WHY IS THE ENGLISH OF LEGAL DOCUMENTS HARD TO UNDERSTAND?

Agonizing to make heads and tails of English legalese
By Jose A. Carillo 

Sometime in 2014 a reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times, Mr. Henry Bon Ruiz, sent me the following e-mail:

"Sir, I hope you can enlighten me on why legal documents and contracts use too many unnecessary words that are not direct to the point and hard to understand?

"Is this a lawyer's standard procedure so he can be the only one who can interpret and make money out of it?

"Most legal contracts and documents are too wordy, not direct to the point and confusing (terrible grammar). 

"Is this standard practice in law? Why can't they make it simple and precise?"

My reply to Mr. Ruiz was as follows:

Dear Henry:

Your first question is why legal documents and contracts use too many unnecessary words, words that you say are not direct to the point and are hard to understand.

The answer is that these legal documents and contracts use English that’s called legalese—the jargon or specialized language that lawyers use to communicate with fellow lawyers and other members of the legal community, particularly justices, judges, and paralegals. This language presumes that the target audience—whether readers or listeners—is adequately knowledgeable with legal concepts and the legal system. This is why to laypersons not equipped with or are not privy to this knowledge, legalese would read and sound much too wordy for comfort and, very often, beyond understanding and comprehension.

Your next question is whether the use of legalese is a standard procedure of lawyers so that only they can interpret the document or contract and thus be able to make money from those who need or have use for those documents and contracts.

I think that this is a very harsh assessment of the motivation of lawyers in writing or speaking in legalese. Here, from a lawyer who writes under the username WiseGeek, is I think a fair, levelheaded justification for legalese:

"In law, words have very specific and clearly defined meanings, and lawyers are careful when drafting legal documents to say precisely what they mean, even if the meaning is only apparent to other lawyers. Some of the word use may appear unusual to people who aren’t familiar with the law, as ordinary words can have a different meaning in a legal context. For example, seemingly redundant phrasing actually isn’t, when the legal meanings of the phrase are considered."

In contrast, here’s a more candid justification for the complexity of legalese from a lawyer who blogs under the username SoMeLaw Thoughts:

"Here’s one deep, dark secret about lawyers—we see risk everywhere. I can look at a picture of a man on a sidewalk and come up with a dozen potential lawsuits without batting an eye. And that’s before this hypothetical man crosses the hypothetical street. We lawyers spend years reading the most ludicrous cases you can imagine that involve chain reactions of people jumping onto moving trains, dropping bundles of fireworks that explode, and a concussive wave that tips over a large scale injuring a woman nearby (actual, famous case). It’s our job to see the worst potential outcome and help our clients avoid it.

"So when a client comes to an attorney and says “Hey, can you draft up some terms for my business so that we’re protected from lawsuits?” then the lawyer’s mind starts spinning like a rickety travelling carnival ride that was installed without inspection, has no safety restraints in the cars, and is operating at twice the recommended speed. Our minds are now racing to give our clients the best possible defense to a future lawsuit.

"That’s an important distinction—giving a defense to a lawsuit rather than preventing a lawsuit. Lawyers know that anyone can be sued by anyone else for anything. The question is whether the lawsuit has merit and will stick. Good terms and conditions will give you plenty of ways to dismiss the lawsuit with as little effort as possible, but you’ll still have to deal with the lawsuit. So that’s why these terms and conditions can run so long—they are trying to arm the company for a war that might come from the land, sea, air, space, other dimension, and in the case of some special litigants, parallel universes where your company is secretly in league with paranormal forces and therefore should pay the plaintiff one billion dollars. Drafting these terms are like packing for a trip when you have no idea if you’re going to Hawaii or Antarctica and you don’t know how long you’ll be gone…"

Now, Henry, your third question is whether it’s standard practice in law to make most contracts and documents too wordy, not direct to the point, confusing—and also to have terrible grammar.

