Revolutionary Cheek

Businessday Magazine 20 February 1987

When the revolution that freaked Ferdinand out was raging, what struck and frustrated me most was the inadequacy, the sketchiness, the falseness even, of information being churned out at the time. Things were happening so fast – as though life were on fast-forward mode – it was humanly and technologically impossible for print and broadcast media to cover and report it all.

Daily newspapers rendered nothing but snippets, fragments, slices of the revolution, mostly from and about the rebels and barricaders in and around Camps Crame and Aguinaldo. The few items there were about the Marcoses and Vers were very thin, mostly official press releases, or based on Marcos’s televised press conferences which we’d already seen but told us next to nothing about goings-on behind the scenes. Worse, different reports, sometimes within the same newspaper, would provide different data on the same events. After the revolution the papers were, of course, awash with the affair.There were personality profiles, and the first-person accounts; the social commentaries, political analyses and opinion pieces, all attempting to digest the reality of the people power phenomenon and its national and global implications; materials on the fallen regime and its greed, on the new leadership and its chosen few; and plenty more about a presidential daughter and her showbiz aspirations, on ex-detainees and torture, on Reformists and a snake called Tiffany, among other trivia.

Some yielded heretofore unpublished information about the four days, but, again, these were fragmented and had to be carefully sifted from what were often rather emotional renditions of events. Like the news reports during the revolt, these tended to neglect journalistic details like when, where, who, why, how, etc.

What I was looking for – some chronological retelling of the four days, blow-by-blow and event-by-event, as the revolution unfolded not just in the Enrile-Ramos camps and the people’s barricades but also in Malacañang Palace, the White House, the US Embassy, Clark Air Base, the Archbishop’s Palace, the contemplative nuns’ convents, and wherever else something was happening – I didn’t find.

Both local and foreign weekly magazines tried, but their accounts were only slightly more enlightening and some were just as uninformed or misinformed as accounts published earlier.

By this time I was deep into note-taking, combing throughevery newspaper and magazine that came my way, sifting, lifting historical from hysterical data, with an eye towards pieceing these into a chronology that would reflect the multi-events unfolding parallel-ly / synchronously on different fronts throughout the four days. A tedious task. Newswriters tended not to indicate what time, clock-wise, things happened or were observed to happen. It isn’t clear, for instance, what time Cardinal Sin made his first call to the public over Radio Veritas. I didn’t know where to place it – before Butz Aquino’s first call or after. Around nine o’clock, said several accounts. After Butz’s call, said another. Butz called after ten, said one. The Cardinal called late in the night, said yet another.

I was constantly rearrranging and refining my sequence of events. Especially as I began taking in new data from the snap books. I’d find that I had placed one event too early, another too late; or mistaken three Marcos presscons for one – thanks to a reporter who didn’t bother to specify so, just summarized / lumped together pronouncements from three consecutive presscons into a report on the latest from Marcos.

Not that the snap books were that much more particular about times and spaces. Only books do have more pages, and so contain more details. But the rush to cater to a captive world market saw writers, editors, publishers rehasing for the books the same angles already extensively covered by dailies and weeklies. There was no time to backtrack and double-check, to confirm what what was generally assumed, much less to unearth something new. The race was on.

People Power by Patricio R. Mamot was the first substantial effort to hit the stands (a month or so after the revolution). In seven chapters – The People Power Phenomenon, Prayer Power, Enrile and Ramos, The Reform AFP Movement, The Media Blitz, Cebu Calling, and Malacañang – Mamot recounts the events of the four days through a stream of quotes from both published and unpublished reports. Inevitably, the chronologies overlap. Too, Mamot’s narrative reeks of the euphoria and ecstasy that overwhelmed print media in the wake of Marcos’s departure. Mushy going.

Quijano de Manila’s Quarter of the Tiger Moon is much breezier reading,naturally. Taking the February event a day at a time, Nick Joaquin renders “a panoramic view that shifts from palace to street corner, and from ministry office to barricade,” daring, as he goes, to synthesize the whole with the nooning tiger moon.

