Tilapia redux

 

TILAPIA first crossed my plate in Quezon City. Once and never to return, I vowed.

At the university canteen, I chose a nicely fried fish and was shocked when it came on a plate, camouflaged under an ooze of greens like a Hollywood actor penetrating a jungle camp. Because I skipped breakfast and lunch to finish a paper and was not facing evening class with a gut up in arms, I tackled the now alien fish, only to share all but the tail with the fat university cats. 

Farmed fish taste depends on the quality of the water and the feed. Unlike the seawater ones, freshwater fish must be harvested at its ideal size. Too big, a fish grazes too long on moss, muddy bottoms or fish meal with its link to mycotoxins.

Spoiled by the diversity, taste, and affordability of Cebu’s marine bounty, the husband and I avoid fishy misadventures in Cavite, especially because the pandemic drives the price of fish caught off the Batangas coast to deep space.

After the Taal Volcano erupted last July 1, a young man in Batangas said in an interview that he took advantage of the two-hour window allowed by officials for male residents to leave the evacuation centers in the morning and visit their homes to feed the animals.

Speaking in the lilting tones of the Batangas-born, the fellow said that fish, like people, cannot skip a meal without consequences. 

The Taal Volcano Island is designated by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology as a Permanent Danger Zone (PDZ).

For nearby lakeshore communities, vigilance means calculating the moods of a volcano. In the wake of the Jan. 12, 2020 eruption,  animal welfare activists focused on the horses, dogs, cats, and livestock that were abandoned in the emergency and needed rescue. 

How do you rescue fish? A fish farm involves not just fish but an ecosystem of men and dogs guarding against fish thieves. When you depend on fishing and fish farming in a PDZ, you do not wait to be rescued. 

Assessing the 2021 eruption, President Rodrigo Duterte joked that he will “cap the hole” of Taal. After the 2020 explosion, the president vowed to pee into the crater and eat ash.

Unlike the president, the discriminating tilapia does not eat ash. Aficionados know the fish must be bought “live and fresh,” cleaned thoroughly and cooked properly. 

In other places, tilapia, the second most farmed fish next to carp worldwide, is called the “St. Peter’s Fish”. Online sources trace the name to a belief that this was the fish Jesus of Nazareth multiplied in the miracle feeding multitudes.

Tackling a volcano, a pandemic, and leaders who do not know when to cap their holes, the tilapia will mayhap cross my plate again.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 11, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Domestics

A FILM still of “Kisapmata,” the 1981 masterpiece of Mike de Leon, is both a recreation and a reversal of the tableau in Bethlehem.

There is still a man accompanying his wife, heavy with child. They wait to be let inside a house, its lighted upstairs window seeming to be a beacon in the swirling dark. 

A neighbor’s Christmas “parol” completes the Nativity scene. However, this man-made star streams a weaker light, a visual cue that de Leon’s diorama negates all that the créche in Bethlehem stood for: love, redemption, life.  

An off-duty policeman shot in point-blank range a mother and her son during a personal dispute in Paniqui, Tarlac.

A witness recorded from an overhead vantage point the four times Police Senior Master Sergeant Jonel Nuezca clicked the “gatilyo (trigger)” of his service sidearm and ended the lives of Sonya Gregorio, 52, and Frank Gregorio, 25. 

In film language, the camera angled downwards is a panopticon of surveillance and judgment. 

In “Kisapmata,” the upstairs window monitored by retired policeman Tatang Dadong (acted by Vic Silayan) exposes the limits of our view: we see what we only want to see.  

Enraged citizens called for the punishment of Nuezca and even his young daughter, who joined the confrontation and walked away from the bodies. 

Fewer voices questioned why Nuezca is still in the force despite being flagged for five administrative cases within six years, including two homicide complaints dismissed for lack of evidence.

The Tarlac double murders of unarmed civilians by an off-duty cop using his official firearm is an “isolated” incident that has not convinced President Duterte to rescind his order, made in 2017, to allow off-duty police to carry sidearms as protection from “armed communists”.

Human rights watch groups estimate that more than 8,000 to 20,000 persons were killed by the police since Duterte took office in 2016. 

During the three-year War on Drugs, poll after poll showed that the wealthy and the educated rated Duterte’s performance from “very good” to “excellent,” his popularity only slightly dipping among those with less income.  

In “Kisapmata,” Dadong’s wife Dely (Charito Solis) is cleaning the couple’s room while watching television. She accidentally touches the gun placed underneath her husband’s pillow. Without once taking her eyes off the TV screen, she returns the pistol in its drawer on his bedside table. 

