Panorama

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Title: Panorama
Issue Date: Volume XII (Issue No.8) August 1960
Language: English
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extracted text: AUGUST 1960 85 Centavos CONTENTS Articles: Nationalism and the Filipino Intellectual................... by Jose A. Lansang 3 Filipino Painting.....................by Arturo Rogelio Luz 10 Educating Emotions Prevents Juvenile Delinquency by Dorothy Thompson 15 The Individual in a Mass Culture ........................... by George Gerbner 22 The Congo Knot............................................................ 28 The Performing Arts ............... by Ricardo Cassell 31 The Kidnaping of Kamlon ....................................... 35 Solar Upheavals Heard on Earth ........................... 49 The Filipino Theatre by Daisy Hontiveros-Avellana 81 The Instructive Role of Popular Publications........... by E. P. Petanne 86 Cigarettes and Lung Cancer.......... by Lois Miller 91 Regular Features: ■ Scratching: Sign of Personality? ............................... 2 Star Twinkle Helps Measure Space Distance.......... 27 Fiction: The Lost Ones...............................by S. V. Epistola 50 Book Review: Literature and the American Tradition ................... by Leonard Casper 79 PANORAMA is published monthly by the Community Publishers, Inc., Inverness St., Sta. Ana, Manila, Philippines Editor-. Alejandrino G. Hufana Foreign contributing editor: Leonard Casper Art director: NARCISO Rodriguez Business Manager: Mrs. C. A. M AR A MAG Subscription rates: In the Philippines, one year P8.50; two yean P16.00. Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S.; two yean $7.00 U.S. Single copy 85 centavos. Zell your Jrirnds about the Panorama, the Philippines’ most versatile, most significant magazine today. (five them a year’s subscription — NOW! they will appreciate it. Subscription Form ................. 1 year for P8.50 ................. 2 years for P16.00 ................. Foreign subscription: one year $4.00 U.S. Warne ............................................................................................... Street ................................................................................................ City or Town ............................... 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. Inverness St., Sta. Ana, Manila, Philippines Dibds that scratch their heads have the bird ex" perts scratching their own heads in confusion. There now appear to be three ways — not two — that birds will scratch their heads, Jack P. Hailman of Bethesda, Md., reports here in the magazine The. Condor. Scientists had just about decided that the two me thods were behavior traits. If an unidentified bird were seen to use the “direct” method, in which the leg is brought directly to the head, he could not be placed in the same family as the bird that used the “indirect” method of bringing the leg over its drooped wing in order to scratch its head. Exceptions to the head scratching rule have been noted, Mr. Hailman says, and now there is a third method: perchscratching. Scratching the head against the perch is widespread enough among the Emberizinae — the bunting family — to justify considering it as a third method, Mr. Hail man suggests. The method seems to be directed to the side of the head and does not seem to be a response to any appa rent outside stimuli. The perch-scratching motions observed by Mr. Hail man are “variable in form, and possibly are primarily the result of individual experience in contrast to the more rigid direct and indirect scratching motions,” he reports. 2 Panorama AUGUST 1960 Entered as second class mail matter at the Manila Post Office on Dec. 7. 1956 VOL. XII MANILA, PHILIPPINES No. 8 Seriously speaking Nationalism and the Filipino Intellectual By Jose A. Lansang WHETHER ARTIST, WRITE ? or scientist, the Filipin) intellectual appears t j have an increasing probler 1 with nationalism, reputedly a i force loose in on r world today. And it has not be * come dear to anyone — certain ly not to this writer — whether it is nationalism that creates the problem, or the Filipino in tellectual that is maladjusted to this supposedly important force in our contemporary world. In view of this unresolv ed issue that serves as the startservations and which has opengni point of these rambling obed various trains of thought crowding in the mind, I will just go on, leaving the issue to fare for itself. In 1955, in our Philippines, a writer has to work in order to live; he would na turally prefer just to write, but necessity is a ruthless taskmas ter, and Nick Joaquin has had to read proofs at the Free Press, Jose Garcia Villa at one time clipped newspapers for a living, N.V.M. Gonzalez teaches class, Amador T. Daguio writes press releases for the Armed Forces. And, it is more or less the same with the other writers, or those who are trying to become writ ers in our country. While this is an old paint, dating back to Homer himself who had to sing for his meat and wine in order to live to compose epics, and at a time when nationalism as we know it today had perhaps not existed, it occurs to me now that one of the possible causes of the intel lectual’s maladjustment vis a vis nationalism might be the probability that nationalism has some relation to economics, or economics to nationalism. How ever that relation is turned around, the fact that an artist or writer has to eat and remain alive and tolerably presentable to his fellow beings seems to argue that, whether he likes it or not, economic forces do entangle him, and perhaps has entangled him since Homer’s days to ours. The artist, writer or scientist never has lived by bread alone, but he must pursue the staff of life nevertheless in whatever the pursuit becomes a conscious one the seed of nationalism, or nationalistic feeling, is already sown, and beings to sprout willy nilly as the days go on. Until the day is inevitably reached when nationalism becomes some problem to the intellectual. Looking back at what might losely be called the history of Filipino nationalism, one re members that Rizal’s motivat ing grievance was the usurious and later confiscatory treatment by the powers that be then of his family’s lands in Calamba, and that Bonifacio, the fan-ped dler and later warehouseman in a Manila foreign firm, sublimat ed his thirst for economic sta bility with deep draughts of night reading applied no less than the most subversive chap ters of Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution. 4 Panobama A nd since Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio have been accepted by common consent as the fathers of our national ism, with the significant in cident that Rizal, by any stand ard, was irrefutably an intellec tual, even if Bonifacio was not exactly one, I would offer the surmise that the land troubles of his family in Calamba might have had something to do with the feeling of nationalism which like a quick-growing vigorous plant, sprouted and matured in Rizal, nurturing his splendid intellectual labors for Filipino redemption; just as Bonifacio’s futureiess job as a bodeguero in an alien commercial house in his homeland may be surmised, in these Freudian times, as hav ing had something to do with his leadership of the Filipinos’ one and only Glorious Revolu tion. Keeping such tentative sur mises in mind, I am fascinated by the vague recollection that in order for Filipino intellec tuals of Rizal’s time to give free expression to their rising nation alistic sentiments, and to nour ish such sentiments into further vigour, they had to go abroad, principally to Europe where, at the time, the social and political atmosphere appeared to be hos pitable to their feverish intel lectual activities. Some went only as far as Japan and Hong kong, but they seemed to have found the intellectual climate there already much better than that in the Philippines. My further fascinating thought about these Filipino in tellectuals of Rizal’s time who may be said to be among the founders, or at least harbingers, of Filipino nationalism: They seemed to have had the knack of going to the countries or ci ties where they could find nour ishment, or at least sympathy, for their budding nationalism. They went to Madrid, Barcelo na, London, Ghent, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, Yokoha ma, Hongkong. Rizal passed through New York and visited the Niagara Falls. II *T * he world’s currencies were not yet inflated in Rizal’s time and the Spanish real and the Mexican peso, I im agine, bought a lot more then than what our peso today can buy; but still it must have meant some fair sums of money for a Filipino intellectual in those days to live, study, and carry on “propaganda” for Fili pino rights and liberties in Ma drid, Barcelona or Paris. It is known, of course, that Rizal liv ed frugally, Marcelo H. del Pi lar starved on the sidewalks of Barcelona, and Graciano Lopez Jaena who Rizal, according to General Jose Alejandrino, rat ed as the most talented Filipino he (Rizal) had known, squan dered all his money like a true August 1960 5 Bohemian in the cafes where he sat for endless hours and where he wrote some of the best edi torials of La Solidaridad. Still Rizal and his family were not exactly poor, nor were the Lu nas (Antonio and Juan), nor Mariano Ponce, and certainly not Pedro A. Paterno. These expatriate Filipino intellectuals received regular remittances from home, and it was not ur gent for them to earn their dai ly bread. They were all patriots and nationalists; or, rather thev were consciously founding Filipino nationality. And economic sta tus did not seem to have affect ed the degree of warmth or con viction of each patriot’s championshin of his country’s cause. The well-to-do Rizal was no less uncompromising than the penu rious Plaridel, and the bohemi an Jaena was as conscientious in his advocacies as the fairly opulent Ponce. The common de nominator of their individual drives, all sublimted into fiery championship of the Mother land’s cause, was, I believe, the desire for human dignity. Rich or poor, landlord or starving art ist in the Philippines under the Spanish colonial administration was equally treated an inferior, an “Indio”; and, how bitterly Rrzal felt about this debase ment of the Filipino may be felt, by contagion, so to speak, by any sensitive-minded Filipi no today reading his essay, “The Indolence of the Filipinos.” As long as the Filipino intel lectuals who pioneered in the struggle for rights and liberties for their countrymen — in oth er words, for human dignity — were still remote from the fruits of victory, their nationalistic sentiments help them together, although rivalries such as those that developed between Rizal and Plaridel over the leader ship of the Filipino intellectuals in Spain suggested that econo mic and ideological motivations were present, as potential divi sive factors, albeit submerged for the time being by what Ri zal wisely invoked as the need for unity as a prerequisite for the success of the Filipino com munity’s labors for the Mother land. Rizal, the intellectual genius and scion of a landed family, a deeply religious man in his own fashion — as all his writings show — would be called in to day’s terms a partisan of what President Eisenhower, for in stance, has called “progressive eonservatisim”; Plaridel, the penurious journalist and found er of masonry in the Philippines would, on the other hand, fit into the category of what are called today “left-wing” democ rats, or even “anti-Soviet” so cialists. These economic and ideological undertones which characterized the intra-group 6 Panorama relations and activities of the Filipino intellectual community in Spain would suggest an ex pansion of my original surmise about the possible relationship between economics and nation alism. It may be said that na tionalism, ecoonmics and ideo logy have perhaps intimate con nections and even — quien sabe? as the Filipino intellectual of Rizal’s time used to say — organic relationship. Ill A WIDER VISTA of speculation now opens before us; and interesting features may be found if we glance briefly at the “social and economic landscape” on which Bonifacio’s revolution was staged, and what transpired thereon immediately after. The interesting features may be best suggested by a number of ques tions. Aside from the amor phous, disorganized aggrieved massed in the country who ral lied behind Bonifacio’s revolt, who were the main supporters and moving spirits of the Katipunan organization, besides the Tondo proletarian? What was the social and economic status or standing of these supporters? What were their individual cal culations, in so far as improve ment of personal fortunes was concerned, if, and after, the or ganized revolt had succeeded? Were their ambitions merely political in character, or, were their aspirations colored and motivated by social and econo mic considerations? It is one of the serious gaps in our historical record, of course, that facts and informa tion on which to base more or less dependable answers to those questions are still await ing to be unearthed and to be classified and organized by the historical researcher. And there are other questions. After the success of the revolution, there was the conflict between Aguinaldo and Bonifacio, and the un fortunate killing of the Katipunan founder and hero; what were the real causes of the con flict? Did the fact that, essen tially, Aguinaldo was identified with the land-holding class while Bonifacio, the plebian, had little respect for vested in terests in land have anything to do with the conflict between the two? A N INTERESTING aspect of 7 * the rivalry bewteen Agui naldo and Bonifacio was the fact that neither was an intel lectual. Aguinaldo, scion of a family of means, did not belong to the group which formed the Filipino colony in Europe where the ideological prepara tion for the revolution, so to speak, had been matured. What were the motivations of Agui naldo, aside from the obvious one of patriotism, which made him dispute the leadership of Bonifacio? Were there social August 1960 7 and economic motives involv ed? And again, what lay, really, behind the later conflict be>tween Aguinaldo and Antonio Luna? To ask a more general question, were there social and economic cross-currents pulling as undertow beneath the storms of conflict on the surface be tween Aguinaldo and Bonifacio, and between Aguinaldo and Luna, indisputable nationalists and patriots all? And, a last intriguing question: How and and why did the intellectuals lose control of the revolution which they had ideologically prepared for? My own impression, after having asked the foregoing questions, is that to this day the substantial content of what we call Filipino nationalism is so shapeless and indeterminate be cause we have no informative answers to those questions. We have been let down by our his torians. vi sm with ballast the contempoellectuals is, I say? a man without ural or poltical home. He ven a c thinks more often than not of human liberty as having been won at Runnymede and in the battles of Lexington and Con cord — for he has committed to heart much Anglo-Saxon his tory — while he is confused about the issues of the battle of San Mateo or the bloodier one at Zapote bridge. He recall's Ba" taan and Corregidor, but their curious aftermath does not lift his heart, because it was not really his nation’s own free de-| isions which had exposed his bunti^t^terrible devastation, nd after the cruel ordeal was over Japan and the Japanese appeared to have received bet ter treatment by the free world Panorama itself than the Philippines and the Filipinos. Filipino nationalism has thus been stunted and stultified, and the Filipino intellectual has not shown so far any strong incli nation to look for ways of fas hioning a political and cultural home buttressed by solid and autochthonous elements of sound nationalism. It is not young intellectuals of the Rizal type, nor even of the Bonifacio type, who, in the Philippines to day, are developing a conscious nationalism that shows pros pects of being seriously and sustainedly asserted, and there fore likely to result in the cons truction of a political and cultu ral home that Filipinos can tru ly call their own. The new conscious nationalists are found among the youth who are enlist ing in the public service, or who are entering the technical professions, and perhaps the greatest number, those who are trying to find a foothold in the commerce and trade and pro ductive industries of the coun try. Here, then, is a possible support to my earlier surmise regarding the connection be tween nationalistic feeling and economic factors. August 1960 9 Original or copy? FILIPINO By Arturo Rogerio Luz What do we mean by Fili pino painting? A paint ing by Filipino, a Philip pine theme painted by any painter, or do we mean a Phil ippine theme painted by a Fili pino painter? Again: When a Filipino painter paints a foreign theme or subject, does he pro duce Filipino painting or is he merely a Filipino painter paint ing? And when a foreign paint er paints a Philippine theme or subject, does he produce Fili pino painting or is he merely a painter painting a Filipino theme or subject? Filipino painters have paint ed and are painting native and foreign subjects, in local and foreign surroundings. Luna and Hidalgo painted foreign themes and subjects and are said to have produced Filipino paint ing. Others before them copied saints, depicted religious themes and painted foreign subjects. They are remembered not on ly as Filipino painters but as the grandparents of Filipino painting. And there are paint ers who have also painted, and are painting, native themes in local surroundings: Igorots, the planting and harvesting and pounding of rice, the nipa hut and the barong-barong. The works of Luna and Hidalgo, and those before them, may or may not be considered Filipino 10 Panorama PAINTING painting, but not because the theme is foreign. Paintings of Igorots, the nipa hut and barong-barongs may or may not become Filipino painting, but not because the subject is na tive. The use of native themes or subjects does not necessarily produce Filipino painting, any more than the use of borrowed themes or subjects will always produce foreign painting. Gauguin was a French painter who lived and painted in Ta hiti, and who married a Tahi tian. But Gauguin did not pro duce Tahitian art by painting Tahiti, any more than by mar rying a native could he have made himself a Tahitian. A Chinese painter painting a New York skyline will not produce American painting, but might produce a painting of a New York skyline, a Chinese painting of a New York sky line, or simply a Chinese paint ing. A painting by Hernando Ocampo was at one time award ed a prize for being the most representative Filipino painting among many other paintings. Yet the painting was abstract and the symbols, universal. ■ una, Hidalgo and others " since then have painted and are painting foreign themes and subjects, and have some August 1960 11 times produced Filipino paint ing. And other painters have painted and are painting native themes and subjects, but do not always produce Filipino painting, only paintings of Philippine themes by Filipino painters. And a few painters have painted and are painting native and foreign subjects, and have sometimes produced Fili pino painting. For in the term Filipino painting is clearly^ or perhaps_ hopefully^ implied a body of paintings that, irrespec tive of content or form, and without recourse __to the acci dents of geographyor nationaHty^iiZyeEZreprESentati^^of the native character or spirit. “From time^tb-time Filipinos indulge in intense, if misdirect ed, nationalism. At such times the tendency has been to pro nounce as foreign anything ac quired instead of inherited, and to condemn as evil anything that is borrowed. In painting this has often resulted in a hasty reexamination of existing forms and a rejection of any thing even remotely foreign. This is accompanied by a fran tic search for purely native forms and motifs, supposedly inherited and uninfluenced. In variably the search ends with the rediscovery of Igorot and Moro forms and motifs, an cient Tagalog script and indi genous fauna and flora. fThese are used, more or less arbitra rily, to disguise otherwise con ventional paintings, masquerad ing as True Filipino Painting. While these cannot be denied as being native subjects, neither can they be accepted as the on ly native subjects, nor taken to be the only requisites to Fili pino painting. This is not to suggest that Filipino painters should not paint native themes, or that native subjects will not pro duce Filipino painting. Quite the contrary. Filipino painters should paint native subjects, for native subjects have produced and will produce Filipino paint ing, though not necessarily al ways. For while Igorots and palms and carabaos are unde niably Philippine subjects, ty pical native subjects, they are not necessarily the only Philip pine subjects. The danger, if any, in limiting ourselves to the hut and palm and carabao is not so much because they are not Philippine subjects, which they are, but because these are often mistaken to be the only ~tfue Philippine sub jects, which-of course they are not. There is a tendency among many painters to rely on these native elements as leading in evitably to Filipino painting. At the same time few, if any, seem to realize thatQFilipinos are not necessarily Igorots or Moros or barefooted natives but can also be Manilenos who like to wear~shoes and” prefer palm-beach suits to g-strings 12 Panorama and would rather go about in automobiles; that the Philip pines is not made up entirely of palm-filled islands infested with carabaos in an eternal sunset; that the carretela is no more native than the jeepney and that Moro art and life and custom is no more Filipino than it is Hindu or Mohammedan; that we are part Chinese and Indian, Spanish and Indonesian and in many ways American, in speech and manner and cus tom, and certainly in art. Jk national art or expression stems from tradition, or it grows from influences. Many influences acquired from different sources over a long period of time, absorbed and altered£by native use and man ner and custom, slowly assum ing ^untaue^and^ particular form or charaCter~~until these are completely assimilated into the native culture, in time be coming the native tradition. There is yet not tradition in Filipino painting, only painters painting in a foreign manner or style or tradition. We have painters painting in the classic and academic Western tradi tion. And we have painters painting in the contemporary styles or manner, in the con temporary French or American or Mexican manner. But not in the Filipino manner, for there is yet no distinct Filipino style or tradition, only Filipino painters painting in a foreign manner or style or tradition. If we have therefore pro duced, or are producing Filipino painting, we have produced it painting in a foreign style or tradition, and not necessarily using native subjects. We have produced, or are producing, Fi lipino painting by painting saints and fields and dalagas, huts and fruits and buildings, leaves and shapes and color. And we have painted these either in the Western tradition, in the contemporary interna tional styles, or sometimes in the manner of a Klee or Ma tisse or Tamayo. Never in the native tradition, not in the Fi lipino style or manner yet sometimes, perhaps, in the Fili pino spirit, that indefinable, in tangible blend of diverse cul tures and backgrounds and qualities. For how else can one account for that quality in a Manansala, which can be in any one of many styles and bearing the trace of many sources yet sometimes, often times uniquely, curiously Filipi no? Or how else explain the Filipinism in Ocampo ' who paints in the international style, in the abstract and non-representational manner yet suc ceeds, as no other Filipino painter, in reflecting the native heat and vitality and color? Filipino painting does not stem from tradition, but from influences: malayan-ori e n t a 1 August 1960 13 traits deeply ingrained in the native character and, more re cently, occidental influences no less, if not possibly more, a part of native culture and expres sion. If it is therefore to our malayan-oriental origin that we can ultimately attribute that native element that spirit or quality in native art or expres sion, it is to the occidental cul tures that we owe our whole background in painting. The Filipino painter is native by birth, European-American by training or tradition, partly Mohammedan or Spanish or Chinese or Indian or American, in heritage and manner and custom. And not any one of these, but all. If we have pro duced, or are producing, Fili pino painting it is only because the native element, our innate and inherited traits and torms have combined, or are combin ing, with all the acquired orien tal-occidental cultures and has formed, or is slowly forming, an art or expression which is neither occidental nor oriental, at the same time both — but which must ultimately be dis tinct, unique and Filipino. It may have failed to define the native element or more closely examine Filipino paint ing. But if I have succeeded in suggesting what Filipino painting is not, or what the na tive spirit or quality could be, that is good enough. For as one painter suggested: no one should define Filipino painting, for there is yet no Filipino painting, only paintings by Fili pinos. * * * Evidence Early in his career, young Clarence Darrow was defend ing a difficult case against an older attorney whc loftily re ferred to Darrow as "that beardless youth.” When Darrow’s turn came, he addressed the court as fol lows: "My worthy opponent seems to condemn me for not hav ing a beard. Let me reply with a story. The king of Spain once dispatched a youthful nobleman to the court of a neighboring king, who received him with this outraged complaint: ’Does the King of Spain lack men, that he sends me a beardless boy?’ “To which the young ambassador replied: ‘Sire, if my King had supposed that you imputed wisdom to a bear, he would have sent a goat.’ ” Darrow won the case. 14 Panorama For you, baby fawuJt By Dorothy Thompson Z"J few days before the discontinuance of the an cient Third Avenue El in New York, I decided, for old times’ sake, to take a last ride on it. I climbed the stairs to board at a midtown station, shortly after three in the afternoon. No one was on the platform except the elderly ticket seller and a dozen youths from a nearby high school. They were traveling on passes, free transportation furn ished public-school pupils, and their behavior was atrocious. The ticket seller asked them to line up to show their passes. This they refused to do, shov ing, crowding, and shouting at one another at the top of their lungs. He spoke to one girl who had crowded through, saying, “Please come back and show your pass.” “I showed you my pass,” she screamed back. “I’m sorry, but you didn’t,” the old man said. Now, still screaming reiteratively that she had shown it to “the old dope,” she flashed the pass through the wicket and banged it on the old man nose, shouting, “There’s your pass for you!” Their uptown train came in, and they galloped aboard. I was going through the downtown August 1960 15 gate, but had time again to ob serve their faces. They wore an expression of extreme aggres siveness. Not one looked happy. In none was there an expres sion of interest or affection. “Excuse me,” I said to the ticket seller. “Are they always like that?” “Usually worse,” he said biterly. “I’m scared of three o’clock. I have the feeling they might kill me — just for a joke.” It was a small incident, but I was unable to dismiss it from my mind. A few weeks before ( a boy of fifteen had been shot dead in a New York street by a seventeen-year old youth who be lieved him to be a member of a rival gang. When the murderer was arrested two teen-aged girl onlookers had cheered him as a hero. The papers were full of such stories, I had seen noth ing on the station but a display of bad manners. But beyond the bad manners, it was that facial expression that disturbed me. I knew what the ticket seller meant. It was frightening in it self. The wearers of this expres sion, whether they know it or not, belong to a tiny previleged group of the more than two bil lion people who inhabit this pla net, for only a small fraction of mankind has access to educa tion above the primary grades, and millions not even that. *"Yhese youths of fourteen to eighteen are not working as most of their grandparents were, helping to “pay their own way.” The municipality is pay ing their way; they don’t even have to trudge on foot to school. They have, <rfree for nothing,” access to centuries of human culture; great museums housing two millenia of art; the finest music for the turn of a dial or the adjustment of a record; li braries in which the wit and wisdom of ages are stored. The President of the United States speaks to them on televi sion; talented actors perform for them in their own homes; a vast entertainment business ca ters to their tastes; a multimillion-dollar clothing business dresses them within the bud gets of their parents’ income more lavishly than any youth except a small class of the rich have ever been dressed before. Great scientific enterprises work day and night to guard them from diseases. Youth clubs are organized in and out of school to provide for their re creation. In the great cities an ever-increasing number of them live in modern apartments, fur nished with every convenience, with part of the rent paid by the community. Public parks and play grounds are at their disposal. 16 Panorama They are, in fact, by any stand ards, in any time, “lords of crea tion.” Yet all this, which comes to them from others, they take for granted, as a “right”, and if it is not granted, feel, and are call ed, “underprivileged.” None of it moves them to gratitude, or awakens in them a sense of re ciprocity toward society. That the fatherly old ticket seller, calling for their passes, is, in fact, a cog in a mechanism operating for their benefit, and a fellow human being, is unre cognized. The public parks must be po liced against vandalism, and their shadows are jungles for gangs preying upon each other. Anyone who takes the trou ble daily to compile from any great metropolis newspaper re ports of legal misdemeanors and crimes committed by minors will be appalled at what he ac cumulates in a month, and na tional and local statistics en large the story. Whenever a pe culiarly savage and senseless crime occurs, the public is mo bilized; calls are issued for more law-enforcement agencies, more public expenditures for youth clubs, better co-ordination of so cial agencies, and the appoint ment of a new committee. Citi zens assess the causes; the schools blame homes and churches; the parents blame the schools; the sociologists blame “living conditions,” and so ad in finitum, in a circle that only gets back to where it started. Yet I submit that the fault lies primarily in one place: in education; and that the basic fault is a misconception of the purpose of education, and the means by which it can be effect ed. This misconception rests on the thesis that knowledge is the source of power, in the indivi dual and in a society; that a suf ficiently “informed” population is capable of satisfactory selfgovernment; that conduct is pri marily controled by reason; and that the purpose of education is to create “individuals efficient in their own interest.” PUT this phrase in quotation marks because it is not mine. Fully a generation ago I read a book by the British sociolo gist, Benjamin Kidd, called The Science of Power. It was writ ten during the early stage of the First World War and is long out of print. I only lately re obtained the volume, which had been borrowed from me and not returned. Benjamin Kidd observed, then, the growing savagery in Western society—the savagery of class and international con flicts, the ever-increasing sav agery of war and the ever grow ing cult of naked force, accom panying enormous material and scientific progress. He believed August 1960 17 the eventual result would be the decline and fall of Western civilization, in which prediction he was by no means alone. Power in a society, he declar ed—the force that makes for survival—rests upon the trans mission and improvement of the cultural inheritance, and this transmission and refinement is not accomplished by the train ing of the individual intellect, the inculcation of skills or the arguments of reason, but by the “emotion of the ideal," awaken ed in very small children—in whom he believed it was inhe rent and natural — and culti vated to maturity. The ideal is “other-regarding" emotion, that subordinates the interests of the individual to the interests of the community; the interest to succeed to the interest to ac hieve; the interest to get to the impulse to give; the interest of the present to the interest of the future; the instinct of agression to the instinct of altruistic prot ectiveness. The child, in short, cannot be made a worthy member of so ciety by appeals to his self-in terest; he cannot be rendered immune to aggressive urges by indoctrination that “crime does not pay.” He is not made good or bad by external material liv ing conditions; or by a greater or lesser amount of intellectual training; or by a higher or lo wer I. Q. His actions and atti tudes as a child largely deter mine his actions and attitudes 18 Panorama as an adult. But these are not inspired by his brain, but by his feelings. He becomes what he is encouraged and trained to love, admire, worship, cherish, and sacrifice for. This training cannot be incul cated by appeals to self-inter est, by fear of discipline, by preachings, or by ambition for individual recognition as some one above and apart from hu man society. The affectionate instincts which preclude aggres siveness grow in response to af fection and out of the desire to be loved, which means to be ho nored. In all this manners play an important role, for good man ners are nothing more or less than the expression of conside ration for others. It is futile to tell a child that earliest age into attitude or pos ture of respect. Schools that insist on clases’ standing when teacher .enters the room do not do so for the sake of the teach er’s prestige, but for the sake of the children. The teacher is to be respected for herself and her function. To say that education must encourage individual “self-ex pression” begs the question. What kind of “self-exoression”? The first expressions that need to be engendered are those of courage, industry and helpful ness. The desire to help is pre sent in nearly every small child. A toddler will say, “Me help mummy.” Only too often his help is impatiently rejected as impending rather than contri buting to performing the task, but in rejecting it a creative so cietal impulse is being suppress ed in the child. A modern catchword is, “The child dpes not exist for the school, but the school for the child.” A little thought expose the fatuity of this slogan. The school is an institution of the community and exists to serve it; to transfer to the child its highest ideals, and so guide, train and enlighten him that he will, as a member of the com munity, cherish its highest ideals, emulate its best beha viors, protect its safety, feel a duty for its well-being, and thus ensure its freedoms and its sur vival as the condition of his own freedoms and survival. The freer the society, the more dispersed its powers, the more essential is the develop ment of its personal and social character. The school is the child’s first encounter with society, and its primary task is to help him. to become socially acceptable and socially creative. Apart from society the “individual” has no meaningful existence. But socie ty is not the sum total of the individuals comprising it, at any moment. It is a continuity that they inherit and carry on. They do not inherit it as in dividuals, through their genes— August 1960 19 but as part of a general cons ciousness and conscience re garding what is beautiful, true admirable, and worthy to be cherished and emulated; in short, of what is good for man kind. All societies have their more and moralities or they are not human societies but jungles. The first function of education is, therefore, not to turn out bet ter or worse laborers, house wives, stenographers, mathema ticians, engineers, and so on— each activity representing but one function of a human per son—but to send on their way new members of the communi ty who, through their characters (largely conditioned by emo tional response), will contribute something over and above whatever they do for a living. Society is transcendent to the individual. Apart from pure ly biological inheritances, it creates the individual. The so cietal impulses alone preserve society and through society the individual. “No man is an is land unto himself.” jIll crime, in whatever ca7 tegory, consists of only one thing: malicious offense against a fellow human being or beings. Those who merely hurt the feelings of others with out feeling uncomfortable them selves are in an emotional con dition to commit graver misde meanors. Courtesy—a “mere” matter of manners—is an ex pression of the “other-regard ing" emotion. Internal feelings are reflected in external beha vior, but external behavior also contributes to the cultivation of internal feelings. It is hard to feel aggressive while acting con siderately. Good manners may be only skin deep to start with, but they seldom remain so. Children are imitative. Rude, quarrelsome and violent parents are likely to have children of similar behavior. But the home alone does not condition the emotional behavior of the child, who, above all, imitates his con temporaries and those adults whom they, as a group, admire. The school has the advantage over the home in that it is a society of children. Their emo tional response to that society will determine their later emo tional response to the world at large. Only the stimulation of the emotion of the ideal in very small children, where it exists latently, will create a society approaching the ideal: a so ciety instinctively protective; one that does not invite ag gression by aggressiveness, but will instinctively defend against aggression, not out of hate but out of love. If we looked back upon our own, what teachers do we remember—o r what about them do we remember? The lessons they taught us, well or ill? 20 Panorama We remember only the teachers we loved, only those whose characters we instinctively re spected and emulated. It seems to me that far too much empha sis is put today upon pedagogi cal training, especially for tea chers in primary schools, and far too little upon selection for character. It also seems to me that too much importance is attributed to intelligence tests as placing children in educable or uneducable categories. The child, with an I.Q. of 69 is not, as an indi vidual,, going to make the mark in the world that the child with an I.Q. of 30 may. But he may be just as good a human being. For goodness and badness, with rare exceptions — like sanity and and insanity—are not con ditioned by the brain but by the emotions. Our prisons and in sane asylums are filled with peoplp who have nothing wrong with their' brains but whose emotions are deranged and whose societal impulses have never been cultivated or have gone awry. No country is more health conscious than ours, and parti cularly of the health of child ren. We are concerned about their nutrition and have devel oped it into a science; Lu.idreds of millions of dollars are read ily obtainable for research, es pecially into the diseases that aifect children. And this is all very well. But penal institutions are nevertheless filled with wednourished inmates. Four times as many people die each year from bullet wound as are lost from polio; and more hospital beds are required for mental cases than for any other one disease. Criminals become so not irom hardening of the arte ries but from hardening of the heart, and few cases of insanity have direct pathological causes; the overwhelming majority are due to emotional derangements of frustrated egos. Society can protect itself only if its educational institu tions foster the protective, other-regaraing emotions in child ren. The insights for such a de velopment seldom come out of the pedagogy books. They are the insights of all great religious teachers; of those who have con cerned themselves to create good people in a good society. August 1960 21 Lonely in a crowd The Individual in a MASS CULTURE George Gerbner T takes 17,000 different job classifications to produce an ordinary can of peas. Thou sands more are needed to mar ket the millions of cans that must be sold to pay the produ cers and to make a profit. A small army of specialized talent mus: convince us, therefore that one brand of ordinary peas is like no other brand of ordinary peas. Finally, we need a de tachment of the artists, perfor mers, and technicians to create the popular cultural atmos phere in which the vibrant image of the brand the corpo rate profile of its provider may be etched in the public mind. All this is genuine aspect of mass culture. Mass culture today has ab sorbed and utilized previously existing forms and functions of high folk class cultures, devel oped new form of its own, and transformed the whole into a historically new phenomenon. The facts of this transformation are so obvious that we often take them for granted. Parents used to wonder how they spent their time before they had chil dren. Today they are equally apt to ask, “What did we do be fore television?” 22 Panorama As a nation we now devote more time to the consumption of mass-produced communica tions than to paid work, or play, or anything except sleep (and the “late show” is cutting into that too). Television alone, only ten years old as a mass medium now demands one-fifth of the average person’s waking life. Comic books, twenty years old, can sell one billion copies a a year at the cost of $100 mil lion — four times the budget of all public libraries, and more than the cost of the entire book supply for both primary and secondary schools. Movies de veloped within a lifetime, reach 50 million people who still go to theatres each week. The same number stay home and watch movies on TV each night —a total of 50 million a week But such facts and figures illuminate only one facet of the transformation. They do not reveal anything about changes in the structure, context, and orientation of popular culture. H omo sapiens became a re cognizable human being through collaboration, communi. 1y, and communication^, Of these, communication is the most uniquely human element in its symbolic representation and re-creation of the human condition. This symbolic repre sentation and re-creation — whatever we call it news, infor mation, or entertainment — is the heart of popular culture. This is the shared communica tive context of messages and images through which society reveals to each of its members the varieties limitations, and potentials of the human condi tion. The basic social function of popular culture is, therefore, to make available to all members of the species the broadest range of meanings of their own humanity that society makes possible, and, in turn, to help them build such societies as new conceptions of the human po tential may require. Popular culture can fulfill such functions to the extend that it makes available repre sentations and points of view that enable men to judge a real world, and to change reality in the light of reason, necessity, and human values. To that extent, popular cul ture also forms the basis for self-government. Men’s experiments with selfgovernment are predicated on a historically new conception of popular culture. This new con ception assumes that men have such consciousness of existence as they themselves provide for in communications; that reason confronts realities on terms culmakes available; that societies can be self-directing only to the extent, and in ways, that their popular cultures permit them to be so. August 1960 23 Much has happened since some of these assumptions found expression in the First Amendment. Popular culture has come to be mass-produced and harnessed to the service of a marketing system. The founding fathers made life, liberty, and property sub ject to law but tried to protect freedom of speech and press from the main threat they knew —government. They did not foresee the revolutionary cul tural development of our time: the transformation of public communication into mass-pro duced commodities protected from the laws of the republic but subjected to the laws of pro perty and of markets. Today the words of Andrew Fletcher, uttered in 1704, rever berate in the halls of the Acade my (and, at times, of Con gress): “I believe if man were permitted to write all the bal lads, he need not care who should make the laws of the na tion.” For ours is a revolution in the making of all the ballads. The “ballads” of an age are those vivid dramatic accounts and images which compel atten tion for their own sake and which, in so doing, provide com mon assumptions about man, life, and the world. They are the means through which socie ty communicates to its mem bers. Today these means are big, few, and costly. They are own ed, controlled, and supported by industrial enterprises of mass communication. These en terprises, and the industries that support them, bear central res ponsibility for decisions affect ing popular culture. It falls to them to safeguard the freedom to reflect on the requirements and dreams of a real world. But there are neither Constitutional guarantees nor alternative forms of support to protect the mass media in carrying out these responsibilities and in safeguarding these freedoms. The strategy of private-enter prise mass production is geared to careful assessment, cultiva tion, and exploitation of market able desires. A detachment of intelligence specialists probes public fancy; . reconnaissance brings in the sales charts, costper-thousand figures, consump tionstatistics; corporate head quarters issues a series of battle orders; an army of popularity engineers prepares compelling messages designed to make the public want what it will get. Then vivid images of life roll out of the “dream factories”, produced to exacting specifica tions to sell the public what it wants. These are the images and messages through which millions see and judge and live and dream in the broader hu man context. And the condi tions of sale are implicit in the in the content and quality of the the dream. What are these im24 Panorama lications? How do these condi tions of sale affect the indivi dual’s image of himself? How is that image changing? Individual means indivisible, a single separate person. Indivi duality is the sum total of char acteristics that set one indivi dual apart from all others. What leads to differentiation and uniqueness of individual existence? One