Tag: history

The Absurdity of Our Ephemerality

Sometimes I can’t bear the thought that some haughty prick from the future, say, two hundred years from now, would casually drop a quip perhaps during class, that 21st century people actually ate meat from murdered cows, but then loved their dogs and cats at the same time. Then this entire room filled with futuristic a-holes would laugh at the joke and everybody would be like, “Man, how could people from long ago be so barbaric and stupid?”

———-

Hell, sometimes, I can’t bear the thought that my grandchildren would be joking about the poor, uncivilized world grandpa used to live in. How they seriously believed something like “gender” or “race” could be anything other than linguistic categories weaponized to control and oppress people. “I wonder if grandpa celebrated primitive stuff like that?” “I wonder how it would feel like to be the product of a violent, uninformed society? We’re really lucky we were born in this time.”

———-

What I’m trying to arrive at is that sometimes I can’t bear the thought of our ephemerality; that we must accept this frustrating fact that however serious we go about our daily business, and however fiercely we believe in our convictions, and however sturdy we build our buildings, or sterilize ourselves and our environment aiming for the perfect, spotless, hygienic modern way of life, all of these will lose their significance over time; they’ll be watered down, recontextualized, seen from a different perspective–a higher understanding; they’ll be reassessed, found lacking, and replaced with fresh concepts, innovative technologies, new things that would be impossible to conceive right now. And so, no matter how intelligent you think you are, no matter how cool you fancy yourself, no matter how much you think you get it–in time, you’ll be judged as wise as an ape, scratching its butt and smelling the rich aroma of shit from its fingers.

———-

“Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss… What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Here, I feel like Nietzsche just flat out gave up on humanity as he understood it–on his contemporaries–who are basically still us if you think of the “overman” as a type of being who won’t appear on this earth for many years to come. There are only a hundred or so years separating Nietzsche from us, and if you view this distance taking into account the hundreds of thousands of years since our species popped up on the planet, and the millions of years of hominid evolution–a hundred or so years mean diddly squat.

Nietzsche here, dead as a dodo as he may be for many years, was still describing us–you and me. How the best thing about us is that we’re not an end; that even though we’re completely shitty in his eyes, hey, it’s a good thing we won’t be here forever; in fact, we’re just a bridge, a tool for the preparation of the arrival of the Overman or Ubermensch or Superman who is basically the coolest gal or guy since Jesus (no, seriously, Nietzsche had mad respect for Christ and the Overman is the next step towards the evolution of humanity whom he saw as burdened with unnecessary, ultimately self-destructive Christian ideals).

I don’t really want to delve deep in all of that. What I’m pointing out here is that one of the greatest philosphers of all time thought that it’s really fortunate that this current sickly crop of people would eventually be replaced by something better–I don’t know, maybe a new hominid species? A species that could better appreciate the beauty of living and actually take care of each other for the sheer love of others and not because of religion? Maybe a species that has evolved larger, more complex brains that would prevent nasty stuff like war from happening? Maybe robots?

He sounded really optimistic about it all, but I’m just here thinking about how he’s so gleeful about wanting to replace us with something better, like we’re an old television set or a broken mobile phone or laptop, and I can’t help thinking that I wish I could kick his dead ass.

———

Here’s a haunting thought: a sea of people who all thought they were the best of the best, the cream of the crop, the bee’s knees, and the cat’s pyjamas are all dead. Buried. Decomposed. Or dying at the exact moment you’re reading this. Only two Beatles are left. A host of folks who have dreamed so much, and achieved so much, who were loved by so many are now either forgotten or in the very last seconds of living in the memory of someone who’s also in the clutches of death in their bed.

Pondering their many hardships and countless adventures can be so romantic. Maybe the men imagined they were like Flash Gordon–a handsome, intrepid space explorer smiting evil–and the women thought themselves to be the real-life Jo from Little Women, a brave and independent lady breaking social expectations. The guys popped their collar and slicked their hair, and the girls stripped their suitors of their valuables like a Material Girl.

They were the protagonists in their own minds, as much as we think the same right now of ourselves. In many ways, they are ourselves just in a different time. And then the ink dried on their chapters, their books closed, and then the pages yellowed as new volumes were laid on top of one another. It’s an entire library of protagonists with nobody to read their exploits and heartaches.

