opinion


WASHINGTON POST WRITERS GROUP


THE OTHER VIEW


A 4


The Manila Times


SATURDAY


D e cember 11, 2010 Edit orial


Nobel Prize boycott: Congratulations?


unequivocally high-minded and could effectively advance its plans for our country.


F


By this act—which pleases the Chinese Embassy and most likely also the topmost members of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee and the highest officials of the Council of State—the Aquino administration has entered the elite stratum of very special friends of the People’s Republic of which the foremost stars are North Korea and Burma. That means China will back up the Aquino administration’s social and economic programs—and its military and police modernization programs—with aid, loans, investments and technical advice. Armed Forces Chief of Staff General Ricardo David Jr. is, at this writing, in China as a guest of the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese government. Reports say he is working to get China to supply some important additions to the AFP’s logistical needs. If he comes back with his mission accomplished, it would be among the first fruits of the Aquino administration’s decision to exercise its option not to attend the Nobel Prize Award ceremonies and be a symbol of growing universal approval of China’s methods and policies.


Philippine chooses China over the USA? The Philippines achieves this status of close friend of the People’s


Republic at a time when China has overtaken Japan as the second largest economy in the world (the first is the United States) and has become, in economic and political terms, a key global figure. It is also a time, as Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, speaking to reporters, has said, when the Philippines should be choosing who to ally with—between the USA and China. Mr. Enrile thinks the choice ought to be made soon—and the choice should be China because “It’s better to ally ourselves with our neighbors in Asia.” Mr. Enrile is an expert in correctly choosing the winner. He it was, remember, who, as Ferdinand Marcos’ Defense Minister, led the military mutiny that grew—with the late Cardinal Jaime Sin’s help in rallying nuns, priests, seminarians and the audiences of Radio Veritas to risk their lives in support of the coup d’etat/mutiny—into the EDSA Uno People Power Revolt. In deciding to stand beside Communist-Party-ruled China—in its campaign to blacken the Nobel Peace Prize and demonize Norway for honoring the imprisoned human rights activist and pro- democracy dissident Liu Xiaobo—President Noynoy Aquino effectively trashes the memory of his sainted mother, President Corazon Aquino, and his father, the martyr Benigno Aquino Jr., who were defenders of human rights and champions of democracy. But that is a painful sacrifice President Aquino and his aides


have made for the greater good—the guarantee of the Chinese leaders’ and Communist Party’s friendship and special treatment as an ally and beneficiary. Mr. Aquino and his key aides—by supporting China’s anti- human-rights and democracy doctrine and practice—are changing the perception of the Philippines held by those in the rest of the world who avidly cheered and gave physical and moral support to the first President Aquino in bringing down the martial law dictatorship. The Philippine action to acquiesce in the Chinese government’s condemnation of Liu Xiaobo (and the house arrest of his wife) was received with shock and anger by human-rights and pro-democracy activists here at home and everywhere in the world.


Goodbye human-rights advocacy They are asking: Weren’t Noynoy Aquino and his Yellow Army among


the most vociferous denouncers of former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for her anti-democratic acts—issuing undemocratic executive orders and failing to go after military and police perpetrators of extra- judicial killings and forced disappearances? Why are they now on China’s side against dissenters like Liu Xiaobo? The answer can only be that Mr. Aquino and his closest associates are more pragmatic and utilitarian than bleeding-heart human- rights and pro-democracy activists, and Christians who pray the Blessed Virgin Mary’s rosary, like his late mother and father. Mr. Aquino and his closest people know, as former President Clinton did, that “It’s the economy, stupid!” It’s not human rights or democracy or pageants of civility like the Nobel Prize that will solve the poverty problem and shape up the Filipinos into a people single-mindedly focused on abolishing poverty and becoming a rich and powerful country, like the People’s Republic of China.


Is that why the President is a supporter of the Reproductive Health concept of arresting population growth—even if the use of cancer-causing chemical contraceptives is tantamount to killing babies in their primordial stage as embryos?


Is that also why the campaign to make corruption disappear must include the demonization of the Supreme Court, which has declared the Truth Commission unconstitutional? Is that why the first sentence of the nullified Executive Order No.


1 was almost exactly the same as that of President Cory Aquino’s when she was leading a revolutionary government and had the powers of the presidency and the Congress at the same time? Is that also why the President has turned away from his cam-


paign vow to prioritize passage of the Freedom of Information bill that will force government agencies to be transparent and officials to let the people know what they are doing? For following the pro-democracy, pro-life Philippine Constitution, whose grand initiator was President Cory Aquino, would perpetuate a Philippines that is the exact opposite of the Chinese model of secretive, undemocratic and ruthless governance that brooks no nonsense from whiners for human rights and transparency. These must be the only reasons—shocking in their grim


decisiveness and revolutionary thrust but high-minded in a fascistic sense—that would justify the Aquino government’s decision to boycott the Nobel Awards ceremony and participate in the Chinese government’s effort to dehumanize Liu Xiaobo. Otherwise, the reason would be despicably cheap and ugly: To make Beijing forgive and forget the incompetence and lack of discipline of the authorities and the police that led to the death of the Hong Kong Chinese tourists at the Luneta on Monday August 23, 2010.


