Down the toilet bowl

WHEN you lose your way, try Googling your way out.

After a week of listening to television reports about the death of Jeffrey Laude, I went online to clear up my confusion. It was not just the event and the circus that immediately pitched tent. The way it was reported and the manner I was filtering the story made me doubt if I understood myself at all.

How could the killing of a 26-year-old Olangapo resident shake my world?

First, I am the type of consumer who digests television news to stay updated. I know the risks of eating fast food (and being as cavalier with my news consumption) but news is a commodity I want served, at the end of a day of technical writing, as light as dinner and as a prelude to the series of soap operas that I hope will usher in at least eight hours of sleep.

But Laude’s death offers no easy escape.

First, he didn’t just die; he was killed. Second, Jeffrey was better known as Jennifer. According to accounts, he preferred to be her. That’s a choice that defined/defines him/her in life/death.

(Blame not just media but our entire culture for the slashes (/) that are liberally sprinkled in this story. According to punctuation rules, the slash frequently substitutes for “or,” referring to a choice of mutually exclusive conditions, as in “he/she” means “he or she,” assuming the one cannot be the other. But the slash can also be a way of not taking sides in a contentious point: for instance, using “freedom fighter/terrorist” to sidestep accusations of labeling or stereotyping. And the slash can be used to surface submerged connections between apparent contradictions: “love/hate”.)

All the TV reports I heard referred to the “killing of a Filipino transgender woman”. Would it have mattered if the media was simply reporting the killing of one Jeffrey Laude, not the Jennifer Laude?

I think the circus came to town the minute someone first reported, “Filipino transgender woman”. Male or female, news anchors latched on to the phrase, with voice inflections and glances more pregnant with innuendoes than a herd of promiscuous slashes. I saw how the phrase broke the composure of an official, asked on camera to theorize why Jeffrey/Jennifer was killed. Either the protocols of police training or broadcast performance prevented the poor man from raising his hands to cover the smirk that bloomed like molds as he imagined for us the murderous instinct that must have seized Jennifer’s companion when he came face to face with Jeffrey in the motel room.

On print, a reader of the phrase focuses on “killing” first, followed by “Filipino transgender woman,” according to the words’ order of appearance. A reader less lazy than I may even get up and Google “transgender” to better understand. Unlike a transsexual who resorts to medical intervention for sex change, a transgender chooses a gender identity different from his or her sex at birth.

But for a TV viewer like me, the eyes and ears are faster to the draw than vocabulary checks. I heard “gay prostitute,” “German fiancé,” and “American serviceman”. I saw nightly the death scene, described by a top-rating talk show host as “iconic”. She didn’t elaborate except to say, with portent, “we all know what this means”.

The head crammed into the toilet bowl may have one meaning, many or none at all. A TV host acting like a semiotician poses as many dangers as a journalist speculating on a police investigation within the time constraints of primetime TV news. When the case shows no fresh leads, the recourse is to turn on the victim, and disassemble his/her life. What happens to the victim and his/her family’s right to justice?

Yet, justice, too, is at the root of gender. What we consider as masculine or feminine is not determined by nature but nurture and culture. In a world that holds up the heterosexual as normal, we see only as shadows in our periphery the “others”: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.

The news media can correct the myopia of gender-based crimes. Or join the queue in perpetuating violence against those we judge as “different”. We don’t have to actually ram heads into toilet bowls; we can just replay the image nightly.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 19, 2014 issue of the “Matamata” Sunday editorial-page column

Electronic dreams

WHEN I’m home, buying groceries is one of the chores I share with my older son Carlos.

There’s a gap of 28 years between us. It’s most obvious in the way we tackle this chore we dislike but accept.

We both come up with lists.

I write my list at the back of old receipts, ATM slips, cut-up calendar pages, and writing drafts. I keep the list in the book I am reading, and take it out when I remember something or the household supply runs out.

Carlos keeps his list in his tablet.

Having two lists should make our grocery trips a breeze. But as they say on Facebook, it’s complicated.