Like I said–it can all be very romantic.

Until you imagine the future version of Twitter and somebody there reignites the discussion about how deluded people used to be.

Doubtless they saw themselves as good, decent people. But ’90s kids were still sexists and homophobes for enjoying that overrated show “FRIENDS.”

Is this our fate? Are we all destined to be fodder for some futuristic online troll and cybernetic class clown?

———

Some days when I’m taking long walks to work, a deep feeling of being displaced in time creeps up my leg, threatening to knock me off balance. I am walking over lands that used to be in the bottom of the ocean. This entire land mass had not been directly hit by sunshine for millions of years because here where malls and office buildings now stand was just saltwater and strange creatures of the deep now extinct.

Under my feet, deep, deep underground could be the ruins of undiscovered empires, maybe the powdered bones of a brutal chieftain who left villages overflowing with blood and decapitated bodies. People would cower to speak his name and looked up at him as if he was descended from a higher order, a demigod.

But nobody could possibly know that. That’s the very thing that’s so absurd about our ephemerality. We live such short lives that there’s no telling what stories our sneakers step on as we make our way to our dreary cubicles. There are not enough historians to chronicle what went on here, and not a lot of readers to bother to learn the past. After all, the lives of kings and knights may be interesting, but the days and nights of peasants scrounging for food could put one in a dull mood. In all likelihood, you and me, we’re taking our reasons to the grave–why we live this way and not any other.

And then thousands of years from now, what might this place be? Perhaps a barren, apocalyptic wasteland crawling with mutated rats? Or maybe a technological paradise where no physical bodies now reside, but instead free-flowing conscious data, electrical impulses that know everything but long for the old days when organic creatures could still feel each other by holding hands?

To have all these ironies in your head trying to crush you, bellowing in your ear, inviting you to walk away and do something different, anything different just to protest the fantastic absurdity of it all can be a tad jarring when you finally sit in your chair, fire up your laptop, open your email, and be greeted by a customer service ticket. Somebody’s order didn’t arrive.

We are trapped here in this time cage.

Literally. Just think how many millions of people have been killed throughout history by diseases we now treat as a chore to vaccinate ourselves against. In fact, we’ve forgotten so much about how miserable life used to be that we’ve begun to question if vaccines are really that good. Maybe they’re negatively impacting children’s brain development. We have the luxury of being ignorant. We’re lucky.

But not that lucky.

Don’t you feel cheated that if only you were born maybe two decades later, you’d surely open your eyes to a world who doesn’t know the dangers of cancer and HIV? A world where it’s very clear that gender is not black and white but indeed a spectrum, a rainbow, and every single one has the right to express whom they want to love? Hopefully by that time, the world is a more tolerant place, and the barriers that prevent us now from treating other people equally have broken down. But no–we are two decades early, and we must suffer the consequences of this chronological randomness as other people had done in the past. And make no mistake–a lot of them knew they were being cheated on by time, too. Many of them wanted to break out of their time cages, too, fly out and live in a nook of history more understanding, gentler, and with better healthcare. They all failed and so will we.

———

“2019. What a barbaric time to be in,” those space-dwelling, cyber-brain-enhanced jackasses would say.

If only there was a way to clap back at our future mockers.

If only we could let them hear us over the enormous divide that separates us, and give them–despite their greater knowledge and better, more nuanced sensibilities, more just societies–a big, old “FUCK YOU!”

“Fuck you. We don’t care that we’re backward, tribal apes who butchered sheep and loved our cats. We don’t care that you’re better; we were better, and the best, and the lousiest all at the same time–once upon a time. We existed, and despite all appearances that we were idiots, we actually knew what’s up. We were aware all along about the colossal shit that was going on behind the scenes. We knew.”

That would make me rest easy. It would make it fair.

Justice is when the dead could answer back.

Thoughts on Matters of Taste and the Dutch Tulip Bubble of the 1600s

The first ever critique of someone’s taste probably went something like, “Man, your taste in rocks is horrendous! What a dumb, lowlife you must be to think such a rough, ugly stone dislodged from a mound of bison dung is worth anything. Why don’t you be like me and collect these shiny, smooth, grey pebbles collected from a river? Look how beautiful they are!”

