Panorama. Vol. X, No.2 February 1958

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Part of Panorama

Title: Panorama. Vol. X, No.2 February 1958
Issue Date: Vol. X (No. 2) February 1958
Year: 1958
Language: English
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extracted text: 1958 FOOTNOTE TP LOVE PAGE 42 . CONTENTS Articles Army of the Finest Republic . . . . . . Erne5to Cangco Oil: Hope of Philippine Economy ............ . ]. P. Sto. Domingo, Jr. Indarapatra, Sulayman and the Four Monsters .... Arsenio Villanueva 1 You and Your Income Tax .... Jose C. Campos, Jr. E Return of a "Native" .............. Arturo Mayo 2" Paris and Cairo ................ F. C. Sta. Maria 3'. Japan's Rising Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3~ A Billion Billion Electron Volts! ... Manuel TiempO 39 I'll Take Hunting ................ Rony V. Diaz S.3 Gobs on Maternity Duty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Soviet Writing Today ........................ . Congress for Cultural Freedom 69 The Battle of Bessang Pass ...... E. U. de Guzman 80 World of the Tirurays ............ Grace L. Wood 85 U. N. Troubleshooter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Poetry Footnote to Love .......... Armando F .. Bonifacio 42 Fiction Young Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gregorio C. Brillantes 44 Regular Features Are You Word Wise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2' Panorama Peek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 :I Book Review: Band of Angles . . . . . Leonard Casper 5 7 Literary Personality - XXXVII: Lord Dunsany . . 6 l Panorama Quiz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 '3 In the Beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 ; Philippine Panorama: Palawan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7. Fun-Orama by Elm.er . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 PANORAMA is published monthly by the Community Publishers, I Inc., 1986 Herran, Manila, Philippines i Editor: FELIXBERTO C. STA. MARIA I Foreign contributing editor: Leonard Casper Art director: Rodolfo P. Perez J Business Manager: MRS. C. A. MA.t~AMAG , I Subscription rates: In the Philippines, one year PS.00; two years I J 'P9.GO. Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S.; two yeare; L $7.00 U.S. Sin(,le copy 50 centavos. MANILA PAPER MILL, INC. Manufacturers of •KRAFT PAPER Factory: 0 WRAPPING PAPER •BOND PAPER •ONION SKIN • MIMEOGRAPH • GOLDEN KRAFT Novaliches, Rizal Manila Office: 180 Echague, Quiapo Tel. No. 3-26-45 3-43-11 about the Panorama, the Philippines' most versatile, most significant magazine today. a year's subscription-NOW! they will appreciate it. SLJBSCRIPTION FORM -------------------- 1 year for P5.00 -------------------- 2 years for P9.00 -------------------- Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S. Name ----------------------------------------------------------------··--····-----------------------------------· Street -------------------------------------····--------------···----------------------------------------------·--City or Toum --------------- -----·····---------- Province --------------------------------··· Enclosed is a check/money order for the amount specified above. Please address all checks or money orders in favor of: COMMUNITY PUBLISHERS, INC. 1986 Herran. St:a. Ana, Manila VOL. X Entered as second class mail matter at the Manila Post Office on Dec. 7, 1956 MANILA, PHILIPPINES FEBRUARY 1958 :Army No. 2 of the l!irst lRepublic 1HE ARMY of the first Philippin.e Republic was a soi· dierly outfit. It is not the shabby, ill-equipped army that we imagine it to be. In fact, the first army of the Philippine government was disciplined, neatly garbed and rather well-equipped. It wa1 a soldierly outfit Frank D. Millet, an American war correspondent who came to the Philippines with the first American troops, was impressed by the units of the Philippine army. He reported :-hat around Manila the Filipino soldiers "were never observed to drill and were rarely seen to march in large detachments." However, at Bacoor, Cavite, which was the first seat of the Revolutionary government, occasional parades in review with brass bands were conducted. "On this occasion," Millet re· ported, "Aguinaldo and his staff were most resplendent in gold lace and trappings and the review was conducted with pomp and style calculated to impress the natives with his power and the high quality of the army at his command. The troops made an excellent appearance. The soldiers were perfectly obedient to orders." It has to be admitted that the troops of the first Philippine army never received any formal instruction in war or military conduct. They picked up their military knowledge as they went along driving, capturing and fighting the Spaniards. Needless to say, these soldiers became very proficient in guerrilla warfare, ambushes and sneak attacks. They also awed their enemies by their valiant and sometimes foolhardy last-ditch stands. Millet remarked that immediately after the surrender of the Spanish army to the Americans "large bodies of insurgent recruits were seen drilling on all sides, imitating manuevers of the American troops.'· The reason for this was the reorganization and training of the army initiated by General Antonio Luna, the Director of Wat. Luna gathered the best available military talent which included Filipino ranking officers in the former Spanish army. One such soldier, Major Jose Torres Bugallon, later became Luna's chief of staff. Bugallon was a graduate of the Academia Militar de Toledo. To train the officers of the Philippine army, a military school was established in Malolos. :fl FTER SEVERAL months, the arm y was completely transformed. It became .an organization in the best military tradition. Millet recorded this c.hange in his report of the departure of Filipino troops from Manila after a negotiation with the American commander-inchief. "The strains of martial music, echoing among the house, beyond the Campo de Bagumbayan, announced that the movement was in progress in Ermita, and, in a few minutes we saw, to our great surprise, the head of a column of Filipinos emerge from the Camino Real, and wheel into Calle de San Luis which leads along the southern border of the great open space into the Paco Road. PANORAMA By the time we reached this street, it was filled with troops, numbering three thousand or more, headed by a gallant disµlay of officers, and with three large and excellent bands playing as vigorously as those on a street parade on St. Patrick day. The column halted, officers and aides galloped backward and forward, and consulted and gave orders and were full of business generally. After a delay of ten or fifteen minutes, the order was given to march, and the column moved around through the Paco road, past the barracks of the Sixth Regular Light Artillery, into the Calzada, at the point where they had been forced away ·on the day of the surrender, and along under the walls of the town, crowded with Spanish prisoners, and to the Luneta. Here they wheeled into the Camino Real and marched down the thoroughfare the whole lP,ngth of the Ermita and Malate and out into the gathering FEBRUARY 1958 darkness among the bamboo thickets at Maytubig." The demonstration greatly impressed both the Spaniards and the Americans for, to quote Millet again, "they made a brave show, and they were neatly uniformed, had excellent rifles, marched well, and looked very soldierly and intelligent ... In the beginning the soldiers of the first army had no uniform. According to General Jose Alejandrino, before General Luna asked his brother, Juan, to design a uniform for the soldiers, they wore anything that suited their fancy. The only badge of service was "a red and blue cockade with a white triangle bearing the Malay symbol of the sun and the three stars and sometim~s a red and blue bank pinned diagonally across the lower part of the sleeve." Later the rayadillo uniform was prescribed. Most of the soldiers went unshod. For this reason, some Americans called them "the barefoots." ! T HE UNIFORM of the officers was made of finely striped blue linen. The badge of rank is a revolver. The officers also wore riding boots. During the inauguration of the First Republic in .1V\alolos, some Filipino generals appeared in khaki uniforms. The army of the Republic was armed with a variety of rifles - Mausers, Remingtons, Ambers, Muratas, tercerolas, paltiks and falcunetes. Later, during the Philippine-American War, Springfields and Krags were added to the collection. The sandatahans, or bolomen, was also a part of this army. This unit was composed of reserve troops. The soldiers did not carry canteens or haversacks. Their provisions were transported by sled or cart to the area of operations. In most cases, when they billeted in a village, they occupied the houses. A foreign observer described the manner of suply of Filipino troops during a military campaign. "The food was issued at the front was mostly rice brought up in carromatas to within a 1ew hundred yards of the trenches, where it was cooked by women, perhaps in some large and now disused cockfighting theaters with remarkable structures of bamboo and nipa which are found every6 where in the country. Each man had double handful of rice, sometimes enriched by a portion of meat or fish, which was ~erved him in a square of plantain leaf. Then he was unemcumbered with plate or knife or fork and threw away his pnm1t1ve by excellent dish when he had licked the plate clean." General Frederick Funston called the Filipinos poor shots. This was admitted by Alejandrina in his memoirs. The main reason, he said, is lack of practice because of ammunition shortage. The Filipino soldiers often used refilled cartridges. The reorganized Filipino battalions of General Luna that faced the Americans at Bagbag, Calumpit, and Santo Tomas were veterans who knew how PANORAMA to use their rifles. They were also commanded by experienced officers. The following is General Funston's estimate of the Filipino soldier: "While not very capable in the offensive, these insurgents showed no little mettle in defending positions, for they often stuck to them until the bottom of the trenches were literally covered with dead." SOME brilliant counterattacks, however, were executed at La Loma, Bacolor, and San Fernando. The best-known defensive campaigns of the kind that General Funston recalled were made at Caloocan, Calumpit and Tirad Pass. In the fight for the possession of San Fernando, Pampanga, where an American diYision was stationed under the command of General Arthur MacArthur, 7,000 Filipinos under Aguinaldo launched a counterattack. During the battle, Funston wrote, a band of Filipino soldiers appeared from a ravine and made a dash for the American lines, yelling and firing as they advanced. ~ ot one Filipino survived this charge. Funston commented on this charge: "What a strange fatalism possessed them we can only guess. It seemed a pity, &s certainly they deserved a better fate." If we may be permitted to answer Funston across t h e years, we can only say that it is no fatalism that drove these soldiers on but the thought that another band of invaders were about to settle on the ground that they had wrested from the Spaniards. ALL FOR ONE BAYANIHAN is a charming practice of the people of rural Philippines which reflects the warm and generous nature of the Filipino, his concern for his brother, his inherent capacity for work. The people of the bayan come together without being asked, to help a neighbor move his house to a better location, or help plow and harrow his field before planting it to rice, or to dig a well. FEBRUARY 1958 7 01 8 Will they hit it? 1 HOPE OF PHILIPPINE ECONOMY I By Jesus P. Sto. Domingo, Jr. PHILIPPINE ECONOMY-anemic as it is-still has something on which to pin its hopes-the oil possibilities all over the archipelago. Every now and then, the presence of oil seeps, gas emanations and bituminous rock deposits are reported. These, to an optimist, are substantial bases to claim the presence of the source rock, waiting to be discovered. A study of the neighboring countries will lead one to believe that presence of this valuable mineral in the Pihlippines is highly possible. For instance, Japan, British Borneo and Indonesia are the closer countries which are all oil producers. In fact, as of 1956, they have contributed a total of 138,492,641 barrels of oil to the total world oil produced, as fol- quantity. lows: At present, there are a good Daily Average Total for the Year Japan ........ . 5,926 barrels 2, 169,968 barrels British Borneo . I 16,12i 42,502,806 Indonesia ..... . 256,338 93,819,867 What will these make of the Philippines? Geologically and geographicallf; the Philippines is linked to the whole chain of islan~s as far north as Alaska, through Japan, Formosa, and down south to British Borneo on the west and Indonesia on the east. It is of interest to note that all these islands have petroleumbearing rocks. Furthermore, in the recent studies of the geology of the Western Pacific area, several authorities were inclined to believe that a: closer affinity of the Philippines to Indonesia exists. Comparative examinations of the fossils of both countries have shown that the tertiary rocks of the Philippines have great similarities with the tertiary geology of Indonesia, where oil fields have been determined to be underlain by tertiary sediments. In British Borneo oil has been found to come from pliocene rocks. Petroleum-bearing rocks of Japan are established to be of pliocene and miocene age. With this available information, it is safe to conclude that there is oil here in commercial FEBRUARY 1958 number of companies and pri· vate parties which are out to prove the presence of this precious liquid. Many also are yet to be granted their concessions. The increase in number of concessions may be attributed to several factors. First, there is a very good prospect for success in the search for oil. Second, the increasing oil imports annually create interest in the search for it. Third, the recent crisis in the Middle East shifted the attention of foreign companies to look for oil source in this part of the world; the Philippines is one of the countries they have turned to. Finally, the government has encouraged many by giving them enough protection by enacting the Petroleum Act of 1949. T HE SEARCH for oil in the Philippines is, however, not exactly new. The history of oil exploration in the Philippines dates back to as early as 1890 when Abella y Casarriego, a Spanish geologist, reported the presence of oil in Asturias, Toledo, and Alegria, all in the province of Cebu. Six years later, in the same places, Smith, Bell & Co. drilled two wells which yielded small amounts of oil; they however, had to abandon the work on account of the uprising a year later. In· 1936-38, the National Development C o m p a n y drilled wells in central Cebu and in Barili, with less valuable results. The Far East Oil Co. (now PODCO), tried their luck at Daan-bantayan in 1940, only to be disappointed by the outbreak of war the following y ea r . Again the same company drilled another hole in 1947 but no encouraging results were obtained even as they had reached basement at 9,995 feet. Valuable seeps have also been reported around Bondoc Peninsula, in the southern part of Quezon province. A n d from 1906 to 1925, several American companies had drilled for the oil bu t various complexities forced them to abandon the wells. The place has not been given up completely, though, as even today several companies are concessionaires in that area. In 1950, after the enactment of the Petroleum Act, PODCO drilled three wells in Pampanga province; two of the wells were dry and the ~ast apparently did not furnish good results as no report was made available. At present, PODCO together with Calasiatic and Topco, has already reached about 13,000 ft. 10 m their latest well in Cagayan area. Only recently, Stanvac Oil Co. had to abandon its first well in their Cagayan concession. The well was reported to be one of the most expensive wells so far drilled. The company had sunk two million pesos in that well alone. However, valuable in formation on the structure and sedimentation of the area were obtained which w o u 1 d greatly help in future ventures. As of December I last year, Acoje was reported to have started drilling operations in Bogo, Cebu. (Bogo is a place not very far from the wells drilled by PODCO in 1947). Several other oil companies such as the White Eagle Overseas Oil Co., Maremco, San Jose Oil Co., Inc., Rep. Resources & Dev. Corp. and many others are still on the exploration stage. San Jose Oil Co., Inc. has reportedly one of the biggest exploration programs. Extensive geological a;1d geophysical surveys are be in g conducted throughout most of the company's concessions. Future plans include simultaneous airborne magnetometer and .San Jose is laying down plans for a gravity survey over Manila Bay, which is scheduled for early this year. Seismic surveys may likely take place in 1959. PANORAMA JN THE meantime, while exploration surveys and drilling operations are going on throughout the country, it is important to n o t e that the s e a r c h for oil has already brought many blessings to the Philippines. One cannot deny the fact that many jobs have been created; interest in the science of geology has been stimulated; large amounts of dolJars have been brought into the country. It is therefore to be hoped that the coming years would bring considerable progress in the search for oil in this part of the world. And finally, in the event that the source of this natural wealth is found, a bright future for Philippine economy is forthcoming. 74" 'lflHU ... Research A researcher at the University of California di~ covered that tears produced by ellWtional stress have a different chemical composition from those produced when peeling onions. :(. :(. A researcher discovered that of the dozen American insurance firms whose names start witI1 "Old" only one was organized before 1930. ¥ :to Crime A resident of Denton, Tex., reported the theft of a car that had no tires. ¥ ¥ Colgate University reported the theft of a 70million-year-old dinosaur egg from a glass case in Lathrop Hall. Medicine An orthopedist at the University of Pittsburgh warned that the common toe-touchinJl exercise may cause serious back trouble in later life. * FEBRUARY 1958 11 Mindanao's epic heroes indarapatra, sulayman and the four monsters 12 By Anenio VillanuevG I .!'i"DARAPATRA and Sulayman are the epic heroes of the Maguindanaos of Cotabato. The exploits of these heroes have been recorded in Arabic, the lingua franca of the Maguindanaos. The exact age of the epic is not known although some scholars have suggested that it is as old as the Moslem culture in the Philippines. The evidences that they advanced are I) the language of the epic, 2) the similarity of certain details to some of the tales produced by other Moslem countries and 3) the participation of the Moslem priestcraft in the perpetuation of the story. The first man to record this epic in English was the Egyptian-American physician, NaPANORAMA jeeb 1'1\. Saleeby, an authority on Mindanao. This epic also appeared in Philippine Fowl Tales edited by Agnes Cook Cole. Saleeby heard the story from Datu Kali Adam who in turn learned it from Maharajah Layla and a Moslem scholar called A lad. During the time of lndarapatra and Sulayman what is now the province of Cotabato was largi;ly underwater. This large inland lake was walled on all sides by mountains. The people, the ancestors of the present-day Maguindanaos, farmed these mountains. They became prosperous. Their prosperity, however, was short-lived. Four man-eating monsters appeared from nowhere. One of the monsters, Kurita, was described as possessing many limbs and haunted Mt. Kabalalan and its vicinity. The second, Tarabusaw, looked like a huge man and lived on Mt. Matutum. The third monster was a large bird called Pah. This monster ravaged eastern Ranao. I ts egg was said to be as big as a house and everytime it took to the air, its shadow darkened the earth. The fourth monster was another giant bird with seven heads. It called Mt. Gurayn home. FEBRUARY 1958 THE STORY of the spoliations wrought by these monsters reached the court of King Indarapatra, the ruler of a nearby kingdom called Man tapuli. He was so distressed that he summoned his brother Sulayman. Sulayman agreed to fight th e monsters. Indarapatra thereupon gave Sulayman a magic ring and a majic sword called Juru Pakal. Then lndarapatra planted a tree near the window of his palace. "By this tree," the king said, "I shall know what's happened to you, 0 brother of mine ... " If the tree thrived, everything was well but if the tree wilted it would mean that Sulayman was in grave danger. Sulayman flew to Maguindanao-land. He saw that the area had been completely devastated by the monsters. He landed on Mt. Kabalalan. The horrible Kurita appeared and there was a terrible battle. In the end, Sulayman killed the monster. Without resting, Sulayman flew to Mt. Matutum. The enormous Tarabusaw appeared to