It's only words

LOOK DIDA, my grandson Miguel Iñigo tugged at my shirt and pointed to the blown-up photo on one wall of the eatery where, I learned later, a friend in the local government ingested crispy pork that ran roughshod in his bowels.

No this is not about bowels, which often times are confused with vowels, and indeed find confluence in some affliction endemic to politicians called verbal diarrhea.

My apo referred to a picture of sculptors emblazoned with the big bold texts “Wood curving, Betis Pampanga.”

Is it the shape of the wood? Or the craft of the men? Migo asked me what was headlined there.

A curved piece of wood being carved into a work of art. Passable alibi for the semantic lapse. Still, it’s wood carving, both livelihood and art.   

Part of editorial work is traversing through verbal landmines of homonyms indiscriminately, usually carelessly, planted in news stories which gave them a different meaning. Okay, which reduced them to meaninglessness.

There is for instance the breaching of the Arayat setback levee one time, noted down as levy in one story and levi in another. The embankment assumed in the first the imposition of a tax, and if capitalized that of Pampanga’s foremost business and media mogul, and in the second a Hebrew patriarch which when uppercased that of the inventor of denim jeans.

A police story one time referred to a rouge’s gallery making me search for the names Max Factor, Revlon Maybelline, L’Oreal and Alexandra de Markoff in that list of scoundrels, also known as rogues.

Then there was the murder suspect reported to have been hailed in court. So what was a man indicted for a heinous crime praised for? Instead of being compelled – haled – before a judge to face the bar of justice.

Still on legal grounds, pork chopped legislators flout the law when they flaunt their ill-gotten wealth. Maybe – in contrition, and to make amends – they may also flout their loot and flaunt the law. So much for wishful thinking.

A case too in semantic misdemeanor is that of the “aid” of Nanay Baby Pineda herself aiding the flood victims. Aid for the assistance misplaced for the assisting aide of the governor. At least, it was not a case of the dreaded disease which, to distinguish, we always put in all caps, AIDS.  

As dis makes the whale of a difference between honor and dishonor, so in spells the chasm between fame and notoriety – famous, the heights of glory; infamous, the abyss of obloquy, okay, disgrace.

It is thus the ultimate insult to call – even unwittingly, ignorantly too – a child celebrity as “infamous.”

A matter of semantics, so careless journalists pooh-pooh wrong choice of words in their stories.

Yeah, it’s only words. And – to paraphrase that song – words are all we have to take our readers’ minds away.  

Write with care. We owe it to them.

Apat na dekadang hugot

NAGLIPANA NGAYON sa internet ang tinatawag na “Jollifeels” o serye ng mga patalastas na tanging itinakda para sa Araw ng mga Puso.  

Dahil sa ang tema ng serye ay ang kawagasan ng pag-ibig, sa kabila ng di pagkakatuluyan sa harap ng altar, o sa maagang pagkuha ni kamatayan sa kasing-irog, sari-saring bansag ang ipinangalanan dito, tulad ng Bida ang Sawi, Biyak Puso, Laglag Luha, atbpa.

Ako mismo ay hindi nakapagpigil sa pagtulo ng aking luha sa Almusal at Date.

Subali’t gaano man katindi ang tama sa puso at timo sa damdamin ng Jollifeels, wala pa rin sila sa kuwento ng isang katoto sa pinagpatnugutang lathalain sa kolehiyo noong dekada ’70, ang Regina ng noo’y Assumption College sa noo’y bayan ng San Fernando.

Inirog, dinakila’t sinamba ng aming makata ang isa sa aming mga manunulat ng balita. Subali’t kung gaano kadaling magtahi-tahi ng binukayong berso’t ugoy ng rima, gayun naman kahirap nitong isabibig ang nagpupuyos na pagmamahal, ang alab ng pag-ibig sa kanyang sinisinta.

Tila baga’y sapat na’ng siya’y mabanaagan man lamang ng sulyap, at langit na mismo ang kanyang narating. Kaya hayun, ang pahaging hangin ay sa kawalan din nauwi.

Ang mga landas ay tuluyan nang nagkahiwalayan sa pagtatapos ng pag-aaral.

