A tribute well-deserved

Even from one who is a non-expert on the media profession – save for one being an avid reader, this paper’s publisher and BANAT NEWS editor, Mr. Juanito Villaluna Jabat, highly deserves the 22nd Grand Perlas Award as “Valuable Filipino in the Media Profession”.

Actually, due to fewer than a hand’s fingers of casual meetings – that rare really – one misses that privilege of befriending in person the master punster on this side of pen-pushing.

He is among the few who had stuck to The FREEMAN since that exodus of its staff to another local daily many years ago. Again, even as a reader per se, one couldn’t help empathizing with TF owner Dodong Gullas for that diaspora, and truly admiring in silence Nito Jabat’s loyalty. No wonder, Dodong Gullas treasures him like a rare dresden china.

Many TF readers now prefer that every issue carries “Have Bat, Will Strike”. And perhaps read it first before the front page news story. One can’t recall now for how long Nito’s “Have Bat” has boosted The FREEMAN’s goodwill, but one thing certain is that it has enhanced its stock. It tickles the young and the old – and in-between – and the brilliant, the mediocre, and even the dullard whose differing senses of humor all thirst for more witty play of words.

JVJ’s sway in local media is now a given. Aside from his wide-ranging editorials during his previous TF watch – and as stringer for Reuters(?) on gates, one hears – it has been “Have Bat” that the dean of pun hereabouts has regularly amused his fandom, and still unsatiated.

Indeed, the play of words isn’t just a special talent or gift, but also the punster’s unique art or style. And, JVJ is both gifted and stylish as a wordsmith to come up with ease the spontaneous facility of words, the proper semantics, the savoir-faire to mix wry humor with suave lampoon, and the happy disposition to make fun without denigrating certain targets as funny, or to feel hurt or insulted.

While green is often the color of many jokes, JVJ doesn’t relish the loud salad green, but tones them down with metonymy, impish nuances, indirect reference, metaphors, et seq., leaving to the readers whatever naughty conclusion, if any, like saying: “Imo ra na, ‘bay, wa koy labut unsay anaa sa imong hunahuna”. For instance, he doesn’t sound vulgar or malicious when he warns in his usual sunny disposition: “Don’t invert my nickname; otherwise, you risk committing an obscenity”.

Indeed, the 22nd Perlas Awardee more than deserves the accolade as his lifelong career runs through the gamut and tiered steps of the 4th estate. His journalistic style is the low-key profile, rather than the cigar-chomping and loud-mouthed editorial titan of the old school.

One hasn’t heard of him chomping reporters or office staff for breakfast at a drop of a hat, or dressing down copy editors and proof readers for ineptitude or for English blunders. His style sounds like steering his editorial ship in the manner he uses to hit public scalawags with satiric grace and with a smile.

Unlike perhaps the classical British periodical essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele who famously collaborated on “The Tatler” and later “The Spectator”, or the famous American publisher and editor, Horace Greeley, as often aggressive and ballistic journalists and sometimes pictured as over-bearing martinets, JVJ is a laidback version who runs his papers, and does his periodical pieces with unforced persuasion that spells better suasion.

Indeed, Mr. “Have Bat” epitomizes the modern fourth estate in all his ever-smiling simplicity and pleasant personality, with no put-on hubris, airs, or affectations common among mere pretenders.

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