Manolo Quezon's "I am a Bootlicker" Essay

Ever read a book whose words really hit you? Or maybe a movie whose dialogue continually haunt you? For lovers of the written word, I recommend this gem of an essay written by Manolo Quezon entitled "I am a Bootlicker." Funny, witty, candid and most of all, true. (As a PR practitioner myself I should know). The best I have read in quite a long time. Read it here.

The Church of the Angry Christ

Inside the Victorias Milling Company (VMC) compound in Victorias, Negros Occidental, there sits a Catholic church unlike any other church in the whole world. Known to locals as the St. Joseph the Worker Parish Church, the VMC chapel has gained international renown through a Life Magazine article which dubbed it as the “Church of the Angry Christ.”

Long before Da Vinci Code, the Church of the Angry Christ in Victorias created a stir in conservative church circles for its depiction of Jesus Christ as an angry God and its singular rendition of Catholic saints as brown-skinned Filipinos. The architectural design and religious iconography of the Church of the Angry Christ is distinctively different from the host of old Spanish churches that can be found all over the Philippines. When it was first completed in 1949, many Catholics felt that the church decorations were inappropriate and not in line with traditional liturgical iconography. For one, most churches depict Christ not as an angry but a merciful God. Likewise, no other church in the Philippines has deliberately “Filipinized” traditional Biblical themes to give it a modern Filipino face.

The Church of the Angry Christ was constructed by Victorias Milling Co. (the largest sugar refinery in Asia) to serve the spiritual needs of its employees and their families who are living inside the sugar refinery compound. The Salesian priests of St. John Bosco oversee the parish while at the same time administer the Don Bosco Technical Institute located inside the VMC compound. The Belgian liturgical artist Ade de Bethuene was commissioned to design the decoration of the church’s baptism room while Arcadio Anore executed Bethuene’s designs for the baptisery and other parts of the church. Spanish-American creole artist Alfonso Ossorio, whose family owned Victorias Milling Co. then, painted the chapel along with local artist Benjamin Valenciano who did the images of Mary and Joseph, the crucifix and the Stations of the Cross. The Ossorio mural depicted Jesus Christ (God the Son) hands outstretched being received by God the Father, represented by two giant, red-orange hands. A descending dove (the Holy Spirit) with multi-colored wings hangs above while Sts. Joseph, Mary, John the Baptist and one unidentified brown-skinned woman (Mary Magdalene?) stand as witnesses to Jesus' resurrection.

I grew up going to mass in the “Church of the Angry Christ” every Sunday. I remember that as a small child, I would stare at the “weird” and scary murals from the beginning of the mass up to the end, not paying attention to the liturgy. I even remember attending one of the summer art workshops conducted by Benjamin Valenciano, the Filipino artist who helped Ossorio paint the church. As a child going to that church every Sunday, little did I know that I was face to face with avant garde art and an important landmark of our cultural heritage.

More than fifty years after its completion, the “Church of the Angry Christ” has become a touchstone in the development of Philippine religious art. Its principal architects, Ossorio and Bethuene have been given international recognition as pioneering proponents of Filipino religious iconography as an artform. When VMC fell on hard times in the early 1990s, Filipino art conservationists feared that the Church of the Angry Christ might deteriorate if the sugar refinery shut down its operations. But the sugar central has now recovered financially and hopefully will continue to preserve the church.

The Church of the Angry Christ heralded the birth of Filipino religious art in the Philippines. It is one of the few artistic landmarks in Western Visayas and it draws religious art aficionados from all over the world. It should therefore be declared as a Filipino Heritage Site to ensure its preservation for generations to come.

Aswangs in Western Visayas

Aside from sugar, Western Visayas is also famous for its aswangs. Aswangs are the scariest of all supernatural creatures in the Philippines, commonly appearing as bloodthirsty eaters of humans. The myth of the aswang is popular particularly in Panay. The province of Capiz even parlayed this notoriety into a festival. The Aswang Festival of Capiz, which created a stir with local Church groups a while back, now attracts hundreds of tourists yearning for some thrill and excitement, and in the process created livelihood oppotunities for Capiceños.

Perhaps the most popular aswang in Western Visayas is Teniente Gimo. According to legend, Teniente Gimo was a real-life Teniente del Barrio (or Barangay Chairman in present-day terms) in Dingle, Iloilo. He is said to possess supernatural powers and can change into any animal. Various night-time AM radio dramas have depicted him either as a blood-sucking villain terrorizing small villages or as a sort of local “superhero” who used his supernatural powers to help the weak. Another more recent incarnation of the aswang myth is that of Maria Labó. One version of the myth says Maria Labó used to be a beautiful barrio lass who was raped by village men. Swearing revenge, she is said to roam the fringes of small towns victimizing young men. Another version describes Maria Labó as a cannibal who ate her own two sons. Maria Labó is said to be fond of eating human liver and is recognizable by a huge scar across her face, thus the name Maria Labó.