People Power edited by Monina Allarey-Mercado, is a compilation of first-person accounts, again, still, by participants partial to Cory and the Reformists. There is a loose chronology, arranged by the day if not strictly by the time of day. Eyewitnesses wax euphoric, rhapsodize, on the EDSA miracle. State of the heart. Praise the Lord.

And then came Breakaway, Cecilio T. Arillo’s inside story. It recounts the events of the four days from the point of view of the military camps and installations and fronts and in the Malacañang complex. A new angle. With close-ups of loyalists-turned-rebels (though still at arm’s length of the Marcoses and Vers). And with a different version of a certain sequence of events. Fascinating, if grating, reading. But then Arillo is not the storyteller De Manila is.

In October, Veritas Extras I and II hit the streets a week apart. “Coup!” by Alfred McCoy, Marian Wilkinson, and Gwen Robinson confirmed Breakaway’s scenarios (differences in time data notwithstanding) though focused on the Reformist plot, American intervention, and how Marcos “actually ordered his tanks to fire.” Sensational rather than thorough. But like Breakaway, a mine of military info. Rounded my chronology considerably. Enough to say enough. To only skim through other books, just to make certain I hadn’t missed a rare perspective.

Otherwise it made sense to dare declare the above-reviewed publications representative of literature issued February 1986 through February 1987. Then to dare say that my chronology tells a more complete story than any other. And finally to conclude that the whole story has yet to be told.

Where goes the revolution?

This one I wrote very soon after the four day revolt, but it was rejected by the Manila Chronicle, I figured because the editor was still in euphoria-heights, but could be also because I ended with Halley’s Comet ;-)

Early March 1986. I’m still reeling from the revolution. A mind-boggling soul-stirring manifestation of the higher powers of a praying people.

Radio Veritas was the medium of the revolution. And right now we could all do with more of the kind of broadcasting – people-oriented, bilingual with a highly Tagalog bias, intelligent, consistent, Christian, and caring – that RV gave us those 17 days from the 7th to the 23rd of February.

It was a relief when, on the 24th, TV Channel 4’s first free broadcast was launched by, among others, RV’s Orly Punzalan and Fr. Efren Dato. It felt right. I thought Veritas was back and, hallelujah, on TV, too. What a break. What magical days!

But unpredictable, full of twists and turns. As it turns out, the liberated TV station does not have the facilities and field equipment required for on-the-spot news reporting. Only a lot of telephones through which flood in, naturally, calls from the people with all sorts of questions, suggestions, reactions, messages, appeals, donations, updates and the like, a la Radio Veritas. Alas, Orly et al have long been taken over by other volunteer anchorpeople, mostly amateurs, mostly TV and movie and recording pop stars, na magagaling lang kumita pero wala namang alam, mostly waxing euphoric about people power, apparently impelled by a great need to display, assert, their participation and triumph (yes, Behn, opportunists all), when not trying (very hard) to answer / respond to gut questions from the public – e.g., how does one handle / sublimate ill feelings toward sipsips and balimbings? if this is the people’s television, why are the people having such a hard time getting in, getting heard, getting answers to their questions? – and failing miserably.

Where’s the Church? Whereare the nuns and priests and lay apostles? Why have they stopped talking to / communicating with the people? Have they been stopped? By whom? Can it be that so soon the Church has resumed a non-partisan stance? Back to the traditional separation of Church and State?

But what about the revolution that’s still going on in the minds and hearts of Christian Filipinos, affecting his interpersonal relationships, affirming some values but overturning others? It’s a second phase that’s begging for guidance, for guidelines, temporal and spiritual. Perhaps the Church can be persuaded to resume its revolutionary posture, demand a chunk of TV time, for the good of the Whole? Or have we learned nothing (!) from the Radio Veritas experience.

Whose idea was it anyway to call in commercial performers to man the mics? Why not the masscom specialists and their professors, why not the political scientists, the community elders, the people experts, particularly the Tagalog-speaking ones? Anong katutturan ng salita kung iilan ang nakakaunawa? Paano naman ang karamihan? Sadyang sawing-palad na lamang?

