Freedom as respect

These are writers’ times. So much is going on that’s important now and even more important for our children’s future. Each day one wakes up to a slew of subjects crying out for prioritization in our journalism and our literature, our blogging and Tweeting and Facebooking, our memoirs analogue or digital.

I’m sure all other creative people feel the same way. Our visual artists have so much material on their hands, by way of their hearts and what they see and feel around them. Our music makers hear many voices in their heads. 

A fine example is Heber Bartolome, who like most everyone has embraced the zeitgeist and written a tanaga, a poem in Filipino in traditional metric mode, and turned it into an original song composition. Here’s Heber’s “Tatlong Tanaga para kay Cory”:

“Dumaan ang tag-araw/ Dumaan ang tag-ulan/ Langit ay naging dilaw/ Nang ikaw ang magdaan// Binti ay namimitig/ Balakang nangangawit/ Lahat ay magtitiis/ Ikaw ay ihahatid//

Bayan mong iiwanan/ Ang pamana ay dangal/ Ikaw ay halimbawa/ Ng Dakilang Maylikha.”

Per our common friend Edd Aragon, the best editorial cartoonist in Sydney (and who’s coming home soon for a yearend exhibit of paintings at the Yuchengco Museum), Heber created the poem-song “as tribute to the great Filipino woman, Cory, who has deeply touched the nation’s hearts and history.” Incendiary as always, Edd adds: “The battle for freedom and a government free of greed and corruption continues.”

Master photographer Ben Razon also sent us Heber’s poem-song, which may be experienced by accessing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4m9xjI4yC8

Like Heber, many of us were profoundly affected by Tita Cory’s departure. I, too, wrote a thank-you tribute on the very day of her demise, shedding tears in the process. It had to wait till last Sunday for publication in this paper.

Many others have bared their hearts on the departure of the lady who exemplified the best in us and of what we can be, and assured ourselves of our capacity for deep grief and great love.

Relations and friends sent SMS and e-mail from abroad, sharing their own mixed feelings of pain and pride over how we sent her off, even as they all stayed glued to their TV sets and computer screens that have turned us into a global bayanihan of countless barangays. All together have we reveled in our genius for song.

Of course it also had to happen: furor over a fiasco involving our highly spirited arts and culture community. Typically, the basic issue keeps getting sidetracked or ignored.

There may be no question that Cecile Guidote Alvarez is qualified for the state’s highest honor for an artist. The question is one of propriety. She could have quit her NCCA post first. It doesn’t wash that people outside the NCCA are now claimed to have recommended her inclusion in the new NA list. Everyone knows that she had used the same letter-brigade tactic in getting her friends and/or chosen ones added to the list in the past. So it’s rather easy to conclude that quid pro quo came into the picture.

That she tried to push for the three other DNA’s or Dagdag National Artists in the early rounds of official vetting — to no avail, meaning those three names didn’t make the grade — led to the understandable speculation that she likely knew she was a sure inclusion, but had wanted to diffuse the expected onus of controversy over her conflict-of-interest situation.

Initially, I thought it couldn’t have simply been coincidental that the President listened to other lobbyists supporting those same three names. Our friend Cecile (whom we have held in respect from as far back as the early PETA days that we were part of) either obviously had her way with her recommendations, or could not advise the President properly had she earlier been given the marching order for their inclusion, thus her pushing for them in the early vetting.

On ANC’s Media in Focus program last Thursday where we guested with National Artist for Literature Virgilio Almario and CCP board director Atty. Lorna Kapunan, NCCA commissioner Joe Lad Santos denied flat out that Cecile had pushed for the three other DNAs. Well, as I told Joe Lad, then it’s his word against that of other NCCA commissioners who recall otherwise.     

Much is now being made by the DNAs’ defenders of a supposed Honors Committee in Malacañang that Joe Lad said practically becomes another layer of decision-making over and above the accepted vetting process conducted by the NCCA and CCP. Methinks this is a retroactive stonewalling tactic for lack of any other defensive posture. As far as I know, the so-called Honors Committee is an ad hoc body that only recommends additional distinctions and cash prizes to athletes, entertainers and other Pinoy exemplars that have done us proud, mostly in competitions abroad.

