Boundaries

My inbox was filled to the brim with angry commentaries from various e-groups I participate in regarding a travel piece published in People Asia magazine, an affiliate of this publication.

The piece was about the writer’s recent tourist foray into Greece, replete with photos of the writer amidst the ancient ruins — a topic innocuous enough one might hardly give it much pause. It was written from a decidedly (in fact, almost to the point of caricature) burgis point of view: the spur of the moment decision to travel, complaints about the economy-class seats of one airline and whining about being caught in a planeload of migrant Filipino workers.

I am not sure if the burgis point of view is contrived to make it truly reprehensible. I do not know the writer — although there is testimony from the blogs from those who do know her saying the voice in that piece is really the writer’s.

At any rate, the piece in question touched a raw nerve and provoked a digital storm. The bloggers have ganged up on the offensive piece and beat up on the writer for making derogatory remarks about our overseas workers: their demeanor, their tastes and their style.

Jim Paredes, one of those offended by the voice and point of view of this piece, described the writer as a living, walking and writing Doña Buding — after that stereotypical matron played by Dely Atayatayan in that long-running television sitcom enshrined in our collective memory. That Doña Buding character is ostentatious, obnoxious and consistently demeaning. In a word, a character so easy to hate.

Jim’s characterization is simply brilliant. He has such a remarkable knack for that. I suspect that the digital storm now raging around that offensive piece is driven in part by our shared disdain for Doña Buding and the dread that she actually exists in our midst. Not only does she exist, she is bearing down on the heroes of our time: Filipinos who take their chances abroad and earn the volumes of foreign exchange that has kept our economy from disappearing into the sinkhole.

So powerful is the digital storm raging around this piece that the phenomenon has made it to television. The first report aired about it says the writer has since resigned.

I am of two minds abut this controversy.

On the one hand, the whole attitude and view of the world conveyed in this piece is truly reprehensible. It leaps at the reader straight out from another age, the one that glorified aristocrats and accepted the aristocratic disdain for the ways of commoners.

After all the trauma we have gone through as a nation, it is a wonder that such an aristocratic attitude could still manage to persist. To think this is a time when lifestyle checkers are automatically unleashed on practitioners of ostentatious consumption and BIR auditors instantly scramble around anyone who flies to Greece on a whim to see if taxes have been paid on incomes that make such behavior possible.

Good grief, didn’t we just reduce to scrap metal those luxury cars someone attempted to smuggle through the Subic Freeport?

Yes, the rage of the bloggers around this piece is a healthy one. It is a ceremony of reaffirmation of values that are good for the community: hard work, simple living and profound respect for those among us who dare the torments of working abroad to keep their families, and eventually the national economy, afloat — no matter that they tend to be boisterous when happy, intrusive to the point of discomfort and possessed of a fashion sense not all may agree with.

But, on the other hand, I am a little uncomfortable with the lynching-mob atmosphere in the e-groups, the facility with which self-righteous rage could, within a day, develop into a contagion.

In the Age of the Internet, it is so easy to rant, to condemn, to bemoan and, yes, to raise sacred cows protected by an army of bloggers insisting on the currently fashionable version of what is politically correct. Chatter could easily become a crusade. Couch potatoes could easily metamorphose into militants, tearing down at those who do actual work to build edifices.

Armchair quarterbacks abound in cyberspace. They second-guess, they disseminate handy opinion, they could be pettier than usual and yet condemn their targets-for-the-day to the digital equivalent of the garrote.

I do not mean to romanticize the old media — the ones at least restrained by some amount of editorial supervision and the accountability of publishers to the wisdom of established law. But as a liberal and as a writer myself, I take conscious effort to exercise tolerance to the fullest. In the face of all the trash swept up by increasingly more open media channels, that is a challenge that becomes tougher by the day.

The liberal ethic is best stated by the philosopher John Stuart Mill: I may disagree with what you say, but I will fight to death for your right to say it. That is my gospel.

On my view of writers, I take my cue from the troubadour Jacques Brel, whose most pathetic character is the ecrivant sans opinion. A writer without an opinion. Scribblers without a point of view.

All the angry blogging going on regarding that travelogue is at once healthy and disconcerting. It is phenomenon that we ought to understand more fully.

On the one hand, it tells us that with the privilege, and the challenge, of putting their bylines and consigning their thoughts to the permanence of print must be ready to deal with the instantaneousness, and democratic access, of the blog.

On the other hand, we have to collectively settle on working boundaries of responsibility and decency in the practice of blogging — a new, intoxicating technological medium that allows broadcast without editorial accountability nor the normal standards for ensuring fair representation.