factor is the range of response required by the environment. Life probably began in the depth of the oceans where food can float to the sim plest organism with little effort or sensation on its part. A higher form of differentiation is required when the organism can float against the current, as well as with it, in search of food. But the highest forms of life we get tremendously more complicated pattern because of the operation of another factor: social life. Specialization in the perform ance of socially necessary tasks leads to further differentiation and uniqueness. When 17,000 different job classifications go into caning of peas we have an intricate social network both re lating and differentiating ways of making a living, which is the material basis of individualized existence. But existence by itself is not consciousness of existence. Be tween human existence and our consciousness of existence stand the symbolic representation and imaginative re-creaiton of exist ence that we call culture. Cul ture is itself a historical process and product. It reflects the gen eral productive structure of so ciety, the role and position of communications institutions, the dominant points of view their role and position may impart to these institutions, and certain overriding myths, themes, and images. ^DUCATORS especially wond er about the consequences inherent in the commercial com pulsion to present life in salable packages. They observe that in a market geared to immediate self-gratification, other rewards and appeals cannot successfully compete. They are concerned about subjecting young people to dramatically heightened im pact of the adult environment as the target audience of con sumers presumably wishes to see it. There is fear of distor tion and moral confusion in the image of the human condition that might emerge. And there is suspicion that the appeal to juvenile fantasy, role experi mentation, curiosity, and even and even anxiety and revolt, may be based more on the pri vate necessity of developing ha bits of consumer acceptance than on public requirements of developing critical judgment and of defining essentials of a useful life in society. Not least among the parado xes confronting “people of abun August 1960 25 dance” having “comfort and fun” in the “afluent society” is the shadow of what rather than surfeit in our midst, and around the world. The soothing voice ti tillates lethargic consumers while muted government re ports speak of as many as one out of every five American fa milies living in stubborn poc kets of permanent poverty. And before the message is over, somewhere within half a day’s jet-range of the voice a spiderbellied child whimpers and lies still forever. The image of the human condition reflected in the selective mirror of mass cul ture defies full moral compre hension; it can be grasped only in terms of previleges of the market place, of purely private rewards of the moment, danger ously divorced from the world of crying needs with which the present market structure can not effectively connect. The charge of the critics is, in brief, that for all its attrac tions and private satisfacitons, our mass culture does not link the individual to that real world of existence in which he can be come an autonomous person, in which he can base his direction on an awareness of the existing structure of his relations to the others, in which he can find re presentations and points of view necessary to judge and change reality in the light of human values. The complexity of the struc ture of our relationships to otner places on popular culture in c.easing demands to illustrate, illuminate, explain, and drama tize the meaning of being a man in a collective society. Whether we call it information, enter tainment or even escape, I think it is basically this quest which explains the alacrity with which we embrace every basic innovation in popular cul ture. But the “privatized” indi vidual finds his hidden thirsts increased rather than quenched. Over previledged as a consu mer and undernourished as a citizen, the purely private indivi dual is a perpetual Walter Mitty. His daydreams of identity present flight from insight into the broader context of his exist ence. From his ranks come ad dicts of schizophrenic images of Superman. Mass-produced sa dism and irrational violence are his staple diet. These afforded private gratifaction in their cheapest, and therefore most profitable, form; they can thrill him while he “tells of the world” without having to enter into any consequential relations with it. The purely private individual cannot think in Des cartes’ sense of critical reflec tion; he can only salivate to clues that evoke his “internal stirring”; he can “resonate” but not reason. There, by grace of mass culture, goes a challenge for us all. 26 Panorama However near or far Star Zwinkle Helps Measure Space "Distance 4 stronomers at the Mt. Palomar Observatory here have completed studies of twinkling stars which will help measure astronomical distances far more ac curately than ever before. For more than 40 years astronomers have based their measurements on the twinkiers, pulsating stars known as cepheid variables. But the calibrations were not as accurate. These stars have two unique habits that make it poss’ble to use them as distance indicators. They dim and brighten in a rhythmic cycle, called a period, and the length of their blink period and their brightness are related. The longer the period, the brighter the star. Twinklers with half-day periods are 100 times brighter than the sun and those with 40-day blinks are 6,000 times brighter than the sun. This means that if two cepheids of the same period are compared and one of them appears brighter than the other, the difference in brightness will be due en tirely to the fact that one is farther away than the other. If one appears to be one fourth as bright as the other, it means that it is twice as far away because brightness varies inversely with the square of the dis tance. August 1960 27 A piece of string The CONGO KNOT THE CONGO PROBLEM HAS become an entanglement of several distinct pro blems. It may help to unravel the strands and examine each individually. They are: the mutiny and the restoration of peace; the secession of Katan ga; the economic effect of Rhodesia and Nyasaland; the administrative breakdown and its repair; the Russia’s jubiliation; and the effect on race re lations, particularly in neigh bouring countries. Probably there are other strands stiff entwined. The restoration of peace has properly become a matter for the United Nations. It is a token of the progress made in Africa — and a rebuff to those who opposed it — that troops should be upholding the will of the United Nations from independent countries which five years ago did not exist. R is now proposed that European troops shall be used alongside African troops. African coun tries will regard the Congo as their affair, but the presence of Europeans will demonstrate that the United Nations is in tervening not against Belgians but against trouble-makers of whatever race. Belgium can be criticized on many grounds for her scandalous handling of the Congo’s independence, but she cannot to blamed for try ing to rescue people in danger. To this extent M. Lumumba’s complaints of aggression can be dismissed. He is on stronger ground in fearing Belgian de signs of Katanga. The Belgian Government’s statement that it had “noted” the province’s se cession might be interpreted as recognition. If secession might be interpreted as recognition. If secession were made absolute, it would mean that all hope of Belgian-Congolese economic co operation had been lost and that Belgium was prepared to write off the benefits to Africa of her 75 years there for the 28 Panorama sake of her copper interest. It would put the rest of the Con go in desperate economic straits, and African Govern ments and politicians through out the continent would not for give either Belgium or, vicar iously, the other colonial Po wers for an act of treachery to the State. |f atanga’s fortune cannot ■ * easily be separated from those of the Federation of Rho desia and Nyasaland. Last year the copper production in Ka tanga was 280,000 tons, which is more than the world surplus. If production stops entirely there will be a world shortage and Northern Rhodesia’s cop per prices will shoot up. A ceil ing price on copper would be hard to enforce. Apart from the short-term political dangers in herent in copper boom, in which Europeans will benefit indivi dually more than Africans, the way would open for copper sub stitutes to take a hold of the market and jeopardise North ern Rhodesia’s (and, if it is still there, the Federation’s) whole economy. Thus, even while the status of Katanga re mains in doubt, it is important that the Union Miniere should get its technicians back from their refuge across the border. They cannot be expected to go back without the firmest guar antees of security. As soon as the United Nations force has began to keep the peace M. Lu mumba should have a good night’s sleep and brace himself to negotiate with T. Tshombe a federal arrangement whereby Katanga (and possibly other regions) remains part of the Congo but enjoys that degree of provincial autonomy which he has been claiming since long be fore the Belgians left. If, as seems possible, the Central Government starts to break up the Congo will in any case be more than a collection of pro vinces. In the more favorable political climate which a CongoKatanga federation would bring about the administration pro blems could be tackled. The Congo will, for some years, have no energies to spare for quar rels with her neighbours. Her immediate purpose should be to restore the administrative ma chine to the conditions it was in when the Belgians left, and then to get new people to rut it. As soon as possible they should be Congolese, but in the meantime they should be grateful for any one with experience and a knowledge of French. Most of the former French colonies in Africa are now independent. They, too, suffer from a short age of experienced staff, but it is not as serious as the Congro’s It would entail great self-sacri fice to part with some of the men they have, but between August 1960 29 them they might muster the core of an efficient Congo Civil Service. In the last ten days, the So■ viet Union has had its first opportunity to meddle directly in an African situation. Mr. Khrushchev seems to have no other purpose than to excite emotions still further and cause as much havoc as he can. He must have little respect for the intelligence of Africans if he thinks that the Belgians rescue operation in the Congo can be represented as imperialist ag gression against Madagascar and Togo, which is how he des cribed the situation in his mes sage to M. Lumumba. It may that Russia which hitherto has been lukewarm in its support of an African nationalism based on intellectuals and the middle class rather than on the prole tariat, sees in the mutiny a working-class uprising which meets the Marxist specification. Whatever profit Mr. Krushchev eventually extracts from it, the Congo situation will not simpli fy the job of those in Rhodesia and Nyasaland who are working for a sensible solution of racial problems. It has emphasized the danger of creating an admi nistrative vacuum which has only lately been realized by the Government concerned. Afri can self-government is now the rule, and European Govern ments the exceptions. The ex ceptions cannot be expected to persist for many years. On the other hand, no responsible Afri can leader can take the risk of re-enacting the Congo debacle. Britain with her diminishing overseas responsibilities and her growing army of ex-colonial civil servants, is uniquely able to offer handsome terms: inde pendence with a unified Euro pean-African Civil Service and with a training scheme (on the lines of that at the Zaria Insti tute of Administration in Nige ria) to overlap independence. It would be worth trying to get Dr. Banda’s and Mr. Kaunda’s signatures to an agreement en titling Britain to ensure conti nuity in Civil Service when the date for self-government is fix ed. It invariably happens that the colonial civil servant doing the job is also the training of ficer for his subordinates, but we should not stop at this. Something like a crash prog ramme in administrative train ing here and overseas is need ed for the future security of the inhabitants, black and white, of Central and East Africa. — From Manchester Guardian Week ly 30 Panorama Juan, Be nimble By Ricardo Gassell fir is my belief that one, if not the one, great factor that has held back advance in all aspects of artistic endeav our, particularly in the perform ing arts, is the many factions in to which the Philippines is di vided. In art we are bound to find those who follow, appre ciate and even idealize one par ticular artist, group or move ment in a particular field. This is a sad commentary on the in telligence of such biased fac tions, but this condition is most prevalent here. It is only right and natural that those who appreciate art in any form will have definite pre ferences and dislikes. But when preferences reach the point of prejudice, and judgment and ap preciation are blinded by bias, then it becomes a most unheal thy condition for growth in any field. It has been responsible to a great degree for the present state of artistic endeavor. It is true that art and culture want and seek the approval of socie ty and the general public, but too often cultural functions are reduced to social functions. Is an artist to be judged only by his artistic worth'or by his so cial background? Should an ar tist be solely interested in acti vities in his own field or sup port ventures in other fields and give recognition to the works and achievements of others? Is he to expect recognition of his own worth if he is not equally willing to recognize that worth August 1960 31 in others? Is he to be afraid to give acknowledge ment of the value of others for fear it might weaken his own little faction? Any field of art is competitive. We all recognize this, but in competition there is still room for cooperation and recognition. Let me be the first to admit that even within my own group or following, judgment is some times shaped by prejudice. Be ing an artist I revolt at criticism and am overjoyed with praise. Quite natural! Praise makes the the effort worthwhile, while cri ticism makes me strive to pro duce something beyond such criticism. But in my heart, I know there is nothing in art that can reach such a standard as to be above crticism, for nothing in art can be perfect or please all. There has been sporadic talk and lukewarm interest shown in the construction of a Nation al Theatre. I am afraid that the construction of a National Theatre would be a case of put ting the cart before the horse. If the primary purpose of this theatre is for the use of visiting artists from abroad or for the few groups that have the draw ing power to fill such a theatre, then is it a worthwhile under taking? How many of the small dramatic groups who find even the F.E.U. Auditorium too large to fill with an audience, could afford to use a large theatre? Could this theatre be of advan tage to them? How many ope ras, vocalists, pianists, ballet groups, orchestras, etc., would find such a great value in this theatre? Truly, we need a bet ter equipped theatre with a larger stage, but are we ready for it? Aren’t there other things that art and artists need far more? How many of the pro blems confronting cultural ad vance would be solved by such a theatre? This theatre would need a director or a governing board. In view of the many factions prevalent here, what person or persons would direct the poli cies of this theatre without pre judice? Such a theatre will cost money to maintain and operate. Would the rental for perform ances in this theatre be beyond the reach of some groups? Would it not be better for the development of local artists to perform mora often to smal ler audiences than to a larger audience? I think we need a National Theatre, but not built of con crete and steel, but of artists and audience. When we have such an audience that our thea tres are too small to accommo date them, then it is time to build a larger and better thea tre. Le’s build that National Theatre with our artists first. To do this, we need cooperation among artists and the break 32 Panorama down of factionalism. How this is to come about is a problem which I don’t pretend to solve, but it must be solved before we can see the improvement in cul tural activities here that we all want. We have in the Philippines no theatre group that has reach ed general acclaim and is as ac tive on the local scene as the “Manila Theatre Guild.” I should not include musicians and the various orchestras who, although performing regularly or quite, enjoy comparatively few concert performances. This Theatre Guild has been able to present plays twelve months out of the year that run as long as one week each to adequate or full houses. Their performing artists are drawn primarily from a minority group. Their audience is composed generally of a minority group. Some of the plays presented are excel lent. Then why is it that with all the Philippines to draw from for both artists and audience, there is no national group that is as successful and active on the local scene? Far too often, we, the local artists, look for outside help and are too preoccupied with our private likes and dislikes. If the interest of the group infringes on our own plans, we too often fail to realize that we will profit as artists in direct ratio to the profit or progress of art, parti cularly in our own field. Let me take the example of a ballet dancer. There is little or no field for those who want to make dancing, not teaching, a career. A future for ballet can only be created by raising the standard of the art here, devel oping a larger audience and in general improving the lot of all dancers. The future of the indix idual does not so much depend on personal acclaim and even ability, as it does on the recog nition and high standard attain ed by ballet as an art here. There will be no future here for a dancer unless the future for ballet is secured. The same is true of drama and other theatri cal aits. When the local au dience demands more and bet ter stage plays and we are able to provide them, then we have a future for a actor. I we present not one good dancer, but a number of good dancers in entertaining performances that will make the audience come back for more, then the individual dancers have a fu ture. But if the individual dan cer is afraid of competition and will put his or' her interests above and opposed to the best interests of the group, that fu ture will be long delayed. The other point I wish to touch upon is the proposed com missioner of arts. The author and those who support the idea that there should be within the August 1960 33 Philippine government a body to extend aid to and perhaps have some regulatory power over artistic endeavours are making a grave mistake. The same problems of factionalism will enter into such a depart ment. Who is to say what is true or good art and what is not? Such a commission would have certain responsibilities and with those responsibilities there must be authority. Who is qualified to hold such authority, and what is that authority to con sist of? The commission was proposed to promote art and the interest of the artists, I gather. I think such a commission would be decidedly opposed to the interests of art and artists. Would you want me or one of my followers to judge the work of another teacher or choreogra pher? If this commission were to offer aid to a competitior, would I not cry out “favor itism”? The future of the arts and ar tists lies not in outside help so much as in cooperation and team-work. We can use help, but we can do much by admit ting that other artists have something to offer. What is good for art is good for the ar tists, but it is not necessarily true that what is good for the artists is good for the art. Ssh . . . A minister, trying to impress his young daughter with the necessity of silence while he was writing his Sunday sermon reminded her, “You know it's the good Lord who really tells me what to say." “If that's true,” demanded the daughter, “why do you scratch so much of it out?” 34 Panorama Just a local color through a white glass The Kidnaping of KAMLON By Agnes Newton Keith ■ LIKE EVERY BOY who comes in the garden except those two,” I complain to Harry. “Those big oafs! They’re at least eighteen! They’re too old for these kids anyway,” says Harry. “I’ll get rid of them pronto,” and he starts eagerly toward the door. “Now wait a minute, let’s do it tactfully. Don’t make them lose face. They may be quite nice boys, only I don’t like the way they slouch around in Bo wery fashion, and they use bad words — well, the words sound worse when they use them than when George does. They weren’t very polite this afternoon when I told them I‘d rather they’d go home because they were older. They just leered at me and waited some time before they finally sloped off, and they were back inside an hour. But do be careful how you handle them, or there’ll be a feud on our hands and we’ll have everlasting trouble.” “I” handle them!” Harry is out the door now and shouting at them: “You two big fellows over there — be off now, you two. My wife’s already asked you to leave. Hurry up, get along, on your way, get going! And don’t come back. This is private garden. I’ll put the po August i960 35 lice on you if you come again. Hurry up, I say!” It takes a couple of minutes for the astonished two to recog nize the fact that this is a com mand, not a request. Then, while the smaller boys watch with awe, they turn about and slouch slowly out of the garden and up the compound drive that leads to the landlord’s house. “I wonder if they’re related to Escoda,” I speculate. ‘T’here’s al ways a raft of boys around there, and he has hundreds of grand sons. I know they did t come in over our fence, anyway.” “How fast they go out is all that interest me. I don’t think you’ll have any more trouble with them. You must just let them see who’s the boss!” Our house is south of Manila at Paranaque, about twenty mi nutes by car. The compound we're in opens onto Manila Bay and we have a big garden. There’s a barrio next door that makes the compound a bit noi sy; our back fence is right against it. The mass of Filipinos live in community units called barrios, having anywhere from a few to over a hundred small houses, overcrowded with people, child ren, dogs, pigs, chickens, sari-sa ri (notion) stores, maybe a com munity loud-speaker, and sel dom. either a sewage system or good drinking water. Barrios exist < in cities and in the coun try. It is understood in the com pound that barrio people don’t come in. The landlord is a Fili pino — he lives in the first house by entrance — and he doesn’t permit it. Two days later I tell Harry, “Those two big lunks were in again today. They were playing with Kam. You know how Kam insists on beHg friends with everybody. I just can’t get him to go out and bite the right peo ple. Anyway, when I went out to ask them to leave, they started to talk to me about Kam, and say what a nice dog he was, and how they’d heard he cost a thou sand dollars. I told them they should divide everything they heard by ten, at least. They don’t seem too bad when you talk to them, only they’re not nice the way the other kids are. But when I reminded them that we preferred just to have younger boys in the garden, they went on out without an argument. It’s better to settle the thing amicably if we can.” “Damn it ell, ts our garden! That’s what we get for letting it be overrun!” ‘The other barrip boys don’t have anything to do with these t” o Georve and the others were up in +he tree house all the time and didn’t let on. Pricilio told George that one of the boys has served sentence in Muntinlupa for theft, and he’s supposed to be one of a big gang in Para naque.” 