When I was newly married, I learned, before buying glassware, to run my fingers over the surface. The eyes can be distracted; the fingers detect any surface flaw. From Marcos to Duterte, the culture of impunity domesticates us. We sleep with the enemy; we keep them in office.

Source of “Kisapmata” still: news.abs-cbn.com (photograph by Cesar Hernando; courtesy of Mike de Leon)

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s December 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

 

Cardboard justice

THE CORPSE had clean feet.

The body was deposited beside a highway that would soon be crawling with motorists getting away for the weekend to Tagaytay and Batangas, favorite watering holes for Manila’s middle class and affluent.

On a weekend, the site would have been risky for an execution or a disposal. There are nearby malls, arcades, and the restaurants and excursion sites of Tagaytay and the beaches of Batangas.

But late Thursday evening or Friday dawn? A few meters from a university and situated beside an open clearing, the spot is located along a stretch of road that is unlighted and uninhabited.

The body wore denim pants and a white shirt. Any onlooker could see the packaging tape winding around the head, the hands tied behind the back, and the ankles.

All during the ride to Metro Manila, I wondered if the theft of the shoes was an afterthought of the crime. A man’s life was negligible; his shoes were not.

“Bloody PH drug war catches eye of int’l media” was the title of a Philippine Daily Inquirer page-one story on Aug. 6.

After I searched “death toll in PH,” Google turned up 1.7 million references in 0.61 seconds. The first page of the Google search contained only two references to the Typhoon Haiyan casualties; all the rest were about the body count of President Rodrigo Duterte’s War on Drugs.

The extrajudicial killings have been condemned by the Church, media, and human rights organizations, here and overseas.

“Will the human rights people still be noisy when their rights or their loved ones’ lives are violated?” That’s the reaction of Boni, a taxi driver in Lapu-Lapu City who voted for Duterte primarily because of his tough stance on drugs. He said only Duterte is capable of taking on the rich and powerful who are preying on the common people.

Yet, there is a pronounced class slant in the profile of victims falling in the War on Drugs. In photo after photo, the victims shot down in the streets or abandoned in gutters, dumps and grassy lots seemingly come from the lower socio-economic brackets.

The news photos show not just the cocooned faces and the blood bath but also the dead men’s feet in slippers. If bare, the soles are dirty, as these would be if the men had earned their living, shod only in slippers, out on the streets or had just run for their lives.

While drug financiers and narco-politicians are paraded in news conferences or given a presidential face-to-face castigation, the men sharing their crime but not their status end up as statistics. According to another Inquirer report, Oplan Tokhang was not carried out in a gated village after the homeowners’ president certified in writing that no resident was engaged in drugs.

Jennelyn Olayres, widow of a slain drug user, protested against this form of cardboard justice. In an Aug. 1 Inquirer report, she asked President Duterte to look into the deaths of those “judged by a cardboard”.

Beside the body of her partner and many other victims of extrajudicial killings were pieces of cardboard, labelling the body as a “drug pusher” or repeating a moral: “Don’t do drugs”.

To the homeless, discarded grocery boxes have infinite use, whether as a sleeping mat, temporary roof or kindling. Thanks to the War on Drugs, we have another use for cardboard.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 1, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Which orifice is talking?

THE ARTIST wore a checkered polo, jeans and running shoes. He uncapped a tube of toothpaste and brushed his teeth.

He bent to put down the tube of toothpaste and toothbrush on the floor. He picked up a megaphone and whispered into it.

I don’t know about my fellow onlookers but I wasn’t sure at first if I heard him right. He said “Patya… patya” as if he were whispering a secret or entreating a lover.

Then the megaphone was replaced on the floor. The artist picked up the tube and brush and repeated the act of brushing.

Then the switch again, the megaphone covering the lips that repeated the words, clearer now because after the second and third and other times, the man was screaming: “Patya… patya… patya sila (kill them).”

A scent of peppermint permeated the silence inside the room occupied at the center by the artist in the checkered polo and his manic monologue.

With each brushing, the man’s lips, chin then the lower half of his face glistened with red. He was a harlot gone amok with lipstick. A clown prowling to get out of a nightmare. A demagogue drunk with power.

To some of us, the performer dripping red reminded us of the man who, just that noon, took his oath as the country’s 16th president.