SATURDAY December 11, 2010 The Manila Times DANTE F. M. ANG 2ND, Executive Editor


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VOLUME 112 NUMBER 061


Literature without borders L


AST weekend the Philippine Center of PEN International held its 52nd annual conference in Cebu City. Two of our leading writers from Cebu, Simeon Dum- dum Jr. and Resil Mojares, gave the keynote address and the Jose Rizal lecture, respectively. Note that I use the phrase, “writers from Cebu,” rather than “Ce- buano writers,” precisely to avoid a classification that Resil Mojares problematized in “Writing from the Margins,” his keynote address at the 2008 PEN conference in Manila. We have become more careful about the tags we give to Philip- pine writers and writing. The term “regional literatures” has given way to “writing from the regions.” The former presupposes Philippine literature (mainly in English and Filipino) centered in the metropolis, and relegates the rest to the periphery or regions. This Philippine PEN seeks to rectify. For this conference, Philippine PEN takes a leaf from the charter of PEN International, that “litera- ture, national though it be in ori- gin, knows no frontiers, and should remain common currency between nations in spite of po- litical or international upheav- als.” This principle may well ap- ply to Philippine literature from all the regions. Cebu was chosen as the venue of this year’s conference because of a strong community of writers that Philippine PEN could depend on to make the meeting a success. The central location of the city also


ELMER A. ORDOÑEZ


makes it accessible to participants from the rest of the country. 10 writers from other countries flew in to take part in the meeting. The question of a “borderless” Philippine literature was taken up in three sessions devoted to writ- ing from Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. Three other panels dis- cussed literatures from foreign countries including the US, Mexico, Japan, Vietnam, Spain, Nigeria, Indonesia and Singapore. Poet Simeon Dumdum Jr, who is regional trial court executive judge in Cebu, set the tone of the con- ference in his excellent keynote speech. Here are excerpts: “When I reflect on our conven- tion theme, ‘Solidarity in Litera- ture without borders,’ especially on the phrase ‘without borders,’ I think of birds. For me they exem- plify what it means to live with- out borders. Of more than 600 bird species found in the Philip- pines, about 400 are migratory, such as the egrets, sandpipers, terns, plovers. They generally ar- rive in the country in September, and depart in April. Sometimes I imagine a poet from the country where these birds come from


banding the leg of, say, a Gray Plover, and inserting inside the band a sijo, ghazal, luc-bat or copla de arte mayor, whatever might be the peculiar verse form of that country. And if that plover chooses to winter out on the shores of Talisay in Cebu, where we live, I might replace the sijo with an ambahan or tanaga for the bird to take with it when it flies back in April to its country of ori- gin. The unknown other poet and myself will have established a sort of solidarity between us, and as far as we’re concerned writing knows no borders. “Of course, that solidarity and that borderlessness now takes on more sophisticated forms, con- sistent with advances in technol- ogy. But the basic things re- main—our commitment as writ- ers to justice and compassion, and the rest of the virtues that advance the causes that dignify and fulfill the human race. “To sum up, writers and birds should not be put inside cages, whether territorial or political. Perhaps we do not know that birds are likewise members of PEN, the reason why they too have quills.”


Back in 1994 the National Commission for Culture and the Arts literary committee held a conference at a more modest venue (Ecotech Center) in Cebu City, with the theme “Towards a National Literature.” Its proceed- ings were published in Many Voices (1995) which we edited. It


Swindle of the year


cut showdown of 2010—and House Democrats don’t have a clue that he did. In the deal struck this week, the president negoti- ated the biggest stimulus in American history, larger than his $814 billion 2009 stimulus package. It will pump a trillion borrowed Chinese dollars into the US economy over the next two years—which just happen to be the two years of the run- up to the next presidential elec- tion. This is a defeat?


W


If Obama had asked for a sec- ond stimulus directly, he would have been laughed out of town. Stimulus I was so reviled that the Democrats banished the word from their lexicon throughout the 2010 campaign. And yet, despite a very weak post-election hand, Obama got the Republicans to offer to increase spending and cut taxes by $990 billion over two years—$630 billion of it above and beyond extension of the Bush tax cuts.


