“Kaibigang Selo: Ang may taglay nitong sulat ay isang lihim na kapatid natin sa Rd. L. M. no. 2 ang taas. Walang sukat at dapat maka-alam na siya’y kapatid kundi ikaw lamang at ako.” Thus Rizal, conspiratorially, to Marcelo del Pilar, on November 4, 1889.

Most of Rizal’s letters were meant to be read in company, to be passed from hand to hand, to be copied and circulated (indeed, copies of some of his letters were found by the raiding party that broke into the warehouse where Andres Bonifacio was employed, and were used as evidence in his trial for treason). A few, like this letter from Paris, were meant to be confidential, and a hundred and twenty years after it was written we can still easily intuit why.

“Friend Selo: The bearer of this letter is a secret brother of ours in Rd. L. M., of the second degree. No one should know he’s a brother but you and me.”

The secret brother in Freemasonry whom Rizal recommended to Del Pilar’s good graces was a Filipino priest, “most likely Father Jose Chanco” (in the considered view of eminent historian John Schumacher SJ). Chanco needed the help of Del Pilar and Julio Llorente, whose Masonic friends of similarly high rank were well placed in Spanish officialdom. “Kaya nga,” Rizal wrote, “alinsunod sa pangako niya sa akin na tayo’y tutulungan niyang lihim, sa lahat ng makakaya, iniaalay ko naman sa kaniya ang ating tulong—That is why, following his promise to me that he will help us secretly, to the utmost, I am offering him our help.”

It was not often that Rizal, whose 114th death anniversary we remember this week, wrote in muffled tones, in cloak-and-dagger (or overcoat-and-fog) fashion. His correspondence with Antonio Luna, plus a few other fellow separatists, had some of the same quality. But that is another matter, for another day. For the moment I only wish to point to Rizal’s use of Tagalog.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Rizal did not write only in Spanish. He wrote a few pieces in English (published in England and Hong Kong) and—I did not realize this until a couple of years ago, and I suspect many other Filipinos suffer from the same symptom of miseducation—he wrote a considerable amount in Tagalog.

Some scholars and historians have remarked on Rizal’s return to Tagalog, but mostly in passing. “To emphasize the role of language in this effort at solidarity and unity, he began to write his colleagues in Tagalog,” Jovita Ventura Castro wrote in her introduction to “The Revolution,” her faithful translation of the “Fili”—and then left it at that. The most programmatic of Rizal’s biographers, Gregorio Zaide, reserves only four paragraphs to Rizal’s Tagalog writing, combining it with his advocacy of a new orthography. “In spite of his European education and his knowledge of foreign languages, Rizal loved his own native language,” Zaide’s first paragraph began.

Perhaps only author and academic Nilo S. Ocampo has studied Rizal’s use of Tagalog in real depth and consuming detail. His “May Gawa na Kaming Natapus Dini: Si Rizal at ang Wikang Tagalog” is bracing, a necessary corrective. The title is borrowed from Rizal’s last (extant) letter to Mariano Ponce, written in his last month in Hong Kong while preparing to return to the Philippines; cast entirely in Tagalog, the letter expresses Rizal’s appreciation for Ponce’s loyalty and then, characteristically, proposes a project: for Ponce to return to the Philippines with a printing press. “May gawa na kaming natapus dini,” Rizal adds—a resonant line that can be rendered either as “We’ve completed some work here” or “We have some completed work here.”

In fact, Rizal never stopped writing in Tagalog; it was the language he used in writing many of his letters to his sisters, and he was always ready to translate works he thought useful back home: Schiller’s “Wilhelm Tell,” Hans Christian Andersen’s tales, even (when he was in Hong Kong) “The Rights of Man” as proclaimed by the French Constitutional Assembly in 1789. He also attempted several times to begin a third novel, in Tagalog.

All together, and as Ocampo proves, Rizal’s Tagalog writings constitute a substantial body of work.

But it was in his correspondence with Del Pilar and Ponce, the engines of the Propaganda, that Rizal’s turn to Tagalog is most telling, and most relevant to us. Ocampo tallied 28 Tagalog letters exchanged by the three Propagandists, including two partially written in the language.

