142. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #6: Remember Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora were framed.

If you remember Lapu-Lapu of March 16, 1521,  surely you'll remember February 17, 1872. Three Filipino priests, Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora, were lobbying that the parishes be assigned to the seculars. Then, a revolt erupted among the workers in Fort San Felipe in Cavite, which ended in the massacre of most of the putschists by the Spanish army. To save himself from the government which was running after the perpetrators, Capt. Saldua volunteered to be a star witness against the three priests. The Spanish authorities believed everything Saldua  said and refused to allow the three to cross-examine Saldua, saying Saldua suffered from an ailment of some sort. It was a trial that thrived on rumors and happenstance. If you were a prosecutor then, you would have moved to dismiss. Yet, national security was an utmost concern; somebody had to be hanged, and the three vocal priests of the secularization movement matched the frame. On their day of execution, Zamora was driven to insanity, Burgos cried like a baby, and Gomez was resigned to his fate, saying, "Dear Father, I know very well that a leaf of a tree does not move without the Will of the Creator; inasmuch as He asks that I die in this place, may His will be done.”  Saldua, poor fellow, got hanged first. And Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora followed the same end. When they died, the heavens darkened as the people knelt and uttered the prayer for the dead. The death of the priests broke Rizal's heart and inspired him to dedicate the El Fili to the three. When Aguinaldo's army captured the towns of Cavite, they stormed the parishes seeking an affidavit from the Spanish friars to absolve the martyred priests, as if the event did not take place more than twenty years before. But such is the hunger of the people for the truth that no matter how long it had been, the memory of injustice would haunt them and embolden them to undo what was wrongly done, even with an inconsequential affidavit which had no legal bearing. Death could never quell the people's desire for the truth. Lately, you said you would bring back the death penalty by hanging. Many people would not be fine with that, but because you are the President, you can make it happen. Just remember Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora were framed. The Spanish did not get it right, they never did. And this nation, born of the blood of the three martyred priests, seeking the blood of those who disturb our peace, in spite of our learned judges, lawyers, and the men and women who work for justice, we know, we would never get it right one hundred percent of the time. No system would ever get it right all the time.  For no matter how hard we ponder and study the question -- "Should a criminal be hanged?" -- we would always miss a spot and be blind.  We would probably get it right most of the time, but in each time, an unsettling question would lurk in our hearts, are we hanging a Gomez, Burgos, or Zamora again, victims of the mob and the burning passions of their time, witnesses to the limits of our human faculties and ways, and icons of regret that would wound us for the rest of our days?

141. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #5: Give the really rich some spanking

Your crusade against the criminals is welcome, but to be a true socialist as you say, you have to give the rich some spanking. They have made a lot of money through the years. They trumpet it every year, and they're taxed the same way as the rest. So, give the poor a buena mano hit. I pick two darlings of the business world to take it -- Smart and Globe, the telco duopoly. Hit them with the windfall tax. Windfall -- that's what they get every year. They have been raking in at least a billion a month each for so many years, and they give us shit. Dropped signals, no signals, garbled signals, and very efficient billing and collections. They never gave us a rebate for all the bad service they give, and they are proud of it. The Supreme Court even ruled once that a 100 million tax on Globe prescribed and never to be collected till kingdom come. Pres. Ramos broke the PLDT monopoly in the 90s, but through predatory practices, what was once a thriving marketplace of the telecom industry is now a Mutt and Jeff of telco comedy. Come on Mr. President. Be a true red-blooded socialist. Hit Smart and Globe with a windfall tax -- 80 percent of their filthy profits. Use the money to build more schools for children to teach them nobody makes that kind of money without deserving it. 

140. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #4: Keep yourself humble.

I've been analyzing your discourse that set the tone of the campaign, and I think the key element that got you votes was humility. It manifested in many ways like self-deprecating humor ("I've been copying since grade one"), manner of dressing (maong jeans amidst the call for "disente"), public adulation for a rival in Miriam Defensor Santiago ("You will live forever"), and a cool and collected demeanor while waiting for the debate to begin -- highlighted by a joke on Mar Roxas's third visit to the toilet -- when it seemed that every candidate would die if he or she didn't win, you played the jester who's left your fate to the gods. I'm sure you've been humble for a long time, aware of your role in the world and the little space each one of us occupies in the universe, proclaiming no monopoly of the truth, moral righteousness, nor good intentions. This shouldn't be hard, humility. But the presidency has a way of going to people's heads. Just remember it is not a prize, but a duty. Humility. Humility. 

139. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #3: Cut your credit

No, blast it into smithereens. You don't owe anyone your position, not even the 15M voters that swept you to power. You owe it to the 100 million of us that keep this country together, including those that did not vote for you, the millions more to be born in your term, and the millions who died to build this republic.  Your donor, Emilio Aguinaldo, should declare bankruptcy for the billions he gave are now written off -- lista sa tubig. The polarities in your team that are now creating little fiefdoms like the Samar and Balay of the old should be busted. It's one team, the President's. No little presidents should emerge. You don't owe them. The guy who used to give you the answers to your math quizzes, the man who taught you how to shoot, the lawyer who got your marriage annulled, the doctor who treats your migraine, and the bishop who lends you his plane -- screw them all.  I asked an adviser of yours a week before you got elected if you are a philosopher  king, and he replied that you are a benevolent despot -- a reply not enough to swing my vote away from my loyalties for a despot doesn't look like anyone in Plato's ship of state. But the theater of the elections is over. The ship of state is now for you to steer. You can still be the philosopher king. Begin by declaring you are debt free. Let your creditors call you a scumbag, walang utang na loob. It doesn't matter what they say. There should be no paybacks, only thank yous. 

138. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #2: Do Something Crazy

Do something crazy. Curfew, alcohol ban,  karaoke limit -- not crazy enough. You offered four cabinet seats to the left? It means nothing because the laws they are going to implement are capitalist creations and compromises. The three hectare retention limit of the Agrarian Reform Law, for example, used to make Jimmy Tadeo's blood boil; he wanted zero. You trash-talked Congress and their penchant for legislative inquiries? Oliver Lazano can do a better job. What I want is the most outrageous idea you can do with your mandate -- something to stress a point to its illogical limits. You hate rapists? Introduce the penalty of castration and whatever's removed are fed to the dogs in plain view of the convict. What a spectacle. That would make Michel Foucault turn in his grave. Plunderers and white collar criminals? Twenty years in exile with the Dalai Lama on the mountains of Tibet, costs of board and lodging charged to their loot. Murderers? One year inside a tomb beside their victims. That's just for the criminals. For transportation, we need a cable car across Luzon. What about a tunnel to connect Cebu, Bohol, and Negros Island? For Mindanao, tunnels, railways, cable cars, put them all there. Make it a showcase of development. You can even move the capital of the country to Davao and build a Malacanang of the South.  For the OFW's, slash the remittance fee rates into half. Bring the price down by making the postal money order system electronic. I'm sure these too are not crazy enough, but you get the drift. Do something crazy, outrageous, and wild. Be the imaginative President we never had. Create a Department of Imagination. Don't squander your mandate like the others did. Nobody get's to be president twice. 

137. Unsolicited Advice to an Incoming President #1

I never want to hear you say it's the outgoing President's fault. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, you're the President now. It's your problem now and you asked for this. You filed a Certificate of Candidacy for the Presidency, campaigned for five months (actually, evidence shows at least two years), burned a lot of energy and dough speaking to throngs of crowds that sent them to cathartic heights, and now you have it: the title, the chair, the seat, the power, the voice, the big fist. You have the treasury, the army, (even the enemy's army which might no longer be the enemy unless the RA's would have there way again), the international community, and you can command people power and electrify this nation. So man up, unsolicited advice that was shunned by your outgoing predecessor, don't blame him or any one before him. 

