Wednesday, March 13, 2024

PRIME SEAT OF POLITICAL POWER IN THE PHILIPPINES

Tales of the longest-staying Malacañang resident except for one
By Jose A. Carillo 

From its beginnings in 1802 as a Spanish aristocrat’s summer home, Malacañang Palace in Manila was to become the prime seat of political power in the Philippines. It served as the official residence of the country’s governors-general both during the Spanish colonial years until 1898 and during the American occupation until the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. From then onwards it was to be the official residence of 12 successive presidents of the Philippines1—Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmeña, Manuel Roxas, Elpidio Quirino, Ramon Magsaysay, Carlos Garcia, Diosdado Macapagal, Ferdinand Marcos, Corazon Aquino, Fidel Ramos, Joseph Estrada, and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.1


For all their political power, however, all 12 were simply short-term tenants of Malacañang under the country’s democratic system. Each took residence there for at most a four-year or (later) six-year stay, and could look forward to the possibility of staying longer only if reelected. Indeed, only two managed to stay in Malacañang for more than one term—Marcos, who won a second four-year term and managed to extend his stay to a total of 21 years through the expedient of martial rule; and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, former Malacañang tenant Diosdado Macapagal’s daughter, who succeeded Estrada as president when the latter was ousted after only 30 months in residence, then managed to extend her own tenancy for another six years—a term that, of course, brings us to the present day. (Three of the official Malacañang tenants died during their tenancy: Quezon in 1944 and Roxas in 1948, both from illness, and Magsaysay in a plane crash in 1957.)

Today [in election year 2020], a total of nine presidential candidates want to become Malacañang’s official tenant for the next six years—among them Joseph Estrada, the ousted Philippine president who wants to reclaim Malacañang to vindicate his name; Senator Benigno Aquino III, son of previous Malacañang tenant Corazon Aquino; and Senator Manuel Roxas II, grandson of former Malacañang tenant Manuel Roxas, who, as Noynoy Aquino’s running mate, puts himself in a contingent position to be also a Malacañang tenant. How the political winds will blow in the national elections this coming May [of 2020] will, of course, determine whether that tenancy would be handed over and revert to any of the same families that had previously occupied Malacañang, or go to the serious contenders for first-time occupancy—Senator Manuel Villar, Jr., Senator Richard Gordon, and former Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, Jr.

Longer-staying Malacañang tenant than most

Through all the often fierce jockeying for residence in Malacañang over the years, however, one man had largely kept mum about the fact that he had been a longer Malacañang resident than any of the Philippine presidents by this time—except one. This was until that former long-time resident, Raul S. Gonzalez, came out last November with a superb memoir-cum-essay collection, My Malacañang: Essays on presidents, people, places and politics, where he blithely asserts in the very first sentences of the very first chapter: “Except for Ferdinand Marcos, no president of the Philippines lived in Malacañang longer than I did. You read it right—‘than I.’ And yes—‘lived,’ as in resided, ate, drank, slept, wakened, thought, dreamt, fell ill, got well, played, laughed, wept, prayed. And yes, yes—‘longer,’ 12 or 13 years.”



                                                                              Raul S. Gonzalez: Author of My Malacañang

Who, one may ask, is this Raul Gonzalez2 who can refer too familiarly and too nonchalantly to a stately place of residence—a palace, in fact—that many an ambitious Filipino would fight for and die for and likely even lie for just for a six-year stay?

To be sure, Gonzalez had actually been a non-elective Malacañang resident. He used to live in a chalet within the Malacañang compound because his father, architect Arturo M. Gonzalez, was appointed by Philippine Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon sometime after 1935 as Malacañang’s buildings and grounds superintendent. Architect Gonzalez held the position until his violent death inside Malacañang grounds in December of 1949.

Strong sense of ownership over the place

The younger Gonzalez himself sums up his strong sense of ownership over Malacañang in the first chapter of his book: “Malacañang was where I took my first firm steps and uttered my first coherent words, where I rode my first bike, read my first book, stole my first kiss, wrote my first poems. It was, I might add, also in Malacañang where I saw what war did to men and what men did in war, in Malacañang where two sisters of mine were conceived and [where] my father bled to death in my 15-year-old arms from a bullet fired from a crazed soldier’s browning automatic rifle, Malacañang which shaped me into the person I am.”

This amazing facility with English prose is vintage Raul Gonzalez, a now-retired communications executive and writer who’s an English-language wordsmith with few equals in the Philippines. His career, spanning several decades until the late 1990s, included a stint in government as press secretary of the late President Diosdado Macapagal and as senior vice president of the Government Service Insurance System; in academe, as vice president of university relations of the University of the East5; and in the mass media, as beat reporter for the now-defunct Manila Chronicle in the 1950s and, in the 1990s, as opinion columnist for the Philippine Star and The Daily Tribune. He had also served as public relations adviser and speechwriter for some prominent public figures in the Philippine scene.