But my own research finds that, of the surviving letters, there are 47 entirely in Tagalog (including seven between Del Pilar and Ponce). And there are five more partially written in the language. The Tagalog letters were exchanged between July 7, 1888 (when Rizal was newly settled in London) and June 15, 1892 (when Rizal was preparing to depart Hong Kong for Manila). The first was a mere postcard from Rizal to Ponce; the last asked Ponce to consider going into the printing business.

I expected to trace the start of this turn to mid-February 1889, when Del Pilar asked Rizal to write a letter of encouragement in Tagalog to the women of Malolos who had bravely petitioned for the privilege to be taught Spanish. But in fact the Tagalog writing started before that, and then petered out after. It surged again, and then dissipated. And then it gathered up again, only to dissolve once more in the sea of Spanish the propagandists swam in. It came and went in waves.

What prompted the repeated turn and return to Tagalog writing?

To be concluded

Google Books is controversial for several reasons; in this ambitious corporate attempt to digitize as many books as possible, copyright and monopoly issues may only be the most vexing. These and other issues are contentious even though, or especially because, casual reader and scholarly researcher alike already enjoy the benefits of digitized books directly.

Many of the books are available only in Preview format, but even the limits of this format can be liberating: some books offer a few pages (so we can read Fr. Miguel Bernad on “The Nature of Rizal’s Farewell Poem”); others several dozens, perhaps even a couple of hundreds (such is the case, for instance, of the massive and minutely detailed Indonesian-English dictionary by Alan M. Stevens and A. Ed.
Schmidgall-Tellings).

Last week, Google announced one more benefit—and it is staggering. In a word, “computational analysis” of the millions of books already digitized is now possible. In the first version of Google’s N-gram viewer (n-gram means a “string of characters uninterrupted by a space”), we can “search” over 500 billion words contained in over 5 million books (to be exact: 5,195,769), “containing ˜4 percent of all books ever published.” What does this all mean? It means we can “observe cultural trends and subject them to quantitative investigation.” (All the quotes are from the paper published last week in Science magazine, co-written by 13 authors and “The Google Books Team.”)

That sounds forbidding, but in fact the viewer was designed to be fun, informative and ridiculously easy to use.

For instance: Searching the 361 billion words available in the English corpus (the largest of seven language corpora, and the most reliable) for mentions of Jose Rizal, Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo in the 110 years between 1896 and 2006 yields a visual picture of the ebb and flow of historical reputation, if by reputation we include the sense of contemporary relevance.

(In the graphic above, Rizal is represented by the line in dark shade, Bonifacio by the medium shade, Aguinaldo by the line in light.)

We can see that Aguinaldo was much more famous and written about than Rizal during the last years of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century. His role as a revolutionary general and first president of the first Asian republic, which was reported in the international news columns of the newspapers at the time, is recorded in the books published in those very years. Note the first two peaks in his reputation: the first occurred at the height of the Philippine-American War, and the second (for reasons I can only guess at) immediately before and during the first Philippine Assembly elections of 1907.

Rizal’s reputation reached its peak in the early 1960s; in 1961, the international community (not just the Philippine nation) celebrated the centenary of his birth. (The peak that followed soon after may have been propelled by the government’s publication of the now-standard Rizal compilation of writings.)

We can see other milestones in Rizal studies reflected in the graph: for instance, the controversy over the law requiring the reading of Rizal’s novels in the early 1950s is caught in the web of data, while the fire lit by Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” (one of the most influential books of the late 20th century) seems to have sparked an enormous amount of renewed interest in Rizal after its publication in 1983.

Bonifacio’s graph shows the extraordinary influence of the compelling revisionist views (considerably in error, in my layman’s view) of Teodoro Agoncillo. In 1956, his “Revolt of the Masses,” the still-standard reference on Bonifacio and the Katipunan, was published. I think the graph shows the immediate and impressive impact of Agoncillo’s bracing history.

The centennial commemorations of 1996 (the revolution, Rizal’s execution) to 1998 (the proclamation of independence) register in the graphs only as a modest and sustained rise—a modesty that should invite further reflection, both of the serious and fun variety.

Very interesting feedback in the last two weeks, in response to the column on Chiz Escudero and Andres Bonifacio, moves me to revisit the topic. Instead of worrying the definition of “ilustrado” again, however, I would like to discuss the class composition of the Katipunan—and argue that somebody like Vice President Jojo Binay would have fit right in.