challenge him. The monster tore large branches from huge trees to club Sulayman. But Sulayman again emerged victorious. The next was Pah. Sulayman was able to slay the giant bird but one of its severed wings 13 fell on the hero and he was crushed to death. The plant near Indarapatra's window suddenly dropped and died and lndarapatra knew that his brother was no more. He buckled on his sword and like his brother zoomed through the air. He found the carcass of the giant bird; lifting one of the wings, he found the bones of Sulayman. Indarapatra tore his hair in grief. He prayed to all the gods for help and solace. Suddenly a jar of water appeared from nowhere. The king knew that the gods had heard him. He poured the water over the bones of Sulayman and Sulayman came whole again. "I have been sleeping," Sulayman told his brother. lndarapatra decided not to expose his brother to any further danger so he instructed him to go home. "Let me take care of the fourth monster," lndarapatra said. After another fight, the many-headed bird of Mt. Gurayn lay dead. THE KING looked around for survivors. In a distance he saw a beautiful girl. He ad~ vanced toward her but she mysteriously disappeared. Near the spot where the girl disappeared, Indarapatra saw a fire and some rice. As he was hungry, he boiled the rice using his thighs for a stove. Then he 14 heard someone laugh. He tiuned about and saw an old man who was convulsed over his strange Vr'.ay of boiling rice. The old man led him to a cave where the survivors of the monster had taken refuge. There were only a few left but they had a datu for a ruler. The girl who mysteriously disappeared turned out to be the daughter of the datu. In gratitude, the datu gave the hand of his daughter to PANORAMA lndarapatra in marriage. There was a feast and much rejoicing and the cave dwellers were once more able to lead a normal life. After some time, lndarapatra became homesick. He bade farewell to his father-in-law and wife and returned to Mantapuli. His wife in Mantapuli upon his arrival gave birth to twins. The boy was named Rinamuntaw and the girl, Rinayung. They were, according to legend, the ancestors of all the tribes in the Lanao region. REPTILE APPETITE A RARE curiosity of Cuba's reptile life is the batcroshing boa constrictor. A Smithsonian Institution mjssion recently brought back a collection of the reptiles. The bat-eating snakes are true members of the constrictor family and show a curious adaptation, a Smithsonian announcement says. There are many bat caves in the Trinidad mountains on the south coast of Cuba. Thousands of fruiteating bats spend the day sleeping in the dark, damp depths of these caves and at dusk fly out of their hidden caverns. Each cave consists of several chambers. These have narrow entrances that are barely big enough for a bat to squeeze through. The big snakes hide, coiled in rock crevices, besides these entrances. When the bats start their nigthly exodus a boa will strike again and again. Since a bafs progress is impeded by the narrow aperture through which it must pas, each strike by the boa usually nets a bat. The captured bat is crushed in its coils by the snake and eaten. The snakes have prodigious appetites, sometimes consuming a dozen bats at a time . • FEBRUARY 1958 15 0 F ALL ~HE_ re".enue measures, 1t 1s income tax which hurts us most for the simple reason that the government takes the money away from us when we need it most. Each one of us may be wondering why we have to pay a tax on income when what we earn is not even sufficient to provide for our needs and that of our family. The only practical explanation for this is that income tax is a sure and profitable means of raising revenue -if strictly and properly enforced. I emphasize strict and proper enforcement because according to the annual report of the former Collector of Internal Revenue for 1956, only 63,927 individual taxpayers in the Philippires carry the burden of paying income tax and the bulk of thes~ taxpayers is made up of employees. This report does not state the true state of things. Neither does it mean that there are only 63,927 residents of the 16 YOU and your INCOME TAX By JOSE C. CAMPOS, Jr. Philippines whose annual incomes justify the imposition of the income tax. In a country like ours with a population of 22,265,300 this statement would indicate tha: the tax burden here is not as evenly distributed as it should be or that there are still. many who have successfully evaded paying their tax liabilities. According to this report, a total of 63,927 individuals, citizens and aliens alike. and 2,359 private corporations filed their tax returns for the year 1956 and paid a total of Pl41,973,· 039.05 in income taxes alone. The taxes due from these per son5 can maintain the government for one entire year with the exception of the Department of Education and National Defense. The entire budget for 1956 has P602,007,347.00 with the Armed Forces carrying an appropriation of more than l/ 3 (Pl 70,202,073.00). Of the P141,973.039.05 in· PANORAMA In this reYised and updated yersion of an earlier Panorama article, a law professor in the UniYersity of the Philippines tells about all a layman has to know in the complicated subject of income tax. come tax paid for that fiscal year, P83, 190,315.32 was paid by business corporations and 1"43,903,325.57 came from the pockets of the 63,927 individual taxpayers. Other interesting things revealed by the above figures as reported are: (I) Of the 63,927 individuals who filed their income tax returns, about 30% were single. with a reported net income of over f'73,784,152.l I and a tax liability of more than P8,667,033.9 I. From these we can infer that the burden of rnpporting the government falls more heavily on the shoulders of those who prefer to preserve thei: status as single. (2) A very substantial portion of the income tax were paid by Manilans. Of the 63,927 taxpayers, roughly 50% were from Manila, with a tax liability FEBRUARY 1958 of over f'300 million. This is understandable because the city of Manila is the center of business, employment, and industry; furthermore, internal revenue measures are, as a rule, more strictly and effectively enforced in Manila, where the Bureau of Internal Revenue is located. What Is Income? J NCOME TAX is a tax on income. But how can we tell what is income and what is not? Is there any basic concept which can be defined or described? The economists have devoted a great deal of thought to the definition of income, but it must be confessed that it is difficult for a lawyer to get much concrete aid from their work. It will be valuable to a student to compare the definitions of a few economists with the concept as it has been worked out by the courts. C. C. P!ehn, "Income as Recurrent, Consumable Receipts," 14 Am. Econ. Rev. I, 5 (1924) says that "Income is essentially wealth available for recurrent consumption periodically re - ceived. Its true essential characteristics are: receipt, recurrence and expendability." W.W. Hewett, "The Definition of Income and Its Application to F e d e r a l Taxation," 2 2 - 2 3 ( 1925) : "Net indivdual income is the flow of commodities and services accruing to an indivi17 ·dual through a period of time and available f o r disposition after deducting the necessary cost of acquisition." I can cite a long list of definitions by famous economists, but as one author puts it, "No gen· era! agreement exists among economists regarding the content of income." (See 53 Pol. Sci. Q. 85; Torleou, "The Concept of Incom~ for Federal Tax Purposes," 20 Tenn. L. Rev. 568 [1949]). This latest statement lend~ an encouraging note to the lawyers. C o u r ts have, through a long process of defining and redefining, arrived at a very simple definition of income, and that is "the gain derived from capital, from labor or both combined, including a gain through the sale or conversion of c a pi ta I assets." (Doyle v. Mitchell Bros. Co., 247 U.S. 179.) Taxable Income. Although the tax imposed by law is on income, not every kind of income is subject to tax. In the compu ta ti on of the tax; various classes of income must be considered: (a) Income, in a broad sense, meaning all wealth which flows into the taxpayer other than as a mere return of capital. It includes the forms of income specifically described as gains and profits, including gains derived from the sale of disposition of capital assets; (b) Gross income, meaning income (in a broad sense) less income which, by statutory provision or otherwise, is excluded or exempt from the tax imposed by law; and ( c) Net income, meaning gross income less statutory deductions. Gross income includes gains. profits, a n d income derived from salaries, wages, or compensation for personal services of whatever kind and in .whatever form paid, or from professions, vocations, trades, business, commerce, sales, or dealings in property whether real or personal, growing out of the ownership or use of or interest in such property; also from interests, rents, dividends, securi. ties or the transactions of any business carried on for gain or profit, or gains, profits and income derived from any source whate1.Jer. Compensation f o r personal services of whatever kind and in whatever form paid constitutes income. It includes salaries, wages, commissions, compensation for services on basis of percentage of the profits, tips, previous c; retiring allowances paid by private persons or by the Government of the Philippines, except pensions exempt by law from tax, like retirement gratuity. However, socalled pensions awarded by one to w!10m no services have been rendered are mere gifts or gratuities and are not included in gross income. Compensation also includes marriage fees, baptismal offerings, sums paid for saying mass for the dead and other contributions received by clergymen, or religious workers for services rendered (40 Rev. Reg.), rewards, strike or employment benefits to the amount in excess of the contributions to the fund, and Christmas gifts based upon a fixed percentage of salaries. In a recent ruling by the Board of Tax Appeals, Christmas bonuses granted by emFEBRUARY 1958 ployers to deserving employees have been considered as gifts and not income. Pensions paid by the Government of the Philippines or any of its instrumentalities to a pensionado abroad are taxable income. This is so for the reason that pensions are in the nature of salaries received by the pensionado f r o m the Philippine Government or its instrumentality. (Ruling, Feb. 7, 1940, BIR). Likewise, per diems and travelling allowances given to an employee while travelling on official business should be included in his gross income, but amounts actually spent are deductible therefrom. (Ruling, March 8, 1940.) Income Not Taxable. Not all kinds of income are taxable. The following items are not included in gross income, hence not ~axable: (I) Life insurance: proceeds of life insurance policies paid to beneficiaries upon the death of the insured, whether in a single sum or otherwise. (2) The amount received by the insured, as a return of premium or premiums paid by him under life insurance, endowment or annuity contracts, either during the term or at maturity of the term or upon surrender of the contract. (3) The value of property acquired by gift, bequest, devise or descent; but the income from 19 such property should be included in gross income. (4) Interest on government securities, obligations of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines or any political subdivision thereof. (5) Amounts received, through accident or health insurance under the Workmen's Compensation Acts, as compensation for personal injuries or sickness. (6) Income of any kind to the extent required by any treaty obligation binding upon the government of the Philippines. (7) Income of foreign governments received from their investments in the Philippines in stocks, bonds, and other domestic securities. (8) Amount received by officers, enlisted men, and their beneficiaries by way of backpay for services rendered during 1942-1945 (Rep. Act No. 210). (9) Amounts received- from the United States Government, or of the Philipt:ines or from any agency on account of damages or losses suffered durin.g the last war (Rep. Act No. 227}. ( 10) Amounts received from the United States Veterans Administration (Rep. Act No. 360). The foregoing items just enumerated are properly excluded in the computation of gross income and are not included in your tax returns. 20 Deductions NOT ALL income that you include in your tax returns as gross income is subject to tax. There are certain items which are allowed as deductions from gross income. In computing net income, the foliowmg are allowed as deductions: a. All the ordinary and neces· sarv expenses paid or incurred du~ing the taxable year in carrying on any trade or business, including a reasonable aliowance for salaries or other compensation for personal services actually rendered; travelling expenses while away from home in the pursuit of a trade or business; and rentals and other payments to be made as a condition to the continued use or possession, for the purposes of trade or business, of property to which the taxpayer has not taken or is not taking title or in which he has no equity. Before an expense is allowed as a deduction, it must satisfy three requirements: (I) It must be both ordinary and necessary; (2) it must be paid or incurred within the taxable year; and (3) it must be incurred fo carrying on a trade or business. An expense incurred in carrying on a trade or business is sometimes referred to as a business expense. Among the business expenses which are deductible are management expenses, commission, labor, salaries, supPANORAMA plies, incidental repairs, operating expenses of transportable equipment, travelling expenses, advertising and other selling expenses, insurance premiums ag·ainst fire, storm, theft, accident or other similar losses in case of business, rental for use of business property and the cost of goods purchased. A taxpayer is entitled to deduct the expenses paid in carrying on a trade or business from his gross income derived from whatever source. Travelling expenses include transportation expenses, meals and lodging. If the trip is undertaken for other than business purpose, the expenses are personal expenses and the meals and lodging are living expenses and therefore not deductible. If the trip is solely business, the reasonable and necessary travelling expenses become business expenses and are therefore deductible. A professional man may claim as deductions the cost of suppiies used by him in the practice of his profession, expenses paid in the operation and repair of transportation equipment used in making professional calls, dues to professional societies and subscriptions to professional journals, rent paid for office rooms, expenses for fuel, light, water, telephone, etc .. used in such offices and the wages of office assistants. AmFEBRUARY 1958 ounts currently expended for books, furniture and professional instruments and equipment the useful life of which is short, may be deducted, but these expended for instruments or equipment of a permanent nature are not allowed as deductions (69 Rev. Reg.). b. Amount of interest paid within the taxable year on indebtedness except that interest on indebtedness incurred or continued to purchase bonds and other securities, the interest upon which is exempt from tax is not deductible. Interest, whether for business or for personal purposes, as, for instance. the interest paid by a taxpayer on a loan from a bank or a private person for the construction of his residential house is deductible. c. Taxes paid or accrued durinq the taxable year: This will include import duties paid to the Customs officers, business, occupation license, privilege, excise; documentary stamp taxes, residence taxes A and B, and any other taxes of every name and nature paid directly to the Government of the Philippines or to any political subdivision. Automobile registration fees are considered taxes. Taxes are deductible only by the person upon whom they are imposed. But not all kinds of taxes are deductible. The following are not deductible: (1) Income tax 21 imposed by the Internal Revenue Code; (2) Income, war pro· fits and excess profits imposed by the authority of a foreign country, except that a taxpayer who has paid income tax to a foreign country is allowed a certain per cent credit for such foreign taxes; (3) Estate inheritance and gift taxes; and (4) Special assessments or taxes assessed against local benefits of a kind tending to increase the value of property assessed. d. Losses actually sustained during the taxable year and not compensated by insurance or otherwise. This will include losses suffered in transactions to carry on some trade or business or l o s s es of property though not connected with trade or business, if the losses arise from fires, storms, shipwrecks, or other calamity, or from robbery, theft, or embezzlement. e. Debts due to the taxpayer actually ascertained to be worthless and charged off within the taxable year. Deduction of bad debts is available to all taxpayers, regardless of whether they are engaged in trade or business, provided that the debt is a valid obligation. When does a debt become worthless? Worthlessness is a question of fact. For instance, any of the following may give rise to a bad debt: flight or disappearance of the debtor (Hard-Wood Lumber Co., 5 B.T.A. 1171); bankrupt22 cy or insolvency may be an actual indication of worthlessness (Sec. 102, Rev. Rep. No. 2). f. A reasonable allowance for deterioration of property arising out of its use or employment in the business or trade, or out of its not being used. A professor may not deduct depreciation allowance for his car because he is not using it in trade or business (unless teaching can properly be classified as a trade or business). g. Depletion of oil an d gas wells and mines. A reasonable allowance for actual reduction in flow and production in case of wells and a reasonable allowance for depletion not to exceed the market value in case of mines. h. Contributions or gifts actua!ly paid or made to or for the use of the Government of the Philippines or any political subdivision thereof for exclusively public purpose; to domestic co.rporations or associations organized and operated exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific, athletic, cultural or educational purposes or for rehabilitation of veterans, no part of the net income of which inures to the benefit of any private stockholder or individual. Contributions to the Red Cross, Community Chest, Anti-Tuberculosis Society, Girls' Scouts, Boys' Scouts, and others of similar nature are deductible. A PANORAMA gift to the University of the Philippines is deductible but a gift to the F.E.U. may not be claimed as a deduction for the reason that F.E.U. is a corporation where part of the net income inures to private stockholders. The maximum amount which an individual taxpayer may deduct from his gross income by way of a gift or charitable contribution do not exceed 6% of his taxable net income. In order to validly claim the deductions aforementioned, tangible evidences of such items should be attached to your tax return, such as receipts, vouchers, deeds, contracts, etc. A mere entry in your returns without supporting papers will usually be disallowed. Standard Deduction Method. For purposes of administrative convenience and to enable individual taxpayers to make a short-cut in filling their tax returns, an individual other than a non-resident alien, may elect a standard deduction in lieu of the deductions above stated. Such optional standard deductions shall be in the amount of f'IOOO or an amount of 10% of his gross income, whichever is the lesser. For most of us, who are strictly on a salary basis and are not actually engaged in business for profit, the optional standard deduction is most beneficial both from the FEBRUARY 1958 . standpoint of convenience and economy. An unmarried professor earning f'4,800 per annum can hardly claim and prove that he is entitled to a deduction of f'480 by way of standard deduction without being obliged to prove that he actually incurred such deductible items. This is Schedule J in your tax returns. Non-deductible Items. 0 u r law does not allow deduction for any of the following items; 1. Personal, living or family expenses. This explains why the cost of the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the tuition and other fees of your children, doctor's bills, etc., are not deductible. 2. Amounts spent for permanent improvements, new buildings, or any improvement to increase the value of any property. 3. Amounts expended in restoring property or in making good th e exhaustion thereof f o r which an allowance is or has been made (these two constitute what is known as capital expenditures); and 4. Premiums paid on any life insurance policy covering the life of any officer or employee or of any person financially interested in any trade or business carried on by the taxpayers. 