Apatnapu’t-dalawang taon eksakto ang lumipas nang muling magkatagpo-tagpo ang aming mga landas sa pagbabalikbayan ng pinakamamahal naming ina sa Regina, ang ngayo’y Ginang June V. Whitmer.

At sa ating makata, ang muling pananariwa ng naunsyaming pagmamahal na kinipkip sa kanyang puso sa loob ng apat na dekada; ang larawan ng inirog at sininta hanggang ngayo’y laman pa rin ng kanyang pitaka.

Ito ang kanyang hugot sa kanilang muling pagkikita nitong ika-8 ng Pebrero:        

Isang araw na damdamin

Tibok ng puso ko, ay di magkamayaw

Ang pangungulila, tuluyang naparam

Nawalay na hirang, muling magtitipan

Kaba ay nadama, gayon-gayun na lang.

Tanong sa sarili, hitsura'y ano na?

Di pa nagbabago, ang dating ganda n'ya?

Ang para sa akin, di na mahalaga

Ang magkita kami, akin nang ligaya.

Bawal mang isipin, asawa'y mayron na

Ang aming tadhana, di sa isa’t-isa

Naputol na lubid, bubuklurin pa ba?

Maaaring 'sang araw, maging alaala.

Habang pumapasok, ay lalong ninerbyos

Nandyan na kaya, ang irog kong si B...ts

Aking naririnig, halakhak sa loob

Pamilyar na boses, sa 'ki’y nagpakabog.

Subali't naglaho, nang aking makita

Kanya ay kaakbay, mahal na asawa

Di ko na pinansin, nabaling sa iba

Kirot sa puso ko, para lang mawala.

Lihim na pagsulyap, ang aking ginawad

Ni harapin siya’y, di ko na hinangad

Ba't pa isinama, ang kanyang kabiyak

Di man malapitan, di man makausap.

Kusa s’yang lumapit, ako'y kinausap

Ang pag-aalangan, di pa rin mabawas

Gusto mang magtanong, ay di naganap

May pader sa gitna, gusto kong mabuwag.

Ang mga pasaring, sa aming dalawa

Sa aking kalooban, ay nagpapasaya

Dating kalungkutan, ang palit ay tuwa

At sa bandang huli, ay pansamantala.

Matuling lumipas, ang mga minuto

Ang pamamaalam, ng bawat katoto

Minsan pa'y nadama, ang pagkasiphayo

Aking ginigiliw, kailan magtatagpo?

Nang s'yay nagpaalam, di ko na tiningnan

Baka mabakas n'ya, aking kalungkutan

Palad n'yay yumapos, sa 'king mga kamay

Pumawi sa hapis, sa kanyang paglisan.

Kailan magkikita, 'yan di ko pa alam

Di ko pa rin alam, ang mararamdaman

Kung gaya ng dati, sana'y huwag na lang

Salang ituturing, sa asawang mahal.

Ah, sa lalim ng hugot ng aking kaibigan, aking nasambit lang: Sa wagas na pagmamahal, walang sala, walang bawal. Gan’un pa man, di ko napigil “mag-poesyang” Kapampangan:

Apat nang decada
Mepuput a sinta
Misapuac, misalbag,
Meualang alaga.
Taram ning nasa man
Qng berso ning poeta
Culang yang pamutut
Qng bucnul ning lugud
Tali cang ‘urelia
    -  Ning mal nang asawa.

Memorial to equality

THE “Rolls Royce of Cemeteries.”

So crows the Angeles City government of the 1.6-hectare burial ground it developed in Barangay Sapalibutad, replete as it is with everything unobtained in public cemeteries like crematorium, columbarium and chapels.

The city cemetery has just been issued its operational clearance by the Department of Health. Earlier, the city council passed Ordinance No. 403, S-2016 “Establishing the Angeles City Memorial Park and creating the Angeles City Memorial Office under the city mayor and other related purposes.” Making all systems go for the full delivery of a campaign promise of Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan, a feat that took a little over four years.

No tale from the crypt is our piece of the public cemetery’s coming-to-be, published here on Oct. 23, 2012:   

Equal in death

DEATH IS the great equalizer. So it has been clichéd. The one sure thing none of us can evade, be we rich and powerful, poor and dispossessed and anywhere in between. 

But in death the great social and economic divide still obtains: the magnificent funeral and the beggar’s burial, the grand mausoleum and the common grave.