I am sure I am not the only one to wonder, reading the standard accounts of the Philippine Revolution, about Pio Valenzuela, the medical doctor, co-founder and Katipunan emissary to the exiled Rizal. What was someone like him doing in a revolutionary organization described (by the fecund Isabelo de los Reyes) as “a plebeian association” consisting of the “pobres y ignorantes” or (by the influential Teodoro Agoncillo) as “a commoners’ society” made up of “the unlettered masses.”

Agoncillo’s answer is that Valenzuela (a source of his, on whom I think he relies too much) was unrepresentative of the organization. Four decades after completing “The Revolt of the Masses,” his landmark and still-definitive textbook on Bonifacio and the Katipunan, he belittled ongoing attempts to describe with greater precision the very demographics of Katipunan membership he seemed to take as proven.

“The attempts of some uninformed students today to rob the masses of what rightfully belongs to them is rather awkward since the alleged participation and leadership of the middle class and the intellectuals [in the Katipunan] was limited to two—Dr. Pio Valenzuela who lost no time in surrendering to the Spanish authorities less than a week after the outbreak of the Revolution, and Edilberto Evangelista. Bonifacio, on the other hand, is claimed by people who never even had any dealing with the Katipuneros to have belonged to the middle class, being, it is claimed, photographed wearing coat and tie.”

Agoncillo was a larger-than-life figure, erudite and fiercely opinionated. Reading him, however, I sometimes get the sense of an ill-tempered Cheshire cat; when his arguments fade, only his sneer is left behind. Fortunately for all of us, some of those uninformed students he may have referred to continued with their research.

Jim Richardson, for instance, has built on the early promise of “The Roots of Dependency” to build a sterling reputation as one of the leading scholars on the Katipunan. (His excellent website on the Katipunan can be found at kasaysayan-kkk.info.) Sometime in 2007, he used Katipunan documents seized in 1896 and kept in Spanish military archives, plus a first tabulation by Spanish officials, to produce an outline of the revolutionary organization’s class composition. (See “Notes on the Katipunan in Manila, 1892-1896.”) It makes for fascinating reading.

Over 200 names of Katipunan members are included; 136 have their occupations identified. And what did Richardson find?

“Most commonly and typically, therefore, the Katipunan activists were clerks, employees, agents, tobacco workers, printers and service personnel. They were indubitably proletarians in the Marxist sense, because they did not own any means of production and had to sell their labor in order to earn a living. Nevertheless, it is clear that Isabelo de los Reyes, Teodoro Agoncillo and others were wrong to classify them as collectively belonging to “the lowest stratum of society.” Their wages or salaries were either around or above the median for the city in the mid-1890s. Clerks were generally paid about 25 pesos a month, but those who reached senior positions, as did Roman Basa (Bonifacio’s predecessor as KKK president) at the Comandancia de Marina, earned over twice that amount. Dependientes and personeros would mostly earn between 15 and 20 pesos monthly, and the wages of
skilled workers in the tobacco and printing industries were in much the same range. Andres Bonifacio was paid 20 pesos a month for his labors as a bodeguero, and supplemented his income by making stylish walking canes and paper fans and by employing his talent for calligraphy.

“Lower-paid occupations, by contrast, are conspicuously absent, or at least under-represented, in the cohort ….”

“If many Katipunan leaders were not ‘poor’ by contemporary standards, neither were they ‘ignorant.’ Again the information is highly incomplete, but five KKK activists are known to have graduated from the University of Santo Tomas, the pinnacle of higher education in the colony—Pio Valenzuela in medicine; Feliciano Jocson in pharmacy; Ladislao Diwa and Teodoro Gonzales in law; and Jose Turiano Santiago as a perito mercantil. Three others started law courses at the university but did not finish—Teodoro Plata, Aurelio Tolentino and Emilio Jacinto—and several of the escribientes [clerks] had completed at least two or three years of the segunda ensenanza at the Colegio de San Juan de Letran, the Ateneo Municipal or in private schools, and would therefore have been regarded as well-educated by the standards of the day. The printers would likewise need to have attained a relatively high standard of literacy.”