The shiny, smooth, grey pebbles might have also been presented as suggesting something of the higher intelligence of the stone collector.

You think it’s ridiculous now but once there must have lived a cultured ape.

———

When I think about how people go nuts over matters of taste, I’m reminded of the story of the Dutch tulip bubble that happened in the 17th century. For those of you who haven’t heard this crazy tale before, you read that right–tulips. Apparently, at one point in history, the Dutch deemed tulips so valuable that a single tulip bulb was worth as much as or more than an entire house including the land where it stood. Some of these flowers, which were introduced into Europe just a century before, were worth 10 times more than the annual income of a skilled craftsman.

The priciest of them all were bulbs that had an unusual mix of colors different from the more common single-hued varieties at the time. Many years later, people would discover that these exotic flowers were actually suffering from a virus that messed up how they look, producing the strange streaks of colors that the Dutch so coveted.

In short, these were very sick plants.

———

People lost their heads so much over tulips that they gave the flowers intimidating names like “Admiral Pottenbacker” or “Admiral van der Eyck.” There was even an “Admiral of Admirals.”

Come to think of it, if a garden bulb were to command such a great price that some deluded craftsman could lose his entire estate and end up with nothing but a sickly plant in a pot, you might as well call that piece of vegetation an admiral. Few titles would have been fitting.

———

And then as if the Lord of Sense got so tired of the noisy Dutch taverns trading in futures (this was, in fact, the birth of this questionable financial fuss, as well), he just struck hard one evening in February 1637 to end the farce once and for all. For some reason, people just stopped showing up in one such tavern supposed to hold one of these popular tulip auctions that determined who had the right to own a flower that hadn’t even bloomed yet.

And from there, the bubble burst. Some people felt the economic hammer fall more acutely than others, and there were a lot of folks who lost a fortune. Overall, however, the Dutch economy–already the richest of that era–didn’t really take a dive.

After all, when the dust had settled, no serious, logical person with a conscience would really bereave a family of all their valuables just because their drunk father made the wrong decision to sell everything he owned for a rare purple tulip with yellow specks on its petals the night before the mania melted away.

———

I personally think it’s telling that a mania like that happened to the wealthiest economy in that period of history. When people have so much wealth and so little reason to think why one person deserves much more respect or recognition than the other, then the ground is ripe for something truly idiotic to grow and thrive.

I mean, if I were wealthy, and you were wealthy, our neighbors were wealthy, our friends were wealthy–and if we’re all wealthy, then what would separate me from you?

Surely we can’t test our bravery to see who’s of better stock. We’re not soldiers. Or warriors. I can’t defeat you sword in hand and declare I’ve bested you after a decisive, unquestionable final blow to the head. And we all can read and write, can reason our way around issues using the thinnest of facts to back us up, so intelligence would be such a drag to measure. A contest like that takes so long to judge to determine the winner. Besides, people who love to argue never, ever lose an argument. They just keep on arguing until somebody gets parched.

Admittedly, this is a brazenly simple and theoretical version of what might have transpired, but people must have panicked as they realized they were running out of ways to one up one another.

It was probably a goddamn first-world psychological crisis that punctured holes in the very fabric of society.

And so out of nowhere, some florist raised his hand and said, “Ok–how about who owns the better tulip?”

———

True–taste is a good barometer of a person’s standing in life. One’s Admirael der Admiraelen de Gouda Tulip without a doubt indicated that one had sufficient education and class, as could be expected of someone who had sufficient sacks of money to trade for such a renowned plant.

But what of it?

Was that the point? To declare beyond a shadow of a doubt that one was filthy rich and on the cutting edge of culture? Versed in the finest, most secret knowledge of the floral market?

You could say it’s all just a game. People were trying to outsmart each other and make themselves wealthy like they do all the time, and so they put, what is called in fiction, a “MacGuffin” in the center of it, allowing them to play this game of who gets rich and who gets wretched. It could have been anything–a tulip, a sunflower, acorns, a ball of rubberbands, bitcoin… It doesn’t matter. The point was to get a game of big winners and sore losers going.

Things of ghostly value haunting the real world of men.

Isn’t that where taste comes from? Just utter confusion over what something is really worth?

———

Going back to our story, in the end, it seemed like the bubonic plague played a major role in reversing people’s minds about those tulips. Imagine how uninspiring it was to debate whose flower was better as your neighbors perished by the thousands.