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135. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Struggling with the Zeros

Duterte has backtracked on his initial denial of the allegations made by Sen. Trillanes about his Php 211M  deposit in his BPI bank account and has said that the account exists and it has about a little less than Php 200 M. When asked to explain about his initial statement that the account had barely Php 50,000, he said he was confused with the zeros. This curious incident highlights a potential problem in the event that Duterte is elected President. He probably needs to attend a math seminar to re-orient him about the  zeros, considering that the annual budget is PHP 3 trillion which has  twelve zeros, the national debt is 77 Billion USD which has nine zeros in US dollars and more in pesos, and the population is 100 million which has eight zeros. Thus, the problem would be how to help him cope with zeros. Should we call his former math teacher from the Ateneo de Davao for him to teach the president about something the president should have learned in grade three? Should the better option be making custom made  calculators with keys shaped like women's lips for him to get the hang of it easily? Shall we order instead an abacus with bullets as beads or will it be better to appoint to the cabinet his seatmates from grade school math so they can make the calculations for him and he can just copy from them like the old days. Another proposal on the table is to ask him to imagine the zeros as corpses of the people he has killed, which might actually be a good idea. Whatever the solution is, come June 30, 2016, the math educators of the Republic are going to be in a crisis as the people have elected a president who gets confused with zeros.

134. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Finding the best excuse for the Php 211M

The timing couldn't be more right. Less than two weeks before the election and Trillianes pops the Php 211M expose. Somebody deposited Php 500  in the bank account, and Banco de Oro accepted it with the names of D30 and his 'drama queen' daughter on the deposit slip. Trillanes has proven half of his allegation, that the bank account exists; the other half, which  is the Php 211 M deposit, may be proven in just a matter of time. The Duterte crisis team faces the toughest hurdle yet. The spin doctors have successfully navigated through the Pope curse incident and the rape joke, but now, it's about the money deposited in an account which is not declared in the SALN. What are the options for Duterte? Let us count them all from the inventory of past spins and excuses:

1. The Corona excuse - "Inipon ko yan since grade school."

2. The 5-6 excuse - "Hiniram ko sa bumbay."

3.  The Chavit Gambit - "Payag ako makulong basta kasama si Erap."

4. The Erap excuse - "Kay Jose Velarde yan!"

5. The Arroyo excuse -  "Kay Jose Pidal yan!"

6. The Cito Lorenzo excuse - "Kasalanan ni Joc-Joc!"

7. The Joc-Joc Bolante excuse - "May sakit ako."

8. The Joey Marquez excuse after being caught by his wife in bed with another woman - "Hindi ako 'to!"

9. The Kim Wong style - "Isoli ko na lang yung natira."

10. The Flaminiano style - "Objection your honor!"

11. The Classic Duterte style - "Putang ina mo Trillanes, barilan na lang tayo!"

133. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Looking for the Hollywood Script for the Presidency

The Duterte election story is a narrative straight out of Hollywood. I told a friend of mine every episode of this Duterte phenomenon follows Joseph Campbell's Hero of Thousand Faces in which Campbell described the template of the monomyth or the hero's journey. From the time Duterte's name was floated around as a possible presidential timber (this is called, "the call to adventure"), to his initial decision to refuse the nomination (there I recognized it immediately as the part called "refusal of the call"), to the seemingly overwhelming clamor for him to heed the call (where the call is heeded and the formal adventure story begins), to the early days of the campaign where he took pot shots at Mar Roxas and his Wharton degree (a sort of the hero slaying the dragon there), and to his climactic ascent to the top of the polls (the recovery of the treasure in the cave). This is Hollywood.  It's the essence of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter,  and yes, Batman. It is why in spite of his crass language, off beat self-deprecating if not idiotic sense of humor, and the limited focus on crime prevention as a campaign platform,  Duterte is a hit. Duterte's handlers sold us an old script and most of us fell for it. Yet,  come June 30, 2016, when the adventure story ends, and Duterte is sworn into office, there is no Hollywood script. As the late comedy king, Dolphy, used to say when he refused to run for public office (in spite of the popular clamor),  "Eh paano kung manalo?" But Duterte brushed it all off during the last debate by saying he'll just copy from the others as he's been copying from others since grade one anyway. Somebody please give him a DVD on the life of Churchill, before somebody sneaks him a video on the Nazi's. 

132. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: 8. Marcos is buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani

I once met a guy who claimed he was Marcos's illegitimate child and that the real Marcos didn't leave for Hawaii and stayed in obscurity in the Philippines for years until he died and got buried in a cemetery in Posadas Village. He showed me a picture of the tomb where the words Ferdinand E. Marcos were written. I felt amused in a weird kind of way as I showed the man the door. Indeed, in death as in life, Marcos Sr. is the stuff of myths and legends and controversy as well.  I recalled that PNoy once toyed with  the idea of Marcos being buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, until Commissioner Etta Rosales, then Chair of the Commission of Human Rights, lobbied hard against it by claiming she herself was raped while in detention during Martial Law. Erap and Arroyo also thought about it, but due to popular opposition against the burial, Marcos remained frozen in a crypt in Ilocos. Duterte seems to be the man who would put the end to this debate as he vowed to bury Marcos in the Libingan once elected. This long standing national debate reminds me of the  story  of Antigone who sought to give his brother Polynices a decent burial in spite of King Creon's orders that Polynices should not be buried or mourned for on the pain of stoning. Antigone defied the order, got caught, and was locked in a tomb where she hanged herself to death. But Haemon, King Creon's dear son, turned out to be Antigone's lover, and upon seeing Antigone's grim end, Haemon killed himself as well.  As Jorge Luis Borges said, "Destiny takes pleasure in repetitions, variations, symmetries."  On first impression, it seems what we are seeing in the Marcos burial debate is  a simple variation of the Antigone story, which did not end well for King Creon and the powers that be of Ancient Greece.  Duterte is poised to bury Marcos once and for all at the Libingan ng mga Bayani,  but I suspect this is still not going to end easily even if he succeeds. Marcos's enemies and the people Marcos once caused to suffer would come in the dead of the night with their spades, picks, and shovels for one solitary barbaric/heroic purpose: to unearth his rotting corpse from the resting place of heroes. It's the Antigone story in reverse. 

131. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: 7. Joma Returns

Duterte has not been apologetic with his friendship with the New People's Army (NPA) and its founding father, Joma Sison. Joma himself has floated the thought balloon of his return if Duterte wins. I'm pretty sure Gen. Palparan, the erstwhile red hunter and congressman, would not be amused. What a curious turn of events it would be when Joma visits Palparan in jail. Even more curious is when Joma visits Malacanang, the palace of the "naghaharing uri" the destruction and fall of which Joma has committed his life to pursue. How would Joma's jailers, Juan Ponce Enrile and Fidel V. Ramos, feel? I'm half-guessing hundreds of rebellion and murder charges have been filed  and archived in various courts against Joma, but would the Department of Justice under Duterte's term even lift a finger to reactivate them? I have once tried to read  Joma's treatise on national democracy, but I was too much of a 'dem-soc' to go pass the first page. And today, the Maoist ideology is bankrupt.  If Joma returns, all I have for him is an old copy of his poetry and a question I once inscribed on the margin, "Are you a guerrilla first and a poet second or the other way around?"

130. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: Playing Cat and Mouse with the Smokers

The story goes that Duterte once pressed his gun against the crotch of a defiant smoker who challenged a restaurant owner to ask the Mayor to stop the smoker from getting his post dinner nicotine fix. Duterte gave the smoker two choices, to eat the stick of cigarette or have the smoker's balls blown off. To the anti-smokers among us, myself included, this sounds like a great prospect for 2016 -- finally a dead serious campaign against the smoking tyranny in the entire country. But I doubt it if this hardballing style against the smokers can be replicated in the entire country. I don't think there would even be enough bullets for all those balls. Besides, playing Russian Roulette with smokers' balls is sadistic and illegal. Instead, I see the future of smoking as the new form of protest under a Duterte Presidency, similar to Noynoying -- activists converging in Mendiola each with a stick of cigarette, their balls showing, and the protesters chanting in unison, "Kalayaan para sa yosi at betlog!"