23 Gains a1.1d Losses SUPPOSE you bought a house and lot in 1949 in Manila for residential purposes. You built a new house in the more swanky district of Little Baguio or. New Manila, so you sold the old house in 1953. You derived a gain of f'I0,000 in the transaction. This is income. But not all of it is taxable income. Only 50% of such gain should be included in your tax returns because the income is what you call a capital gain. The gains from sales or exchanges of capital a:osets are called c~pital gains. A capital asset means property held by a taxpayer (whether or not connected with his trade or business), but does not include stock in trade, property of a kind which would be included in the inventory; property held primarily for sale to customers i n th e ordinary course of trade or business; property subject to depreciation allowance; a n d real property used in trade or business. The definition is very vague because it does so by exclusion. In the determination of what percentage of gain or loss in the sale or exchange of capital ass.et shall be taken in to account the rule is: I. 100% if the capital asset has been held for less tha!J. a year. 24 2. 50'7o if the capital asset has been held for more than a year. On the other hand, suppose you incurred a loss instead of a gain in the sale of your realty. Can you claim the same as a deduction? Although you suffered a loss of say f'l0,000 when you sold the house and lot in I 953, you cannot claim full deduction for your loss. Only 50'% of your loss is allowable. The rule regarding gains or losses in transactions involving capital assets works both ways, whether the transaction results in ga!n or loss. Personal Exemptions After subtracting all such deductible items, net income is derived. All manipulations, legal or otherwise, with the end in view of reducing taxes on income, are or must be done before you come to the determination of net income. Once net income is determined, what follows is a simple case of addition and subtraction. Although income tax is a drastic revenue measure, its proponents have tempered i~s harshness by allowing taxpayers a certain amount of personal exemption for themselves and for their dependents. If the tax·· payer is single, or a married person legally separated or divorced from his or her spouse, he b allowed a personal exempPANORAMA tion of 'Pl,800. If the taxpayer is a married man or woman not legally separated or divorced or the head of a family, he is allowed 'P3,000. Where husband and wife file separate returns, only one exemption of ?3,000 shall be allowed from their aggregate income. An unmarried person may claim the personal exemption of 'P3,000 provided that he or she is a "head of the family." For income tax purposes, a head of the family includes an unmarried minor woman with one or both parents, or one or more brothers or sisters, or one or more legitimate recognized natural, adopted children dependent upon him or her for their chief support provided such brothers, sisters or children are less than 21 years of age or where such children are incapable of self-support because they are physically or mentally defective. In addition to this personal exemption, an additional exemption of 'P600 is allowed a head of a family for each legitimate, recognized natural, or adopted child wholly dependent upon the taxpayer, if such dependents are un-der 21 years of age or incapable of self-support because mentally or physically defective. You may be wondering why the tax code fixes the personal exemptions to 'Pl,800 for peoFEBRUARY 1958 pie who are single and 'P3,000 for married people or head of the family and 'P600 for each dependent child. By what criteria are these sums fixed? These are arbitrary sums allowed for personal, living or family expenses of the taxpayers and his family. Being arbitrary, they may not be fully adequate to provide for all expenses. However, at the time the Tax C o d e was enacted ( 1939) these exemptions were calculated as roughly equivalent to the minimum subsistence. Under present conditions, I venture to say that the personal exemptions fixed by law do not justify that minimum calculation. The simple thought behind these provisions is that a married man is entitled, for obvious reasons, to a higher exemption than a single person; likewise, exemption from tax should be weighed in proportion to the number of dependents of the taxpayer. These ideas are part of a more generic concept that the burden of income taxation should be adjusted according to the capacity to pay. If the s t at u s of a person changes during the taxable year by reason of marriage, birth, emancipation, or death, h o w will it affect his tax liability? If a person married in the middle of the year, is he entitled to c I aim full exemption of 'P3,000? If a child is born in 25 December of the same year, is he entitled to claim the full exemption of P600? The answer is in the affirmative. The personal and additional exemptions shall be determined by the status of the taxpayer at the close of the taxable year, except in the case of death. If the status of the taxpayer changes by reason of death, the amount of personal and additional exemption shall be apportioned in accordance with the number of months before and after such change, following the rules prescribed by the Secretary of Finance. The person, be he a minor or of lawful age, a citizen or an alien resident, must file a tax return on or before March 31 of every calendar year and pay the corresponding income tax after proper assessment by the Collector of Internal Revenue. An alien resident of the Philippines pays a tax on his entire net income received from all sources in the same manner as Filipino citizens. A non-resident alien pays income tax on his entire net income received from all sources only within the Philippines if such alien is engaged in trade or business or has an office or p~ace of business in the Philippines. The returns m u s t be made personally by the taxpayer, unless by reason of minority, sickness, or other disability, 26 or absence from the Philippines, the taxpayer is unable to make his own return in which case it may be made by a duly authorized representative. The best way of reducing your tax liability is first, by knowing your rights under the Tax Code; and second, knowing your liabilities. With these as your weapons, you can watch your step against the pitfalls in income tax. For salaried employees, it is always advantageous to claim the optional f.tandard deduction under Schedule J of your tax returns rather than claim the deduction enumerated under the right hand column of Schedule A. To prove my point, a professor earning P6,000 peiannum will have to do a lot of mental gymnastics and paper work to show and prove that his deductions under Schedule A wculd amount to P600. If you choose the standard deduction, the revenue officers stop asking you questions. Some people manage to pass as head of family with several dependents without inviting scrutiny from the tax collectors. Others do succeed in c!aiming additional exemptions for dependent children who are not legitimate, recognized natural or legally adopted children. In so far as such practices do not attract the attention of the revenue officers, you can claim PANORAMA personal exemptions beyond the amount you are legally entitled, thus indirectly reducing your tax liability. But one word of caution. Should the collector discover that your returns were fraudulent, a surcharge of 50% of the amount of your tax liability as rectified will be levied and collected from you, plus the threat of a criminal prosecution. For those who are landlords and businessmen in their own right, or as a side line, the standard practice is to inflate business expense and other deductible items provided that they are supported by clear and tangible evidence. A device used by employers is to give high salaries and remuneration to the employees and deduct the same as business expense or grant their employees Christmas bonuses. If you have hopes that the income tax would be reduced or abolished, you are due for a big disappointment. The tax on income is one of the biggest sources of revenue-in fact, the revenue derived by our government from this source constitutes almost 1/5 of our estimated national income. Unless some ingenius congressman thinks of a better substitute, the tax on income is here to stay, and will continue to hurt your pocket. In fact, the tendency for tax rates on income is to increase in order to provide revenue to finance the ever increasing and expanding government activities. In order, however, to relieve the income tax of its harsh effects on the small income group, I propose as amendments to the existing law on income taxation: I. Increase of the personal exemption for married people or head of a family from f>3,000 to f>5,000. 2. Increase of the additional exemption for each dependent child from f>600 to f>IOOO. 3. Allowance, as a deductible item, of medical and hospital expenses. "What's the trouble between you and your wife?" "Incompatibility-the later my income the less patibility ." FEBRUARY 1958 27 Most of the twenty words given below should be in your reading vocabulary. That is, you should be able to recognize them, although you may not be able to define ur actually use them in writing. Select the proper definition fo reach, then turn to page 74 for the correct answers. Fifteen is passing. 1. bemused-(a) amused or entertained; (b) confused; (c) puzzled or intrigued; (d) elevated or honored. 2. bounteous---<:!J plentiful; (b) expensive; (c) unlimited; (d) dangerous. 3. incarcerate-(a) to dispute or deny; (b) to punish; (c) to mah answerable for; ~ to imprison. 4. grime-( a) sweat; (J)} anything unsightly; (c) hard work; (d) dirt or foul matter. 5. supple-(a) subject to change; (b) sweet or delicious; (-C) flexible; (d) deep. 6. unkempt-(a) without bounds or limit; (lJJ not combed; (c) injurious; ~ unexpressed. 7. viv~cious--'(} lively; (b) full of attve. 8. irresolute-(a) harsh or impolite; not significant; ( d) untruthful. curves; (c) luxurious; (d) talk<efdoubtful or indecided; (c) 9. gainsay-(a) gross profit; (b) lo repeat; (c) to announce publicly; (ti) to deny. 10. odious-(..,....-hateful or detestable; (b) heavy; (c) lacks melody; ( d) distant or remote. 11. clarnmy-(a) shut-up tight; (b) rugged in shape; (c-) cold and damp; (d) dark. . ./ 12. aerate-(a) to shoot, as a missile; (~ to expose to air; (c) to subject to criticism; (d) to destroy. . / 13. extricate-( a) to free from blame; (b°'( to disengage; (e".) to squeeze out the juice from; (d) to make special. 14. Jitter-:(3:) scattered rubbish;· (b) small fish;;c) a measure of volume; ( d) threshold. 15. resume-(a") continuation; (b) suspension; (c summary; (d) introduction. / 16. romp---(a) hesitate, then leap; (b) to dance wildly; (<;)/ to stray; (d) to play in a liv~ly manner. I 17. sanctuary-(a) a place of worship; (~ hall of saints; (c) a sacred or holy pl~; (d) a CathC?lic cemetery. 18. t6lecast-(~to broadcast by television; (b) to project on a screen; (c) to relay by radio; (d) to inform by telephone. 19. thwart-(a.)f"'to scare or threaten; (b)~o ppose successfully; (c) to bis.me; (d) to expose to public vie . 20. woeful-(a) wretched or unhappy; (b pitiful; (c) hopeless; (d) romantic. 28 PANORAMA Harrison's last wish Return of a <"<"Native" LATE LAST November, Gove r n o r-General Francis Burton Harrison-often called the grandfather of Philippine independence-died. In death he returned to the Philippines. This was his wish. The former governor-general died of heart attack on November 21 in Flemington, New Jersey. He was governor-general of the Philippines for 1913 to Hl21. But even after his term of duty he stayed in the country as adviser to four chief executives. His last Philippine appearance was at the inauguration ceremonies of Manuel Roxas on May 28, 1946. Harrison arrived in Manila on October 6, 1913. He became governor-general following the victory of the Democratic Party in the 1912 presidential election. Before he became governor-general, he was a congressman of the thirteenth and sixth districts of the state of New York. FEBRUARY 1958 By Arturo Mayo At this time, Resident Commissioner Manuel Quezon was working for Philippine independence "as soon as a stable government can be established in the country." In March 1912, William Atkinson J ones, a Democrat from Virginia, introduced a bill in the U.S. Congress calling for complete Philippine independence after eight years. The Congress did not approve the bill. In July 1914, Jones introduced another bill, without specifying a definite date for the gra~ting of independence. The deliberations on the question of Philippine independence were closely followed by Harrison. He supported completely the Filipinos' bid for freedom. Immediately after assuming his post, Harrison started the Filipinization of the civil service. Key administrative posi29 tions were given to Filipinos. This program alone earned Harrison a good deal of bad criticism, especially from the American sector. But Harrison was undeterred. In a letter that he wrote to Quezon on May 11, 1914, Harrison said: "Of course, it is the most vital importance to have action by Congress as soon as possible on the Philippine question. Uncertainly is the cause of a good -deal of the business and political troubles in the islands, as it has been for some years in the past. I hope Congress will act at the next session." HARRISON did much to keep the spirit of Filipino leaders fighting for independence. In numerous letters that he had written to Quezon and Osmeiia, there is the unmistakable personal concern that he felt for the country. He took long trips to the provinces to see for himself the condition of the people and to become acquainted at first hand with the problems of the country. The concrete results of these trips are increased public works and the revitalization of the educational system. Harrison knew that independence was inevitable for the Philippines and he wanted to prepare the people for the responsibility of sovereignty. 30 The news that the President of the United States and the Secretary oz War were in favor of the independence bill gave Harrison great joy. On that day, he wrote to Quezon: "The news has just arrived of the introduction of the ... bill and I wish to congratulate you most heartily upon the successful completion of your winter's work, and particularly upon the fact that the President and the Secretary of War are reported to be so strongly in favor of the bill. I know how hard you struggled for a fixed date for independence, but believe you have no other course than to support with all your might the present bill. After all, the bill contains much of permanent value to the Filipino people, and given them an opportunity to demonstrate their capacity for the final demonstration later. "You will know by this time, of course, of the results of the meeting last Sunday at the Opera House where Mr. Earnshaw delivered to the Filipino people the communication of the views of the President on the question of a fixed date for independence. My own view is that under the new Jones Bill the Filipino~ will be given a chance to show how competent they are for self-government, and that the showing PANORAMA they will make will silence the criticisms of their opponents." The more influential sections of the population, however, did not receive this news with joy. They started a campaign to discredit the Filipinos as "incapable of running their own affairs." The movement also sought to discredit Harrison. In the United States there was a strong petition for the removal of Harrison. WHEN THE furor died down, both in the Philippines and in the United States, negotiations for the granting of independence were finally agreed upon. The Jones bill was passed in the House on October 14, 1914, with the votes counted at 211 to 59. The bill rriet stiff opposition in the Senate because of Republican opposition.Senator Clarke of Arkansas introduced a bold amendment granting independence to the Filipinos at the end of not less than two years and not more than four years from the date of approval of the act. Vote on this amendment resulted in a tie-41 one to 40. Senate President Marshall broke the tie by voting in its favor. But the Republicans, combining with the Democratic-Catholic bloc in the Senate, opposed the Clarke Amendment. Finally both houses of Congress approved the Jones bill without the Clarke amendment. President Wilson signed it on August 29, 1916. Harrison recorded the reaction of the Filipinos: "Anyone who was present in the Philippines during those days will forever remember the outburst of wild enthusiasm of the people. In every possible way, demonstration was made of their pride, satisfaction, and gratitude for the self-governmen t granted." Governor-General F r a n c i s Burton Harrison was buried shortly before noon on December 5 at the Cemeterio del Norte. His burial plot is directly behind President Magsaysay's. Strenuous Enough The town's most important citizen was being interviewed about soon becoming an octogenarian. "I'm sure our readers would like to know what exercises you use to keep fit;' suggested one reporter. "Son," was the answer, "when you're pushing 80, that's all the exercise you need." FEBRUARY 1958 31 Paris and C9airo In the protracted cold war poverty and nationalism-which abound in Afro-Asian countries--are allies of the Kremlin 1 wo IMPORTANT conferences held over the year's end stressed the widening rift between the East and the West. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit talk was convoked in Paris in mid-December and lasted a few days. It was followed about a week later by the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference held in Cairo. That the NATO meeting was prompted by Soviet Russia's recent spectacular successes with missiles is public knowledge. The appearance of the sputniks in October and November quickly turned Western smugness first into alarm, and then into fear. It was time to mend fences. And the Atlantic Alliance wall in central Europe, weary from age and internal dissensions, required first attention. For some time the need to revitalize the eight--year old alliance had been felt, in the face of numerous changes in the military and diplomatic fronts. The sputniks provided the cue. 32 By F. C. Sta. Maria Thus goaded, the 15 member nations sent their top delegates to the rickety Palais de Chaillot in Paris on December 16, armed with ideas on how to face the new menace. U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower easily towered over the rest of the delegates by virtue mostly of the wealth and the influence that his country held among the Atlantic powers. On hand to meet him was France's youthful Premier Felix Gaillard. Britain's Harold Macmillan and Belgium's Paul-Henri Spaak, secretary general of the alliance, were there as expected. So were the heads of the other states. Together, the delegates represented 450,000,000 people - one-sixth of th e world's population. In 1949 these nations, scared by the stealthy advance of the communists across Eastern Europe, hastily put up a common wall of defense. This wall ran PANORAMA southward from Norway in the Scandinavian peninsula to Turkey in the Mediterranean. lt did arrest the Red march. The wall now showed ominous little cracks, however, which could easily lead to complete collapse. Soviet missile superiority would see to that. On the conference agenda were two urgent items: the strengthening of the alliance militarily and politically, and the counteracting of Russian propaganda. .ft FTER THE usual introductory speeches, a few things became evident. First, that there existed basic disagreements among the members on the manner of handling the U.S.sponsored nuclear weapons. While most of the delegates welcomed the modernizing of NATO arms through the use of intermediate range missiles (IRBMs), a few vigorously objected to leasing their territory as bases for such weapons. Second, there was a preponderant sentiment to explore closely Soviet Russia's peace proposals. Regarding the first, it was agreed "in principle" to establish "stocks of nuclear warheads, which will be readily available for the defense of the alliance in case of need." The vagueness in phraseology was deliberate. W h at is really meant was that the U.S. offer FEBRUARY 1958 was not acceptable to some members. Norway and Denmark specifically said so. They would not allow American IRBMs to be based on their soil. Why the reluctance? Because such bases, in the opinion of those countries, would attract Russian attack. Because, too, to allow these American-controlled rockets on their soil would mean a surrender of sovereignty. American law forbids the outright giving of nuclear arms to foreign countries. The short-ranged missiles (up to 1,500 miles), on the other hand, could be effectively u s e d against Russia only from nearby European bases. But they have to be manned by Americans. Could joint control be possible, perhaps? Maybe, but it would be a complicated and impractical arrangement, certainly unfit in a modern atomic war where the time element is decisive. Failing to agree, therefore, the conference settled for the approval "in principle"; the U.S. hoping, naturally, that the individual me m be r nations would eventually yield. The decision to "promote" negotiations with Moscow on the deadlocked disarmament issue-and the related problem of easing world tensions-was rather unexpected. At least for the United States it came witfi 33 no little amount of disappointment. Only weeks earlier Soviet delegates to the U.S. disarmament sub-committee, heady with sputnik success, walked out on the sessions, after announcing to all and sundry that Moscow's patience was exhausted. And here was the tough Atlantic Alliance suggesting virtual appeasement! But the U.S. was clearly overruled even from the start; there would be no sense in pressing a lost cause. West Germany, seconded by Great Britain, was the author the suggestion. As Britain's Macmilfan said later in sponsoring a post-conference proposal for a non-aggression pact between the U.S.S.R. and the West, "It could do no harm; it might even do some good." Still the West's conciliatory attitude during the Paris confab has been interpreted by some as a realistic admission of weakness. A New York Times writer commented that Russia's influence was greatly felt in the deliberations-in terms of fear on the part of the delegates. Perhaps it was not exactly fear, but a healthy respect for Soviet technology. But it amounted to the same thing. JT SEEMED that Premier Bulganin's efforts to blunt the effects of the meeting, 34 even before it started, were not necessary. Circulating a letter to NATO and U.N. members days before the meeting started, Bulganin offered, among others, the immediate banning of nuclear weapons and the calling of a new "summit" conference to discuss East-West differences. The letter was dismissed by the West as propaganda. But still, the Kremlin derived silent satisfaction from the outcome_ of the Paris confab, at least in as far as the "promotion" of negotiations was concerned. It was a Russian idea. In one other aspect, the Atlantic Pact meeting underlined the lack of unity among the members. For while they agreed to hold more frequent consultations to avoid conflicts, and to pool scientific data and facilities, they studiously avoided the issue of colonialism. It was evident that in an effort to achieve complete harmony, they overlooked France's scandalous adventures in Algeria, Britain's desperate sovereignty over Cyprus and the Netherland's disputed claims over West lrian. Mention of any of these affairs could have easily splintered the group. Even the United States, without a colonial axe to grind, dared not bring up the sensitive question. As the Paris_ delegates prepared to leave for home, the PANORAMA grounds of the University of Cairo were being readied for the Afro-Asian conference. By the end of Dec em her unofficial representatives from 42 nations were gathered in the Egyptian capital, eager to match the NATO confab, in number if not in fury. In many ways the Cairo assembly fell short of the 1955 Bandung conference, to which it was claimed as a successor. Clearly communist-inspired, the meeting counted with over 400 delegates consisting of ambassadors, foreign ministers, exiled leaders, politicians an d plain businessmen. S o v i e t Russia, which was left out in Bandung, was am p 1 y represented. Nationalist China delegates were denied a d m i s s i o n on the grounds that China was already represented. The Philippines and Cambodia did not participate. Soon it became plain that communists also directed the show. From the floor arose resolutions bitterly assailing the West. In the end, it was only I n di a' s tempering influence which caused the deletion of anti-U.S. phrases from the resolutions. Even at that, direct attack against the Eisenhower Mideast Doctrine went through untouched. Supporting several pet neutralist ideas, the conference also: FEBRUARY 1958 (I) called for disarmament and a halt to nuclear tests; (2) c o n d e m n e d military pacts, colonialism and imperialism "in all its forms"; (3) demanded Red China's admission to the United Nations; and (4) declared nationalization as a "lawful means" and "right" of every nation. Other resolutions supported fully Indonesia's claims over West I rian, called for the unification of Korea and Vietnam and denounced Israel as a "base of imperialism." One more remarkable aspect of. the Cairo affair was the opportunity it gave the Soviet to woo Asia's underdeveloped countries. Chief Delegate Rashidov S. Rahidovich generously offered economic aid to all who needed it. "Just ask us," he said, "no strings attached." \t)11ETHER sincere or not, the statement might well be the theme of Russia's next offensive in the un thawed cold war. It could be her winning slogan, too. Having apparently surpassed the United States in scientific achievement, the U.S.S.R. can now concentrate on the economic phase. Her potential customers: Asia and Africa's one billion undernourished, poverty-stricken peoples. If there is any good that the 35 Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference achieved, it was to serve warning to the Western powers that a tremendous dormant force has begun to awaken in Asi9. and Africa; that unless those in the Free World who are in a position to lead this motley group do so with genuine sympathy and sincerity, this same force would help destroy them through communism. now or even in the next twenty years. But it will come. It could come suddenly, as in the wake of a devastatmg nuclear war. Or it could come slowiy, and without violence. The fact is that in this protracted battle poverty and nationalism-which abound in Asia and Africa-are the allies oi the Kremlin. The challenge is infinitely greater for the West.-The Philippine journal of Education. 36 The decision may not come FISHING BY RADIO A RADIO device that can be attached to fish to trace their movements has been developed by scientists, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization re.ports. The device consists of a tiny ultrasonic oscillator. The osci11ator is placed in a small capsule that can be clipped to a salmon behind the dorsal fin. The need for such an invention arose with the construction of dam.s and powerhouses for hydroelectric projects along major river systems. Such projects created problems for migratory fish, particularly salmon, which move upstream to spawn at certain seasons and later return to the sea. By-passes have been devised to allow the fish to move up and down a river freely, but the turbulent water at these points makes it difficult to follow the course of the salmon. The radio device can be fitted, without handling, while the fish is isolated in a small enclosure near the surface of the water. A radio apparatus in a boat picks up the sounds, which cannot be heard by the human ear. Instruments then chart the depth at which the fish is swimming and its exact course. PANORAMA End of cheap labor? 's Rising I N SPITE of the tradition that Japan sells cheaply abroad, Japanese costs have been rising steadily in the last few years due mainly to the workers' demands for higher wages. Foreign buyers are no longer sure of finding cheap goods in Japan. Japanese textiles, toys, cameras and ~imilar goods are still offered at low prices. But in steel and other heavy industries especially, Japan is not always competitive with her European trade rivals. Yet wages in Japan are still low by European or North American standards. The government each month examines the balance sheet of an average urban family. The latest official report was that income from all sources, in a working class family, totaled 28,488 yen ($80), while gross expenditure was 26,601 yen ($74). Thus, there was a small carry-over that month, largely FEBRUARY 1958 attributed to reduced income tax. In the total of expenditure, officials stressed that it was significant that expenditure on consumption, the basic requirements of living, was 24,483 yen 1,$68), leaving about $6 for extras, including entertainment. Yet these are described as good figures, representing a standard of life well above that applying among many classes of Japanese, both in and out of the cities. Over all Japan, in the same period, the average monthly expenditure for families of all types, including merchants, was less: 24,291 yen ($56), or perhaps more, all Japanese industries employ large numbers of girls and youths. These form a large proportion of the population, and there is great competition for work when they ieave school. So a factory payroll, as shown by official reports in Japan, includes 20 percent 37 or 30 percent of the employees receiving the equivalent of between $22 and $33 a month. JN THE higher scales of Japanese wages, a worker is able to maintain, at best, a tiny house. Most of his earnings are spent immediately. There is little saving. Japanese custom demands the payment of bonuses twice a year, at mid-summer and at the new year. With these, the wage-earner buys his winter overcoat and the wife her summer dress. There may be something left over for an annual treat for the family - a picnic, a day at the seashore or a pilgrimage to the family burial place. Simple and austere as this may be, millions of people in Japan live well below such a standard. Most working-class homes in Japan have no bathroom. The whole family takes its bath at the public bathhouse. There are enough of these so that no one has to walk more than a hundred yards or so. The evening procession of kimono-clad bathers along the streets, towel and soap in bowl, is a feature of Japanese life. Outside the cities, where the expense of gas and electricity forces most housewives to eco11omize severely, cooking is mostly done on a small charcoal fire. Father, if he is a laborer, goes to work with more patches than original material on his trousers. Yet these are comparatively good times for Japan. Everyone says that the country is enjoying its greatest prosperity in history. While wage-earners hope for better incomes, the government and employers fear that higher costs will reduce Japanese ability to sell overseas - and the employers' ability to pay wages even at the present standard. Food 38 A dentist in Bristol, R.1., recommended that meals begin with dessert and end with vegetables in order to inhibit tooth decay. :t :!: * The New York St.ate Agricultural Experiment Station reported that one tablespoon of honey wiII sober a drunk. PANORAMA By Manuel Tiempo From outer space, the mysterious cosmic rays can deliver . . . A BILLION BILLION ELECTRON VOL TS I FEBRUARY 1958 THE EARTH and everything on it are being bombarded constantly by mysterious, penetrating radiations. These radi1ttions come from all directions in space. They are called cosmic rays. Cosmic rays are by far the m o st powerful radiations known to man. Some of these rays carry energies that are equal to many millions of hydrogen bombs. The scientists regard these mysterious radiations as messengers from outer space and the successful understanding of their nature could yield invaluable answers to the origin and character of the universe, from the largest galaxy to the infinitesmal nucleus of the atom. B<;;cause of the promise that these rays hold for science, there is now afoot a coordinated effort to study them. They are currently being studied by means of giant balloons and soon they will be observed more closely by means of rocketlaunched earth satellites. 39 A new type of instrument called the cosmic pile has been inst::illed on top of the 11,300foot summit of the Jungfrau in the Swiss Alps. This instrument is designed to record automatically the frequency of cosmic radiations that are believed to emanate from the sun. More and more technicians are becoming interested in cosmic rays because they may constitute the principal hazard to the space traveler of the future. No one yet knows the exact intensity of these radiations and hence is the great unknown in our preparations for future space travel. A team of sci en tis ts from the University of Chicago, headed by Professors John A. Simpson and EnrJco Fermi, has been able to measure one such radiation. This radiation emanated from a solar burst. Professor Simpson reported that this solar burst was able to release in twenty minutes the energy of a billion of the largest known hydrogen bombs. Studies like this have proved that some of the cosmic rays do come from the sun. They also prove that extensive, though weak, magnetic fields occupy the space between planets. THE SCIENTISTS at the Massachusetts Institute o f Technology, under the direction of Professor Bruno Rossi, and 40 at Cornell University, under the direction of Professor Kenneth Greisen, are studying, by means of new instruments scattered over an area covering fifty acres, what are known as air showers of cosmic rays. These air showers are millions of secondary cosmic rays produced when a single high energy primary cosmic ray starts a chain of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere. The most important result of the M.l.T. experiments so far is the proof of the existence of showers of several hundred million particles. This provides proof in turn that the primary particles that caused these showers must have energies greater than one billion billion electron volts. For comparison, it might be relevant to point out that the highest energy reached by man-made machines is ten billion electron volts, produced by Russian scientists. The M.l.T. scientists have suggested that since there exist primary cosmic ray particles of energies greater than a billion billion electron volts, our previous ideas about the origin of cosmic rays need to be changed and possibly the conditions of inter-planetary travel. Their conclusions are based upon the following reasoning: It was first suggested by EnriPANORAMA co Fermi and it is now generally accepted, that cosmic rays gain their enormous energies by being gradually accelerated as they travel through space. Calculations show that as long as the energy of a cosmic ray particle is sufficiently low, the magnetic fields that are known to exist in the galaxy oblige the particle to revolve in a tortuous path so that its is prevented from getting out of the galactic volume. At energies approaching a billion billion electron volts, however, the trajectory of the particle becomes practically straight, so that it is enabled to escape into intergalactic space. This means that no particles with energies greater than a billion billion volts could appear in the cosmic radiation if the particles could be accelerated only within the galactic volume, since they would escar-e the galaxy long before such energies are attained. It is expected that the findings of the scientists of the International Geophysical Year will suggest the correct direction of investigation. TOOTH TRANSPLANTED THE successful transplant of a human tooth from one socket to another elsewhere in the mouth was reported recently by two dental scientists. The researchers extracted a young girl's sprouting wisdom tooth and fitted it into the empty socket of her missing first molar. The developing root attached itself readily to the new surroundings. Within eight months the socket was well filled with developing new bone and the tooth was firm. The case demonstrated, the researchers said, that it is possible in carefully selected cases to transplant an expendable tooth from one socket of a patient's mouth to take root and serve a vital function in another socket. FEBRUARY 1958 41 42 my love, t•me before you is not remembered and there is not even vagueness there nor darkness to speak of light nor shadows as here your voice is music casting shadows that my heart sees against you that is light. PANORAMA 'Panorama 'Peek The sea gets its way • • • the ceaseless pounding of waves wears boulders down to sand and one smashing breaker can change the entire aspect of tirings44 rifoung Man By GREGORIO C. BRILLANTES EVERYONE IS smiling in the photograph: his father and mother, his sisters Lisa and Belen and his cousin Remy, and the rest of the girls in the row of chairs, and the young men seated on the floor: smiling into the present through the pale yellowish tone of years in the wide, high-ceilinged sala of the house of Tailac. Directly behind the group is a tall Christmas tree topped by a star. The picture is frame"d, on one side, by the profile of an upright piano, its keyboard uncovered, and by a board window, on the left, with horizontal grilles (he remembers the feel of loose flaked rust on his boy-fingers): beyond is the dark glimmer of a garden. He wonders now if the white stone angel is still there, brooding under the peaceful trees. His father sits hugely in his de hilo coat, his expression amused and tolerant (he was probably thinking: Ah these young people, they must have a party, complete with photographer), still strong and hale, with a doctor's solid reassuring voice, smiling at the Christmas Eve and a few more seasons safe from the gradual, evil blankness of mind that he himself, for all his skill, would not be able to cure nor charm away. His mother is wearing a flower-printed balintawak dress, $.l small plump woman with a proud, alert face. The girls look into the camera (perhaps Mr. Palaganas' battered tripod) with a kind of tense, bright PANORAMA eagerness against the illuminating flash that accents their youngness, eighteen and ninet~en and twenty-one. The boys. sit on the floor in diverse attitudes, his brother Pepe leaning back toward Hie girls in mockmischief, his uncle Carlos grinning stiffly, one among them with a fat, surprised stare, another half-sprawled and seemingly asleep and dreaming deliciously: and the young man Nita in the middle of their disorderly row, deliberate and poised and obviously the tallest, his smile faint and solemn, neat in a white coat, gazing, it seems, into something that the rest could not be aware of or desire to understand. It is Nita who becomes the center of picture: he alone is in maximum view, hands and shoulders and legs revealed without infringement, as if by u.esign. His white suit gives an impression of individual cleanness: the other younger men in contrast appear vague and tangled and a trifle shabby. He holds, as it were, the other people together: his presence has inspired a spontaneous unity: it is as- if he, as much as Christmastime, were the occasion of the picture. Nito alone in the party seems to desire one's total attention to speak FEBRUARY 1958 something vital and serious, a knowledge that he has learned with some pain. BECAUSE he was only a boy of ten, he must have been upstairs when the picture was t~ken! a late hour certainly, hstcnmg on the margin of sleep to the musk and the talk and the laughter. From the stairs, he had watched the dancing through the banisters: the girls and the young men waltzing and tangoing tirelessly to the Victrola and shuffling through fast numbers with expressive little cries when Nito played the piano. Looking down on the sala, the couples whirling against the tile gleam of the floor, he soon grew tired and sleepy and went to bed, hopeful that in the morning, he would find the bicycle under the Christmas tree, his father's gift: years earlier, he had ceased to believe in Santa Claus not without an emptiness, a·~ he would lose faith in the inevitable successive myths: but that would be a long time yet, and he was only a boy sleeping after a whole day's play: he woke up once and heard them singing Joy to the World, their chorus sounding near and farnway through the dark and the warmth and the blankets of sleep. He was safe in his father's house: with a child's pure, transcendent vision, he 45 sensed the December skies above the town, the enormous clusters of stars burning coldly, their light falling like the softest oowder of snow, he imagined, ·like the whiteness in the cards his sisters sent to their friends, falling in silence on the roof arid the water-tank and the trees, raining down upon the town through the vast Christmas night while he lay warmly in the dark and listened to the singing and the year moving closer to its end. A WAR AND a time of manhood later, he discover::. the picture in his sister's home: he has come to spend Christmas week with Lisa and Berting and the children. After the first pleasurable recognition, he finds himself wondering at Nito's grave quietness in the photograph: he remembers him as an unusually jocular fellow, laughing easily, his eyes twinkling and warm and gay, and he walked about with a certain slight swagger, as though he had not a care in the world. The solemn smile, the painea, brooding gaze might have been parts of Nito's act, the humorist striking a wry pose for the photographer: but h1:; woula have looked more natural, he decides with sudden fondness, if the young man had leaned back teasingly toward the girls, like Pepe, and pretended to 46 pinch their legs. Or perhaps, in that recorded moment, when there had been a lull in the dancing, had Nito felt a premonition of some dark fate ... He dismisses the fancy in a rush of loyalty to the young man, recalling the party in his father's house, the dancing and the laughter, and Nito bent exaggeratedly over the piano-keys, his shoulders bobbing to the bright swinging beat of music that he alone could make. Ni to was his brother's friend: they were classmates in law school: Pepe would come home with him on Sundays, and they would take the first trip back to the city early the next morning. He came from someplace in the South: at first, everybody had thought his accent atrociously funny, but he spoke with a kind of vigor, an audacity that cancelled his possible shortcoming, and he had a warm teasing brand of humor. His father and mother liked Nito the first time Pepe brought him home that year: there was that quality about him, a positive innocence that no malice could ever soil: he was the sort who would not pay much attention to any form of despair. Pepe called him Gus, but to the rest of the family, he became Nito, for Agustin and the -me's diminutive term of affection. He was a young man PANORAMA with many enthusiasms: he played jazz and slow ballads, he was an amateur magician, a good dancer, a passable mecha!1ic: he made the old Dodge run again when it got stuck in the driveway. On those week-ends he came home with Pepe, and during that Christmas he spent with the family, and the two weeks of the following summer, he transformed the house into a brighter place: conversation at table snap.ped out of its dullness: everyday affairs took on a brisk energy: in the afternoons and evenings, th e re seemed always to be a party in the living room, even when it was only Lisa or Belen or Mr. Macapinlac's daughters from next door prevailing upon the guest to play the piano some more. HE REMEMBERS one such evening, Lisa's birthday in the last week of the young man's stay in the summer. Nito stood in the sala, tall among the girls, laughing his easy laugh under the mellow globes of light: he was talking in hi!