36 Panorama “It’s a good thing we’re mov ing in a month. It’ll weed out some of these friendships... What do the kids do up in ths tree house?” ‘Oh, read comics, and drink Cokes, and tell dirty stories, I suppose. The words are differ ent. but t’'e meaning’s the same in all languages. George knows the same jokes new in Tagalog, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, and English. I think sometimes the boys smoke a little, but not much. Ponching’s the only one that carries cigarettes. The rest of them are always in training for seme magnificent athletic event that’s going to make them famous. Pricilio lifts weights every morring, Bing chins him self hundreds of times, Junior does push-ups, and Fred jumps rope. They’re all mad about physical fitness and strentgh, and everlasting perfecting them selves to grapple with the big opportunity th2t never comes. It breaks your heart to think that those kids just don’t have a chance. It seems wicked when you think that there are people in this town who spend two thousand dollars for a cocktail party! It’d make a Huk out of me, for sure!” “One hundred and fifty you mean. ?^d that’s one pup in a lifetime.” “Well, I’m not so sure that a ped'g eed pup was a very good idea out here.” “But the city’s full of pedi greed pups. It was in the social column the other day that some body s prize pooch had a set of traveling tweeds made for him in London to wear on a trip to the States, and somebody else’fe French poodle wears a rhines colar. Kam s just a sum dweller compared with lots.” The day has been overwhel mingly hot, and now at sik o’clock I am sitting on the door step wondering how the boys can possibly have the energy to climb trees. I don’t see why they don’t fall, or the branches break, as I watch them swing ing p”ecariojsly with complete assurance thirty feet above ground in : he tallest mango. The descent ti earth is simple; Ju nior comes first, drifting down from the tree house with the end of a bending bough, sweep ing to a branch and catching its end, which plunges him down to a lower limb, which bends with bis weight ti’l be drops to the ground. Then Bing’s turn, then George. . . Crack! I see the leaves and George plummet down together, turn ing in air, not sweping. He hits the ground headfirst — it looks. Almost before he alights I am on the way to him, Pricilio shoo * s down from the tr-e cn’l Junior is on the s~ot. I think he’ll never rise, but he bounces to his feet holding his shoulder, and shouts “I'm all right, Ma,” August 1960 37 then falls d )wn again and passes out. Pricillo support him to the house, and I can scarcely get to him. They carry him in and put him on the bed, where he re vives enough to sse that he has become a hero. Now he groans, just often enough to show he is in pain, and infrequently en ough to show he is being brave. He can’t move his shoulder, his face is cut, but nothing else seems wrong. I cut off his sing let and call the doctor. “A fractured shoulder,” the doctor says. “That’s not much to complain of for a thirty-foot fall.” “I didn’t fall,” says George proudly. ‘The branch broke with me.” “You’re still up there, eh?” says Doc. “George, you can’t possibly go swimming with your shoulder swaddled up like that!” “I won’t get wet. 1 * 11 sit on the life raft, and the boys will pad dle it ” “Only in shallow water then.” “And can we go in the banca Sunday?” “No, you can’t go in the ban ca again until your shoulder is quite all right and you can swim.” “But, Ma, in a banca I don’t have to swim.” “I know all the answers, and thev’re all NO.” “But, Ma, there’s nothing to do but read comics or go to the movies — and you know Dad doesnt like me to do that. Any way, I can swim fine with one arm.” “Now, George, Dad will be home very soon, and if he agrees that two arms are superfluous, then you can try swimming wi h one .But not t.ll he’s here.” As soon as Harry comes back from his trip to the pine forest of the Mountain Provinces we are mov.ng to another residence, as the friends from whom we rent this house are due back in Ma nila from their holiday. Renting a furnished house in Manila usually means moving every few months, a process called puddle-jumping. Fortu nately I have found a very nice place only five minutes walk from where we are, and situated so that you can walk from the garden into the water of the bay. ■^■oving days are e”en worse than Christmases for ca taloguing age and disintegration of the human spirit. This one in Manila began badly at 8 a.m. when the station wagon came to move our ration of luggage and Hary said, “Where’s Kam?” “Isn’t he on the rope?” Kam has started to wander, so we have formed the habit of clipping his lead to a long rope. Later in the day, when we are prepared to be on vigil and whistle at intervals, he is allow ed to run free. I keep a rope 38 Panorama tied from coconut palm to co conut palm across the length of the front garden for this pur pose, and Harry, who is usually first out of bed, always attaches Kam to it. “On the rope?” Harry says. “Oh, I took the rope down last night and packed it with his dish and blanket so that we wouldn’t forget it this morning. I just let him run loose this morning. I thought he’d be all right for once.” With the station wagon wait ing, I run around the compound from house to house, whistling and calling, and asking one and all if they’ve seen Kam. I run up Quirino Avenue, down to the bay shore, back to the barrio, whistling, calling, and asking un til my mouth is parched, my voice hoarse, my temper bad. Now as I pant up the compound drive, the station wagon honks as if to convey the impression that I am deliberately delaying the move. Breathless, almost voiceless, very mad, and begin ning to worry, I gasp out to Harry, “That damn dog’s no place to be found. No place!” “Well, we can’t wait all day! Come along! He’ll turn up. I’ve asked the boys to watch out for him and bring him around if they see him. It’s only three mi nutes to the other house any way,” says Harry. “Come on, Mali he’ll find us when he gets hungry. Nobody else around here can afford to support him,” says George. “I’m afraid he’s been stolen,” I worry. As the station wagon rolls down the drive I look back anxiously, half expecting to see a plump, fawn-colored Teddy bear with his leg up at somebo dy’s pet bush. No hope. As soon as we unload our pos sessions at the new place, I hur ry back to the old house to su perintend the frantic cleanup that is going on. Again I half believe that I’ll see Kam asleep in the drive, nosing somebody’s garbage, chasing the ducks — and again I don’t. It is midday before I begin to feel about me a conspiracy of silence, reinforc ed by meaningful looks, which Luz and Lavandera are enclos ed in, as we scrub closets and shelves. At one o’clock Luz calls me to come to the kitchen, and says, “Tomas talks now over the back fence to people who say they know where Kam is.” ‘Where are the people? I‘ll go and see them. I’ll tell them to get Kam and bring him back right away.” I start for the door but Luz says, “I think better you do not go out, or they will be frightened and go away. Best to leave Tomas talk to them. I think they wish reward.” I peek out of the back win dow and see Tomas plastered against the fence on our side and a crowd of dark heads stick ing up on the barrio side. “You August 1960 39 go, Luz, and see what’s happen ing,” I urge. “I don’t understand all this mystery. If they know where the dog is, why don’t they bring him?” As Luz appears voices are raised; then the crowd thins out and Tomas leaves the fence, talking to Luz. She is back in minute and says, “A friend of Tomas brings a message from people who see the dog this morning. They can find the dog if you give a reward.” “I’ll give a reward when I get the dog back. Tell Tomas to tell them so. But who saw the dog? Are they the ones who stole him, do you think? “Tomas says his friends didn’t steal the dog, but they know who did. I think it is that Paranaque Gang.” I have always laughed at the hair-raising stories that Lavandera and Luz tell about the Paranque Gang” — stories they manufactured, I have thought. Now I say, “Well, I don’t care who did it. Tell them we want the dog and we’ll give a reward when we get him back” If it hadn’t been moving day I would have felt much worse. As it was, I was too busy to as sess my sense of shock; I just wanted to get the dog back, the house clean, and the new beds ready to sleep in. I was still cleaning the closet when Luz came back. “They say that if people give rewards now, they get dogs back more quickly.” “I won’t give a reward till I get the dog — that’s definite. They’ve got a lot of nerve. It must be the very people who stole the dog that Tomas is deal ing with, if they’re making con ditions.” “No this is friend of the peo ple who took the dog. Lavandera says for sure this is that bad gang. The uncle of one boy lives next to her, and the boy is bad. He is the big boy who comes in the garden that day the Master says to get out.” Then I recall my conversation with the big boy: “This is a very fine dog, I guess? * ’ “Yes, Kam’s a fine pooch.” “I think this is a very expensive dog, eh? I hear you pay one thousand dollars for him!” “Heavens, no! Divide that sum by ten...” “Luz, tell Tomas to send word that I will pay a reward as soon as I get the dog, but not before. And I want him back tonight!” It all seems silly and like a tabloid except for the fact that it is true, and Kam is gone. This time Luz comes back to say, “The people are frightened, and they have gone away. Tomas says maybe they wont’ come back now because you didn’t pay the reward.” “But, Luz, they’ll come back for the reward. That must be why they stole the dog — to get a reward.” 40 Panorama “But they are very bad gang. Maybe they do it because Mas ter says, Get out!” nighttime Kam has not ** turned up and we go to bed a very sad household. With sorrow, George becomes ex tremely morose and won’t talk at all; I keep on talking endless ly in the effort to make it make sense; and Harry just says, Wait. Luz and Lavandera, who have decided to come with us rather than return to their for mer jobs, have been talking end lessly all afternoon. Lavandera has gone home to the barrio now, and I am hoping she may hear news there. Tomas, our closest link with the dog, has stayed in the old house. “But what shall I do if they don’t bring Kam back tomor row?” I ask Harry, who is leav ing early next day for the Mountain Provinces again. “I’m not going to just sit back and let Kam go, forever. It’s all so stupid. If somebody stole him for a reward, and I agree to pay the reward, why don’t they bring him back and get the re ward?” “Give them all day tomorrow, and if Kam’s not back by the next morning go to the local Paranaque police and report it,” Harry advises. “Promise the re ward to the police if they find the dog.” “I think maybe it is not good to go to the police,” suggests Luz. “The thief will be frighten ed then to bring back the dog.” “But what can I do, go out and call the thief pet names to reassure him?” “Lavandera says best to wait,” Luz warns. Next morning Harry leaves. No messages come about Kam and he doesn’t appear. Pricilo wanders up the road to the com pound gate and the watchman won’t let him in, so he comes up the shore instead and whistles to George from the beach. They sit on the wall in front and talk for a long time. George tells me later that Pricilio feels bad about Kam being stolen, and says he will watch for any news of him inside the barrio. The following morning I get out of bed determined to go to the police. I tell Luz and rather expect her to protest. Instead she says, “I will go with you to help you talk.” I am now begin ning to think less ligthly of her “Paranaque Gang,” and do not wish to involve her in any local gang wars, so I say, “Never mind, Luz, I’ll mqke them un derstand if I have to bark like a dog to do it!” But when I go out to the car Luz is there in her shopping dress waiting, and La vandera is with her. Arrived at the police station, we work our way through seve ral minor gangsters till we get to a man looks as if his part in law enforcement were to intimidate August 1960 41 witneses. I start to give my re port in English, but Lavandera cuts in Tagalog, and Luz carries on a duet with her, and I soon give up and sit back. The only facts the policeman makes a note of are how much we paid for Kam and how much Kam eats, which latter item has to be told to him twice, and he ob viously finds it incredible. La vandera is in top form, and I imagine tells our entire family history, true and false, and her own, while Luz in an affirma tive refrain. When at last the two of them slow down, I say loudly and firm, “We will give a generous reward to the police if you get the dog back.” Then, for the first time, po liceman turns around and really looks at me. He suddenly looks luite cheerful, and smiles plea santly, and seems to be waiting for something nice to happen. Nothing happens. It isn’t until after I’ve left the station that I realize that of course this was my cue to press the reward right into his palm. I don’t know why I didn’t see it at the time; I guess because it seemed too crude that way — the little sta tion cubicle was full of police and their clients, and somehow although I knew one bribed the police, it never occurred to me that one did it so openly. It isn’t until I get right away from the stale station smells of urine, tobacco, and garlic that I recognize the fact that there isn’t any finesse about this deal, and nothing is too crude. I know them for sure that the police will not be heard from. I have forfeited my rights. Mow comes the part of the story that I still can’t quite believe. By midafternoon verbal threats are coming in from all directions, via third par ties, that the gang that has sto len Kam is angry with me for going to the police and has sworn to kidnap George and tie a stone around his neck and drop him in the bay of Cavite Point, a favorite gangster dispo sal system here. The story comes through Luz through La vandera, the compound garden er, the night guard, the neigh bor’s cook, the cook’s neighbor, Lavandera's neighbor who is un cle to a boy in the gang, the new houseboy, the policeman at the corner, Justino our driver, and everybody’s friend. Each one has gotten the story through somebody else, no body has spoken with the peson who made the threat, but everybody swears it is true. And then everybody, even strangers whom I do not know but who know me as George’s mother, sends warnings to me, comes to me tell me, or tells a friends to tell me, Keep George at home; don’t let him swim, go to the movies, go away, go off in ban42 Panorama cas, go in buses — keep George at home! It is fantastic, it is ridiculous, it is terrifying, it is hysterical — things like this don’t happen. But things like this do happen in Manila. Ordinarily, I do not believe third-person stories. I always ask, “Who said it?” and don’t ac cept it unless I can verify it firsthand. It cannot verify these rumors, I can find no one who will admit hearing the threat made; each one has heard it each one swears it is so, and ob viously believes it. “But why?” I ask. “What does anyone have against George? If they stole the dog for money, I can understand it. But why this crazy threat? It doesn’t make sense. What’s George done to anyone? What can they get out of it but trouble? It’s not even a kidnap-ransom threat. It’s just plain evil. It doesn’t make sense. It can’t be so.” I wouldn’t believe it. I must be growing hysterical, I told myself; I should know better. But I did believe it. I knew that one mistake would be too many. I was a stranger here, a foreigner among an impoverish ed people, people of violent emotions, a people with wrongs to resent. So I didn’t believe it, and I did believe it, till I was nearly crazy. Meanwhile Kamlon, the victim of the original crime, is not forgotten — but has become just a dog, while George is our only son. The servants establish a vo luntary relay guard over George which annoys him frantically George refuses to take any of it * seriously, except the absence of Kam. He laughs at me and everybody else who tries to talk precautions to him. He says, “Oh, Ma, they’re kidding you!” and never loses a wink of sleep, and goes swimming in the bay with the boys, just one more bobbing head among the rest, while I strain for him to come snfely in. Or alternatively, if I manage for a minute to per suade him that it might not be a joke, and that he should stay near home, then he arms him self with a bolo and a pair of knuckle dusters, traded for with a barrio boy whose brother uses them professionally. “That’s the best way in the ‘ world for you to get bumped j off, you crazy child!” I warn an- < grily. “You can’t use a bolo the 1 way the Filipinos do. They’d have your head off before you got the thing out of its shell.” “Not shell, Ma, please. That's a sheath. And I’m better than you think with a bolo!” Next day a neighbor tells me that he had a car stolen once and he gave twenty-five dollars to the local motorcycle cop, Luis, and Luis traced the car and brought it home, so why August 1960 43 don’t I ask Luis to get to the bottom of the mystery? So I do ask Luis. He comes around and I present my case, and he says he’ll need some ex pense money to begin on. This time I get the cue immediately, and go well above what I think he expects, just to be on the right side. Luis says he’ll report when he gets something to re port, and he disappears and is not heard of again. Meanwhile Harry has been gone ten days in the pine for ests, and I can’t get word to him. Half the time I do not dare to go to sleep at night, and the other half I cannot sleep. This night as I lie in bed won dering how long I can stand it, and wishing I could get Harry home, I hear a whistle outside my window. I sit up and look out and see a white-clad figure standing in the shadow of the tree ten feet away. In a minute a masculine voice calls softly, “George! George!” in a clipped Eurasian accent. “My God,” I think, “a decoy! They’re trying to to get him to come out, and then the’ll snatch him! They are to coming right into the compound and up to the house!” I shout out, “Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!” quite hysterically, and the fi gure melts into shadow. I fall back in bed feeling quite ill, then — but with my mind made up. I have waited long enough. I will go to the American Em bassy tomorrow and ask them as an American national for pro tection for my son. I’ll ask them to investigate the whole matter, and meanwhile to give me a United States military guard for the house, or else take George into the protection of Embassy quarters until they can determine if the threats are gen uine. After all, I have approach ed the police here, and they have done nothing, and I have crossed Luis’s palm and he has disappeared. We have two arm ed guards in the compound — but who can tell to whom they owe allegiance? With my mind made up, I fall asleep. ^The next morning at seven, “ while I am having coffee, Harry walks in. It is one of the best surprises I have ever had, and a wonderful relief to tell him all about it. At first I won der if he will pooh-pooh it and think I am being hysterical. Pehaps I am. “ . . ‘And we’ll have to do something right away. Today,” I say. “I can’t £tand it any longer. I’ve watched George day and night now for eleven days, and even if nothing happens to George, I’ll be completely crazy if this goes on. I’ve made up my mind to go to the American Em bassy today.” “No. I'll go to the Secretary of Foreign Affairs myself first Panorama thing this morning,” Harry says. “The Philippine Government is responsible for our protection here, and Foreign Affairs is the legitimate liaison between tAe government and the United Na tions. I know they will take im mediate action. If you go to the American Embassy, they will have to go through government in any case. Now don’t worry any more, we’ll get to the bot tom of it.” “Thaiik God you’re home. Tm getting so jittery I can scarcely tell fact from fiction. At the same time I’m angry with myself for feeling so frightened when perhaps the whole thing is ridiculous. I ne ver appreciated before how wonderful it was to have a po lice force you can rely on in time of trouble” At ten o’clock Harry calls me. “There will be a National Bureau of Investigation agent out immediately. Tell him all about it. And cheer up.” In half an hour Agent num ber X, who goes unnamed, of the N.B.I. is in the house and on the job. He is a fine-look ing, well-built young man, gen tle in speech and in manner, and intelligent. He is as reas suring to meet as my police friend was disappointing. I tell him the whole story, and add, “If you can assure me that I’m being hysterical and foolish, and that there is no danger to George, Hl believe you, and re fuse to believe these threats.” “I cannot tell you so, ma dam,” he says cautiously. Then he talks with George, Luz, and Lavandera, asks for snapshots of Kam and a description, asks for our address in the other compound, and says, “I will place a guard on your house until I know what is behind this. Meanwhile, keep George within sight, or inside the house. I will report to you later.” And he leaves to visit the bar rio, the old compound, the neighboring houses, and Lavandera’s neighbor who is the un cle of a boy in the gang. As the young agent walks down the path I feel like a per son whose sentence has been lifted. I am no longer helpless against an unknown, evil force; something is being done. Next day I hear from Lavan dera that Agent X has done some thorough investigating of the old compound, the local sari-sari stores where gossip sells with goods, and the house of Lavandera’s neighbor. Pricilio drifts down from the bar rio in the afternoon to talk with George, and he tells us of house-to-house visits in the bar rio by Agent X. Everyone in the barrio is being questioned, and I begin to feel decidedly apologetic to them. Most of the boys are staying away from us now, and I real Auoust 1960 45 ize it is in order to protect themselves from being classed on our side by the thieves, and as such being exposed to a ve nom from which they have no protection. For we can hire guards, we can call in the N.B.I., but the barrio has no one but the police. In the barrio, saint lives by jail mate, and innocent child beside ex-convict, and their only protection is to mind their own business. Five days later at five o’clock, Agent X telephones me. “I think I have your dog. Can you come with me to identify him?” I agree eagerly, and am waiting for Agent X when Harry arrives home. Agent X, accompanied by another agent, picks us up in his car. He has located a dog he believes to be Kam in the home of a Chinese family who breed dogs and who claim to have pur chased Kam for one hundred dollars from a Filipino who was offering him for sale on the street. Now, about ten minutes drive from our own house, we turn up a well-known street in a good district and stop at a large compound. “Are you sure you can iden tify the dog?” asks Agent X again. “Yes.” While