We fight over whose list should be the “official” guide for our buying. Carlos claims my list requires a penmanship translator at least, a shrink at most. I don’t find any joy in an electronic list I cannot cross out, item by item, with a red pen I wield like a turbolaser cutting down another domestic invader raiding my days.

Once, trying to be the adult, I said we could both use our lists. This shocked my son, the idea that two adults of sound health and full abilities would squander their time on a task that’s not even saving the planet.

In the end, Carlos won by posting about our War of the Lists on Facebook. Those of you who sided with him (yessss, including the traitors who were born in my decade and rightfully occupy with me the same side of the Digital Divide) did not tyrannize me into sharing your standpoint by the sheer force of your overwhelming, unassailable Likes.

My capitulation came with the realization that a grocery list converted into a micro essay is infinitely superior to one that will only line a landfill.

I remember this battle waged last summer when I had to recently write a paper for class. To expound on the theory of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas that journalism can create a public sphere, I reflected on how anyone with a computer, an Internet connection, and the desire to communicate is changing how we relay things and relate to each other in the brave borderless world online.

Don’t know how to write? You can take a photo, make an illustration, or upload a video you made. In the age of Tweets, running only for 140 characters, Carlos says my usual paragraph-long comment is the equivalent of a medieval unrolling of the scroll and the throat-clearing preamble that precedes a royal pronouncement that the world is actually flat.

Don’t know what to write about? I find there’s an online community that can watch cats watch themselves for hours and hours. I love artists who blog, as well as writers who knit and paint with a palette that captures a moment just before it vanishes between seeing and unseeing. Online, anything goes, even wrong speling.

Can’t get anyone to publish what you wrote? Start a blog, which is free. Start a blog for every passion. Write for yourself. Write for a reader of one if that makes you hear yourself and see yourself better.

Conversely, you can also express yourself by making a sex video or leaking someone else’s. In the playroom of Web 2.0, no pendulum is more wicked than user-generated content.

According to Habermas, the modern paradox is whether persons set free to become themselves by modern communication can penetrate the fog of self-indulgence and find an affinity with others.

Can we stop thinking of ourselves, monitor powerful institutions, and act for the greater good? Can social media surface informed and critical opinion?

Or will we just end up like Alice, excessively watching our holes, coveting the shape-shifting white rabbit of technology, and trivializing our pursuits?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 11, 2013 issue of the Sunday editorial page column, “Matamata”

The usual suspect

FIRST, the Church.

And now the president, too, wants media to be “agents of hope.”

During the Oct. 17 opening of the P1-billion studio of GMA Network, Gloria Arroyo urged media to “sustain our people’s hope” in the face of a “global economic crisis that is responsible for driving up the prices of food, fuel and rice in the Philippines.”

In the next paragraph, however, the president debunks the country is in a crisis. Although the US is going through an “economic meltdown,” Arroyo says we only “face strong challenges.”

I check the mirror for signs. Whenever I hear doublethink, the cynical journalist in me always rears her head, an unlovely sight.

Doublethink can make two contradictory realities exist in a politician’s mind. As George Orwell wrote in his book “1984,” a fictional political party adopted these three slogans: “WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

But what did Orwell know? The man didn’t even get the year of the new dystopia right.

So I decide to take up the president’s suggestion, and go undercover in the sunny isles where journalists are loathed to tread.

I choose a day when I don’t have any deadline to beat. One has better credibility as an instrument of positive thinking when future articles are still at a hazy remove and one’s editor has, as yet, no idea what’s going to hit him or her.

I walk around our village. I smell the flowers along the roadside, and end up sneezing from the dust-coated petals.

I drop by a neighbor’s stall of local and national dailies to seek inspiration (and to be honest, some shade to relieve the headache that’s threatening to erupt from this excessive strolling).

Every reporter begins the day by scanning with hope the competition’s coverage. To survive in this business, we hope to have more scoops than our rivals.

I scan all four dailies. I scan them again. The story I’ve hoarded has not come out in the others. I’m alive!

About to give myself one point for giving one person—myself—hope to live till the next deadline, I catch the well-curdled face of my neighbor beside the weathered sign of “No free reading.”