For the new TV 4, this rebirth should not be just a matter of straightening out the station’s ownership and getting on with production and programming. The people’s television can become more than just another propaganda machine, can set new / higher standards for Pinoy television arts, long rendered mediocre by a profit-oriented anti-people system. A microcosm of the macrocosm. (The part is also a Whole, and reflects the patterns of larger Wholes.)

Of course it is no coincidence that the upheaval is occurring just when Halley’s Comet is a-visiting. Yes, HC is still around, just dropped out of sight in January when its orbit took it behind the sun (from earth’s point of view). It’ll be back within sight of telescopes soon, within the next two weeks, and will remain in sight as it gets closest to earth sometime in April. Which augurs many more twists and turns, ready or not.

As it hurtles through our solar system in pursuit of a 76-year orbit, Halley’s Comet is wreaking cosmic havoc, disturbing celestial patterns, invading and altering force fields, including that of planet earth’s (surely we are experiencing a peak in the frequency of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, unexplained collisions and explosions such as the Challenger, and extreme highs and lows in temperatures) and her creatures’ physiology, chemistry, life energies, and (in the case of humans) psyches.

Individually and collectively, we are being compelled to make changes, to break out of patterns, to strike out on new roads toward a more humane social order. Let’s not waste these precious moments. Let’s make the most of this heaven-sent point / parentheses in time and space that has so far proven pregnant with potential. Let’s get our act together as a people. Differences are reconcile-able on a collective level of thought, where the good of the Whole has primacy over the good of the few.

Verily, the Age of Aquarius is here. Seeds sown now will bear revolutionary fruit. Said Carl Jung, “Whatever is born or done this moment of time, has the qualities of this moment of time.”

In the name of Christmas

Parade / Notes of a TV Junkie / 15 Dec 1982

Christmas is here. There’s no denying the cool evenings and chilly dawns. There’s no missing the storewindows decked out in buntings of red & green & gold, beckoning, inviting, warm and welcoming and enticing, reminding us all, lest we forget, that the holiday season looms straight ahead and it’s time to make Christmas lists, to shop, to be generous, to give in a spirit of love and goodwill.

So, too, with television. Can-afford sponsors have momentarily replaced their regular ads with specially-made Christmas commercials, the better for us to see (in living color yet) and hear about the wondrous joys that are ours for the taking (in exchange for money, of course). The message is clear. Indulge, indulge, this the season to be merry.

I like to think that I’m impervious to it all, that I can watch and not be swept up by the merciless onslaught on the human, the acquisitive, the greedy in me. But it’s a difficult battle. My own children are not in my camp. The commercials that offend me because they tease my children with a cornucopia of material goodies that they don’t really need are the very same commercials that they make abang for, the ones they watch with eyes popping, hearts pumping with excitement, hands craving to touch, to hold, to play. No more shifting to other channels during commercials. At least not where I watch TV, where child power equals, sometimes supersedes, parent power.

Thanks to television commercials, it’s getting harder and harder for parents of normal, growing, impressionable children to explain about values and priorities. Parents are pulled this way and that. What to do? Indulge them, given them their Lego sets and Barbie dolls and Twin Stars and Mighty Kids lest they grow up anxious and envious and frustrated? Or do we give them more credit than that, appeal to their minds, help them understand the difference between essentials and junk, point out the alternative joys that can be derived from other less shiny, less obvious objects?

A balance is difficult to reach, much more to maintain. We end up buying them a sample of everything that our middle-class means can manage and yet I always feel that it’s still too much, they cost too much, we waste hard-earned money on plastic toys that crack, break, splinter, hurt, on not-for-cuddling dolls that cost a small fortune to clothe, house, make happy. Where’s my sense of values? Going, going, gone.

Were I a witch with a magic wand, I’d wave the trusty thing and in a flash commercials would disintegrate and forever be gone. But I don’t have a magic wand so it’s back to the salt mines or I might not survive Christmas. Television’s got me by my tail.

What’s in a Special?

Observer, Sunday Magazine of Times Journal 14 February 1982

The drumbeating that heralded Kuh Ledesma’s special Ako ay Pilipino was extraordinary. Press releases promised a musical docu on Philippine culture, to be aired at least once by every television network within a span of four consecutive weekdays, no less. The timing wasn’t bad either: right smack in the midst of the first Manila International Film Fest. The unprecedentedness of the entire affair was delightfully intriguing. It better be good, I thought.