To bring all this down to the 21st century: Part of Binay’s mass appeal is his self-identification as a self-made man, a diligent student who supported himself through school and made savvy investments on the side. (The topic of his latter-day wealth was the subject, among other stories, of a prize-winning report by Gigi Go, formerly of “Newsbreak.”) If a dossier had been compiled on him during the late 1960s or early 1970s, he would have been described in Katipunan-like terms: as a non-propertied militant activist, an orphan and a scholar, working as a claims
adjuster in a big insurance company—in other words, a living, breathing, modern-day escribiente.

Without quite realizing it, a week ago I walked into the longest roll call I’ve ever been a part of—but I’m getting ahead of myself. This is a reflection on influence, and it begins with a book.

On Nov. 30, the Ateneo de Manila published “To Give and Not to Count the Cost,” a collection of essays about “Ateneo heroes,” to mark (several months late) the end of the university’s 150th anniversary. In the case of some of the subjects, the quotation marks were superfluous. No one can seriously dispute that Jose Rizal, Gregorio del Pilar, Benigno Aquino Jr., Edgar Jopson, Evelio Javier and several more were heroic, however that term is defined. In the case of a great many others, however, their heroism had a decidedly personal meaning: an unforgettable act of charity, a decisive intervention, the gift of lasting friendship or personal example.

In the special case of a very few, the definition of hero was propositional, and it was the essayist’s task to convince us. Two quick examples of a convincing definition: sociologist and theater director Ricky Abad’s tribute to all the members of Tanghalang Ateneo, exemplars of what he calls “the heroism of the ensemble”; and poet-publisher RayVi Sunico’s argument for terror as a tool in teaching, exemplified in the caustic genius of Rolando Tinio and the intense integrity of Fr. Roque Ferriols.

How did the university choose its heroes? It didn’t. Instead, it chose the contributors, 150 in all, and left the choice entirely up to them. (When some declined or failed to meet the deadline, substitutes were found.)

The method meant some unfortunate omissions: As university president Fr. Ben Nebres said in his opening remarks, no one wrote about Fr. Bill Masterson, the visionary who created Loyola Heights and whose centenary we mark today. And as Raul Rodrigo wrote in his introduction, no one wrote about Claro M. Recto. The list can go on: I can add Leon Ma. Guerrero, or Fernando Canon, Rizal’s classmate and a general in the Revolution.

The method also meant some overlap. (And because the school is a Jesuit university, many if not most of the essays were naturally about Jesuits, or teachers, or both.) There are multiple portraits of Fathers Horacio de la Costa (whose genius, Ramon Reyes remembers, preceded him); Catalino Arevalo (known affectionately to many as “Father Rev” and to millions as Cory Aquino’s favorite priest); James O’Brien (the gentle giant who taught Howie Severino about Philippine social reality and Chot Reyes about basketball); and many more. There are profiles of teachers who made a difference: the eminent scholar Rey Ileto on Mon Tagle, Bam Aquino on Ching Chee Kee, Jimmy Hofilena on Fr. Francis Reilly (and again, many more).

At first glance, the list of subjects, in its entirely, might be seen as possessing the capacity to surprise, but having spent several late nights reading and rereading a great number of the essays, I have reached the opposite conclusion. The essays do not surprise; rather, they confirm what we know about the authors. The choices, it turns out, are characteristic.

Let me take only the most obvious example: Business leader Manny Pangilinan’s choice of a philosopher, Fr. Ferriols, as his personal Ateneo hero surprises only if we perceive Pangilinan through the lens of mass media: a corporate turnaround expert, a sports aficionado, a famous workaholic. But as Tony Samson’s profile of Pangilinan proves, the man better known as MVP is erudite, given to using words even in corporate settings in their full depth of meaning—the man, in sum, as philosopher-businessman, if Plato had lived long enough to describe the type.

At the book launch, held in Leong Hall, about 100 of the 150 contributors were on hand to receive their copy of the book. They were called to the stage alphabetically, and only by their names—no titles, no positions, no initials, no Latin honors. It took me some time to realize it, but as the names were called—Norman Black, Renato Corona, Richard Gordon, Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, Patricia Licuanan, Onofre Pagsanghan, Manuel Pangilinan, Chris Tiu—it occured to me that I was listening to a roll call, of the university gathered as one class. It was the egalitarianism, the level playing field, of the classroom.