In My Malacañang, Gonzalez writes with elegant, sometimes almost rhapsodic prose about life in the old palace by the Pasig River, about Philippine society and politics in general, and about the movers and shakers he had served or had met in the course of his career as communications executive and writer.

Listen to Gonzalez reminisce in My Malacañang about summer of '45 at the end of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines:

“MacArthur returned not a moment too soon, an eternity too late. Our fast had lasted three long years, almost unto starvation, and turned us children in Malacañang into grotesqueries—looking like gnomes and salamanders, eyes bulging out of their sockets and cheeks sunken and hollow, limbs without flesh and stomachs bloated by hunger, some of us so ravaged by beri-beri that taking a single step was almost like carrying the cross up Calvary.

“Yet we, starvelings all, found soon enough and quickly learned that we could only munch so many apples, chew only so much gum, gulp down only so much Coke, gobble up only so many Babe Ruths and Tootsie Rolls.”

A life-changing encounter with death

And here’s Gonzalez summoning from memory his terrible, life-changing encounter with death in Malacañang:

“The soldier fires, and I see Father knocked off his feet and flung a yard away, a perplexed look on his face, a half-smile playing on his lips. He has always been elegant—Father, that is—and he rights himself and like a leaf whose autumn has come, falls slowly, gently, gracefully to the ground…

“I rush to where my Father is, cradle him in my arms, and he looks at me with those eyes of his that even in anger never stop smiling, and I see a wet, red spot on his necktie getting larger and larger and larger. ‘Help him,” I cry, “Help him.’

“Hands—I don’t know whose—pull Father out of my embrace but, to this day, I can feel his weight, his warmth, and his blood oozing out of him as he lay dying in my arms on the earth of his Malacañang.”

Gonzalez as press secretary to Philippine President Diosdado Macapagal, early 1960s

Many years after his father’s death, Raul Gonzalez was to become a non-elective Malacañang resident again—if only on a day-job basis—when he was appointed press secretary by President Diosdado Macapagal. After Macapagal gave way to Ferdinand Marcos as the new official Malacañang tenant in 1965, Gonzalez worked with the private sector and wrote off and on as an opinion columnist for some Metro Manila broadsheets. In 1986, under the government of then Malacañang tenant President Corazon Aquino, Gonzalez was named GSIS vice president for public relations, a position he held until 1998 under the Malacañang tenancy of President Fidel Ramos.

Insights from the corridors of power

His having walked and worked in the corridors of political power gave Gonzales deep, unparalleled insights about the workings of government. Listen to his philosophical rant in his newspaper column in 1995 about the inefficiency of government:

“Indeed, a lean bureaucracy is a contradiction in terms, as oxymoronic as military intelligence…Thus, where private industry, which is motivated 95 percent of the time by the desire for profit, tries to make do with as small a complement of personnel as it can get by, the government, which is motivated 100 percent of the time by the desire for power, tries to make out with as large a bureaucracy as it can get away with.

“Private industry will make one man perform 10 different tasks, but government will make 10 men perform one and the same task. Put another way, private industry fills a job so that it may be done; government creates a job so that it can be filled. Or better yet, private industry will fill a job only when it is necessary for the purpose; whereas government will create a job because it is necessary to its purpose.”

A keen eye for high achievers

Gonzalez had a keen, discriminating eye for high achievers among people—particularly for young student writers in that often awkward, self-conscious stage of growing their creative wings3, but even for the adult high achievers who had already proven their executive and leadership mettle by winning the tenancy of Malacañang itself. Here, for example, is his recollection of President Fidel Ramos in mid-1996 after the latter’s round of golf at Malacañang Park:

“He still has a wide-eyed reverence for excellence, especially athletic excellence. He looked at [German ace golfer Bernhard] Langer with a respect I hardly see him accord other men; the same look he gives Luisito Espinosa, Elma Muros, Robert Jaworkski4.“He takes a child-like delight in leaving things looking better than when he found them. He couldn’t stop talking about the improvements he had worked in the park and the place itself. ‘You grew up here,’ he said. ‘Come more often and take a longer, closer look at what I have done.’”

Gonzalez with former Philippine President Fidel Ramos during the
launching
of My Malacañang in Manila, November 5, 2009

But the usually mild and soft-spoken Gonzalez could also be savagely indignant and bitingly sarcastic with his prose, although often in high magisterial style. Here’s what he wrote in his 1995 newspaper opinion column about popular Philippine comedian Dolphy’s response to his fans who were then egging him to take a stab at high public office:

“Paano kung manalo ako? [What if I win the election?]

