Weekend Morning Poetry: Preludes by Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. (Biography at Wikipedia)

Preludes
By T. S. Eliot

I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Shackleton: A Tale of Courage and Endurance

Ernest Shackleton is best remembered for his outstanding leadership during a time of crisis than for the various explorations he led in the early 1900s. In August 1914 he set up an expedition aiming to cross Antarctica from the Weddell Sea to the Ross Sea, cutting through the South Pole. But before reaching his destination, his ship the Endurance became trapped in a pack ice in the Wedell Sea. After being stuck in the floating ice for ten months the Endurance was crushed between the drifting ice sheets and afterwards sunk. To many, being trapped in hundreds of miles of ice with limited food and water is a scenario so hopeless that thousands of seamen and explorers had in the past surrendered their courage and lost their lives in it, but to Shackleton hopelessness was not an option, and through a heroic display of courage and hope he turned their failure to cross the Antarctic into a legendary story of endurance and survival. Of the 27 crewmen he took with him, none lost their lives during the two harrowing years of living on the ice more than a thousand miles away from civilization.

When the Endurance sank, Shackleton and his team had no choice but to make a settlement on a floating ice floe where they lived for six months. Soon, when the floating ice began to break apart, they knew they had to get on their remaining boats, paddling for seven days from ice floe to ice floe until they arrived on the uninhabited Elephant Island.

With his crew already suffering from frostbite, scurvy, fever, cold, hunger and mental depression, Shackleton knew he had to act fast. Thus, he decided to go to the nearest known whaling station in the island of South Georgia (Antartica), setting out with five of his men on a dangerous open-boat journey aboard the James Caird (one of the last functional boats they had). He left the rest of his men in Elephant Island and vowed to return to rescue them. For 16 straight days he and his five crewmen rowed south across the Atlantic, reaching the nearest part of South Georgia after surviving episodes of ferocious storms, squalls and stress in the open ocean. Polar historian Caroline Alexander described this as one of the most extraordinary feats of seamanship and navigation in recorded history.

The crew of the Endurance. Photo taken by the expedition's photographer Frank Hurley

However, the boat landed on the wrong side of the island, and Shackleton and his men decided to take a very difficult 36-hour hiking through the snowy valley to get to the nearest whaling station at Stromness Bay on the other side, wading through miles and miles of snow and glacier across the island’s mountainous interior without any map, tent, sleeping bag and proper mountaineering equipment aside from a carpenter’s axe. Eventually they arrived at Stromness, and there Shackleton was able to borrow a ship and mount a rescue mission to save his men in Elephant Island, a mission which, after four attempts, proved futile. But soon Shackleton was able to contact London and four months later secured the survival of all his sailors, bringing them home to England in May 1917 aboard a rescue ship.

The Endurance crushed between the ice

Shackleton was credited with saving his crew during their long ordeal which might have cost the lives of all of them. For this, despite his failure to cross the Antarctic and reach his goal, Shackleton and his crew were awarded the Polar Medal.

His ability to lead his men out of a seemingly hopeless adversity by continuously providing them the will to carry on and therefore endure became a classic example of excellent and inspiring leadership, and has ever since become a model used not only by soldiers and seamen but also adopted by managers in the corporate world.

What did Shackleton do to avert more disaster and therefore, reverse his failure into a story of exemplary leadership?

Charles Chappell of Wharton University’s Executive MBA Program cited five leadership qualities which largely contributed to the survival of the Endurance crew. These were: a.) Putting your people first; b.) Flexibility in tactics; c.) Choosing people for character and not just competence; d.) Optimism in times of adversity; e.) Leadership by example and; f.) Equal treatment of men. Chappell explains each one of them:

a.) Put your people first. In 1907, Shackleton led an attempt to be the first to the South Pole. He and his men trekked across hundreds of miles of the Antarctic continent to within 97 miles of the Pole. He knew that being the first to reach the Pole would have brought him everlasting fame and glory. But Shackleton and his men were weakening, and he knew that a final push to the Pole would put their lives in grave danger. He turned back. As strong as his desire to lead expeditions was, his sense of responsibility for his men was stronger.

