Awake in the interregnum

I had been puzzling over it for the past few days. That’s why I was extremely glad that my friend and favorite Philippine Daily Inquirer reporter TJ Burgonio did the story on the bastardization of mural of the Neo-Angono Artists Collective commissioned by the National Press Club. It shed light on why the NPC did in what would be the last nail in the coffin on its stature as the “bastion of press freedom.” Of course, as everyone already knows, the NPC has long lost such a stature, if it ever genuinely had one, considering that it was bestowed not by the nature of its creation as a professional body of a basically reactionary press during the 1950s, but by individual officers (such as Satur Ocampo, Antonio Zumel, Tony Nieva) who eschewed the industry’s neutrality formula and committed themselves to journalism for social change during martial law. To put it mildly, the NPC is an elite organization that has little to do with upholding journalists’ welfare, professional standards, and freedom of the press. But why it would defile a piece of art despite the risk akin to altering a copy, was a mystery until it was reported that it was done for Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, who was guest of honor at its unveiling. Of course. I should have known that it was only the queen of censorship who thinks that an artwork is as malleable as the headline of an administration newspaper.

The Arroyo regime brands and kills people it terms as “leftists” all over the country. So I guess the Presidential Security Group was acting in the name of counter-insurgency when it hunted the mural for “leftist” signs and had them painted over—obliterated or maimed. In this sense the artists’ creations are similar to the victims of extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and torture. The “bastardization” of the artwork is horrifying on two levels. First is the act itself, a personal and professional affront to the artists and what they call their intellectual property rights. But because their work is on the overtly social theme of press freedom, its defacement is made more ironic and the affront more public. It is a public affront to see Arroyo admiring a mural on the History of Press Freedom devoid of signs that the press is as under seige today as it was during martial law. That she resisted immortalization of “minor” details that would remind of her own present tyranny—the name of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines on a banner (actively opposed to the killings of journalists under the Arroyo regime), the news of Jonas Burgos’ abduction this year, an editorial of the International Federation of Journalists on the chilling effect of the anti-terrorism law—is a major censorship issue. I imagine that the artists must feel like how journalists who have their stories killed do. Both their creative labors are towards the projection of a certain truth, and denying this truth is not just about denying recognition or respect for their labors, it is about impoverishing public memory.

Yet it must be noted that unlike that of the mass media, the power of a painting nowadays to imprint itself on public memory is highly limited. Physically, the NPC mural is situated at a sad old building hardly anyone but a small mix of journalists, hao-siaos, businessmen, and politicians visit. It speaks not to the masses, although it tries to speak to journalists whose job it is to speak to the masses. Its defilement was meant to satisfy one person and her sycophants. That is perhaps why the NPC officers tried to justify the changes as “minor”. In reality they were trying to downplay the significance of such changes by downplaying the significance of the painting as a whole: exposing it as their private property of select spectators. But the artists, proud of a work that depicts how “press freedom is not only the concern of journalists and writers but of the common people as well,” reproduced it in their website. They know that it carries a message useful to the public in these trying times and which must therefore be popularized.

It is interesting that this popularization that the artists envision took place when the message was destroyed. Or at least on the surface it was destroyed. Because the message was about government censorship and resistance to it—the government censoring this message and the artists resisting it only reinforced it. I guess it was this underlying drama that compelled the PDI to make the story its banner.

Generally speaking, it is ticklish for any news organization to publish stories that would shed bad light on fellow journalists. TJ had asked me, concerned, if I thought that the story was balanced enough (it was). Here the dual tendencies of the mass media emerge. On one hand, you have the NPC becoming complicit in the government’s reactionary moves to tinker with public memory. On the other, you have the PDI exposing this complicity. So what the PSG had claimed they were trying to do—affirming the neutrality of the media by purging both “leftist” and “rightist” elements (although it still evades me why the saloon touch-ups of Randy David and Juan Mercado would make a painting less radical)—is impossible. The press is not and will never be neutral. Although TJ’s story was perfectly fair (it got the side of everyone concerned with the issue), the fact of its writing and landing on the front page was an exercise of a political choice to uphold what shameful industry colleagues preach about but ultimately fail to understand, much less assert: press freedom.