And never that twain shall meet?

Not in Angeles City lately. So it seems.

The impending closure of the over-capacitated Catholic Cemetery in the aptly named Barangay Cutcut – “bury” in English – posed a most serious situation to the city government, the sementeryong luma serving for the longest time as the city’s public cemetery.  

Times of necessity require ingenuity as much as serendipity, confluencing in the right direction toward a desired resolution. In the case at hand, this instanced in the unearthing of an over-two-scores-old city ordinance and the charity of a landed family to donate part of its estate to the city.

The unity of purpose and singularity of action among the principal stakeholders of the issue, capping, if not crowning, it all.

Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan tendering the Private Memorial Park Type Cemetery Ordinance of 1968 which gave the city government the mandate to seek from private cemeteries five percent of their land for charity burial.

EdPam heard about the ordinance in 1988 yet, when he was vice mayor, from his father, Alberto, who served as vice mayor to Mayor Eugenio Suarez.

The Most Rev. Pablo Virgilio David, auxiliary bishop of San Fernando and curate of the Holy Rosary Parish Church which has jurisdiction over the city’s Catholic Cemetery, brokering understanding between the city government and the private cemetery’s owner.

Robin Nepomuceno, long time public servant from vice governor to barangay chairman, representing the family that owns Holy Mary Memorial Park.

The end-result: a memorandum of agreement whereby the memorial park will provide the site for some 200 concrete apartment-type niches to be built by the city government along standards set by the Department of Health.  

Bishop David said the Catholic Cemetery would be finally closed soon as the niches at the Holy Mary Memorial Park are made available.

This, even as the city government fast tracks plans for the city’s new public cemetery in Barangay Sapa Libutad  – regarded as first “real” public cemetery, with the tiny one called patirik-tirik in Barangay Sto. Cristo, if I am not mistaken, in disuse for the longest time now.

“It will not just be a place for burial but a peaceful park where we will also have a crematorium," Pamintuan promised of the new public cemetery in two hectares of land donated by the Ayson family, owners of the Poracay Resort in the sands of Porac town.

The final place of rest for the city’s poor just like those posh memorial parks where the rich are buried. 

On hallowed grounds, equality comes to everyone.  Aye, death may then be the great equalizer.

In the aspect of being “the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another. "As Mitch Albom in Tuesdays with Morrie says.

Murder, we wrote

O, ANGELES din ito.

TV Patrol’s Noli de Castro introduced thus his Kabayan Special Patrol clip on the still unresolved June 2015 gruesome killing of bank teller Tania Camille Dee allegedly by her estranged husband Fidel Shieldon Arcenas inside posh Sta. Maria Subd. in Barangay Balibago.

De Castro’s overtone slashing further at the city’s tattered image, coming in the wake of a slew of news on the twists and turns rising out of Jee Ick-Joo’s abduction and subsequent execution by police elements.

No more queries of “Where’s the mayor?” now, what with the Honorable Edgardo Pamintuan having had his solemn presence impacted – on national television yet – beside a fuming General Bato de la Rosa punishing the city’s kidnap cops last week with push-ups.   

And, officially, personally, sincerely expressing his deepest condolences to Jee’s widow in memorial rites at Camp Crame Monday.   

The question du jour is: What is happening to the city? As I gathered from not a few caffeinated heads at the Starbukcks, Krispy Kreme and Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf I frequented.

No, it does not take the mayor to answer that question. I can very well do that. As I did, indeed, with my coffee confederates, thus: What is happening to the city now that has not happened to it before?

The killing of a Korean?

We listed five fatalities in some previous column: Her Tae Suk, 65, shot dead while walking with three other Koreans toward Prism Hotel in Clarkview Avenue on Feb. 19, 2014; Park Youn Jae, 60, owner of Royal Hotel in Barangay Cutcut, shot dead inside his office at the Koreatown along Friendship Highway here on Sept. 17, 2015; two males and one female with gunshot wounds in the head dumped at the FVR megadike on Oct. 12, 2016.

Murder – being victims of it – is far from exclusive to Koreans in the city.