> rapid characteristic way, nodding his head for emphasis, certain of himself, at ease: he would find his destiny, joy and comfort and success in life, im mune from anguish and defeat. His humor was not trivial: it was the complement of his opFEBRUARY 1958 timism: the future held only the best of the brightest things. The girls, perhaps sensing this, were drawn to him as to an imperishable dream: they were secure in his company. He danced with all the girls but concentrated on Lisa later in the evening, the barely perceptible swagger in his movements, bending low to whisper in Lisa's ear, the tall laughing young man· who would never be defeatt-d: while he, the small young brother, watched them with the unspoken encouragement of an accomplice. But on the night before Nito left that summer, conversation was subdued, almost hushed, even h i s father's booming laugh had a hollow ring in it, somehow. Nito's departure, announced with his usual bantering comedy( Tomorrow, you'll finally get rid of me and have some quiet around the house), broke the spell he had woven with his presence: the family felt the threat of a loneliness. Because there was a moon, they went for a walk across town, he and Nito and" Pepe and his sisters an d Remy, strolling about in the plaza for the sake of being out in the high wan ing moonlight. Nito still teased the girls and tried a couple of his fantastic jokes, but he received little response: when they sat on the steps of the kiosko, no-one had much to say. 47 Wind passed over the trees and the church and the high school washed pale in the moonlight: abruptly it was late in the night, and going back through the town (the main street clean and em p t y and plunging straight infinitely beyond in the shadowed silverlight) there was nothing else to say. The girls walked bunched lazily together, as if for the warmth of a secret, while he and Nito and Pepe followed behind, their steps whispering loud in the quiet hour. The last he saw of Nito, the young man was in the sala with Lisa and Pepe (before· the grilled window of the photograph) : the three simply stood there, without speaking, facing the garden and the statue of the angel and the trees in the April night. He woke up late in the morning: Ni to was gone, the day empty and long and silent with his absence. The rains came, and he was in the sixth grade: Pepe. went back to his classes in the city, and wrote home that Nito had not enrolled. The war began and although it did not strike the town, its pain and loss invaded their lives: Pepe did not return (He was free not to go, his mother said, dazed and murmuring and old suddenly): when the soldiers were released from Capas, his father volunteered the basement for a relocation center: 48 the haunted men waited be· neath the trees, sullen and wordless as exiles in a strange country. 0 NE AFTERNOON in the city, riding a bus through Quiapo, he thought he saw Nito in the pedestrian-crowd: but the hurrying figure turned out only to be a boy with a crewcu t &nd not very tall. Prompted by an impulse he could not have explained, he asked classmates from the South if they had ever know Ni to: they had not met him, nor heard of the name. In a night club once, celebrating the New Year with friends, he seemed to have heard Nito's chuckling laugh, the unabashed rapid accent of his voice: but the lights were dim and the faces blurred and the memory swiftly discarded in the moment's drunken boisterous happiness. With leisure and attention now, he wonders whatever has happened to the young man Nito, why he had never written nor visited again. Perhaps, like Pepe., Nito had died in the war. Or he had survived the univer· sal ruin, treating it as a ridiculous fantasy, to be dismissed with the flick of a wrist: the attitude, the rememberer hastens to assure himself, is not improbable. Perhaps, Nito had married since then: he is somewhere here in the city, laughPANORAMA ing his easy laugh and teasing a wife as joyful and irrepressible, and joking with his children, and going through life with that slight swagger and drawing to himself, like a magician, all the good things, the bright and shining things. He looks once more at the young man in the photograph, the tragic solemnity so out of context with the warm, mov ing image that he has treasured: he refuses to accept the fact of Nito's death. The faces smile at him through the mist FEBRUARY 1958 of yellowness that is perhaps the color of far lost time: the faces of the dead, and the liv· ing: smiling at him on a Christmas Eve in Tarlac, in the year of Nito and Pepe and the dancing and the bicycle shining it~ blue chronium miracle under the Christmas tree. Nito preside~ in the center of the group, wanting to tell him something. LISA COMES into the room and he closes the picturealbum: to release a tension, he sits back and lights a cigarette. His sister leans out the window. peering in to the evening street below, and calls out her youngest boy's name: she gives up after the third try, and settles down on the sofa beside him. The heat of the kitchen glistens on her face: he feels her sag against the cushions with a L)Ud sigh. "Want me to go look for him?" "Oh he'll tire soon enough and come home. Give mP. a cigarette." He lights one for her, noting the globules of sweat on her nose, the loose band of hair pasted on her brow. She smokes furiously, e x h a l i n g thick streams of smoke toward the low ceiling. She squashes the half-finished cigarette on tht ashtry and muttering something about the maid, drags herself back to the kitchen, her 49 slippers flapping across the floor: he watches the broad bulk of her back, the rounded arms disappear behind the curtains. She comes back after the interval of another cigarette, passing a comb in her hair: her oval face is oily and unfQcused, long unexposed to wind and sun. She returns to her place on the sofa, reaches out for the radio and catches the last bars of a Christmas carol: she shuts it off in the middle of the succeeding commercial and resumes combing h e r hair, knotting it tight in a bun. "What's taking th em so long?" "A traffic jam, I suppose," he answers. "You know how 1t is this time of year." "He shouldn't have brought the girls. All that dust and hurry downtown." Her son bounces up from the stairs, a thin, sprightly boy with large feverish eyes, duckling into the bedroo·m before his mother could begin to scold him. She gestures a weary circle with the comb: ''I'd rather have half--a-dozen girls anytime. Boys-it's different with boy::;. They are so-I don't know-impossible." "Have you heard from Belen?" "No. Why?" "I was just thinking ... If we got together one Christmas ... " 50 "She has her family." "Wouldn't it be just fine ... It's been a long time, L~a-" "If we had the old place in the province ... " ·'I've just been looking over the pictures." "Pictures?" "There, in that album." "Those are very old ones." "Lisa, you· remember Nito?" "Ni to?" Her face remains dull, unfocused. "Who's Nito-?" "The tall fellow." He feels suddenly in the room, like an accusation against them both, all the years that she has not he1trd the name. "Pepe's friend -the guy who used to-" "Oh ... Nito ... " and for the flicker of a moment, a light seems to shine over the tired indifferent eyes. "But that was so long ago ... " "That Christmas Eve he spent with us ... " He grows conscious of his homelessness: he thinks of his rented room above a roaring asphalt street, the nights sad with various types of dying. What have I done with my life? (The boy watching the dancing through the banisters.) "There was a party-in the sala-" "Yes?" absently, while she tries to relate this evening to the night of her young laughing slender girlness, a thirtyish woman wbo is not used to "Was there a dance?" PANORAMA "He was quite a fellow, Nito." But Berting and her daughters are coming up the apartment stairs, and she rise~ abruptly as her husband strug. gles into the room with a pine tree, the girls talking all at once. "Here, Papa, we must put 1t here, near the window." "No, it'll look better her, under the mirror, Papa." Berting pauses in the mid die of the room, the pine branch held in both hands, as if he does not know what to do with it: finally he drops it on the table, dabbing at his sweat with a balled handkerchief. "I hate riding on those crowded busses,'' Berting informs him. "We wasted a whole hour in a traffic-jam." "I told you to buy it last week," says Lisa. "Where will we put the tree, Mama, where?" "There, by the window ot course." "Mama, I saw the prettiest doll in a store downtown. You'll get it for me, please, please, Mama?" H ER LITTLE boy has joined them in the room, and he is tugging at Lisa's arm. "And a pistol for me, huh, Mama?" His sister keeps nodding but she is not listening: she is frowning at the sparse lusterFEBRUARY 1958 less needles. With a resigned shrug, she plants the tree in the draped kerosene can she has prepared earlier in the day: it looks shorter and wilted, now that it is vertical. The children bring out a box of ornaments, and with little piping shouts of energy and delight, proceed to load the tree with tinsel ribbons and cardboard bells and tir.foil stars. Lisa stands back without com ment, like a stern, loveless teacher waiting to point out the first mistake: his brother-inlaw lingers in the doorway to the bedroom, blinking expectantiy. It is Nena, the eldest (she looks most like Lisa when a young girl), who directs the job: she is bright-eyed and eager and graceful as she flits about the tree: "Give mt: the big star, we'll put it on top, there, ayan, how beautiful!" He smiles encouragingly at the child Nena, standing on a chair and fastening the topmost star with such a glowing of joy and certitude, urging her on in his heart (so young, so unmindful of the years of time), remembering Lisa and Belen in anothei: December, the girls and the young men dancing in the high wide gleaming sala in Tarlac, and Nita, tall and laughing and unconquerable, playing his fast uncaring mu· sic, going forth to his destiny with his casual swaggering stride, the lost dead young man whom everyone had loved, Pepe's best friend, solemn and brooding forever (the dark Word in his eyes), in the photograph taken on the Christmas Eve he was ten and a boy safe in his father's house, listening to the voices downstairs singing near an d distantly along the warm, familiar boundary of sleep, while he dreamed only of the morning's surprise and the starlight like a silent rain of whiteness fa 11 in g through the night of Christ's birth over the town. * * * 52 SOUNDTRACK ON FILM A NEW British development which enables cameramen to record directly onto film while shooti~ is in progress, has made its debut before producers and technicians in Britain. It is a midget recordi~ unit which has been designed for use with magnetic striped film and a cinecamera. Compactness has been achieved by using transistors and small batteries in a case the size of a cigar box. I'he whole unit weighs only three pounds and the operator wears it strapped round his waist while <ihooting. It offers considerable saving of time end money over other methods of sound recording. The model has provision for recording from two microphones with separate controls. The recording characteristic can be modified for speech or music. {I'll 1alze Hunfoi9 From mouse deer to crocodiles By ROMY V. DIAZ 7HE HUNTING grounds in the Philippines offer a large variety of game birds and animals. Their sizes range from the tiny quail to the great monkey-eating eagle, from the dim unitive mouse deer to the bulky wild water buffalo. The most popular game bird is the snipe. This is a migratory bird that periodically visits the country to escape the nippy weather of Siberia and other ice-bound regions. The favorite habitat of snipes in the Philippines are the swamps or the marshes. They descend on the country in huge flocks and toward the middle of September every watery place in the country is crowded with the long-legged birds. FEBRUARY 1958 There are three kinds of snipes. The first two are of the jack snipe variety. They are both migratory. Their local name is kanduro. The open season for the kanduro is from the first of September to the last day of February. The daily bag limit is 50 birds. The third kind is the pacubo, a local variety. The season for the resident type is from January 1 to the last day of June every fifth year. The bag limit is 5 bird~ a day. The next most popular game bird is the duck. Except for three species, all .the game ducks that we have are migratory. The list of migratory ducks includes mallards, pintails, teals and spoonbills. The favorite haunts of these birds 53 during their periodic visits are lakes, slow-moving rivers, marshes and secluded fishponds. Pigeons come next. Our forests shelter 50 species and except for the barres ground dove, they are all classified as game birds. The hunting season for pigeons and doves begins in August and ends around the middle of January. The most hunted of the pigeons is the balud, a fruit eating type that is almost as big as an average chicken. Other game birds are the labuyo, partridges and quails. The labuyo is a wild chicken which is usually found in grasslands and the edge of the forests. The partridge is not a local bird. It was introduced here by a group of American sportsmen. The first group of partridges was released in the Fort McKinley vicinity but they have multiplied so fast that they are now common in Laguna, Cavite, Batangas, Rizal and Bulacan. 54 To hunt partridges, the hunter needs a trained pointer. The dog flushes the birds out and the hunter shoots them on the wing. The partridge is demanding on the hunter. It is fast on the wing and requires a good shooting eye. The quail is not very popular because of its size. Most hunters feel that good ammunition is wasted on these tiny birds. The game birds that inhabit the brackish marshes and the tide flats are the sandpipers, godwits and plovers. Of this group the Pacific golden plover is the most popular. Its local name is matang baca. pRoBABLY, the most exotic game bird is the peacock pheasant. This beautiful bird is found only in Palawan. The peaccck pheasant season is open only during June of every fifth year. The bag limit is 12 birds. This bird is usually traped instead of shot because it makes a very beautiful decorative pet and is always in high PA NOP.AMA demand among zoo owners. The biggest game animal in the Philippines is the wild carabao. This animal is usually mistaken for the tamaraw. The tamaraw is smaller and its horns are differently shaped. The wild carabao is completely unlike its domestic counterpart. The wild carabao is a ferocious beast t:iat will attack to kill when provoked. To hunt this beast, f1e hunter needs a jeep or a small truck. A wild carabao weighs close to a ton. The open season on wild carabaos is from January to the middle of May each year. The limit is one male per season. The most highly prized game animal is the deer. The deer is quite common in Philippine forests. It is numerous in Mindanao, Mindoro and Palawan. The Sierra Madre is fair hunting ground for deer. Two bucks each month of the open season is the bag limit. The open season is from January to the middle of May. The mouse deer of Palawan is hunted more for the curiosity than for the thrill of the chase. However, the government has restricted the slaugtter of this animal and may be hunted only during the month of January every fifth year. The bag limit is only one male. The most dangerous of the game animals is the crocodile. FEBRUARY 1958 Crocodiles abound in most of the islands. I ts favorite habitat are lakes and slow-moving rivers. This animal is hunted both for the pleasure and the value of its hide. There is no limit for crocodiles and they may be hunted any time of the year. Crocodiles are particularly numerous in the tributaries of the Cagayan river and Lake Naujan in Mindoro. HUNTING has become a favorite sport of many Filipinos. It received its greatest impetus immediately after the second world war when firearms and ammunition were very common. With the restrictions on ammunition and guns, the hunters were forced to use only .22 calibre rifles. The reason is more economic than anything else. The cartridges of a .22 and even the rifle itself cost very much less than a large bore gun. It has been noted by foreigners and forest rangers that the Filipino bunter is more of a butcher than a sportsman. For one thing, the Filipino hunter as a rule seldom respects the hunting seasons. For another, he makes no distinction between the male or the female of the species he is hunting. The result of this lack of discipline is the sorry depletion of our game stock. The governSS ment cannot afford to hire more forest rangers to enforce the hunting regulations. ble. Only the wise use of our game stock would preserve not only for this generation but for the succeeding, the fine sport of hunting. The hunters therefore are enjoined to be more responsi56 * * * TO SAVE THE MUSK OX O NE OF the world's rarest animals, the musk ox, is reported to be in danger of extinction in its chief home, Northeast Greenland. According to a report from Danmarkshavn in Greenland, many of the animals, which look something like a cross between a small ox and a sheep, have been found dead of hunger. Their numbers have been declining steadily in re,;ent years. The cause of the animal's plight is believed to be the milder climate. In recent years warm winds after the first snows followed by cold weather have caused the snow to melt and then be replaced by ice. Musk oxen as a result have been unable to scratch down to the vegetation below on which they live. Another fact causing alarm is that no calves under one year old have been observed this year in the Danmarkshavn area. A sam.ple count on one district revealed twenty-six bull musk oxen to one cow. The number of musk oxen in Northeast Greenland is not known, but it is the only area left in the world where they are relatively plentiful. They also exist in a few places in the Canadian Arctic. Greenland authorities are considering imposing new hunting restrictions to prevent them from becoming extinct. At present hunters are allowed to kill a maximum of six each year and this may be reduced PANOW\MA Review tom\titlmitbtrntrntlbiitrnt6tdtlmlmlWll' i~ 1~ Ba1-i~ ot a1-i9els • Ii By LEONARD CASPER :g ~ , 11\l ~"" ,!J'll\ .