Loyalty in the time of pandemic crisis

Way back in the early 1960s, Ulli Beier, the director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Culture, gifted me with a trip to the Trobriand islands deep in the South Pacific a two hour C-47 flight from Moresby. The Trobrianders are Melanesians but their features are not as strong as those in Papua New Guinea. In fact, but for their curly hair, they could very well be Filipinos. At the time, all of them were half-naked; the men and women wore skirts of shredded banana leaves. At the time, they had no written alphabet or currency – being a protectorate. They used Australian currency. Their sexual code is the subject of Malinowski’s “Sex and Depression in Savage Society.” Upon reaching puberty, sexual promiscuity is the norm. I was told that the World Health Organization team that was there studying them with all that sexual abandon noted that  pregnancy was very rare. But once they got married, the punishment for bigamy or adultery was death. We have this even in so-called primitive societies – stringent norms of loyalty, for loyalty is also translated as love.

My short story, Puppy Love, will become a movie very soon, I hope. Ria Limjap is going to produce it, with Piolo Pascual in the leading role. I like to consider it as a meditation on loyalty. Two very young people fall in love but they end up having separate lives. In all the years, however, they were loyal to each other, although in the end, their loyalty was to memory.

Again, memory! Without memory as recorded and made permanent by artists (writers mostly), there is no history, no nation. Memory and loyalty are therefore so profoundly entwined and they become us; loyalty then defines our goals, our very lives for with loyalty is that strongest of human urges – which is so easy to identify, to nourish, and it is love. Like all feelings, however, it can also perish. Everything that lives must die.

My story, Olvidon, is a meditation on corruption. Dr. Salvador Puro, endocrinologist, goes to the United States. His job as director of research in a major government hospital was given by a powerful politician to a relative. After 20 years in a major research institute. Dr. Puro achieves the international reputation for his findings that led to cures for diseases like AIDS. A former student who is now Minister of Health of the new President of the Philippines visits him and convinces him to return to Manila to attend to the President who is afflicted with a strange disease – his skin is turning white. Dr. Puro goes back to Manila where he is given a fortune, a house and bank accounts in Switzerland. He is also provided with women and honors. Olvidon is also a commentary on loyalty to one’s profession.

Who was the politician who said my loyalty to my party ends where my loyalty to my country begin? In truth, many are not even loyal to their political parties; their loyalty is to their family, their friends. For which reason, they transfer from one party to whichever will grant them favor – balimbing. They can’t be loyal to an ideology, to an institution. In the end, although they may profess revolutionary ideas, when they achieve power, they will rule as badly like the hordes of politicians that preceded them, hostage as they are always to their personal loyalties. This is what Dr. Puro concludes in Olvidon.

Disloyalty does not stigmatize them as it would in other societies where loyalty is also a profound moral value because it transcends the person.

The “blood compact” is a form of bonding that is supposed to last because it was made with blood. The Katipuneros who signed their pledges with their blood legitimized and made permanent their pledge of loyalty. The relationship between a man and a woman is made permanent by their vows when they are married. Such vows are often sundered.

The question of loyalty arises when we look at ourselves, our country, and our relations with other people. There is that old saying that a man cannot serve two masters.

I can sympathize with the dilemmas that our ethnic Chinese face. They are brothers, they went to school here and most of their relatives and friends are here. I urge them to be loyal to their culture, their language (although many of them can’t speak any Chinese language). Their culture gives them their identity. But they should be able to make a distinction between Chinese culture and the Chinese state, that this Chinese state has infringed on the sovereignty of the Filipino nation.

Is there a test for Loyalty?

Of course there is, and the most popular perhaps is in the Old Testament when God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, for Him. In some societies, the test is even ritualized as in Japan where loyalty is entwined with honor. All those Kamikaze pilots who gave their lives to the Emperor died honorably. Until the shogun, Ieyasu Tokugawa, united that nation in the 15th century, Japan was divided. Clans were fighting another, until Tokugawa prevailed and gave Japan several centuries of peace. To test the loyalty of one of his followers, he asked him to kill his wife. Such kind of proof is not demanded today. If people whose loyalties are dubious. Many Filipinos of Chinese ancestry, with Filipino names, even loudly proclaim their defense of China every time Mainland China is criticized. They do this because their loyalties are to the Chinese state. How can we be sure of this? Simple – ask them to declare publicly that, in the event of war with China, they are for this country – and not for the Chinese state.

My novel, Po-on, ends with that epic battle in Tirad Pass, December 2, 1899. Istak Samson, the peasant who leads his clan in its hegira to the plains of Western Pangasinan is asked by the fictional Apolinario Mabini: to guide the fleeing Aguinaldo and his ragtag Army through the Cordilleras to Cagayan Valley. He joins the rearguard led by Gregorio del Pilar and in that mountain pass, he recognizes his nationality, his loyalty and most of all, his duty as demanded by that loyalty. And so it is in this way that our national anthem ends.

I’d like to see it on the opposite manner – that we should live for this unhappy country, work for her, give her all our strength as duty, duty, duty.