I doubt if it’s standard practice in law to deliberately and viciously make contracts and documents very wordy, not direct to the point, confusing—and also to make their grammar terrible. Legalese is, I think, simply the present-day outcome of centuries of overcareful, overzealous, overprecise, overbearing, and overwrought formulation, implementation, interpretation, and application of the law in evolving societies. It’s an arcane, stultifying language that generations of lawyers and other legal practitioners have not seen fit or bothered to simplify for clarity of expression and for easier understanding by laypeople. 

Indeed, for no better reason than convenience, modern-day legal practitioners still resort to and freely use many of the English-language legal templates and language quirks that date back to Victorian England and even earlier. They do so as if totally oblivious of the evolution of the English language in our Telecommunication Age towards accuracy, brevity, and clarity. I think this is precisely why you’ve gotten the wrong impression that most contracts have terrible English grammar. 

Actually though, on close examination, their English grammar would most often be aboveboard, except that their syntax and construction are often those of a long bygone era, when those documents were still laboriously composed by longhand using quill and ink. In a very real sense, then, most contracts and legal documents today are composed by lawyers as if they are living in a time warp, making them—both the documents and the lawyers—sound terribly outdated, even archaic.

Your last question is whether it’s possible to make contracts and legal documents simple and precise. My personal answer is that, particularly in a democratic country like ours, it’s not only possible but highly desirable. In recent years, in fact, there has been a growing movement in North America and in the United Kingdom to use plain and simple English not only in contracts and legal documents but also in court litigation and in legislation, the better for laypeople to understand, appreciate, and follow the law as well as to assert their rights and fulfill their responsibilities as members of society. Read, for instance, “Lawyers Should Use Plain Language,” (http://www.afn.org/~afn54735/language1.html) an article by Carol M. Bast in the Florida Bar Journal for a comprehensive discussion of the plain language trend and legislation in the United States.

Let’s just hope that the plain English movement and legislation will soon catch on in the Philippines as well.

Sincerely yours,
Joe Carillo

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A most welcome commentary from a Filipino balikbayan:

Along with my response to Mr. Henry Bon Ruiz's complaint against legalese in the Philippine setting, I am pleased to share this frank but heartwarming commentary by Mr. Juanito T. Fuerte, who described himself as "a religious follower" of my English-usage Forum in The Manila Times. He compared the tough English legalese of Philippine lawyers to the simpler legalese currently in vogue in the United States [in the 2014s]: 

March 20, 2014

Hi, Joe, 

Having lived for a few decades in the United States where most people (including lawyers) write the way they speak, I can understand BonRuiz and agree with him when he said that the English of lawyers in the Philippines has “too many unnecessary words that are not direct to the point and are hard to understand.” Unlike in the States where even someone with no education higher than high school (like myself) can readily understand what lawyers write without having to pause to consult the dictionary or to read the material over and over again, here in the Philippines it becomes a necessity for nonlawyers to take a long pause and painstakingly analyze the words or sentences in their legal documents so as to understand or decipher what is being said.

Over the years that I lived in the States, I had several powers of attorney, wills, and other legal documents prepared for me by American lawyers during the four times that I bought and sold a house in those years. Not once did I find it hard to read and understand what the pertinent documents were saying. But here in the Philippines, when I hired a lawyer to handle the sale of a lot owned by my deceased wife, I had to ask him to summarize and interpret for me—in plain English or Tagalog—what the transaction documents he had prepared meant. This was because reading and trying to understand them almost made me feel like going through a maze. Of course, it also dawned on me that we Filipinos do have a penchant for using high-sounding words instead of everyday, simple ones. 

Since coming back home three years ago, in fact, I have been exposed to some new English words like the following: “venue” (place), ”ambiance” (atmosphere), “signage” (signs), “wastage” (destruction)), “sans” (without), etc. Why these words instead of everyday words? My guess is, it’s because one who uses them feels sooo...cool, sooo...elite, and sooo...impressive! Worse, I also oftentimes run across words like “senatoriable,” “presidentiable,” and “masteral”—words that are not even in the dictionary!  

This is not to criticize our lawyers, most of whom are brilliant practitioners of their profession who can stack up any time against their counterparts anywhere, including those in the U.S. But in this age of fast food and instant communications, perhaps it’s time for them to part with their old ways of writing or saying things, simplifying legal documents and making their English less complicated.  

