Shared Crucible
Hanging over a rocky cliff, left hand clasping a gaunt twig jutting out of slightly loose soil, a 350-foot drop staring at me from underneath my feet.
Did I mention the smiling jagged rocks below and a male Sydney funnel-web spider, the Atrax robustus, the world’s most venomous arachnid, crawling up my left hand, itching for a bite?
That’s how I felt after I was served my retrenchment papers on the morning of the last day of June 2020. It felt like a bullet had struck me from the back, coming from a gun I hardly noticed was there until, after a three-month-long silence from Olympus, someone finally pulled the trigger.
My mind rushed to whatever options are left for me to take. At 57, going back to daily newspapers is out of the question. I’m not as physically capable of handling the daily grind as I was 10 or 20 years ago.
A greater part of my journalism was spent not in the fields of conflict coverage or investigative field work but in peace initiatives wrought by warring subjects and their verbs, the unflinching search for context to complete a reporter’s story while trying to save dangling modifiers from being choked to death.
I was editor. Language and logic, context and ideas, served as battlefields for my failures and humble conquests.
Broadcast has never been in my list of possible employment for one simple reason: Writers write. I find talking a chore.
I’ve had my share of public relations work during the early years of my writing career. I was, in fact, one of the few who were given fancy titles: Corporate Communications Strategist, one topped by a five-figure monthly salary, a company-issued car, driver and free gas. Not bad for a fumbling space cadet like me back then.
Perhaps, going back to it may not be so bad as it pays triple the crumbs that regularly fall off the journalism table. Unfortunately, though, the latest word is that the Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on several industries including this one, or so I was told. But I know PR to be resilient. My only reservation is that the industry may have evolved by now into something I am barely familiar with. I could be biting off more than I could chew.
I’m no stranger to being a ghostwriter, too. My early career was such a hodgepodge of writing assignments from God-knows-who-and-what that I practically wrote everything from someone’s weekly column to the occasional obituary. The latter was easier said than done since it’s not advisable, even professionally, to speak ill of the dead and get paid for it.
Shortly after leaving college as a fresh undergrad, I tried sales, particularly encyclopedias. After 365 days, I quit because I hardly sold a darn page. While thinking of potential customers, I ended up reading more than half of Britannica’s Great Books of the Western World. I gave it all up after devouring Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto or was it Das Kapital? Can’t recall.
So, what’s a boomer, three years shy of being a senior citizen, wracked with arthritis and pain the likes of which could kill a brontosaurus, to do with life after the newsroom? Best-case scenario is to be a columnist for any newspaper of worth. After nine books, I think I can crank up 800–1,200 words thrice a week, enough to stave off any possibility of ending up living in the streets.
Worst-case scenario could be to turn to a life of crime. Quite the practical choice in this day and age of tokhang, if you ask me. Kill for pay if not for sport. But since I am always caught with my face buried in a book when I’m not writing, I might not like the prospect of seeing someone assassinated using a hardbound, leather-wrapped Marquis de Sade’s One Hundred Twenty Days of Sodom, or Jean-Paul Sarte’s Being and Nothingness. I love my books with a vengeance. I don’t want them dog-eared when taken as evidence. Makes me angry. And they wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.
Seriously now, imagine 11,000 employees of the biggest network cut down by Congress’ decision to nip ABS-CBN in the bud. That’s 11,000 on top of the 7.3 million (a rather conservative estimate by the Philippine Statistics Authority) eased out of employment because of Covid-19.
Where will they go from here?
While I share the same crucible with them, their situation is far more debilitating than mine. Debilitating in the sense that only the congressmen and congresswomen who voted against the network wanted it closed, not the people and regions they represent.
Based on an Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey, three out of four Filipinos or 75% are in favor of renewing ABS-CBN’s franchise. In another report, the SWS said, “Results of a Social Weather Stations (SWS) survey released Saturday show that 56 percent of Filipinos said the decision of the House committee on legislative franchises to disapprove a fresh 25-year franchise for ABS-CBN is an attack against press freedom.”
To add to the growing number of proofs, the Reuters Institute Survey says 9 out of 10 Filipinos value independent journalism.
All this invalidates Palace spokesperson Harry Roque’s claim that it is the decision of Filipinos to shutdown the country’s biggest entertainment and news network.
To me, the closure of ABS-CBN is not only an exercise of power in extremis by the committee’s Technical Working Group, it is a clear betrayal of their role as representatives of the people.
From the looks of it, they acted as though they were a lynch mob or a syndicate (and not as elected representatives) for the purpose of satisfying the will of the President and not the will of the people. Rep. Rodante Marcoleta himself admitted that the decision is “the will of Congress”.
By doing so, they drew the line between us and them, fully disassociating themselves from their constituents.
If that doesn’t bother you, you might want to have your blood pressure checked. You may have already flat-lined somewhere between ECQ and GCQ.
Just to emphasize the point of their disassociation, here’s what Inquirer columnist Randy David has to say:
At one point, a congressman, addressing the network’s officials, asked in a pained tone: Why are politicians, especially congressmen, always depicted as villains in your sitcoms? I would have replied: If politicians learned to behave like statesmen, fiction would cease portraying them as society’s villains.
With Covid-19 on the one side, a vindictive, largely good-for-nothing government on the other, to say little of a growing economic recession, what are we to do with our lives?
I feel deeply and passionately for the 11,000 who lost their jobs due to the closure of ABS-CBN. I am one with them in the search for alternative employment now that we’re all anxious about our family’s future. It’s too early to tell how this new expedition into the unknown will pan out. The road is dark, our options well-nigh thin, if not nil.
I am, however, certain of one thing: that each day comes with the hope of finding something new, something we can trust to sustain us. And while that faint yet nagging sense of smug betrayal may not leave me for the time being, having been shot at the back, I’m sure one day it will.
On that day, history will have its last word.