Aside. Daily and weekly television shows, whether foreign or local, drama or comedy, variety or musical, tend to slip into unremarkable ruts. The tedium of producing one show after another, day after day or week after week, on limited budgets and inhumanly unvarying timetables cannot but affect the quality of the finished product.

A TV special, on the other hand, is always worth catching. Conceived on a grand scale, production funds allow for toprate talents, costumes, props, technical crew and equipment, unlimited film footage, travel and location-shooting expenses, etcetera. Seeking to impart a special message or, at the very least, to sell some superstar to faceless masses, the magic of television is invoked and placed in the hands of artists in film.

There is no excuse for slipshod work in the making of a TV special. Time to think, to plan, to research, to dream, to cover alternative angles, to re-shoot imperfect sequences, and to edit taped material into a creative and cohesive whole – all thisis given. End of aside.

Kudos to Kuh

As a musical, Ako ay Pilipino was special. Witch-woman Kuh Ledesma was an excellent performer. Interpreting Pilipino songs of love and pride and life and roots, her voice rang clear and true, never wavering though crooning now, belting anon, sighing, seducing, demanding, asserting, expressing. The lipsynching was so well done (9 on a 10-scale, I’d say), it was easy to pretend she was singing live.

Ledesma’s portrayal of a native Filipina departed from the extravagantly emotional and gestural. Clad in the exotic raiments of a brown goddess, the angular frame moved simply, sparingly, sometimes striking unlikely yet strangely dramatic stances with an aloof intensity. A mere wrinkle of dark brows over black sparkling eyes was all it took to convey a whole gamut of emotions and passions. Projecting powerfully, she sustained moods with enviable control and sensitivity.

Cameras captured her from every angle, zooming in, zooming out, encircling and embracing, caressing like a lover. It was a visual experience seeing the brown high-boned face close up, catching the play of light on its shadows, watching her change into maiden, princess, nymph, witch in the wink of an eye. Viewers were enthralled, not so much by the music, as by the audio-visual apparition of Ledesma at her craft.

Whither went Philppine culture?

The repertoire consisted of original Pilipino compositions by Canseco, Faustman, Labrador, Francia, Lumbera, Cayabyab and Pedero. Beautiful music, heart-gripping lyrics: some movie themes (like Dito Ba), some truly ethnic (theme from Mahal), some popular ones re-arranged to a slower beat (Kayganda ng Ating Musika) – all in all a get-away from the danceable and the commercial.

Edited into musical gaps were a series of film clips: one of a white anthropologist talking of the nose flute of mountain tribes; two of a humanities professor on the Filipino lowlander’s romantic temperament and music; two of another anthropologist on the social systems of the Palawan minorities; one of Lucrecia Kasilag showing off primitive courtship instruments; and one of a Tiboli anthropologist on the Tibolis.

That the film clips had interesting bits of cultural information to offer, and that Kasilag was a swinging surprise at the eight gongs are neither here nor there. What struck the viewer halfway through the hour was the apparent unrelatedness of the documentary to the musical portion.

What did Ledesma’s songs have to do with the Palawan minorities and the Tibolis? Which of the songs she sang epitomized the lowlander’s amorous style? There was simply no script to speak of, no attempt made to string the separate parts towards some semblance of a theme or message. It was like watching two different shows, one a musical and one a docu of sorts, that got edited into each other by mistake.

Yet, had the docu portion been handled well, Ako… might not have needed a script at all. Had the focus of documentation been the music of the cultural minorities rather than a hodge-podge of lifestyles and rituals, then a theme might have emerged, unbidden. Or, what if Ledesma had taken a more active role in the documenting task? She had ample chance to interview and jam with the natives in whose costumes she was garbed, on whose tribal grounds she treaded, but she held apart instead. As if her physical presence were sufficient and only for the sake of ambience anyway.

A pity. All that dazzle was for naught. Ako… left the viewer feeling empty and wasted. Nothing learned. Nothing gained.