichment while majority of the people is in dire poverty to me is immoral. no ifs no buts.
I agree with Jojo. As a bonus, the insights we can gain in evaluating the intellectual-collaborators of Martial Law can also help us in understanding their counterparts in the present dispensation. Conversely, now might be an opportune moment to assess the Martial Law intellectual collaborators since we have the benefit of having a number of present day intellectual collaborators to compare with.
Quite right CVJ, kasi some of them are back in business (posing as pundits for democracy and/or press freedom, among other things). Others are writing their memoirs. Geronimo Velasco, — a technocrat-intellectual, for example, has come out with a book defending his stint with the Marcoses (incidentally, one of his admirers is Randy David). I heard Gerry Sicat is writing a book on Virata.
some administrations subsequent to marcos did make use of known collaborators and enablers of the martial rule , intellectuals or otherwise. cory aquino had maceda, enrile, and ramos who all managed to turn their coats and abandoned the sinking dictatorship in time. the filipino electorate kept sending back to the legislature known stalwarts of the marcos regime, e.g., tatad, angara, maceda, enrile. they elected two presidents closely identified with the dicatorship, namely ramos and estrada. filipinos have short memories when it comes to politics. in general, they are not too discriminating even in choosing their heroes and “public” intellectuals.
Manolo must be hurting from the comments of Jojo in relation to Gloria. Aww.
But must the totality of the person be judged by the kind of associations kept or decisions made and not by how he/she has treated his fellow human being?
I guess we still have not learned the context in which Manglapus said his famous line about relaxing and enjoying it. In my book, a “collaborator” who saved a few lives is better than a “fighter” or non-collaborator doing his fighting (and perhaps lecturing in the rule of law) in the safe confines of his home in a foreign country.
That I guess is wisdom.
By taking a stand against Gloria Arroyo when it counted, i.e. at the time Hello Garci came out, i think Manolo compares favorably to other collaborators (past and present).
(sigh) when will that ‘Hello Garci’ issue die down?
don’t we get it? only the portion thats perceived to be anti-gloria is being played and hyped up. how come not all the rest of the tape is played and hyped up as well? only one reason – the fact that the opposition does not come with clean hands will be revealed!
what that eager beaver Alan Paguia did never comes close to Chavit Singson’s expose. Chavit risked prosecution for jueteng. Paguia is so afraid of playing the rest of his edited tapes for fear of prosecution of violating the anti-wiretapping law (and incriminating the opposition in the process)!
lets move on. please do an Al Gore
“In the case of Cesar Virata, i cannot understand why he is still held in esteem when he (along with Jobo Fernandez) is one of the enablers of our IMF-engineered economic collapse.” — cvj
you could ask corazon aquino why she chose to retain jobo as central bank governor when the Marcoses fled; or why virata is generally viewed by the business community to this day as one among who never enriched himself from his association with marcos (unlike folks like enrile, even jose de venecia).
as for the debts that kept soaring during the MArcos years, these technocrats were at the forefront of the borrowing binge of Marcos — but let’s just say that they wrongly believed that the borrowings would be used by marcos and imelda for the betterment of the economy
and yes, i’m all for letting the guilty parties pay. let’s start with imelda who i really think should be shot by firing squad, and i would personally volunteer to be among the ones to shoot her.
association with the wrong people may taint you, but maybe just maybe personal trustworthiness will save you in the end.
and oh by the way, the toupee-wearing larry henares is a nothing but a pretentious SOB. don’t believe what he says. he is no nationalist, but he likes to pretend that he is.
fisball, i also was incredulous at first when larry henares came out with that column praising Danding Cojuangco more than twenty years ago. However,subsequent events, particularly the IMF’s [mis-]handling of Russia (in the 90’s), Thailand (during the ’97 Asian crisis), South Korea (during the ’98 crisis) in contrast with Mahathir’s skillfull response to the Asian Crisis, proves that even a pretentious, toupee-wearing SOB can speak the truth.
Cesar Virata (and even Jobo Fernandez) may be men of integrity but we cannot minimize the damage they have done. Good intentions hardly makes up for incompetence, especially one that was is a result of wearing ideological (in this case neo-liberal) blinders.
anthony scalia (at 2:07 pm), spoken like a true collaborator.
cvj,
“spoken like a true collaborator”
as per bencard, a ‘collaborator’ who saved a few lives is preferable to a “fighter†or non-collaborator doing his fighting (and perhaps lecturing in the rule of law) in the safe confines of his home in a foreign country.
any chance you might know of a ‘fighter’ or ‘non-collaborator’ bencard is referring to, my friend?
happy new year to you!
