Celebrity, Privacy, Public Interest, Civility

Reblogged from Interlacements:

By Romel Regalado Bagares

It’s been one bloody Sunday indeed and you probably know I’m not referring to the Mayweather-Cotto fight at the MGM Grand Garden (what a ho-hum affair!) but to something that happened right at home. You guessed it right, the One Airport Brawl to shame all other airport brawls, that one between a celebrity couple – Raymart Santiago and Claudine Barretto – and the tough-talking macho journalist Ramon Tulfo.

Read more… 1,218 more words

Berlin and the art of keeping time

By Romel Regalado Bagares

My unabashedly touristic pose at the Brandenburg Tor

Berlin, Germany (February 23, 2012)— Twenty three years after the fall of the “Iron Curtain,” and I’m wearing a wristwatch once again.

Not that all that time I wasn’t wearing one, I didn’t mind time at all;  but in 1989 – or three years after our own February 1986 People Power Revolution –  I was a wide-eyed high school  junior in Lagao,  General Santos City  who watched with fascination television news of the “Berliner Mauer”  finally tumbling down as hordes of East Germans hungry for the freedom enjoyed by their Western cousins flooded into West Berlin in their rickety Trabants.

To my young mind, the first bloodless People Power revolution destroyed the Marcos-made mythical narratives of martial law; the fall of the Berlin Wall further amplified for me the human spirit’s longing for authentic freedom.

I remember coming across a New York Times piece on the historic event carried by a now -defunct local newspaper and the impression it left on me: the journalist, whose name escapes me now, wrote of how he thought he had history figured out; he had long been an observer of events in the East, and yet he too, did not see the writing on the wall.

The Protestant Berliner Dom, host to the protest movement in the old days

The sudden flood of time caught him flat-footed. After watching thousands of  East Berliners seep through the broken walls and flow into all directions, he found himself unable to come to grips with the enormity of the historical moment.  What he did next totally captivated my imagination: he took off his wristwatch, and threw it away, a gesture meant to signify that henceforth, he will no longer be bound to mindless time-keeping.

I decided I’d do the same.  And so for the next 24 years, I steadfastly clung to what my friends considered a sophomoric – if not inscrutable – vow . The timely advent of pagers and later on, of mobile phones, with their own time displays, somehow made the timepiece-less switch easier.

It took this trip to change all that. I’ve just planed in from Zurich, where I earlier conducted a three-day intensive course for Filipino evangelical church leaders based in Europe on developing a reformational worldview under the auspices of the Alliance Graduate School in Manila.

Yesterday, the eve of my flight to Berlin, my Filipino hosts graciously gifted me with a Swiss-made timepiece as a souvenir of my visit. Truth to tell, I wasn’t prepared for the generous gesture, but how could I refuse it?

And so before my host Hector Chio drove me to the Zurich airport early this morning for my flight to Tegel, Berlin, I finally put on my new wristwatch.  It felt like an addition to the four layers of clothing I was wearing to ward off the cold of European winter.

A lone trumpeter in a crowded Berlin cafe playing sad old love songs

Ever since I’ve laid my hands on Count Harry Kessler’s   diaries about the Weimar Republic, Journey to the Abyss,  I’ve always wanted to see this city whose streets once bore the footprints of  great thinkers like Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Hanna Arendt, Walter Benjamin and many others (as James Wood recently noted in his column in the Guardian, Berlin has a peculiar way of naming its streets –either in triumph and atonement – as it has a habit of memorializing figures who had either brought it honor or  who had borne the brunt of its own unspeakable cruelties).

But indeed, you walk down its streets and you breathe in history.   For this visit, I knew exactly what I wanted to do – with only one day to spend in Berlin, as I’m heading for Amsterdam the next day –a walk through the heart of the city: from Alexanderplatz in the East  in the Mitte District down towards the West to  the Unter Den Linden – the city’s famously historic boulevard  – and beyond . There you’ll see many of the important city landmarks, such as the Fernsehturm TV Tower, the Berliner Dom, the Museumsinsel, Humboldt University,  Hotel Aldon,  Brandenburg Tor,  and  farther West, the Reichstag.