Much as the terror that gripped Koreatown in the wake of Jee’s kidnap-murder, fear engulfed the Australian community in July 2008 when, in a span of three weeks, one Tylar Hammond, 64, was found hogtied and stabbed inside his residence in Balibago; tourist Keith Joseph Cook, 68, was killed in the city’s entertainment district; and one Raymund Arthur Kelly, 56, was seriously injured after being shot at point blank range by motorcycle-riding robbers.

As with the Koreans now, the Australians then feared they had become specific targets of criminal gangs in the city.

The single attack on foreigners in the city with the most number of casualties remains the killing of three US servicemen and one Filipino mistaken for an American by NPA partisans in separate places on October 27, 1987. As fresh as the blood spilled on that day, a recall of the names of the victims: A1C Stephen Faust, SSgt. Randy Davis, Sgt. Herculeano Mangente, and furniture maker Joseph Porter – all shot dead as “targets of opportunity.”     

The “city of friendship,” as Angeles was hailed during the mayorship of Blueboy Nepomuceno, quickly morphed into “murder capital” with – sound the dirges now – sisig queen Aling Lucing, businessman Arwin Ting, trader and disc jockey Heherson Punzalan, apl.de.ap half-brother Joven Pineda Deala, Angeles City oldtimer American national George Lavalley, Barangay Pulung Maragul chairman Edilberto Cayanan, American tourist Jerry Melton, former Barangay Malabanas chairman Thelmo Lalic, to name just the high-profile victims.  

Much earlier, there was the so-called “festival of death” in May-June 1988 chronicled by the Angeles Sun where some 40 individuals were murdered – the city engineer Filomeno Bonifacio, human rights lawyer Ramon Cura, medical practitioner Pat Santiago, a number of policemen and militants killed in a war of attrition between urban partisans and right-wing vigilantes; the common criminals pouncing on a whole family of seven, a couple and their three  house helps, a jeepney driver, a retiree, the ordinary folk.

It took no less than then-Rep. Carmelo F. Lazatin, noting how the resurgence of violence in Angeles had reached alarming proportions, to call on the military and civilian authorities – and sit down with them – to craft “pre-emptive actions” to confront the deteriorating peace and order situation.

Murder, we wrote about then. Murder, we write about now.  

Aye, what is happening to Angeles City now that has not happened to it before?    

Why, even the city police corps is – now as then – the bumbling, inept, idiotic Keystone Cops of silent-movie Hollywood. Or, in the local parlance, the pulis patola and the pulis pansitan combined.

With the few exceptions rising to the challenges of “tokhang for ransom” or pushing up to extortion and thievery. 

Police files

MAY PULIS, may pulis sa ilalim ng tulay…

The ditty is a satirical flick of the finger at the uniformed sneak preying on unwary motorists for two Osmeñas or a Roxas in exchange of their being let go off some trumped-up traffic infraction.

Pulis, pulis, pulis matulis.

Ah, double entendre here: the sharpness of the cop at filching the last Quezon off a hapless victim, and the put-on machismo obtaining in a force whose members purportedly have not just one, but two or more paramours.

Flash Report: The Philippine National Police holds the record for the quickest response in crime situations, beating such elite police forces as the New York Police Department which registered eight minutes, and Great Britain’s Scotland Yard at five minutes. The PNP registered zero minutes. Impossible? No, they are in the scene, themselves committing the crime.

Truly, that is a most painful joke – to the national police – that has circled the globe via internet. And just how are the police caricatured? Uniformly: pot-bellied, palm outstretched.

Tawagin mo na akong demonyo, huwag lang pulis.

Ah, the unkindest cut of all inflicted upon the PNP in the Inquirer comic strip Pugad Baboy where the comparison to the police provided the final straw that broke the patience of the henpecked Air Force Sgt. Sabaybunot stoking the rage in him to snarl at his domineering wife. Better be called a devil than a policeman, can anything get lower than this?

Object of ridicule and derision, the police may be the rich lode of all that humor, but the joke is on all of us: victims of the very things we draw laughter from. Doesn’t it hurt to laugh?

STILL MUCH in currency is that which I first wrote here in Oct. 2007 as rather long intro predicating the subject of then-Chief PNP Sonny Razon’s “Mamang Pulis” program towards the refinement in the physical appearance of cops to “soften the brusque image of the police.”

Extreme Makeover I titled the piece. All cosmetics, epidermis thick, the program turned out.