Guys, I think selling out and serving an autocratic regime is different from working with a constitutional and, yes, democratically (yet flawed) regime like Cory’s, Erap’s, Eddie or even Gloria given that kind of political space they work in. Under Marcos the political choices were quite stark: you were either for the brutal autocracy or not. Happy New Year~!
I was supposed to take Adrian Cristobal as my Prose instructor during my Creative Writing years yet instead opted to take a second-rate, obscure non-fictionist for the same shallow reason that most of his critics are infuriated with his pen–he used to be Marcos’s ghostwriter.
Years afterwards, I accidentally came across his narrative, “I, Suleiman”. I cursed my immaturity and regretted the chance of being mentored by one of the finest Filipino writers in English.
To the late Adrian Cristobal, you may be accused of anything, but mediocrity is not one of them.
Kimosabe, if creative writing in English (and no other language, Filipino or otherwise) is only what matters in talking about Cristobal, that’s fine. But the issue is loyalty — and a stubborn one at that — to a brutal autocratic pus-ridden regime.
jojo,
for consistency’s sake, why don’t you use the same standard — “But the issue is loyalty  and a stubborn one at that  to a brutal autocratic pus-ridden regime” to the people working under merry adminstration under Gloria?
good luck, with distinguishing the black, the white, and the gray.
cristobal was a national treasure, simply because he was a “titan of a writer” as krip yuson wrote. if i were you i would suspend judgement and at least read some of his works, as kimosabe did.
and oh, about rizal, he swore loyalty to Spain and to the Catholic church at least publicly to the very end and condemned the Katipunan or the Revolution. but we all knew where his heart was just by reading Noli-Fili. so we did not take it against him, did we?
Happy New Year Anthony, i think you were referring to Beancurd (not Bencard) although i can understand your confusion this time.
fisball, how can you suspend judgment on someone who is already dead? It’s not like Cristobal can still make up for what he did. We can accept that he is both a gifted writer and a one-time Marcos tool. Heidegger was a great philosopher but this does not compensate for his being a Nazi sympathizer (and vice-versa). Among the living, Michael Jackson is both a great pop artist and a pervert. They will be admired for one aspect and despised for another. That’s the way it is for many historical figures.
anthony, sorry, it wasn’t me who said anything about “collaborators” who saved lives. it was the one who uses a guttural version of my handle (beancurd, lol).
anyway, i don’t think anyone needs to hide in a “safe” haven abroad to criticize the gma administration in any manner fail or foul. unlike under marcos, abusive critics of gma and her family flourish with nary any fear of being “salvaged”, thrown to jail, or deprived of their material possessions, without due process of the law. thus, we have the leftists politicians, ambitious muckrakers, scheming bishops, “evangelists” kuno, military power seekers, biased media and academics, and assorted malcontents, who spend their waking moments throwing crap at gma every chance they get.
in this blog, we have the likes of mlq3, equalizer, manuelbuencamino, shaman of m., madonna, cvj, (not to mention intermittent visitors from e. tordesillias’ blog) whose anti-administration commentaries could have put them in troubled waters under a regime like marcos’. all these individuals are LIVING proof that democracy and freedom of speech are alive and well in present day philippines for, at least, the enemies of pgma.
on the contrary, i would probably feel a little insecure defending gma in the philippines, considering some of the rhetorics of intense hatred of some in this blog and in the mainstream media.
in more stable democracies of the world, e.g., u.s., u.k., once a loser in politics, (almost) always a loser. politicians whose competence/integrity had been exposed as wanting , and for which reason they had been rejected by electorates, usually die politically and seldom, if ever, return to the land of the living. i think the same is true with respect to “heroes” and “public intellectuals”.
apparently, not so in the philippines.
Bencard, i’ve been meaning to ask a lawyer, what’s a Writ of Amparo and why is it in the news nowadays?
cvj, being a u.s. law practitioner, more than a philippine lawyer, i probably is not the right one to answer your question re writ of amparo (approved, by juducial fiat, in august 2007). from what i understand, it is an extraordinary court process that bars the military or police from avoiding judicial compulsion for the release of the investigatory files, particularly on cases of unexplained kilings or disappearance of suspected “political” criminals or enemies of the government, by simple denial.
personally, not to question the noble intention behind the institution of this writ, i doubt the efficacy of such a process for the simple reason that one cannot squeeze blood from a turnip. if there was a complete absence of factual information, no amount of compulsion can produce one – and that’s that!
edit: 2nd line, should be: am not the right one…