Column: Conrad de Quiros, rock star

He was the writer as columnist, earning his large and loyal audience through sheer skill in writing. But the power of his prose depended on the clarity of his thought. Published in Rappler on November 11, 2023.

When my students at the University of the Philippines hosted Conrad de Quiros at a forum they organized for my opinion writing class, back in 2009, they prepared an unusual reception for him. Instead of the usual set-up, with the speaker in front of the auditorium at the lectern and the audience seated in the usual rectangle of neat rows, my class covered the entire front part of the College of Mass Communications auditorium in handwoven mats and then spread throw pillows all over the place. In the middle of that large, improvised, banig circle was a lone chair, reserved for Conrad. It was a sit-in, the perfect setting for a forum my students titled “Jamming with Conrad.”

I was not prepared for it (my students do all the work in the forums; my only role is to invite the speakers), but when I walked into the auditorium I immediately realized it was an inspired idea. We all ended up literally sitting at his feet, while he took questions and gave calm, calming answers. 

Some of his answers were deeply provocative, because Conrad was a provocative thinker. But in person, Conrad was a gentle, thoughtful presence. My students in 2009 must have come up with the concept for the forum because they saw Conrad as a guru to listen to, someone to jam with: long hair, crisp English, with an earned reputation for both hard drinking and fearless writing. And to borrow the rhythm of his own prose for a moment, Conrad did not only look the part, he did not only act the part, he WAS the part.

Patricia Evangelista and writing the war

This is classified in the Rappler archives as a Newsstand column, but in fact it is a review, specifically commissioned by our executive editor Glenda Gloria, timed for release on the day Pat Evangelista’s book Some People Need Killing was launched in New York. (In the end, we decided to run it the morning after, so as not to compete with the news reports about the launch.) Published in Rappler on October 18, 2023.

Rodrigo Duterte was the only candidate for Philippine president who promised to kill thousands of his potential voters to solve what he called a drug crisis; he would fill Manila Bay with the corpses of as many as a hundred thousand drug addicts, he said. Once voted into office, he made good on that promise. 

Some People Need Killing, the journalist Patricia Evangelista’s much-anticipated account of Duterte’s promised war on drugs, includes in its breadth of detail and casualty count and dramatic incident some of those very Duterte voters who ended up killed in Duterte’s war. There is even an entire chapter on Duterte supporters consumed by regret. This may have been an effort on Evangelista’s part to end her harrowing, thoughtful, absorbing account on a less bleak note, but she is above all else a reporter, and her faithful reporting does not sugarcoat reality. Thousands of extrajudicial killings had changed the country irrevocably. A nation of martyrs has become a country of killers. Some of the early vigilantes called it right. We are Duterte, they said.

Evangelista’s account is a memoir of her coverage of the EJKs and what led her to it (it is subtitled “A Memoir of Murder in My Country”); but it is also reportage, some new and some already published but expanded, filled with even more detail and drawn with more context, all of it reworked into a whole; it is, lastly, an analysis, of how a democracy can die.