Nothing like the prospect of painful death to remind us of what truly matters.

And that a fleet of admiral tulips wouldn’t make a pile of dead bodies any less stinky.

 

Christ Was Here Just 14 Minutes Ago and Other Ironies of Time

“You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.”

– Treebeard, The Two Towers

“There is no future. There is no past. Do you see? Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”

– Doctor Manhattan, Watchmen

————–

I am at a strange point in my life when I’m, arguably, not too young and not too old. Of course, a lot of people would say 33 is already too old given that the baby boomers already had settled lives at this age (marriage, kids, a snore of a job, and whatnot), but I beg to differ. Times have changed, and I–supposedly belonging to the much maligned millennial generation–am still a man collecting plastic playthings molded in the image of muscled men in colorful trunks and tights.

I call this particular juncture in my lifetime “strange” because, of late, I have been feeling strangely, keenly aware of how I am at once distant and near both the past and the future. Some recent events have doubtless triggered this weird mix of anxiety and wonder about the nature of time, the most impactful of which was the death of my sweet grandmother. Yesterday, I saw a sad picture of my father lighting a candle over her grave just newly adorned with bermuda grass, and I couldn’t help but think that this powerful woman bursting with life, energy, and the most entertaining brand of humor just maybe two or three years ago, is now cold and damp earth beneath my father’s feet. And as healthy as that man is, he’s looking old, too.

Someone had uploaded faded, yellowed pictures in a chat group showing me and my cousins, our parents, our uncles and aunts with my grandmother. Taken with those large, clunky cameras and printed on photo paper, the years have not been kind to these pictures, some of them with faces you could barely discern. One showed me as a malnourished teenager in a jacket five times my size, another my sister, who’s now living halfway around the world, as a suspicious, wild-haired baby, and yet another of my aunt looking like a summer girl plucked out of Instagram. We all look so different now and these snapshots of life supposedly happened such a long time ago–but did they? When digital photos became accessible, the vacation and holiday pictures we take suddenly took on a marvelous degree of permanence and perfection that completely set them apart from those stained, cracked pics in our family albums. Suddenly–in terms of quality and if you don’t mind the subjects who had totally changed in their appearance over the years–my first uploaded digital pic on Facebook back in 2008 looks like it could have been taken just last week.

But was 2008 such a long time ago? Phones were a little dumb back then but not as dumb as the Facebook Newsfeed these days. Beyonce wanted you to put a ring on it. Twilight was a plague us Potterheads tried to avoid ferociously, our fangs out and our claws bared. Somewhere along the way, I learned what a rewarding and goddamn stressful thing a relationship was. In truth, I don’t feel as if these events had been too long ago; sometimes, I feel that these could have been just five or six years ago, and one out of three girls would still shriek my ear wax off if I mention the name “Edward” or “Jacob” to them.

2008 doesn’t feel that long ago and, frankly, neither does 1998 to me. Celebrity Deathmatch was the most awesome thing in the world (hey, maybe it still is?). My Heart Will Go On went on forever in every radio station. There were Britney Spears and the Spice Girls and all the fibers in my being raged to an unpleasant stiffness whenever they were on MTV. And the President of the United States lost his office due to a job he blew (a blown job). Yes, we wore baggy clothes featuring anime characters that would have looked alien today, but all in all, these happenings still do not feel that far back into the past.

10 years, 20 years don’t feel that long ago to me, especially when I’m alone and retracing my life in the canvass of my condo’s cobwebbed ceiling.

You know what feels long? How about 12,000 years?

12,000 years is the supposed lifespan of an Ent, a tree-like being in J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I remember these creatures whenever I get to pondering the vast expanse of time. Treebeard, the oldest of the Ents, spoke and moved so frustratingly slow that the Hobbits got madly impatient with him. But could you really blame a creature who had lived thousands of years to give a flying squirrel’s posterior about a halfling’s extremely short-lived preoccupations?