By the way, when, say, a certain a legal expert describes the result of a certain finding or court ruling as “final,” is it necessary to make “and executory” follow the word “final” even when the finding or ruling is declared to be final on the same date it was issued without any further stipulation? I ask this question because my understanding of the word “executory,” as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, is “designed or of such a nature as to be executed in time to come or to take effect on a future contingency.” Therefore—but please correct me if I’m wrong—when used after the word “final,” and if the date of effectivity is other than the date when it was declared ”final,” the words “and executory” should specify the future contingency that would trigger the effectivity of the finding or ruling. By the same token, in the absence of any contingencies as to how or when the finding or ruling would take effect, the declaration of a finding or ruling as “final” should no longer be followed by the words “and executory” (as what most legal experts often do). What do you think?  

I thought I should let you know about these thoughts of mine, Joe. I’ve learned a lot about proper English usage from the days of your “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times, and I’m now also a religious follower of your English Forum because I know that I have just begun to scratch the surface and that there’s a lot more for me to learn. I’m sure a lot of other Forum members would say the same thing. 

So, as my old neighbor in Virginia would say, “Keep plugging!”

All the best,
Juanito T. Fuerte

RETROSPECTIVE TO AN AWFUL BEAUTY TILT Q&A FIASCO

“Faulty English question, 
fumbling English answer” 

By Jose A. Carillo

In a national beauty competition in the Philippines in 2008, a badly phrased English question by its promoters in the Q&A portion elicited an embarrassingly fumbling answer from one of the finalists, throwing a big question mark on the Filipino people’s vaunted reputation for English proficiency.

Part 1 – Awful response of a beauty-and-brains contest finalist (March 29, 2008)

IMAGE CREDIT:  WIKIPEDIA/PAUL CHIN

TV SCREEN SHOT OF THE 2008 BB. PILIPINAS PAGEANT OPENING DANCE NUMBER

Shortly before Holy Week in the year 2008 or almost 17 years ago, Mr. Roquito Lorenzo, a reader of my English-usage column in The Manila Times, forwarded to me YouTube links and a transcript of the much-talked-about fumbling response of a beauty contest finalist—let’s just identify her as Miss Jenny S. here to spare her from further embarrassment—in the interview portion of that year’s competition for the Binibining Pilipinas title.

Mr. Lorenzo’s e-mail asked me this question: “As an advocate of the English language, sir, what can you say about this? I found it really disgusting, and I believe it’s the result of our country’s shift from English to Pilipino as the medium of instruction. I think we need to go back to the use of English as medium of instruction in all school levels.”

Here’s my open reply to Mr. Lorenzo:

“Like many other Filipinos, I share your disappointment that Miss Jenny’s remarks in fumbling English fell far below what was expected from a young woman aspiring for international recognition as a beauty-and-brains queen. But before we condemn her and before we generalize on her performance as a reflection of a declining English proficiency among us Filipinos, let us pause for a while and examine what actually happened from a language standpoint during that interview.

“As we can see from the YouTube footage, one of the beauty contest judges, Ms. Vivienne Tan, posed this question to Miss Jenny S. from a written script picked from a tambiolo: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’ 

“Having been GM of an English services company who for nearly five years oversaw the development of many English proficiency tests, I can tell you that that question is terribly flawed both grammatically and semantically. Worse, it’s a highly unfocused question calling for an abstract answer—one that surely won’t elicit a quick, lucid, and straightforward response no matter how intelligent, alert, and fluent in English the person being asked might be.

“Try some role-playing and imagine yourself as Miss Jenny being asked that same question: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’ I would imagine that if you’re a nonnative English speaker like me, you’d first try to make sense of its fractured grammar by translating it in your mind into Tagalog as, say, “Anong papel ang ginampanan ng pamilya mo para sa iyo bilang kandidata sa Binibining Pilipinas?’

“That doesn’t seem to make much sense either, so in panic, you’d probably try to mentally correct the grammar of the original question to make it more amenable to a decent, reasonable answer. If you are lucky to be rhetorically capable in English, you’d probably end up with this grammar-perfect question: ‘What role did your family play in your quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?’