129. Problems and Prospects of D30 Presidency: 5. Life at 30 kph

One of the things Davao City is proud of is the speed limit of 30 kph on its roads. Months ago, even the Mayor's daughter, 'drama queen' Sarah Duterte, was caught  overspeeding and it made the headlines. The idea behind slowing down vehicles is the prevention of accidents, albeit I haven't seen any serious study which proves that slow vehicles cause far fewer road accidents. But Newton's Law of Motion gives us the equation F/M=A from which we can derive M(A)= F. Such that a lower acceleration will produce a weaker force and probably cause less damage in the event of a mishap. Yet, it still depends on how the accidents go. A car moving  at 10 kph and running over a stray dog would still kill the dog as a car running at 100 kph, but Duterte would not mind any one running over a stray dog -- they shoot stray dogs after catching them in Davao. Yet, how will this speed limit apply to the millions of cars in other cities of the country, such as Metro Manila, Metro Cebu, and Cagayan de Oro? Imagine the stretch of Katipunan with its parade of trucks everyday running at 30 kph. My son, Juancho, would probably take ten years to finish from UP as he would always be late for his classes and those trucks are going to stall traffic in that area. How long would it take to go to Tagaytay or Baguio City? Lawyers would probably camp out of the courts on the eve of their hearings to make sure they arrive on time. I would also surmise that it would be the final blow to the newspaper business as they would arrive one day late. On the positive side, it would rid our roads of big American trucks and cars in favor of Asian made 1.1 cc vehicles as people would have no use for gas gusslers if they can drive them up only to 30 kph. And the jeepney drivers, some of whom gear up to second gear from a stop, would be dismayed to find out the second gear is the highest gear they could go. Ayos ba bay?

128. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: 4. The Death of the Dress Code

In the 1990's, our moot court professor Judge Oscar Pimentel used to berate us for folding the sleeves of our Barong. Young and impressionable law students that we were, we couldn't understand why Judge Pimentel disapproved of such fashion sense among the male would-be lawyers when then Pres. Ramos himself was going around his official functions in long sleeves Barong with the sleeves folded up to the elbow. Apparently, Pres. Ramos's handlers thought it was a symbolic way of showing that the President was hands on with his job and his official wardrobe's formality was getting in the way of his work. With Duterte, however, it seems the entire Barong, not just the sleeves, is on its way out. I haven't seen Duterte in any official wear, and his wardrobe appears to be composed mostly of jeans and sports shirts. This reinforces Duterte's image of being a man of the ordinary people as indeed, it is easy to alienate others if one comes in a Barong or even a coat and tie. Thus, much to the dismay of  Judge Oscar Pimentel, the entire Barong, not just the long sleeves, would be retired during the Duterte Presidency, assuming it happens. As in the Ramos era,  the Barong's formality would also get in the way of work as it can be easily soiled by stains of blood. Pesteng yawa.

127. Problems and Prospects of D30 2016: 3. Middle Kingdom Woes

We all heard it last night: Duterte is going on a jet ski to the Spartlys to plant the Philippine flag and dare the Chinese navy to shoot him. It sounds like a joke, but I think it's cryptic. What he is actually saying is there is nothing he can do about it. On other occasions he floated the idea of a joint venture with China, yet I think he missed the fact that there are other countries fighting over the islands, including Vietnam, which planted a cell site on one of them and offered a better signal than Smart. So, a joint venture with China might actually cause us to fall from  grace with other southeast asian countries interested in the islands. We become friendly with China and become enemies with other neighbors.  It only shows Duterte has no plan yet for the Spratlys issue, and all he is trying to do is use the issue to promote his tough guy image. But come June 30, 2016, all we can do is follow up on his pledge to go on a jet ski to the Spartlys with the Philippine flag, and dare the Chinese navy to shoot him. And if they do? Well, I hope Leni Robredo is the vice-president then. 

126. Problems and Prospects of D30D in 2016: 2. Following through theFederalism Promise

2. Duterte promised federalism and I'm sure to the average Juan the big "F" sounds like a good idea. But are we going to break up the Republic into federal states like the US of A, and are we thinking that automatically we'll have prosperity like the US of A? The most immediate impact of federalism to this country is that it will increase the number of elective and appointive positions in government. It is going to create redundancies in order to give the federal states autonomy. The model is the ARMM where they have secretaries of departments over the ARMM region and the local secretaries appear to have more power than the secretary in Manila. So, if we have federal states, then we will have as many sets of cabinet secretaries as there are federal states. Are we going to have as many sets of congressmen and senators too? What happens to the judiciary? Are we going to have little supreme courts too and one big super supreme court in Padre Faura? How long will it take for my little ejectment case to finish from the Municipal Trial Court to the final Supreme Court when as it is it already takes six years to finish. We might end up having more public officials than ordinary citizens. Somebody please do the staff work on this federalism shit.

to be continued

125. Problems and Prospects of a Duterte Presidency 1. Adjusting to Life with the DDS

The signs are all over. Duterte rallies have been well-attended. Carlos Celdran has been praising the Liberal Party (in spite of Proceso Alcala) to argue the case for program continuity. Meanwhile, Poe's team has been brandishing the ho-hum news of the solitary defection of Joey Salceda to GP's  team while Binay is saying Duterte should have a psyche test from Makati. Yet, all I can imagine is Edwin Lacierda raging live on ABS CBN on Guido Delgado's similar suggestion for PNoy in the 2010 campaign.  What can you say people of Daang Matuwid? A friend of mine said the Mar campaign committee has released an email to adherrents persuading them about the nine or so reasons why Mar will win. In other words, every non-Duterte fan is desperate. While I am not about to concede that Duterte is going to win, I would like to be prepared when it happens. So, here are my key problems and prospects in the event that the Duterte  dream (or disaster, however you want to look at it) comes upon the Republic on June 30, 2016. 

1. Adjusting to life with the DDS (aka Davao/Duterte Death Squad)

Everybody seems to be focused on the resulting peace and comfort that is expected to come with the promised elimination of criminal elements in three to six months. But how are we going to live with the DDS? Am I postponing dieting for a good six years because the criminogenic profile of a drug pusher/addict resembles the stick thin Joey Pepe Smith? If we all start to get thin, the DDS might mistake us for drug pushers/addicts and put us on the hot list for elimination. And are drug dealers the only criminals on the hotlist? What about the smugglers, tax evaders, adulterers, concubines, stock market manipulators, money launderers, SALN falsifiers, check bouncers, estafadores, facebook hackers, pornographers, trespassers, forgers, mambobosos, and the like? Can the DDS even tell which criminal should go? Is the punishment for all crimes death? What if you just snorted a molecule of cocaine? I'm preparing my resume so I can apply for slot as a consiglieri of the DDS. Maybe they need some guidelines, a lesson on mala in se and mala prohibita, culpa, culpa aquilana,   a lecture on the classic Lecaroz v Sandiganbayan, and dare I say --  DP as in "d.u.e. p.r.o.c.e.s.s."?   I'd do it for free as long as they keep me out of that list. 

(to be continued) 

123. The Assault of the Lolas

I once defended an octogenarian accused of the crime of Robbery. It was the weirdest case I have ever handled, and I got by with a defense of physical impossibility, as I presented a medical certificate that my client was so old she could not even walk or carry anything heavier than a pound. I thought nothing could be as weird until I read the news today that Lola Valentina, 78, and Lola Jovita, 65, have been accused of Direct Assault in connection with the Kidapawan massacre. This government, which has been peddling the public with news that the economy grew under its watch, detained the old ladies who are now held up in Kidapawan and  their pictures are being passed around as they beg for bail money. I have no argument that Direct Assault can be committed by old people.  They can spit, slap, and pull the nose hair of the police, who in this case were armed with batons and guns, and be deemed liable for Direct Assault of a person in authority. But isn't that a silly thing? Out of the thousands of people involved in the bloody  incident, this government picked two old ladies, still young enough to shout and demand for rice to feed their hungry grandchildren, but too old to run away from the police who were also spraying them with water from the firetrucks. Oh, yeah, they were sprayed with water - water that could have been used instead to nourish their dried up farms. And this government has the gall to brag about the economy? Let's wait for the investigation, as it has not been proven that this heartless idiotic government  has caused the rise of the economy. Hell, it has not been proven that the economy rose at all, ask Lola Valentina and Lola Jovita who wouldn't be rallying in Kidapawan and now languishing in jail if it did. 

