Evolving Genres of the Written Word:

“Fake News Fiction” & the Like(s)

Alfred A. Yuson

I
n a world that’s said to have gone upside down, the primary victim
is the primary virtue that is truth.
What is truth? It comes in many faces. It has a range of
identities, definitions and synonyms, such as verity, or simply,
fact, as in scientific data. As well does it enjoy a multiplicity of antonyms:
untruth, lie (from white to barefaced), deceit, duplicity, fiction, and these
days, alternative facts.
The verbiage related to politics and the verdure of imagination that is
literature appear to have coalesced, or are now running parallel. The usual
error of conflation is also eager to mistake one for the other.
The year just passed has been recognized as the starting point of a
timeframe for this head-shaking development, much as hindsight now
identifies the brave new words of long ago that have apparently proven
prescient. The popularity of the book 1984 by George Orwell has been
revived, and demand for copies has risen so surprisingly that retailers soon
found themselves out of stock.
Another title, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, is also now
being championed by literary critics and political observers alike as
having even more of forecasting relevance to what has been happening
worldwide: in brief the rise of populism with its fearful tendency to slide
to authoritarianism, let alone fascism and tyranny.
But it seems that popular leaders have in common the facility to
utilize the popular lie, the untruth that becomes an article of faith among
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fanatics. Emotions are wildly at play when rationality takes a backseat,
inclusive of its invaluable aspect that is skepticism, or the need to question
the validity of anything before blind acceptance.
With the resurgence of Putin’s Russia, the calamitous meltdown
in Syria that has propelled millions of refugees towards Europe and
elsewhere, the continuing bizarre behavior of North Korea’s kingpin, the
historical fiction advanced by the People’s Republic of China with regards
entitlement to the South China Sea, the shocker that was Brexit, which
first gave distinct voice to the rise of populism, as eventually affirmed with
the election of a Rodrigo Duterte in our country and a Donald Trump
in the United States of America, with more rightwing populists waiting
in the wings in other countries — all these political developments have
become alarming, not only for progressives or liberals, or democrats (in
lower case), but learned observers, journalists and historians who have
enjoyed the privilege of casting a long view on global shifts that concern
paradigms.

Fake news started with electoral or political campaigns, and proliferated

upon the questionable success of such exercises. To convince voters of
the supposedly positive effects of having the United Kingdom withdraw
from the European Union, its proponents shielded the electorate from
the notion of possibly deleterious economic consequences, and focused
instead on the supposed cleansing of the national workforce. It rallied
the emotional demographic sector behind the false ideal of a cessation of
employment being taken over by migrants.
For a specifically personal case — personal to me, that is, as well as
other lovers of whisky — no thinking went into the repercussions of having
to establish new trade relations for the distribution and sale of single malt
whisky and blended whisky traditionally manufactured with excellence in
Scotland, which happens to be part of the United Kingdom.
Concerned ambassadors with knowledge of trade diplomacy have
raised the same concern as when Scotland attempted to seek independence
only recently. Had the move succeeded, an independent Scotland would
have had to establish diplomatic relations with all the countries that the
U.K. already enjoyed trade relations with. Some measure of disaster could
have befallen Scotland with regards its distribution of whisky. The delays

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and new arrangements would have translated into much higher prices for
good ol’ Scotch.
Thankfully, for myself and several friends with whom I’ve engaged in
many hours of elbow-bending at a bar, that didn’t happen. But now, with
Brexit, which still has to come into gradual and full shape, the same concern
has been revived. Well, it probably won’t affect many Filipinos who still
think nothing of the perils of gout while manifesting their nationalism with
continued intake of San Miguel beer. But for those who have “moved on”
and learned of the greater healing powers of “uisge beatha” or the “water of
life,” we can only say that the gods of spirits remain just, since Japanese and
Taiwanese whisky now provide alternatives to our idolatry of the Scottish
genius with regards both water and life.
In the US, the false news also started during the long-drawn contest
that involved primaries for the selection of Barack Obama’s successor. In a
way, it may be said to have been similar to searching for a Nikka or Suntory
replacement for Lagavulin single malt, that is, if a great whisky can be
compared to a great president.
And here in our own proverbial neck of the woods, similarly, the
black propaganda unleashed on and from all sides during the presidential
election campaign of 2016 became easily converted into both defensive
and offensive (in more ways than one) battlecries, even with or maybe
because of the euphoria of victory as what turned so-called “retards” extra-
giddy.