“Even if the question is expressed this clearly, however, it still wouldn’t admit simple particulars for an answer—only abstract ones or tags. After so many agonizing seconds, the best you’d probably come up with are lame, unconvincing answers that play on the word ‘role’ in the context of movies and movie stars. In your heart, of course, you’d know that you won’t sound convincing with answers like those, for the simple reason that normal people—whether aspiring for a beauty crown or just applying for a much-coveted entry-level job—don’t talk in that highfalutin way.

“Try some role-playing and imagine yourself as Miss Jenny being asked that same question: ‘What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?’ I would imagine that if you’re a nonnative English speaker like me, you’d first try to make sense of its fractured grammar by translating it in your mind into Tagalog as, say, “Anong papel ang ginampanan ng pamilya mo sa iyo bilang kandidata sa Binibining Pilipinas?’

“That doesn’t seem to make much sense either, so in panic, you’d probably try to mentally correct the grammar of the original question to make it more amenable to a decent, reasonable answer. If you are lucky to be rhetorically capable in English, you’d probably end up with this grammar-perfect question: ‘What role did your family play in your quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?’
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT OF MISS JENNY’S FUMBLING REPLY TO THE QUESTION: “WHAT ROLE DID YOUR FAMILY PLAY FOR YOU AS CANDIDATE [OF] BINIBINING PILIPINAS?”

“Well, my family’s role for me is so important because there was the wa... they’re, they was the one who’s very [laughs]... 

“Oh I’m so sorry. Um, my family, my family. Oh my god. I’m…

“Ok, I’m so sorry. I, I told you that I’m so confident… Eto, um, wait… [laughs]."

Then she ended her answer with this apology: “Um, sorry guys because this was really my first pageant ever because I’m only 17 years old and [laughs]...” 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I thus have this feeling that Miss Jenny S. was stumped not so much because of an English inadequacy or the jitters, but because the question she was asked was so badly phrased and was too vague, too abstract, and too difficult to answer. Answering that question would require a very strong rhetorical flair that normally can’t be expected from a 17-year-old nonnative speaker of English.

Indeed, I challenge readers who were disgusted by Miss Jenny’s performance to role-play for her for exactly 60 seconds—never mind changing to a one-piece bathing suit or swimming trunks or imagining yourselves on-camera for a nationwide audience—and come up with a sensible answer to that badly phrased question.

I’ll take up in my next column the three most convincing suggested answers to that question.

Part 2 – Soliciting better answers to that faulty English question” (April 5, 2008)

In response to my open invitation, two readers of my column in The Manila Times observed that the question that had so befuddled Ms. Jenny S. wasn’t really that difficult to understand, then vigorously took up my challenge by coming up with several suggested answers that they thought might have satisfied the contest judges and the general public as well.

THE FIVE FINALISTS IN THE 2008 BB. PILIPINAS COMPETITION 

Before discussing their answers in detail, however, I would like to take up first the views e-mailed to me earlier by two other readers of my English-usage column—views that I believe could help us establish clearer benchmarks for assessing our problems with speaking English

Here’s the view of Mr. Alberto T. Pangilinan, a senior payroll specialist working in the United States:

“I agree with your premise 100 percent that the way the question was phrased was definitely out of bounds. Clearly, however, the shift in the country’s mode of school instruction from English to Tagalog did not help Miss Jenny S. and would not help other Filipinos in similar situations. I wish you could publish your response to Mr. Roquito Lorenzo’s question in other publications aside from The Manila Times so others may learn from your insightful explanation.

“I also wanted to get your opinion on whether it is proper for local folks when being interviewed on network TV back home to continually shift from English to Tagalog and vice versa. When the news footage is shown on the international news here, their responses are sometimes difficult to follow or understand, and a lot of folks here in the States are driven bonkers by them.”