In addition to being a principled choice, this decision gave those who served under him on the Endurance confidence that their lives would not be cavalierly sacrificed to meet the expedition’s goal… crossing Antarctica was [the expedition’s] nominal goal, but its fundamental goal was to ensure that the men survived. This clarification, along with the knowledge of Shackleton’s general experience in polar exploration, helped ensure confidence in, and the credibility of, Shackleton’s leadership. It helped give Shackleton what John Gardner calls “the capacity to win and hold trust.”

b.) Be flexible in tactics. Although the fundamental goal of survival remained paramount, Shackleton wisely remained flexible in the tactics he chose to achieve that goal.

Once Shackleton realized that the Endurance was trapped in the ice, he resolved – and, despite his bitter disappointment, communicated matter-of-factly to his men – that their goal had changed from crossing Antarctica to wintering over on the ice.

c.) Choose your people carefully — for character, not just competence. Shackleton knew how well the rigors of Antarctic exploration would test the spirit of his men. In selecting the expedition’s members, he looked for technical qualifications, but he placed even greater emphasis on a positive attitude and a lighthearted, even whimsical nature. When he interviewed Reginald James, who became the expedition’s physicist, he asked whether James could sing. Alexander Macklin, a surgeon, won a place on the expedition when, in response to Shackleton’s inquiry about why Macklin wore glasses, Macklin replied, “many a wise face would look foolish without spectacles.”

d.) Sustain optimism in the face of adversity. Although everyone understands the importance of optimism, Shackleton recognized that being optimistic was most important when it was most difficult. When setbacks occurred, he had to remain outwardly optimistic, despite his own feelings, to prevent a growing despair among his men. He knew that such despair could, in the face of adversity, lead to dissension, mutiny, or simply giving up. Day after day, to counter the morale-sapping effect of the miserable cold, wetness, fatigue, hunger, and boredom of their life on the ice, he summoned the strength to remain optimistic – despite suffering the same conditions himself. Warren Bennis has noted that “all exemplary leaders are purveyors of hope and optimism.” Shackleton himself stated that “optimism is true moral courage.”

Shackleton knew that this same optimism was important in his men; as a result, he constantly sought to neutralize threats to morale. He noted that the moodiness of Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, was improved by flattery and by being included in consultations about the expedition’s course, so he was sure to include Hurley in high-level meetings and often asked Hurley’s opinion (he used well two techniques of interpersonal influence described by Pfeffer: ingratiation, and engaging others to enhance their commitment). Similarly, he feared that the worrying of George Marston, the expedition’s artist, would spread like an infection to the other men. Shackleton’s insight was that the disposition of these men was distinct from, and sometimes more important than, their technical abilities.

In their tents on the ice, Shackleton ensured that the ability of such “bad actors” to erode morale was checked by having them reside in Shackleton’s own tent or his second-in-command Frank Wild’s tent. Later, when Shackleton made plans to leave Elephant Island to seek help at South Georgia Island, he was careful to leave Wild in command of the group that remained ashore, and to bring along Harry McNeish, the expedition’s carpenter, who had proven to be a particularly serious troublemaker. Shackleton recognized that much of the task of remaining optimistic could be accomplished by keeping the men so busy that they would have little opportunity to brood over their predicament. To that end, he encouraged and took part in a variety of pastimes, such as card games and sing-alongs. Seeking to keep his men fit as well, he encouraged soccer matches and dogsled races on the ice. When he sensed that the mood of the men was darkening, he would use a holiday observance or some other excuse to justify extra rations of food to boost morale. Shackleton appreciated the importance of what John Gardner calls understanding the needs of followers – not just their physical needs, but their psychological needs as well.

e.) Lead by example. Shackleton knew that actions persuaded more strongly than words. When he and his men were forced onto the ice by the destruction of their ship and faced the prospect of making their way over hundreds of miles of rough ice to land, he gathered his crew and, explaining the situation, he pulled his gold coins out of his pockets and threw them into the snow. He then took a Bible given him by the Queen of England, tore out two pages to keep with him, laid the Bible in the snow, and walked away.

f.) Strive for equal treatment. Shackleton realized that, while it was essential that his authority and leadership not be questioned, he should not receive favorable treatment. He dutifully took his turn performing the most menial of chores. When the men took to the ice and drew for sleeping bags, Shackleton somehow ensured that he and the other senior officers drew wool bags, while the more junior men got the warmer fur bags.