Aside from Teniente Gimo and Maria Labó, one can also hear many scary tales of kapres, dwendes, engkanto, santermo (St. Elmo's Fire), white ladies, manug-hiwits (or mangkukulam) all across the region. Back when there was no cable TV, I used to listen to terrifying aswang stories on our wooden AM transistor radio and one of my favorite programs was the story of Teniente Gimo.

Much has been written about the socio-psychological and anthropological explanation for the persistence of the aswang myth in Filipino folklore. But the first time I heard of a scientific explanation of the aswang myth was from Mar Roxas, Mr. Palengke himself. Back when I was still his executive assistant at DTI, I heard him talk to several important visitors in Capiz about a mysterious disease called Dystonia de Panay and how it may have contributed to the perpetuation of the aswang myth in the region. Dystonia de Panay (scientific name: "torsion dystonia-parkinsonism") or lubag in Ilonggo is a rare musco-skeletal disease found only in Panay. I don’t know who exactly discovered it but a scientific study found that there is an unusually high frequency of dystonia in Panay, particularly in the town of Dingle, Iloilo (where Teniente Gimo supposedly came from) and several areas in Capiz province. Of the 50 recorded cases of dystonia, 23 are from Iloilo and 19 of are from Capiz and all are males. It is called lubag in the vernacular because persons with this disease are afflicted by intermittent twisting movements, muscular contortions and shuffling gaits. There was no known cure for the disease. The said study's Molecular genetic analysis indicates that the mutation responsible for X-linked dystonia-parkinsonism was introduced into the Ilonggo ethnic group of Panay more than 2,000 years ago.

Before it can be sufficiently examined by science and before a cure to it was found, the disease mysteriously vanished in the 1950s. To see someone afflicted with dystonia de Panay must have been a really scary sight especially to simple, superstitious folk. Hence the preponderance of aswang myths in the hinterlands. Who knows, since dystonia de Panay is a congenital disease it may suddenly appear again somewhere when we least expect it.

It’s School Opening Time Once Again!

President Arroyo's temper tantrum has focused attention to our country's education problem. But I predict that after a month or after the media had shifted its attention to other issues, the education problem will be conveniently forgotten and its problems unsolved.

Over 20 million students all across the country are returning to school next week. As the children troop to their classrooms, the hopes and dreams of millions of parents go with them. For most families in the Philippines, a good education for their children is seen as their only way out of poverty.

Most people are aware of the deteriorating quality of instruction in our public schools. We already know for example that there is a huge shortage of classrooms, textbooks and teachers, and that the budget allocation for DepEd is always inadequate to meet the annual increase in student enrolment. In fact, most parents would rather send their children to private schools if they can afford it.

But what most people do not know is the extent of the deterioration in our public school system, which is downright alarming. According to a study conducted by the Kaakbay sa Pag-aaral, an NGO engaged in education reform advocacies, only 6 out of 100 grade 6 students are prepared to enter high school. Even more alarming is the group’s findings that only 2 (yes… as in duwa) out of 100 4th year students are fit to enter college. The same study revealed that only 6.59% of graduating high school students could read, speak and understand English well enough to enter college. 44.25% had no English skills at all. Our students perform even more poorly in math and science, as reflected in the results of the National Elementary Assessment Test (NEAT), National Secondary Assessment Test (NSAT) and the National Achievement Test in recent years. The study concludes that a grade 6 graduate of our education system has only the competence of a grade 3 pupil, and a high school graduate has the competence of a grade 6 pupil.

What our education officials are not telling the parents is that they have adopted the “triage” system as an “unofficial” school policy. Triage is defined as “a process for sorting injured people into groups based on their need for or likely benefit from immediate medical treatment.” It is usually used in hospital emergency rooms, on battlefields, and at disaster sites when limited medical resources must be prudently allocated. Applied to our educational system, triage means sacrificing the many to save the few. In most public schools today for example, all the brightest students are put in one “elite” class (normally called Section 1) and students who show exceptional aptitude in math and science are sent to the Philippine Science High School. Those children who are in most need of teacher attention and guidance, the mediocre and low IQ students, are largely left to themselves because tutoring them entails too much effort, time and money. This situation is not entirely the teachers’s fault nor is it entirely the government’s fault. The fault lies on society as a whole: Filipinos are simply breeding more children than we can afford to educate.

So unless Junior is Grade 1 section 1 at Arevalo Elementary School or passes the entrance exam in Philippine Science High School, forget about him getting a high-standard education. But this is probably just as well. If we are just going to be a nation of domestic helpers and caregivers anyway, why bother to spend millions of pesos to educate them? Why produce management graduates, accountants, engineers and scientists when they can make more money employed as domestics and construction workers abroad? In fact, a semi-literate domestic helper working in Hongkong makes more money than a CPA practicing here. And since we are musically gifted as a people, we might as well just teach our children to play the guitar or some other instrument so that they could become entertainers in some swanky hotel abroad. That way, we get more bang for the buck.