* * *

I am only too aware that the Ateneo de Manila has produced its share of villains. The same week I read the book, I was rereading an essay of William Henry Scott’s on the nine clergy of Nueva Segovia, those unfortunate men of the cloth who were tortured in October and November 1896 on mere suspicion that they were part of the Revolution. Three of the four priests—Fathers Adriano Garces, Mariano Gaerlan and the gallant Mariano Dacanay—were brutalized by a volunteer who did not only hail from the Ateneo but was a classmate of Rizal himself! Scott couldn’t help but note: “Enrique Lete y Cornell, a Spanish mestizo from San Fernando, La Union, was Jose Rizal’s classmate in the Ateneo, and elder brother of Rizal’s fellow
propagandist, Eduardo Lete, in Spain. He was killed—one is tempted to say fortunately—during a small uprising in Santo Tomas, La Union, on April 11, 1898.”

It is against this backdrop that the heroism of the many people who have walked the halls of the Ateneo de Manila achieves fuller meaning.

* * *

I was grateful for the opportunity to write about Tina Montiel, a mentor who was never my teacher, but who taught me, between 1982 and 1986, some of the most valuable life lessons. She proved, by personal example, that to engage in politics was nothing less than my bounden Christian duty.

I don’t think there is any question that Senator Francis Escudero’s campaign support for the vice-presidential candidacy of Jejomar Binay proved pivotal in the May elections. One political ad of Escudero’s was especially well-timed and well done; it featured the popular first-term senator asking the simple question, Who is my vice president? against a backdrop of Binay images. His lengthy answer began this way: “Ang bise-presidente ko, hindi mayaman, hindi ilustrado, kulay Pilipino (My vice president is not rich, not an ilustrado, looks Filipino).”

It is tempting to critique this answer as a set of criteria that disqualifies Escudero himself from higher office. After all, he was born into wealth and influence; studied at elite universities (he is an alumnus of Georgetown in Washington, D.C., like Bill Clinton and Gloria Arroyo); and like millions of other Filipinos, will fit right in in Singapore or Hong Kong, or in Schwarzenegger’s California. But I would like to focus instead on his notion of ilustrado, and to point out that like too many of us,
he labors under a consequential mistake.

Escudero’s use of “ilustrado” in the campaign ad takes out the original meaning of “enlightened” (that is, learned) and substitutes for it a mix of class and racist meanings: he equates the term with both the idea that comes before it (rich) and the idea that comes after it (not brown, therefore mestizo). This is not an original achievement; there is something in our culture that allows us to define “ilustrado” in these erroneous but resonant terms.

How erroneous? Well, here’s a test. The hero whose life and cruel death we honor today, the revolutionary Andres Bonifacio, was he an ilustrado?

Many of us would perhaps answer no. Isn’t Bonifacio known as The Great Plebeian? Didn’t Teodoro Agoncillo, author of the standard history of the Katipunan, describe it, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, as “a distinctly plebeian society”? Wasn’t Bonifacio merely an unschooled “bodeguero”?

In fact, Agoncillo erred—and the proof is right there in his famous book, “The Revolt of the Masses.” To lay the predicate, let me quote a crucial paragraph from that small classic of my time, “Roots of Dependency,” by Jonathan Fast and Jim Richardson. “The customary point of departure for proponents of the thesis that the insurrection was organized by ‘the most ignorant element’ of the Filipino people had been the figure of Andres Bonifacio, popularly commemorated as the ‘Great Plebeian,’ founder of the Katipunan and its president at the outbreak of the 1896 revolution. Agoncillo, for instance, despite his own evidence to the contrary, contends that Bonifacio was ‘almost illiterate’ and ‘belonged to the lowest class.’ Even from the scanty information available on Bonifacio’s life, it is certainly clear that the Katipunan Supremo was not of the ‘lowest class’ of Philippine society.”

Agoncillo’s “own evidence to the contrary” includes proof of Bonifacio as an enthusiastic reader, a consummate organizer, a conscientious writer—proof, that is, that Bonifacio was not “almost illiterate” and was in fact an advanced autodidact.