In addition, Frank Worsley, one of Shackleton’s crewmen wrote in his memoirs:

“I recalled the way in which he led his party across the ice floes after the Endurance had been lost; how, by his genius for leadership he had kept us all in health; how by the sheer force of his own personality he had kept our spirits up; and how, by his magnificent example, he had enabled us to win through when the dice of the elements were loaded most heavily against us…”

The crew towing one of their remaining boats

In an earlier journey to the South Pole (1907), Shackleton gave his only biscuit allotted for that day to the sick Frank Wild, who later wrote in his diary:

"All the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me."

In their book Shackleton's Way: Leadership Lessons from the Great Antarctic Explorer (2001), Morrell and Capparell wrote: "Shackleton resonates with executives in today's business world. His people-centred approach to leadership can be a guide to anyone in a position of authority."

In his book The Worst Journey in the World (1922), Cherry-Garrard wrote: "For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organisation, give me [Robert Falcon] Scott; for a Winter Journey, [Edward Adrian] Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, [Roald] Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.”

For this it is very appropriate to call Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition “the last great Polar journey that [was] made,” and was worthy of its place in the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.

Preludes
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

Weekend Morning Poetry: The Indian Upon God by William Butler Yeats

Biography

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, he was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, and others, founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after being awarded the Nobel Prize; such works include The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1929). (See article from Wikipedia)

The Indian Upon God
By William Butler Yeats

I PASSED along the water’s edge below the humid trees,
My spirit rocked in evening light, the rushes round my knees,
My spirit rocked in sleep and sighs; and saw the moor-fowl pace
All dripping on a grassy slope, and saw them cease to chase
Each other round in circles, and heard the eldest speak:
Who holds the world between His bill and made us strong or weak
Is an undying moorfowl, and He lives beyond the sky.
The rains are from His dripping wing, the moonbeams from His eye.
I passed a little further on and heard a lotus talk:
Who made the world and ruleth it, He hangeth on a stalk,
For I am in His image made, and all this tinkling tide
Is but a sliding drop of rain between His petals wide.
A little way within the gloom a roebuck raised his eyes
Brimful of starlight, and he said: The Stamper of the Skies,
He is a gentle roebuck; for how else, I pray, could He
Conceive a thing so sad and soft, a gentle thing like me?
I passed a little further on and heard a peacock say:
Who made the grass and made the worms and made my feathers gay,
He is a monstrous peacock, and He waveth all the night
His languid tail above us, lit with myriad spots of light.

Why I am ambivalent towards P-Noy

And now I am really ambivalent towards P-Noy. Sometimes I do have misgivings on the consistency of his thinking, on his mindset, for there have been a couple of times when he himself displayed some behavior or judgment which one might find either theatrical or just plainly eccentric. One day in New York he would take to the hot dog stand to scorn at Gloria Arroyo’s Le Cirque freak that gave off a gaseous stink of her visit in the city in the twilight of her term, and the other day P-Noy would come out of the garage honking with his new Porsche. Once he will talk against haughtiness and the other day he will just put a foot in his mouth.

No vitriol. One may be correct when he says that this is among Aquino’s right, that even though he is a public figure he still deserves to be treated as a normal person who has the right to acquire not only everything he needs, but everything he wants as well just like any other people residing in this Great Island Nation (Newsbreak’s Inside Track has just proven the foregoing paragraph wrong).

But we are not talking about our rights here. We are talking about leadership, leadership and the gravity of its concomitant responsibilities. Sacrifice is the number one tenet of leadership, and being an example is the second. Transformative leadership is the ability to enforce change by starting it from within. From this point begins a wave of inspiration that will be emulated by a people who in the ankle of our downtrodden times are looking for an idol, a hero that can provide them the will to carry on and contribute to his neighbor’s recovery, moved by the very sacrifice his leader has exhibited; an icon who will prove that selflessness is not a romanticism of the past. Today when our correct sense of right and wrong is fast disappearing to the evils of liberal materialism, our people badly needs a leader that will show them that words can no longer make the virtue of our time.

All we need is action.