Later, the artist Roy Lumagbas, known better as Roylu, informed us that the title of his performance was “Sipilyo/ Si Pilyo”. The homonyms are not interchangeable: the first use refers to a toothbrush; the second means “The Mischievous One”.

Some of us wanted to know if Roylu has an advocacy against President Rodrigo Duterte, whose campaign promise to end criminality by any means, even extrajudicial killing, was embraced by more than 14.8 million voters, representing 39 percent of the electorate.

Roylu, who now lives in Bolivia, is a member of XO?, pronounced as “So?,” the quintessential question that triggers doubt, inquiry and criticism. XO is a group of Fine Arts alumni, students and faculty of the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu.

Artists in their own right, the XO members occasionally gather to use performance art to draw the public’s attention to issues. The audience gathered last June 30 at the UP Cebu Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) was composed of artists, students and teachers.

We had earlier listened to visiting multimedia artist, professor Leticia R. Bajuyo of the University of Notre Dame and Hanover College, talk about her work with “momentary monuments.”

Retrieving the detritus of commercial culture, Prof. Bajuyo constructed monumental artwork from metal slugs, Styrofoam peanuts, compact discs and other throwaway materials. Unlike monuments that are traditionally built to last, Bajuyo’s art is about using transience to “make the matter matter.”

People are fickle, she observed. We suffer from “social amnesia”. Yet, art connects people so we can reflect on “what we remember and what we forget.”

UP professor Raymund Fernandez, a co-founder of XO?, said that unlike actors who play a role, an artist is “not acting” in performance art. During martial law, Roylu, Mons and I had classmates, students, and friends who “disappeared” for being political lepers: activists, human rights workers, Reds.

Now we hear again the unspeakable made popular and official: “Kill the others”.

When artists speak—or say, brush their teeth—it pays to listen.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 01973226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 3, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“1-4-Du30”

I DARE say that May 9 will turn out to be the ultimate “hugot (love)” fest for Rodrigo Duterte.

Love is a strange partner for the Davao City mayor, whose trademark symbol is a bare-knuckled clenched fist, an image in consonance with his most outstanding campaign promise: to wipe out crime within three to six months if he becomes the country’s next president.

I make this fearless prediction based on what I have seen and heard. Those who will vote for Duterte do so out of great affection for him.

Charisma is unpredictable but palpable in a politician’s relationship with the public, who reserve nicknames for those they have taken to the bosom like “one of them”: Digong, Leni, Miriam.

Even I, who will vote for Mar Roxas out of a pained sense of social obligation, refer to my candidate by his family name, specially when I’m repeating to myself the reasons why I will vote for a contender weighed down by the Yolanda and Mamasapano debacles and the rest of the public’s frustration with the Aquino administration.

So it is not without a sense of envy that I notice how the public dotes on Duterte. At an uptown Cebu mall, I observed how the crowd waited patiently for an hour and 45 minutes to witness the Visayas leg of the presidential debate.

When the wide outdoor screen finally showed the four contenders (Defensor-Santiago had a medical appointment) standing on the stage of the University of the Philippines Cebu, more mall-goers joined the audience. The delay meant there were three or four levels of diners also witnessing the debate from the terraces.

This well-heeled crowd, pacified by smartphones and tablets during the debate delay, erupted into cheering and clapping whenever Duterte argued or joked. In this age, when social media turns everyone into a journalist or an analyst, digital empowerment means the rise of infotainment.

Having never witnessed the eruditeness and eloquence of Lorenzo M. Tañada Sr., Jose W. Diokno and Jovito R. Salonga, we crowned the “most entertaining” as the winner of the past two debates. When neighbors watching Duterte campaign in our village turned our streets into an unscheduled fiesta, I realized again how the man epitomizes the “change” voters want.

Tañada, Diokno and Salonga served the people; their personal and public lives attested to this. Are we bothered that we now confuse spontaneity with authenticity, humor for sincerity, irreverence for depth? There’s little time to reflect, given the energy we devote to posting, sharing, tweeting.

In Dumaguete City, Duterte is already a winner had a survey been conducted on the most visible politician seen on wristbands. The waiter serving us, the boulevard trinket vendors, the pretty coed taking a selfie in an SUV with a gigantic decal of the clenched fist, the beauty parlor with the Sto. Niño shrine, finger-scrawled graffiti on the dusty bumper of a bus.