There’s more. Agoncillo also identifies Bonifacio as a Freemason (a fact confirmed, among others, by the account of Gregoria de Jesus, Bonifacio’s widow, in 1928.) “This points to another inconsistency in the view of the Katipunan leader as a simple plebeian,” Fast and Richardon write. “The majority of Filipino Masons in the late nineteenth century were men of some substance and education, and Masonry constituted the principal organizational focus for the domestic following of the expatriate ilustrado propagandists.” When Rizal founded La Liga Filipina, he turned to Masons like himself. But this group, Agoncillo had written, “personified the middle class.” Fast and Richardson then note: “Yet Bonifacio was one of Liga’s
founding members.”

What prevented Agoncillo from seeing the full meaning of the evidence he had himself put together? This blinkered approach has unfortunately hardened into doctrine, with the ascendancy of what the scholar Resil Mojares has called the school of pious nationalism. The very sin Agoncillo warned us against is the same sin too many of us are now guilty of: uncritical acceptance of a famous author’s conclusions. The uncritical reader “takes for granted that the fame of an author is sufficient guaranty of reliability and competence,” Agoncillo wrote. “Such mental outlook smacks of hypocrisy and cowardice.”

Renato Constantino, in his equally influential “A Past Revisited,” does make allowance for the evidence; but he uses shifting, highly nuanced terms both to “place” Bonifacio economically and to define the ilustrado class as “this broad stratum with an uneven consciousness.” This leads John Schumacher, SJ to note, in a lengthy, critical review in 1975: “In spite of all these careful distinctions and reservations, in later parts of the book, ilustrado is continually used as synonymous with elite and wealthy.” (To be sure, it was Constantino who shepherded Fast and
Richardson’s game-changing study into print, in 1979.)

Fine. Bonifacio may not have been a member of the proletariat, but did that make him ilustrado? I can only hazard a guess based on the example of other personalities of that heroic era who were indisputably ilustrado too, even though they did not, like Rizal, study in Spain—men like Emilio Jacinto, Bonifacio’s closest co-worker, and Apolinario Mabini.

In the sense then that the enlightened ones were those who were learned and who
placed their learning at the service of an emerging nation, Bonifacio, like Escudero, like Binay himself, must be classified an ilustrado too.

I do not wish to add to the unbearable burden of the families of the victims of the Ampatuan, Maguindanao massacre, especially those who lost loved ones who were not media workers, with another reflection on the massacre’s implications on Philippine journalism. The horrific killings—57 bodies recovered, one still missing—reveal more about life in the Philippines than the state of the media: The Philippine polity as an anarchy of families (to borrow Alfred McCoy’s evocative book title); the role of violence in society; the wages of greed; the coopting of much of the country’s security forces; even (in the case of the unfortunate victims who
merely happened to be driving by) the very gratuity of life when you are poor
or not powerful.

I try to keep all this context in mind, but I am also bound, as a journalist, to recognize that the senseless killing spree cut the history of journalism in the Philippines in half, like the sun at noon. Before it, the time was A.M., or ante massacre; now we work, and are conscious of working, in the P.M.—post massacre. The sense of one era ending, and a new,unsettling one beginning, was already strong when the full scale of the massacre was revealed a year ago; it is palpable now.

A contrast may be instructive. Two months ago, at the seventh edition of the Media Nation forum, I shared perspective-setting duties with a few other journalists. I tried to connect the controversial media coverage of the Aug. 23, 2010 hostage-taking at the Luneta, at that time still the subject of fierce debate, with the Nov. 23, 2009 massacre in Ampatuan, Maguindanao. My main point could be summed up simply enough: A history of journalism in the Philippines written years from now will likely not mention Aug. 23; it will certainly dwell on Nov. 23.

The Ampatuan massacre was not only the worst single loss of journalists’ lives in recorded history; it was a direct attack on, perhaps even a death blow to, the very concept of “media,” as this has come to be understood since at least the last years of the Marcos dictatorship.

I can think of at least three characteristics of “media”—in the singular sense that many of us use it, whether in English or Filipino or any other language—that lay bleeding and backhoed after the Ampatuan rampage.