Weekend Morning Poetry: He Who was Born by Aleksandr Blok

He, Who was Born
By Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok


He, who was born in stagnant year
Does not remember his own way.
We, kids of Russia’s years of fear,
Remember every night and day.

Years that burned everything to ashes!
Do you bring madness or grace?
The war’s and freedom’s fire flashes
Left bloody light on every face.

We are struck dumb: the toxin’s pressure
Has made us tightly close lips.
In living hearts, once full of pleasure,
The fateful desert now sleeps.

And let the crying ravens soar
Right over our death-bed,
May those who were striving more,
O God, behold Thy Kingdom’s Great!

The Theatre of Wikileaks

As of this writing, Wikileaks’ Cablegate has published only a small fraction of its huge stockpile of diplomatic cables numbering more than 250,000, about 118,000 of which are classified either as secret or confidential correspondences between several US embassies around the world and the US State Department in Washington. These memos are yet to inflict a felt impact on the countries involved, however, that many of the cables revealed an assortment of long unheard-of ironies and absurdities in international politics makes it inevitable for statesmen and world leaders to either exercise caution or become more defiant in the light of the Cablegate revelations.

But it seems that Wikileaks is yet to post the real bombshell of an expose comparable to its 2007 leakage of a video of an American helicopter firing at civilians in a Baghdad neighborhood thereby killing two Reuters journalists, or it has published only selected memos which it deems are able to create quite a stir but don’t yet bring a major shocker that will rock monopolizing governments (has it saved the best ones for last?) For now Cablegate seems to focus mostly on being an anthology of embarrassing politics, aimed at the US government the fall guy of which (Hilary Clinton) is trying hard to let hackers understand that Cablegate is putting national and individual security at huge risk. Wikileaks’ soft-spoken founder and Editor-in-Chief Julian Assange has told TIME’s Richard Stengel via Skype that in its four years of publishing history the whistle-blower website has never caused any individual “to come to any sort of physical harm or to be wrongly imprisoned.”

According to the website’s statistical graph, 1, 796 of the memos came from the US Embassy in Manila. This wikidump, which is the largest in Southeast Asia, dates from January 2005 to February 2010 and consists of 982 unclassified, 749 classified and 65 secret memos to Washington. While Wikileaks is yet to publish any of these memos, the Philippine media is anxiously standing by as any of its disclosures would prove instrumental in revealing the US’s perceptions and position on various issues and controversies confronting, or rather hounding, the Arroyo administration at the time. Isn't it interesting to know what transpired during the close-door meetings held between President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and Hilary Clinton during the latter’s state visit in November 2009, as well as during the lightning visit of CIA Chief Leon Panetta in Manila October of the same year?

But right now, what have the published cables really accomplished? Or, as Newsweek puts it, are these revelations worth the amount of ink spilled about them?

Perhaps the disclosures are a good treasure trove for information-deprived journalists, who at present are still having funfare at the cables through Wikileaks’ various mirror sites (the original website has since been taken down by its main server in the US, avoiding the perils of bearing government pressure). I think the published ones, though nevertheless surprising, will not polarize world governments into paranoid and non-paranoid blocs much like in the Cold War days, though some relationships can be affected and surreptitious transactions by Mafiosi governments will all be taken back “for review” by their respective leaders. Most of all, the cables must have become a lesson to the US not only in keeping “secrets” but also in making and categorizing them.

What’s more, the disclosures put a burning sword into the backs of leading state leaders and politicians who should be reminded that they are dealing with domineering governments who use realpolitik as the universal currency hidden in their pockets.

The contents of the diplomatic cables range from disturbing to amusing. From Clinton’s orders to obtain sensitive personal data about Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and other key UN officials to some unflattering opinions about Afghan President Hamid Karzai (whom a dispatch from Kabul portrays as a paranoid crackpot) and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi (whom US Charge d’Affaires in Rome Elizabeth Dibble calls “feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader”), there is a long stream of backstage jeering and lambasting that exactly defines how politics in entangled alliances works.

One cable taunts French President Nicholas Sarkozy as “an emperor with no clothes.” A Chinese official writes that North Korea is behaving like a “spoiled child,” and a US diplomat even called its leader Kim Jong Il a “flabby old chap” when the tyrant suffered a stroke in 2008.

Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi is reported never to go anywhere in the world without his Ukrainian nurse whom he admires as a “voluptuous blonde.” It is also told that he has an “intense dislike or fear of staying on upper floors” because of a vertigo that is so extreme that he cannot climb any more than 35 steps. Another revealed that during the nuclear stand-off in Libya Gadhafi expressed his preparedness to leave a dangerous storehouse of highly-enriched uranium to its fate at a Tripoli airport “to teach the UN a lesson” just because of an unkind brushoff during a recent US nuclear summit.

Another cable refers to Russia’s Vladimir Putin as “alpha-dog” and likens his relationship with former protégé and now Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to that of Batman (Putin) and Robin (Medvedev). Germany’s Angela Merkel, which is labeled in one cable as “risk averse” is given a pet name by US diplomats – Teflon. Speaking of Merkel, one unique cable from the embassy in Berlin tells wryly why the German chancellor nominated Guenther Oettinger as EU Energy Commissioner:

“Chancellor Angela Merkel nominated Baden-Wuerttemberg (BW) Minister President Guenther Oettinger as EU Energy Commissioner primarily to remove an unloved lame duck from an important [Christian Democratic Union] bastion. The move was not the promotion of a valued colleague as Merkel's allies sought to portray it. Rather, Oettinger's increasing loss of party support in BW compelled Merkel to push Oettinger out to protect her support base there. Oettinger is noted for a lackluster public speaking style, and some commentators have asserted that Merkel, who has often stood out at EU meetings, wanted to appoint a German Commissioner who would not outshine her.”

The deputy chief of mission in Germany who wrote the report describes the act tongue-in-cheek as Germany’s “time-honored tradition of sending unwanted politicians to the EU Commission,” noting further that Oettinger is “a poor public speaker” who “has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth,” providing an example when Oettinger tried to defend former BW Minister President Hans Filbinger during the latter’s eulogy, referring to the deceased as an opponent of the Nazi regime when in fact Filbinger had a documented “pro-Nazi” war record. The deputy chief entitled his report “Lame Duck German Governor Kicked Upstairs as New Energy Commissioner in Brussels.”

Meanwhile, a 1979 memo from the American Embassy in Tehran sounds like something straight out of a cynic’s doctoral dissertation:

¶3. PERHAPS THE SINGLE DOMINANT ASPECT OF THE PERSIAN PSYCHE IS AN OVERRIDING EGOISM. ITS ANTECEDENTS LIE IN THE LONG IRANIAN HISTORY OF INSTABILITY AND INSECURITY WHICH PUT A PREMIUM ON SELF-PRESERVATION. THE PRACTICAL EFFECT OF IT IS AN ALMOST TOTAL PERSIAN PREOCCUPATION WITH SELF AND LEAVES LITTLE ROOM FOR UNDERSTANDING POINTS OF VIEW OTHER THAN ONE'S OWN. THUS, FOR EXAMPLE, IT IS INCOMPREHENSIBLE TO AN IRANIAN THAT U.S. IMMIGRATION LAW MAY PROHIBIT ISSUING HIM A TOURIST VISA WHEN HE HAS DETERMINED THAT HE WANTS TO LIVE IN CALIFORNIA. SIMILARLY, THE IRANIAN CENTRAL BANK SEES NO INCONSISTENCY IN CLAIMING FORCE MAJEURE TO AVOID PENALTIES FOR LATE PAYMENT OF INTEREST DUE ON OUTSTANDING LOANS WHILE THE GOVERNMENT OF WHICH IT IS A PART IS DENYING THE VAILIDITY OF THE VERY GROUNDS UPON WHICH THE CLAIM IS MADE WHEN CONFRONTED BY SIMILAR CLAIMS FROM FOREIGN FIRMS FORCED TO CEASE OPERATIONS DURING THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION.