we walk toward the rear of the compound the oc cupants of the houses are ga thering to see what business brings four strangers here with such an earnest air. There is a garage at the extreme rear where I see a small brown ob ject on the floor by the door, and while Harry and the agents stop to argue with a Chinese who intercepts them, I call, “Kam!” For a moment the brown thing doesn’t move, then a head lifts wearily and I see it is Kam—but Kam doesn’t see it is me. He is chained to the floor with a short chain, and although he lifts his head dis piritedly at the sound of my voice, it seems to mean nothing. It is Kam, but he is no long er the golden Teddy bear, as wide as he was long, who left us. This is a thin, ribby, wor ried creature with a dull, soiled coat, who has already learned that the world is harsh. I call again, and he looks up again. Suddenly the idea penetrates, the golden body jerks and pulls against the chain, while I run to the garage, and end up on the floor with Kam slobbering all over me in a crazy, hysteri cal fashion, wagging his rear end madly, tangling me in his chain so that I can’t escape, and getting up and sitting down in nervous anxiety for fear I will disappear. Now, to the crowd which has gathered and watches with interest, it becomes quite plain whose dog this is. 46 Panorama Agent X detaches himself from Harry and the Chinese, who are now shouting at each other, and looks at Kam and me with satisfaction and says, “I guess the dog has identified you.” Now I hear Harry say, “I certainly won’t pay you what you paid for the dog! It’s peo ple like you who buy stolen goods who encourage people to steal. You must have known that no good dog would be of fered for sale on the street without papers, if he hadn’t been come by crookedly.” The man, who doesn’t seem to have much faith in his own case, says rather feebly. “Then just pay twenty-five dollars please, to help my loss.” “I won’t pay you a damn cent,” Harry shouts. He strides toward me and Kam, jerks the chain right out of the staple in the floor, and starts for the car. Meanwhile, to the aggrieved keeper of Kam, the agent hands a little paper saying that the dog has been confiscated by the N.B.I. as stolen goods and re turned to the owner; that any redress the man seeks must be from the person who sold him the goods. With Kam in the lead, we sweep out of the com pound, leaving a very depressed man surrounded by his neigh bors enjoying his misfortunes. THOUGHT YOU said we might have to wait for a court or der before we could take the dog home,” I said to Agent X. “There was no doubt the dog was yours,” says X with a grin. “So I think we can call this case closed. That man will do nothing further.” “But what about George? Is he safe now? Do you know who stole the dog?” “We think we know who took the dog, but we do not have proof, and probably could not get proof, because people are afraid to testify in court. After we learned who took the dog, we were able to trace him through some relatives of the thieves who are respectable people and work in government offices. The relatives are very unhappy that the young men always make trouble. These re latives known they might lose their jobs because of this. So we tell them that if they can help us find the dog, we will take it as proof of their own good faith. So they find out that the dog was sold to this Chinese breeder, 'and we get the dog. Now we tell them that if anything happens to the Keith family while they stay in Manila, the N.B.I. will come straight to them and hold them responsible, and they will lose their jobs — so better to make the young relatives behave themselves.” August 1960 47 “But why did anybody want to do this to us? We don’t have half the money wealthy Fili pinos have. Most of these peo ple around here are our friends.” “This is a bad neighborhood. It is outside the city. There are many gangs here. There are many very poor people, and rich people live beside them. There is temptation.” “But what about George? Will this gang be waiting for revenge on him?'” “I think George will be alright now, because the thieves are frightened. But it is best not to let him go away from the house alone—always let a servant go with him, or let him accompany friends. That is for safety’s sake, but I don’t think there will be any trouble. We could not prove this case in the courts and convict the thieves, because we cannot get sworn evidence. But we got the dog back.” Now Harry asks the agent to accept the reward we had offered for Kam, but he refuses firmly and says, “It is our re ward to solve the problem. We are here to serve the people.” The next day Harry writes to the head of the N.B.I. and thanks him for the efficient work of Agent X, and encloses a check as contribution to what ever welfare fund they may have. The check comes back with a letter saying again, “We are here to serve. Our reward is to help solve your problem.” “Well,” says Harry. ‘Then return of the check is the only unbelievable part of the story!” ‘The N.B.I. agents probably get paid a living wage,” I sug gest. Whether or not the two young men who were thrown out of our garden were the thieves, we cannot say, and we will never know, for silence has fallen. Lavandera says nothing now about her neighbor who is the uncle of a very bad boy. Luis is too cautious to make any report. Luz, if I ask her who she thinks the thieves are, says, “Best not to speak of these things.” Justino, our dri ver, a Tagalog, says when I ask him, ‘Tut-tut-tut! These Filipinos!” Rustico, the new houseboy, a Visayan, says haughtily, “All these Tagalogs are thieves!” But Esteban, the compound guard, solves the problem in the popular way by saying, “You see? No Filipino would do such a thing! There was Chinese initiative behind it. That’s the way it-is with these crimes, Chinese master minds plan them and make us poor Filipinos commit them.” “But Esteban, in this case the Chinese master mind got stung by the poor Filipino!” I suggest. “You see? It served him right, ma’am.” 48 Panorama How are you? Solar Upheavals Heard on Earth Dadio astronomers have concluded that the whole solar 21 system including the earth was heavily bombarded by electrical particles when the sun spewed out unusually large flames on three occasions last year. The events took place on Feb. 10, May 17 and Aug. 31. High-pitched radio signals from Venus and the moon re ceived on the earth shortly after the outbursts are also be lieved to have been caused by electrical clouds from the solar upheavals. These views have been recorded by the Royal Astronomi. cal Society of Britain and also, independently, by Dr. John D. Kraus, of the Radio Observatory at Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, in a report to the British science journal Nature. AZ R. kraus said it looked as if the stream of particles ejec2 2 ted by the sun and traveling earthward first encoun tered the planet Venus, resulting directly or indirectly in the production of strong eleven-meter radio signals from the pla net that were "heard” in Ohio and elsewhere. The particles, he added, eventually reached the earth and formed a large ionized (electrified) cloud around the moon. Dr. Kraus is not prepared to say whether the moon-signals orignated on the moon or were merely a reflection of sun Sig nals that bounced earthward from big particle clouds near the moon that acted as a mirror. But he considered the disturb ances the most important of the year. British observers have expressed surprise that cosmic rays from the sun detected on earth on the day of the biggest out burst (Feb. 10) seemed to be delayed in transit. Cosmic rays normally travel with a velocity only slightly less than that of light: 186,000 miles a second. On this rec koning the journey from sun to earth should have taken only about eight minutes. It took eleven minutes. The suggestion that the rays received on earth were re flections of those that first hit Mars has not been generally accepted. The view is that most cosmic ray activity after a solar outburst occurs after the flare or flames have sunk bark to the surface of the sun. August 1960 49 fiction 1 When the bell rang a sec ond time, Ben gathered up the notes he had been lec turing from on the religious in stitutions of the Ifugaos and thrust the sheaf of papers into a manila folder. 50 Panorama By S. V. Episfola dnn?°eb a"ybody have a ques tion? he demanded, looking L daVroom"'’ ““ about 'h'' b-nders and gathered to^nJ August i960 books and things. No one a hand. Fhat? Not even one ques]’ he insisted smilingly, jng from face to face. A 4of the girls on the front I smiled and shook their I s. From the back of the *1, a boy spoke up, "None, Very well, then," and Ben ked up his folder from the tern. He looked about the •sroom once more. "Good ,” he said and strode out o the amber sunshine of the afternoon. jfte stepped into the hall and mged himself into the flow still disputing students. He ft the stream when he reached e end of the hall and turned one into the Anthropology lvilion. Half-way up the stairs J the staff office, he started Ambling in his pockets for the loor key, certain that the others tad already locked up and {one. But when he emerged £rom the stairwell, there was white fluorescent light spilling out the half-opened door into the hall which the thick bougainvilleae vines already shield ed from the sun. It was Paz still in the room, and when he stepped inside she looked up from the book op ened on the reading stand be fore her and smiled up at him. "Don’t work too hard, Paz,” he said as he passed her desk. "I’m not really working,” she said, and when he had reached his desk on the farther side of the room she added, "I’m just reading." "Reading what?” Paz picked up the book on her reading stand and held it over her head, its covers spreadeagled towards him. He readily recognized the translation the German scholars at the Inns bruck Institute had made of the monograph he had done on the beads. "You went into too much trouble reading that,” and he let himself down into the arm chair behind his desk. "I had no trouble at all, real ly,” she maintained, laying the book aside on her desk. “I wrote that thing long ago, and it’s not even entirely mine.” "But nothing’s ever entirely ours.” Den got up from his desk ® and with the folder of lec ture notes he crossed over to his bookcase. Paz went on speak ing, but he was not listening anymore. Quite automatically, for remembrances of that sum mer among the Ifugao villages in the highlands had already begun to fill his mind, Ben un locked the bookcase where he kept his notes. He saw himself again as he was, a young stu dent out on his first field trip with Dr. Garcia. Then he per Panorama ceived Ellie, very scientific and competent in shirt and jeans, showing him how to do his work properly, talking very se riously to him of myths people had already stopped believing in. Paz had stopped talking, and she was looking up at him quiz zically when he turned away from the bookcase to go back to his own desk. "Anything the matter, Ben?” she asked in a puzzled tone. "Why?” he asked back, won dering as he faced her what could have brought on the ques tion. "I think I’ve made you an gry,” she said. "I really should ’ve asked before taking your monograph, but I’m sorry, Ben. Truly, I am.” “Give it no further thought, Paz,” he said lightly, breaking into a smile. “I was going to ask you to read that paper any way.” He crossed back to his desk and seated himself on the arm chair, facing Paz on the other side of the room. "You did a very good job, Ben,” she said seriously. Ben laughed. He rose from his desk and walked over to the armchair in front of Paz. Then, as he drew the armchair closer to her desk, he asked, "You’ve seen the beads themselves?” She nodded and, pulling back the top drawer of her desk, lifted out the soiled cloth bag in which Ellie had handed the beads to him one evening once upon a time. He watched Paz, her fingers steady and strong and confident, undo the knot stopping the bag’s mouth, won dering the while if this could not really be Ellie all over again. He quelled his thoughts and reminded himself again that only the Intellect mattered. Paz finished untying the knot, and the bag was open. Hold ing its other end, she spilled the string of beads on the glass top of her desk, where it lay loosely coiled. “They’re very lovely,” she said admiringly as she looked up at him with a smile. "That was the very thing I said the first time I saw those beads.” “They must have cost their first owner a fortune.” “He could not have minded, I’m sure,” he told her, laugh ing. "You see, this string of beads was meant for his bride.” Paz only smiled. || e took the beads into his ■■ hands. The jade glowed dully in the fluorescent light as he turned the string this way and that among his fingers. Then, turning toward Paz, he went on to explain, still wind ing and unwinding the string of beads among his fingers, “For tune gave much to that mar riage, and when the eldest son reached the age for marrying, the old lady gave him the beads to give his bride as a wedding present.” Ben stopped talking and, putting down the string of beads on the table, stood up and moved away. He stopped before the window, watching the sprinkler sending jets of water revolving over the grass below. Then he faced about, speaking as he walked back to wards her, “But this marriage proved fruitless, and as was the custom they had to separate. The girl married again, and it was her new husband who sold the beads to Ellie.” “And then you bought these from her?” Paz asked, picking the beads off the table as she turned to look up at him. “No, Ellie just gave them,” he said in a voice which was almost too soft for her to hear. Then he plunged on, “It was also she who supplied the leads I followed in that paper you read. That’s why I told you it’s not entirely mine.” “But there’s no mention of her in the paper.” "That’s because she refused. I asked her many times to let me put her down as co-author. She refused each time. She did not even want her part acknowl edged.” “That’s unreasonable, I think.” “Not really, perhaps. She must have had her own reasons. I must have failed her in some way. I don’t really know. But for a long time we had both believed we would do great things together. We could have, too. Who knows? But in the end she got married, and that was the end of all that.” “I didn’t know, Ben. I should n’t have asked. I realize . . .” “No, you did not ask,” he cut in. “I told these to you.” “Thanks,” Paz said. 54 Panorama He settled himself in the arm chair and watched her gather up the string of beads into the bag. Then, pulling out the drawer, she dropped the cloth bag inside without as much as raising her eyes. “I guess, I have to get going now,” and he rose from the chair. ”1’11 stay a while longer,” she said, finally pushing in the drawer. “Well, good-bye then.” “Goodbye,” he heard her say as he strode out of the room. The Light had already gone ■ Horn the upper branches of the acacias lining University Avenue when Ben emerged from the University College building, but it was not quite night yet for the street lamps to be turned on. Only in some of the rooms in the science pa vilions were the lights already ablaze, casting white fluorescentlight patches on the lawn under the windows, and as he walked past the Physics Pavilion, he caught the w’ords rectilinear mo tion on an inclined plane be fore the voice paused. It did not start again until he had reached University Avenue, but then he had gone too far al ready and he did not recognize any of the words spoken. He continued to the cement sidewalk under the trees, and the voice was soon lost to him. Ben stepped off the curb at the corner where the cement side walk ended, and he crossed the street to the waiting shed. The place was empty and, resigned io a long wait, he sat down at the very end of the long wooden bench placed there, as a plaque attested, by Class 1950. No bus had shown up yet when the lamps went on among the trees all along University Avenue. A cluster of students came to the waiting shed. But they remained standing off to one side, disputing noisily about some unknowns in Qualitative Chemistry. Ben listened to their arguing until he heard a shy, "Good evening, sir.” Ben turned from the chemis try students and found a girl standing near his end of the bench. In the garish light of the naked electric lamp overhead, he recognized the face, remem6ering it from an introductory course in anthropology he had offered in a previous semester. But the name eluded him. Nonetheless, he smiled to her. “Hello,” he said. She sat down beside him. testing her books and things on her lap. “Sir,” she started dif fidently, casting her eyes down upon the books on her lap. “I’d like to shift to another course sir.” He remembered the name then. Rosario Sanchez. She was the girl who always came to August 1960 55 him during registration, inva^ riably with the request to shift major courses. Feeling expan sively tolerant, he asked, “Agairi, Miss Sanchez?” She nodded, though she kept her eyes down. She pulled from a pocket length of red and black beads strung together, and she started playing with it. Ben waiting for her to go on speak ing as he watched her twining and untwining the string of beads among her fingers. Then, as though she were unsure of the propriety of having spoken to him, she continued, “I’ve al ready shifted too often before, sir, and I’m really ashamed of this now.” “We all knock about for some time, Miss Sanchez.” “Thank you, sir,” she said, still without looking at him. “I thought you would be an gry, sir, that’s why I went to see thp Dean first.” “What did he say?” “He said I could shift to ano ther course, sir, provided my adviser had no objections.” Now she lifted her head to face him. "It’s all up to you, sir.” “Well, what course is it this time, Miss Sanchez?” “Anthropology, sir.” “I’m afraid you’ll find that boring.” “No, sir, I don’t think I would,” this with the finality of statement. Ben thought of say ing that she "was surely 1 trying to be funny, but when he saw the serious eyes the girl had turned his way, he said nothing. “Please, sir, don’t say you dis approve,” she said earnestly. “I shall not shift again, sir. I pro mise.” “Well,” and he smiled, “see ing how determined you are, why not?” “You’re letting me shift, sir?” and in her eagerness she leaned over and put a palm lightly on his arm. “Yes.” “Thank you, sir,” and taking away her hand, she sat back on the wooden bench beside him. “Thank you so much, sir,” she repeated when he turned side ways to face her. Her eyes were shiny in the harsh glare of the electric bulb, but she was smil ing. “I’m so glad, sir,” she said, jumping up from the bench, her books and things clutched to her breast. “Thank you, sir. thank you,” and she hurried off, half-walking, half-dancing. She stopped after she had gone some distance and turned around. “Good-bye, sir,” she called back, waving her free hand at him. Ben raised his hand over his head and waved back. She was smiling when she turned away once more, and he watched her hurry up the gravelled path to wards the girls’ dormitory in that half-walk and half-dance gait of hers. 56 Panorama “Who’s that, Ben?’’ The voice surprised him, and * Ben twisted around. He found his friend Phil towering over him. “One of my students,’’ Ben said. “I hope you hadn’t been too hard on her, the poor girl.” “No.” Ben stood up when he heard the familiar racket the big bus always raised whenever it turn ed into University Avenue. The students were still talking hot ly about their unknowns. With them, Ben watched the pale headlights of the oncoming bus grow brighter in the twilight. The bus stopped before the waiting shed, and while the students milled around the door, some girls loaded with brown shopping bags and pack ages stepped off the bus. “We’ll take my car,” Phil said when Ben started towards the waiting bus. The chemistry students climbed aboard, and the con ductor called out once more, “Manila, derecho.” “Let’s go, mv car’s on the other side of the street,” Phil said when the bus started down the avenue. Together the two men crossed University Avenue as the big bus disappeared around the first corner. “But what took you out of your air-conditioned office on a hot day like this?" “You.” “Why me?” “I came to fetch you,” Phil said when they reached the car. “That is, if you’ve got nothing doing tonight,” and he flung the car door open. “Oh, no. Not again.’ “Don’t you worry. We’re not going to the same places to night,” and Phil laughed. “We’re going down to Davis Park.” Ben guessed what for and he smiled. “Jenny?” “Yes,” and Phil motioned his friend into the car. Ben faced him. “You sure you want me to?” “Why do you think 1 drove all the way out here to find you?” Ben got into the car and waited for1 Phil to get in behind the steering wheel. “It’s a good thing you found me,” he said when Phil had slammed the door afterr him. “There was really no trick to it,” and Phil smiled, swing ing a sidelong glance at Be i who had turned to face him. “Paz told me up at your office I might still catch you here i: I hurried, and I hurried, and I found you Here with that stu dent of yours.” “That girl’s one of my prob lems, you i know/’ Ben said. “JuSt like us, huh?’’ ‘“I guess so,” Ben said and Phil released the hand brake. But her troubled are really Au'ust 1960 57 troubles. Ours never really were, Phil.” “Yah?” and Phil started the car. “The whole lot of us were just lazy and shiftless.” The engine caught, and Phil shifted gears. The car rolled forward, and he steered off the curb. “Why, what seems to be the trouble, Ben? Boy-friends?” Ben ignored the remark. “Her parents are divorced, and it’s the trust division of a bank that’s looking after her now.” Ohil said nothing. He drove ■ down the length of Univer sity Avenue without speaking. He shifted gears again to slow down when they got to the check point at the main gate into the campus. Someone came out of the guard house and waved them on. Phil raised his hand and waved. Then he shift ed to ■ high, gear, speeding on towards the highway. "What’s she shifting to?” Phil asked after he had settled into a fast steady clip. “Anthropology.” Phil let out a dry chuckle, 2nd Ben demanded, “Why?” “Anthropology’s a very neat way of throwing one’s self out of life’s running,” Phil said. “All you guys, from old man Garcia down to you, Ben, you all potter around buried vil lages where life has died, and here life’s just begging to be lived.” Ben smiled out of amuse ment. He knew what Phil would say next, and to beat him to it, Ben said, “I know, why don’t 1 get married?” “Yes, why don’t you? What’s wrong with that Ph.D. in your department?” Ben had not counted on this turn the conversation had tak en. He did not want it. He would not encourage it any fur ther, and he answered drily, “Nothing.” But Phil was not to be de nied. "Then why? You still car rying the torch for Ellie?” “Let’s just say 1 enjoy being a bachelor and that I see no point in getting married to that Ph.D. or to anyone.” "But why, why?” Phil insist ed. Ben sat back, crossed his arms over his chest and wished to God Phil would stop talking, but because he felt that an an swer had to be given, Ben re plied, “The life of ideas that’s the only life that interests me.” He swung his eyes towards Phil, expecting to catch him laugh ing, or smiling at least. Instead he found him hunched over the steering wheel, looking se riously ahead. But he was un prepared for Phil’s next words. “Why, Ben,” he began slow ly, “you have thrown yourself out of life’s running.” 