Media as a source of protection. The journalists asked to join the convoy bearing Toto Mangudadatu’s certificate of candidacy were expected not only to provide coverage but to provide a form of protection to Mangudadatu’s relatives and proxies. The size of the media contingent may have been unusual, and a reflection of the riskiness the journalists assigned to the coverage, but in essence this was what many whistleblowers, witnesses against powerful families or syndicates, opposition politicians and others similarly disadvantaged have come to depend on from media: protection in terms of publicity and documentation.

Media as an institution of immunity. The intrepid journalists who joined the convoy knew full well that, in Ampatuan-ruled Maguindanao as well as in many other areas, the life of an individual journalist did not amount to much. Too many journalists, most of them in the provinces, have fallen victim to motorcycle-riding assassins. But those who agreed to go with the convoy must have thought that, with three dozen media workers all together, an attack on them would constitute an attack on media as an institution itself, and hence was somewhat improbable.

Media as a substitute for government. The journalists who rode to their death did so because, as in so many other similar instances, the profession they belonged to was regarded as a substitute for government. When government security forces failed to guarantee the convoy’s safety, the obvious alternative was media.

Media, understood in these terms, lay riddled with bullets after the shooting stopped. Perhaps the third aspect, that of being a substitute for government, will prove the hardiest and the one most likely to survive. The first element, that of being a source of protection, may be the first to succumb to its many wounds. We can judge this for ourselves, when we evaluate calls for live TV coverage of the trial of the massacre suspects. The notion that greater exposure for the witnesses will be in their best interests may still sound logical, but after what happened to the journalists who mediate that very exposure, the idea must ring hollow to the
witnesses now.

Several years ago, a friend once told me, her brother had almost been the victim of a crime. He was at a gasoline station somewhere in the southern part of Metro Manila, and there was an attempt by several men to either rob him or abduct him (my memory fails at this point). I remember very clearly what happened next, in my friend’s story. In the middle of the criminal attempt, a woman rushed out of the gas station’s mini-mart, held up her media ID, and shouted, in Filipino: “Hey! What’s happening over there? I’m with the media.” (The original, as I remember it from the story, was even more emphatic: “Media ako”—I’m media.)

At that, the criminals stopped what they were doing, and fled.

I am certain that this kind of story has been repeated many times; I am less certain that it will have the same effect now, on either journalists-with-IDs or criminals-caught-in-the-act. The Ampatuan massacre has changed everything.

The whistleblower behind the NBN-ZTE deal, Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada, enriched our vocabulary of corruption with his flair for the dramatic phrase. Perhaps his most enduring contribution is the concept of unmoderated greed, which he applied to the Arroyo family and its many associates. I think it applies to the Ampatuan massacre too. It turns out that unmoderated greed fed that most ambitious, most ruthless, of all powers: violence.

Don’t look at me; I had to look up the meaning of the word too. I had stumbled on it in Christian Monsod’s “excellent lecture” on the 2010 automated elections (the phrase is Mahar Mangahas’, from his column on expert assessments last Saturday).

At first I thought it was a mistake; it seemed out of place in Monsod’s congenial English. Turns out it is an exact term in rhetoric, meaning a figure of speech, often
used for comic effect, in which the latter half of the line redefines the
meaning of the first. A classic example would be Henny Youngman’s famous joke,
which begins as though offering his wife as an example of something: “Take my
wife … please!” (Badaboom.) The end recasts the meaning of what comes before.

Monsod sums up his view on the Automated Election System used in 2010 in similar fashion: “I am reminded of that paraprosdokian: ‘I would like to die peacefully in my sleep like my father, not screaming and yelling like the passengers in his car.’ Our electoral system is that vehicle and the driver is the Comelec. And I am glad that the IT community is screaming and yelling now rather than later.”

The point is unmistakable, the image apt: the Comelec under Jose Melo may have fallen asleep at the wheel. The public was generally satisfied with the 2010 elections, but as Monsod himself also notes, the Comelec under Benjamin Abalos received high trust ratings immediately after the 2004 vote too; it was only a year later, after public knowledge of election fraud had become widely shared, that the “meaning” of the Abalos Comelec was recast. Could a paraprosdokian lie in wait for Melo and his commissioners? Take the Comelec … please.