“Bias” became one of the first bywords. Never mind that its popular,
populist’s use as an adjective only displayed a severely limited level of
literacy. In so-called trolls’ hearts and minds (if a troll can be said to have a
heart and a mind), all reportage and reckoning of their idol’s triumph and
initial conduct in office that was less than idolatrous merited that single
word of dismissal, even if unhappily truncated in violation of proper use.
“Bias.” It embodied the simplistic notion of unquestionable supremacy.
We have also heard of the upturn in proferring false binaries or
dichotomies, again a staple populist’s tack. Everyone who raised an
eyebrow or two, much less criticized the actuations and promouncements
of the unconventional president, was said to be “Dilawan” or of the so-
called “Yellow Army.”

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 Much like what happened in winning the vote for Brexit, and much
like what would happen with Donald Trump’s unlikely but apparently
inexorable triumph (ironically despite his losing in the “popular” vote
count), it was the promise of a departure from what was perceived as
the faulty facets of a predecessor that invested faith in the wildest of
prospects. Not only wildest, but the actual diametrical opposite of the
predecessor.
Ah, disente, kanyo? O, eto, mamamatay-tao, na mumurahin pa kayo!
In place of what was adjudged as utter display of apathy, here then was
the stark, raw empathy involving a purveyor of crude language and street
justice.

With regards our former colonizer, in place of expertise in foreign affairs,

there was the brazen allure of a demagogue that said what the disgruntled
and displaced wanted to hear: protectionism against all imagined threats,
terroristic, economic, and social, that went with porous borders and
the nagging defiance against stereotyping the faithful of other, different
religions as well as expanded gender sets.
When reason is cast to the wayside in favor of panaceas, so are the
hallmarks of truth, whether they’re of the motherhood character of the
text in Goodwill greeting cards or of more detailed and forceful substance.
Such is the present dilemma in the United States of America: how does
one convince the other half that climate change is indeed a scientifically
proven threat, at least more so than the possibility that a Muslim from
countries that had no record of terrorist attacks in the U.S. may now be
importing terror together with her or his luggage upon landing at the John
F. Kennedy airport, his passport and visa details be damned?
Falsehood has a certain lure, as if of a siren song, of what we want
to hear, and the promises the tune entails. One could well imagine that
the literarily inclined among Americans, especially if they were brought
up cuddling classic books, say, even foreign vintage epics, that if there had
to be a new Captain America to lead the country back to safety, that leader
would, like Ulysses, command his men to lash himself into the mast, so
that he would be powerless to give in to the temptations sung by Circe
and her minions. But alas, not only does the current version of Captain
America forego that wise recourse; he himself flings the siren songs to a

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people becoming even more divided, owing to different interpretations of
the truth.
He insists that the crowd at his inauguration as President was the
largest ever, despite substantial camera evidence to the contrary. And his
own minions suggest, indeed as the now infamous Ms. Kellyanne Conway
had, that there is such a thing as “alternative facts.”
To that fanciful statement, the response was just as devastating as
they were incredulous. “They’re falsehoods,” intoned television journalist
Chuck Todd. Lies, plain and simple: that was the common verdict, except
perhaps from among some Republicans and members of the extended
Trump family.
Yet it seemed to be all of a piece with what had presaged the fantastic
utterance. The world going upside down had also entered a dimension
defined as post-truth — wherein falsity has crept up to attain a deadlock
with veracity, and all systems go when it came to a coin toss between the
two.