For the better part of the day, that is what I did, a retracing in part of my first ever visit to Berlin in 2007.  Back then, I was a graduate student in Amsterdam, and my Dutch friend and I, helped by a few hundred euros earned from a recent lecture we did together in Munster,  Germany, stayed for a few days at an old hippie colony in East Berlin, and from there, explored many parts of the city on foot.  Much to our delight, we found Berlin to be cheap and inexorably full of historic, intellectual and cultural wonders. That it remained cheap I knew right away as soon I bought upon my arrival at Tegel airport what is known as a tageskarte — a day ticket, which I can use in all of the city’s public transportation systems, all for 6.30 euros. In Amsterdam, a one-hour city tram ticket already costs 2.70 euros.

booksellers outside the Humboldt University gates

Later in the afternoon, I was joined by my host, law school classmate and kababayan Chicky Arumpac, who now serves as a vice consul at the Philippine Embassy;  funny that she had been too busy with work since she assumed office a few months back that she had no time at all to explore the city. So I played tourist guide to her, and at her request, gave her a tour of the Humboldt University premises.

On a wall at the university’s main lobby, one reads inscribed the famous words – in German, of course –of one of its famous products, Karl Marx, to the effect that in the past, philosophers have sought to understand the world, but the point however is to change it (to which we Dooyeweerdians would jokingly retort, well Marx utterly misunderstood reality and reduced it to the economic aspect; the point is that before he can change it, he must first see that created reality displays a great variety of aspects or modes of being in the temporal order, which  break up the spiritual and religious root unity of creation into a wealth of colors, just as light refracts into the hues of the rainbow when it passes through a prism).

(Reductionist) writing on the wall?

I recall that on my last visit, after I posed for a photograph right beside the inscription, an old lady walked up to me – she was apparently the wife of one of the Marxist professors there – to complain how today’s generation have forsaken the lessons of history as Marx understood it.   Apparently, a bust of Marx used to adorn the university lobby as well but it had been taken down by university authorities.  Well, the Marx-Engels Forumstill stands in Mitte on the eastern banks of the River Spree, albeit 100 meters away from its original location. It was our next stop.

Chicky found it fascinating that the monument to the main architects of Marxism has no inscription of any kind and simply assumes that people knew to whom the artistic installation gave honor.  “The creators simply assumed that everyone knows Marx and Engels!” It was getting dark when we were done with what tourists come to do there: have their pictures taken in the lap of Karl Marx.

We had intended to see as well the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe to  the south of Brandenburg Tor –a 19,000 square meter site covered with 2,711 concrete slabs arrayed in a grid pattern on a sloping field – but we absentmindedly walked towards the wrong direction.

At a Vietnamese dig in Kreuzberg, reminiscing about law school days

When we realized we were in the wrong part of the city, we decided to take a bus to the memorial, hoping to see it before night finally fell on Berlin. But we missed the stop nearest to the memorial as well.  We finally decided to head for the hip and colorful Kreuzberg district, a behive of multi-cultural life, whose residents live by the motto, or so I’d been told, “live in poverty in style.”  There we had  dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant with another law school classmate, Anna De Vera, who is also a vice consul at the Embassy.

After  a 35-euro dinner for three, we retreated to a nearby café — popular and always crowded — where we had some drinks and reminisced about our law school days.  A lone trumpeter played sad, old, love songs in the din of the crowd. We actually thought it was pipe-in music that was playing.

When I looked at my watch again, it was nearly 10 p.m. It was time to call it a night. I got an Amsterdam-bound train to catch at 4 a.m.

The Great Crash of 2012

The view from the top

by Romel Regalado Bagares

Davos, Switzerland — I may have missed the World Economic Forum (WEF) by a few weeks but my Filipino hosts assured me I couldn’t have come here at a better time.

For starters, the unusually cold spell that hit all of Switzerland just a week ago — with the mercury hitting as low as -16 centigrade – dissipated earlier than projected.

Then there’s the happy fact that the sun is up; everywhere you look you see people in their skiing best rushing out of cars and buses in a mad race for the snow-bedecked mountains surrounding this resort city.

You know snow is in happy abundance in the Swiss Alps because during the two-hour drive from Zurich to the city, you pass by houses, buildings and factories with roofs layered over with meters-high powder white blankets and for a moment you imagine them to be giant cakes decorated by an unseen hand with so much icing.