122. Let's wait for the investigation

Artwork by Celeste Lecaoz Copyright 2016

Whether people died in Kidapawan, whether they're hungry, whether the NPA was feeding them while the protesters were demanding for rice, whether the police shot them or they shot themselves, whether they obstructed the road, whether road obstruction deserves death, whether the drones which captured the gruesome event were functioning, whether the massacre was staged by Duterte supporters, whether the protesters were unthinking minions of the NPA, whether our leaders were inept, whether we should see, hear, and speak while  the investigation is on going. Yes, we should all wait for the investigation, so we can find out the truth:  We should be happy to be alive. It's bad luck. It's not fatal.  It's GMA's fault. It's the dictatorship. Ninoy, someone's father, died too.

121. Every Massacre is a Repetition of Another

Line art by Celeste Lecaroz. Coloring by Teresa Regina Aceron Copyright 2016

I was inside the San Beda College compound when they shot the farmers in January 1987. We were told not to leave the campus until around 8pm, and what I saw afterwards in Mendiola was the big mountain of slippers and other belongings that were gathered after the crowd was dispersed. Thirteen people died and a lot more were injured in that incident. Jose Diokno was supposed to speak in the San Beda auditorium the following day,  but because of the heartbreaking event, he cancelled his engagement. The goverment was saying it was the fault of the leftists for having agitated the farmers to proceed to Mendiola after their week stay in the compound of the Department of Agrarian Reform where their demand for an immediate land reform program became futile. And I can't help to see the parallelism between Mendiola and Kidapawan, which happened on April 1, 2016: an Aquino in power; farmers demanding something immediate to them, land and food; the red scare, the blame being put in Leftist/NPA, and most importantly, the injured and the dead. Jose Diokno, one of the greatest figures in Philippine legal history, resigned from the Aquino government then in 1987 in disgust. According to her daughter, Dr. Maris Serena Diokno, "It was the only time we saw him in tears." So far, this is the only thing not repeating itself in this massacre, a man of honor in an Aquino government condemning the massacre and resigning from it. Every one else is saying, "Let's wait for an investigation." Some are even saying, this is a set up for Duterte. Well, at least, we know Nietzsche's Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence has a crack. When events repeat themselves, there are variations. Yet, the crack on the Kidapawan Massacre is on the heads of those Aquino sycophants.

120. Open Notes

When I used to teach in a law school, I had a policy of open notes during exams.  I guess my students loved me for it, but soon they realized that the answers to my questions are not in any book. My theory is that the true measure of learning is in the ability of the students to determine the relevance of available legal information given a particular problem and the ability to apply the legal information to the problem. This process presupposes that the student has read through the material, determined the important matters, synthesized the lessons, and has found their connection to real life scenarios. So the students who have not been doing their homework will never pass the exam even if I allow them to open their notes during exams. They would more likely than not miss the point, fail to spot the relevant issues, and cite the wrong law.  This is the same view I have for the presidential debates. It doesn't matter if they have open notes.  If they don't know their stuff, they would be muttering irrelevant information and they would miss the point of every question. Besides, intelligence is less about data, but more about disciplined thinking, just like the presidency being less about debates but more about leadership. Incidentally, the candidate -- who claimed to be unaware of the no notes policy and insisted on a compromise where everyone is not allowed to have notes except him -- has already shown the brand of self-entitled idiotic leadership he brings. Heaven forbid that he wins. 

119. Coffee, Chocolate, and the Doctrine of Eternal Return

"Everything has returned. Sirius, and the spider, and thy thoughts at this moment, and this last thought of thine that all things will return"


- Friedrich Nietzsche



I have been trying to decide whether my earliest memory was coffee or chocolate. It has something to do with Nietzsche's idea of the cyclical nature of things. If Gary Larson were to make a comic out of it, it would be like those well-drawn characters and "Infinity" would be telling "Finity", "You cannot fill me up because I'm limitless and you're limited." So, "Finity" answers, "Oh yeah, what if I repeat myself endlessly?" It's like putting a mirror in front of another mirror, a trick I used to play as a kid. If you peek inside it, there is an endless repetition of the mirror inside a mirror, with your nose peering into it. But my inclination is trying to remember where it all began -- coffee or chocolate -- and by so doing I hope I could explain where I am and predict where I would go. And maybe I might find out something interesting too. 


1. Coffee


I was born in 1970 in Manila but I grew up in Pola, Oriental Mindoro, Philippines, south of Manila, north of Cebu, east of Palawan, west of Boracay. My mother, Zennie,  who was taking the first board exams for medical technologists after I was born, had left me in the care of my grandparents, Benedicto (Tatay) and Maria (Inay), while my Mom and my father, Edmund, started out with their young married life in the outskirts of Quezon City. She had been teaching medical technology college students, and she couldn't live with the thought of her students passing exams the board exams and she failing it. Thus, the toddler, who happened to be me, had to be sent to the old town with the grandparents while she focused on the review.


In Pola, we lived in a big house made mostly from trunks of Narra trees, which my Tatay patiently planted, tended, and harvested in his homestead farm after the war.  The house had three big rooms and I stayed in the master's bedroom with my grandparents. I would normally wake up alone at dawn as the folks were early risers. While the roosters began to cock, Inay would be sweeping the front of the house. I could hear the gentle swishing of her broomsticks as she cleared the ground of dried leaves from the previous day.  Tatay would be at the public market awaiting the day's catch to prepare for our meals. As I open my eyes from sleep, I would be greeted by the high ceiling works of those Narra craftsmen who built the house in 1967. I would then slowly make my way to the dining table, which was a long twelve-seater and also made of solid Narra. I would be by my usual chair at the left side of one end, and there I would find it -- a cup of coffee. 


It's Kapeng Barako, caffea liberica, always fresh and warm, which Tatay boiled in a pot over a stove. The coffee was a daily staple. As soon as I stopped drinking milk and became conscious of the world, I started having coffee. So, I don't ever recall having taken milk.  We put sugar and evaporated milk on it. Sometimes, we pour coffee over rice. Fried eggs and rice soaked in Kapeng Barako was our daily breakfast fare. Sometimes, we had pan de sal,  pineapple jam, and cheese. 


Kapeng Barako is probably one of the boldest flavors of coffee. I would describe it to my future wife, Ma. Celeste, as the one without finesse. It is bitter and has that Turkish roughness at the finish. But Tatay's pot-boiled Kapeng Barako has somehow tamed its boldness and cleaned up the finish. That's why it's best for soaking rice, a practice which amuses  Manilans and foreigners alike. 


The coffee is grown in the farms of Pola but the variety came from Batangas and Cavite. Back in the 70s, I would often see coffee beans being dried on mats laid out on the streets. On one occasion, I tasted one of these red cherry fruits out of curiosity and found it mildly sweet. After being dried under the sun, the coffee was roasted and then brought to the market where it would be grounded and sold. Inay owned a store, and she sold ground coffee in old newspapers rolled into cones for “manalapi” or fifty centavos each. She made a good living out of that store where she sold rice, canned goods, soft drinks, cigarettes, and liquor.  Coffee was sold cheap and the margins were low. But I could tell from memory it was the one which always registered a sale day in and day out. It was what retailers would now call a "fast moving consumer item".


The coffee would stay in the pot the whole day to be warmed as the need arose. And if there was anything left at the end of the day, it would be poured on the sink so the pot could be cleaned for the next morning’s brew. Meanwhile, with the advent of processed food, instant coffee made its way to our dining table too. But Tatay never quite gave up on our Kapeng Barako. He would offer guests coffee and ask them if they preferred instant coffee or the pot-boiled Kapeng Barako. He always had both in reserve. 