In Malacañang, the otherwise gently avuncular and articulate spokesperson

Ernesto Abella came up with his appeal for both “creative imagination”
and “creative interpretation” in reference to the often confounding
pronouncenents of the Bossman himself.
If the consequences of all this verbal shell game weren’t or can’t be
tragic, why, of course we can all grin and bear it, maybe even accede that
we’ve just been thrust into comedy hour.
And yet what we are experiencing now is actually part of an apparent
global pivot to a curiously novel inclusion among the genres of writing,
inclusive of verbal articulation — which is written down and reported,
and which draws adverse reactions, all on paper or on reading screens of
all sizes, from television monitors to desktops and laptops to tablets and
cellphones.
In terms of reportage and commentarty per se, while it started with
a fringe kind of journalism — blogs and trolling on social media — the
initially questionable purveyance of fake or false news has seeped into
established tri-media, with prominent personalities, mostly related to
politics, spewing mind-toggling conundrums or seemingly oxymoronic
terms such as that by-now infamous classic: “alternative facts.”

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 A popular blogger in the service of Duterte as infallible icon in turn
compares the writing of fake news with that of fiction, and identifies them
as the same banana. I will submit that she may have a point there, however
possibly tenuous, or yet to be established through the process of correct
discourse.
It may not matter that her master often prefers to rely on a
lodestone of invective. Or should it? He is evidently not of the province
of recognition that to curse is to give up on discourse, to cease and desist
from being discursive. Nawalan nang diskurso, kaya't magmumura na lang,
at/o magpapatawa ng paka-krudo.
What about claims that appear to be plucked out of thin air?
Four million Filipinos are drug addicts. That’s one in 25. Over a million
surrenderees, thus acknowledging their addiction. Where are they now,
when a supposed rehabilitation center funded by a generous Chinese
fellow, one that can house over 10,000 poor but salvageable folks, is
presently only rendering service to not even a few hundred?
Reputable national and international news organizations have
decried what they contest as “dubious claims … used to justify (the)
bloody anti-narcotics campaign, (per) review of official government data
and interviews with the president’s top anti-drug officials, (who) say that
data on the total number of drug users, the number of users needing
treatment, the types of drugs being consumed and the prevalence of drug-
related crime is exaggerated, flawed or non-existent.”
Why does he say that he will take his policemen’s accounts as Gospel
truth, no matter if it all flies in the face of CCTV evidence and official
investigative reports, then eventually backtrack, without seeming so, when
he freezes the same policemen’s conduct of the all-out war on drugs, not
because the number of over 7,000 Filipinos slain has been breached, but
more because one South Korean businessman was strangled to death right
inside a police camp?
The same creative spokesperson recently contended, in the wake
of a former president’s niggling observations, that President Rodrigo
Duterte’s leadership style is “transformational” and “more visionary.” More
visionary than that of the former president, or even of all his predecessors,
we suppose he means.

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 We cannot dispute this claim, as yet, and brand it as falsehood. It is
but a claim. And who knows, the first part of the claim may be true, in a
manner of speaking. That is, that the burgeoning kill list had indeed caused
this strange divergent development — of many Filipinos being transformed
into a community characterized by general apathy, while many others were
in turn being transformed back into the old “days of disquiet and nights of
rage” — as Jose “Pete” Lacaba described the season before the imposition
of Martial Law.