You’ve never seen so much snow in your life.

I’ve lived in Amsterdam for a year for graduate school but the winter I encountered there was rather mild — two days of snow and for but a few inches of it that before I could think about taking pictures, it was all gone. Forever.

In late January, European and American policy makers met again at Davos to try to hammer out a plan of action to prevent a looming eurozone crash in the event that the Greece 100 billion euro ($100 billion ) debt debacle make a turn for the worse — with little success, it seemed.

The Swiss, it seems, are largely unperturbed. Their currency is at its strongest, and wages in Switzerland are at their highest. The good economic situation here has attracted droves of nationals from other EU countries seeking escape from the bleak economic prospects in their home countries. Davos itself shows this — hordes of Germans have found employment here and many are seeking Swiss citizenship. Austrians and Portuguese are following suit.

But I’m here because my hosts think it’s the perfect time to introduce me to a fine Swiss contraption of daredeviltry known as the schlittel.

It’s actually the Swiss version of dear old Santa’s sleigh, only that it’s much smaller and there isn’t any Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer to pull you. Instead, you propel the schlittel down the snow-covered slopes using your own weight.

There’s been a revival in interest among the Swiss in this instrument of Swiss ingenuity in the last few years.

I guess that could mean anywhere between the spike in the sale of the contraption and the high probability that more people could get injured as a result of their newly-rediscovered enthusiasm for it: last year, an eight-year-old boy and a 21-year old woman died in separate schlittel crash incidents in Switzerland.

Reports quote the Swiss Council for Accident Prevention to say that around 10,000 people – both children and adults – get injured from sledging per year in this country of about 8 million. That figure is around 1,000 fewer than the entire population of Davos.

Of course, the grim statistics didn’t at all deter me- after all, I only learned about it after the fact.

The unit given for my use is the Davos, a traditional wooden sledge, named after the Swiss resort where the first official sledge race took place in 1883. I understand it remains the most popular model, consistently outselling plastic ones.

The instructions Hector Chio gave me made the whole exercise rather simple. You sit near the rear end of the sledge and then flex your legs towards the front and slightly away from each other. You bend forward and push on against the ground, using your hands.

Off you hurtle down the meandering path that’s nearly three kilometers long. You tilt your right foot ever so slightly to your right to steer the sledge to that direction, your left foot to your left. To stop your advance you stomp both feet on the snow.

After so much huffing and puffing –all to no avail — I had to be pushed forward to get my schlittel moving. So off I went, whooooweeeee…..very nearly ramming into Hector 10 meters down as he was giving instructions to his son Heckie on his own sledge.

No, no, no, no, I’m fine, I told him when he offered help. To assuage my hurt pride, I decided to let the others in our party of 20 men, women and children hurtle on ahead of me so they won’t see me crashing again.

And crash again I did. Well, it’s more like turn turtle I did.

After three more hard falls half-way through the course, I made a quick calculation of my chances at surviving the next crash with little more than a few scratches. I decided that the odds were stacked against me. There was only a thin and short wall of packed snow on my left to serve as a brake in case I veer off the path towards the abrupt drop down one side of the mountain into sure death.

Just before I crashed for the fifth and last time I thought I was making real progress: I had just cleared a 50-meter stretch of the route and was headed for a tight and narrow bend to the left. I rehearsed Hector’s instructions in my mind — bank ever so slightly to your left with an ever so slight tilt of your left foot.

A pose with members of Praise Christian Church-Zurich

Instead, I made an abrupt and wide jerk of my left foot, causing my sledge to make a sharp lurch, front pointed upward. An unseen force pulled the schlittel from under me and I flew and landed on my belly a few meters away with a loud thud.