Tolkien was clearly putting us in the Hobbits’ shoes and telling us that a lot of the matters we fuss over in our daily lives are only caused by our lifespan being too short or our expiration date being too soon. We need to do everything now because, honestly, we don’t have long to live and the clock is ticking. Some people are able to extend their stay much longer than expected but these folks are still quite rare. There are a handful of women (five to be exact as of this writing) who have lived past 110 years old, gaining them the flashy, heroic-sounding title, “supercentenarians” even though you can imagine there’s probably nothing “super” about how they feel. As unrepresentative as I am of my cohorts, I would admit that at 33, there are already some mornings I feel so heavy that I wish I were made of metal and a huge magnet could pull me up from my bed, drag me, and drop my limp body into my office chair. Everything–tasks and leisure alike–is becoming so tiresome I’m beginning to think that a couple more years and I’d be ready to say, “Screw it, I’ve seen everything, where’s the exit?”

Still, some days I think to myself, “Wouldn’t it be exciting to live long enough to be here when man first sets foot on Mars?” But then if this space faring milestone only happens after 40 years had passed–would I still care, stuck in my wheelchair, unable to see through my three-inch cataracts, with the least bit of excitement a fatal threat to push my blood pressure over the edge? Maybe it’s not worth it. Hell, perhaps it’s best to check out just before sex turns into an appalling affair.

Thankfully, 40 years is still some ways off into the future. The way I personally think of it is that to get there–that unpleasant 73 year mark when everything’s painful, evil, dark, and cursed, including smiling children–I would have to go through the length of my entire life up to this point again and then some. I would have to suck on my mother’s breasts again (my earliest memories), watch all my favorite morning cartoons again like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Denver the Last Dinosaur (kidding, I hated that wimp Denver), play around the flag pole of my elementary school again as my mother accompanied my sister to school, kick ass in elementary by being a teacher’s pet and receive my fair share of bullying, have to get circumcised again and be in utter shock of my poor, murdered genitals begging for help in a pool of blood, fool around high school and discover the gift of masturbation, be torn between wooing crushes and playing Counter-Strike, graduate, get really serious in college and fill my head with some dead German and French philosophers’ mind farts, hate Capitalism, discover I was in fact a dork and nothing like Batman or Wolverine or Raphael (my favorite sai-wielding ninjutsu-adept turtle), lose almost all confidence in myself and attempt to extricate myself from society, somehow get into a relationship and regain a sense of belonging, love Capitalism then witness more than five retrenchments as a transcriptionist, then a writer, then a social media marketing expert or whatever they want to call that profession, which only became possible because a guy named Mark Zuckerberg was even more of a dork than I was a few years ago, see all my friends go to leave for other jobs before finally being here at this moment in time, a little comfortable with my work, with the most amazing girlfriend in the world whom I hope to marry, but struggling with accelerated hair loss.

That would be quite a long time to relive.

But maybe still not that long.

After all, 33 years is really just a millisecond of a millisecond of a millisecond of time.

Recently, I’ve been obsessing about dinosaurs, paleontology, history, and evolution as anybody who had an excess of time in front of a computer would… naturally. I have learned that if you compressed time into a 24-hour period, such that the Earth formed at midnight and that the present moment when I’m typing these words is the next midnight, modern humans would only have appeared at 11:59:59pm–that’s all of one second. And if you took that clock and recalibrated it to compress human history into another 24-hour period, only 14 minutes had passed since Christ was here, walking amongst people.

The universe is 14 billion years old, the Earth four and a half. It took three billion boring years for microbes to evolve into fish in a world filled with volcanic eruptions and rivers of fire. Animals have been here 600 million years but mammals themselves started scurrying as little, insignificant rodents 200 million years ago. The dinosaurs, the poster boys for extinction, were actually here much longer than us, ruling the planet for 165 million years compared to our measly 200,000! In fact, the dinos overstayed for so long that the Tyrannosaurus rex is nearer in time to Donald Trump than to the stegosaurus–you know that other popular dino with four legs, huge plates running along its spine, and spikes on its tail? I’ve scratched my head at this myself multiple times but it’s true. There are only 5,000 years of recorded human history and prior to that, human beings spent roughly 150,000 years being embarrassingly simple-minded like you during the first couple of seconds when you wake up in your bed, not knowing what the hell is going on.

Given the sheer immensity of this timeline, you can see how 33 years is truly puny verging on nothing.