And here are the thoughts of Ms. Faye Tierro-Mendiola, a long-time US resident: 

“I read your column and I agree with you. Unbeknown to me, the country’s medium of instruction is now Tagalog. Since when was this? I’ve been living in the US for 33 years, but I go to the Philippines every year to participate in a medical mission.

“We Filipinos used to be very proud that our medium of instruction was English. In fact, people of other nationalities—even Americans—used to be jealous over how fluently we spoke English and how good we were with English spelling. But I guess the situation there is not like this anymore.”

Here’s my joint reply to Mr. Pangilinan and Ms. Tierro-Mendiola:

“The shift from English to Filipino as our medium of instruction may have contributed to Miss Jenny’s fumbling answer, but I think not that much. As I explained last week, I think the bigger contributory factor was the low quality and low comprehensibility of the question itself that was posed to Miss Jenny S.

“Yes, Filipino was adopted as our language of instruction under the 1987 Philippine Constitution. But on May 17, 2003, to reverse the declining English literacy of Filipinos, [then] President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo issued Executive Order No. 210 restoring English as the primary medium of instruction. However, in April 2007, some educators supportive of the Filipino language challenged the legality of this executive order before the Supreme Court, where the matter as of this writing (2008) was still pending.

“As to TV news footages abroad showing Filipinos shifting from English to Tagalog and vice versa during interviews, there’s not much we can do about it. That’s really how most educated Filipinos speak today in the home setting.” 

Part 3 - “The question was clear enough but clumsy,” an American engineer commented (April 12, 2008)

This time, I will present and evaluate the answers given by the two other readers who had similarly taken up my challenge to play the role of Miss Jenny S. and respond to the same question.

Let’s first take up the answers of Mr. Douglas M. of New Jersey. He said that the question was clear enough but clumsy, and suggested improving its phrasing as follows: “What role did your family play that helped you become a candidate for Binibining Pilipinas?” He then offered these two complete answers that Miss Jenny could have used:

“My family fulfilled a leading role in the development of my code of morals simply by the example they set.”

“My family played a vital role in providing me with a stable and stimulating household that allowed me to develop myself as an individual.”

From a language standpoint, I must say that Mr. Douglas M.’s rephrasing of the question is only a slight improvement from the question actually posed to Miss Jenny S. It’s almost as semantically convoluted and as mired in abstraction as the original—still very much the kind of question that’s unlikely to elicit a specific, candid, and straightforward spoken answer. I dare say that not so many reasonably intelligent and English-proficient persons could manage to make sense of that grammatical and semantic tangle (They’d likely ask: “Why must a family specifically play a role at all in matters like this? Can’t a family just be itself doing what it must?).

Indeed, for such a highly abstract question, it isn’t surprising at all that Mr. Douglas M.’s answers had to use so many big words and abstract phrasing themselves (“fulfilled a leading role,” “development of my code of morals,” “by the example they set,” “stable and stimulating household”). These answers would sound so premeditated and contrived in this context. They simply couldn’t have come out of the mouth of the 17-year-old Miss Jenny S. at that time—unless, of course, that she had been tipped off about the question and had composed and memorized her answer. In any case, in informal conversational situations, adult people of any age and of any educational level don’t speak with such high-flown vocabulary, analytic phrasing, and complex sentence structure.

But now let’s listen to Ms. Nora Baua of Quezon City playing the role of Miss Jenny. She chose to answer not the original question but this more grammatically precise and forthright rephrasing that I suggested earlier: “What role did your family play in your quest for the Binibining Pilipinas crown?”

Here's Ms. Baua’s answer playing the role of Miss Jenny S.: “My eldest sister encouraged me to join the beauty contest and even accompanied me to the office of the organizers to give moral support. And once my mother knew that I was one of the finalists, she encouraged me by reminding me not to eat junk food and to always to eat fresh fruits and vegetables and to drink eight glasses of water every day. My father was the last to know that I joined. Would you believe he announced the news of my candidacy to my tiyas [aunts] and tiyos [uncles] and other relatives and asked all of them to pray for me?”