Preparing instant coffee was easy. Hot water, coffee granules, sugar --  and it was done. Instant coffee demystified the complex process of making pot-boiled coffee for the young kid that I was. Unfortunately, it lacks flavor, which is what coffee is all about. When I was a teen-ager, I once stayed in a house in Barangay Sinipit, Cabiao, Nueva Ecija and was served instant coffee that looked so pale, it could compare with  a baby’s urine. I felt pity for the people in that town for having known coffee only in that way. 


Recently, I met a client who owned a coffee plantation in the Kona belt in Hawaii and she would give me a kilogram of Kona coffee every year as a token of her appreciation for my work. Kona is considered the champagne of coffee. It runs in one's mouth like water. No bite, just smooth, no sourness. It has low acidity, so to drink it is to have a clean luscious coffee experience. How can instant coffee ever compare?  


Yet, commerce succeeded in subverting the experience and changing our perceptions. Advertising and the onslaught of mass media made it impossible for common folks to resist the lure of modernity. Were it not for Tatay who prepared coffee the old fashioned way, I would not have known that real coffee is not instant.



2. Chocolate



An equally strong memory that lurks in my mind, however, is chocolate. We poured hot chocolate over suman and laced it with condensed milk. We also pour it over our rice. But often the chocolate is made into champorado with sticky rice. Condensed milk is how we sweetened it. When I was four, I remember being impatient with eating the hot champorado one day. Tatay who was concerned about my predicament taught me the trick of spooning the champorado from the edge  of the plate, which was the coolest part of the porridge. It worked, and since then I never had trouble with hot chocolate porridge again. 


In 1987 as a teen-ager going on summer vacation,I arrived in Pola and found Inay roasting cocoa beans in a big pan. The smoky aroma of the cocoa roasting enveloped the kitchen, and I could hear the sound of Inay's rhythmic and gentle strokes on the pan cradling the beans from one side of the pan to the other. She was like a conductor as she gracefully stirred the beans from side to side and around the pan above the light fire, carefully paying attention that the beans were roasted evenly without burning them. The outer shells were popping out of the beans and the chocolates were revealing themselves in the heat. Then, she stopped. It was time to  ground them. 


Tatay had set up the grinder on his working table. It was screwed from one edge of the table. It had an opening on top where he put the beans, and a long hand lever which he turned on a circular motion to grind the roasted beans. Chocolate would then emerge from the other side, oily and sticky brown, to be scraped off and placed on a plate. 


As the chocolate landed on the plate, it was mixed in brown sugar, rolled into balls,  and left to dry overnight. It would be then kept in glass bottles before they were given away as gifts or consumed. We never sold them to anyone. They were too precious to be sold. When groceries marketed their own local chocolate tableas, Tatay lamented that they were mixed with peanuts. So, through the years our family continued to make our own chocolate.


Unlike the instant coffee, however,  instant chocolate was never quite regarded as an equal to our chocolate tableas. We rarely had instant chocolate in the house, and Milo was never considered a chocolate drink at all. It was something you drink to make it to the Olympics, a product of Filipino marketing genius and hot air. 


Milo is made from chocolate and malt, and it is an energy drink because of the carbohydrates in it which is derived from sugar. So, in a sense it's claim as an energy drink has basis but it makes Coke, which has seven teaspoons of sugar in a can, the energy drink for all seasons. 


Yet, in the 70s, people were not aware that a boost in energy from sugar would be accompanied by a sugar crash. So, if you were going to the Olympics and you're drinking Milo thinking it can boost your energy, you're actually setting up yourself for defeat. My family knew it was all a ruse. Thus, for my current household, where four kids grew up, I have bought not a single tin can of Milo. 


3. Repetition


In the 80s, my Dad had this steel contraption where a ball with swing back and forth by its own weight. I was in grade school then and I wondered often if the swinging would ever stop. Every time I visited my Dad's office in a building in front of Stella Maris School, Aurora Boulevard, Cubao, Quezon City, I would notice it swinging. Nobody seemed to touch it and I concluded, it would probably never stop unless it got toppled over accidentally or on purpose. My Dad moved in to a new office soon and I lost track of what happened to that steel contraption. 


After finishing high school, I went to Ateneo to take up a degree in philosophy. I soon got introduced to the works of Albert Camus, especially The Stranger and the Plague. What fascinated me with Camus's work, was its eloquence yet it inhabited a sense of quiet resentment about the condition of man. In another book, Albert Camus had an image of the Sisyphus whom the gods condemned to ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, and the stone would fall back of its own weight over and over again. It reminded me of my Dad's steel contraption. 


Many years later, I discussed the myth of Sisyphus with Juan Benedicto, my first born son, one morning over coffee and chocolate, and he said it was sad. But I told him that in knowing that we are destined to swing back and forth and repeat what we have done, there is a possibility that the understanding can give us an idea on what we can do about it. The alternating current moves from point A to point B then pulses back to point A and point B. Sure, it is repetitive,  but something happens in this repetition, energy is present. And as long as the swinging goes on, the energy is there. 



4. Coffee again



Tatay and Inay traced their heritage from Batangas Province home of Kapeng Barako. Inay hailed from Bauan and Tatay from Calaca. Inay's family moved to Pola before World War II and started a farm where they maintained a self-sustaining community during the war. Tatay was a typewriter repair man. They got married and had their first child, who was my Mom, after the war. They stayed in Gov. Forbes street in Manila while Inay's siblings finished their studies in the University of Sto. Tomas. Life was full of hope then but it was not easy. Inay noted how unstable Tatay's job was and decided to pack their things, move out of Manila, and get into agriculture in Pola. Soon, they attained success in farming. Their farm grew to 37 hectares which allowed them to build a big house and send their children to school. All their three children finished college, and one even became a lawyer. They lived unto their 80s, sustained by the fruits of their farming venture. 


My Mom passed the board exams and was a topnotcher. My Mom said she dreamed that she got 33.33 percent, and was bothered by the dream, until the results came out that she was #3 among the topnotchers. I then moved in with back with my real parents in an apartment owned by Ilocanos in Quezon City to begin my schooling.  But the coffee habit had stuck, except that we never had Kapeng Barako in our apartment in Quezon City. We had Nescafe or Great Taste, which didn't taste that great. Once in a while though, chocolate tableas from Pola  would make their way into our kitchen, and I would have a blast with champorado for breakfast. 


Relatives from Canada soon introduced us to the foreign instant coffee brand, Taster's Choice. It was much better than the local brand as it had this pleasant aroma, which all things imported seemed to have. Yet, it was still pale compared to Kapeng Barako. The 70s and 80s were the era of instant coffee. Hardly any household in Manila brewed their own coffee. On one occasion though, I found different kinds coffee beans being sold in Rustan’s Supermarket in Cubao. Yet, my curiosity and interest for different kinds of coffee could not be supported by my allowance. So I often wondered how the other types of coffee tasted like.  One afternoon while preparing for philosophy oral exams, a classmate, Vinnie, bragged about his dad who was a regular purchaser of Rustan’s coffee beans. He said his dad always said that all coffee was bitter, the difference was in the aroma. 

In 1991, I decided I was going to law school. I was about to finish my degree in philosophy from the Ateneo, and I asked my metaphysics teacher,  Fr. Roque Ferriols, S. J., to make his letter of recommendation. I met him at the lobby of the Loyola House of Studies while he was having coffee. Fr. Ferriols was the first Filipino to teach philosophy in Filipino during the 70s. He was a young Jesuit scholastic during the war. Thereafter, he was then sent to New York to complete his studies in Fordham University. He was a linguist as well. He translated Greek texts directly to Filipino and often in class, he would provide the equivalent of one Greek quotation in English, French, Spanish, Ilocano, Bisaya, and Tagalog. The man was a genius, but I would remember him for the depth of his simple philosophical statement, "Sana wala na, ngunit meron." It's hard to capture that in English, but my best attempt is, "It could have been nothing, but it is."


