Year of the pig January 2, 2007

OVER the weekend i got flooded with text and calls from my lawyer friends offering me their services pro bono and prodigally should I need them in my "case." The reason for this was an item that appeared on page 3 of the Inquirer on Friday. It was titled "Media groups sue Mike Arroyo over libel suits."

The third paragraph read: "The class suit argues that the libel suits have not only caused the respondents sleepless nights; they also have a chilling effect on press freedom," said the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines, one of the groups that instigated the suit. Others involved are the Center for Freedom and Responsibility and the Daily Tribune, as well as 36 print journalists, including Philippine Daily Inquirer columnists Ramon Tulfo and Conrado de Quiros."

That is quite misleading, and has misled my friends into thinking I am one of the journalists the First Gentleman--a humongous insult to "first," "gentle" and "man"--has filed libel suits against. I am not, to my great dismay. I did say in a column some time ago that I felt discriminated against, being left out of the illustrious group of people who have earned the fellow's ire. There are now a whopping 43 of them, including my good friends Billy Esposo, Marites Vitug and Ellen Tordesillas.

Why they have not included me in the list, well, I understand that the First Gentleman's lawyer told a talk show on TV--friends told me about it--that in my case the things I have been saying are well within the law! I had a good laugh over that at the expense of my friends--who seemed to take a rather violent exception to the thought.

I can only thank my lawyer-friends for their gesture (and non-lawyer-friends for their expressions of sympathy and solidarity) and I beg them to stick around, I may yet have need to impose on them in the future.

For those who do not know it yet, and by way of background, over the past months Mike Arroyo has been filing libel charges against journalists for calling him various things, from being arrogant to being a crook. That has no precedent in history. I do not recall any presidential spouse--or mistress--filing a libel case against these many journalists, if at all. Well, now Arroyo's victims are fighting back. Last Friday, with the aid of lawyer Harry Roque, they filed a countersuit against Arroyo citing abuse of power.

I am, of course, all for it and have been helping out in it. I am one of the endorsers of the class suit, which was probably what caused the confusion. From where I stand though, I don't know why Arroyo shouldn't just be charged with abuse of the English language, if not of sanity. What does libel mean but that one is lying? What does to charge people with libel mean but to say that they are liars? Mike Arroyo calling other people liars? That isn't just the pot calling the kettle black, that is the vulture calling the eagle coward. Never mind if the journalists were right or wrong to call Arroyo a crook, mind only if he or his wife and their friends have any capacity to tell truth from lie.

You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who vowed solemnly she would not run again but did. You want to charge someone with lying, charge the person who said she welcomed an impeachment trial to prove her innocence but paid off the "tongressmen" to kill the impeachment bids. Indeed, you want to charge someone with lying, charge that father of all liars who said he was here all the time; it was just that people, including the Foreign Affairs Department and the Singapore Immigration, who swore he had fled abroad; and that the entire opposition that was hunting him down to answer for his crime could not see where he was.

Arroyo's lawyers say he has every right to file libel charges against people who criticize him because he is not a public official, he is a private citizen. What can I say? I rest my case about their ability to tell truth from lie. No, I rest my case about their ability to tell the truth.

The easiest refutation of that is what he and his wife did at the height of the "Hello Garci" scandal in 2005. If Arroyo was just a private citizen whose existence had nothing to do with government, why did he go on "voluntary exile" after being accused of influence-peddling and receiving kickbacks from an illegal numbers racket, presumably so that his wife could "go on with her job?" If he was just a private citizen whose prodigious weight weighed little on government, why did GMA announce his departure in a major speech before businessmen, claiming she was making a terrible "sacrifice" by letting him go? That was an hour before Susan Roces was to appear at Club Filipino, and GMA's bad acting so incensed Roces she unloaded that "I looked you in the eye and saw no contrition there" tirade at her. Of course, sending the First Gentleman--that phrase really burns the tongue--to San Francisco was as much a punishment for him as forcing Dracula to drink blood, but that is another story.

The NUJP and the filers of the class suit themselves have a point when they say Arroyo's libel suits against journalists screw press freedom. By themselves, those suits already constitute a threat to it. But taken in conjunction with the unrelenting decimation of journalists in the provinces, they are an effort to scuttle that freedom entirely. Those are two sides of the same coin: The killing of critics outside of Metro Manila and the muzzling of critics inside it. It means to do to the media what EO 464 did to public officials, which is to make them see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

This year may be the year of the pig, but we would do very well to see that the swine do not prosper.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=41199

Stamped January 1, 2007

BRITAIN HAS PRETTY MUCH BESTOWED upon them all the honors any Brit can get in a lifetime, including making them knights of the realm. They are John, Paul, George and Ringo, otherwise known as the Beatles. They do not require family names, the first names are enough to identify them. Now Britain has decided to give them the ultimate honor—in the case of two of them, John and George, past their lifetimes. That is to make them postage stamps.