58 Panorama Phil spoke this gently as though he had been softly shocked. Almost, as Ben ima gined, as a woman would have said, Why, darling, you have hurt yourself. Phil drove silent ly for a long time. Then he nudged Ben with an elbow and waved towards the countryside beyond the window. The lights of Davis Park had emerged from the darkness. But Phil did not speak and Ben only nodded after throwing a glance at the bright bobs in the distance. Then there was the billboard, announcing under white fluor escent glare, Davis Park. Phil slowed down and made the turn, and for a while they drove down a narrow roadway be tween tall trees that loomed darkly over them on each side till they came to the check point. A uniformed man stepped out into the strongly lit edge of the roadway and waved them on into the Park. The trees fell away behind them, and Phil wound leisurely past open lawns that swept up to neat, welllighted glassed-in bungalows. Phil stopped at the end of a long line of automobiles in front of one of the bungalows where lights of many colors had been strung out from the house over the terrace and the lawn down to the street gate. Up in the house, somewhere, an orchestra srtuck up a Glenn Miller dance piece. For the first time Ben noticed the people dancing on the terrace and he turned on Phil, “You did not tell me.” “You didn’t ask,” Phil said airily as he stepped out of the car. “But I’m not dressed at all,” Ben said, seeing that his friend had a white coat over' his black pants. “You’re all right as you are." “Let me use your car, Phil. I got to change,” Ben said, feel ing very conscious of his barong Tagalog. “You’re all right as you are, come on,” Phil repeated. “Look, here’s Jenny now,” and he walked off to meet her. Ben slipped to the other end of the seat behind the steering wheel and waited for Phil. But it was Jenny who peered into the car. “Hi, professor,” she smiled. “Hello, Jenny.” “Well, come on up to the house, Ben.” “But—” Phil joined her at the car win dow. “Fellow wants to drive home, Jenny, xsays he isn’t dressed.” “Oh, but he is, can’t you see?” she laughed, looking around at Phil, and Ben joined their laughter. “You look all right, Ben,” she said reassuring ly. “Come on, Ben, don’t be dif ficult now,” she coaxed. “Oh, okay then,” and Ben August 1960 59 slid out of the car, pushing the door open before him. The two turned towards the house when he stepped off the car to the curb. Ben slammed the door be hind him and hurried after them. He caught up with them at the gate. “I’ve got to tell you people that I’m still in my working clothes.” “Isn’t that just terrific, Phil?” Jenny said. “At long last here’s a man who works.” “Really terrific,” Phil said. Ben fell in step beside Jenny as the two walked towards the house holding hands. “You people’ve not changed a bit,” he said to match their light talk. “And your jokes, too, they’ve not changed at all.” With her free hand, Jenny started pummelling his arm. “Even your reactions are the same,” Ben laughed. “All right, all right, if you must go about insulting your friends,” she said, and Phil admonishingly put in, "We’re still your friends, you know.” They reached the porch laughing. The two went on to the terrace still holding hands. Ben detached himself and looked about for anyone he knew. He saw Jenny’s bro ther Jim hurrying towards him with a grin lighting up his young face. They shook hands vigorously with much laughter, slapping each other on the shoulders and back. “When’d you get back, Jim?” “Couple of months ago. But dammit I missed you in Paris.” “My concierge told me about you. You should’ve stayed long er though. I would’ve liked to show you around Montmarte.” My damned classes, that’s why.” “But I heard you did quite well all over the Latin Quar ter.” “It became a matter of na tional pride, you know.” “No doubt,” and the two be gan laughing loudly. They soon spent themselves, and Jim took Ben’s arm. “Now, you must come and meet the girls,” Jim said, pulling Ben along into the house towards the girls clustered about a sofa just beyond the door. Jim in troduced him all around, speak ing the names of the girls clear ly, but Ben got none of their names. “Ladies, this is Bienvenido G. Cortez,” Jim said. “He teaches at the State Univer sity.” Then, when Ben started to pull him, he quickly added, “But don’t let that fool you, ladies. He’s been to Paris.” The girls smiled as they turned to look up at him. Ben smiled back, trying not to feel too conscious of himself under their scrutiny. "He lived there a long time,” Jim went on. Ben tried to pull him away. 60 Panorama Jim shook him off and went on talking enthusiastically. “Ben’s really been all over,” he said. “Why, he used to write me from everywhere in Europe. Even from San Marino.” Then he paused and looked from face to face. “Ever heard of that place before, ladies?” The girls smiled and shook their heads, and Jim told them triumphantly, “That’s the prin cipality in the south of France.” Ben tugged at Jim’s elbow again, this time much more in sistently. “Well, you’ll have fo excuse us for now,” Jim said, starting to move away. Ben had suc ceeded. “But we’ll be coming back.” “Please do,” said the girl in the pink evening dress at the end of the sofa. The rest of the girls smiled back, they even nodded, look ing very pleased. He drew Jim along, away from the sofa and the girls. “What’s the matter with you, pushing and pulling like that?” Jim demanded when they got beyond hearing of the girls. “I just wanted to get away.” “Get away?” Jim said, ex ploding in a hoarse whisper. “And just as Nellie was begin ning to sit up? A fine fellow you are!” “Who’s Nellie?” “That’s the girl in the pink dress.” “Oh, well—” “Man, you do not know Nel“But who is she?” lie?” “The only daughter of Don Hilarion Francisco.” “Oh.” “And do you know what that means?” “What?” “She inherits the Francisco millions, that’s what.” “But, Jim, 1 thought you’re already engaged to that Span ish girl in Barcelona?” “Yes, but I’m not thinking of myself, I’m thinking of you.” Ben laughed. “I’d like to see you married before 1 die.” “And you’ve decided it’s go ing to be Nellie.” “She’s really a bright girl, Ben. Truly worthy of your ta lents and intellectual stature.” They stepped up to the bar. Following Jim’s example, Ben got on one of the high chro mium stools and rested his arms on the brightly polished hard wood counter. The white-jac keted bartender moved over to them. “Good evening, sir.” “Hello, Slimmy?’ Jim said. “Make me a very dry martini, will you?” Then, to Ben, “Name your pleasure, man.” “What can one have?" “Anything you like. Name it and you have it.” Then, “That right, Slimmy?” “That’s right, sir.” August 1960 61 “I’ll have bourbon-on-therocks then.” Climmy nodded with a smile and turned to make the drinks. Jim shifted on his perch and faced Ben who had taken to reading the labels of the bot tles on the shelf before them. “She studied in Europe, too, did you know that?” Jim said, taking out his cigarette case from a coat pocket. He clicked it open and offered the spread of cigarettes to Ben who waved it away. “She was in Switzer land four years.” "That right?” “Yes, sure, she was in a fa mous college in Zurich,” Jim said, picking off one of the ci garettes. “Studying what?” “The humanities. You know, the arts. Literature, painting, architecture, music. You know, the arts—” The bartender returned and put down their drinks on coast ers before them. “She’ll make you a fine wife, Ben,’ ’and Jim stuck the ciga rette between his lips. The bar tender produced a match book, struck one of the sticks and held its flaming end to the tip of Jim’s cigarette. “Thanks, Slimmy,” Jim said, blowing out smoke through his nostrils. Slimmy put out the flame as he turned away, and Jim con tinued, “Yes, Ben, she’ll be a fine wife,” he said. “You can be certain of that.” “Maybe,” Ben said, picking up the glass before him. He clinked the ice around in the glass, then he took his first sip. Jim took his very dry mar tini off the counter and, turn ing a wide grin on Ben, slipped off the bar stool .“Let’s go talk to the girls then,” and he wink ed at Ben. Ben lifted his glass and took another sip, then he turned to Jim. “I’ll join you later,” he said. "Come on, let’s go,” insisted Jim, tugging at Ben’s arm. “Let me sit here a bit,” Ben said. “I’ll join you in a little while.” Jim went away, and Ben turned about the stool, watch ing Jim make his way back to the girls. The orchestra struck up another dance piece just as he reached the sofa, and Ben saw him put down his martini on the low table beside one of the chairs and bend low before one of the girls. She stood up and gave her hand to Jim. They went out together Jo the terrace. Ben picked up his drink and, getting off the stool, hurried on to the nearest door, glad for this chance to escape. The door let out into the end of the terrace farthest from the orches tra and the dancing couples. He found Jenny sitting alone ^among the host of untenanted 62 Panorama wrought iron tables. She looked up with a wan smile when he stopped by her table. “May I?” he asked, indicat ing the empty chair opposite her. “Yes, sure,” she said. “Only, I hope you’re not going to ask me to dance.” “Why?” “I don’t feel like dancing.” “Good,” he said, sinking into the chair. “I only wanted to sit anyway.” Ben set down his drink before him and stared at Jenny’s face. “Where’s Phil?” “Out, there, someplace, talk ing business with his friends,” she answered, sounding cross and annoyed. “Why be annoyed?” Ben said softly. Then, she continued to be silent, he went on, “That’s his work.” “I used to think that,” she said ^vith a laugh. "But what’s wanted is only money as though that were the biggest thing in the world.” “He just wants to be a hus band you’ll not be ashamed of, I think.” “I’m not getting married, Ben.” Ben raised his glass, gulped down a little of the bourbon, set down his drink again and stared at her. “You’re serious, Jenny?” “Yes, very.” “Why?” “We won’t be able to make a go of it, Ben.” “Then what are you going to do?” “Go back to San Simon, I guess. Teach again in the high school there.” “Would you be happy doing that?” She did not answer that. In stead, she shifted around in her chair towards the people danc ing at the other end of the ter race. “Look, there’s Suzy.” Ben turned to look. He found Suzy engrossed in the intricacies of the cha-cha. “That’s my sister who married for security.” “What’s wrong with that?” “She’s not happy.” They turned away from the dancing, and Ben said, “You mean you’ve decided she’s not happy.” “Consider her family, Ben. Her husband gets home from the office, she meets him at the door, and as a matter of rou tine, he pecks at the mouth she holds up to him. He asks how the kids are and she tells them they’re fine. He plays with them for a while, then he goes up stairs, changes into his lounging robe and comes down again for his usual martini. He drinks this while reading the newspa pers or the market reports while she sits opposite him, knitting or crocheting. Then rhe maid announces dinner and they go in and eat. After the dinner August 1960 63 she did not prepare, they sit and watch TV with the children till it’s time to sleep. Sometimes instead of changing into his lounging robe, he gets into eve ning formals and tells my sis ter that he’s going to a party, he’s coming home late and she must not wait up for him. Is that the life, Ben, for this sensi tive sister of mine who once made you sit still and thought ful with a story she once wrote?” Ben picked up his bourbon again and very slowly took a long, long sip, tilting back his head to empty the glass. “I don’t know, Jenny,” he said, putting aside the empty glass. “What do you want out of life, anyway?” “I just want to be happy like anybody else.” “But how does one get to be happy?” “You remember my brother Leoniel * ” “Yes, I do,” and Ben told her about his stopping at San Si mon the previous summer. "That brother of yours has changed the face of that old town. His buildings have made it look different.” “That’s what I mean, Ben.” “Is that happiness?” “He drinks a lot, I know. He beats his wife, hits her on the head sometimes. But they’re happy.” “How?” “Can't you see? They're alive, Ben, alive. He’s doing some thing he believes in and she has stuck by him.” “And you think Phil is not capable of this?” Jenny shook her head. “Phil * has changed a lot since those days when you used to come here after school and play ping-pong with Leonie. It makes me sick the way he says yes sir, no sir, to my father,” she said in the tone people change to when they have to speak about revolting things to their friends. "He has come to love luxury very much, Ben.” “We all like luxury, don’t we?” “Yes, but not in the manner you and Nitong take luxury,” she answered. “It has never be come a drive in your lives. It has become that in Phil’s.” Then she forgot about Phil, and she asked about Nitong. “He’s living in La Palma de Mallorca I heard, but I have the address of a bar in Paris through which he can be reached.” “What’s he doing there?” “Writing plays, I suppose.” “He’s happy, I bet.” “Well, he’s doing something he feels important.” Jenny smiled. “I liked him a lot, Ben, I still do, I guess. I used to await his coming to our house in the old days with 64 Panorama great eagerness. Of course, you people only saw me sitting there in the sala, busy with something or other all the time. But I was only pretending really, so I could see him and listen to his tempestuous talk. We went out on dates eventually. Then one afternoon he told me, ‘I’m not going to be a kept man,’ and he stomped out of our house forever.” “In Paris he once asked me about you.” “What did he say?” "He asked if you were well, if you had gotten married, if you were still painting. He asked a lot of questions.” "And what did you tell him?” "I told him you’re fine, that you’re engaged to Phil who has become affluent.” "And then?” "He said nothing more. He left. Walked out on me. Just like that.” , “That’s just like him.” "I heard later that he went to the theatre and sat through a rehearsal of his latest play without speaking to anyone.” Ben looked up. Jenny was smiling at something far away, and he found himself thinking again of old Dr. Hans Kepler back at the Innsbruck Institute. In this recollection the old man was smiling genially, a long let ter in his hands telling him about his students making im portant contributions to the un derstanding of myths. For Dr. Kepler the smile marked the vindication of a trust, the shar ing of a task’s rewards. But Jenny’s was only of the kind one accorded distant mountains. Ben broke off his thoughts and faced away. The orchestra stopped play ing dance music, and the peo ple started filing into the house, clapping their hands. Then the orchestra began playing dinner music. "Ben, you go ahead have your dinner,” Jenny said after a while. "And you?” Ue saw her try to smile. Her ” lips quivered but she man aged a smile. Embarrassed, Ben stood up, took his empty glass and hurried into the house. He left the glass on the bar coun ter and headed for the table that had been set in the dining room. Somebody handed him a paper plate and silverware, and he took his place at the tail of the line, behind a girl. She faced about and smiled at him when he stopped behind her. "Hello again,” she said in a pleasantly modulated voice. "Hello,” he answered, remem bering her face from Jim’s in troductions, but he could not think of her name. She was the girl in pink. As though this could make up for his truant memory, he decided to speak August 1960 65 with her. Seeing her fix the folds of her dress, he said, “That’s a perfectly stunning dress.” “Thank you,” Pinkie said in the same carefully modulated voice. “But I’m sure you’ve seen more stunning dresses in Paris.” “Yes, but never as becoming ly worn as now.” “Thank you,” and she smiled again. “If that had not come from you, I would’ve called this the most outlandish line I’ve ever heard.” “I wouldn’t dream of hand ing you a line.” Now he knew he had started a game, and de ciding to keep it up, he said, “One hands lines only to old women, never to lovely young ladies.” Her cheeks dimpled, flushing lightly, and Ben walked slowly behind her as the queue moved on. B^n kept his little game going as they progressed down the length of the table. Pinkie told him about the Filipino dishes laid out before them, sug gesting which to pick at and which to get, and dutifully he followed every suggestion till they reached the end of the table where they were handing out the desserts. “Take nata de pina,” she said in a whisper. “I’ll take nata de pina,” he told the waiter, and the man handed him a small crystal bowl of this delicacy. Her friends came up when they turned to leave the table. “Ah, there you are, darling,” they said in a strident blabble of noise. "Certainly, you don’t intend to keep the Professor to yourself, darling,” someone teased. “But I do,” Pinkie teased back, stepping closer to him till their shoulders touched. "Now, now, that’s not fair.” “Oh, well—” “Good, that’s sweet of you, darling,” they chorused. “You’ll come and join us then, profes sor?" "I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I promised to sit with someone I hadn’t seen in years,” he said, marvelling at the ease with which he had lied. "How sad!” “But I’ll join you later, la dies.” “That’s the same thing you told us a while back, remem ber?” “We’ll be waiting then,” they said, and Ben excused himself. He hurried back to the ter race, but Jenny had gone. The table was empty, and when he looked around he found no sign of her anywhere. The orchestra was still playing dinner music over the unmistakable hum of dinner conversations at the ta bles scattered about under the many colored lights. Ben turned his back on these and walked 66 Panorama to the untenanted tables on the other end of the terrace. He set down his plate of food on the wide top of the balustrade and started nibbling at a stem of celery which Pinkie had sug gested as a very good appe tizer. Below him was the flower garden and beyond were the trees standing darkly over the colored lights strung ever the lawn and flower beds. It looked quiet down among the flowers, and Ben looked about for the stairs. He found a short flight of steps that descended to the lawn, and he was about to take his paper plate down when he heard someone clear his throat loudly behind him. “Here, have another one, Bienvenido.” Ron Julio emerged from the half-light, holding a glass out to him. “It’s bourbon-onthe-ro,cks.” Ben accepted the glass and, seeing the old man empty hand ed, he asked, “But what about you, sir?” “I can’t really drink any more,” he said. "But in my day, even if you do not ask, I could outdrink the best of everybody. Now, I can’t even drink a cup of coffee without my daughters “But you’ve had a full share of everything, sir.” “That’s what I like to think, especially when I remember I first came to Manila with fif teen centavos in my pocket and a parcel of cow hide my father had given me. I peddled that to the Chinese on Calle Gandara and I made eight pesos.” A servant patted up with can vas lounging chairs which he set down on the highly polished tile floor behind the two men. Don Julio sank into the chair behind him, indicating the other one to Ben. “Sit down, my boy.” Ben angled the chair so he could face the old man without losing sight of the garden trees beyond the balustrade. “Thank you, sir,” he said, taking the chair. The servant pulled one of the flat-bottomed steel chairs to Ben’s side and laid down the plate of food there. “Go ahead, eat your dinner, Bienvenido,” and together they faced towards the garden. “Looks good from here, huh?” “It’s all very fine, sii.” “It will look even finer very soon,” the old man said. “I’m putting a swimming pool out there. I didn’t have the money for it last year, but business has been good this year.” “That’s all very good, sir.” “Yes, but I’ve had to work like a carabao all these years.” “But that’s how it is, sir,” Ben said, opening the folded paper napkin on his lap. Don Julio laughed, his chair creaking under him, but he did not say anything, and because August 1960 67 he could not think of anything to say Ben pretended to be busy with the food on the plate. “I heard from Jim that you were in Paris for some time,” the old man said after a while. “I was studying sir,” Ben said, looking up from the food on his lap. “And what’re you doing now?” “Teaching anthropology, sir, over at the State University.” "That’s the one that’s got to do with primitive societies, no?” “Yes, sir, that’s right,” Ben said, trying to tear off a leg of the squab with knife and fork. “And you’re also doing re search, I suppose.” “Yes, sir,” Ben said. The leg would not come off under the slashing strokes of the knife. He gave up trying and laid the silverware aside. He tore off thq leg with his fingers. “There’s a whole lot we still have to learn, sir.” “You really like your work, don’t you?” “Yes, sir, I do very much,” Ben admitted, wondering if he should also confess that he had long since decided to give his lifetime to his work in anthro pology. He considered the ques tion as he picked the bone of its flesh, but the old man con tinued to speak, and Ben left off thinking about this question. “I wish you could work for us,” the old man said. “I don’t see how, sir,” and Ben laid down the cleaned out leg bone on the edge of the pa per plate. “I know nothing at all about business, sir,” and he picked up the glass of bourbonon-the-rocks the old man had brought out to him. Don Julio let out a laugh sharply. He put aside his drink and, drawing up his feet higher, clasped his hands around his knees. “But consider this, Bien venido,” he said, “when I start ed out I had very little of every thing you people have at your finger-tips. I had very little mo ney and no education. Now I have this house in this nice neighborhood. I belong to a lot of exclusive clubs, and I get driven around in my limousine by a uniformed chauffeur. I have a business worth two mil lion pesos a year, and I started with almost nothing.” “But you had the talent, sir, the feeling for your work.” Don Julio smiled. “Yes, I sup pose you’re correct there,” he said. “But those are no longer necessary. They’re even super fluous now. I’ve built up the business, it’s stable, but it has got to grow. For that an edu cated man is needed.” “But you already have Phil, sir.” ‘He’s all right, he knows the business,” and releasing his clasped hands, t h e old man 68 Panorama stretched his legs before him. “You see, my boy, a corpora tion grows only as long as it serves society, and it takes a man, educated as you have been, to see to that. That’s my point.” “I still don’t see how I can fit in, sir. As I said I know no thing about economics.” “Economics is the job of the technical staff.” “And what’s to be mine, sir?” Vou’ll be the guy who’s ■ going to see what ordinary businessmen cannot see or will not see,” and Don Julio turned his eyes gravely on Ben. “But 1 suppose you’d rather be work ing on those primitive peoples, huh?” and then he smiled. "Any way, I wish you’d give this se rious thought,” he said as he rose to his feet. “Yes, sir, I will do that,” Ben said, rising after the old man. “Good,” Pon Julio said, tap ping Ben on the shoulder light ly. “It’s a position worth ten thousand pesos a year at the start. Remember, my boy, it’s a stable business.” “Yes, sir, I will.” “Good,” the old man said, “1 got to go now and see what the boys are doing out there,” and he walked away. Ben picked up his drink and watched