¶4. THE REVERSE OF THIS PARTICULAR PSYCHOLOGICAL COIN, AND HAVING THE SAME HISTORICAL ROOTS AS PERSIAN EGOISM, IS A PERVASIVE UNEASE ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE WORLD IN WHICH ONE LIVES. THE PERSIAN EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN THAT NOTHING IS PERMANENT AND IT IS COMMONLY PERCEIVED THAT HOSTILE FORCES ABOUND. IN SUCH AN ENVIRONMENT EACH INDIVIDUAL MUST BE CONSTANTLY ALERT FOR OPPORTUNITIES TO PROTECT HIMSELF AGAINST THE MALEVOLENT FORCES THAT WOULD OTHERWISE BE HIS UNDOING. HE IS OBVIOUSLY JUSTIFIED IN USING ALMOST ANY MEANS AVAILABLE TO EXPLOIT SUCH OPPORTUNITIES. THIS APPROACH UNDERLIES THE SOCALLED "BAZAAR MENTALITY" SO COMMON AMONG PERSIANS, A
MIND-SET THAT OFTEN IGNORES LONGER TERM INTERESTS IN FAVOR OF IMMEDIATELY OBTAINABLE ADVANTAGES AND COUNTENANCES PRACTICES THAT ARE REGARDED AS UNETHICAL BY OTHER NORMS. AN EXAMPLE IS THE SEEMINGLY SHORTSIGHTED AND HARASSING TACTICS EMPLOYED BY THE PGOI IN ITS NEGOTIATIONS WITH GTE…

Somehow there are diplomats who are just un-diplomatically rude. In 2008 when businessmen guests chorused before UK’s Prince Andrew, Duke of York during a brunch in Bishkek that doing business in Kyrgyzstan is “like doing business in the Yukon” in the nineteenth century (“only those willing to participate in local corrupt practices are able to make any money”), a cable says that the Prince just laughed boisterously and said, “All of this sounds exactly like France.” When a British businessman describes American and British investments in Kyrgyzstan as comparable despite his observation that US’s economy is paramount over that of UK, the prince just snaps: “No surprise there. The Americans don’t understand geography. Never have. In the UK, we have the best geography teachers in the world!”

What Wikileaks shows us is a great theatre of political comedy, while at the same time it provides a good ground for studying the US diplomatic behavior which, even though sometimes rough, has nevertheless been sensitive and accurate enough to record the minutest of the minute, even sometimes giving weighty significance to the seemingly-insignificant. CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, writing in TIME, says that Wikileaks in fact shows the skills of American diplomats, not their failings. If there is someone who must be culpable, he says, it must be “Washington’s absurd data-sharing policy that made this possible.”

But in the first place, if these “secrets” haven’t been secrets since then, the shock and awe wouldn’t be so much, and governments would have been more circumspect a lot. Perhaps, things might have been different.

2010 in a nutshell

I want to greet the New Year with this post, a post that ends this blog’s long silence and one which begins a brand new promise of participating in our democracy by contributing to the national voice.

The previous year, like many other years had been a mixed box of pleasant and unpleasant events. The turn of a new government under the P-Noy administration has brought in a new dawnbreak for our people who, though continually struggling, do not resign themselves to the belief that Hope has diminished along with our Trust to politics and governance which had already been diminished by the previous administration. Despite the fact that a string of blunders has tarnished the bud of P-Noy’s tenure, it still remains that the new president has the promise of being a different leader in that he seems to have the least interest in enriching his pockets. I hope that this will not just be an impression, but an accomplished reality in the end.

The swift and early signing of the P1.645-trillion national budget for 2011, the release of political prisoners detained by the Arroyo administration, P-Noy’s calls for the silencing of haughty and insolent elitism echoing in his “Walang Wang-Wang, Walang Tong, Walang Counterflow” speech and his attempts to erase the vestige of a government inherited from a scandal-laden administration are pretty good signs that the new government is able to translate words into action.

P-Noy has to watch out though, not to fall into the trap arising from the clamor of the mob. He has to have his own judgment to weigh the propriety of what the people want him to do. Though the vox populi, vox Dei dictum is a democratic linchpin especially to a dominantly theist country like the Philippines, being the said “voice of God” is not a passport for “the voice of the people” to be obeyed through and through. As this country’s chief executive, P-Noy acts as the head, and thus he has to be the chief brain of national policy-making, fairly utilizing his vested authority to think things through so as to make them fair to all and injurious to none, even to fugitives who are too, entitled to the due process of the law.

Not only that, as a leader he also has the moral responsibility to become the “conscience” of the Filipino people.