Let me digress a bit at this point to offer an anecdote: a personal recollection

of a memorable conversation I had with a friend, if a more senior colleague
in the profession, that took place sometime in the late 1970s or early-to-
mid 1980s. I must apologize that my memory — that fallible repository
of private truths as well as acts of deceit — cannot presently pinpoint the
exact year of this occurrence: a late-night meal downed with Irish whiskey
at the original Café Adriatico off Remedios Circle in Malate.
I also can’t remember what brought us together: just the two of us, as
the song says. We must have come from some concert or cultural activity
around the area. In any case, I found myself being treated to this midnight
repast and drink, by virtue of his being the senior colleague, by Mr. Adrian
E. Cristobal, the fellow we honor with this lecture series.
After exchanging perverse notes on the comely ladies we must have
ogled in the activity we had attended, and maybe comforting ourselves
with prevarications on why we wound up at Café Adriatico by ourselves
alone, the chat went on to literary matters, very briefly. And eventually, to
my surprise, to politics.
I can’t for the life of me establish exactly when this conversation took
place, whether it was in the early 1980s when Martial Law had already
supposedly ceased, or maybe even after post-EDSA People Power 1, when
Marcos had already flown off and Adrian had relegated himself into an
opinion columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
I had never been in his league, merely in his employ at some point or
other, or as a beneficiary of his patronage at the height of Marcos’ Martial
Law.
What surprised me most was when Adrian volunteered to share
with me, not upon any solicitation on my part, what he thought had been

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Marcos’ gravest offense against the Filipino people. And that was the fact,
as he said, that as someone who ruled for 20 years as president and despot,
Marcos had stonewalled a generation of the best and brightest Filipino
leaders from ever taking over the reins of government. Not just Aquino,
Benigno Jr., he said, but the likes of Lorenzo Tañada, Jovito Salonga, Jose
Wright Diokno… I’m not sure now if he added other names. But that, in
a nutshell, was Adrian’s bit of a post-mortem on what turned out to be
ruinous political rule.
Well, I’m sure that he had other, varied post-Marcos insights that he
shared with other friends and intimates, or may have put down in yet private
notes. But it was a memorable night for me, since I had been allowed entry
into one small room of verity, if of the Monday armchair theorist variety at
worst. I had felt secure however that even given his reputation as a man of
letters, a fictionist and dramatist, a Palace rationalizer himself (but never
an apologist, as far as I knew), a strategic spinmeister, and a sophisticated
raconteur of wit and antic humor, what he told me was a personal tidbit of
truth.
Adrian expressed an opinion, a studied opinion. Given his experience
as part of history, and his appreciation of that history, then this studied
opinion may be said to be closer to fact than to conjecture.

We are all said to be arbiters of our authenticity of experience, and this

is what ordains us to function on whichever side of the fence may seem
attractive or fortuitous for the moment.
Here, now, many of us find ourselves at a crossroads, as always.
From the oral tradition to generational, genre-saturated literature, from
journalism in all its forms to the crafting of academic papers, advertising
briefs, legislative proposals and judicial discourses, indeed, even or
especially of history, we know or we should know that we have all been
part of a floating era of baloney, balderdash and bullshit.
Post-truth. Default narrative. Creative interpretation. These are now
the syndromic symptoms that stupefy us who are worshipful of the word,
written or expressed any which way.
But are Cervantes’ windmills also a lie created in his famous
character’s mind, in the guise of geriatric lunacy, except that it amuses and
entertains us? And is Borges’ phantom in the circular ruins a fictive hero as

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fantastic, thus unreal, as Smeagol/Gollum or Gotham’s Batman, and Gabo
Marquez’ butterflies emerging from a dying man’s mouth as winsome,
windblown and yet wacky as a flying Peter Pan?
In real life, there is the individual that is said to be a pathological liar.
In fiction, there is the unreliable narrator: the young boy whose narrative is
riddled with whimsicality, or the mentally deficient who mistakes paranoia
or fantasy for realism.
“True Lies” was the title of a film. “Gaslighting” has become a
trendy term sourced to another film, where the manipulation of a victim
is carried out by dimming the light from a gas lamp to achieve effects of
gradual reality distortion. In fiction, effective magic realism is attained by
first creating stepping stones as a gradual passage to further suspension of
disbelief. One does not stun a reader with a major miracle, unless one were
writing in another genre that is not disguised as partly realistic, such as the
fable, or outright fantasy.
Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch employs exactly that game’s modus
operandi in terms of structural formatting. One can best go through the
sequences, as suggested by the author himself, by jumping from one
chapter to another, the way filmmaker Quentin Tarantino eschews straight
narrative structure, or how Akira Kurosawa repeats a sequence with retold
versions of what really happened.
Not a far cry, I say, from techniques now being employed by
disruptive presidents.