Don Julio make his way to the other end of the terrace where the people were. Then Ben raised the glass to his lips and drank off a little of the bourbon slowly. The dinner was over, and the orchestra had resumed playing dance music. Ben lowered his drink and watched the couples dancing as he clinked the ice around in his glass. Then he drank off a little more, taking the bourbon vrey slowly into his mouth. Where was it he had learned to prefer bourbon? This pre ference which had been thought so funny in Paris. Don Julio had once upon a time burst in on them in the bath house after a hard game of tennis. “Here,” the old man had said, thrust? ing the bottle of bourbon at them. “There’s no drink like bourbon for tired men,” he said. They had accepted the bottle and Leonie had uncorked it. They had passed it from hand to hand among Nitong, Jim and himself till it was empty. But many years had gone since then. At that time there was only a wooden frame house with a porch in front. They were also younger then. Leonie was still running after the girl he had since married. Jim was a fresh man in the University College, and Nitong was still around with his deeply glowering eyes, writing poetry which noboy un derstood. Suzy was majoring in English and publishing her sto nes in the Sunday magazines. And Jenny was still in the high school department of a convent August 1960 69 college, flitting about whenever Nitong was around. What had they made of their lives which had glowed with such bright promise in those days? Then remembering what he had in his hand, Ben lilted the glass again and finished off the bourbon in a quick gulp. He put down the empty glass on the table and walked away, bothered by the feeling his re membrances had awakened. He saw himself again in the late afternoon sunshine, squatting beside the chief of an impov erished mountain tribe, listen ing to exciting tales of prowess and vitality in the past told in a tired old voice. “Our magic has lost its power,” the old chief had said tiredly without bitter ness. “In the beginning the gods gave our tribe a bowl from which we could draw strength and life, but terrible things have befalleq my people. Our magic does not work anymore. We give our young men the old beads to give their women that they may bring forth an abun dance of children, but the chil dren do not come anymore. The bowl is broken and inverted on the ground.” The tired old voice faded ■ out when Ben stepped into the house. He was heading for the bar when he felt the light tug on his sleeve. He turned to look and found himself looking at Pinkie’s pleasantly smiling face. “You promised, professor, remember?” she said. Ben managed a smile. “Yes, of course,” he said, “but I hope you’d cut out that professor sluff.” “Yes, but what shall we call you?” “My friends call me Ben.” “It’s Ben then,” she smiled. They walked together towards the sofa where the other girls were. They pushed an armchair forward, and he sat down facing Pinkie who had taken the place the others had made for her on the sofa. “Well, I’ve done my part, girls, but you’ll have to cut out that professor stuff,” she said, and Ben stared at her face, won dering what could be afoot. “I promised wq’ll not call him professor.” “But what shall we call him, Nelly?” the girls asked in cho rus. Ben shot a glance at her. So that is Nelly, he thought, smil ing back when he saw her smile at him. “He’s to be called Ben,” Nel ly said, and she introduced him to the girls anew. He got back on his feet and, in the manner he had picked up on the Conti nent, took each one’s hand with a bow from the waist, repeating her name. First, there was Chi tang beside Nelly, then Nan and Lulu on the sofa, and Gio 70 Panorama over at the armchair. “I am deeply enchanted, la dies,” and he sank back into his armchair. “But let’s not be for mal at all,” he added after a while when no one would speak. “Yes, let’s not,” Nelly agreed, brightly. "Okay, but it’s his own fault,” Chitang said, “shaking hands like that, like some horrid Frenchman.” The others laughed, and Ben said, managing a smile. “That’s only because I feel so thorough ly disconcerted, ladies. I beg your indulgence, ladies. You see, I’ve never sat with colehialas before.” They laughed heartily at this. “Really, Ben,” Gio said, bend ing a little towards him, “we’re not really monsters.” “I’m only beginning to find that out now,” Ben replied, smiling back at them. There, I’ve started another game, he thought. The same game ol ping-pong all over again. And he played the game until the party started to break up, re turning every remark they made with the skill he had learned from his classmates in Paris. Gio was first to go. Ben got up when her father came to fetch her, and she introduced him, “Father, this is Professor Cor tez.” “How do you do, sir?” Gio’s father said. “How do you do, sir?” Ben said, stepping forward to shake the hand the older man had of fered. “He teaches at the State Uni versity, Papa,” Gio said. “Indeed, how nice,” he said. “I studied there myself, LIB., 1932. I hear the standards are still tough.” “We try to keep it that way, sir.” “Yes, it’s really a tough school,” Gio’s father said. “Why, I distinctly remember, we used to—” “Come on, Papa,” Gio said, pulling her father away. “Well, so long, sir,” he said. “We should meet again,” and he walked away with his daugh ter. Then only Chitang and Nelly were left. “Did you go to Madrid, too?” Chitang asked after Lulu and Nan had gone. “Yes,” Ben said. “When?” “Four years ago in summer.” “Why, Mama and I were there that very summer,” she said. “Funny, we never met.” “I would have missed you anyway among all those Madrilenas.” Then he glanced around at Nelly. “Isn’t that true, she looks so much like a Madrilena, Nelly?” Nelly smiled, nodding her head. “And all that time I was dy August 1960 71 ing to meet another Filipino again,” Chitang said. “You would’ve been disap pointed,” she told him. “Chitang does not speak it at all, Ben,” Nelly said. “I’ve tried to learn it, though. But I can’t seem to get the hang of it, Ben. Papa speaks it beautifully, but he never talks to any of us in Tagalog. Only to the servants and to the driv er. But it’s a beautiful lan guage, they say.” Co when her father came Ben decided he would speak to him in Tagalog. "Kumusta po kayo?" Ben said as he stepped forward with his prof erred hand. The man’s pleasant look changed into a glower. He stopped some distance from their group, staring unsmilingly at Ben. Nelly rose from her seat and joined them. "Dr. Almario, this is Profes sor Cortez,” Nelly said pleasanth’“How do you do, sir,” the doctor said levelly in English. “Papa, Professor Cortez teach es at your alma mater.’’ “Very interesting.” Then he turned to his daughter, “Well, shall we go, Chitang?” “I’m ready, Papa,” and she picked up her stole from the back of the armchair beside her. “Well, if you’ll excuse us, professor,” Dr. Almario said in the same icy tone. “We have to go, sir, good-bye.” Chitang took her father’s arm, and together they walked away towards the door. “He surely looked irritated,” Ben said as he returned to his seat. “You shouldn’t have spoken to him in Tagalog, you know.” “I’m sorry for that, but just the same it’s been a very nice evening, don’t you think, Nel ly?” She nodded, smiling back at him. "I guess I’ll have to see about getting home myself now. It must be quite late al ready.” She glanced down at her wrist watch. “It’s still early, not quite one yet really.” “Tomorrow’s a working day, you know.” “I work too.” “Still that doesn’t make us even.” Then he launched him self upon a deliberate lie, the words coming easily to his lips. "I still have an exam to pre pare for my eight o’clock class in the morning.” “Well, let’s go look for Phil, then,” and she held her hands out to Ben. “I heard him say he’d drive you back to the Uni versity.” “What about you?” pulling her up. “You coming too?” “No, I’m staying with Jenny tonight.” Ben picked up her brocade wrap and helped her get into 72 Panorama it. They crossed to the door to gether, coming out at the far ther end of the terrace where there was nobody. The orches tra was still playing dance mu sic, and there were a few cou ples still dancing. Ben felt her hand brush against his fingers. It was warm. Tingling darts shot up the length of his arm, and he thrust his balled fists into his pockets as he side stepped away from her. “Let’s go look over there,” Ben said, indicating the other end of the terrace when he sensed her heading for the wide steps that led down to the garden. “Yes, let’s,” and they walked off in the other direction. They met Phil at the edge of the dancing area. "Where’ve you been? I’ve been looking all over for you,” Phil said. “Why, talking with Nelly here.”, “All right,” Phil said. “Let’s go if you’re ready.” “I’m ready all right,” Ben said, and all three started to wards the street gate. “I was afraid you’d scold me again,” Phil said. Nelly walked with them down the gravelled path across the lawn. Ben stopped when they got to the gate. “Well, it’s been a distinct plea sure getting to know you, Nel ly.” She gave him her hand, and he took it in a tight grip. “Well, good-bye, Ben,” she said, tak ing back her hand finally. “Good-bye, Nelly,” and he turned about, hurrying after Phil who had plunged on to his car which was now stand ing alone a little way down the curb. Phil was already be hind the steering wheel when Ben got to the car. Phil reached over and unlatched the other door. Ben got in, drawing the door shut after he had seated himself comfortably. “Jenny not seeing you off?” Ben asked when Phil started the car. “No.” The engine caught, and Phil steered away from the curb, driving slowly down the wind ings of the road towards the gate into Davis Park. “We had a big fight,” Phil said after they had left the Park’s main gate. "Over what?” Phil did not answer, and no body spoke again till he stop ped the car in front of Ben’s apartment house on the cam pus. “Thanks for everything, Phil,” he said as he let himself out of the car. “Okay.” “Come out sometime for din ner. I still have a bottle of bourbon we can get merry on,” and Ben shut the car door. August 1960 73 “Yah, thanks, Ben, I’ll come out soon’s I get a few things straightened out,” then he turn ed away from the window and started the car. “See you then,” ind Ben waved a hand at his departing friend. He stayed on the curb in front of the darkened apart ment house till the car had rounded the corner at the end of the block. Then he turned about and climbed the short flight of steps to the door. He let himself in and pulled the door gently after him. The landlady had left the stair-light on and Ben lingered among the mailboxes beside the stair landing. He found a couple of letters in his box and a folded piece of note-paper tuck ed under the steel frame of his name plate. He took the paper and climbed on to the second floor, unfolding the note as he mounted the steps slowly to his room. It was from Paz, apologizing for having to importune him about anything, but would he be good enough to bring his other notes on the Ifugao beads to the office in the morning? There was something she would like to look up. Ben folded the note and slip ped it into his pocket. The two letters had foreign stamps. One had been air-mailed from Germany. He tore this open. It was a former classmate, writing in congratulation for a paper Ben had read at the last anthro pological congress in Rangoon. He smiled. Now, the other let ter. It had come by surface mail from a town he had never heard about in North Africa. A letter from Nitong. He stopped at the head of the stairs and read the letter in the light released palely by the single electric bulb over the landing. fdiTONG was fine. He had gone to this town, because he had heard he could live there more cheaply than he could in Paris during the winter. No, he had not gone by buying passage un any of the ships plying be tween Marseilles and North Af rica. He had worked his way on a tramp steamer to this town. Fine place, too. Every thing so cheap. No newspaper he knew how to read. Very few Frenchmen outside of the legionaires. No real conversation then, but plenty of wine. The ideal place, the beautiful life. He could live there forever. And he had already finished a passel of plays. Maybe these will get produced the very next sea son, or they might even get to be published. Who knows? And now could Ben, his friend, the one friend remaining in the whole wide world, a brother really, not send a few pesos? A hundred maybe? It could go a long way. Then an address 74 Panorama was mentioned. He slipped the letter back into its envelope as he walked on to his room down the cor ridor. Then he started to laugh soundlessly. The letter struck him as extremely funny. Ear lier at the party he had per suaded himself that money had no real value, th tt Nitong alone had decided on the one life really worth the try. And all the rest of them, waste. But now here was the letter and the plea for money. The free man, a beggar. Ben stopped at his door, still chuckling, and turned the key in the lock which gave easily with a slight click. The door sprung free, and he pushed his way noiselessly into the dark ness inside the door. He had been mistaken about Nitong, about life. He felt under the drapery for the electric switch. It had been wrong to yield so easily to Jenny’s dark arguings, and he decided to call her the next morning. He would tell her she was wrong, and with a resolute flick of the wrist, he threw the switch. The overhead light came on, dazzling and sud den, over every part of the room. Again, the familiar arti facts of his bachelorhood: the sofa standing in motionless in timacy with the chairs and the low coffee table; then beyond, by the shuttered windows, his old wooden desk and its attend ant armchair; and beside the stiffly unmoving curtains, the glassed-in bookcases and open shelves, mounting the tiered dis array of books and bundled magazines and manila envelopes and papers, so like some con struction in an esoteric idiom, abandoned before completion by its ambitious builders. Ben crossed to the desk and, unpocketing the folded note from Paz, dropped it with the letters under the flaring cowl of the reading lamp on the table. Then he went on into the bed room, leaving the door ajar be hind him. He undressed in the light that flooded through from the other room, chuckling to himself again when he thought of how wrong Jenny had been. He went over her dark argu ments as he changed into pa jamas with unminded skill born of ingrained habit. She was cer tainly very much mistaken, he thought, switching on the bed light. Of course, it had all looked correct then. But he had too much bourbon-on-the-rocks, he chuckled, and he was him self feeling depressed. Anyway, she was mistaken. Of that he was certain, he kept telling him self as he walked out^ of the bedroom and even while he August 1960 75 went about locking up his apart ment for the night. He put the night-latch on the outside door, turned off the ceiling light and made his way to the bedroom by the feeble light from the bed-lamp. He went over to the bedroom win dows and threw open the glass panes to the cooling night breez es. “Well, tomorrow’s another day,” he said lightly and, put ting down the mosquito net over his iron bed, crawled in side. He pulled the switch chain above his head and the light went out. For a while he stared at the unrelieved darkness, then he closed his eyes, yielding him self over to sleep with the final thought, Tomorrow’s another day. But his eyes refused to stay shut, and when the muscles started to twitch in protest, he opened1 his eyes again. He was still wide awake. He turned on his side, seeking sleep. Then, he knew not how, he was star ing at the darkness, thinking. Jenny’s gently serious face ma terialized out of the darkness. She was asking about Nitong and he told her again. He’s happy, I bet. He could not for get the way she had spoken these words, and now in his mind he was hearing her say them again. Ben cut her off. He pressed his eye-lids together 76 tightly and turned on his back. After what seemed a long, long time, he opened his eyes again to test his drowsiness. But he was still awake and unsleepy. Ben gave up trying to sleep. He tugged at the switch chain, and the lamp over the head-board loosed its steady beam on the darkness. He flung the netting aside and sat up, throwing his legs over the side of the bed as he did so. He probed with his toes under the bed for the slip pers, then he shuffled off on slippered feet to his desk out side. But suppose she was right after all? Then what? he thought as he pulled the arm chair closer to the desk and sat down. He switched on the bronze reading lamp and picked up the letters on his desk. In the end he picked out a ■ pipe from the rack before him and tamped tobacco into its bowl from the brass humi dor beside him. Certainly, he had deserved this treat. He left his desk and lit his pipe with the ornate silver lighter he kept on the coffee table for his guests. He took his pipe out to the little porch over the carport at the end of the second storey hallway. It had been a clear day and now the moonless sky was span Panorama gled all over with stars. He drew slowly on his pipe as he roved the heavens with his eyes. Al most inevitably he found him self thinking back to one eve ning in his youth when he first discovered stars. When was it? It seemed embedded so deeply in archeological times. And al most as carefully as he would reconstruct the histories of old societies, he conjured that part of his youth. He pieced memory with memory, matching snatches of conversations, fragments of gestures, filling in the breaks with shattered bits of shared intimacies, and he had the whole patched up and complete, like the Ming vases he had worked on once upon a time with Ellie. Through the patch work, he perceived Ellie’s face again: remembered sunshine lighting up a remembered smile, a remembered nose crinkled in remembered playfulness. Ben felt the old emotion sweep feeb ly within, where once it had surged wildly, pounding with almost lethal turbulence. He stopped roving among the stars, temembering the tribal chief in the highlands of his youth. The old man had been right, the bowl was broken. Vi tality was lost forever. But nothing really matters, he protested. There is still the life of the mind. Only the life of ideas matters. The Mind. Yes, but was that not the same thing Nitong had told him the first time they had met in Paris? They had shaken hands on that in glee and to celebrate this mutual confirm ing of beliefs, Ben had bought a bottle of the very best cham pagne in France. This, he re membered clearly, but he felt none of the elation which had surged up his breast then. Yet had he not said the same thing to Phil in the car as they were driving out to the Park? Ben repeated the words to. himself, but his remembering brought nothing of the confidence out of which the words had sprung. At the party, while he was watching the people strutting about in their imported finery, while he was listening to the alien rhythms of their speech, was not this life of the mind the obvious thing to believe? Yet, as Phil had put it, this is but a lifetime consecrated to pottering around buried villages where life had died. "And here’s life just begging to be lived," he had added. Yet how was life to be lived? Surely, he thought, there must be an answer. A lifetime has to be lived out to its end. And searching the coldly twinkling stars dusting the heavens, he only found the Milky Way. It August 1960 77 was a faintly luminous trace where the bowl inverted above him had cracked. Ben found himself stopped, his steps barred. He had at last come to the edge of the porch. He reached down and gripped die railing. Below him, the University’s experimental farms edging the campus stretched on and on till it blended into the darkness far away. CREATIVE ARTS A group of courses designed to encourage creativity upon the part of the adult, like Prinstance creating sound reasons why he or she shouldn’t be horn? with the kids instead of attending these courses. D-l Creative Dusting Fee: $10.00 (And 4 Old Undershirts) An ideal course for the housewife who feels unful filled, and who doesn’t seem to get any emotional gra tification out of her cleaning chores any more. New techniques are introduced which enable her to ex press her artistic inclinations and enrich her spiritual development. THU RS. 7;30-10:00 3rd FLOOR TEACHERS’ LOUNGE D-2 Live Like A Slob And Like It Fee: $7.50 (And 4 Bottles of Dust) An ideal course for husbands whose wives are ex pressing their artistic inclinations and enriching their spiritual development while they let the house go to pot. THURS. 