Which makes me believe that the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Truth Commission was justified (regardless of the SCORP’s motivation) in a way in which democracy should treat every person with equity before the law. Democracy is not anchored in Utilitarian principles of policies made “for the greater good,” instead it aims for the ethical ideals of "the Greatest Good," where everyone deserves equal footing before the gavel no matter how necessary a different kind of prosecution may seem. Nor does it too, settle in the antiquarian rules of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” If Arroyo had been unjust during her regime it does not mean that we have to employ that same injustice, even to her, otherwise we have just become the very monster that we tried to defeat. Though the prospect of making Arroyo responsible for leading a corruption-ridden government may be a relief to the many lives her era had severed, it is the law that forbids her facing the executive branch’s specialized and paramount attention and stoning (unless her acts may be deemed as crimes against humanity).

This fact for us may be heart-breaking. But this is equality promised by our sacred Constitution, suing on level ground on one hand while preventing prejudiced punishment on the other. Arroyo is lucky enough to benefit from this, for this time the law becomes strangely harsh towards the victims, but nevertheless it is the law. This is an example of the blindness of Justice and equal protection regardless of personal status.

The attempted creation of the Truth Commission is an instance of acts arising from popular expectations, and it is very popular indeed. But being guarded by the Constitution where no man is supreme the President of the Republic must acknowledge the fact that he is under its dictatorship come what may. Anyway, we are a government of laws and not of men.

Twenty-ten is also the year of the Manila hostage crisis, perpetrated by a disgruntled policeman who hi-jacked a busload of 25 people, 20 of whom were Hong Kong tourists. National and international criticisms are enough for us to change our media’s old system of sensationalizing events in the expense of a tragedy just to be able to compete with each other. Also this has given a slap on the face of our police force to improve their training and preparedness. In reaction to this the government raised its budget allocation.

The nation also suffered a lot in 2010. In September a grenade blast rocked De La Salle University where thousands of aspiring lawyers and supporters were having fanfare in time for the bar exams. Thirty-five people were injured.

In October Typhoon Juan, one of the most intense tropical cyclones ever recorded, swept through Northern Luzon, leaving a trail of destruction where over 200, 000 people were made homeless.

Then in November, Vicente Romano III officially resigned his post as Department of Tourism (DOT) undersecretary hounded by a harshly-criticized tourism promotion campaign called "Pilipinas Kay Ganda," the concept of which was lifted from the “Polska!” campaign of Poland.

However, we also had a lot to celebrate in 2010. On March 4, National Scientist Lourdes J. Cruz was honored at the L'Oreal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science for her breakthrough research on conotoxins.

On May 10, the country voted in its first-ever automated elections.

Venus Raj, whose question-and-answer slip up became one of the popular topics in cyberspace this year, was proclaimed fifth best in the Miss Universe beauty pageant.

In sports, Manny Pacquiao thrashed Joshua Clottey and Antonio Margarito in matches eight months apart to claim his eighth consecutive weight class. Another Filipino pugilist, Nonito Donaire, TKOed Hernan Marquez to retain his interim super flyweight title, and then five months later also defeated Wladimir Sidorenko to win the WBC Continental Americas bantamweight title.

Lately the Azkals football club of PH defeated Vietnam 2-0 in the 2010 AFF Suzuki Cup quarterfinal round. The defeat was considered one of the biggest upsets ever recorded in the regional tournament.

We also bid goodbyes and paid tributes to people who are worth remembering, including former Press Secretary Cerge Remonde (b. 1958), comedy actor Palito (b. 1933), folk singer Fred Panopio (b. 1941), popular psychic Jojo Acuin (b. 1957), comedian Redford White (b. 1955), 2009 Binibining Pilipinas International Melody Gersbach (b. 1986), former Supreme Court Associate Justice Abraham Sarmiento (b. 1921), poet Ophelia A. Dimalanta (b. 1933), and writer and graphic novelist Pablo Gomez (b. 1929), who once gave me a brand new wallet in one of our writing workshops in Bulacan.

We triumphed, failed, learned lessons, and said goodbyes. Today we are looking forward to a brand new year - nay, to a brand new era still with unvanquished hopes and dreams, and most of all, (I pray) with an iron will.