Press freedom, really, is the freedom of journalists and artists to make a choice to either preserve or change the status quo. It is the freedom to be revolutionary like the Katipunan symbol painted on Andres Bonifacio’s arm, or reactionary like the sappy arrow-pierced heart the NPC replaced it with. Historically, the nature of the mass media has been that of the latter. But those with good tastes and good principles know where to stand. That is, like the NPC mural in its original state shows, with the masses.

I came to the protest action on the 35^th anniversary of martial law last September 21 camera-less. My favorite reportage weapon was unwittingly locked inside the office that day. It was just as well. It was kind of fun just being there, observing the conduct of things, not having to be on the lookout for every snap-worthy piece of action. In short, just truly being part of a highly righteous and symbolic act of people’s indignation against the obstinate Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo regime.

Even the most veteran martial law activists who lived through the worst of the Marcos dictatorship agree that there is nothing that happened then that is not being repeated today. Of killings, massacres, disappearances, torture, illegal arrests and detention of ordinary civilians and activists, the Arroyo regime has a mounting toll and openly barbaric generals under its wing to shock the international community. Of harassment and suppression of the legal opposition, it has left the Supreme Court balking and chasing after executive decisions with an increasingly inutile sword called the Philippine Consitution. Of First Family corruption, it has inclined the public to think that convicted plunderer Joseph Estrada is a saint (vis-à-vis Gloria) and Imelda Marcos at least having the wit to appear merely delusional and not totally crass, unlike thug-like Mike. Of illegitimate mandate, well, with the still unraveling saga of the Hello Garci tapes and of the highest election commissioner figuring in a most anomalous million-dollar government contract, it really takes the cake.

That is why none of us who were babies during martial law can say that the horror of that period is past. It is our present, has been for quite a while now. Perhaps, the only difference is that fewer are aware of it as acutely as when the dark curtain then fell so dramatically, with the grim-faced proclamation, the curfew, the media takeover, the mass arrests. Nowadays, the state has learned to finesse its ways. Why arrest a hundred people at the same time when, one by one, they could be silenced forever? Why impose a curfew when you can just unleash soldiers unto communities with orders to be extra active at night? The state has also been aided in a big way by the debilitated functions of the mainstream mass media. Why rob television stations of their franchise when they produce exactly the kind of fluff that distorts, masks, and distracts from the realities at hand?

Of course, many times under the Arroyo regime, journalists act valiantly and are harassed and killed as are activists. Still on the extreme end of the spectrum of tyrannical response to media, a newspaper office was raided last year. And a day before the 35^th anniversary of martial law last week, a film was banned.  

The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board’s X-rating of Rights, a series of public service announcements on the human rights situation, is yet another ghost of the dictatorship come alive. (Read Lisa Ito’s Cut the Censorship, Shatter the Silence and Francis Joseph Cruz’s Censoring the Censors) The MTRCB’s chosen words of justification this time: “Scenes in the film are presented unfairly, one-sided and undermines the faith and confidence [in] the government and duly constituted authorities.” Obviously, not within what the Supreme Court, in Gonzalez vs. Katigbak, defined as limits to the constitutional right to freedom of expression: that censorship is allowable “only under the clearest proof of a clear and present danger of a substantive evil to public morals, public health or any other legitimate public interest.”

Citing such a doctrine is of course unnecessary to ascertain that the MTRCB does not have at heart the public interest, but that of the ruling regime which Rights—in several brilliant and thought-provoking ways— exposes and opposes. It is only necessary to cite as a challenge to anyone who is saddened, as I am, that the protesters last September 21 was a fiery crowd of thousands but was not big enough to barrel their way through a police barricade and into Mendiola. To anyone who wishes that more would see the iron fist clenched around the necks of their countrymen, feel the one constricting their own, and rage like the first quarter stormers of old.

For people to snap out of this craftily manufactured 21^st century stupor, we would need films and all kinds of creative and grassroots-based endeavour with the sole purpose of undermining “faith and confidence in the government and duly constituted authorities.” Because the Arroyo regime does not have nor deserve the faith and confidence of a people ruled through treachery and fascism. Precisely, the challenge is to become, as best as one can, a “clear and present danger” to a dictatorship that only defiance and uprising can stop from killing, from plundering, from basically making a nation relive martial law, the kind more terrible because undeclared.