This pair of sandals, its soles crafted from tough rubber tires and its straps from rubber interior tubing, was standard issue for South Vietnamese guerrilla fighters during the Vietnam War. I saw it as a symbol for breaking rules.
I remember an anecdote about breaking rules that I read somewhere, so long ago in my youth I no longer remember from which book or magazine. But the story struck me so deeply I still remember the details like I read it just yesterday.
An American writer is visiting Paris, and one evening he takes a cab to attend a late-evening dinner in another part of the city. The French cab driver, it seems, is fluent enough in English to strike up a conversation with him, and the writer is happy to oblige as he wants tips on how to get around town. So they talk sporadically about random topics. Continue reading “The art of breaking rules”
This is Part 4 of a multi-part essay written for my “Pathless Travels” column. It was originally published in Northern Weekly Dispatch, 21 Aug 2005, and which I then reposted a few months later on my defunct blog hosted at Blogspot. ReadPart 1here, Part 2here, and Part 3 here.
The year was 2005, and the GMA broadcast network had scored a big hit with the sword-and-sorcery TV series Encantadia. Sword battle movies were on the comeback trail worldwide, from Hollywood to China, and the genre seemed to appeal to Filipino sensitivities. But does it really unlock insights to our own history? From our rich historical military legacy as a people, are we learning anything practical and applicable to our own times?
Suicide volunteers had their limbs and torsos tightly bound in fibrous cloth or leather strips. Then, on signal, they assaulted the enemy lines with kampilan, kalis or bolo tied with thongs to the wrist of each hand, as they shouted “Allah’u akbar!” or “Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!” or simply “Tadtad!” Illustration is by Ellsworth Young, from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22407/22407-h/images/p227.jpg
I hope that you, most patient readers, have followed me thus far. Maybe you get in a vague way what I’m trying to say but can’t pin it down. Some of you might suspect that this is merely a nostalgia trip that meanders from one hazy idea to the next. So let me try and summarize the whole nebulous thought in one short paragraph:
War is too important to society to be left only to the professional soldiery. It must be the serious and routine business of the whole citizenry. Let us learn from our rich military legacy, not just through films and books, but by preserving and using what is still of practical use. Continue reading “Romancing the sword (4)”
To my utmost satisfaction, Conrad reprinted my letter in full a week later in his column. I had misplaced my copy of that issue. This morning, however, it reemerged, yellowed and brittle, from a closet of old files that I was cleaning out. Its contents might be of interest not just to the younger generation of PSHS scholars, but to student activists who, I hear, are still doing the same kind of mass work among the squatter colonies of North Triangle as we did 40 years ago.
I hear The Bourne Legacy is shooting a few sequences along Agham Road in the North Triangle area of Quezon City’s central district. I suppose some film scenes will utilize the communities’ slum-housing conditions, which represent perhaps one of the starkest contrasts between abject poverty and cosmopolitan glitz this side of Metro Manila.
Portions of this sprawling area have now been cleared of so-called squatter communities and replaced by sleek malls, carparks, and office buildings. But there remain urban poor pockets that continue to remind us of how this part of the city looked ten years ago.
Nay, twenty years ago. Nay, forty years ago, when the road now known as Agham (“Science”) Road was just a gravelly dirt track that led to God knows where.