When I taught the Short Story at the Ateneo, I would tell the class, on the
very first day, how we actually apply fiction nearly every day of our lives,
with regards the most commonplace things, or at the very least during
special moments. As when, say, as young students, they have been given the
privilege of driving a car to school and back. And on a particular afternoon,
they get into an accident. And when Papa comes home that evening, how
they must break the bad news.
Options galore. Pa, guess what? I got an A in our Philo exam. Also in
Theology. Oh, by the way, I got into an accident today. Option 2: Wow, Pa,
there I was, driving along Katipunan, when a lovely rainbow materialized
over Marikina after a thunderstorm, and I couldn’t help but marvel at
God’s wonders, when this container truck just came out of the blue and…

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Option 3: Papa, I know you’ll have to sanction me for this, but it really
wasn’t my fault. Or, I mean, I couldn’t help getting emo when my new
girlfriend Maria suddenly told me, while we were in the middle of tight
traffic, that she’s transferring to De La Salle after the sem. So, well, the car’s
a total wreck.
These options are among the various ways one can mount a fictional
attack, or simply, tack. One chooses what one may deem as the most
effective way to tell a story. And one’s decision would depend on one’s
knowledge of the audience, in this case one’s father. Is he the gullible,
merciful type, or very macho if somewhat romantic? One selects the mode
with which to engage what one thinks is the level of the listener’s credulity.
And one tells such varied stories in one’s entire life. How best to
explain the birds and the bees to a child? How to tell the spouse when one
is fired from a job? How to tell one’s in-laws of the need to downsize, or
migrate to America, without them?

We go through life and we learn, through a continuum of conundrums.

You can spin but not tell a lie. You should always or only rely on
verified data. Remember the boy who cried wolf. Matroshka dolls are
layered truths. Smoke and mirrors are the key to M.C. Escher’s drawings.
Bach’s canons are auditory palindromes that sound exactly the same going
forward and backward; they are mathematical in their effusive precision.
Jazz improvisation, characterized by inventiveness of spirit and
artistry of innovation, plies the sublime “truth” of music, hops, skips and
jumps over its restrictions, or undermines it in a subversive yet empowering
new way.
Ah, religion: the age-old narrative of adoration and faith, however
much it continues to distance itself from humanism, that is, the
cognizance of woman’s and man’s own powers of healing and magic, of
transubstantiation of hate to happiness, of gaining haloes owing to human
heroism. But there is the power of prayer to convince the prayerful of the
strength of their hopes.
Goebbels tells a lie that grows in credibility on a daily basis. It
is different from the parlor game that is Chinese Whispers, where the
original truth undergoes a procession of embroidery or misinterpretation
until it arrives at the end of the line as an entirely different truth. For

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its part (let me repeat), China’s claim of a nine-dash line is still simply
historical fiction.
The hackjob is a tabloid or online clickbait away. Trolls and bots feed
on information access, algorithms, data charge, selective justice and happy
endings.
We hear of “alt-fact” from the world of “alt-reality.”
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” “The
question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many
different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be
master — that’s all.”

We collect quotes referring to this brave new upside-down cake of a world

and its reverse-parallel, concave-convex universe.
The writer-editor Dean Francis Alfar observes: “Alternate facts, fake
news, creative interpretation, post-post-truth. Welcome to the world of
speculative fiction! Except it isn’t speculative anymore.”
Peter Yu of Hong Kong comments on an FB thread: “Chinese have
a saying for this, ‘pointing at a deer, and calling it a horse.’ It’s a common
tactic of the failing ruling class.”
Emma Grey Ellis of Wired opines: “We don’t live in the age of post-
truth. We live in the age of internet-enabled bullshit.”
The scholar-author Vince Rafael in Seattle informs us: “A new and
timely course, ‘Calling Bullshit’, soon to be offered by my colleagues at
UW, Carl T. Bergstrom (School of Information) and Jevin West (Biology).
Here’s the syllabus…”
Trump’s press secretary Sean Spicer laments: “The default narrative is
always negative, and it’s demoralizing, And I think that it’s just unbelievably
frustrating when you’re continually told it’s not big enough, it’s not good
enough, you can’t win.”
From Northwest Portland, the celebrated author Ursula K. Le Guin
weighs in:
“A recent letter in The Oregonian compares a politician’s claim to
tell ‘alternative facts’ to the inventions of science fiction. The comparison
won’t work. We fiction writers make up stuff. Some of it clearly impossible,

