Martial law babies.
That was what they called us, the incoming freshman batch at the University of the Philippines Diliman, school year 1973-74.
The implication was that it was just our luck, we had missed the party.
Upperclassmen regaled us with war stories of their glory days, engaging in pitched street battles with the Metrocom and the Philippine Constabulary at Mendiola during the First Quarter Storm, or manning the barricades at the Diliman Commune, when the campus was declared a “liberated zone” for several euphoric days.
That was all over. Those stories had become part of Diliman folklore, told and retold by grizzled graduate students and misty-eyed Poli Sci professors.
The year before, midway through my last year of high school, Ferdinand Marcos had embarked on his authoritarian project. My father dragged me kicking and screaming to his barber to have my shoulder-length locks sheared, because soldiers were stopping jeepneys and giving longhairs impromptu buzzcuts.
The military was arresting political opposition figures and journalists, but I was more bummed out by the fact that the weed supply had dried up (as it turned out, only temporarily).
Life under Marcos’ “New Society” promised to be a dreary Orwellian trudge for a nascent bohemian bon vivant. That was how, in my protracted adolescence, I saw myself.
There was one bright spot: I had passed the UP College Admission Test without breaking too much of a sweat, an amazing feat considering the chemical abuse I had subjected my brain cells to throughout high school.
I even got into a much sought-after quota program. I had penciled in Business Administration as my first choice, mainly to appease my parents, even though I couldn’t really see myself as a business major. (I can’t remember what my second choice was.)
Even though my mother was a UP alum, my parents weren’t immune to the belief, common at the time, that attending UP would turn me into a card-carrying communist.
They needn’t have worried. I had other plans.
In my senior year of high school, we were sent on a field trip to scope out prospective colleges. First stop was the august University of Santo Tomas. For some reason, our campus tour guide chose to highlight their rare book library, a dank scriptorium redolent of musty vellum, presided over by a Quasimodo-like figure with a wandering eye out of Umberto Eco.
Next stop was UP Diliman, which was a complete contrast: guys in jeans and T-shirts and coeds in miniskirts and bell-bottoms, sprawling on the grass at the Sunken Garden, or hanging out at the covered walk, smoking cigarettes and laughing in the sunshine.
I honestly have no recollection of our third stop at the Ateneo de Manila campus. I had already made up my mind: it was UP or bust.
Even under martial law, UP represented a kind of personal and intellectual freedom that, after nine years of Catholic school, seemed irresistible.
Pre-martial law, my “groovy” uncle (the one who smoked a pipe and had a subscription to Playboy) used to take me to the Butterfly. It was a folk joint just outside the Diliman campus, where UP types gathered to hear the likes of the Demetillo brothers, Big and Small, essay Bob Dylan numbers.
One of my high school buddies also had an older, long-haired cousin from UP who used to hang out with us. One time he took us to the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation padhouse/HQ in UP Village to pick up a pair of comely sisters, both UP coeds, for a party. As I inhaled the strawberry incense and eyed the blacklight “Che” posters, I thought “now this is the kind of college lifestyle I could get into…”
I didn’t really mind being a martial law baby.
I was too busy taking in the full-on UP Diliman experience: the laissez-faire attitude toward class attendance and decorum, the emphasis on intellectual curiosity over rote book-learning, hallowed UP traditions like the “Oblation Run” and the fraternity rumble, the terrible cafeteria food…
Where else would you find a campus org named “Samahan ng Bastos sa Kanteen,” whose raison d’etre appeared to be harassing female students? Their unofficial mascot was Danny Purple, so-named because of his signature purple pants. A derelict older man with slicked-back hair and gin breath, he would occasionally shout the vernacular for “vagina” at passing coeds, who quickly learned to give him a wide berth, or to no one in particular.
In today’s politically-correct climate, a guy like Danny Purple would have been committed to a mental health facility or, at the very least, ejected from the premises by security. But in keeping with UP’s famous tolerance for personal eccentricity, he was pretty much left to wander the school buildings. The urban legend I heard was, he had been a student many years ago, had fallen hard for campus beauty Boots Anson, and had lost it when he was rejected, deteriorating into the tragicomic figure before us.
Renato Constantino looked at Imee Marcos for a minute, then resumed his lecture
Another unforgettably surreal “only in UP” moment was when Imee Marcos, now a senator, walked into my History class wearing a “Kabataang Barangay” T-shirt, tailed by a burly PSG bodyguard. The classroom fell into an awkward silence; the professor was none other than the redoubtable nationalist and avowed Leftist thinker Renato Constantino. Until recently, Ms. Marcos’ father had him under house arrest.
