ABOUT a dozen years ago, I helped a young woman from the barrio relocate from her analytics jobs in the US Midwest to a similar role at one of the California-based tech giants. I stayed for a few days at a hostel where new hires can stay for free while looking for places to stay. After my return to farm work, the first message I got from her was not about the so-called “post First World” working conditions there but about words.
This was her first message: Old man, every other sentence in my new workplace is peppered with the word juxtaposition. The single word that dominates both informal conversation and written communication.
Former Manila Times publisher Dante Arevalo Ang who died a few days back similarly invoked one word to sum up his expectation of the content, cadence, tone and nuance of the opinion pages of his beloved paper: ruminative.
Opinions that are deep and thoughtful, reflective and contemplative. Opinions that reflect the diversity and vigor of debates in a functional democracy. A functional democracy despite its warts and flaws was, after all, what DAA wanted for his country.
Have the op-ed pages of The Times lived up to that so high a bar set by DAA? I cannot answer that question. What is factual is that the op-ed pages of The Times have been publishing opinion pieces of astonishing diversity. So vast is the spectrum of opinions that get ink space in The Times’ op-ed pages that you can call it a literal babel of persuasions and creeds. Like the economic precision of Stephen CuUnjieng, the humanity of Maria Isabel Ongpin and the “Sermon on the Mount” columns of Father Shay Cullen. Maybe some fall under the category of “ruminative.” Most fall short of DAA’s expectations.
Even with the shortcomings, DAA must have been pleased that he had turned the op-ed pages of The Times into the vastest marketplace of opinion writing that has no precedent in Philippine journalism.
Reminiscent of what was said in China in the summer of 1956-1957, in the rudely aborted effort of Mao Zedong to make arts and culture flourish: Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
DAA’s creed, which was to “let a hundred schools of thought contend” in the op-ed pages of his paper may have been his most important contribution to contemporary journalism. Left, right, center-left, center-right. There is space for contending thoughts, even for those ideologically hollowed out pieces pleading neutrality. Or those who view autocrats as the nation’s saviors.
There is also a competing legacy: DAA’s standing up for fearless journalism, journalism that is without fear or favor.
The news pages of The Times holds no reverence for the demigods in the public and private sphere and the stories speak truth to power. The stories take only one side, the side of facts and verifiable evidence. The absence of sacred cows allows unbiased reportage, unimpeded by, for example, a reporter’s fear that the controversial big shot currently in a hot seat is friendly with the publisher.
Through the long years of writing for The Times, the only times DAA got in touch with me was during the Covid regime, after I had written a piece extolling Pedro Abad Santos who, I said, was considered a greater hero in many Pampanga homes than his martyred brother, Jose Abad Santos. Pedro, more known as Perico, was a Kapampangan Brahmin who gave up all his material wealth to lead the agrarian struggle in the early 1930s. Pedro, an ascetic, indeed gave everything up, except his books and he was said to own the most extensive collection of Marxist literature in Southeast Asia.
He founded the Partido Sosyalista ng Pilipinas, or the PSP, which later merged with the Pekape, the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas.
DAA asked if we can start writing a series on lesser known heroes, like Pedro Abad Santos, like the trio of heroes wiped out from the Philippine peso bank notes by the harebrained decision of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas to shift to polymer, then replace the trio with images of flora and fauna. I proposed that we let the Covid die down first. Then we can start the stories about lesser-known heroes.
I am still recollecting the intervening events on why the series on lesser known heroes was never written. I think it was my own laziness.
Maybe that series can still be done. With a new angle. Say, about the silent, unsung heroes of Philippine journalism. Starting with someone I know very well: Jose Luna Castro, the poor boy from my Lubao hometown who set out to be a Methodist pastor but had a change of heart in favor of journalism. He is considered the father of modern journalism and wrote the first Manila Times journalism handbook.
Then DAA, and his quest for op-ed pages of the ruminative kind.