Mangahas’ column last Saturday gave a most useful summary of Monsod’s insights; instead of trying my hand at another summing-up, allow me instead to quote Monsod at length. The lecture was 14 pages long; I can only quote a handful of passages.

Even before the pre-election Inquirer Briefing at which I heard him speak, I already found Monsod’s position on the question of automation tonic: mentally honest, intellectually rigorous and relentlessly pragmatic. (Characteristically, he
began his lecture with an accounting of his views before the elections, and ended it with specific suggestions.)

What follows is a necessarily incomplete survey.

In his paper, Monsod rounded up other expert assessments on the May 10 vote and, in their great diversity, managed to find common ground. “In fact, there are many areas of agreement. There was general acceptance of the results, especially for the national elections. There was agreement that the elections were attended both by perennial problems and by problems associated with automation and there was agreement that there was a need for a thorough review of the system and for
corrective measures if the AES is going to be used again. Finally, there was agreement that the PCOS machines should not be purchased. Thus, if the Comelec
decides to purchase the machines, it might be a good idea to insist that all
those involved in the transaction be subjected to a lie detector test and asked
the question: How much is the commission on this deal?”

He itemized the reasons why the assurance repeatedly given by Smartmatic, the Comelec’s election partner, that election fraud would be detected because of the system’s auditability, must be judged seriously defective. One reason included a criticism of PPCRV’s Tita de Villa (couched, characteristically, in self-deprecatory mode). “But the main argument of the Comelec against the parallel manual count was the random manual audit. And that, I am sorry to say, was a failure. In the first place, the chair of the TWG-RMA is a statistical illiterate like me and should have
realized her limitations.”

He was clear about the standards he wanted to use. “Twenty-four years after democracy was restored in our country, we should be harder on ourselves in determining if our elections are more mature and democratic, with democratic elections defined as ‘an equal opportunity for every qualified voter to cast a ballot and have that ballot counted.”’

He gave very specific recommendations about what to do next, including the following: “The second reform is to stop appointing retired justices to the Comelec. This is not directed at any individual but at the reality that the work of the Commission is too demanding for people who are used to contemplating the law from the isolation of their offices, who are virtually clueless by training and
disposition on the technical and non-legal aspects of elections and are too old
in their ways to actively manage the process, to go out to understand the
problems in the field and to pro-actively campaign for reforms. The Comelec is
a place for young, visionary, energetic and honest people who can rise to the
challenge of the changing paradigm of elections and the tasks of the Comelec,
and who can interact better with the generation who constitute the great
majority of the voters.”

And at the end (after discussing in detail “governance” issues like local warlords), he placed the very issue of automation on the line. Two of the three questions he proposed we use to “reexamine the agenda on election reform” were a direct assault on the easy assumption that automation is a necessary step forward in political maturity: “Will solving these other problems make wholesale fraud less of a problem to the extent that we can use less expensive systems with less vulnerabilities in its operation that would still ensure more accuracy while
giving the voters the ease of voting and faster results that they obviously prefer?
What will the system look like? This obviously calls for a comprehensive
cost-benefit analysis of automation.”

It is an analysis the Comelec and the Congress do not seem ready to begin.

With this shift in authority, Rubel proposes that as of 2010, the Internet has entered the Validation era, in which Internet users are beginning to “find the signal in the noise” and hold on to only those pieces of information and people that are most important to them online. The rise of intimate social networks such as Path, and group messaging apps such as GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society and Kik, is an indicator that “people want to be closer to people they care about and let all the riffraff set aside,” says Rubel.

A most interesting, if rather programmatic, read.

One last element about this. This is the BBC’s iPad app, if you haven’t seen it. And I think one of the brilliant elements of it is that when you launch the app, it doesn’t present you with a menu of options. It doesn’t say, “Here are 17 options, choose one.” It’s not a choose-your-own-adventure. It immediately tells you, “This is where your adventure should start.” It puts you in a story right away. You don’t to have any action, you’re immediately pushed in. And then it becomes, “How do you navigate from story to story?” Instead of going to a story, hitting the back button, going to look over the other menu of options, then going back again. The metaphor that exists on a lot of iPad apps in the news world is swiping from story to story. Which is a very similar experience to what you traditionally had in newspapers — seeing stories and being able to dive in right there.

The return of the professional journalist as gatekeeper?