“The question Dolphy asked himself is a question no one who aspires to an elective office should fail to ask himself, preferably as soon as the political bug bites and even before the itch to run develops: Paano kung manalo ako? It is not that an honest reply to this question may ensure that our government will not be run by dogs—worse yet, by curs—that got lucky and caught a car. That is simply being patriotic. It is, rather, that Dolphy’s question may stop people less knowledgeable or less honest about themselves than Dolphy from spending the next six years of their lives scurrying from one rat hole to another in the effort to keep their nincompoopery concealed, private, and known only to their mothers. That is surely being kind to oneself.”

When giving vent to his opinions, Gonzalez could throw caution to the winds, too—even get stylishly snarky or snarkily stylish—as in this passage from his August 1990 newspaper column defending President Cory Aquino when the media tide began to wash against her:

“…it takes only one word to explain…why a media contract is out on Cory, why there’s a policy of againstness on her, why the tales against her are bound to grow taller, wilder, dirtier. The word is: Fear. Fear that she just might run. And if she does, paano naman kami?

“There’s no one in the Opposition now who can beat Cory—and all the polls show it; this despite the ravings and rantings dutifully, and sometimes gratuitously, reported by media about how uninspired her leadership is, how inept her Cabinet members are, how gosh-awful her giggling last July 16 was…”

Flesh-and-blood sketches of people in power

Except for a few touching, sometimes overly sentimental vignettes about Gonzalez’s personal and family life in the latter part of the essay collection, My Malacañang largely devotes itself to perceptive, flesh-and-blood sketches of the men and women—and their surrogates as well—who had tenanted Malacanang over the past 74 years.  He weaves quick, arresting tapestries of their virtues, foibles, and quirks: the imperious Manuel Quezon, “with his short fuse and low boiling point,” unleashing his trademark “puñetas” on those who dared cross him; Carlos Garcia, “the most placid and serene president,” who was probably made so “by composing ‘balak,’ Boholano poetry, and playing chess to the exclusion of anything else”; Diosdado Macapagal, with his almost mystical respect for the Filipino, but who “lacked the charm to convince the people of the sincerity of his intentions,” thus leading to his political undoing; Ferdinand Marcos, “too calculating to allow himself the luxury of genuine anger” and one who “never uttered any word, made any gesture, showed any expression that had no conscious purpose”; Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, possessing “considerable charms,” but with a temper “hair-trigger in its sensitivity and thermonuclear in its explosiveness”; Cory Aquino with her Noah-nesque kind of political leadership, “unshakable in her faith that everything depends on God”; and Joseph Estrada, whom he likened to the Biblical Samson, “a huge man with a big heart and no guile at all, [who] preferred the simple pleasures and the merry company of commoners.” 

Here, indeed, is the essential Raul Gonzalez, an astute observer writing with the confident, sure-footed voice of a consummate English-language stylist. His singular experience of having been the longest-staying non-elective resident of Malacañang had given him a ringside seat to recent Philippine history and contemporary events. And many of his essays in My Malacañang sparkle in his highly engaging narrative and expository style, some even rising to the level of great, unforgettable prose, as in this vaulting passage about the Filipino mentality of “puede na”:

“Name me, show me any bug in the systems we employ, any defect in the goods we produce, any deficiency in the service we render, any blemish in the leaders we choose, any kink in the armor we don, any fly in the ointment we prepare, any flaw in the way we think, comprehend, decide, act—and, believe you me once more, it can be traced to how easily either these two phrases—puede na or puede pa—comes to the Pinoy lips and moves the Pinoy mind…

Puede na I blame as the culprit for the mediocrity that the Filipino has become. It is what has held us back as a people despite the agility of our mind, its inventiveness, its thrusting nature; despite the beauty and bounty of our land; despite so many good starts; despite the fact that we have always been pathfinders and trailblazers, first in many things—to drive out our colonizers, to gain political independence, to absorb the ways of the West.” 

Truly, Raul Gonzalez’s 65 essays in the 320-page book make My Malacañang not only a highly evocative and compelling set of cautionary tales about life and politics in the Philippines but also superb, instructive reading for students of style and rhetoric in English. (2010)
-----------------

Copyright © 2010 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved. No part of this article may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information on reprints, please send e-mail to the author at j8carillo@yahoo.com.

1The succeeding Philippine Presidents after Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo--Benigno Aquino        III, Rodrigo Duterte, and the incumbent Ferdinand Bongbong Marcos Jr.  

 Jose P. Laurel was president of the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation from 1942    to 1945 but, based on Raul Gonzalez’s first-hand account in My Malacañang, Laurel            never took up residence in the palace, preferring to always sleep in in his house in                Peñafrancia St. in Paco, Manila.