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some of it realistic, but none of it real — all invented, imagined — and we
call it fiction because it isn’t fact. We may call some of it ‘alternative history’
or ‘an alternate universe,’ but make absolutely no pretense that our fictions
are ‘alternative facts.’

“Facts aren’t all that easy to come by. Honest scientists and journalists,
among others, spend a lot of time trying to make sure of them. The test of a
fact is that it simply is so — it has no ‘alternative.’ The sun rises in the east.
To pretend the sun can rise in the west is a fiction, to claim that it does so
as fact (or ‘alternative fact’) is a lie.
“A lie is a non-fact deliberately told as fact. Lies are told in order to
reassure oneself, or to fool, or scare, or manipulate others. Santa Claus is a
fiction. He’s harmless. Lies are seldom completely harmless, and often very
dangerous. In most times, most places, by most people, liars are considered
contemptible.”
And our own distinguished poet-fictionist-editor Gémino H. Abad
often reminds us: “What is imagined is most real.”
To be virtual is to be virtuous, that is, in possession of the virtue of an
imagined world, where the good cop and the bad cop can be a chiaroscuro
of simplification.
Why, we might claim that even poetry is facsimile. Metaphors be
with you, we now say as if wishing one a phosphorescent moral force.
Meanwhile, from Duterte: “Istorya lang yan. But be careful,
sometimes it merges…” Typical of the mayor from Davao, he climaxes
with ellipses, and thus divides us among those who think he is a brilliant
strategist who deliberately confounds, and those who believe he is simply
inarticulate, especially in terms of rendering finality.

Now trolls and mainstream media are at war, a war of bloggers’ choosing,
as they see themselves as the initial underdogs that have upped the ante
with the privilege of Internet manipulation.
Sass Rogando Sasot, the same reputed Filipina scholar in the
Netherlands who has come home to meet with her icon, and who had
identified the writing of fake news as equal to writing fiction, posted the
following on the Internet on January 30:

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 “Ito dapat ang final question:
“If you were the VP of a country and a typhoon is predicted to ravage
your hometown at the same time as your family reunion in New York
which you planned a year in advance, which one would you cancel? The
typhoon or the family reunion?”
More or less, the reactions from the alleged dilawan may be capsulized
as: “Pwede na pala ma-cancel ang bagyo. (Ang sakit sa bangs.)”
Others abandoned reason for the quick gratification of ad hominem
cut-and-thrust as well as good ol’ false binaries.
From John Genuino: “If you were the president of a country, would
you kill your own citizens?’ That would be a better question.”
The pejorative, the caustic, the sarcastic, the satiric, the parodic
are all employed in this raging war of words and worlds gone zany if not
mad — where the enhancements of photoshopping are debated vis-à-vis
professional pure-ism, and the claim of no filter is a championing of the
naked truth. No lies! No enhancements! No bias!