One evening, our stroll outside the Dumaguete wharf was interrupted when a man with a backpack was chased and collared near a pier checkpoint. Tourists and residents, we stared at the man protesting his innocence in the harsh crossfire of light. Two cops, with drawn guns, dragged the suspect from the middle of the street.

What will it take for Duterte to clean the streets in six months or 180 days? Will we be sweeping bodies or broken promises? Neither appeals.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s March 27, 2016 issue of “Matamata,” the Sunday editorial-page column

Lost in details

SHOULDN'T the backstory be more important than political correctness?

My mentor, Sun.Star Cebu public and standards editor Pachico A. Seares (PAS), perfectly nailed the storm of reaction generated by Manny Pacquiao's latest foot-in-the-mouth
blunder.

"They're tough on Pacquiao, soft on Duterte" was the title of his Feb. 19 column
"News Sense".

On why there was a more impassioned backlash to the boxer than the enforcer—
both have made statements that set off the public at one time or the other—PAS offered
four possible explanations: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activism,
global media's agenda-setting, culture of machismo, and greater public acceptance of
Duterte's record in public service.

Compared to Duterte, a wily fox in playing with the press, Pacquiao is, to put
it charitably, naïve with media.

In his self-ignited controversies, Manny outtalked Dionisia, his mother, who has
amply demonstrated her willingness to give reporters a guided tour around the insides of
her closet as well as her heart.

Like many celebrities, Manny is undone by his own gullibility in Mannydom.
Mother and son talk to the camera as if what they were confiding—birthday plans, agonies, bible readings, biases—is no less than the Truth about the world, according to Pacquiao.

Someone needs to tell Manny that in this age of heightened communication, he shouldn’t forget the filters. As a filter, intolerance is most intolerant of intolerance. To sugarcoat the bitter pill of reality, as well as other human blemishes like literal-mindedness and bigotry, political correctness (PC) comes handy.

We say what others want to hear. We say whatever it takes to get what we want. We say because we can always deny later. We can blame the press. We apologize. We are human, notoriously frail, after all.

Unlike Pacquiao, who chose the route of public atonement for PC, Duterte breaks rules with audacity. He seemingly gets away with disrespect for women—arguably the feeblest pillar, besieged by machismo, misogyny and sexism—and disregard for life and the rule of law.

Why are we unmoved when Duterte undertakes a kissing spree with women who flock to his sorties? When he casually mentions the roles to be taken by his wife, current partner and other women in his political future, there is no outcry from netizens. Even his critics have fallen silent when they used to probe his connection to vigilantism and street justice.

Has his network of social media influencers achieved a coup in political correctness? Perhaps these memes are effective in entertaining a section of the online public drawn to Duterte’s “authenticity”. Perhaps his tough-guy stance on criminality can hardly be double-talk or empty promise from a man who is open about his connection to the Davao Death Squads.

For this voter, Duterte is no longer a candidate to be seriously considered. Political correctness—or its opposite—matters only when one is probing the image for sincerity.

To gauge sincerity, knowing the backstory is essential. In literature, it is the flow of events that lead to the main narrative. Applied to an actual person, the backstory are the characters, decisions, actions, events, responses, and consequences shaping the person.

Fictional or otherwise, a person is more than what he or she says. On May 11, let’s dredge up the backstory before choosing the ones to lead us.


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


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s February 21, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column

Tango with millennials

AFTER a three-year hiatus to study, I returned to teach undergraduates and found the ground has shifted.

“How do you find this batch?” asked Ian, a former student who became a colleague. Disconcerting, we agreed.

Class discussions this September reinforced the impression. At the University of the Philippines (UP) Cebu, junior Mass Communication undergraduates dutifully researched on martial law’s (ML) impact on press freedom.

Our attempts to link pre-ML press licentiousness, ML press censorship and early attempts at media self-regulation were fraught. Half of the class had glazed eyes, an invariable effect of history lessons.

Things dramatically improved when discussion bridged the past to the present. Another group of junior undergraduates named Rodrigo Duterte as the presidentiable to watch in 2016.

Duterte’s political tango (Will he run? Won’t?) tantalizes the young. The controversy over his record of human rights abuses does not.

The man who “cleans” the streets of Davao through his speculated links with Death Squads is deemed by half a class of bright, idealistic youths as the country’s next hope.

My younger son, a freshman in a private university, also recalled hearing Duterte’s name among schoolmates attending the prayer vigils for a slain student, a recent victim of crime.

Unlike Millennials, I have a knee-jerk reaction to vigilantism, which I associate not with the cleansing of crime-free streets but with the purging of dissent and opposition by the power-obsessed.