When I walk away, my ears strain to listen to the jingling coins that have crossed over to my neighbor’s palm.

I am no closer to finding elusive hope but am richer by four dailies that I’ve already partially read. My heart plummets.

It zooms up again when it encounters half-way down the evilly cackling journalist that’s just bidding her time to resurface.

When I reach home, I spread the newspapers and read, page to page. I reread a couple of times just to be sure.

I realize then my fatal mistake. Why did I undertake this experiment in the first place? I should not have read the news at all.

Pandora opening the box released all evils except one: hope. The Greeks, in this legend, believed hope to be a weakling but still a risk

What is more dangerous than holding out a lifeline of optimism that life will ever be free of lying politicians, greedy generals, interfering journalists?

Yet what good is there in denying or ignoring the hard truths behind the headlines: “rice crisis,” “financial crunch,” “euro-generals mess”?

Beyond the pittance of her pay, a journalist exacts no influence on economic policies and trends, but she will report on these.

A journalist has no discretion over public funds, but will probe how these are spent or misspent.

Whenever hope becomes a fatality, why do we not look accusingly at those who betrayed, lynched, murdered and bragged with impunity afterwards?

Why do we blame the messenger?

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 26, 2008 issue

SOS

Dear Bru,

Help! Is there a Bumblebee still left standing in a toy store shelf in New South Wales?

I’ve given up hope new stocks will ever arrive from Manila. I suspect there’s a conspiracy of parents keeping watch on all their ports. The chance of any shipment of these yellow-colored robotshifters arriving soon in Cebu—and ending the panic of all parents besieged by nine-year-old fans of the Transformers—is only slightly better than any hope of a silent night on Christmas eve (unless you’re in Davao).

Of course, I am hyperbolic. Life in this country is slightly enlarged beyond truth and reasonableness. So I am not exaggerating that I am considering flying so many
miles out to buy a toy Juan might outgrow during the two-week Christmas break, despite the fact that I cannot even buy a spot on a bunk on economy class in a slow boat from Pier 1 to Talibon. For how many times have I watched that Transformers DVD until my son was reasonably convinced I could recognize, even blindfolded, a yellow alien masquerading as a Camaro?

Really, I’ve lost all appetite for boring reality.

Since we’re on this subject, do you remember the scene when Optimus Prime and Megatron, grappling in their death clinch, fly into and through a downtown highrise?

“That’s wicked!” howls my son every time that grand battle flashes on screen. I, too, watch, gape-mouthed, my shock as undiminished on our 77th rerun as on the 7th.

Is it a good or a bad thing when children remember nothing of 9/11? That ordinary working day in New York when two planes from out of the sky, beyond belief, rammed into the World Trade Center. While people lost lives, innocence, faith, the boys and I were in bed. They were telling me how their day went. In the dark of their room, I listened, just glad that homework was done, the hostilities over.

You know that expression, “beyond belief?” Among other things, 9/11 relegated this to the recycle bin, to borrow some computerese from Carlos. Really, is anything ever “beyond belief”?

In 2007, Hollywood released the Transformers film. Apparently, movie executives judged that, based on preview reactions of test audiences, it was now okay to put on screen a grand battle reminiscent of that unbelievable day in 2001, except of course, this time, it’s not ideologies, geopolitics, humanity warring against itself but just two leviathans of the Decepticons and Autobots, races from somewhere deep in space.

“It’s just a movie, Mom,” as Juan would say, exasperated again that mothers are so without imagination. “Those are autonomous robotic organisms, not people.”

Did I copy Juan’s shrug when I saw the photo of the Marcoses emblazoned on the front page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer’s lifestyle section last Nov. 22, 2007? Though the years have added a few more chins on Imelda, the smiles of the Iron Butterfly and her children, Bongbong, Irene and Imee, look genuine, far from robotic.

In their place, I would be as sparkling. Though the 21-year-old news photos are grainy, there is no mistaking their long faces when they cowered on the balcony of Malacañang, the late dictator making his last stand just before fleeing the country.

