MALTREATMENT OF MEDIA IN MANILA PEN TONIGHT

As a practicing journalist, as an editor of the country's most awarded environmental community newspaper, an active partner of the Center for Community Journalism and Development, the Center for Media Freedom andResponsibility, the Philippine Press Institute, and the BIMP-EAGA Media and Communicators Association, I join our fellow media practitioners tonight in condemning the excessive show of force of the Arroyo administration in keeping the Manila Peninsula standoff under wraps. I urge all my friends in this group to speak up to their colleagues and all members of the Philippine and worldwide community of freedom loving individuals about this unprecedented maltreatment of professional media practitioners who were arrested and brought to Bicutan, just because they happened to be in Manila Peninsula hotel doing their jobs.

While we may have biases, I know that we are always expected to maintain objectivity even when we come face to face with issues like this.

But tonight, I simply have to speak up if not for those who were actually arrested, but for my fellow media practitioners who are toiling in the provinces far away from the network support of bigger media organizations.

What happened to our fellow media practitioners tonight was unprecedented since EDSA 86.

If this could happen to colleagues who are working for manila-based and foreign-based news organizations, what sort of protection can community journalists depend on when they come to the same situation covering police and military stories in the provinces? To what recourse will we run to?

No onions for intellectual debates

Afternoon of September 29 started out slowly for me.

After lunch, I texted my two remaining close friends who shared the same sympathies as mine with regards to the debauchery that is slowly creeping up Palawan from its southern tip.

I was adamant in attending the UPAA forum scheduled for the afternoon.  For what could be a more incongruous topic for a fora than "responsible mining"?  I told my two friends, since nobody at our house (my mom studied in UP Diliman in the early 50s, while her four boys studied hard sciences in Diliman and Los Banos later on) got invited for the gathering, I've already told my mom not to attend.  We were in a boycott mode at the house so to speak.

But my two friends texted me back to attend.  I previously texted them, what the heck is the organization of UP alumni doing with the responsible mining bandwagon?

Turned out one my two close friends was scheduled to speak.  Upon their urging, I changed my mind and decided to attend the forum.  I told one of my friends, am only going there because of you.  She was asked to deliver the mining situation in Palawan from the anti-mining side.

First to draw his sword in the forum was Engr. Fuji Rodriguez, who is with the Narra Nickel.  Probably the longest and most parched talk of the day.  As parched as the mountain sides they have razored off in the south.  The engineer was boasting that he is in the company of what is probably the most intelligent group of men in Palawan during his time in the mining industry.  Duh!  (Let's compare our Stanford-Binnet's Mr.)  After a rather hyper-extended (just like men trying to augment their sexual inadequacy with huge, loud, shiny cars) introduction to his talk (f__k me, you've been introduced by the forum host already!), the mining engineer dived into the kernel of his talk about responsible mining: the reforestation blah, and the alternative livelihood blah for the affected communities.  He was talking about the gulayans for the community.

This was followed by a very raunchy (I hope you're intelligent enough to understand what I mean by this) deconstruction of the current Mining Act delivered by a witty old professor from Baguio.  My friend delivered her talk after the witty deconstruction that elicited a series of guffaws from the audience.

Everything was almost going fine (it was an intellectual discourse among UP alumni anyway), but the vice governor decided to react.

One of the informations brought out by my friend to the afternoon audience was the fact that as of now, there are 315 applications for mining in different parts of Palawan.

The vice governor said, based on his fact checking with the secretariat of the provincial board, there are only around 15 mining applications in the board.

Faced with the two incongruous numbers, he could not engage the intellectual discussion and asked where did my friend from Palawan NGO Network Inc (PNNI) get the data.  He was like a child appealing to the audience, this cannot be true.  This girl has taken my candy.  Although somewhere in the hyper-extended (Too!  They seem to share the same preponderance for boring the audience) reaction he issued a disclaimer that he was not lawyering (well, that's what he is, a lawyer) for the mining sector, his demeanor late in the afternoon was like he was the one worst hit by my friend's statements during the forum than the mining advocates.

Even the presentation of pictures of indigents near Rio Tuba (site of the Rio Tuba Nickel Mines) suffering from skin diseases right after an unloading of sulfuric acid was questioned.  The vice governor must have thought the audience composed of men and women who have TAKEN THEIR UNDERGRADUATE studies in the fertile rooms of UP are so delicate, they cannot be allowed to get exposed to such horrifying images.

But the vice governor should be aware that we, as the best and the brightest minds of the Philippines living and toiling in this corner of the country, have been trained for the horrors of work and society.  Matters of visual taste and "but we have tried our best" apologia are poor defenses in such intellectual exchange among the brilliant minds who have walked the holy halls of UP.

Looking Out

Because I was never a part of them, they exist at that moment just as I look up the clock face to find the second hand two ticks away from the zenith.

I could never hold the visions completely.

And in moments when am untruthful to myself, I also say the visions could never hold me because I was never a part of them.

But I keep coming back to take my surreptitious peeps at memory’s leaking hole.