He greeted me that morning, and filled out the boxes in the form. I remember him ticking the boxes that was probably a little short of a grand slam recommendation to the law school and showed them to me. He said that he wanted me to see what he thought of me, which was contrary to the instructions of the law school forms. I thanked him for it, because it weighed a lot considering his reputation. It gave me confidence that I could make it to law school. He folded the paper and put in the envelope. He was about to lick the seal of the envelope with his tongue when he stopped and said. "Better seal it yourself as the ants might eat it. I'm drinking coffee."


My new adventure could have ended there as I almost got killed on the day I started law school in June 1991. I was on the seat farthest to the driver on a jeepney. Buendia Avenue was slippery as it was drizzling. We had just traversed Makati Avenue and the driver had stopped at the WIP building to load some passengers. We were accelerating to a full speed when I saw this light blue armored van approaching us. Its driver had lost control as the front wheels were locked but the van kept moving on the wet road. The van's driver swerved to our lane and hit us, landed on the sidewalk, bumped a few pedestrians, and came to a full stop after hitting a plant box a hundred meters forward. I had scratches of the van's blue paint on my jacket. We were fine. But the pedestrians were wincing in pain. We got off the jeepney as they loaded the victims on the jeepney which was to take them to the nearby Makati Medical Center. I took short walk to the Ateneo Law School, uttered a prayer in the chapel, and went up the cafeteria. I ordered coffee which they brewed in a large pot and some rice and  longaniza.  I poured coffee over the rice and ate the meal that I could have missed forever.  Thinking about it now, I was just an inch and a second away from certain death. But I was not meant to die yet, because I  had to complete a cycle. I had to drink coffee first before I die. It's not superstition, but Nietzsche, or it could be Fr. Ferriols with his cup of coffee muttering, "Sana wala na, ngunit meron."



5. More Coffee


In law school, I had to find a way to stay awake every night to finish the reading list for the following day. Ground coffee was hard to find in Project Two Quezon City where my Mom and my sisters stayed until I got married in the late 90s. So, I had to get by studying late nights in our apartment on Nescafe and Taster's Choice. The boost from caffeine was there, but it soon wore out as I had to drink cup after cup to keep up with the readings and recitations. I struggled in my early years. I felt sleepy and I couldn't focus. And with the Ateneo Law School’s demand for academic excellence, I was always a few points away from failing marks.


At the turn of the 90s, somebody marketed Jolt Cola, which had a double dose of caffein. But it didn't have a lasting effect either. I got appointed as a Notes and Comments Editor of the Ateneo Law Journal in my junior year. We had access to the student activity room which we shared with the student council.  It was the elite crowd of the school and we soon learned that we all shared a passion for coffee. Somebody organized the Coffee Club, and we chipped some of our allowance for a large coffeemaker, ground coffee, and a rack for our mugs. We were blissfully united by the smell of coffee that enveloped the room as soon as the first cup was brewed. By this time, I had managed to get a grip on how things worked out in law. I had more focus. I ditched Jolt Cola and the house blend Nescafe and looked forward to my daily cup from the Coffee Club. 


One morning I arrived in the student activity room and found a friend, Blue, visibily agitated that the coffeemaker ran out of filters. He opened the drawers of the table one by one only to find out that the boxes of filters were empty. We thought of options like using our socks instead to help us get by, but we decided it was not a good idea (too many flavors), and we settled with tissue papers. It worked and we found peace and harmony again in the coffee that was brewed as we tackled the reading list of the day. The coffee from the Coffee Club probably turned around my academic carreer.  Thus, I attributed it less to coincidence but more to the Coffee Club that I soon made it to the Dean's list and then graduated with a silver medal in 1995. 


Passing the bar exams was my next hurdle. My Dad decided he was going to allow me to stay on my own apartment to help me focus as I reviewed. It was the first time I was going to live on my own with one specific objective, pass the bar. The first person I visited to help me assemble my stuff for the apartment was my Mom's brother, Tito Dexter, who was then Vice President for legal in a local bank. He was kind enough to lend me his coffee maker that afternoon and gave me some money to buy coffee and a box of filters. I emerged from his office gleefully clinging to the machine like a kid happy to bring home a toy. 


The coffee maker was the only appliance in the apartment. I had a bed, a table, a guitar, and books. I shared the apartment with a friend, Punzi, who once tried out the coffee and couldn't sleep for the night because of the extra doze of caffein. The smell of coffee dominated the apartment, it was the elixir that kept me going in the dead of the night for months as I prepared for the big exams. 


While taking a break from the preparations one Saturday afternoon, my friend, Enzo, brought me to the lobby of Makati Shangri-La Hotel. He said this was where he spent his days reviewing. He ordered coffee which came in a small pot, good for three cups, and some biscuits. He had a good view of the orchestra which played baroque music and he opened his books. I decided it was not a bad way to spend 60 bucks in 1995.


My friends, Punzi and Enzo, and I eventually passed the bar. I became the third lawyer in the family after my two uncles, Edgar, my Dad's brother, and, Dexter, my Mom's brother.  I took my oath as a lawyer in April 15, 1996. and applied for work in a securities law firm, Picazo Buyco Tan Fider & Santos where the bosses were all coffee addicts too. The curious thing was they didn't have any coffeemaker, so we all had to content ourselves with Nescafe. One day my Mom bought me a Taster's Choice Coffee blended with almonds. It became a hit in the firm that it ran out in less than a week. One of my bosses who probably consumed a lot of it apologized to me and I told her it was fine. Besides, I never really liked Taster's Choice as I was always yearning for real brewed coffee.  A few weeks after, the firm management decided we were going to have a coffee machine and the lawyers blissfully worked day in day out. 


In 1996, I started dating my soon to be wife, Ma. Celeste. We met each other in college. She was two years behind me in school so she was in third year when I started law school. I lost touch with her until I was already working. A friend of ours, Steven, gave me her number and one Saturday afternoon in 1996 I decided to call her.  We went out to have a quick dinner in EDSA Shangri-Mall food court and watched a play at the theater. After the play, she invited me to her house where she stayed with her mom, Percy, and sister, Cristina. Celeste prepared some coffee in her cafetiera, which she took home from Italy, after a year long stay. Unfortunately, when the cafetiera was about to finish boiling the coffee, it tipped over the stove and spilled the coffee. I found the cafetiera a curious piece of gadgetry that evening and that made me more interested in Ma. Celeste as we obviously both shared a passion for coffee. We got married a year after and I finally got to have coffee as prepared through the cafetiera when we moved in together in 1998.


At about the same time, I was invited by a client for a meeting at Starbucks, 6750 Ayala Avenue, which as it turned was the first of more than 200 coffee shops they would soon put up.  I wondered what was this hip place with the young professional crowd? It brewed coffee and made chocolate all day and served expensive baked goodies. I would hang around the place since then and find my way too in other branches. They had coffee and chocolate from all over the world. I thought it was brilliant way to earn a living. Finally, commerce has found a way to make money on coffee and chocolate without disrespecting them. 


6. Coffee still


By 2003, I have started my own law firm and high in the agenda of the to do items was how to serve the coffee for  clients. I have taken fancy for the Verona blend of Starbucks coffee which has a bit of cocoa on it. I instructed the office manager to make sure only Verona blend is served and coffee was prepared through French press. One of our first clients was a congressman from Leyte whose term has ended and who asked his wife to run for the seat that he vacated. She appeared to have been cheated in the race so we filed a protest in her behalf. The couple came to the office  several  times and had coffee while we were discussing the case. We did not know each other before the engagement but we got to know each other well through those moments. I noticed that whenever coffee was served, his wife would have the task of putting milk and sugar on it. She would taste it before she would turn it over to her husband to drink.  Our firm was on the cusp of a breakout that year. We had few retainers and we were living from payroll to payroll. Their case provided us, however, with a steady cash flow that helped us make it that year. Many years later, Steve, one of the partners who handled their case. asked him why the former congressman chose our office to handle their case. He said it was because he liked our coffee. 