For the first time in my 20 years, I didn’t go home that night. Many students and teachers kept vigil in Lahug, a scene replicated in many campuses across the nation and the people-clogged streets of Manila. We pooled money to buy batteries for the few radio sets that transmitted Radio Veritas’ coverage of People Power.

Warming some of our mats were day-old copies of opposition papers, including the Inquirer. People boycotted the crony papers for printing news manufactured by Malacañang. Like a few that were not afraid to print the truth, the Inquirer was scarce on the streets.

Now, 21 years later, the same paper fawns over Imee’s birthday party. The Marcoses have cause to smile. After all, they are even better than Lazarus. They were never dead at all; they don’t stink. The son is a member of the House of Representatives.

But I am digressing. When you have cornered a Bumblebee, do not let it out of your sight. So I can relieve you of the unbearable tension of possible suicide attacks from other parents, do secure a roundtrip eticket for me to and fro New South Wales. I will reimburse you as soon as I get my yearend bonus from newspapering and teaching (this is unreal because this is an email from the Philippines, remember?).

Your loving sister

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Dec. 2 issue

Mirror, mirror

THE PRICE of freedom is steep. Few can be more familiar with that burden than media workers.

Recently, two events pushed again to the forefront the conundrum faced by media: how responsible are we in using our vast resources for information and persuasion?

Last Friday, ABC Studios and producers of “Desperate Housewives” apologized for the anti-Filipino remarks made by the Teri Hatcher character in the show.

Certain demands though—such as banning the series from Philippine free and cable TV, editing the controversial scene of Hatcher to correct online viewing, and requiring a future episode to air a retraction or correction of the offending sentiments—seem melodramatic and excessive.

More encouraging is the realization that, contrary to the popular bias that the Boob Tube caters only to the shallow and the apathetic, today’s media audience can be critical, vigilant and assertive.

In particular, the Oct. 5, 2007 report of the Philippine Daily Inquirer singled out the “political muscle” of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in protesting derogatory articles. OFWs blogged to condemn columnist Malu Fernandez for mocking overseas Filipinos in her People Asia article. Fernandez later apologized and resigned.

Lest we get swept away in American-bashing and self-righteous finger-pointing, the “Desperate Housewives” faux pas should make us reflect on our own cultural sensitivity and awareness of and respect for diversity.

Local sitcoms also pick on minorities’ quirks and other stereotypes for a few laughs. We are quick to bristle when other nationalities stereotype Pinoys as domestic helpers or sex workers. However, we ride along when local actors exaggerate the Bisaya’s “hard” pronunciation, the Tagalog’s imperialistic posture, the Chinese-Filipino’s dishonesty, the Indian’s usury, as well as countless jokes at the expense of physical disfigurement (the short, the fat, the dark-skinned, the dwarf).

The public’s deafening silence to these local lapses should be cause for worry. Either few of us are watching these shows and patronizing local entertainment or many of us agree with the stereotypes and enjoy the minority-bashing.

Closer home, ABS-CBN’s termination of a reporter, camera man and driver involved in the airing of tampered news footage has set off reverberations. Many viewers and media colleagues are taking up the cudgels for the axed workers, arguing that the network’s punishment was “too harsh” and that another chance should be given, considering their years of service with the network, deprivation of livelihood, and consequences to their families.

A dismissed media worker truly faces extreme odds to find again employment within the same industry. “Reinvention” may force one to seek work with former competitors or rivals, go freelance, or do public relations work for clients—if the axed media worker can get such jobs.

For the reputation of members of the media is just as fragile as those of the public figures and private citizens they cover. Sometimes, one thinks that a media worker’s credibility is even more tenuous. The knowledge, skills, news instinct and reputation for credibility acquired painstakingly in the field or at the desk over the years can all be lost with one human lapse in judgment.

That is the cross of those who take on the task of holding up a mirror to society. We in the media must be able to look at our own faces without flinching, as well as accept the reality that some errors don’t go away after we run a simple erratum.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Oct. 7, 2007 issue