2Raul S. Gonzalez the writer and communications executive is not the same Raul M.       Gonzales, the former Philippine justice secretary.

3From the late 1960s up to the mid-1970s, Raul S. Gonzalez was adviser of the college       student newspaper of the University of the East, the Dawn, with a circulation that grew to   over 65,000 copies weekly.

4Luisito Espinosa, Elma Muros, Robert Jaworkski were at the time the leading Filipino       athletes in professional boxing, running, and basketball, respectively.

RELATED READING:

To refresh the memories of the Filipino electorate, check out the list of 15 Philippine Presidents (and their qualifications and fitness for public office) since the establishment of the Philippine Commonwealth in 1935. Click this link to Wikipedia: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Philippines

POSTSCRIPT: 

Former journalist and Philippine Press Secretary Raul S. Gonzalez, the author of My Malacañang, died on May 15, 2013 at Medical City in Pasig City, Metro Manila, after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

RETROSPECTIVE TO A 2003 PERSONAL ESSAY

The Quixotic Quest for Good Teachers
By Jose A. Carillo


Public-school teachers are comparatively the most productive professionals a nation can have on a continuing basis. In a whole lifetime of teaching, where a teacher handles, say, five sections of 60 pupils each every school year during a 40-year career span, she helps educate something like 12,000 pupils and nudges them a grade or year closer to becoming productive professionals themselves. Of course, nine other teachers have to work with her to achieve that, so the country’s current public teaching force of 327,000, if just trained and motivated to do a superb job, can assure the Philippines with something like 98,100,000 capable high school graduates every 10-year cycle and a total of 392,400,000 graduates within the teacher’s 40-year career span—more than enough to replace all of the undesirable products of the previous half century’s half-baked and largely misdirected teaching.

        IMAGE CREDIT: STEEMIT-BETA

This visionary mathematics for our public school system performing at peak efficiency is probably too fancy, too idealistic, and too incendiary, and those with only a piddling understanding of mathematics really should not fret if they don’t get it. But the numbers are probably reasonably accurate and for real. They are as real as the fact that in a longer career span of probably 50 or 55 years, a good number of lawyers—the most glamorized and usually the most lucrative-earning professionals of all—probably will litigate only a few hundred cases that only serve to keep moneyed criminals and organized deceivers out of jail, work out schemes for maybe a dozen corporations to do gray-area or outright unethical things legally, or legislate laws that often only get our law enforcers in a perfect bind (like those that prevent them from evicting professional squatters without giving them a relocation site). 

As to the medical doctor and the dentist and the engineer and the accountant and the journalist, it’s probably prudent to keep them out of this productivity equation. We may not avail of their services very often or deal with them directly, but when we do, they sure can alleviate suffering and give us comfort and reliable information—thus giving us peace of mind and helping make our lives demonstrably better.

But before we hear again that righteous platitude about all professions being equally honorable (as if professional con artists and professional pyramiders and Ponzi schemers could be honorable), let’s go back to the baseline data about this country’s public school system. The Philippines, as already mentioned, currently has something like 327,000 elementary school teachers, with more than 80 percent of the country’s Department of Education budget of 106.5 billion Philippine pesos (US$2 billion) going to their salaries. And, in what seems to be a jolting surprise, a recent World Bank report says that Philippine public school teachers are among the best compensated in the world. 

Based on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, according to the World Bank report, the starting salaries of Filipino teachers were much higher compared to those of most Asian, Latin American, and even some European Community countries. They were higher than Korea’s and matched only by Jordan’s. But then we should be very careful about these worldwide macro level comparisons. Too many inter-nation adjustments are brought to bear on their computations as to render them meaningless in real domestic terms.

Viewed more realistically at the micro level, the compensation for Philippine public school teachers boils down to a starting salary of about 11,000 Philippine pesos (US$208) a month.* This is lower than what a salaried janitor gets in the better-paying government corporations or private companies in urban areas. The even more shocking downside is that this entry-level salary for teachers stays practically at that level even after 15 years of service. In high-teacher-salary countries like Korea and Jordan, those entry-level salaries almost get doubled after 15 years by performance incentives and regular salary increases. 

In contrast, for the backbreaking job the Philippine public teacher puts in, the system provides her absolutely no incentives or rewards at all. It plays a blind eye to the need to motivate her to teach well and to keep her in the profession. Worse, the World Bank study found, the Philippine public school system–in an unbelievable act of illogic–keeps the salary scales the same for both primary and secondary teachers even if the work and the required qualifications vastly differ. Indeed, after more than a century, the Philippine public education system is thus still ridiculously muddling through in managing its most important development resource.