-111u !111\l ~JI\\ flll\l =6Jal iJ'IL\l ~r11n FJ"ll\l; ~ ! II\\ ;nl\I !"Ill ~11u ·' Part I 7HE ATTEMPT of a few critics to dismiss Band of Angels as a preconceived Hollywood bedroom farce is confuted by the actual movie's failure even to approximate the novel's themes or to suggest the ir.ner contortion of its characters. What the novel provides, for the first time in the Warren effort, is a complete context of credibility, those elements in which the corkscrew motions of the soul can be described without exaggeration as progre~s - world enough and time: duration -what Perse Munn, Jerry Calhoun, Jack Burden and Jerry Beaumont were all too young to have in sufficiency. Band of Angels gains by being narrated from the point of view of Manty matured and capable oi respecting the anguish of her recollected earlier self. She demands pity or justice no longer; but- like Willie Stark in His Rise and Fall and Jerry Beaumont- an understanding that surpasseth peace. It is herself she has been fleeing. Simply by running no more, not because exhausted but because disabused, she stifles the two cries which have shadowed her pasasge: "Oh, who am I?"; "If only I could be free . . ." Refusing to accept the absolute denial of self imposed by slavery, she retreats in fever to the other extreme, absolute selfishness, careless of even those who tried to love her: her father, and Hamish Bond. These she rejects after hav!ng used her sex and youth to incite their pity. They are her dolls, to whom she gives endearments like sweets but secretly clings, needing to be needed. They are her victims, along with Rau-Ru and Tobias: Robert Penn Warren, iJand of Angels (Random House. N.Y.; 1955). FEBRUARY 1958 57 but she is theirs, too, for thinking to find herself in them. for expecting to make their strengths hers. The characterization is one of Warren's subtlest and truest, though at first glance most puzzling. Manty is so frail and disordered a young woman, so easily denied person and reduced to body by those routines of subjection, passion and bondage, that she seems to fade in the vicinity of masculine color and mass. Yet this is precisely her most powerful advantage, the trap that literally kills Hamish Bond and Rau-Ru. No one really can be brutal to her. Manty's suffering is psychological, and largely self-inflicted. SHE HERSELF is aware, occasio~ally, of her hold on Bond. When he offers to shoot Charles in a duel for having insulted her, her pride is caressed. In violent need, Bond himself earlier has already raped Manty, as if struggling tlJ repossess his former innocence by violating hers; or in a manner of mutual branding, so that she will never be able to leave him again, nor he ever successfully desert her. Manty welcomes the rape of Bond (the morning sight of his scarred leg turns her terror to tenderness) and seeks out the cuffs of Rau-Ru as a kind of recognition, decoration,_ from fellow sufferers, to satisfy her own need to be pitiful; and to invest herself with the power of forgiveness. This fault in her, however, defeats itself, almost in mock confirmation of Seth Parton's latter-day edict (years after dispassionately testing his passion by not lusting after her, on the scene of a local seduction) that "only in vileness may man begin to seek." . Her very exaggeration of her role as victim finally place.;; her in a position where she has to believe that misfortune has rnndpapered her down to less than nothing or that her deepest wounds are of her own making. Rather than deny her· self identity, she accepts the burden that goes with it and achieves that precarious poise suspended somewhere betweeri solitary confinement and the status of mere chattel: the absolute self and statism (man as statistic). Such transformation would seem extreme, had Manty not been equipped with that weakness of strength which passed as love for the doll Bu-Bula, made her feel an accessory to the selling of Shaddy the slave, constructed an image of restored life from a horse's golden apples, helped her to reas58 PANORAMA sure Dollie when the servant felt unloved and to kiss a Negro child who had approached her, let her sustain Tobias when he felt like a pebble in an avalanche and forgive his own nobility turned selfishness. All these prepare for her final quiet and knowledgeable embrace of life. Such rehearsals of grace, intuitive yearnings not however without some inner comprehension, preserve Manty from petrifaction through over-self-concern, at its starkest when a son is born to her in Kansas and dies almost unobserved. At ti!Jles she is even so scrupulous as to feel burdened with not only all past choices but those not chosen as well. Furthermore, although she cannot find herself in others, she discovers in their common pattern of illusions why she cannot. Bond, despite repeated references to people's being only what they are and demanding that men face facts, has as much an assumed identity as Manty. In a story as perfectly within the story as a cavity is in a tooth, he is revealed as Alec Hinks, ex-slave trader, driven to his inhumane business by the anonymity of his weakling father and by a desire to reduce to an absurdity his mother's false memory of slave servants. Thus he has made her lie come true, in a shocking, not respectable way. In turn, he is rejected by his own "son," Rau-Ru, his k'la and secret self, in an attempted denial of that relation. Rau-Ru puts the noose around Bond's neck, although he is not sure that he would actually have killed Bond had the latter not jumped to make sure. By that time Ruu-Ru has an assumed identity of_ his own: Oliver Cromwell Jones, puritan and protector, zealot of his own interpretation of the law. However, cruelty does not fit him well. He saves Manty from the bushwhackers, his motives now obscure even to himself. And it is such fevers of kindness which distinguish Rau-Ru, Bond, and even Tobias from the more permanent and demoniac hypocritical disguises of Charles, Seth Parton, and Miss Idell. (9 APTIVE TO his own slave-running days, Bond once excused himself with the words: "I didn't make this world and make 'em drink blood, I didn't make myself and I can't help what I am doing." It is Maule's curse, from The House of the Seven Gables, that is summoned by this talk of drinking blood FEBRUARY 1958 59 and the relevance of Hawthorne's novel, in which each member in a family line brings death on himself not through the malignancy of some predestining agency but through his own greed, his own re-commission of an original sin, is as clear as the epigraph from Housman: "When shall I be dead and rid/ Of the wrong my father did?" Man inherits the conditions of evil, yet "is capable of choosing otherwise. Without choice there is no identity; talk of human helplessness is self-pity in the extreme - which Bond will not allow himself. And so the example is set Manty, who resents Charles' speaking of Bond as "pauvre vieux." In exchange, Bond and Rau-Ru sense in Manty's fragile trust the limits of their own willingness to end pretense. Each becomes at first the accomplice of, then the catalyst for the others. 60 * * * How It Started TO BLOW OFF STEAM Early locomotives had no safety valves, so at intervals the engineer had to pull a hand lever and blow off steam to prevent an explosion. Observers compared such a spectacle with a grand dis:play of temper. TO LET YOUR HAIR DOWN During the "Golden Age" of France, noble women dressed their tresses in elaborate fashion. Only in the privacy of her room did any beauty relax to the extent of letting her hair down. Hence, any perwn of either sex who relaxes is said to let his or her hair down. PANORAMA Literary Personality - XXXVll Lord Dunsany: Bearded Baron THE plays and stories of Lord Dunsany, Irish poet, novelist and dramatist wl!o with a quill pen on parchment dealt almost exclusively with what he called "the mysterious kingdoms, where geography ends and fairyland begins." They enjoyed considerable vogue immediately after World War I. Dunsany plays produced in New York in 1919 received critical acclaim. These included "King Argimenes," "The Gods of the Mountain," "The Laughter of the Gods" and "The Golden Doom". These works sometimes dealt with frivolous persons who denied the existence of gods and were spectacularly done in by these supposed non-existent deities. In "The Gods of the Mountain" the thunderous tramp of the vengefully approaching gods rocked the theatre. "The Glittering Gate" was about two dead burglars who jimmied the gates of heaven. His plays were genuine flesh-creepers; horrors from an ancient land that never really was. When he first tried his hands at his fey and legend-soaked plays and tales, Lord Dunsany was a career army officer. He estimated that during his period 95 per cent of his time was spent soldiering. The critic Ernest Boyd called the Irish peer "a fox-hunting man ... with a literary talent and a sensitive imagination ... the juxtaposition of two people in one, the man of imagination and the fashionable sportsman." Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, eighteenth Baron of Dunsany, was born on July 24, 1878. His family home was Dunsany Castle, built in 1180, at Dunsany in CJ'tmty Meath. A towering athlete (6 ft. 4 in.) Lord Dunsany fought in the Boer War and in the World War I. Of his experience he said: "Our trenches were only six feet deep; I shall never fear publicity again." F~UARY_ 1958 61 HE HAD SEEN much fighting in the Boer War, which he had participated in after attending Eton. He was an officer in the Goldstream Guards and later served in the Royal Inniskilling Fusilliers. In the early days of the first World War, he was critically wounded. A number of his literary successes were written during this period. He became one of the "discoveries" of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, where his one-act plays such as "The Lost Silk Hat" attracted much attention. Caring little for life in the literary circles of London and Dublin and, since he could afford it, Lord Dunsany spent much of his time hunting, playing cricket and engaging in the activities usual to the country gentry in Ireland. He tried his hand at journalism and it was once said of him that he was writing a poem a day for two or three London newspapers. He wrote rapidly, knew exactly what he wanted to say and he never revised what he had written. Lord Dunsany had a wide following in the United States, where he had lectured frequently. He said in recent years his work were more widely read in the United States than in his own country. He continued to write almost until his death. His most outstanding works are considered to be "The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph J or kens" and the play "If". He was the author of more than fifty volumes of verse, plays and fiction. To Lord Dunsany, goateed gibe-jabber, much of modern verse was talk that "nonsense is truth, truth nonsense". 62 :;: * * Too Much Play "I think," said the physician to a prostrated tycoon, "you'd bertter stop playing golf - and spend more time at the ofiice.n * PANORAMA r Sea travelers plying between Manila and the V isayas have no doubt seen in their frequent trips three ship-like islets oll the island province o I Marinduque. They are known as the Three King's Islands and are named Baltazar, Melchor and Gaspar in the order of their size, the first being the largest. A beautiful legend has been woven around the 011g1n ol these three small islands. 7 HERE WAS once a queenenchan tress who lived in a kingdom of Marinduque. Her name was Maria Malindig and her beauty was known far and wide. Maria Malindig was a wicked ruler; as wicked as she was beautiful. She hated all men and put to death all the beautiFEBRUARY 1958 By Pedro M •. de Leon ful women of her little kingdom. She was wicked because no man. mortal or immortal, had eve,r fallen in love with her--and she was already past the springtime of life. One day a furious storm arose. Strong winds and a foaming sea lashed at the island kingdom of Maria Malindig and shook the foundations of her palace. Some thought that the end of the world was at hand, but many believed that the storm was caused by the gods to punish their tyrannical queen. For three days the storm raged. On the fourth day, it ceased -so suddenly that the people were surprised. The sun rose from the East in glorious splendor. The howling winds abated and the sea became so calm it looked like a big unruffled carpet, blue as blue can be. But that was not the sight that attracted the attention of 63 the people. What struck them with awe and wonderment were three big- ships anchored in the bay, all a glitter in the morning sun. Curiosity drove the people to the beaches. Aye, they said, these are ships from some rich kingdom beyond the seas. Look at the beautiful flags and multi-colored buntings and streamers! Aye, they are foreign ships, for sure. In the palace of Maria Malindig, everybody was also excited. The queen-enchantress and her royal council wondered what the purpose of the foreign ships could be. Were they merely lost in the storm, or did they take advantage of it to effect an invasion? The royal council d!d not want to take chances. As a measure they alerted the armed forces, doubled Her Majesty's guards, and fortified the moats surroundings the royal palace. 7 HE CURIOSITY of the people was further aroused when they saw three boats-one from each ship- being rowed toward the shore. On seeing this, Maria Malindig immediately dispatched secret agents to ascertain the true mission of the visitors. But when the boats docked, what do you think the people saw? The passengers were three monarchs from some nameless kingdoms, dressed in 64 rich royal robes, complete with all the regalia befitting only the richest, if not the mightiest, of kings. On their heads rested crowns of gold studded with pearls and precious stones. Yes, there were slaves, too. They were darker than the kamagong images in the temple of Maria Malin dig. The eldest of the three monarchs stood at the bow of his boat, surveyed the multitude before him and, with a voice as loud as a giant's, spoke: "We are the three mightiest kings of the mighty Empire of Mu." I am King Laki of Hilaga. On my right is King Man-nga of Katimugan, and on my left is King Pangikog of Silangan !" A wave of murmurs rose from the multitude. The king paused good-naturedly, then continued: "We followed the Sun in its westward course and crossed a hundred seas in search of a kingdom ruled by a queen whose beauty is extolled by seafarers in song and story. The storm has driven us to your beautiful shores and we knew this is the kingdom we seek. We have come in the hope that one of us might win the heart and hand of your queen, the heauteous Maria Malindig." When the people heard the king's words, they were overjoyed. They cheered lustily and clapped their hands hard and PANORAMA loud. For, deep down in their hearts they believed that marriage alone could transform their despotic queen into a benevolent ruler. And, no sooner had the applause ended than a minister of the queen appeared, followed by a batallion of armed soldiers. T h e crowd stood aside to give way to the approaching official who, on reaching the water's edge, announced: "Her Majesty has heard, 0 Kings, and she bids you welcome to her kingdom! We are come to escort you to Her Majesty's throne." Th e people cheered once morn as the three kings went ashore; followed by their slaves who bore on their shoulders precious gifts for Maria Malindig. . The three kings were struck speechless by the ·ravishing beauty of Maria Malindig. It took King Laki a long time before he could state the nature of their visit. And when the queen-enchantress learned that they came to win her hand, her heart sang with silent happiness. She asked questions and reflected on the answers given. Certain now that the intentions of the three royal visitors were honest and noble, she said: 1 am convinced of the sincerity of your purpose and I am deeply honored. A woman who rules FEBRUARY 1958 a kingdom needs a man to rule her heart. I therefore give my heart and hand to King Pangikog." 7 HE CHOICE was obvious, for King Pangikog was young and the handsomest man alive. But the kings jumped to their feet as one, apparently to protest. King Laki spoke first. "Your Majesty," King Laki explained, "it is provided in the Imperial Edict of Emperor Nauna, the founder and first emperor of the Mu Empire, that a Muan king marries only the woman he has won in a contest involving skill or prowess. We cannot violate that law." Maria Malindig was quick to answer. "In my kingdom," she said, "I make the law and my word is law." "Your Majesty," King Pangikog said, "I am happy to know that I am your choice. I love you. Your Majesty. I love you with a love as pure as fire, but l cannot transgress the Imperial Edict. A contest there must be, or I go back to my'kingdom alone and unwed." "What ridiculous customs you have!" Maria Malin dig replied. "Powerful kings, bah! What power has a crowned head or sceptered hand resting on a bridled heart?" Aguments followed arguments. In the end Maria Malindig gave way. "Very well, 65 then," she said, "a contest it must be. The king that sails his ship the fastest wins my hand." On the day of the race, Maria Malindig's subjects, young and old, lined the beaches to witness the unusual contest that began at sunrise that day. Maria Malindig and the royal household watched from her tower. Every heart drummed with eagerness and all eyes were focused on the glimmering horizon where the ships of the three kings appeared like three flies perched on a clothesline. One hour passed by. Two hours. Three. Now the ships loomed, larger and the people were almost breathless with anticipation. In another hour the ships loomed much larger and the people could see their prows white with foam, their sails bulging in the wind. Who's leading? the people wanted to know. But none of them could give a definite answer. Only the queen and her court, who could see the progress of the race very well from the tower, knew. It was King Laki who was leading followed by King Man-nga. King Pangikog-well, the queens ideal man was a poor third. To Her Majesty, this was an unexpected turn of events and it dismayed her. Her heart sank in despair. She could not bear 66 the thought that she, the fairest queen west of Mu, would have for a husband such an old, ugly monarch as King Laki. As she brooded over her fate, an evil thought crossed her mind. Her eyes flashed with hate. fl LL OF A sudden, she left the tower window, hurried down the circular stair case and ran across t)1e Royal Hall to the Temple of the Gods. The ministers and members of the Royal Council followed her; half-eager, half-jubilant. All of them had one thing foremost in mind: the magic wand. Certainly, they said to themselves, Her Majesty would use it to turn Pangikog's defeat ~o victory. But the mm1sters we re wrong. The queen was so mad that she forgot all about the magic wand. As' soon as she reached the altar, she profaned the graven images there. "You are all worthless guardians of my fate!" she cried. "You are so unkind! All these years I have longed for the warmth of a man's love, but this very day you denied me that one solace for my longings by denying Pangikog the victory that must be his that I might be his own forever!" Then she got hold of a pole and smote all the sacred idols she could find. Maria Malindig's profanity aroused the wrath of the gods. PANORAMA No sooner had the last idol been knocked mercilessly down than the gods struck back with nameless fury. Horror of horrors! The earth shook violently and a great wind arose from the sea. The sun turned black and the whole kingdom was shrouded with impenetrable darkness. The people ran pellmell, not knowing what the matter was and not knowing where to go. But the panic did not last long. In an hour, the fury of the elements subsided. The sun shone as brightly as ever and everything looked as though nothing had happened-everything, except that, Maria Malindig's palace had disappeared and in its site, a mountain, tall and majestic, had arisen. Then, when they turned their eyes to the west, they saw no ships anymore but three small islands. The people named the mountain after their wicked queen and is so called to this day. The three islands were named after the three monarchs, Kali, Man-nga, and Pangikog (the natives still call them so), but when the Spaniards came, they were officially named after the three Biblical kings Baltazar, Melchor and Gaspar, who were sent out by King Herod in search of the Child who would be King of the Jews. * * * Dignified Spoonerism The austere President Charles W: Eliot was once credited with a deft spoonerism. Accompanied by Edward Everett Hale he was on his way to HarvardYale football game, when a jovial faculty member caught up with them near the Lars Anderson bridge and asked: "Now where in the world would you be going this afternoon, Doctor?" President Eliot answered with his usual dignity: "To yell with Hale." FEBRUARY 1958 67 -Now hear this!---~---~---~---~--.... 