I lay there for a minute or so to catch my breath. I felt my body ache all over as a cold blanket of chill gripped me. Then I heard snow that had gathered on the leaves of a nearby pine tree slide down. I picked myself up, took off my visor and threw a glance into the distance below at the foot of the mountain. I could see the roofs of houses, inns and hotels covered with a thick blanket of white powder. Behind them loomed yet another mountain all wrapped in blinding white. I smiled at the secure thought that no one had seen me and my schlittel crash hard into the snow.*

______________________________

This is a slightly edited version of the essay that appeared in my weekly column for The News Today.

translations and treacheries

Traduttore, traditore. Translator, traitor. But I love to translate poetry written in English into Filipino!  For a poor versifier such as I,  it’s the next best thing to actually writing poetry.   So here’s the most recent produce of my traitorous mind, my translation of Luci Shaw‘s  Advent poem, Made flesh. I’d like to thank my friend — a great poet of a lawyer — Pambie Herrera, who read this at our church’s  Advent Service in Lessons and Carols last night. Ariel Lev Pinzon was  herself a revelation when she read the original poem in English.

Nagkatawang Tao 

Pagkatapos

na pagtiyapin

ang langit at madilim na lupa

ng  kinang ng mainit na pagpapahayag

ang kanyang nakakapaso’t matalas na liwanag

ay sandaling nawala’t

itinago ng lumbay ng sinapupunan:

ang hinahon ng  malawak Niyang rangya

ang pangkalahatan Niyang biyaya

Tinuping maliit sa maligamgam na anino

ng bahay-bata—

Salitang isinilid sa siyam na buwang katahimikan—

walang hanggang nabakuran sa sinapupunan

hanggang sa susunod na kalakhan—ang Dakila,

matapos  magpasakop sa paghihirap ng isang babae,

Kawawa sa ulilang sahig

Nakatikim ng mapait na lupa.

Ngayon  ako, sa Kanya’y sumusuko

Sa ipit at iyak ng kapanganakan.

Dahil ang walang hangga’y

napiit sa panahon

Siya ang aking bukas na pinto

Sa magpakailanman.

Mula sa kanyang pagkakapiit  mga kalayaan ko’y sumibol

nagkapakpak.

Ako’y bahagi ng katawan Niya,

nalalampasan ko ang katawang ito.

Mula sa kanyang matamis na katahimikan,  bibig ko’y umaawit.

Mula sa kanyang karimlan, ako’y kumikinang

Ang buhay ko, bilang kanya,

pupuslit sa baklad ng kamatayan,

Mga himig ng panahon,

kapit-bisig ang langit,

kausap ang mga tala.

 

 

Salin  sa Filipino ni Romel Regalado Bagares  ng orihinal na tula sa Ingles  ni Luci Shaw. 12.4.11

An Advent Poem

One of my favorite poets — Luci N. Shaw — writes from the perspective of faith.   Here’s one poem of hers — Made flesh — which speaks of
the wonder of the Incarnation:

After
the white-hot beam of annunciation
fused heaven with dark earth,
his searing, sharply focused light
went out for a while,
eclipsed in amniotic gloom:
his cool immensity of splendor,
his universal grace,
small-folded in a warm, dim
female space—
the Word stern-sentenced to be
nine months’ dumb—
infinity walled in a womb,
until the next enormity—
the Mighty One, after submission
to a woman’s pains,
helpless on a barn’s bare floor,
first-tasting bitter earth.

Now
I in him surrender
to the crush and cry of birth.
Because eternity
was closeted in time,
he is my open door to forever.
From his imprisonment
my freedoms grow,
find wings. Part of this body,
I transcend this flesh.
From his sweet silence my mouth sings.
Out of his dark I glow.
My life, as his,
slips through death’s mesh,
time’s bars,
joins hands with heaven,
speaks with stars.

“Made flesh,” in Accompanied by Angels: Poems of the Incarnation by Luci Shaw (Eerdmans, 2006).

I made a  translation to Filipino  of this poem, for use during our church’s Advent Service in Lessons and Carols this coming Sunday, 5:30 p.m., at the F.  Benitez Memorial Hall, Magsaysay Avenue cor. Ylanan Road, UP Diliman, Quezon City.  If you want to hear the recitation of the Filipino translation of this poem, or if you want to experience what a Service and Lessons and Carols is all about,  please do join us at this Advent celebration, with  the theme “Let Heaven and Nature Sing!”