So, if we need better proof of why the teaching profession cannot attract the best and the brightest of the land, look no further. If we need better proof of why students would rather become lawyers in a nation already perilously awash with lawyers, or would rather lead lonely lives abroad working as machine-room engineers and nurses and physical therapists and housemaids, or would rather work as card dealers in the world’s casinos or as boilermen in the darkest recesses of ocean-going ships, it is this. If we need the smoking gun for why this country will forever be engaged in a quixotic quest for good teachers, and why it will forever be gripped by a vicious cycle of national incompetence and illogic and superstition, it is this. (July 14, 2003)

This essay appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, July 14, 2003 issue, © 2003 by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

------------------
*I initially worried that the 2003 salary figures here for public school teachers would have grown so substantially today as to render this column seriously obsolete. However, my information is that the salary level of public teachers in the country has hardly changed all these years, making my observations in this column still essentially accurate and relevant.



Tuesday, February 20, 2024

THE NEED FOR AN ENGLISH STANDARD FOR OUR DICTIONARIES

Looking More Closely at Our Dictionaries
By Jose A. Carillo


Several years ago, when I was still managing an English-language service, I chided one of my English-language tutors for insisting on using her 1980-vintage Webster’s Desk Dictionary as reference. The day before that, I had the 11th edition of The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary in compact disc loaded on the computers in our office, and had asked my staff to delete from their hard drives all old dictionaries, particularly the British-English ones—the venerable Oxford English Dictionary included. I had also asked my staff to put away all of their print copies of the British-English Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture and the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, both of which had long ago been bought inadvertently for our use.



 

These acts may sound like that of an Anglo-hater gone mad, but I assure you that there was rhyme and reason to them--I wanted to thoroughly bring the small company’s English usage to the American English standard. I was therefore a bit miffed that one of my staff should cavalierly resist the standardization effort, claiming that she was more comfortable using her fading but trusted Webster’s. So, not entirely in jest, I gave her an ultimatum: keep that dictionary out of sight, or I would throw it into the dustbin myself.

My reason for banning British-English dictionaries and outdated American-English dictionaries from our office was dictated not by a sudden anti-British feeling or spite for things old, but by a very pragmatic consideration: the business depended greatly on the consistency of our English grammar, form, and semantics with American English as the standard. We could ill afford even the slightest variation in the spellings, meanings, and usage of the language, in our understanding of its idioms, and in its punctuations, prepositions, and conjunctions.



It had become clear to me that our mixed use of British-English and American-English dictionaries had been responsible for not a few of our gaffes—some innocuous, some serious—like spelling the word “center” as “centre,” “check” as “cheque,” and “aluminum” as “aluminium”; thinking of corn” as “grain” instead of “maize”; using the wrong prepositions in sentences like “We live in a quiet street in the city and stay in a farm cottage at weekends” (that’s how the British say and write it, while Americans put it this way: “We live on a quiet street in the city and stay in a farm cottage on weekends”); and worse yet, using the wrong quotation marks and putting commas at the wrong places in quoted material.

A few months back, in particular, when a new editor of ours made a final copyreading pass on a long manuscript, she methodically replaced all of the double quotes with single quotes and took out all of the commas inside them and put them outside the quotes, British-style, like this: ‘This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”, and I thought it rather queer.’ Before that, the sentence used American-English punctuation, like this: “This was the title of Paul Zindel’s book, ‘The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,’ and I thought it rather queer.” We were already way past our deadline, so we had to undo her well-meaning but ruinous work in white-hot haste.

Using a dictionary in the wrong English standard could, in fact, not only wreak havoc on our English but trigger needless controversies as well. Once, when a Filipino-Canadian reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times used the word “miniscule” in a letter that I quoted in that column, the newspaper’s editor in chief told me in good-humored ridicule that I was foisting the wrong spellings of English words on readers. “‘Miniscule’,” he said, “should be spelled ‘minuscule’—with a ‘u’ and not an ‘i’.” When I stood my ground, he opened the Oxford English Dictionary for me and for all of the other editors who were present to see. To my dismay, it confirmed “minuscule” as the official spelling, making only a passing reference to “miniscule” as a variant.

Checking the online Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary later, I discovered that it was even harsher on “miniscule”: “a common spelling of ‘minuscule’ that is not correct.” To my relief, though, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language accepts the variant without comment, and I also took comfort in my electronic Merriam-Webster’s assurance that while “miniscule” continues to be widely regarded as an error, it now commonly occurs in published writing.

Most of the English dictionaries we had on hand, of course, whether using the American or British English standard, were products of great scholarship, but in that former language business of mine, there was a screaming need for only one English standard and only one English-language authority. We simply had to be scrupulously consistent and current in our English, and it just so happened that in the Philippines and in many parts of Asia, the standard for English is American English. We really had no choice then but to begin to live up to that standard by getting a good, up-to-date American English dictionary—and that, I am happy to say, was precisely what I had done. (circa 2005)
------------------

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times and subsequently appeared as Chapter 130 of my book Give Your English the Winning Edge published by the Manila Times Publishing Corp, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.