The stamps feature covers of Beatles albums in the original vinyl in which they came out. They are irregularly shaped, jagged at the edges, the picture at front lying on stacks of other Beatles albums. The stamps, says the Royal Mail, mean to “celebrate the Beatles’ extraordinary cultural contribution to Britain.”

I couldn’t be happier. Though it’s not without irony that the Beatles have become an official feature of British post at a time when fewer and fewer people are using paper-based mail, or “snail mail.” I’ve always associated the Beatles with the experimental and cutting edge, blazing paths and leading the way. But no matter, it is still a huge honor.

But the Beatles’ cultural contributions go way beyond the isles off Calais to extend far across the seas. I myself grew up on the Beatles. The ’60s when the Beatles exploded into the scene, musical and otherwise, were my elementary (Grades 2 to 6), high school and college years (1st and 2nd). Which is to say that they were around pretty much throughout my school life. They were companion, comfort, and guide. In quite a long voyage of discovery that began with the innocent and exuberant “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah,” and ended with the bittersweet and emotionally expansive “Let It Be.”

I’ve since listened to other things. I’ve listened to (and loved) all kinds of music, from opera to rock (and its hybrid rock opera), from jazz to New Age, from standards to sub-standards. I’ve even listened intently to punk, particularly when my kid took to it at one point in his high school life: We used to go to Claro M. Recto, which is punk heaven, a particular enclave there shaped like a “U” selling everything from T-shirts of the Sex Pistols et al. to various punk paraphernalia. Hell, I’ve even listened to techno and “emo.” I can’t imagine a world without music—I’ve always thought Herbert Von Karajan’s version of Beethoven’s Ninth was as near to heaven as you could get on earth. A world without music is the end of all life, at least as I know it.

But the Beatles will always have a special place in my heart.

That the British Royal Mail has turned the Beatles into postage stamps is well past due. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Jamaica has already done that to Bob Marley. The honor is more than richly earned in the Beatles’ case. I don’t know of any group, nearly five decades removed, that still sounds as contemporary today as they did during their time. That is the greatest honor that can be bestowed upon anyone; more than medals, or knighthood, or gracing the mail, that one is listened to across generations apart from across borders, across time apart from across space. I’ve never ceased to be amazed that the crowd that squeezes itself into 70s Bistro during its Beatles nights is made up largely of the 20s and below and not my generation.

When I was growing up in the ’60s, the songs of Frank Sinatra, or heaven forbid those of Rosemary Clooney et al., did not have that kind of effect on us. Yet they were only two or three decades removed from us. For all practical purposes, they might as well have been a century so. The Beatles are five generations removed from this one, yet my own kids and their friends know the Beatles songs as well as I. Time Magazine’s panel of judges was right to pick Lennon-McCartney as the most influential songwriters of the 20th century, besting even Cole Porter and the Gershwin brothers.

There’s even a new Beatles album in the market, “Love,” which consists of Beatles songs arranged by George Martin originally for the legendary Cirque du Soleil. Martin, of course, is the “fifth” Beatle, the fellow who made the orchestral arrangements on the Beatles’ songs and steered Paul McCartney into the classical path. (Lennon didn’t like straying too far from his rock-and-roll roots, and said so.) “Love” has had mixed reviews. I personally found some of the (re)arrangements glorious, but unless you’re a Beatles fan, I don’t know that you’ll find much that’s new in it. But long after they broke up 35 years ago, the Beatles continue to make (musical) waves.

From where I stand (with much weaker knees) though, their songs have taken on added meanings, some of them as wryly ironic as their own humor. Last year, I wanted to write about Paul McCartney turning 64 (June 18), but I got waylaid by one thing and another. McCartney, of course, wrote “When I’m 64,” which came out in “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in 1967. He was a young man then, pledging eternal love to a loved one, imagining how cozy things would be when they got to be that age. One month before McCartney got to be 64, he separated from Heather Mills, and is currently locked in bitter divorce proceedings with her. Alas, life doesn’t always imitate art. It did offer me whole new vistas from which to view the innocence of my youth and the guilt of my age.

Quite incidentally, I wonder what kind of surprises life will spring on Paul Simon on Oct. 13, 2011. By then, he will turn 70. I still remember his lines in “Old Friends” (from the 1968 album “Bookends”): “Old friends, sat on the park bench like bookends … How terribly strange to be 70 ….” But that’s another story.

Kind of floods you with memories. Kind of makes you feel old and young at the same time.

Happy New Year, everyone.

http://opinion.inquirer.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=41067