Constantino looked at her for a minute, then resumed his lecture.
Outside the campus, however, militarization and the suppression of civil liberties and human rights continued apace, as we were reminded weekly by the Philippine Collegian, at the time said to be the only free press in the Philippines. Collegian editors were routinely “invited” to Camp Crame for questioning by military intelligence. Some were detained.
The spirit of resistance remained strong if somewhat restrained in its expression. We were exhorted to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”, but most of the raging was done in silence. A semblance of campus political life resumed. There were occasional walkouts and sit-ins, over issues such as academic freedom.
A handful of UP activists took their political beliefs to the next level, and headed for the hills. Some were destined for martyrdom, and were suitably eulogized back in Diliman.
Faced with the repressive tactics of the Martial Law regime, the student Left, once a big tent with room for divergent viewpoints, hardened into Nat Dem orthodoxy in response.
Being a student activist, all grim and determined, seemed like a lot of work.
Me, I was too busy expanding my mind.
Unless I was really interested in the subject, I was lackadaisical about class attendance, doing the minimum to pass the course. In those days, before the “block” system was adopted, you rolled your own: students were free to choose the classes they wanted and to make up their own schedules. I made sure I left plenty of free time between classes to hang out and take in the passing parade of life at UP.
My real education took place in the Main Library, where I spent hours haunting the stacks. In those days, before the Internet, the UP library seemed an endless bounty of knowledge. It literally opened the world to me. I ran through six, seven library cards a semester as I devoured the great and not-so-great authors: Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Andre Malraux, Jean Genet, Louis Ferdinand Celine, Norman Mailer, Ken Kesey…the list is long. Cultural history became an abiding interest, and I studied the Dada and Surrealist art movements as well as the rise of the radical student movements of the late 1960s, and the emergence of the Beat Generation and Woodstock Nation.
In four and a half years, averaging a book a day, I worked my way from the Literature and Art shelves, through the Psychology and Philosophy section, and eventually to the Sociology, History and Political Science sections.
When I was done with the main library, I migrated to the Philippine Center for Advanced Studies—a notorious Marcos think-tank—because they had air-conditioning and an excellent Asian Studies library where I immersed myself in the study of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, Tantrism, Vedanta and Yoga.
Being a business major lasted only one semester. I changed courses twice, eventually landing in the College of Mass Communication as a Journalism major in my junior year.
Until then, I hadn’t really thought seriously about life after college, but it dawned on me that this carefree UP life would have to end some time, and I would have to leave Diliman’s sylvan glades and venture into the dark, dangerous world outside where Martial Law still held sway.
Oops.
It was time, I thought, to make a last ditch attempt to take college seriously. Kind of.
I joined the campus journalism org, though I had been warned by a girl I occasionally smoked weed and played pool with—yes, there was a pool hall on campus, two in fact—that “they’re kinda political.”
Going to UP didn’t turn me into a radical, but it did teach me to decide for myself what was true and what was not….A nation of educated free-thinkers that can’t be duped
Belatedly, I boned up on the radical classics—Marx, Mao, Marcuse. I made the obligatory pilgrimage to Popular Bookstore on Doroteo Jose to purchase a totemic copy of the Little Red Book. I obtained a copy of the banned Philippine Society and Revolution and its companion volume, The Struggle for National Democracy. I even attended a symposium or two, and joined a “lightning rally” (I believe they’re called “flash mobs” now.)
But, honestly, I was just a poseur. I had taken too many psychedelics and read too much Henry Miller to buy into the Nat Dem vision.
Besides, I had developed a taste for Tanduay rum. I had resisted becoming a frat boy, but ended up drinking like one anyway. It was a lifestyle choice decidedly antithetical to the sobriety demanded by the serious activist.
The idea that my parents harbored, that somehow, by attending UP, I would magically become a communist, by osmosis perhaps, seemed laughable. That the idea has been resurrected today is even more so, revealing a tenuous grip on reality and a staggering failure of the imagination. It’s a page from a playbook that was old hat even in the 1970s.
Going to UP didn’t turn me into a radical, but it did teach me to be open-minded, to think and decide for myself what was true and what was not. This is what authoritarians—then and now—can’t abide. A nation of educated free-thinkers that can’t be duped.
Long story short, I eventually married the president of the “kinda political” college org, did my internship in one of the crony newspapers, and landed a cushy government job where I could delude myself that goofing off during office hours and drawing pay were an act of subliminal resistance against the regime…
Eventually, I managed to finish my forgettable thesis and graduate.
But I guess I never really left UP. Or UP never really left me.
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