Monday, February 12, 2024

INSTILLING LOGICAL THINKING EARLY AMONG OUR YOUNG PEOPLE

Teaching Our Children to Think Logically

    By Jose A. Carillo 


Not that I ever entertained the notion that they couldn’t think very logically, but sometime in 2008, I casually asked my two school-age sons whether they had been formally taught logical thinking sometime in their studies. The elder, now 22 (he attended primary school in a leading sectarian university and is now in college taking information technology), said the only time it was taken up was in Grade IV—and only in passing in language arts (“jumping into generalities is illogical”); there was no further discussion of it ever after. The younger, now 14 and in Grade VII in another sectarian school, said he hadn’t heard the word “logic” in class ever; neither was it taught in Montessori School during his kinder. In short, except perhaps in a very few schools in parts unknown in the Philippines (and I’ll be grateful to know where they are), logical thinking is not formally taught to young children at all.



We can be sure, though, that our children are taught many other things our educators traditionally deem more important, such as religion and physical education and civics and ethics. On these the instruction—indoctrination is perhaps a better word—is forceful and intense, very successfully for the first two I must say, yet mostly middling for the other two. Formal instruction in logical thinking, however, is surreptitiously made to wait till first year college. It is, in fact, difficult not to suspect that many schools—particularly the sectarian ones—don’t really want to teach logical thinking to children at all, fearing perhaps that it could undermine the teaching of the major dogmas and beliefs they want to implant unchallenged in young minds.

Thus, by the time our young people enter college and take Logic 101, they could only look at the strange new discipline with great suspicion and distaste. Their mental armor of unthinking habit, religion, superstition, and wishful thinking is already well in place, so what’s the point of replacing it with a new one? Fortunately, some survive the unrelenting assaults on their rational thinking and get to understand how things in our world and in the known universe really work. They are the precious endangered few that keep our country’s tiny fires of rational thinking burning. But most of the children in our country, like most of our generation before them, develop mindsets with little capacity for critical thinking at all.

That our educational system is unable to teach us to think logically early enough is very much in evidence around us, resulting in too many fallacious behaviors among the populace. And based on some history readings that I have done lately, the situation in our country seems to be very much like what Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician and schoolteacher, saw in England toward the end of the 19th century—a situation that prompted him to write a book introducing elementary logic to children.






Dodgson, who taught at Christ Church, Oxford, is, of course, better known as Lewis Carroll, the pen name he used for two enduring children’s books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Although a clergyman, he had a passion for recreational mathematics, using whimsy and satire to show the illogical ways of English society in his time. Finally, in 1896, two years before his death, he published Symbolic Logic, formally setting out his ideas on how children could learn to think clearly and logically.

Here’s what Carroll said in his introduction to the book: “Mental recreation is a thing that we all of us need for our mental health. Symbolic Logic will give you clearness of thought—the ability to see your way through a puzzle—the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form—and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art.”

Carroll made classical logic easy for children by expressing it through riddles, amusing problems, and mathematical puzzles. He made his riddles perplexing but thoroughly engaging exercises in semantics, which of course is the discipline upon which the basic foundations of logical thinking are built.

How delightfully revolutionary it would be if our educators in the Philippines will take the same tack in reforming the thrusts of our schoolchildren’s educationand the earlier, the better for our nations future! (2008)

-------------------

This essay first appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo circa 2008 in The Manila Times and later appeared as Chapter 147 of the author’s book Give Your English the Winning Edge, © 2009 by Jose A. Carillo. All rights reserved.

Sunday, February 4, 2024

DEMOCRACY'S VULNERABILITY TO ORGANIZED DECEPTION

Caution in times of reasonable doubt
By Jose  A. Carillo

There was a time when the spread of false information took a much slower and largely linear path. A jealous or enraged person concocts a lie against a perceived enemy, whispers the lie to a neighbor’s ear ostensibly in the strictest of confidence but certain that in no time at all, that neighbor will break that confidence and whisper the same lie to another neighbor, who, in turn, can be expected to ensure that the process gets repeated ad infinitum. The lie then acquires an attractive reality of its own. Still, there was a downside to the process. Word of mouth was relatively slow, so even the most resourceful prevaricator needed at least a few days or weeks to fan the tiny flame of a lie to a major conflagration.