Soon, I landed an opportunity to be the Corporate Secretary of The Coffee Bean &Tea Leaf Philippines. It lasted for about four years as and I found Coffee Bean to be the classier place. I learned a lot from the company and I often requested to be paid in part with coffee. In 2011, Coffee Bean introduced its concept of pod coffee machines. I was excited about the product that I bought two machines, one for the office and one for the house. Later, I realized they had allotted free machines for members of the Board, but I had already mine and didn't mind spending for it. The great part about it was I could have espresso shots whenever I wanted one. When I first had an espresso, I thought I couldn’t handle it. It was far too bitter a drink to handle. But it was quick. 


So I developed a ritual on drinking espresso, pairing it with a glass of cold water:   First, smell the aroma of the espresso. Drink the water to prepare the mouth. Take a sip of the espresso. Drink water. Then, finish the espresso. Done. And then,  drink water to clean it up. Beautiful. Espresso shots had a way of shooting straight up to the brain to generate the energy that I crave. 



7. Chocolate again 



Inay and Tatay died in 1996 and 1997 respectively. My Mom passed away too in 2014. My family, including Celeste and my four kids, had only been to Pola twice since I got married, so I brought every one home for All Soul’s day in 2014. When we got home,the house made of Narra had not changed at all.  I told my kids how one day I came home to find Inay making chocolates from the fruits of the cacao tree. I showed them the table where Tatay had placed the grinder with a screw and where the last step for making chocolate was done. I opened the drawers of the table and suddenly I found it, the old grinder. It was rusty but all its parts were in place. It only needs to get cleaned and it is ready to make chocolate again just like in the summer of 1987.


In 2015, my wife, Ma. Celeste, and I are in our mid-forties and have taken to morning jogs at the grounds of the University of the Philippines. As early as in our 30s, we have  figured that a lethargic lifestyle is not good for our aging bodies and a solution is to try to exercise regularly. One day after our morning jog, we noticed a new Chinese Restaurant near Quezon Avenue, Lido. It turned out to be owned by some friends of ours from college, Eric and Alvin. 


I felt like having chocolate that day instead of the usual coffee, so I ordered chocolate. The chocolate arrived with a small cup of milk, which I readily poured into the chocolate. It was different in a brilliant kind of way. I told Celeste, if this were steak, this would be perfectly marbled. I thought this drink had the right balance between chocolate and fat content. It's like premium ice cream. And this drink has made me think again that chocolate is for special days. I can't have this everyday because it is too sinful. But I'd like to have this every now and then. 


Recently, my cousin, Jade, who now works in my firm brought chocolates from Pola and prepared it in the office by boiling it with water in the rice cooker. We served it to a new client who liked it so much that he asked for another cup. My client came once more to the office and he asked again if we had chocolate which unfortunately ran out. Then, I thought of our first major client, the congressman who chose us because of our coffee. I thought maybe I should stock up on that chocolate to keep this new client? 



8. The Doctrine of Eternal Return


I still can't decide whether my earliest memory was coffee or chocolate. The legend of Kaldi, the Ethiopian goat herder, who is credited for discovering coffee from the 10th century is a younger tale compared to the 3,100 year old history of chocolate from the Aztecs.  But history has a sort of disclaimer. It cannot claim which came first, coffee or chocolate. All it can say is what is supported by historical evidence which can be overturned as more research is done. Who can possibly tell which drink the first human beings took?


I drink coffee everyday, but chocolate makes any day special. Perhaps, it is both. This is how it has always been. In the cycle of sunrise and sunset, we keep in tune with this rhythm, we have coffee to pepper our day. We are satisfied with it but on special days we have chocolate. We live like my Dad's steel contraption swinging back and forth in a corner of his office day in and day out. And we find ways to preoccupy ourselves on how to make our coffee, boiled, drip method, French press, instant, or pod style for it is  our nourishment. And  still we’re finding more ways to make it, for there is no limit  on how our minds can create the methods to help us do the same task over  and over. "Finity" fills "Infinity" with repetition. And still,  chocolate is our alternative, our special treat, the one that  makes the ordinary different. And we live by it, make it, and share it with family and friends. 


Of course, it would be disrespectful of Nietzsche if we say eternal recurrence is simply about drinking coffee or chocolate everyday. The mystery is that somewhere sometime I already wrote this essay about my life with coffee and chocolate trying to find out where it began,  and I am writing  it again, charting the same thoughts every moment, everywhere, and somehow going back to where I started, not quite achieving the purpose of this quest, but finding out more interesting things than just coffee or chocolate. 


We can look at it as a curse, a boring way to spend a morning, an evening, or forever. It's all the same, like the house in Pola or the names of the people we encounter in our lives. Nothing happens. It is the cycle of Sisyphus repeatedly pushing the rock over the cliff which comes rolling down again as soon as it's there. Coffee and chocolate could be just the props for this farce. They mean nothing and stand for nothing, which only shows that, no matter how far we have gone, we have never been anywhere and we are staying where we are. Salvation never comes.


But we can accept it as our destiny, for something is there to nourish us and it isn't dreary because even if it's just coffee, it's never the same coffee. There are permutations of blends, and methods of brewing it that makes a different experience every time. And on special days, there is chocolate. And our chocolate gets better, even if the process of extracting from the seeds of the fruit has never changed. Thinking about my first cup of coffee, or was it chocolate(?), in the old Narra house and the things that happened thereafter shows that the possibilities are endless, even if things are just repeating. Nietzsche said it was amor fati, the love and acceptance of our fate. I asked Ma. Celeste, as I showed her the mirror trick I used to do as kid, "would you make the same decision to marry me if you knew you would have to make the same decision through out eternity?" She stared at me as if amused by the question, smiled, and said, "Of course!" The Sisyphus who is pushing the rock is tired, but as long as he is smiling, does it matter?


Or we can look at it the Fr. Roque Ferriols way. We live like the current that moves from point A to point B then pulses back to point A and point B that is repetitive, yet something happened in this repetition. I  became the toddler of Tatay and Inay, the son of my Mom and  Dad, the husband of my wife Ma. Celeste, the father of my kids, the friend of my classmates, and lawyer of my clients. We celebrate our lives with coffee and chocolate in the here and now, limited by time and space which we navigate to and fro, and if we live the same lives over and over again, aren't we blessed?  Someone's hand, not quite like Inay's gentle hand that stirred the cocoa beans above the light heat, is not only keeping us in sync with the rhythm of the universe, but also sustaining us. And we found peace, friendship, and love. As long as the swinging goes on, coffee-chocolate, generation after generation, we should be grateful and happy to be around.  Sana wala na ngunit meron. 

118. Sen. Jovy Salonga and his Three Chairs

Sen. Jovy Salonga was the commencement speaker when I graduated from the Ateneo School of Law twenty years ago. Coming out of law school with  a dream of starting a rather late adult life -- I considered law school as a leave of absence from life -- I left the graduation rites that afternoon with the images of three chairs in my memory. Sen. Salonga was quoting Henry David Thoreau, who said, "I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society." The images never left my head, and I have lived trying to set my life in this frame that Sen. Salonga had suggested from Thoreau. Sen. Salonga died a few days ago and I realized most of us only know him from his third chair.  In 1991, I read an essay by Conrado de Quiros on why the Salonga-Pimentel team deserved the presidency and the vice-presidency because they earned it from their work fighting martial law, and I decided to spend the summer of my second year in law school campaigning for Salonga-Pimentel. I also remember Sen. Salonga beaming with pride as he displayed a copy of the Foreign Investments Act before a television crowd. The law was passed while he was the Senate President.  

He claimed that it was a landmark legislation that would propel the Philippine economy. I must say that I regularly refer to it as our office advises foreign investors in the Philippines. It is a well written law that allows the President some leverage on directing investments to specific industries through the Negative List.  If we whispered thank you for every dollar that was brought in through that law, it would probably be louder than the loudest rock star crowd one could ever gather. But nobody ever did and Sen. Jovy never asked for anything in return, except that we vote for him so he can serve us more. Sen. Jovy Salonga did not become president, but I would never forget our graduation day when he came to speak about the three chairs. It is a special reason to be forever grateful for this great man from whose wisdom as a leader the Filipinos have all benefitted. Thank you Sen.Jovy Salonga. May you rest in peace. 