These are glimpses akin to dreams of peripheral visions. Sidelong glances upon beautiful strangers one meets in busy passageways.

Soon the second hand arcs down… and things are no longer where they are supposed to be.

Pornography

This whiteness is an embarrassment.

It slaps me with the cold memory of the toilet tiles and those secluded moments of abandon when bodies are only concerned with bodies.

The real intercourse within these walls is not lightweight. It lacks sterility.

Contacts are always weighed down. Literally, by the book satchels hanging down the backs of college boys, the computer bags down the sides of some IT geeks, the shaving kits of urban soldiers who just happened to pass by the mall today.

Figuratively, we are pulled down by the weight of our loads: the fear that some ugly mall guard will suddenly crash into this unspoken chewing of the cud, that some straight brats (with a kinky show of flesh, some are not so straight after all) will enter the scene with their bad words about the brotherhood.

But, you ask me, why is it an embarrassment?

Because nobody wants to speak of it.

It’s only in poems where you get to read about them.

Chances are you don’t even have access to smut.

For my brother...

…you’re not brainy enough to notice that I don’t have the same skin tone as you.

I hate you for giving me a body hugging pink muscle-shirt for my 19th birthday.

It took you five more years to tell me you are gay.

You must have thought that every gay boy wants to wear pink; that every gay boy has a closet.

Kuya, we are so poor, we could not afford a closet for every boy in the family.

Didn’t you realize that?

BB Genes

I grew up in a brainy lot of boys, but our younger triumvirate is more known among our contemporaries as the enfants terrible. I guess all three of us were bestowed with the brain gene. But it hardly ends there.

On top of that, the eldest of the trio has one more gene. He has the one that allows him to cope with all sorts of people in varied life situations. If ever you have the chance to meet my brother, you will be floored by that charisma -€“ that certain magnetism that is like a passport that allows him unrestricted access to all social animals of the earth. Poor mortals who have been in places with him never ever notice that he had interest in only a few of them. During our recent bonding years while the two of us were having our stealthy naissance as newly self-accepting masculine gay brothers, I remember him telling me an anecdote about Virginia Woolf spending a night at a party. I surely like the cold humor of Woolf -€“ very cerebral, not physical. But I wouldn'€™t have had her composure and would have purposely spilled red wine on gowns of society mistresses and came off smashing a flute glass on the face of some debonair of a gentleman who was full of himself (social gatherings are never devoid of this species).

On the other hand, our youngest also has an extra - the super-perseverance gene. He accomplished major breakthroughs in his chosen path much earlier than his kuyas. He entered academic profession much earlier than anybody else in the family, getting offered a junior faculty position at the flagship campus of the premier state university right after graduation from the university. He handled reinforcement lecture classes for sophomore students at the electrical engineering department during his final year as an undergrad, seated at the student council of his college at the same time. All these tucked with his busy schedule for an undergraduate thesis that almost did not run at the deadline! I was awed by all these. This blatant rolling up of a boy'™s sleeves in a "can do excellently" attitude. I was never more proud of my brother when he pulled it all up together.

But what about me? What did I have?

It was another brain gene. Sans the coping gene. Sans the perseverance gene. Geneticists say the genotype symbol for the male human phenotype is XY and the one for the woman phenotype is XX, the Y gene being dominant over the recessive X. Aside from my XY gene, I probably have a BB gene lurking somewhere in my DNA waiting for the crew of the Human Genome Project to map with scientific accuracy the mysterious phenotype it represents. It took a chunk of my 20™s to muster the skill of coping. And I had long doldrums in my path. My writing cycle was erratic. You would even wonder why I call it a "cycle" at all.

During one of those rare visits of my writer friends to my country nook, I was introduced to a producer of a lifestyle program of one of the two major television companies in Manila. When my friend told the lady that I am a literary writer (an anomaly in an out-of-urban place like Palawan) but I don'€™t do commissioned writing, she was aghast. With composure of course. Suddenly wanting for a word to say, the producer smiled and just looked at the space where I was.

But what can I do? I am uneasy with commercially commissioned work. I am wired to miss deadlines. Besides, salon style work never appealed to me at all, except for one idiotic time during a street party in Malate where I and my younger set of friends composed a rengga out of boredom. On the other hand, I ache for inspiration. The lure of commercial success in a culture of pop tart makes me squirm. Money is like sex. After you bought what you have had in mind, you feel empty. After I've spent myself in bed with my partner, I often wonder why I did it -€“ thus the compulsion to smoke a stick of ciggy after the act. It's not guilt. It's a simple case of - yes, like that. Like that network producer staring into empty space.

ABCs

With all the denials and schisms we have been having all these years, it is difficult to assume commonalities, indeed.

The only commonality to which we would all agree on is the fact that we are biological males who are having sex with other biological males.

Even the subject of sex is not a sacred ground upon which we would all shed all our armors down.

What we would all agree on, for this matter, is perhaps, that we are doing sexual things when we are together.

Let's forget love for the mean time.