68 GOBS ON MATERNITY DUTY CLEAN SWEEP fore and aft! Sails down! Time to refuel!" If you think you're aboard a Navy ship, take another look around. This seafaring lingo you hear is in the main nursery of the maternity ward at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Oak Knoll in the East Oakland hills. And barking out the orders-but gently-is a group of five strapping gobs, who feed, change \liapers and care for newborn infants. There's Corpsman Don Filliater, 18 of Fostoria, Ohio, who more than a year ago joined the Navy. "That was to see the world, mate," he said. Three months ago Don decided the world could wait and volunteered for duty at the nursery. "I get a kick out of babies," he said, as he expertly held and fed a three-day old infant. "It's good duty and a great experience." The tall, blond, 160-pound sailor agreed that some day he would make some girl a wonderful husband. "Meanwhile, excuse me," he said. "I've got to put some new sails on this chum." This particular "chum" was Michael John Maloney, threeday-old son of Aviation Mechanic and Mrs. Clarence J. Maloney The father is currently on duty in Japan. Michael is also Baby No. 27,589 born at Oak Knoll since the hospital started its obstetrics division in August, 1953. Oak Knoll this year ranked fourth in births among the twentyeight Naval hospitals in the U.S., with the production rate ailing alcng at a steady 200-plus a month. Roughly, according to hospital statisticians, the rate would average out to one baby born every two and one-half hours. "However, they're net spaced at those intervals," says Capt. Milton Kurzrok, physician who heads the hospital's pediatrics branch. "There are times when all the babies decide to be born at the same time," he said. For that reason a staff of nine doctors is on duty at the obstetrics ward with a full staff of nurses and trained corpsmen. Having a baby at Oak Knoll is inexpensive for the sailor or marine. The cost is $1.75 a day, which covers all expenses. The charge pays for delivery, nursery care and all meals £or mother and baby. As one new father, a marine PFC, put it: "How can you beat that?" Meanwhile, down at the delivery room. you can hear the voices: "One doll coming up" or "One chum coming up"--or sometimes "Hey, Mac, full speed ahead. This looks like sister ship!" PANORAMA The Congress for Cultural Freedom is publishing an information series on Soviet culture in order to make available for general use documentation on Soviet cultural bfe. Edited by Walter Z. Laqueur, the series provides factual information from Soviet sources about literature, arts, and sciences in the USSR and about Soviet attitudes toward the nonCommunist world. Such information is a prerequisite at a time when cultural contacts with the Soviet orbit are expanding. This article describes Soviet contemporary literature. JSoviet Writing Today THE PROCEEDINGS and resolutions of the Soviet Writers' Congress in December 1954 were generally interpreted at the time as signifying no basic change on the literary front. On the whole developments in the past fifteen months confirm this impression: the great thaw heralded by so many in the autumn of 1953 has not in fact occurred. Yet Soviet Ii tera tu re today is not quite what it was under Stalin and Zhdanov. A certain ferment is recognisable, although it is more marked in the East European satellites than in the Soviet Union, and perhaps more pronounced in the domains of literary history and criticism than in creative writing properly so called.One of the principal e_yents of the December 1954 Writers' Congress was Sholokhov's unexpected attack on the bureaucrats of Soviet literature, and in particular on such a favouFEBRUARY 1958 rite of officialdom as Kon s - tantin Simonov. At any rate Simonov, now mid to be working on the second volume of his Comrades in Arms, was less in evidence during 1955 than he had been in previous years, while his rival's public appearances have become more numerous and more conspicuou-s. As in other countries, personal and clique rivalries play their part in the U.S.S.R., but even a personal feud can become the vehicle of genuine differences in opinion. There is no great novelty, either, in the statement that "our partiality (partiinost: literally, part i-consciousness) differs in principle from that of bourgeois literature ... it reflects in typical artistic patterns the objective causal relations inherent in the development of reality." To balance this affirmation of orthodoxy, there is a cautious suggestion that "the categoric demand for 69 exaggeration (of the "positive" features of homo sovieticus) has done considerable harm to cur literature." This kind of exaggeration, the article goes on, has frequently been defended in terms of something supposed to have been said by Maxim Gorky (Cf. Vol. 27, p. 255 of his collected works in Russian), but this was due to a misunderstanding. "The Soviet reader protests against such (unreal) heroes, against the retreat from living reality, from the life of real Soviet people." Yet it is likewise wrong to exaggerate the darker aspects of Soviet life, a tendency traceable in various novels and plays -listed by the article: the reader is bound to find them equally incredible, since such obnoxious people as are portrayed in these writings clearly could not flourish in Soviet society without being found out and chastised. It would appear that what is demanded from the Soviet Author is an approach midway between the unreality of the iater Stalinist era and the reaction from it in the immediate post-Stalin period, when writas like Zarin and Virta laid undue stress upon "negative" features. In general, "the creation of the image of progressive Soviet man, incarnating the outstanding characteristics and the moral traits of the mil70 lions ... remains the most important problem in the work of our artists." T ms DEMAND for an acceptable via media must be understood in the con text of Soviet literary life as it has _unfolded during the past few years. The two "extremes" criticised in official pronouncements of this kind are not in fact on the same level, for whereas the, official cult of unreality before 1953 was all-pervading and had the full weigh of authority behind it, the critical "naturalism" of 1953/4 was an extremely modest affair and in effect limited to a bare handful of writers. The editorial in Kommunist evidences some degree of dissatisfaction with the state of Soviet writing: "Despite considerable achievements, Soviet i>rts and literature still lag behind life; they do not satisfy the growing spiritual demands of our people." Other literary critics have recently tended to sound more hopeful. R. Messer, author of a work published in 1955 on "the Soviet historical uovel," feels that in this genre at any rate Soviet writers have attained new standards of excellence and left their Western competitors far behind. This is due, it seems, to the fact that in Western writing "it is not the biography of irnporPANORAMA tant historical personages that counts, but the fate of imagin&ry average people who are supposed to embody the spirit of history." 0 NE FIELD in which the official attitude has become a little more liberal is that of the history of literature. Both the new trend and its inherent limitations are well portrayed m the treatment of Dosfoyevsky, of which more below. A rel~ent edition of Bunin's writings includes novels written after he had left Russia in 1918, whereas it was previously held that his post-1917 work was of no significance. Moreover, a few writers who disappeared during the great purges of the later thirties have been quietly rehabilitated. Thus Literaturnaya Gazeta of December 19, 1955, announces the appointment of a commission to f.dit the literary remains of Vladimir Kirshon, and Perez Markish. Kirshon, a well-known play-wright, disappeared in 1937 after being denounced as ::i Trotskyist and an "enemy of the people." Markish was one of the Jewish "cosmopolitans" who vanished from view in 1948/9. A recent catalogue of Collett's, the London agent for Soviet literature, lists the German translation of one of BoriS Pilnyak's works. If this is not an FEBRUARY 1958 oversight, it would be an event of the greatest interest, for Pilnyak was among the most important and original authors of the twenties who were swept away by the great purge. It is also noteworthy that Soviet spokesmen now tend to ftress that no one is being persecuted for "literary deviations" and that Western assertions to the contrary are malicious fabrications. THE DOMAIN of creative writing is less affected by the comparative liberalism now in fashion. The editors of the six leading literary reviews have now published their production plans for the current year. Znamya appears mainly preoccupied with the internal and external enemies of Soviet society, and during 1956 intends to publish a number of fictional and documentary works devoted to the activities of the armed forces and the security C' r g a n s. Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of Nations), which has recently become a monthly, devotes itself to the praiseworthy task of acquainting the Russian public with translations from non-Russian writers in the USSR. However, the more readable works belonging to this class appear to find their way to 1 other and more widely read 71 Moscow and Leningrad periodicals. Thus a novel by Vladimir Lidin, published in the January 1956 issue of Oktyabar, describes the life of a Soviet journalist, a subject hitherto taboo which has recently been tackled by some other writers as well. The recollections of Yury Pilyar ("All This Has Happened,'' Novi Mir October/November 1955) are of interest for a similar reason, for this is the first time that a former Coviet war prisoner has described his experiences in a German extermination camp (ne-ar Mauthausen) at some length. This topic was long banned because Soviet soldiers were not supposed to let themselves be taken prisoner, or at any rate were supposed to escape at the first opportunity. It is therefore or some interest that Pilyar's hero is advised against escape (by a Party representative) and eventually consents to stay in the camp, on the grounds that flight would endanger the lives of the other Russian prisoners by exposing them to retribution. It may also be noteworthy that the title "Hero of the Soviet Union" has been pothumously awarded to the Tatar poet Musa Jamil who died in a German prison camp in 1944. 72 IF ALL THE writings published during the past year, Vera Panova's long short-story Seryosha has probably been the most widely acclaimed, and with reason. The only adverse criticism appeared in the organ of the teaching profession. The story, strung together from a series of episodes in the life of a small boy, shows Seryosha reacting to events such as the second marriage of his mothe r(a war widow), the purchase of his first bicycle by his new step-father (whom he adores), the bicycle going to pieces on the very first day, the arrival of a baby brother, the domestic crisis caused by the parents' imminent transfer to another place of work, and their eventual .decision not to leave the boy behind but to take him along, too, etc. Not only is the story wellconstructed and moving, but it recalls the interesting fact that rnme of the best Soviet writing during the past two decades has been about children. It also offers further proof that Vera Panova is perhaps the most gifted writer of her generation. fhe theme is conventional and the events portrayed are in no way peculiar to the Soviet 5cene, b u t that perhaps is among the merits of this little chef-d'oeuvre. PANORAMA One mark of an eduf'ate<l man is the possession of a reasonable fund of general information. The highly specialized individual, often dubbed an "expert," frequently knows little or nothing ou:.side his own line. Try yourself on the following questiona, then turn to the next page for the correct answers. l. Have you heard of Viscount Ferdinand de Lesseps? He is a French diplomat credited with th~: ~· conquest ·of malaria; B. discovery of the living cell; ~uilding of the Suez Canal; D. settlement of Algeria. 2. Your friend's condition has been diagnosed by the physician as glaucoma, and therefore he: A. )Ray have hardened arteries; B. lose his power of speech; C/lose his sight; D. needs an immediate abdominal operation. 3. lf you are astronomy-minded you would know }hat the planet Pluto is: A. the largest of the nine planets; .!)/'farthest from the sun; C. the planet with canals; D. next to the earth, away from the sun. 4. Where ~s~he picturesque city of Lucern? It is in r A. Switzerland;~ nelgium; C. France; D. Germany. 5. Not known to many, including Catholics, is the fact that Ignatius Loyola, t~founder of -~e Jesuit order, was: A. Russian; B. Scotch; C!"'Italian; D. _)fpanish. 6. Th~ Bible is to,A:hristianity, as the Rig-Veda is to: A. Mohammedanism; !1LHinduism; C. Bhuddism; D. Taoism. 7. The military term "logistics" refers, in common parlance, to: A. the method of accurate aiming, in artillery; B. the defensibility of a position; {/the problem of supply and transportation; ]). counter-espionage. 8. Before his assignment in the Philippines, U.S. Ambassador Charles Bohlen distinguished himself as a diplomat in: A. China; B. England; C. Nazi Germany; D. Soviet Russia. 9. Acknowledgeyforemost modern sculptor in the Philippines today is: A/~a~leon Abueva; B. Victorio Edades; C. Hernando Ocampo; 1' liuillermo Tolentino. 10. Probably the first and only actually operating at~ic energy electrical plant today is located in: A. London; Bµn· ingrad; C. Pennsylvania; D. Quebec. FEBRUARY 1958 73 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 74 ARE YOU WORD WISE? PANORAMA QUIZ ANSWERS (b) (a) (d) (d) (c) (b) (a) (b) (d) (a) (c) (b) (b) (a) (c) (d) (c) ANSWERS confused/ plentiful. · / to imprison dirt or foul matter flexible not coq;lf)ed lively.I' / doubtful or undecided.../ to deny / hateful or detestful \/' cold and damp ./ to expose to air to disengage scattered ru,Pbish summaryV' to play in a lively manner a sacred or holy place 1. C. building of the Suez Canal 2. C. lose his sight 3. B. farthest from the sun 4. A. Switzerland 5. D. Spanish 6. B. Hinduism 7. C. the problem of supply and transportation 8. D. Soviet Russia 9. A. Napoleon Abueva 10. C. Pennsylvania (Shippingport) 18. (a) to broadcast by television 19. (b) to oppose successfully 20. (a) wretched or unhappy First Atomic Electricity S HIPPINGPORT, Pennsylvania - The Shippingport atomi;; power plant, first in the United States designed solely for commercial use, started production of electricity by atomic fission recently, Duquesne Light company announced. At full power, the reactor plant, situated in this little Ohio valley community about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, can produce a minimum of 60,000 kilowatt, enough to light 150,000 homes in the greater Pittsburgh area. Round-the-clock preparations for placing the vlnat into operations were completed last month. First nuclear-produced electricity for commercial use beijan surging through Duquesne,Light company power lines recently. PANORAMA In the Beginning . .. ZIG Z A 6 (line characterized by sharp turns) Oddly enou1h, the term is taken from the German zickzack, a reduplication of zacke, meaning "point or tooth." FEBRUARY 1958 TYPHOON la violent storm) Although derived from the Chinese tai lung, meaning "great wind," this frequent Philippine visitor shouldn•t be blamed on our nei~hbor. DEVIL (evil spirit) Originally the Greek term diabolos meant "slanderer"-today describing only one of the many capers of the evil-minded person. 75 Philippine Panorama - XXXVlll PALAWAN By Maximo Romero No ISLAND in the Philippines harbors more curiosities, both geological and animal, than Palawan. This island is also one of the most sparsely populated in the country. Palawan looks like a truncated bridge between Mindoro and Borneo. Its surface is very uneven-tall cliffs are set in acute contrast with deep subterranean caverns. Palawan has acquired a pejorative reputation because one of its municipal functions is to welcome convicts and lepers. This is a pity because the island is naturally very rich. It has vast forest and mineral resources; its waters are alive with a variety of fishes; its natural wonders can be explo· 76 ited for dollar-earning purposes. Some of the older inhabitants of Palawan feel that these convicts and lepers should be transferred to another island, less rich or at least less promisin~, so that the more normal section of the country's population can be induced to seek for fortune and opportunity in Pala wan. The animal that has mad<:: Palawan famous is the mouse deer. This odd fellow is bigger than a mouse but smaller than a deer. In fact, it looks like an enormous mouse. Like the deer, it is a vegetarian and it inhabits the dark forests of the island. This creature is such an odd sight that hunters went after it in a big way. For a time, it faced eventual extinePANORAMA tion. The government took a hand in the business and restricted the hunting of the mouse deer. A less famous animal also found in Palawan is the peacock pheasant. This loud bird has drawn long sighs of praise from bird lovers the world 'lver. Its dominant color is metal blue but its neck is striped with the colors of the rainbow and it has a pair of absurd eyebrows. A more useful bird is the balinsasayaw. The nest of this b.ird is a classic soup stock. The balinsasayaw inhabits the tall cliffs that wall in the town of Bacuit. For years, edible birds' nests have been an important export of Palawan. THE SWAMPS of Palawan shelter a bird that is now almost extinct, the tabon. This bird is prized for its eggs which it lays periodically near the border of the tide beach. Its eggs· are delicious and expensive. Ruthless seafolk have collected these eggs without any regard for the prese.rvation of the bird. Now, however, the government limits this enterprise and it is expected that within ten years the taboo would again be sufficiently numerous to regain its economic value. The perfume industry knows Palawan as a source of civet. FEBRUARY 1958 This yellowish substance which is extracted from a pouch near the sexual organs of civet cats is used as a perfume base. The local name of this creature is binturong. 0 th e r zoological oddities found in Palawan are the antieat.::r, the porcupine and the flying lemur. Nobody has yet accounted satisfactorily for the presence of th~se creature~ in the island. The waters around the island are some of the best fishing grounds in the Philippines. Particularly rich in aquatic life is the area around Malampaya Sound. It is estimated that the fishing grounds of Palawan, properly utilised, could supply to a substantial degree the rest of the country. Araceli and Coron are towns that flourished because of fish. From these centres, large shipments of fish are dispatched almost daily. Huge flights of seabirds cover the fishing grounds of Palawan. Quantities of these birds roost every night on the tiny rsland of Ursula. Their droppings, commercially known as guano, constitute a natural resource that is at best only indifferently extracted. The forests of Palawan are famous for rattan arid a number of very hard woods. The· Malacca cane from which that beautiful and famous stick is made is found in the forests of 77 Palawan. The hardest known wood in the Philippines, the palo hierro, is native to Palawan. It is said that as a structural material, the palo hierro can outlast steel. There seems to be some truth to this because the palo hierro used in some very ancient Philipp1 ine churches are still more than just service~ble. An-other very hard Palawan wood is the dolo. The dolo tree is found mostly in Culion, Busuanga, and Balabac. This is another wood that can resist wear and the elements for centuries. A MINERAL resource of the island that is currently being mined is quicksilver. This mine is located near Puerto Princesa, the capital of the is78 land. The island is also rich in manganese, chromite, talc, tin and iron. Other mineral resources still remain to be discovered. The famous underground river of Palawan is about seven kilometers long. The point of entr<:ince is St. Paul's cavern which is about 80 weet wide and 30 feet high. The cavern is studded with stalactites of various sizes. A great span of this river has not yet been explored because of the perils involved. Sometimes ·without any warning, the river wouid just rise and cover completely the entrance. The idea in itself is discomfiting even for the trained speluriker. The practice of transporting social outcasts to Palawan was started by the Spaniards. When the Americans took over the country, they established the lwahig Penal Colony. This cor· rective insfitution has since become an agricultural colony. It encompasses 41,000 hectares that have been divided for ad1tninistrative convenience into three areas. This penal colony is near Puerto Princesa. The Culion Leper Colony is the other government institution for social outcasts in the island. This Leper Colony is one of the best equipped and most efficiently managed leprosaria in the whole world. The position of Palawan in PANORAMA Philippine history is not very marked. The iogbooks of both Magellan and Pigafetta contain references to Palawan, but only as a source of water and fresh fruits for their rickety crews. The pirates of Sulu also made a few not very spectacular raids on some of its more accesible coastal . towns. Palawan, it seems, had remained uninvolved. The original inhabitants of Palawan are the Tagbanuas, a Malayo-lndonesian type. They brought to the island a rudimentary method of agriculture on which they were unable to improve. Another ethnic group that can claim priority. to the island is the Batac, a Negroid type. To this day, remnants of this group roam the interior of the island looking ve0 ry puz· bled and dejected. * * * Did You Know . . . ? Is there such a thing as a man-eating plant? No. any tales of man-eating planst have been told to travelers by natives of tropical lands-but such stories have no basis in truth. There are carnivorous plants which catch and devour insects, as, for example the Venusflytrap, the sundew and the pitcher plant, but there is no plant that will catch and devour