Modern communications technology has changed all that. These days, radio and TV, the daily papers, landline and mobile telephony, e-mail, and now even the mechanisms of the law itself make disinformation as fast as blabbering a sound-bite over the broadcast networks, punching the “Send” key of a cellular phone or computer keyboard, or filing fabricated charges against one’s target in a fiscal’s office. Organized deception has become a thriving industry, ruthlessly exploiting the inherent vulnerabilities of the very same mechanisms that make democracy possible.

This is clearly manifest in contemporary national election campaigns. Every seeker of public office is a prime target. Both the good and the bad are fair game for political demolition. Each of them—whether a true leader, visionary, zealot, crackpot, or nincompoop—is prey to the dangerous phenomenon described by the British psychologist Robert H. Thouless in his “Law of Certainty” (1953): “If statements are made again and again in a confident manner, then their hearers will tend to believe them quite independently of their soundness and of the presence or absence of evidence for their truth.”

Thouless has pinned down one fundamental flaw of the human psyche: its profound tendency to believe statements based on repetition instead of actual evidence. Of course, few would take pleasure in the notion that even the intelligent and more discerning among us can be so gullible, but other investigators have validated the “Law of Certainty” and have come up with even more disturbing corollaries: (1) The exposure effect, demonstrated by Borstein in 1989, which states that repeated exposure of people to a stimulus results in the enhancement of their attitude toward it; (2) The twin repetition-validity effect and the frequency-validity effect, established by Brown and Nix in 1996, the first confirming that belief in a supposed truth increases with repeated exposure to it, and the second, that the rated truth of a stimulus is determined by how often it is repeated; and (3) The truth effect, demonstrated by Schwartz in 1982, which states that when messages of questionable truth value are repeated, their repetition tends to move their truth-value ratings toward the truer end of the scale.

The “Law of Certainty” and its corollaries are, of course, the principal tools of ideologues, religious extremists, and political propagandists in foisting untruths in the minds of their targets. They know that by sheer repetition, the feeble resistance of rationality soon caves in and crumbles. This is why in this election campaign season, practically all of the communication channels in our midst are bristling with deceptive messages. Their financiers and practitioners have no time to lose and everything to gain, and can take comfort in the fact that the effort costs so little and that the laws against it are so weak and inutile.

Now, the big question we have to ask ourselves is this: Shall we be sitting ducks to these blatant deceptions? What is our defense against the syndicated lie and half-truth? Thouless gave us what I think is a sound course of action: be thoughtful and skeptical, and adopt a position of caution when there’s reasonable cause for doubt about a particular assertion. In plainer terms, we should never, ever make a fool of ourselves by taking scurrilous political messages at their face value.

So the next time we see a derogatory blind item in the papers, a slanderous e-mail in our electronic mailbox, or a poison text message on our cellular phone, we should not honor it even with a single thought. We should resist the temptation to pass it on. We should stop it on its tracks by skipping it or by zapping it with the “Delete” button. That’s the only way we can run the character assassins out of business. If we don’t, who knows, they just might succeed in getting us to elect people who will send this country further down the road to perdition.

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, March 27, 2004 issue © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.


Wednesday, January 24, 2024

THE WEB AS OUR VERITABLE PASSPORT TO THE WORLD

Waltzing on the Web: A Retrospective
By Jose A. Carillo



I don’t remember now if it was because the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle had fallen in love with the English phonetics expert Professor Henry Higgins, or because she had miraculously acquired such exquisite English under his tutelage that she had convinced the crusty London upper class that she was a member of Hungarian royalty. But there she was ecstatically singing “I Could Have Danced All Night” in that magical bedroom scene of the 1964 movie production of the stage musical My Fair Lady, waltzing all by herself and wondering what brought her so much joy:

I could have danced all night, I could have danced all night
And still have begged for more. I could have spread my wings
And done a thousand things I’ve never done before.
I’ll never know what made it so exciting
Why all at once my heart took flight…


For some reason, this was the image that came to mind when it dawned on me how wonderful and how indescribably powerful the World Wide Web is. That was seven years ago, when my four-year initiation with the personal computer and word processing finally led me to the joys of sending and receiving electronic mail on the Internet, and of entering its chat rooms to talk with friends and strangers in every imaginable place in the planet. I thought then that that was the ultimate high, making my personal presence felt not only in my immediate neighborhood but also anywhere where there was a soul with a computer and a fax modem. But I was wrong. I was soon to discover an even bigger high: that with my personal computer and the Web, the whole world and most everything that it had to offer were now literally at my fingertips.

Like most people, I began using the computer as simply a more elegant and more efficient typewriter. That was when it was no longer possible for me to defend the merits of my portable Underwood against those of its digital counterpart. From there I progressed to making my computer do simple math and spreadsheet accounting for my family business at the time. Every now and then, of course, I would enjoy and amuse myself with the many ingenious games and diversions that could be played with it. Then, with the advent of the fax modem and the Internet, the computer became my indispensable personal communication tool. Not long afterwards, through the Web, it became my veritable passport to the world, my key to the immense body of knowledge and information whose surface I had barely scratched even long after I was through with college.

