Serve: Jo-Ann’s ode to positive nationalism

Less than two years ago, we launched Serve, a book of stories of fearless college editors from 1969 to 1972, arguably the sequel to our 2012 book Not On Our Watch: Martial Law Really Happened. We Were There. Not On Our Watch sold out while the bookstores are running out of Serve — not in big quantities, but in huge demand from those who care to know what really happened to the Philippines during Martial Law, and what happened to those who kept watch during those dark days of military dictatorship.

Writing for Serve, according to fellow contributor and eminent writer Butch Dalisay, was done “…under no compulsion to conform to an ideological standard. They only had to extol the spirit of service to the people — the overarching theme of their youth and now their continuing commitment and legacy.” That is the strategic convergence of the 19 writers. But service, in the epilogue we wrote with our distinguished editor and writer par excellence Jo-Ann Q. Maglipon, cannot be a “fleeting business, to be set aside when the next riveting cause comes along.”

If indeed in the 1970s, our struggles taught us to focus and work hard, today is no different because as positive nationalists, we continue to do our share to see change in the government because there is so much space for change. We need to build our nation because the political and social fabric is rather fragile. We should reinvent ourselves, for innovation can lead to constructive fruitfulness. Positive nationalism, after all, demands a practical expression in a people’s daily lives.

This should be good news to those who want to buy a copy but have difficulty sourcing it. All 19 writers and our editor Jo-Ann reached a consensus to have a second printing. There is a huge difference, though, between the first and the forthcoming edition. The new edition’s preface will be Jo-Ann’s brilliant ode of a speech given during the launch of the first edition in September 2023. I call it an ode because of its beautifully lyrical language, capturing the deepest thoughts and sentiments behind the contributions of these wiser souls.

As Serve is indeed about positive nationalism, let me offer our readers excerpts of Jo-Ann’s lyricism:

“Serve is not a vanity publication.

“Twenty of us did not gather one morning and say, Let’s get down and chronicle the memories of our storied youth. Nor did we decide that our high-flying journey into our ’70s deserved to be immortalized. And, as far as I know, none of us had stumbled upon a burning bush and come to the epiphany that we were special.

“We had always just wanted to put out books.

“We had the skill and the interest — we had been editors in college, or even earlier, in high school, or much later, at work. We had the provocation and the temperament — the country we knew was being written up in ways that made it unrecognizable to us and saying nothing did not feel right. We had the time — or, more honestly, we felt we had only so much time — and we were not going to be run out of here by default.

“Serve is not a self-congratulatory book.

“It is purposeful but, we trust, not smug. Its pitch is deliberate and, we also trust, not a decibel higher than is needed to make the point. All told, we go for the unhurried tone and the decorous language, avoiding breathlessness and belligerence.

“Seriously, this is who we are.

“We say dark times when we mean murderous times. We say events that profoundly changed our lives when we mean families torn, careers derailed, self-worth shattered. We say robbed of our rights when we mean bodily, mentally debased and defiled. We say moneys squirreled away into confidential funds when we mean taxpayers duped, defrauded, double-crossed. And we say autocrat and strongman when we mean murderer and dictator.

“But we refuse to be bullied into being civilized.

“No argument, there is virtue in mastering smokescreens.

“There is even entertainment to be had in tricks, decoys, sleights of hand, and coverups. The whole thing could turn into a wily game in a kingdom where we are lowly jesters, and the jesters win!

“After all, how many times can we keep writing plunderer? How many times megalomaniac and narcissist? Killer and butcher? Sadist and sociopath? Or even the more sedate brain-addled? Ineffectual? Sick?

“These creepy types come around with an almost cursed inevitability to run the republic to the ground — how long before the plain-spoken turns to noise? Or, worse, to ambient sound? How long before the public shuts down? Still, every single time, it is our language, our choice.

“Otherwise, we can just stop all the democracy talk.

“Civilized speech, it is also said, comes with a command of both the message and the mode. Well, we are intimate with our message but we choose not to screech it.

“What’s more, we want to reach people outside our circles — they who flinch before the harsh details of our past, they who like the distance offered by concepts and contemplations, they who find refuge in intellectual fogginess, they who require space to process the ugliness on their own.

“I swear, we’re not knocking any of this. To each his own, we say, at putting the devil in its place.

“Serve is not about extracting sympathy.

“As real as the violations to our bodies and spirits are, this book is not about showcasing them. We have never been about soliciting tears. Quite the opposite — we cover visible battle scars well and we are talented at keeping private pains private.

“I wager it has to do with the incessant hum to ‘Serve the People.’ It is inside, in the head, receding sometimes, losing to times, we admit that the hum, also a kind of murmur, is sacred to us.

“How then call attention to our minor moans? Is not the call to pay attention to the grand lamentations of the many? This is not to say that we are all head and no heart, that we calculate our altruism or determine our course on will alone.

“Not at all.

“We have gratitude, we have joy, we have wonder. No way we are not sentimental. No way we do not let our guard down.

“Serve is not about drama.

“We tell it as it is. If we must be faulted, perhaps it can be for (unconsciously) paring away too much or for (consciously) curating distracting theatrics. Some of us tend to be really spare.

“Serve is not a book of unexamined lives.

“Everywhere is a thoughtfulness, a reflection, a scrutiny of the self.

“Serve is not a book of certainties.

“Believe it or not, we may have begun our campus lives with a worldview egalitarian, classless, even utopian, all harking for that perfect world, but we do not stay static.

“We are searchers.

“We track the ups and downs in belief systems across continents and divides, the better to validate our old certainties or emancipate ourselves from them.

“On home soil, I suppose it counts that one government after another, eternally lacking the vocabulary, has locked down the ‘perfect world’ view as ‘communist,’ making it a word that could get us killed.

“So, we watch, we flex, we carry on.

“In our youth an ideology captures our imagination — one haunting enough to draw many of us to the underground, risk life, and bring a dictatorship down; one potent enough to send a number of us to the hills, court death, and fight for country.

“In our later years we turn to our own evolved set of beliefs — one haunting enough to make us bypass the red-baiting and the one potent enough to make us go ahead and produce obstinate and contrary books that could mark us enemies of the state.

“But, whether in the early or in the later years, we could not have done nothing.

“So, what is out there?

“It has been 51 years and running since September 1972. The millions who vote today have little instinct about the martial rule that descended then. They do not pick up on the parallelisms between Marcos Sr.’s Presidential Decrees then and the Anti-Terrorism Act now handed wholesale to Marcos Jr.

“Yet, this utterly means: The Son need never declare martial law and he will still wield the same overarching power The Father did. Little wonder Butch Dalisay writes this book’s introduction with, in his words, ‘sadness edging on sorrow.’

“So, why this book?

“To fight fantasy, forgetting, flagellation.

“To stop gaslighting activists for the resurrection of a dictator’s family.

“To rebuke calls to embrace unity and move forward by disremembering.

“To demand apology, atonement, redress.

“To remind the powers: We are here, we remember everything, and we write.”