Opinions and commentary in today’s social media — wayward spawn of

masterworks in letters — entail obligations as measurable as those that
challenged predecessors in communication.
Where does the snake oil salesman stand among annals of fakery?
Perhaps a distinction may be attributed to the quality of the imaginative
presentation. Maybe there simply is inherent privilege in literature of
gravitas. Or is it that the morality of truth only rears its butt-end whenever
the writing deals with actual human beings, the very (real) bumblers in a
world of deceit?
Let us listen to a few disparate individuals who speak with the same
sentiment if not the exact same tenor of voice.
The first is a basketball player, an NBA All-Star who can sink three-
pointers and yet recall and invoke a great statesman from the past. After a
Cleveland Cavaliers win over the Washington Wizards, when asked about
a report that his teammate LeBron James favors trading him for Carmelo
Anthony of the New York Knicks (which BTW James vehemently referred
to as trash from a writer who was himself trash), Kevin Love posted this
quote on his Instagram account: “A lie gets halfway around the world

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before truth gets a chance to put its pants on.” The quote is from Winston
Churchill.
From a report in the International Business Times last February 11,
we read of how “Apple chief executive Tim Cook is calling on governments
and technology firms to step up in the battle against fake news and
misinformation online, dubbing it “one of today’s chief problems.”
“Cook urged governments to launch a public information campaign
to curb the spread of false news stories, hoaxes and misinformation that are
‘killing people’s minds, in a way.’
More from Cook: “We are going through this period of time right
here where unfortunately some of the people that are winning are the
people that spend their time trying to get the most clicks, not tell the most
truth.”
Even more recently. Mark Zuckerberg, the genius behind Facebook,
added his voice to this growing condemnation of false news.
And finally, from a fellow Filipino, someone whom I don’t know
personally, have never met, and only found on my Facebook News Feed.
His name is Don Kusuanco. He seems to be based in California, but has
apparently been here in relation to medical missions. His intelligence and
convictions are evident, and his words of spirited engagement resonate
with me.
On February 6, he posted a piece with the title, “Dutertism and the
Legacy of Anti-Intellectualism.” He begins by recounting how he had been
so fortunate way back in June 1991 when he managed to meet astronomer
Carl Sagan, through his boss and mentor at the time at a UCLA research
center, Prof. Richard Turco who was Sagan’s co-writer for the book Nuclear
Winter and the End of the Arms Race.
He recalls, though admits to paraphrasing from faulty memory, what
Sagan said at that time.
“It is our responsibility to safeguard knowledge, never to suppress
knowledge even if it is knowledge that makes us uncomfortable, that
challenges what we already know, and most importantly even if it bothers
those who are in power because in the end, we know which parts of this
knowledge are permissible and which ones are not.”
That was Sagan speaking. Now, 26 years later, Mr. or Dr. Kusuanco
says those words have proven prophetic, “as scientific knowledge is being

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ambushed in the halls of power.” He argues the point in the following
excerpts:
“On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, scientists, hackers, librarians
and archivists banded together to save climate change data and other
scientific data from being deleted, altered or removed from public domain.
“Everywhere, I see signs of anti-intellectual elitism, as science,
arts and humanities are being discredited, critical thinking relegated to
insignificance, and replaced by celebrity entertainment, willful ignorance,
lack of intellectual curiosity, a soundbite and video culture, and the
irrational appeal of conspiracy theorists, flat-earthers and creationists.
“Here in the Philippines, a popular culture phenomenon called
smart-shaming has been described. A social commentator once asked why
people seem proud of the fact that they’re dumb. I notice how social media
trolls, when confronted by facts and statistics that debunk their arguments,
would say sarcastically: ‘Sobrang talino mo.’ or ‘Whoa stop, you’re giving
me a nose-bleed’ or ‘Please be patient because I’m not as smart as you are.’
“The word ‘intellectual’ has become a dirty word, a code for elitism
or someone divorced from the masa, a characteristic we no longer look
for in our political leaders. In December, Duterte, while talking about
hypocrisy, dismissed then US president Obama as an ‘intellectual’ who had
no business being in politics. ‘Alam mo kasi the reality ng mga bright... you
read so many theories... Magkagulo ‘yan and you come up with something
that really abominal.’ (He meant abominable, jeje). This is coming from a
man who cannot even finish his sentence coherently.
“It is our lack of education, our ignorance and our poverty that so-
called populist politicians like Duterte and Trump exploit to perpetuate
themselves in power and their corrupt ways. Instead of the Filipino people
setting their agenda, we have become these politicians’ puppets and pawns
in their political chess game.
“For those of us who can still distinguish between falsehood
and truth, who still embrace the ideals of equality and liberty, who still
subscribe to what is right and what is good, it is our responsibility not to
permit our country to slide back into tyranny, superstition and darkness.
We must argue for a level playing field for everybody so Filipino children
will have access to education and move ahead in life.”