I say “verging” because considering time is almost infinite, as short as 33 years is compared to a universe that has existed for billions of years, that period is still as valid as any duration of time; that is, 33 years is really as valid as, say, 33 million years. And that is the paradox of time, is it not? Moments that are short-lived might as well have run forever against the backdrop of infinity. You say I live in the present but I only see life as a series of past events stretching into yesterday, the last week, the last month, the last year, the last epoch. I can only grasp the present as a hand would try to hold grains of sand streaming down between its fingers. And how could a million years be longer than a second when there could be a million moments within it?

During deranged ruminations like this, I remember another character from pop culture: Doctor Manhattan of arguably the greatest graphic novel of all time, Watchmen. Dr. Jonathan Osterman was a nuclear physicist who was accidentally disintegrated by an Intrinsic Field Subtractor machine but was later able to reconstruct himself as Doctor Manhattan–a powerful being outside time and maybe space. This fictional character’s perception of time was even more bizarre than Treebeard’s because he viewed every event in the past, present, and future as all transpiring at the same time, creating all sorts of problems for other characters in the story who, like us, only saw time as a linear march of events: there is yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But Doctor Manhattan was a being that’s acutely conscious of his past, present, and future existence at each point in that linear timeline, and so he felt disconnected from virtually all the emotional struggles of humanity that arise from their belief that things only happen because of things that precede them (you only leave your boyfriend because he cheated). To illustrate, Doctor Manhattan knew he would cheat on his first girlfriend before he did it because he was already living that life in his future, and yet he still did it. It’s like you celebrating your 10th birthday party, the best, most fun and memorable birthday party of your life, knowing that you’re already spending your 60th birthday party alone in a nursing home, cursing existence. It’s such a dire situation to be in that Doctor Manhattan literally exiled himself to Mars.

But unfortunately, as much as backpacking to Mars is becoming more and more tempting each day considering our present plight and as the world blazes down the rabbit hole of eternal shittiness, there’s nothing much we can do but accept the paradoxes and ironies of time. I guess, if you think about it, there’s a cruel but poetic consolation in the fact that we are helpless and literally can’t do anything about the matter, which means nobody truly expects us to do anything substantial. Sure, you can buy some tubes of anti-aging cream, hang out with the young ones as what’s left of your liver smoulders into a boiling square inch of ash and bile, or play with your man toys like I do as you reminisce about the past–but really, there’s absolutely nothing you can do to turn back the hands of time or stop the seconds in their tracks. We can try to hold on to happiness, to sadness (some people consciously prefer it), to people and things as much as we want to but it’s all over before we think it; and in that–there’s sweet release, a responsibility to be wantonly irresponsible.

The message here is not to make the most out of life because “you only live once.” Chasing after something, which ultimately won’t matter or will matter but only in a certain cramped definition, so doggedly is a fool’s errand. Many have lost their minds and the people who truly care about them trying to recapture past glories that have long transformed into ghosts.

It’s more like this: let the inevitability of the rushing river of time wash over you, accept your fate, and be shredded majestically into strips of beautiful nothingness as the universe races to its end.

Emilio Aguinaldo’s Barber: “I am the One to Blame for the President’s Many Mistakes”

Newly unearthed letters from Emilio Aguinaldo’s ancestral home in Kawit, Cavite reveal that the first Philippine President’s barber was the one to blame for every questionable and downright disgusting decision Aguinaldo had made throughout his life.

The trove of correspondences yellow with age and of priceless historical significance sheds new light on the murkier side of our country’s history from the Spanish to the Japanese occupation era. The letters were penned by Aguinaldo’s barber himself and were anonymously signed “Your loyal barber.”

The team of local historians and archaeologists who discovered the letters released some of the shocking excerpts today, such as this one written around the time Aguinaldo was retreating from the advancing American forces in Northern Luzon in 1899.

“Dear El Presidente,

Word has reached me that you and your troops, in a word, have your boots stuck in unbelievably deep excrement with your hopeless guerilla warfare against the gringos. I warned you long ago that this would happen if you keep your ridiculous and evil flattop. Please let me cut it; I will go to your location even if it costs me my life…”

According to the team’s lead historian, the key word here was “evil.” It appeared that Aguinaldo’s barber firmly believed that the iconic haircut (arguably the flattest flattop ever documented) had supernatural, almost “occult” influences on the President. Another excerpt reads:

“I tried and tried to convince you to adopt a more conventional hairstyle, perhaps a wavy, side-swept one like Dr. Rizal’s or a tidy brush-up like Apolinario Mabini’s, but you insisted on this weird, taboo flattop that my barber family has refused to offer our customers for decades.

