Hold the line

THERE is only one Maria Ressa.

That she posted bail last Valentine’s Day after her arrest the day before on charges of cyber libel speaks loud and clear for those of us who are NOT Maria Ressa.

The chief executive officer of the news website Rappler received the 2017 Democracy Award given by the National Democratic Institute and the 2018 Golden Pen of Freedom Award from the World Association of Newspapers.

She was one of “The Guardians,” journalists fighting the global “War on Truth,” named by the international newsmagazine “Time” as its “Person of the Year 2018”.

Malacañang has denied it is applying political harassment against Ressa and Rappler, vocal critics of the Duterte administration. It has accused Ressa of “weaponizing” the issue of press freedom to attack government and escape accountability.

“Weaponizing” is a neologism referring to how something previously unconnected to warfare—like information, the Law or freedom of expression—is converted into a tool for attacking or defending oneself against an enemy.

In the age of disinformation, bodies and bloodbaths are replaced by doubts sown, credibilities destroyed, and political will diluted.

Political liquidation was first raised into a cottage industry during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. With our country being the most dangerous in Southeast Asia to practice journalism—as tallied in 2017 by the International Press Institute—this administration may yet elevate impunity against the press by turning a top-drawer journalist like Ressa into something more useful than a statistic: the weaponizing of permissibility.

One doesn’t require permission to express views. One thinks one doesn’t require permission. One does.

Martial law in 1972 created this leap in the progression of the freedom of expression. No one spoke what was on their mind. Too many people disappearing; too many bodies reduced to litter.

By the 1980s, the quality of air had improved but the lesson was learnt. The first gatekeeper of information are not the censors nor the liquidators: it is the person with a thought.

Noting how public executions faded by the nineteenth century, Michel Foucault wrote that state power brought about the “age of sobriety in punishment”.

Torture took a bloody long time. Horses tied to tear a man limb by limb were prone to panic. How can the punishment of rule-breakers be made more edifying for the public?

“Since it is no longer the body, it must be the soul,” wrote Foucault. “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

Ressa, weaponized by an onion-skinned administration, appealed to those who love this country: “hold the line”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s February 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Susmaryosep”

KEEPING appearances is as challenging as guessing at appearances.

After a spate of spoiled checks issued to misspelled or misnamed recipients, the accounting office issued a policy that those responsible would be fined P50 for the slip.

The risk of paying for a mistake was more effective than any reprimand. Our office requested two journalists/academics we were tapping as resource persons to email their scanned identification cards.

Revelation. Known by their nicknames, both journalists emailed IDs that showed “Maria” is the first of their baptized names.

Yet, the realization that long-time colleagues are “Maria Lourdes” and “Maria Diosa” on paper was not half as bizarre as the guessing game our family played whenever we met for novena prayers at a chapel in the city.

On the right side of the altar is a man carrying a wooden box of implements. While waiting, relations would whisper, “Who is that saint?”

St. Peter was a popular wild guess until an altar boy made the correction: St. Joseph the Worker.

Years of participating in and covering Labor Day marches left me with the irreverent impression that St. Joseph is the Catholic Church’s unofficial union-buster.

In 1955, Pope Pius XII declared May 1 as the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. The papal move was intended to counter the Marxists’ Labor Day celebration.

Last Thursday, in his homily, Fr. Ramon Echica praised St. Joseph as the patron of a good death. Although scripture does not mention his death, the traditional belief is that he died before Jesus began his ministry.

Fr. Echica said that from this belief stems the assumption that Joseph spent his last days in the company of Mary and Jesus, teaching the latter carpentry.

The image of life easing into the next phase comforts.

Yet the diversity, not to mention contradictions, of narratives niggles: which version is true? The parents who name an infant after the mother of Christ to invoke Her blessings or the renaming by the daughter who grows up to reject all except the material and verifiable as superstition?

Discourse is the way we organize information and represent the world to fit our views. For the French postmodernist Michel Foucault, all discourse, specially language, reveals the “regimes of truth” or the power governing human relations.

“Susmaryosep” was not only invoked when we had to redo a pile of papers required to issue checks to the two Marias.

For weeks, we have been on tenterhooks, monitoring if one of the Marias, who is traveling from Manila, would have her flight cancelled in the ongoing preparations for the Asia-Pacific Economic (Apec) summit.

A total of 1,125 domestic and 239 international flights were cancelled to give way before and after the APEC meetings. Two lanes of Edsa, connecting Shaw Boulevard and a megamall, one of the thorniest stretches, are “dedicated” to Apec vehicles.

Work and school will be suspended in the capital. Even its street dwellers will be sent off on government-sponsored vacations.

All these to ensure the heads of Apec member-economies are spared the harsh realities of the Third World. To ensure the messengers get the message right, 4,000 foreign and local journalists covering Apec await “free-flowing coffee, buffet meals and even free massage”.

Foucauldian discourse has a fancy name for “Apec security” and “Filipino hospitality”. Mine is “Susmaryosep”.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s November 15, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”