Today, we cannot even afford to laugh at the antics of our police. We are just too terrified.

Purely personal

On Feb. 16, 2009, this testimony:

ADVERSARIAL HAD been my personal and professional dealings with the Pampanga police, from its early Philippine Constabulary persona to its old Integrated National Police incarnation to its present Philippine National Police corpus.

Sometime in November 1972, it was at the Pampanga PC Command that the student activist with the nom de guerre “Carlos” experienced the dreaded romanza militar – the euphemism for torture during interrogation – in the heavy hands of a Sgt. Pascua even as a Lt. Samuel Tomas took charge of the psycho side.

It was the good Apu Ceto, then rector of the Mother of Good Counsel Seminary, that plucked his battered, baffled and bewildered ex-seminarian from further harm, and sure detention at the Camp Olivas stockade. This by signing his custody papers with the proviso that should “subject Communist Party member rejoin the movement,” the PC would just arrest and detain the good priest in his stead.

Ah, how I plotted for years to get even with those PC berdugos. For naught of course, the thirst for revenge quenched by the forgetfulness, if not the forgiveness of time.

Sometime in the later ’80s, it was at the Pampanga PC-INP Command that Col. Efren Q. Fernandez read in a press conference an “order of battle” that included the names of mediamen allegedly belonging to the propaganda unit of the CPP-NPA, to wit: Elmer Cato, Manila Chronicle; Chandler Ramas, Daily Globe; Jay Sangil, Philippine Daily Inquirer; Sonny Lopez, Malaya; Bong Lacson, People’s Journal/Tonight.

Raising hell with the Ilonggo EQ, a kasimanwa of my wife, I learned that his intel officer provided him with our names based on a list they found during a raid of the offices of the Alyansa ng mga Magbubukid ng Gitnang Luzon (AMGL). Yeah, it was the attendance sheet at a press conference the AMGL held a few days prior to the raid that certified us mediamen as CCP-NPA propagandists. That’s how intelligent the intelligence officers of that era were.

That was no joking matter though as our being branded as CPP-NPA agit-prop agents could have primed us for termination with extreme prejudice by some ultra-rightist military forces.

Indeed, Cato, Lopez and Lacson were marked for liquidation – not by elements of the Pampanga PC-INP though but by the right-wing vigilantes of an Army colonel then engaged in a war of attrition with the urban partisan unit of the NPA, the Mariano Garcia Brigade.

Cato lived to be third secretary at the Philippine Mission to the United Nations, Lopez to be public affairs manager of the Clark Development Corp., and Lacson to be editorial consultant and columnist of Punto! by the grace of God, the intercession of our saints, and the intervention of friends in the police force, notably the Angeles City Metropolitan District Command under Col. Amado T. Espino, Jr. and the 174th PC-INP Coy under Maj. Roman Lacap, and our patron, furniture magnate Pert Cruz.

Award

February 10, 2009, on the very day of my birthday, I received a letter from the Pampanga Police Provincial Office inviting me to its celebration of the 18th founding anniversary of the PNP on Feb. 16 – today – as “one of the awardees on the said occasion in recognition of your valuable and unrelenting support towards the Pampanga police force.”

Wow! What have I done to merit this?

Insofar as I know, nothing has changed with my adversarial stance toward the police, criticizing them no end for faults and failures, both perceived and real – as we do now on the Angeles City police office for the unsolved high profile killings, as we did on PD Keith Singian himself on the Capitol siege.

Of course, we did commend the police too for job well done – as in too many instances of crime solutions, prevention, even promotions.

By being true to the journalist’s calling, of being both adversarial and advocate, I am now getting this – my first ever – award from the police?

As I know that I have not mellowed a bit, maybe, just maybe, it is not me but the police that has changed stance after all these years.

Yeah, the police see media criticism now under the light of critical collaboration rather than destructive damnation. Else, my name would not have entered their mind for this award.

Here’s a snappy salute to you Sirs.

AND THEN last year, one SPO-something Jimmy Santos slapped me – as editor – along with the veteran writer Ding Cervantes with a libel case based on a Punto story related to illegal drugs.

Our pre-trial at RTC-Guagua is on Feb 8.

Back to square one, so I sing again pulis, pulis, pulis…