Now let us praise famous men

Professor Emeritus of International Politics Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Agee’s line updated would for political correctness add ‘and women,’ thus losing its euphony. But today we wish to praise the three famous men and ideas that embody the Philippines’ gift to the   world in the past hundred years.

‘It’s the only thing we’ve given the world,’ the legendary General Joal Almonte said. ‘People power.’ It spread around the world to the present day — in the Middle East. Joal should know. Down to the most minute detail he planned it.  He saw Jaime Cardinal Sin in his Villa San Miguel garden and asked if his Eminence could turn out the masses upon receiving the signal from General Fidel Valdez Ramos, who to Washington at least was the last shred of decency connecting the archipelago to the outside world. And Kuya Eddie knew what to do down to the most minute detail when Joal laid before him the command of the Mother of all battles.

Art precedes, yes it predicts, the future. Artists see history unfold, and allow us into the secret. My first purchase of art was at Solidaridad’s then Malate gallery, by a man born simultaneously with me, Eddie Castrillo. This was 1970 and the bas relief predicted every detail of the horrors ahead in Martial Law. The greatest artist in the Philippines, and the only one with a following outside this country, is Manong Frankie, Francis Sionil Jose. He’s too modest to note his several-time presence on the short list for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and it is only politics that has prevented this great man from commanding the gift that would demonstrate what he has given the world. A prophet in his own country indeed — like every other he’s read outside his own country. A 300-page German PhD thesis has examined his opus in detail.

Now a confession. Yes, from 1972 I have known the Philippine Constabulary Commander turned greatest president (who else is in contention? Even P-Noy enjoined me to wait before writing — he had not finished). But in 1970 Manong Frankie arrived at my house in Cambridge dragging a suitcase on wheels, the first such I had seen. My asawa had, the day she graduated from Wellesley (where Senator Shahani had preceded her), bought the house for about today’s equivalent of P100,000,000. Nor had she worked a day in her life, but her great-grandfather in 1890 had endowed his descendants forever. Real estate near Harvard was pricey even then, it wasn’t a grand house. Frankie may be 5’3” but I always think of him as ten feet tall. He didn’t understand why with such a ‘big’ house we needed to go off for the weekend to our 200ha farm an hour away. We concocted an excuse. We were the embodiment, in all too many ways, of the de la Cruz family, of Manong Frankie’s latest and greatest novel, The feet of Juan Bacnang.

A great work of art embodies all of us. I see every detail of my life in that book — the undeserved road from rags to riches, the cruelty of power, the abuse of all around us, and the loneliest of deaths. But Everyman will so see. ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ Every educated person instantly knows that line. But Tolstoy’s Count Vronsky doesn’t match Juan Bacnand. ‘A fevered, ruthless will ignites the muscles, each inert single fiber, each tiny vessel of blood with a force that defies logic and reason — a surge that thunders onward, sweeping away whatever impedes the thrust — a pointed elbow, a desperate scream — all are leveled by that relentless crush, and then that explosion which shatters the brain, bones, innards into a million dazzling pieces of ecstasy…’

A great Filipina complained to me of my treatment of her famous mother in a book I’d written. ‘Luckily Filipinos don’t read books and those that do don’t read Anvil’s,’ she said. But every Filipino should read The feet of Juan Bacnang. Not because it is Manong Frankie’s gift to them; it is for the world. Now let us praise famous men. “I think of those who were truly great. The names of those who in their lives fought for life, who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre’. Above all, Manong Frankie, Joal, and Kuya Eddie.