117. Apple, Privacy, and the State (6)

It's hard to say the state cannot touch a convict's mind, especially if that mind plotted against the state. But the test between the liberal and the conservative is precisely at this hairline boundary. Let's assume first that the state has the ability to open up a criminal's brain and find out from its parts the data that it needs to uncover the plots and conspiracies in the criminal's mind. While at it, the state might as well find out how to turn this criminal into a Buddhist so it won't kill any living being. All of a sudden, the promise of peace is in the horizon;  what with all the criminals in the world becoming Dalai Lama adherents? But is that how we want to do it? Every criminogenic mind becoming a Buddhist? The state tweaking people's brains? Yet, what if the state becomes good at this tweaking job and to prevent revolution and reform, it does it to everyone who has problems with the status quo? The citizens would lose their power over the state, such that the citizens would be the beings of the state. It's not going ro be pretty. Speculation? No, its applying Nietshche's will to power. The state would do everything for power, its actions would be dictated by its desire for more power. Humanity will not stand a chance if it allows the state to encroach the data in the human mind. So, the state should never be allowed to access the human mind, regardless if it's the mind of the most notorious criminal. 

116. Apple, Privacy, and the State (5)

Exploring the brain is not equivalent to controlling it. In the context of the Art of War, however, assuming we consider the tension between the state and the individual as a state of war, exploring is intelligence gathering, which is the key to victory. When Sun Tsu says be like water which follows the curvatures and holes of whatever it contains, he is talking about intelligence gathering in the context of war. So, if we allow the state to explore the inner workings of the brain, we are empowering the state to defeat the citizen's brain in the event that the state and the citizen ends up in a conflict like a war. Nietzsche would agree that to know the brain is to have power over the brain. Should we allow the state to have power over our individual brains? No. It's an Orwellian scenario I'm painting, but this is  pretty much what will happen to us if we allow the state to be governed by paranoia and empower it take over our brains. Thus, the state should never know what is in our brains. The physical matter? Sure, in the interest of science. But it should never have access to our thoughts. It should never know how, why, and what we think. It's our last inch of power against the state. If we give up that little space, we give up our freedom. We give up our humanity. We become mere creatures of the state.

115. Apple, Privacy, and the State (4)

There is a Gary Larson cartoon which depicts a couple awake in bed in the middle of the night and the wife holding a pillow with which she apparently hit her husband's head.  The husband is muttering, "I'm not responsible for what I do in your dreams." And I won't explain that further in order not to kill the humor, but move straight with an event I remember from our law school days. Manuel Morato, then Chair of the Movie TV Radio Classification Board, was brandishing his idea to the law school lot about his legislative proposal for his agency to have the power to approve movie scripts before they are actually made into movies. I was outraged by the proposal which explains why I still remember that incident. Censor scripts before they are made into movies, this is a proposal for mind control after the dictatorship has fallen in the Philippines. Morato's bill never made it into law, but you'll never know, as the old guard of morality is hovering around the portals of power. The point is the state should never be allowed to control the inner workings of a citizen's mind. It is the most private of a person's private domain, the last frontier where the individual can assert his individuality and humanity against the state. In the citizen's mind, the citizen and the state are equal. It is where free will resides and it is only through the exercise of the free will by citizens that a state can exist. The state does not exist by itself; it exists because citizens with free will decide that they want the state to exist. Thus, the state should not encroach on the domain where a person's free will resides -- the citizen's brain. This is the core of the right to privacy, the human brain. It should be off limits to the state, now and forever, a categorical imperative that saves the citizen and the state as well. So, Apple it's not about the customer. It's about the citizen. 

114. Apple, Privacy, and the State (3)

Let me start by saying that my iPhone is an extension of my brain. Of course, the extension is not physical, albeit I do not think that can be discounted in the foreseeable future. Everything on my IPhone came from my brain. It has the data from my brain, the names of the people I deal with, my conversations with them, my correspondences, even drafts of my intended communications, drafts of my thoughts, blogs, ideas, notes, images not just of people, but also places and institutions. Not only does my iPhone have my brain's data, my iPhone also does some of my brain functions, like keeping my memories, communications, mathematical  calculations, brain mappings, even logical circuits for logical thinking. It is part of my brain. The phone does not have my entire brain, but a lot of my brain functions have been outsourced to my iPhone. As a matter of fact, if I lose my phone, I'd be crippled. It would probably take me more than a month to get a normal life, and I would need another iPhone to do it. Somebody said what technology extends, it amputates. That is a fair statement and sadly my brain functions that have been extended to the iPhone have sort of mortified. I cannot add or subtract without an iPhone, neither can a write a freaking sentence or a paragraph without the iPhone. I cannot remember what day it is in the week without looking at the iPhone or remember what I'm supposed to do tomorrow without my iPhone.  Thus, the iPhone is indeed an extension of my brain. I have a feeling this is the case  with a lot of other people, especially those with iPhones. So, I'm saying for some people, and they could be a lot, the iPhone is an extension of their brains. Thus, if the government messes with my iPhone, it's messing up part of my brain.  Now, Apple why are you not arguing it this way, you capitalist pig? 

113. Apple, Privacy, and the State (2)

In the previous paragraph, we said Apple's stand on the right to privacy is motivated by its promise of privacy to its customers. By approaching the issue this way, Apple is doomed, legally and morally, so to speak. For all intents and purposes a private contractual obligation is subject to compelling state interests and this has been carved out in the jurisprudence on the US Constitution and probably in the Constitutions of other countries as well. It's the same idea that underlies the prohibition on trading of illicit goods, such as drugs and other contraband. The freedom to contract is limited by what the State permits as legitimate contracts. Thus, by anchoring its objections to the order to decrypt on a contractual obligation, Apple is headed to defeat. Even if we do the test of the categorical imperative on the clash of values between state security and inviolability of private contracts, there is no contest that state interest would prevail for it can be argued that  the right of the state to protect itself against illegal contracts, especialy those which jeopardizes the state's existence, is fundamental. Without the state, there would be no room for rights, as there would be no social order. 

112. Apple, Privacy, and the State (1)

Apple refuses to decrypt a terrorist's iPhone because of privacy concerns in spite of an order from a court which is ordering it for national security reasons. Let's be Kantians for a while and tackle the issue as a purely secular problem. Apple is arguing that the universality of the right to privacy applies even to criminals whose purpose is to kill people in support of a political or social agenda. Kant's categorical imperative urges people to act only according to the maxim by which people can at the same time will that it should become a universal law. Apple seems like it is acting like the American hero, protecting the right to privacy of everyone, good or bad people alike, because it believes in privacy. Yet, the Apple statement anchors its position on privacy on the customer-businessman relationship of trust. It has  sworn that its customer's data is private and therefore it would stand by it, regardless if one of it's customer turns out to be a terrorist. In effect, Apple is putting forth two things on the table: (1) the universality of the value that compels it to honor its word to its customers which binds its to 2) protect the universality of the right to privacy of its customers. Yet, the way Apple words its statement appears to be that were it not for the promise of privacy, it would have honored the court order. Tim Cook says, "Our commitment to protecting your privacy comes from a deep respect for our customers. We know that your trust doesn't come easy. That's why we have and will always work as hard as we can to earn and keep it." Thus, if we break down this dilemna further, it appears not to be about privacy but about the promise of customer experience. In other words, it's really what about they promised the customer. Aye, there's the rub. My iPhone sucks at battery life and I'm hunting down the  Apple marketing material that addresses the promise of how my battery would work and pin down Apple to it for a breach of its promise, the point being, this is not about the right to privacy, but a play for more iPhone customers -- hey look at us, we would defy the US Government for you and your iPhone dollars.  Baloney.  Where is the fun in that? But for the next paragraph, let's assume Apple is sincere...