The beauty of the Web is that you can both literally and figuratively waltz on it while you discover its many treasures. With the click of the mouse you can saunter into any of its millions of sites and discover many things you have not known or rediscover those you have already forgotten, such as what the weather or the price of diapers was when you made your inauspicious debut into this planet, what movie or song album was the rage when you had your first crush, and how much was the price of a bottle of Coke when regular gasoline was 25 centavos to the liter. You can trot from one website to another to find out how much it will cost you to rent a flat in Reykjavik at this very moment, hire a mountain guide in Nepal for an ascent to Mt. Everest, or lease a car in Rome for a land tour of Europe all the way to Moscow. And at any time of day, without leaving your computer desk, you can enter the U.S. Library of Congress and pore over its more than 12 million bibliographic records of books and periodicals, get glimpses of the Smithsonian Institution’s engaging bits of American natural history, or make a virtual tour of the fabulous art collections of the Louvre Museum in Paris.

The Web is especially a great boon to English learners in whatever exciting or exasperating stage of the language learning curve they find themselves right now. This is because English is the lingua franca of the Web, and the latter has everything the learner needs to know about English or anything written in English—from its many idioms and figures of speech to the peculiar conjugations of its irregular verbs, and from the secret feeding grounds of the aardvark to the doomed genetic path of the zebronkey. There are, moreover, hundreds of free English proficiency learning sites on the Web to help the learner perfect his English grammar and diction. And once through with your quest for better English, you can perhaps download the trial edition of the amazingly instructive Rosetta Stone to learn a new language or two from its selection of no less than 22 foreign languages, ranging from French to Japanese and from Polynesian to Norwegian.

I used to snicker at Microsoft’s slogan, “Where do you want to go today?”, as patronizing and pretentious, but now I know in my heart that it captures the fundamental truth about the Web. There truly is no limit to where you might want to roam and wander on it. My favorite Web search engine alone, Google, boasts of an accessible collection of 2,469,940,685 Web pages—almost 2.5 billion pages of knowledge and information, enough to fill hundreds of the biggest physical libraries on our planet! I have peeped every now and then at this hoard and I have discovered veritable gems, like the complete or substantive collections of the poetry and other works of the English poets John Donne, William Blake, and Dylan Thomas, the French poet Jacques Prevert, and the American poet Walt Whitman; the Perseus Project that had put together vast selections from the Greek literary classics; and entire Holy Bibles of every religious denomination.

All of my readings from grade school through college, in fact, would amount to only a tiny fraction of the readings that I have already done on the Web in the less than six years that I started mining it for its treasures. And I have been enjoying every minute of my freewheeling incursions into its pages, far better than when I had the likes of Professor Higgins telling me to my face to read my English textbook from cover to cover or else fail and repeat his English course. (2003)
--------------------

This essay first appeared in the English-usage column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times sometime in 2003, © 2003 by Manila Times Publishing. It subsequently appeared as Chapter 1 in Part IV, Section 1 of the author's book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language, © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.



My Fair Lady I Could Have
Danced All Night
(Music Video)
As sung by Marni Nixon, dubbing the singing
voice of Audrey Hepburn, in the 1964 film
adaptation of the musical


Friday, January 19, 2024

WHEN RHETORIC GOES BEYOND BOUNDS

Retrospective on the Dangers of Overstatement
By Jose A. Carillo

As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon in an in-house chapel of a Metro Manila mall. The Roman Catholic priest officiating the Holy Mass* exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience impressed if not spellbound.

His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given a suitable introduction for him, the priest restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the full-house audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or appeal to reason as well.

THIS GENERIC HOLY MASS CELEBRATION PHOTO IS USED IN THIS ARTICLE
FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT TO IDENTIFY 
THE PRIEST
 OR ANY OF HIS ASSISTANTS MENTIONED IN THE NARRATIVE


To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully asked everybody what each letter of the first word (pinakamatalik
) represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like prodding a quiz show contestant with this riddle: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music movie. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (i)sang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)

The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a simile or metaphor either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called personification—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.

The words he assigned to each of the letters of the word “pinakamatalik” were so convoluted and are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that. 

The problem was that the priest simply didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when anyone balked, the priest would browbeat him or her until he or she relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the impertinent and absurd: to declare this to his or her seatmate “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend”). He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.

That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he or she is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind and thoughtless obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.

In his classic book, Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to retain their persuasiveness and credibility intact.

*At that time he looked like he was somewhere between his mid-30s or early-40s.
-------------

This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.