Even the memory-challenged must associate the month of September with the 1972 imposition of martial law.

The Cebu Press Freedom Week and the Cebu Broadcasters’ Month remind Cebuanos how civil liberties were lost and won again at great cost during the dark years of struggling in the iron fist of the Marcos conjugal dictatorship.

Born in 1976, Ian considers himself a “Martial Law baby”. Fond of the Carpenters, the Abba and Sesame Street, this Gen X member was an activist for human rights, then as a UP Cebu undergraduate and now as a lawyer.

Spanning the mid-1960s till the mid-1980s, Generation X witnessed the rise of mass media and the collapse of the Cold War. What prevented Filipino Gen Xers from getting completely lost in the hedonism of the MTV culture—the penetration of music videos shaped the youth culture at the turn of the millennium—was an anachronism called repression.

Born in 1965, I’m in between trains. I qualify for a front seat in Generation X. Yet I think I managed to squeeze in the last trip for the counterculture Hippie Generation of the 1960s, which opposed the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Martial Law.

When our family left for work and school early in the morning, we passed a secluded spot where bodies were often dumped. An industrial zone, our barangay’s warehouses and high walls lack eyes and ears, the perfect witnesses for clean-up teams in summary killings.

Once seen, never forgotten. Hogtied and bloated, a corpse rarely resembles the person it was before torture and decomposition.

Millennials, straddling the 1980s till the 1990s, are also called the Generation Y.

“Why?” is a good lens for scrutinizing Duterte, who will never get pass the throwback of my 41-year-old memories of martial law: “Never again”.


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

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s September 21, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Of gods and aliens

Dear God,

How are you? I marvel at your patience. It is beyond me to speculate why you ever chose us. These days, we seem to be even harder to understand, let alone accept.

Last Sunday, the Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) celebrated its 101st anniversary. Learning from last year’s horrendous traffic choking areas in Manila where the INC gave away food packs, we stayed home.

I’m a Catholic but am apt to forget this when I am stewing inside public transport for hours because authorities would rather sacrifice the general welfare than turn down a request to hold public assembly on a weekday in key flow points by a group that counts 2.25 million members in 104 ecclesiastical districts all over the country.

However, there was no way to avoid the numerous, large newspaper ads placed by politicians over the weekend. By definition, a politician is a creature that will take a selfie with you and hire a team to make it “viral” on social media.

Falling short of this goal, a politician will pose with religious leaders. Or pay for advertisements that congratulate a religious group that practices unity or bloc voting. If I were running for public office, I might also be a little more pleasant to the INC, whose 2.25 million followers believe “working together for one purpose” expresses your will.

An old, cranky reader, I want to see grey columns of text when I flip newspaper pages, not ads that use a whole page or full colors as a social pretext for a political end to curry personal favors with a religious group. Too many adjectives spoil a sentence, Ernest Hemingway said, a lot more elegantly.

And the artwork makes this cross even heavier to bear. Some ads display a collage of Felix Y. Manalo, first INC leader, Eduardo V. Manalo, current INC executive minister, and “Yours Truly” (the politician placing the ad). The Unholy Trinity: Is the religious symbolism supposed to work as a political anointing or an artistic irony?

If the Tolentinos, Estradas and Revillas used their own money, I might just close my eyes and read news features about alien-sightings. But nearly all the ads displayed the official seals of government. Is that right to use thousands of public funds to greet your powerful friends while taxpayers line up for clean water, cheap rice, daily rides, subsidized hospitalization, public toilets, free coffins, and packs of “Lucky Me” noodles and sardine cans given after calamities?

“Hay, Ginoo ko (Oh, my God),” Davao Mayor Rodrigo Duterte was quoted as replying to talks that he will run with Sen. Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. in 2016. OMG, too, I said when I first saw the large billboard showing “Rody” posing beside a motorbike and cautioning Cavite motorists to drive carefully. When Rody showed up everywhere, a billboard saint for safe travel, I close my eyes, infantile avoidance but at least not adding to my considerable transgressions against Christian patience and charity.

I wish I could experience the visions of Jejomar Binay. After giving away rosary bracelets with his name at the back of the cross, Binay told reporters he will win the presidency, relying on “99-percent prayer”. He prays in the morning and in the evening. A mist gathers in front of his eyes when he talks to you. Lord, why is it that when I close my eyes at every politician’s foible, I just see a dark, dark hole?


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s August 2, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”