BRATTLEBORO — In the summer of 1983 - I think the date was Aug. 8 - I flew from Manhattan to Boston to interview Benigno Aquino Jr., an exiled Filipino politician, for a piece in Newsweek's international edition, for which I worked at the time.
I was quite young - only 26 - but I knew Boston, since I had gone to college and graduate school there, and I had worked as a researcher and reporter on a couple of stories about corruption in the Philippines and had sources in the exile community. It made sense to my editor at the time, Dick Steele, to send me off to do the piece.
Aquino lived in a nice house on Chestnut Hill - he had a post at Boston College - and he was a gracious host. I'm sure he must have been dismayed that Newsweek had sent such a young and unseasoned journalist to talk with him, but if he was, he did not show it.
We talked for a couple of hours while his wife, Cory, who later became president of the Philippines, and their youngest daughter hovered in the background. There were packed bags in the room where we talked. At one point he called for food and beverages, and his wife brought us some sandwiches and iced tea.
The Philippines was nothing but a minor story at the time, which is why Newsweek felt fine sending me to do the piece. I was not really a journalist, though my father had been a good one, and I had grown up surrounded by journalists.
I was actually a poet, at least to the extent to which one can ever make that claim. I had lately finished a fellowship in a graduate program at Boston University, and Newsweek was just a day job for me. It was the height of the last phase of the Cold War - the Reagan years - and the Philippines was a sort of backwater.
Not to Aquino, of course. He was a passionate patriot from an old political family, and Ferdinand Marcos, the nation's dictator, was a sort of arch-rival. Marcos had declared martial law and cancelled elections several years earlier, to prevent a ballot that Aquino, a Kennedy-style liberal, almost certainly would have won.
As part of the crackdown, Marcos had Aquino arrested and sentenced to death for treason. Aquino spent seven years in prison before he was released on humanitarian grounds for a triple-bypass heart procedure in the United States. The death sentence itself was not commuted.
We talked about a lot of things during those two hours, from U.S. strategic interests in the nation (Clark Air Base and U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay, left over from the Vietnam War), to the political tactics behind his decision to return home. It seemed that Marcos was very sick, probably with lupus; there were some local elections scheduled, and Aquino felt it was the right time to get back into the political process.
He told me that he was certain that he would be put in prison the moment he landed in Manila, but that even from prison he could play a role in the unfolding drama. He also told me that he still had a death sentence against him, and that his concern was that he would be killed before he could get to his prison cell.
I took him seriously - he was a great and charismatic man - but my editor at Newsweek did not, rest his poor soul, so that part of the interview was edited out.
Dick had been a correspondent in Vietnam, and he hired me at the magazine, repaying a debt to my father, who had hired him. He had spent some time in Manila, and his impression of the country mainly derived from his visits to a bar called the Hobbit House, where all the waiters and waitresses were dwarves.
The piece we produced a couple of weeks later, the week that Aquino actually flew into the country, had the headline “Soap Opera in Manila: Will Ninoy return? Will Imelda Let Him?” The story was edited to give a somewhat jocular spin to the event.
Aquino flew into Manila from Taipei that Saturday, and when he landed, he was escorted to the back of the plane by three soldiers and taken down the utility ramp.
About halfway down the stairs, he was shot in the back of the head and killed.
Luckily for Newsweek, the killing happened in time to change the story that would go out the following day, and in the following week, I worked about 100 hours. We did a very fine cover package - I still have it.
At Newsweek, it was a tradition to give the mockup of the cover, printed on photographic paper, to whoever had earned it. Somewhere in the boxes of old memorabilia I have in my attic, I have the cover of this issue, which I was awarded.
It is a photograph of Aquino's bloodied face in an open casket, which processed from Manila to his hometown of Tarlac, a journey of more than 50 miles, with hundreds of thousands of onlookers along the way.
“I want them to see what they have done to my son,” his mother said, explaining why she had made the decision to keep the casket open.
To his credit, Dick Steele ran the photo on the cover of the international edition. The domestic edition ran the story inside - the cover story was about computer hackers.
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The event changed my life in fundamental ways, of course. Aquino was the greatest man I will ever have met in person. I still have a phone tape of a conversation with another exile in which he says that he is certain he will be assassinated when he lands in Manila - I got my hands on it during my reporting that week after his death.
“The Filipino is worth dying for,” he said, and that slogan was everywhere a couple of years later, during the election season in which his wife ran against Marcos, had the election stolen, and then became president after a small but very skilled faction in the military engineered a sort of coup, which was called “The People's Revolution”-four million folks on the streets of Manila.