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Indeed, education has always been key. To learning all about numbers and
how they add up truthfully, or myths and legends and how they are told
effectively, dwelling as they may on the un-real, as well as other stories that
have to hew to the truth to gain real power.
While on the subject of education, allow me to mention an item
of minor relevance with regards a particular form of learning — as what
lawyers (often deliberately mispronounced as “liars”) need to go through.
Somewhat like a basketball game that is prone to point-shaving, there is
such a training regimen that hones a master of reason in the craft of point-
splitting.
Jesuitic, we say of such an exercise, when one can argue, through the
refinements of sophistry, a point either or both ways, and be convincing
at least halfway if not entirely. Davao-based Jesuit Fr. Joel Tabora issued
a rather belated acknowledgment of an initially misplaced trust in the
Davao-mayor-turned-president’s efficacy of governance, when he finally
had to find a stance somewhat compatible with or at least not exactly
contrary to the prevailing thinking (even as we speak) among the poobahs
of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines. We now find such
comments that snort in this wise:
“Jesuits as ‘masters of casuistry’ bending the naked truth as it suits
your politics…” Yes, much like lawyers, or blind men feeling up an elephant
in the room and describing the animal of contention.
It is not our objective here and now to render judgment on who
prevaricates and who speaks the truth. It should not be in our purview of
discourse whether to side with whoever tells the truth more than the lie, or
vice versa. It is enough for us to identify the tricks of the trade, and indicate
what may be gained or lost in that endless commerce between truth and
falsehood. And we are simply saying here that this engagement has reached
new grounds in more ways than one.
What we may stress is that it is education that filters most of the
muddy trappings of emotional resonance, and strips bare both the
compelling logic and the trusted instinct that place us on one side of a
question.
Somehow, truth has a stronger affinity with intelligence. That may
be why it has increasingly come under siege. If you have the worldview of
a bemused joker, why, it would seem like much fun — this smart-shaming

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and truth-pooh-pooh-ing — no matter how damaging it may be to the rest
of the values we trust ourselves to embrace. If you are alarmed however
by the advent of such concepts as “fake news fiction” and alternative facts,
then there is the path of the better dream to follow. Or we can always
respond with humor.
The imaginative may recast the recollection of what was termed
Benevolent Assimilation, well over a century ago, as a fake contraption
much like an umbilical cord foisted upon a much younger country. And
now the toddler and pop arrive at a karmic situation of mirroring one
another’s versions of absurd siege — by untruth.
On one hand, the Trump travel ban involving seven countries now
appears to have ground into a halt. On the other, the figure of over 7,000
extra-judicial killings appears to have marked a pause for contemplation.
(Either that or one Korean life did it.) Now, it’ll be myth-making if it’s
claimed that the number 7 always figures as zenith before a fall.
When we here stood on the side of truth in 1986 against a dictator
who was fond of that number, our truth went viral the world over, maybe
because truth almost always goes with freedom — freedom from living a
life of deceit.
In the 2015 film Youth by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino, one of
the ageing characters, a scriptwriter, delivers the wonderful line: “I have to
believe in everything in order to make things up.”
Can truth be boring? Or should the question be: Is truth so boring
that we have to come up with alternative figments of the imagination?
This question is posed to everyone. I hope that I have pirouetted
enough around the pivot that circumscribes humanist causes, inclusive of
both entertainment and enlightenment.
Thank you.

(NOTE: A longer version of this lecture was read at the Asian Institute of Management on February
20, 2017, as the 7th Adrian E. Cristobal Annual Lecture.)

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