a man. .y. .y. Why is hippopotamus ivory more valuable than elephant ivory? Because ivory from the elongated teeth of the hippopotamus-often called sea-horse ivory - is extremely hard, very dense, and very finegrained. Its quality is even good enough to be used for artificial teeth, and at one time, before porcelain, it was extensively used for this purpose . • FEBRUARY 1958 79 THE BATTLE OF BESSANG PASS B ESSANG p ASS is I 7 kilometers south of Tirad Pass. It is 5,000 feet above sea level on Highway 4 of Cervantes, Ilocos Sur. Its strategic value made it one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in the Philippines. General Walter Krueger, commander of the U.S. Army's 32nd and 25th Infantry Division's battles for Villa Verde trail and Balete Pass, respectively." The victory at Bessang Pass led directly to the defeat of General Yamashita. At the time of the battle the Japanese had 6,000 troops com80 mitted to the defense of Bessang Pass. Sotomu Terau, chief of staff of the 19th Japanese Division, declared after he surrendered that the 73rd Infantry of his division, with an effective strength of 2,000 officers and men, were under orders to defend Bessang Pass to the death. This unit had mountain guns and assorted artillery pieces emplaced around the pass. Before the battle they were joined by the 79th Brigade and the 357th Independent Japanese. These two units added 4,000 men. On the other side, the battle PANORAMA of Bessang Pass was one of six major operations of the USAFIP NL (United States Armed Forces in the Philippines, North Luzon). This force consists of five complete regiments and its effective strength is 20,000 men. Colonel Russel W. Volckmann, a Westpointer and veteran of Bataan, was made the commander of the Bessang force. Three days before D-Day on Luzon which is January 9, 1945 this force started a systematic destruction of bridges, aerodromes, line communications, ammunition dumps, armouries, and roads. Enemy supply convoys were ambushed throughout La Union, Ilocos Sur, llocos Norte, Abra, Mountain Province, Nueva Vizcaya, lsabela and Cagayan. ON JANUARY 9, 1949, the entire force was placed under the command of General Krueger. His order was to suppress all traces of enemy resistance in la Union and Ilocos Sur The !21st Infantry under the command of George M. Barnett started the mopping-up operation. The reg;ment's third battalion under the command of Major Conrado Rigor was assigned to secure the area from Tagudin to Cervantes, Ilocos Sur. The "L" company of this battalion was under the leadership of Capitan Emilio F'EBRt1ARY 1958 Narcise. He first attacked the Japanese garrison· at Bitalag, Tagudin and then pursued the fleeing remnants to Becques, where the Japanese were routed. After this operation the company proceeded up Highway No. 4 and attacked the Jap1mese encampment at Suyo, a small barrio midway between Tagudin and Bessang Pass. "L" company proceeded to Butac where it was joined by companies "K" and "M". Their combined mission was to clear the periphery of the major area of operations. They were successful. B·1t before this force could proceed to Bessang, Major Barnett ordered "K" and "M" to reinforce the 1st and 2nd battalions of the main regiment in the battle for San Fernando. Undaunted, "L" made for Bessang Pass. From its prisoners, it learned that the Bessang area was heavily fortified. "L" then decided to attack Cervantes where it was able to kill 60 enemy troops. Another platoon attacked the enemy emplacement at Magun and still another at Maun ting. The noose tightened around Bessang. The Japanese, however, sensed the danger and a large group 1 au n ch e d a Banzai charge against the Filipinos. The Japanese were able to recapture their former positions. 81 Volckmann decided to try to recapture Cervantes. A provisional battalion was created and put under the command of Captain Serafin Elizondo. This battalion tried to block enemy troop movements around Bessang hut the Japanese were able to move heavy artillery pieces and the battalion was cruelly bombarded. M EANWIULE, a stronger Japanese force under Lieutenant Colonel Yoshibaru Osaki occupied Cervantes. The battalion attacked and the Japanese were forced to retreat. Osaki's troops fled to Lepanto, Aluling and Malaya and on March 15, they were solidly entrenched on a hill south of Cervantes. From this position, they harrassed the provisional battalion. Further up at Tangadan, Abra the 15th Infantry, USAFIP, NL had engaged the enemy's 79th Infantry Brigade. Their order was to prevent this· force from joining· Osaki's group. The 66th Infrantry, also USAFIP,NL, had tangled with the enemy on the road from Baguio. San Fernando, La Union was finally liberated on March 24, 1945 by the 121st Infantry. There was a reorganization and a new regiment moved to Suyo and Butas, points midway between Tagudin and Bessang 82 Pass on Highway 4. This reorganized regiment was put under the command of Lieutenant Colonel George M. Barnett and later under Lieutenant Colonel Eulogio Balao. It started the Bessang operation on March 27, 1945. The first battalion under Major Eduardo Borge took a southeastern direction to encircle the enemy's southern flank while the second battalion under Major Diego Sipin pushed eastward along the axis of Highway 4. The third battalion under Major Conrado B. Rigor was held in reserve and a provisional battalion under Captain Elizondo heid Cervantes. The first battalion engaged the enemy on March· 29 at Lamagan ridge. The second battalion moved with extreme cau(tion as there were Japanese outposts nearly everywhere. The Filipino battalions lacked artillery support and their principal arms were only the rifles and machine-guns brought by submarine late in November and December of 1944 to Darigayos, Luna, La Union and Santiago, llocos Sur. The battle for Bessang pass was a fierce and rugged one. Enemy bombardment was extraordinarily heavy. The terrain was harsh. The three battalions sustained frightful losses. On April 13, the operation ·received some air and artillery PANORAMA support. The provisional battalion attacked the enemy stronghold at Buccual, which is north of Bessang, forcing the Japanese to withdraw to Magun. On April 21, the Japanese force at Lamagan ridge was completely annihilated by the first battalion. Two DAYS later, the third battalion after executing a perilous night operation occupied a hill west of Bessang Pass. The Japanese regrouped to try a breakthrough on the line held by Lieutenant Prudencio's "D" company. The Filipinos were forced to give ground but they succeeeded in reestablishing themselves some 200 yards north of Highway 4 toward Cervantes. Night and day, the enemy tried to infiltrate the Filipino lines. But the Filipinos held on FEBRUARY 1958 and after heavy losses the enemy gave up. Meanwhile, air and artillery support had increased. Heavy guns and bombs were hurled at the enemy. The liberators threw more troops into the Bessang area. Slowly, the pincer movement got under way. The 121st, the 15th, and the 66th infantry regiments gained more and more vital ground. In spite of fog, rain, mud, disease, precipices and heavy bombardment, the gallant liberators pushed on. Then in June an order came from Colonel Calixto Duque, G-3; Bessang Pass must fall in t5 days. The first battalion !21st Infantry reorganized and pressed forward to capture the entire Lamagan vicinity, while the 15th infantry drove on toward Nalidaoan to prevent the enemy from consolidating its ravaged 'positions. One by one the enemy positions cracked. Banzai charges became more frequent. Handto-hand fighting became almost a daily incident. The Filipino guerillas, racked by malaria and dysentery, refused to be replaced. The odor of victory was becoming more and more strong. For greater coordination, the 15th infantry took over the area south of Butac while the 66th infantry operation was limited to the right flank. The 83 "B" and "D" companies of the 11th, now under Major Herbert Swick, poised to attack the high ground north and northeast of Bessang. Two companies- "K" and "L"-launched a lightning attack on Bessang Pass following a heavy mortar barrage. This was the beginning of the de~at of the Japanese. Artillery preparations were made and elements of the !21st attacked and captured three enemy tunnels. The night attack of the provisional battalion captured vital enemy positions and annihilated approximately one hundred Japanese soldiers. At dawn on June 14, "K" and "L" launched an extremely well-coordinated attack on the final enemy stronghold and victory was ours. Speaking of the Bessang op'eration, Volckmann said: "It was a thrilling sight to see the men of our advanced elements perched high on the peaks overlooking the Pass, waving shirts, towels, and makeshift flags as a signal o"f their victory. It was a costly victory, but one that personified the courage, spirit, determination and fighting ability of units that have been organized and trained in the midst of the Japanese occupation ... " Once more the Filipino soldier has proved his worth. Austerity 84 A young engineer, newly married, had been promptly sent off by his company to do a job in Alaska. To his delight, shortly alter his arrival there, a package arrived by airmail from his adoring wife. "Here's a cozy sweater I knitted for you, darling, to keep you warm. Postage costs so much for every single ounce that I've cut off the buttons. Love and kis8es. "P.S. The buttons are in the right hand pocket." PANORAMA A sociological report WORLD OF THE Tirurays THE HISTORY of the Tiruray begins with the legend that there were two brothc::rs the elder of which, not wishing to be Mohammedanized, went into the mountains. The lirurays came from the elder brother; the Magindanaos, FEBRUARY 1958 By GRACE L. WOOD from the younger. The trade t'act between the two brothers ~·ere soon exploited by the des:.:cndants of the younger. Jn 1863 the Spanish Jesuits built a school and a church just across the river from the Tiruray's but the Spaniards were not able to defend them from the Magindanao's and therefore did not impress the Tirurays. Today, the displacement of the Tirurays continue. Political authority is in the hands of the Magindanao and the policemen who continue the tradition of exploitation. An educated Tiruray tried to form a "Tiru ray Association" to promote the welfare of the people as a whole but such activity has been mistakenly frowned upon by the government as seeds for subversion. The Tiruray believe that the end of the wor:ld must be coming and are extremely susceptible to exhort_ations of their religious leaders to follow him on a pilgrimage to "Heaven". Such pilgrimages inv6lve kiling everyone on the way to the mountaintop who dises believes the power of the leader. The Tiruray believe that man was created from mud by Minaden because when we do not bathe for a long time the soil can be rubbed off our skins. Mine.den who made the earth also taught the people to cover themselves; to use bark for clothing and to plant cotton which the Magindanao's ordered brought to them for weaving. At one time they also had the services of a magic bird, Biaku, who furnished them with clothing and beads but the Magindanaos, hearing of this bird, began to drive the Tiruray away so that they could have it. A great battle was fought but the Moros won so that they are so rich today. The bird was so frightened that it fled to the Chinese at Hongkong (Sungsung) and since that time beads and cloth have come from the Chinese. T HERE 1s reason to believe that the trade between the Tirurays and the Magindanaos inhibited manufactures among the former, who unlike the other peoples of Mindanao, have no weaving, pottery, or metal work. The first people, according to the Tirurays, had only one dialect but when they increased and wandered afar, Minaden gave them different dialects. 86 A great flood furthered the dispersion of the peoples and they became the Sulug (from Sulu), Samal, Bisayan, Spanisti, American, and Chinese. In the first days people coula be monkeys or human beings at will, simply by taking off or putting on monkey "clothmg". Tulus, the brother of the creator gave some people bow and arrows with the result that the people to whom monkey clothes were given were decimated. The leader of the "monkey people," called "Little Monkey" finally persuaded Tulus to allow them to live in his country after pointing out his fault. One of the Tiruray culture hero, Lageay Lengkuos, could talk from the womb. His pow er was so enormous. He was the only one who could pass the magnet stone in the strait between the big and little oceans where all ships were wrecked. His wife was also powerful and therefore did not have to suf;er in childbirth, so that their child was born from a necklace m a basket on the wall. Religious leaders have a hard time approaching the exploits of these culture heroes. Leng1<.uos is scornful of them because they have matches clothing guns today and thus can·· not expect pity. In his day Lengkuos h a d only breechcloths and bow and arrows. Tirurays believe that the evPANORAMA ii sptnts, Saitan, were brought by the foreign priests and the Japanese. the earth exist, each one and the people in it are more powerful that those below it. T HE PEOPLE of the earth, in contrast to the supernatural beings, may become powerful by gaining the pity of the latter. Usual bravery or suffering can gain this pity. The universe is conceived in terins of power. Eight layers above and below None of the supernatural beings in the pantheon seem to be inherently evil. They punish people for disrespect or for "unkindness," but the people may avoid such punishment if they observe traditions and wear charms for protection. The Older the Better "Yeah, she's quite a combination - the picture 9f her father and the sound track of her mother." · ¥ ¥ Television-The box in which they buried vaudeville. ¥ ¥ "One should never trust a woman who teJls her real age. A woman who would tell that would teII anythinj,!' ¥ ¥ Tourist: "I don't like all the flies around here." Native: 'Well, confidentially, there are a few of them that I don't care for, either." * FEBRUARY 1958 87 Up from slavery U.N. TR~U~lt~H~~TtR D R. RALPH Johnson Bunche, the highest ranking American in the United Nations Secretariat, is a stolid, chain-smoking expert on race relations and peacemaking. Dr. Bunche, an Under Secretary General, learned about both subjects through experience and hard knocks, as well as from books. All his life he has combined scholarship with action. He started to learn about race relations as a child. The grandson of a Negro slave, he grew up in the Negro sections of Detroit, Toledo, Ohio, Albuquerque, N. M., and Los Angeles. He went on to study his subject as a Carnegie Corporation researcher, chased more than once out of angry Southern towns; as a graduate stucfent in Africa, chugging in a battered car from one primitive village to the next, and as a 88 high-ranking diplomat in his nation's capital, yet excluded from the best Washington res· taurants and theatres. Making peace, particularly betwee!l people of different races, was a ski 11 that Dr. Bunche developed gradually, later in life, as his knowledge of race relations came to be applied to world problems. At first it was during World War II, when he worked in the Office of Strategic Services, digging up background for the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the colonial areas where Americans served. It was his job to try to find a course that would avoid trouble between the predominantly white United St ates PANORAMA troops and the non-white populations of those countries. AFTER THE WAR he was in the State Department's Division of Dependent Area Affairs. At the San Francisco Conference of the United Nations in 1945 he helped draw up what tecame the non-self-governing territories and trusteeship sections of the United Nations charter. Later, at the United Nations as the first director of its Trusteeship D i v i s i o n , he was charged with the international responsibility for m o re than 200,000,000 people in former colonies sea ttered throughout the world. The United Nations took him from that job in 1947 to send him to the Middle East with the international committee that aided the birth of Israel. Today Dr. Bunche was once more back in the Middle East, looking into the continuing dispute over control of the Gaza Strip. He helped to write the report that defined the partitioning of Palestine between the A r ab States and Israel. And by an accident of history- the assassination of his chief, Count Folke Bernadotte - it fell to him to work out the truce between Israel and her Arab neighbors. For three months of day-andFEBRUARY 1958 night negotiations on the Island of Rhodes, Dr. Bunche labored heroically and successfully to work out the uneasy settlement that lasted from 1949 until the Israeli attack on Egypt late in 1956. It was an achievement that rocketed him from the ranks CJf scores of talented but obscure diplomats to a position of world-wide acclaim - not alone because of the magnitude of the diplomatic success, but because it made him the first Negro diplomat of world renown. Israeli and Arab diplomats who went through the Rhodes ordeal with him hailed him as "one of the great men of the world." He was given a hero's welcome, complete with ticker tape and open car, when he returned to New York. Los Angeles held a Ralph Bunche Day. In three weeks he had more than 1,000 speaking invitations. 89 THE Aw ARD s that were .& heaped upon him ranged from honorary academic degrees---- over forty of them at last count -- through a long 1oster of titles, including "Father of the Year" in 1949, to the highest recognition attainable, the Nobel Peace Prize of 1950. teaching, for Harvard named him a Professor of Government. But Dr. Bunhe did not want to subject his family to the indignities of segregation in Washington, nor could he teaihimself from the field of action tor sedentary scholarship. He chose to stay at the United Nations, where he became one of the two undersecretaries without department, and what amounts to Dag Hammarskjold's personal troubleshooter. He could have gone on to ~eek other triumphs where he chose - in the State Department, where President Truman offered to make him an Assistant Secretary of State. or in 90 Science on the March CURRENT RESEARCH at Armour Research Foundation baa resulted in progress in aeronotics and building technology and, indirectly, in air pollution and even baby feeding. Certain types of military aircraft may function effectively without conventional anti-icing equipment as the result of new ARF chemical composition which can be sprayed, brushed, or applied in the form of tape. The chemical deicers, by eliminating bulky mechanical equipment, are expected to point the way to significant cost and weight re· duction in aircraft. Also in aeronautics has come the finding that tiny particles of meteoric dust in the upper atmosphere may seriously diminish the chances of a high altitude missile or earth satellite to fulfill its mission. To sim11late the possible hazards, ARF researchers have accelerated dust particles to 4,000 feet per second in a shock tube. Even at this velocity they found dust· ertensively damaged the surface of a half-inch aluminum plate. In home building, a new all-clay constructipn block has been developed recently. The ceramic block, which may produced in a variety of colors, is less likely to expand and contract concrete block tend to do. PANORAMA ";eue- ~1#4 , , , , , , by Elmer Attention: All organization heads and members! Help gonr club raise funds painlessly . . . Join the Panorama "Fund-Raising by Subscriptions" plan today! The PANORAMA f uND-RAISING BY SuBscruPTIONS PLAN will get you, your friends, and your relatives a year's subscription to Panorama. The Panorama is easy to sell. It practically sells itself, which means more money for your organization. The terms of the PANORAMA FuND-RAISING BY SuBscruPTIONS PLAN are as follows: (I) ·Any accredited organization in the Philippines can take advantage of the PLAN. (2) The organization will use its facilities to sell subscriptions to Panorama. (3) For every subscription sold the organizatio_n. will get Pl.00. The more subscriptions the organization sells, the. more money it gets. THE MORNING JOURNAL The only Chinese Daily Newspaper with Editorials in English .:vertise,. THE FOOKIEN TIMES 1 \·. <' Leading Independent Chinese Newspaper with the Largest Circulation in the Philippines -·-·----·------------.....! J.1'ell your friends about Give them a gift subscription - they'll appreciate it I ( Krwum in tN U.S. as Miehle 11 Litlwr>f'inr) • The molt modern Offset pr"' oi its si• I 14 x 20 inches) • Th easiest to operate with Its centralized control pa11el end pg.Ii bvtton operafi011. • No dampening roffers to bother wiHi its patented Rotafount, giv"'9 mechanically controlled ciainpift9. • Hairline re9s+er-ideal few multicolor jobs Oft any type of paper at low cot.t •lid great speed. . . Model R. 30,/90 Actual Demonstration now going on!! You are invited to see COM~IUNITY PUBLISHERS, INC. Pll?NTERS * UTHOGRAPHERS * PUIUSHIRS 1986 llenu, s-. Au !'el. 5-41-96