Hands down, I think this is the best and most sensible answer from among those who took my challenge to play the role of Miss Jenny in that situation. Ms. Baua expressed it in the simple, spontaneous, no-frills, and no-nonsense English that we would normally expect from a woman of Miss Jenny’s age at that time, and I have a feeling that Miss Jenny herself might have answered in the same measure if only the question posed to her had been phrased more clearly and precisely.

Part 4 - “Two very well-phrased but largely abstract and tangential answers” (April 19, 2008)

I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the three readers of my Manila Times column who took my challenge to answer the faulty question that had stumped finalist Miss Jenny S. during the 2008 Binibining Pilipinas contest. All three of them—Mr. Juanito F., 73, of West Virginia; Mr. Douglas M., 45, of New Jersey; and Ms. Nora Baua, 50-something, of Quezon City—demonstrated very high levels of English proficiency in their respective letters to me.

However, as I showed in Part 3, I think only Ms. Baua was able to play the role of Ms. Jean S. credibly and convincingly. She used the simple, no-nonsense English that we normally would expect from a 17-year-old college-educated woman.

As to the two gentlemen playing the role of Miss Jean S., each gave very well-phrased but largely abstract and tangential answers—answers too mature and calculating to have been given by Miss Jenny S. herself off the cuff. I believe, though, that the inappropriateness of their answers was due not so much to their inability to transcend their own level of intelligence and maturity as to the faulty nature of the question itself: “What role did your family play to you as candidate to Binibining Pilipinas?”

Along these lines, I would like to share with readers excerpts from my reply to Mr. Juanito F. when he expressed discomfort over my evaluation of this answer that he suggested Miss Jean S. should have given to that question: “My family has always been supportive of me and has always encouraged me to pursue my interest in life.”

Here are the excerpts of my reply to Mr. Juanito F.:

“Dear Juanito: 

“The vague, nonspecific nature of your answer is no reflection of your English proficiency, in much the same way that the fumbling answer of Miss Jenny S. was in my mind not a reflection of her own English proficiency. It was simply that the question that was posed to her was a clumsy, highly unfocused test instrument. Had it been constructed clearly and unequivocally, I’m sure that it could have elicited a much more specific, sensible response from her or any adequately English-proficient person under the same stressful conditions.

“In particular, one well-focused construction of that question is this proactive version: ‘How did your family influence your decision to join the Bb. Pilipinas contest?’ Another is this reactive version: ‘How did your family react to your decision to join the Bb. Pilipinas contest?’

“A good test instrument for measuring intelligence and articulateness seeks particular and specific information from the mind of the person being tested. This is why I think that such vague, mind-twisting questions as “What role did somebody play to you?” are best confined to take-home or hour-long written academic tests so the person being tested will have lots of time to parse it and compose a decent and realistic answer. It definitely shouldn’t be asked of nervous 17-year-olds in “the world stage” as you call it, for the bumbling answers they would usually elicit are bound not only to embarrass the program sponsors but unnecessarily rile the viewing and listening public and—as had happened in Miss Jenny’s case—sometimes make a lynching mob out of some of them.

“Now, see how felicitously the first question matches this modified version of the specific, more information-laden answer for Miss Jenny that you yourself offered the second time around: ‘To be honest, given the inadequacy of my English, I didn’t want to join the contest, but my family twisted my arm to be in it. How could I refuse when they were at it nonstop for many days and nights.’

“On the other hand, the reactive-mode question I constructed above to ask Miss Jean might have elicited this answer: ‘Oh, my, they scolded me so violently for wanting to be an exhibitionist that I thought I’d die. They were so insistent that I just focus on my Mass Communication studies and get a decent degree. But gee, I wanted to be a beauty queen and nothing would stop me! I pestered them 24/7 and got their permission in the end.’

“Either of these answers surely would have brought the house down during the 2008 Bb. Pilipinas finals, and you and I as well as thousands of other Filipinos wouldn’t be at loggerheads today debating the merits and demerits of the matter."
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This article is a condensation of a series of four weekly columns that I wrote in The Manila Times in 2008 following the public uproar over the fumbling performance of a Binibining Pilipinas finalist during the live English-language Q&A portion of the competition.

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
launchingof 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)
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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.

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.

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*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.