Now it’s being touted as having been created through an executive order in time for the declaration of National Artists in 2003, which included one DNA. Well, that seems to be news for everyone. And if it’s any indication of its nether status, Foreign Secretary Albert Romulo was recently reported to have expressed no knowledge of that Honors Committee when asked about his reputed involvement in it. (Other members are Executive Secretary Ed Ermita and NCCA chair Vilma Labrador.)

Troubling as well is Rep. Imee Marcos’ disclosure that Carlo Caparas sold the rights to his Ang Panday icon poster right before the last presidential elections, just so FPJ couldn’t make use of it. Sold to whom? Without having to offer an answer, now we may deduce that it could be the primary reason for the DNA “payback” for Caparas. And all this now behooves the scenario that his inclusion in Alvarez’s reported list of recommendees during the vetting process smacked of a marching order. Failing which, “presidential prerogative” was raised as the end-all for the process of selection.

As for that Honors Committee, it never met during or after the rightful process. So there.          

Again, it’s not a matter of whether Mañosa, Moreno or Caparas are qualified for the honor. Any claim can only be subjective. Caparas’ defense of his selection, on the grounds of his pop culture status, is easily debunked, as it was the previous Thursday in the same TV program, when film critic Alexis Tioseco pointed out that Caparas’ non sequitur practically paves the way for Willie Revillame to be declared as yet another DNA.

The point is that the already highly evolved selection process hardly mattered at all. Poet Ric de Ungria, an NCCA commissioner, is right in saying that artists should now refrain from having themselves simply used as members of supposed Committees of Peers for the vetting, since all their efforts fly out the window when ranged against what is claimed to be presidential prerogative.

That prerogative is there, it’s true, for now, anyway. It’s the only item of verity that the Palace and NCCA higher-ups have been mouthing. Everything else is either false, idiotic, or beside the point. Or smacks of arrogance, as the way Cerge Remonde weighs in with little knowledge and all bluster — especially when he speculates that protestors may simply want their own friends as NAs. He and all others defending the DNAs in that manner are only doing the President further disservice. 

The issue is not whether Cecile Alvarez or anyone else is qualified for the honor, or if Carlo Caparas knows how to draw and makes excellent movies. Nor is the masa vs. elitista card that Caparas plays relevant or proper. Neither is it material to point out that Mrs. Alvarez did not nominate or push for herself.

The issue is that a process has been set in place that binds both the NCCA and the CCP boards, as well as all artists who have learned to accept and respect that process. Presidential prerogative to render the final choice is there, yes, but this can be abused, as when it circumvents, supersedes, or violates the process outright.

It’s all very simple. Four names made it through the rigorous and nearly sacrosanct vetting process, but when the list reached Malacañang, one name was dropped and four others were added. Even if one can claim presidential fiat, it doesn’t quite make it right.

What it spells is poor judgment if not arrogance of power. Regarding which, unbeknownst to everyone, another living National Artist for Literature, Dr. Edith L, Tiempo, lovingly called “Mom Edith” by all writers, was in Manila on that Black Friday of protest. The NCCA was supposed to take her to Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya, for a weeklong tribute. Foul weather deferred her long anticipated homecoming till the following Sunday.

Had her health allowed it, she would have joined the eight other NAs in the protest rites held at the CCP ramp. And she would have shared her own invaluable comment on the necessary outrage. Take it from a 90-year-old fount of wisdom. Titled “Freedom as Respect and Humanness,” Mom Edith’s statement is as follows:

“The head of a country or state who is truly enlightened provides the populace with the exercise of freedom not just for the government’s considerations but, most important, freedom as every individual’s right and privilege. To be aware of freedom as the individual’s possession requires the respect for his personality, for his considered actions, for his beliefs and decisions. A favorite American saying goes this way: ‘Your freedom ends where my nose begins’; this saying stresses how personal this requirement for freedom goes, with the specific anatomy as the limit that one’s freedom can go.

“What is meant by a country’s head being enlightened? By this enlightenment is meant the awareness that at the very primary root of freedom is the human presence, humanity that demands respect — because without this respect one might as well be dealing with the most fearful and undomesticated of animals.

“A well-run government’s decisions are based of course on respect for rules and regulations, and the respect always as rooted in the awareness of the acknowledged group’s right and well-considered performance of its duty.”