HOTSPOT
On a cool November night in 2015, we went to the Carmelites’ media center in New Manila, Quezon City to cheer our friend Raymund Villanueva as he received the prestigious Titus Brandsma Award from the Order of Carmelites in the Philippines.
As the awards night unraveled, we were awe-struck at the quiet arrival of someone who we have long looked up to and whose voice we have missed: Conrado de Quiros was in the house, rolling quietly in his wheelchair towards a table.
We were happy twice over: For Raymund and the other awardees accepting their awards, and for seeing De Quiros.
That was also the last time we saw him.
From the mid-90s and onwards, De Quiros was the prophetic, angry, stubborn, conscientious, subversive and — most of all — most creative opinion-maker to our generation. It would not be unusual for friends, family, colleagues and comrades to ask one another “have you read De Quiros” on this or that issue.
Way before the terms “key opinion leader” and “thought-leader” were invented, De Quiros was affecting, provoking and moving people, politicians, business leaders, celebrities, and artists. “Influencer” is too weak a word to describe his work, and its effect on readers and on society.
To drive home his point at important moments in history, De Quiros subverted the standards for a column, like when he filled his column with the phrase “Hello Garci” when the post-EDSA 2 president was accused of massive electoral fraud.
In 2004, De Quiros wrote a column with perhaps the longest title in Philippine journalism history. The 34-word header introduced what he thought was to be expected from a presidential candidate. The column was blank.
He would later have the paper publish again a blank column, titled “independent foreign policy” of a presidential candidate.
In such instances, the column became the talk of the town, and quite certainly a topic in many newsrooms and journalism departments.
But it wasn’t just that he subverted the form of the column that made De Quiros a compelling daily read. He subverted conventional wisdom in politics, economics and other spheres of our national life. For a conscientious writer who began writing in the eve of martial law, he never let go of a worldview that’s history-based, committed, patriotic, progressive, courageous, anti-establishment, and sometimes even obscene, according to critics.
No wonder, many would save money to buy his books like “Dance of the Dunces,” “Tongues on Fire,” “Dead Aim,” and “Flowers from the Rubble.”
Colleges and universities included his writings as reading materials for English subjects.
De Quiros was also a sought-after speaker at National Student Press Conventions and Congresses of the College Editors Guild of the Philippines. It is not a stretch to say that he was a “North Star” to our generation of campus journalists and writers from the 1990s and 2000s.
The feeling of fraternity with De Quiros was not just based on his being our pre-eminent columnist. As the Ateneo de Manila University reminds everyone, in a post about his passing, De Quiros was also a campus journalist when he was an Economics major at the Loyola campus. He wrote for student publications Pandayan and Pugadlawin.
De Quiros won awards for column-writing and journalism from the Catholic Mass Media Awards, the Rotary, and the Society of Publishers in Asia.
When illness struck him in late 2014 and made writing his daily columns impossible, De Quiros’ absence was felt. Instead of asking whether we’ve read his, we would ask ourselves “What would De Quiros say? How would he say it?”
Ever since I started writing columns for this paper in early 2014, I have done so partly as my homage to our generation’s “lodi” De Quiros who captured our imagination and showed us how to wield journalism to “comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable,” and to “speak truth to power.”
De Quiros passed away on November 6. He was 72. He leaves behind his bereaved family, friends, colleagues, and a grateful people he conscienticized and persuaded into action.
Rest in power, CDQ.