7;30-10:00 3rd FLOOR STUDENTS5 LOUNGE D-3 Experimental Mah-Jong Fe: 1 Crack, 2 Bamm 10 variations of the game that is sweeping the na tion’s homes and fascinating millions of women who should be sweeping the nation’s homes instead of playing it. FRI. 1:00-3:00 STUDENTS’ HOMES (while the kids are in school) 78 Panorama WWW! Book Review 9 J&ttotiM t \Y7 hen American literature first received grudging recogniW tion in universities, it had to be justified through often ex travagantly forced comparison with English movements and models. More recently critics have distinguished direct imitation from naturalization of imported influence. Just such an awareness of American adaptability, the development of cultural independ ence through accommodation of foreign symbolizations to a dif ferent human environment, has impressed Leon Howard. And the experience of lecturing abroad in diverse countries has reinforced his desire to formulate succinctly the national character of Ameri can accomplishments. He explains how their will to survive in a new land forced New England Puritans to compromise their concept of a closed society. Even the damned proved good citizens and artisans, on whom the elect depended. Later, migrant Romantic attitudes under went similar transformation. The drudgery of wilderness chores, the dangers of primitive life, modified Wordsworthian rapport with nature. For commemoration of pasts already repudaited, dreams of an alabaster future were substituted. And excessive leveling made responsible citizens fear mobocracy, not tyrant kings. H ad the study multiplied such examples of accommodation, however commonplace, until through comparative analyses of several national literatures mutations were discovered, unaccount able through inheritance and therefore genuinely native, a fresh estimate of American growth might have been achieved. Instead, the emphasis in Howard’s book is allowed to shift from discrimina* Leon Howard, Literature and the American Tradition (New York: Double day, 1960). AUGUST 1960 79 tion of cultural origins to measurement of the degree to which intuition, reason, or empiricism dominated any single author or period. Far from being precise, such attempts become increasingly incoherent, partly because few American writers were philosophers trained in tidy definition (Jonathan Edwards and Henry James conceivably are exceptions); but also because Howard’s own use of his terms is far from systematic. Where the mind of a Lovejoy is required, to compress lucidly the complex and momentous, a kind of congenial carelessness is offered instead. “Empiricism” is expected to describe accurately and adequately the self-reliance of Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, Poe’s marketing acuteness, Hawthorne’s skepticism, plus a multitude of other prudent faculties, in spite of myth making propensities, developments from allegorical precept—the usual congeries of the competitive and complementary. Thoreau is classified with the intuitionists; Twain is less realistic than Howells. ... So untrue is such criticism-by-categories to the actual inter dependence, regardless of order or proportioning, among the crea tive mind’s powers of observation, insight, logical extrapolation, and verification through fictitious construction, that the very continuum which Howard has been trying to prove emergent collapses long before the “unsettled” twentieth century is reached. In his final paragraphs, the author claims to have been tracing a tradition undiscoverable in his book: “belief in the creative power of the human spirit to endure and prevail and to exist in the meanest and queerest of individuals.” The patent irrelevance of this summation, however disarmingly everlasting its yea, merely epitomizes. a persistent critical failure caused pernaps by a prefer ence for illustration, rather than exploration, contrary to the ex ample set by makers of literature themselves. —From the New Mexico Quarterly. * * * 80 Panorama Curtain call The Filipino Theatre By Daisy Hontiveros-Avellana ACT I: Pre-1941 There was no Filipino, theater. There were moromoro plays, and there were the zarzuelas. There were some plays written both in Ta galog and in Spanish, and a few in English. A limited num ber of foolhardy young souls like Wilfrido Ma. Guerrero, Severino Montano, Francisco Rodrigo, A. E. Litiaco, Hilarion Vibal presented before the pu blic the plays they had written. Artistic successes? Oh yes! Fin ancial? What does the word mean? August 1960 81 The dramatic clubs of those days were also divided into two groups: the Spanish-speaking groups like the Circulo Escenico, Tali a, Arte y Caridad; and the younger, English-speaking groups: the Community Play ers, the Cosmopolitan Dramatic Guild, the Players * Guild, and the Barangay Theatre Guild. All these local dramatic or ganizations experienced the same difficulties. Most of the people taking part in the plays were working people, or stud ents, who spare only their eve nings for rehearsals. Someone in the cast got sick — the others would have to carry on in his absence. The players rehearsed far into the night. And the realization that they would have to be up early the follow ing morning for their various duties did not make tempers any too sweet. Someone came late — all the others had to wait, whether they liked it or not, for him to show up. It did not have any good effect on the nerves to have to act on stage with an invisible com panion. Then, of course, there was the question of scenery, cost umes, and lighting effects. How to get the best possible of these three utterly necessary items at the very lowest prices — that was the problem which made amateur producers’ hair turn gray. It was useless to ex pect to gain anything financial ly from these amateur produc tions— after one had paid for expenses, which also included rental for the theater (a major expense)—there just wasn’t anything left even for a cast party. These amateur dramatic or ganizations staged plays for the sheer joy of acting, and not for purposes of making money. It was ridiculous therefore, to ex pect them to lavish money on expensive scenery, costumes, and lighting effects — especially when there was no money to be lavished. ACT II: 1942-1945. 'PO ALL APPEARANCES, this period was the beginning of our Golden Age in the thea ter. The local stage never had it so good. We had scenic de signers, musical directors, play wrights, publicity men, and ac tors. Tagalog was accepted, willingly or not, as the lang uage for all these presentations, except for some that were pre sented in English. The form of entertainment for young and old was the stage fshow, which started as a mix ture of drama in all its level and plain vaudeville. A little later, an enterprising company (The Philippine Artists’s League) took a step farther by divorcing the actual play from the musical numbers, and thus getting two separate good shows 82 Panorama instead of one trite hodge podge. The other companies promptly followed suit, and Manila audiences were then treated to plays that were co herent and understandable. Since these presentations were staged in moviehouses, the problem of acoustics came up. So did microphones. To use or not to use? “Off with them!” shouted the purists. They did not stop to consider that doing so would have meant resorting to pantomime — in a theater as huge as the Avenue, say, where the stage had not been designed for dramatic presentations, no voice, no matter how clear and resonant, could have been heard beyond the first few rows without the aid of the lowly mike. “Hide the microphone!” shouted the fence-sitters. In a flower pot maybe, or under a chain? Then watch the atten tion of the audience wander from the play to an intriguing game: where is the microphone? The microphones stayed. Charges of “Illegitimate!” rent the air. “You are not the thea ter!” was the accusation hurled to the stage show. But that un feeling creature went merrily on its way. “After all,” as one amused producer of one such stage show said, “No amount of seals, whether by Good House keeping, the Bureau of Health, or Armour’s Ham, can establish the legitimacy of a dramatic company.” Close on the flourishing reign of the stage shows came several August 1960 83 plays in English, and they too met signal success. The rosters of actors who so wholehearted ly gave of their abundant ta lents to both Tagalog and Eng lish plays was a brilliant and distinguished one. To these actors and to many more, we owe not only several hours of pleasant entertain ment. but also the much-needed relaxation and release from the cares and anxieties of the day. This, after all, is the final desti ny of the theater. The invisible yet solid bond between the ac tors on stage and the people who watch them; the sympathy, understanding, and responsive reactions between these two groups; the communion be tween life as reproduced behind the footlights and the lives of those in the orchestra seats, in the balcony, and in the loge. Upon that magnificent power of the stage to compress in two hours a whole lifetime, or a snatch of a lifetime, lies its vin dication. For the theater, after all, is not on the stage behind the footlights — it is there among the seats. ACT III: Post- 1945. S o MacArthur returned, along with several hundred thousand men whom a grateful Philippines eventually learned to call by their first names — names which all stood for one word: friend. The traditional Filipino hospitality once again again came to the fore. What little there was in the way of food was shared with the “Am ericano.” But the average Joe didn’t care much for exotic dish es that didn’t agree with him. Joe wanted a different dish: entertainment. And that meant, for nine Joes out of ten, a leg show. And songs. Stateside. Sung badly or sung well, but still, American songs. And so the musical show came into its own. Old joke books were dug up; costumes mostly on the taw dry side, were hurriedly made from whatever material was available; furniture was bor rowed from trusting neighbors; a few dances rehearsed in hap hazard manner; leading movie personalities signed up for the starring roles; and the curtains creakily opened on what would probably go down in theater history as the blackest period of the local stage. Manila was beginning to look like a huge army encampment. Khaki was everywhere. But working on the premise that the civilians must still be around, somewhere, and that maybe they wanted entertainment, too, some of the local directors de cided to present plays in Taga log once again. The “lolas” in the audience sighed with con tentment This was their thea ter. The happy state of affairs did not last long. First-run mo 84 Panorama vies, exciting in their newness, hit Manila and took the city by storm. People flocked to them in droves. The owners of the smaller theaters looked on, alarmed. Why shouldn’t some of that good money come their way, too? The plays in Tagalog were given a most unceremon ious kick right where it hurt most — the box-office. * There ‘ll be some changes made,” sang the owners of the small theaters, and that was the funeral march for the Tagalog plays. * But the memory lingers on. History does repeat itself, and once more the school and col leges, as well as the local ama teur theatrical groups, have ta ken up the gauntlet. The Dra matic Philippines (organized during the war years) and the Barangay Theatre Guild (or ganized early in 1939) are still in there pitching. New groups have come in, too. These others are also dreaming of the day when the Filipino national thea ter will come into its own, final ly. There’s Severino Montano’s Arena Theater, Jean Edades’ Philippine Theater, the Civic Theater, Incorporated. And there are our esteemed col leagues in both the American and the Spanish communities: the American Manila Theatre Guild and the Spanish Circulo Escenico. Right now the question of what language to use for the na tional theater is not important: English, Spanish, Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, every little bit helps. Every little production put on by amateur groups and by the school organizations is just one more little step for ward. * * * Doctor, Doctor I was m the hospital, due to be operated upon at 8 a.m. But the attendant did not arrive to take me to the operating room until 9:45. As he transferred rr.3 from my bed to the cart, I remarked, “They must be awfully busy in the operating room this morning. You're one hour and 45 minutes late.” One of his aides clapped his hand to his head and exclaimed, “Oh, man, it's been murder up there this morning!” August 1960 85 Extra! Extra The Instructive Role of Popular Publications By E. P. Patanne The family has been the chief institution charged with preserving and trans mitting from one generation to the next the ideas which this na tion accepts and cherishes as tra dition. This function of the family is basic to the group. Whether Christian or pagan, the family discharges the obligation, not only for the benefit of the society at large but also for the sake of posterity. The rise of institutions of learning has challenged the authority and responsibility of the family vis-a-vis its obligation to the group, to an extent where the latter nas relinquished part 86 Panorama of its role as an agency of culture transmission. A further intrusion upon this sphere of family res ponsibility came about with the growth and development of mass media — newspapers, magazines, movies, radib, television and co micbooks—a combination of the most potent instruments of com munication. With the refinement of advertising techniques, through these media, it has become pos sible to sell soap along with the desirable virtues among women. The printed word, along with pictures, is a pervasive force in modern society, assuming an in fluence vital to the process of nation-building. This little paper seeks to dis cuss the proper and responsible role of popular publications in the Philippines and will confine itself to magazines — Sunday supple ments, fortnightlies and month lies. The magazines circulated in this country, whether supplements to the dailies or separate publica tions, have a readership quite distinct from the following of newspapers. What the magazines offer is usually an entirely differ ent fare from the dated stories strewn in the dailies. There is an extended and more permanent form to magazine articles and sto ries, where the treatment may vary from journalese to literary. Certainly, tnere is more of litera ture in the magazines than in the newspapers. The quality of August 1960 87 this literature may not always be consistently high but in the psy chological plane magazine stuff can sink deeper than humdrum bits of humanity recorded in the dailies. And magazines besides disseminating information can al so be instructive. It is with re gards to this latter function of popular publications that maga zines can be counted among the more significant purveyors of cul ture in the Philippines today. With the apparent antipathy and apathy shown by students toward textbook learning, popu lar publications have assumed ap pealing forms. They offer learn ing without tears, knowledge with illustrations. And they require no semestral examination. They cover a spectrum of subjects classed as “general interest” — from sex to science — attractive and fascinating face for the reader immersed in a mass culture. A further delimitation of this discussion is needed. Preoccupa tion requires my narrowing this paper to the function of the Eng lish-language magazine catering to the so-called popular mind. Since sophistication and distinc tion are regarded as virtues among the masses, the English-language publications are often held up as arbiters of taste and ideas. Ma gazines have become the media for norms and ideals. Their read ership, however, has determined, often dictated upon these pub lications the kind of materials that would ensure continuing pa tronage and keep circulation and advertising within the bounds which guarantee profits. Thus, magazines find it more palatable to popular taste to give prominence to the escapades of Hollywood than say, a histori cal piece dealing with an inci dent in the Revolution or an article about the rituals of rice cultivation. Herein lies a con flict of interests. The magazine editor is often outvoted by read ership, advertising and publisher. But the magazine editor is a creature of compromise. In the end, he would run a profile on Elvis Presley along with a critique on Rizal’s novels. This saves and solves an issue. the English-language pub** lications which has grown conscious of its fundamental role, partly usurped from the family, are still faced with the more sig nificant problem of fighting down the influence of comicbooks, the movies, radio and television feed ing on imported opiates—the tran quilizers and bromides of mass culture where good can hardly be distinguished from the perni cious. An indiscriminate publica tion of the so-called syndicated or canned materials has brought us moments of entertainment along with neurotic lapses deve loping out of sheer frustration. 88 Panorama This ugly aspect of the popular publications has submerged what ever feelings of identity which tradition seeks to buoy up amidst the swirl of mass ideas. In this miasma of mass media, the magazines can define their role. If they seek merely to ap proach the standards and model of foreign publications, then they shall continue to be recreant to society. It is enough that accul turation has packed a surfeit of foreign ideas into our lives, so that Filipinos today practically grope about looking for them selves. The tendency has been a looking back. Magazines to fulfill that vital role it can assume in national growth must perforce adopt an active, instructive policy. They have started to enlarge upon that function which they share with the family and the school. The task is not easy. Magazines have amplified the nationalist sentiment but the ap proach has often been couched in reproachful terms and the treat ment of the subject often turns into an evangelical preaching of unity and survival or a disserta tion on a concept. It is difficult, at this stage, to explain, move and at the same time criticize a people for lacking such a senti ment. Harangue against the leaders of this conutry to provide inspiration to. the people is not often met with success. Nationalism as a positive force in nation-building should be deve loped from a consciousness of race distinction. The approach as many English-language magazines have taken is to let Filipinos discover themselves, their institutions, their culture; not teaching by author ity but by example and illustra tion. Through feature and fiction, this has been done. What is need ed is added and spirited interest in Philippine history, sociology, anthropology, politics, geography, folk litreature and the lives and works of illustrious Filipinos. This can provide orientation to think ing. The popularization of great folk epics, the works of Rizal, Mabini, Lopez Jaena, Marcelo del Pilar and others, significant events in our history, discoveries made in the fields of sociology, anthro pology and archaeology on these shores—all these can help the Fili pino find himself. There is no more nationalistic Filipino than one who feels proud of his race. Magazine editors, writers and contributors are in a position to diffuse a sense of racial distinc tion to the people more than textbooks can ever hope to achieve. This js not making a plea for a return to the hills, to the primitive clustered village of life, to stick agriculture. Rather, the task for the magazines, is to bring the past to the present, making no value-judgments, sim A.UOUST 1960 89 ply filling up for many a blank tapestry of nistorcial experience. By accepting that Philippine life and manners are more in teresting than the romance of the spinning jenny and the telephone, the magaznie editor accepts the priority of articles that can im part national consciousness. Through such articles or stories the popular mind can establish contact with the past and discover an affinity with the minds that produced such grand epics as the Hudhud, the Alim, the Maragtas, Biag ni Lam-ang, Tuwang, I ha lon, and Darangan. Through the magazines, the creative writer can define and dramatize what has been termed “the Philippine experience.” The works of our leading scholars, for long regarded as species con fined to graduate seminars in uni versities, have began to filter into the pages of popular publications. The stuff thev write is usually regarded as “heavy, hence not popular, hence not conducive to upping circulation. The old eco nomic consideration always rears its head. Publishers are business men first and journalists second. But publishing cannot be di vorced from the role which mo dem society has endowed it, namely, that of contributing some thing to national experience. And publications must exert a force other than civic and political. At this point the question may be raised that if the Englishlanguage magazines whose reader ship is confined to a certain level, the proper and responsible pub lications which can do a better job of diffusing the nationalist sentiment are those printed in the vernacular as these enjoy a cir culation touching the grass roots of our society. There is no doubt they can. But then the popular publica tions printed in the dialects are dictated in content to a degree by the mentality and taste of its readership. It is this same reader ship that has made comicbooks national reading matter, prolonged sufferance in Philippine movies and radio and are most prone to borrowed popular ideas. But it can be said, it is the most na tionalistic too. There can’t be any quarrel be tween the purposes of popular publications, whether in English or in the vernacular. There is a striving in them to assert a Fili pino identity, a gradual shedding of stereotype ideas and a reluc tance to accept as proper totally alien experiences. The problem restated is not anymore the total lack of na tionalism among magazine editors and writers; rather it is a defini tion of their role. ¥ * * 90 Panorama Smoke Unlimited By Lois Mattox Miller Over the past five years the American public has be come increasingly aware of and concerned over the rapid ly increasing number of deaths from lung cancer and the appa rent relationship of this disease to cigarette smoking. In work ing with my husband, Senior Editor James Monahan, on the Reader’s Digest TobaccoHealth articles, we have seen important developments which, although by no means solving the problem, do present distinct possibilities for reducing the risk of lung cancer. The first major development was the publication in The Jour nal of the American Medical Association of August, 1954 of the preliminary report of the Hammond-Horn study for the American Cancer Society which indicated, from a broad statisti cal basis, an association between cigarette smoking and high death rates, particularly in lung cancer. This association be tween cigarette smoking and lung cancer was further estab lished and a cause and effect relationship indicated by the Society’s final report on the mass survey of the smoking ha bits of nearly 200,000 men, pub lished in March, 1958. Some 28 August 1960 91 epidemiological studies done here and in seven countries ab road, over many years, confirm the cigarette-lung cancer asso ciation. This epidemiologic evidence of a cigarette-lung cancer rela tionship was supported, during the same period, by experimen tal, chemical, and pathologic evidence. Substances in ciga rette smoke were isolated and used to produce cancer in labo ratory animals. At least ten can cer-causing agents were identi fied in cigarette smoke, and two of these produced in experimen. tai animals lung cancer of the type commonly found among among cigarette smokers. Au topsy studies of men who had died from various diseases, in cluding lung damaged in pro portion to the number of ciga retes smoked. rToDAY, most scientists who have made the closest stu dy of the problem are convinc ed that cigarette smoking is the major cause—although not the only cause — of lung cancer. This opinion, however, is not unanimous. The high incidence of lung cancer in certain indus tries, if employees are not pro tected from noxious fumes, im plicates air pollution as a pos sible cause of the disease. How ever, all the evidence makes it clear that cigarette smoking is largely responsible for the ten fold increase in lung cancer death rates since 1930. In order to determine wheth er popular filter brands decreas ed the tar and nicotine content of cigarette smoke, the Reader's Digest arranged studies by a well-known firm of consulting chemists. First tests made in 1957 re vealed that the majority of fil ter tips then on the market were mere mouth pieces; some filter tip brands gave the smoker more tar and nicotine than the plain tip brands manil'actured ed by the same companies. However, subsequent tests in 1958 and 1959 showed a big in crease in filtration efficiency and a much lower tar and nico tine content of the smoke. While the value of smokt filters is still undertermined, advise offered by many physicians can be sum med up thus: “If you are not now a smoker, do not acquire the habit. If you must smoke, smoke a pipe or cigars. If you smoke cigarettes, your best bet is to stop smoking. If you can’t break the habit, cut down on the number of cigarettes you smoke: the more cigarettes you smoke, the greater the risk. If you don’t cut down, switch to low-nicotine, low-tar cigarettes and keep your consumption of them at a minimum. Smokers will be wise if they have a chest x-ray at least once and better twice every year.” 92 Panorama Attention: All organization heads and members! Help pour club raise funds painlessly... Join the Panorama “Fund-Raising by Subscriptions” plan today! The Panorama Fund-Raising by Subscriptions plan will get you, your friends, and your relatives a year’s sub scription 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 Sub scriptions plan are as follows: G) Any accredited organization in the Philippines can take advantage of the Plan. (2) The organization will use its facilities to sell sub scriptions to Panorama. (3) For every subscription sold the organization will get Pl.00. The more subscriptions the organization sells, the more money it gets. 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