No mean achievement. After all, these are the same Republicans who spent 2010 running on limited gov- ernment and reducing debt. And this budget busting occurs less than a week after the president’s deficit commission had supposedly signaled a new national consensus of austerity and frugality. Some Republicans are crowing


ASHINGTON, D.C.: Barack Obama won the great tax-


postponement of a mere 4.6- point increase in marginal tax rates for upper incomes. And an estate tax rate of 35 percent—it jumps insanely from zero to 55 percent on January 1—that is somewhat lower than what the Democrats wanted.


KRAUTHAMMER CHARLES


that Stimulus II is the Republican way—mostly tax cuts—rather than the Democrats’ spending orgy of Stimulus I. That’s consolation? This just means that Republicans are two years too late. Stimulus II will still blow another near-$1-trillion hole in the budget. At great cost that will have to be paid after this newest free lunch, the package will add as much as 1 percent to GDP and lower the unemployment rate by about 1.5 percentage points. That could easily be the difference be- tween victory and defeat in 2012. Obama is no fool. While get-


ting Republicans to boost his own reelection chances, he gets them to make a mockery of their newfound, second-chance, post- Bush, tea-party, this-time-we’re- serious persona of debt-averse fis- cal responsibility.


And he gets all this in return for what? For a mere two-year


No, cries the left: Obama vio- lated a sacred principle. A 39.6- percent tax rate versus 35 percent is a principle? “This is the public option debate all over again,” said Obama at his Tuesday news conference. He is right. The left never understood that to nation- alize healthcare there is no need for a public option because Obamacare turns the private in- surers into public utilities. The left is similarly clueless on the tax cut deal: In exchange for tempo- rarily forgoing a small rise in up- per-income rates, Obama pulled out of a hat a massive new stimu- lus—what the left has been beg- ging for since the failure of Stimu- lus I, but was heretofore politi- cally unattainable. Obama’s public exasperation with this infantile leftism is both perfectly understandable and po- litically adept. It is his way back to at least the appearance of centrist moderation. The only way he will get a second look from the inde- pendents who elected him in 2008—and abandoned the Demo- crats in 2010—is by changing the prevailing (and correct) perception


Buying new PAF planes from Italy


THE procurement of the SF-260 basic trainer aircraft from Italy is a welcome development for the Phil- ippine Air Force. In its own mod- est way, these trainer aircrafts will definitely improve the capability of


that he is a man of the left. Hence that news-conference at- tack on what the administration calls the “professional left” for its combination of sanctimony and myopia. It was Obama’s Sister Souljah moment. It had a prickly, irritated sincerity—their ideologi- cal stupidity and inability to see the “long game” really do get un- der Obama’s skin—but a decid- edly calculated quality, too. Where, after all, does the left go? Stay home on Election Day 2012? Vote Republican? No, says the current buzz, the left will instead challenge Obama for the Democratic nomination. Really now? For decades, African- Americans have been this party’s most loyal constituency. They vote 9-1 Democratic through hell and high water, through impeachment and recession, through everything. After four centuries of enduring much, African-Americans finally see one of their own achieve the presidency. And their own party is going to deny him a shot at his own reelection? Not even Democrats are that stupid. The remaining question is whether they are just stupid enough to not understand—and therefore vote down—the swindle of the year just pulled off by their own president.—(c) 2010, The Washington Post Writers Group.


letters@charleskrauthammer.com


the Air force to produce profes- sional aviators which are at par with the air force of other countries. The Philippine Air Force is contributing immensely not only in providing support to ground troops in conflict stricken areas but more so in the ➤Letter A5


was a quixotic project, given among others the unresolved is- sue of a national language at the time. Has the situation changed? Judge Dumdum then wrote for the Cebu Sun-Star:


“Such an elusive animal, ‘na- tional literature,’ even if some writers kick it about in confer- ences. But the soccer ball of a dog has as much being as the Ce- buano sorcerer’s favorite pet, the sigbin. Everybody swears to its presence but nobody has ever seen it (and wants to see it).” Fictionist/playwright Jose “Butch” Dalisay from the “im- perial center” noted wittily, too: “Put four writers in a taxicab called ‘National Literature’ and you will get four ideas about where that cab should go.” Writers from the regions were not the only ones wary of Na- tional Literature, but also advo- cates of gay, feminist and Mus- lim literature. Perhaps the only agreement reached was the agreement to disagree.


This time Philippine and vis- iting foreign writers passed resolutions, a) reiterating con- demnation of the Maguin- danao massacre (involving many journalists), and b) ex- pressing solidarity with the Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiabo in prison—prevented from attending the Nobel Peace award ceremony in Oslo. To be continued


eaordonez2000@yahoo.com


OR the very first time, in boycotting the Nobel Prize event and thereby opting to kowtow to Beijing, the Aquino administration (AA) has taken official action that can be called


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