Marci Mac’s Reviews > Some People Need Killing: A Memoir of Murder in My Country > Status Update

We did what we could to report on corruption and abuses of power. President Duterte gave Raper another name. He called us fake news.

I wrote about terrible things that happened because those things shouldn’t happen again. Then one day the man who would be president promised deaths of his own citizens. The terrible became ordinary, to thundering applause.

Democracy, like murder, this is a simple word. I saw it as a general Goode opposed to a general wrong. By democracy, I did not mean the elected administration. The government, every government, failed often, was complicit often, was by and large incompetent, hypocritical, and out of touch. The democracy, I believed in was the nation, a community of millions who saw brutality of an evolution to be condemned.

I was born in 1985, five months before a street revolution brought democracy back to the Philippines. That year it seemed every other middle-class mother had named their daughter Patricia. Evangelista, my surname, common in my country, derives from the Greek euangelos, “bringer of good news.” It is an irony I am informed of often.

“That promise of intimacy was a distant thing, discussed inside a glass–walled conference room one winter morning, thousands of miles away from the heavy heat of a Manila under the gun.”

That. Is great writing. (And yes, what I have written is not.)