One of the things that happened in Manila after Aquino was murdered is that the United States forced Marcos to allow some independent newspapers to publish - it was a sort of client state, so we had some leverage. These papers sometimes were shut down and the journalists arrested, but between 1983 and 1985, when the presidential election season began, there was a steady leakage of truth into the public discourse.
And when the revolution happened, the first thing that the commandos, who had gone renegade, did was take over the television stations, all of which were government-controlled.
I was in Manila myself by then, trying to freelance for The Nation, and I will never forget the moment - it is indelible in my memory - that channel seven went blank during a newscast by a couple of Marcos-controlled anchors, and then came back up live a few minutes later with a couple of rebel soldiers sitting in the anchor chairs.
That was when it was clear the revolution had succeeded.
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I was not a very good journalist, and my time in the Philippines taught me to go into another line of work. But I've tried to make sense of this experience in various ways over the three decades that have followed - in poetry, mainly, but fiction and nonfiction prose as well.
One of the things I have decided in this process is that every mode of representation of reality, rightly done, is a form of journalism - an attempt to get at the truth. This is why I have tried to gain competence in a variety of forms of writing, and why my artistic projects seek to integrate a variety of modes, photography, video, art, music, as well as language. It's all about telling the story, whether for tomorrow's paper, or for history, or for the agelessness of great art.
I believe deeply in liberal democracy - the worst form of governance, as Churchill said, except for all the rest.
In turn, liberal democracy depends on the free expression of ideas, in whatever form they might take. The first thing new dictators do when they overthrow a democratically elected government is round up the journalists, historians, and artists. There is a reason for this - it should be obvious.
The hegemony that an oppressive regime can exert over the expression of ideas is well-told, and we all know it-from Orwell's 1984 to the regular murder of independent journalists in nations like Russia and Mexico.
In a way, however, there is at least a sort of sincerity to this form of oppression. Aquino knew he would be murdered. He sacrificed himself. Three years later, democracy was restored to the Philippines, and his wife became president.
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I think that there is a more insidious form of oppression, and we are living within it now in the United States: corporate control of our modes of representations and the way in which these enter into us and become our own modes of representation.
One of my favorite passages in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is this: “The man has a branch office in each of our brains.”
We still read a free press. But The Wall Street Journal is controlled by Rupert Murdoch now; The Los Angeles Times is just a shadow of what it was; The Philadelphia Inquirer, which once had the best investigative reporting team in the nation, disbanded it years ago; and The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos now. Newsweek was sold for a dollar a few years ago, then sold again.
A few semesters ago, I taught a poetry workshop at the college where I work, and three students, one after another, in a relentless sort of way, read bad poems that had dragons in them. I am used to bad undergraduate poetry, but I was not used to the dragons - these were not the dragons of Beowulf or Chinese art; no, they were straight from the images the students had absorbed while playing video games.
Sometimes it seems that all of life has been reduced to a reality show. We have the most savage economic inequality that the United States has known since the Great Depression, but that barely seems to register. Opiates, alcohol, and pornography are huge industries, and weirdly legal for the most part, since prescription drugs are now the most abused. If the United States were a person, it would need an intervention and intensive therapy. Instead, we hum merrily along.
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Trying to bring these truths into clear focus is hard work. An independent press is essential, of course, and the paper for which I am writing this piece is a shining example of what might be possible when a community supports an independent press. But it is a threadbare effort, under-supported and relying on heroic efforts by a handful of very fine journalists.
Art and poetry that focuses not simply on beauty, but also on truth, is also essential - and this is very hard, because the truth is not beautiful.
“In the dark times/Will there also be singing?” Bertolt Brecht asked. “Yes, there will also be singing,” he wrote. “About the dark times.” So much of poetry these days seems designed to be safe, guarded from workshop critique.
My argument here, which I have saved for the end - I have buried the lead, as they say - is that journalism is a form of art, and different artistic modes of the representation of reality are forms of journalism.
There is an old truism in journalism: if you hear a story from one person, you have to be skeptical; if you hear it again from another, you start thinking you might have something worth investigating; and if you hear the same story from a number of folks, you might have start to arrive at some version of the truth.
Journalists and poets seek to arrive at some version of the truth - we can't ever be certain, and perfection is not allowed to us, because we are human. But we can't even begin the process of inquiry when we are bounded by other forces.
It is obvious the way in which oppressive regimes control freedom of expression. It is less obvious the way in which our own regime, which the poet John Berryman called “the greatest empire the world has ever seen,” also controls these modes of expression - the way in which the man has a branch office in each of our brains.