You even went absolutely nuts when I suggested Andres Bonifacio’s neatly parted mop had more appeal to it, and suggested I was committing treason against the Republic. Your insecurity towards that man was truly boundless.”

Aguinaldo_ang_aglipay
President Emilio Aguinaldo’s hairstyle was so rare, he’s actually kind of funny-looking in this photo taken 1904.

The team’s investigation into the haircut trends in Aguinaldo’s time shows that the President sported an extremely rare hairstyle that both made him into a legend and the constant butt of jokes of Katipuneros during secret meetings.

The barber even remembers the very moment he completed cutting the infamous crown:

“I remember it like it was yesterday. As soon as I lifted my scissors, your eyes literally glowed red. It was as if the innocent boy bursting with selfless bravery turned into a conniving, power-hungry man who will stop at nothing to conquer the country for himself. All because of that cursed flattop.”

“Yes, the hair gave you immense strength and tactical knowledge that allowed you to win key battles in Cavite while Bonifacio embarrassed himself with his losses, but those victories came with a price: your soul.”

The barber’s beliefs–while truly extraordinary–were not without merit, said the team’s lead historian. Aguinaldo’s top was so distinctly flat that he stood out like a sore thumb in the battlefield, allowing every soldier to recognize him even far away, with the unintended effect of boosting troop morale. It was like Aguinaldo gave an inspirational dugout speech every time he took off his hat.

The shock of shocking flatness also unified Cavite revolutionaries–the “Magdalo” faction–like no other conceivable force could. The straightness of the top and the uniformity of the strands, in the eyes of revolutionaries, symbolized strength through unity. The lead historian even went as far as to suggest the flattop was the key determining factor in the 1897 Tejeros Convention at the end of which Aguinaldo was elected the first president of the Philippines and Bonifacio was relegated to the pathetic post of Director of the Interior (so much for starting the whole revolution). As is now famously known, Bonifacio deemed the elections unjust and tampered with, and his subsequent condemnation of the process resulted in him being accused of treason, and eventually being executed.

But Aguinaldo’s barber had a more interesting take on the whole event:

“I witnessed first-hand how your initial decision to commute Bonifacio’s death sentence was immediately overturned when he screamed in your face that ‘your hair was flatter than your unbelievably flat personality’ and that “no wonder we’re losing the war because our enemies are using your head as crosshairs to aim for our soldiers.'”

Apparently, the brilliant general Antonio Luna was also the recipient of Aguinaldo’s ire stemming from his crop of square hair.

“Poor Luna once broke his serious character to make an admittedly tasteless joke about what the difference was between Apolinario’s legs and your hair. The answer being that your hair stands. The savage look on your face afterwards told me that that man–as important as he was tactically to you–was as good as dead. And sure enough, a month later, Luna had more holes in him than Manila.”

Aguinaldo and Quezon during Flag Day, 1935. The first President sported the flattest flattop even in old age.
Aguinaldo and Quezon during Flag Day, 1935. The first President sported the flattest flattop even in old age.

The one-sided correspondences between the first President and his barber continued throughout the years as the hairstylist tirelessly implored his rogue customer to cut his hair and end the curse once and for all.

“Shame on you for surrendering to the Americans! Miguel Malvar was still fighting his heart out while you were taking an oath of allegiance to the invaders and making a secret pact to spread your laughable hairstyle among the young generation of Filipinos who will be reared in American culture. You were the one responsible for this revoltingly bad hairstyle being prescribed in our schools.”

“The demon in your hair was also whispering in your ear when you cooperated with the Japanese as you made speeches on their behalf, even radioing an appeal to Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Corregidor to surrender! If you had only let me nip your mane even an inch, you would not have uttered such unpatriotic nonsense!”

Emilio Aguinaldo never listened to his barber but he nevertheless collected some of his letters, presumably to remind him of the supernatural origins of his ‘do. Whether the barber was speaking the truth or not, it is now undeniable that one man’s bad hair changed the course of history and its ripple effects will be the subject of fierce debates in universities and scholarly journals for years to come.