And yes, you may even bring your friends! For directions, you may refer to the campus map below (click on the map to enlarge):

May it please the Court

For nearly an hour,  I stood and made my case before the gods of Mt. Olympus, my heart in my mouth.  It was my very first time to actually argue before the Philippine Supreme Court — and I was  co-counsel to Prof. Harry Roque in a petition we filed on behalf of  residents of the Province of Palawan in their bid to get a rightful share in the proceeds of the Malampaya oil and gas wells.  Our case rested on the constitutionalization of the international legal regime of the Continental Shelf and the constitutional and statutory grant of fiscal autonomy for local governments.

I barely survived the intense  questioning — for the most part, by  Justices Antonio Carpio and Teresita De Castro. We were given 25 minutes to make our arguments. Prof. Roque, who was first to argue, took 17 minutes to discuss the first three points of our case. I  took care of the last two points in 8 minutes. But the interpellation took much longer. Prof. Roque was grilled for a little more than two hours, and I, for nearly an hour.

When it was all  over, I was simply thankful that I survived the ordeal without throwing up or fainting in shame and terror. It was an unforgettable day for another reason — the oral arguments were held a day after the Maguindanao Massacre.  The very next day, I took the earliest flight to Davao City  to head for Maguindanao  and see how the Center for International Law may assist authorities and families of the victims in the quest for justice.

The photo below was taken after the oral arguments. (From L-R: Me,  Prof.  Roque, Dr. Raul C. Pangalangan and the DFA’s Mr. Henry Bensurto, the latter two being amici curiae in the case).

The same photo introduces the sixth and last installment in the SIX BIG QUESTIONS project of Gideon Strauss, senior fellow of the US-based Center for Public Justice.   In this project,  I join several guest bloggers in his blog in answering, in 250 words or less, six questions that deal with faith, character, vision and personal context.  What contributions am I called to make? And my response is found here. For my fifth post, click here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

GMA Arrested: Problem, Promise, Prognosis

I spoke tonight at a forum organized by theology students at the Asian Theological Seminary (ATS) on the current political situation in the Philippines. In particular, I discussed the topic, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo Arrested: Problem, Promise and Prognosis.

I built the talk around the thesis that what we are witnessing is an opportunity for the country’s political system to decisively defeat the forces of traditional  and patronage politics and set in place a public legal community founded on the norms of public justice.

Click here for  link to the outline of my presentation.

 

 

On Possibilites and Limitations

Amsterdam’s  Museum of Modern Art — the Stedelijk Museum — housed Picassos, Warhols and De Koonings (apart from the works of many other modern masters). Which is one of the reasons why for the better part of 2007 towards the end of my graduate studies,  I spent many Sunday afternoons there (at its temporary quarters that is) , to write  my master’s thesis .  There was a restaurant on the 6th floor, if memory serves me right, where one could grab a beer or juice to relax after hours spent in the exhibits. But cash-strapped, I brought for merienda home-made  sandwiches and cheap 1-liter orange juice in tetrapak.

This graduate school memento many pounds ago  prefaces the fifth installment in the SIX BIG QUESTIONS project of Gideon Strauss, senior fellow of the Center for Public Justice.

As a guest blogger, I answer six questions. I’m now on my fifth.  The post answers the question, what possibilities are afforded to me and what constraints are imposed upon me by my time and place?  Click here for my previous post.

Where do I belong?

Please don’t laugh at the photograph. That’s really me four years ago,  in a country where regular hair cuts were beyond  the means of a graduate student subsisting on starvation-level scholarship stipend.

And yes, the guy I’m talking to in the photo  is the man himself, Mr. Jose Maria Sison.

I thought this photograph would make an intriguing  introduction to the fourth  installment in the SIX BIG QUESTIONS project initiated by Gideon Strauss, senior fellow of the US-based Center for Public Justice.   Along with  several bloggers, I  reflect on six questions in 250 words or less and post my reflections on his blog.

The fourth question: where do I belong? And my response may be found here.  Click here for the third  installment.

Who am I?

It’s not a movie by Jackie Chan (which I love, by the way) but the third installment in the SIX BIG QUESTIONS project. This project was initiated by Gideon Strauss, senior fellow of the US-based Center for Public Justice.   Along with  several bloggers, I  reflect on six questions in 250 words or less and post my reflections on his blog.

Who am I? Here’s my answer. Click here for the previous installment.