People Power

NYT Editorial April 12, 2006

The marchers in white T-shirts poured out of the subway doors and merged into a stream, flowing like blood cells through the tubular innards of the Washington Metro, past turnstiles and up escalators and out into the delicate brilliance of a fine spring day. On the street, they met up
with the others - young parents, old people, toddlers in strollers, teenagers in jeans and jewelry - and headed to the Mall, where they and their American flags dissolved into a shimmering sea of white, red and blue.

The immigration rallies of recent weeks have drawn an astounding number of people around the country: Monday's "national day of action" was attended by an estimated 180,000 in Washington, 100,000 each in Phoenix and New York City, 50,000 each in Atlanta and Houston, and tens of thousands more in other cities.

Adding in the immense marches last month in Los Angeles and Chicago, the immigrants and their allies have carried off an amazing achievement in mass political action, even though many of them are here illegally and have no right to vote. Whether the rallies leave you inspired or
unnerved, they are impossible to ignore.

This nation is deeply divided and undecided about illegal immigration.

The ambivalence runs deep. Americans can hardly even agree on whom they are talking about. Listen to debates from talk radio to the Senate, and you will hear utterly incompatible descriptions of the same group of people. The nation's 11 million to 12 million illegal immigrants are either an occupying army of thieves, snatching jobs and subverting our laws, or they are a wholesome community of strivers, eager to build families and chase the American dream.

Monday's rallies were a decisive victory for the more positive vision. In Washington, as elsewhere, the mood was as mellow as the crowd, which was dominated by parents of young children. (You can shout all the fiery slogans you want, but you will never be threatening with a baby in your arms.) An 86-year-old Salvadoran, Maria Guevara, sat in a folding chair and waved a plastic American flag as a friend, Ana Santos, held a placard to keep the sun out of her eyes. Ms. Guevara was as placid as if sitting beside a pond, though all around her it was noisier than a baseball stadium.

A recurrent complaint against new immigrants - particularly Latinos, the overwhelming majority at most rallies - is that they are slow to assimilate. But these crowds clearly had internalized at least one pillar of the American way: that peaceful dissent can spur a government to action.

Though recent immigration developments in Washington had been a discouraging mix of stalemate and cold political maneuvering, the marchers seemed motivated less by a sense of grievance than by hope, and the pure joy of seeing others like themselves rallying for a precious
cause. They were venturing boldly from the shadows and daring the country to change its laws, but were doing so out of a desire to participate in the system, not to undermine it.

This became especially clear when the thousands on the Mall recited the Pledge of Allegiance, reading from yellow sheets printed in English and in a crude phonetic spelling to help Spanish speakers pronounce the unfamiliar words. Something about the latter version - with its strange
sense of ineloquent desire - was enough to provoke tears.

Ai pledch aliyens to di fleg
Of d Yunaited Esteits of America
An tu di republic for wich it estands
Uan naishion, ander Gad
Indivisibol
Wit liberti an yostis
For oll.

The Risk

Here's Adrian's column which came out in Philippine Graphic magazine:


By Adrian Cristobal

If I were to ape Kundera, I would write a novel entitled The Risk
with a writer as the protagonist.
I would use a quotation from Claude Lefort's book, "Writing: the
political test," which goes this way:
Writing involves risks—the risks that one will be misunderstood, the
risk of being persecuted, the risk of being made a champion in which
one does not believe, the risk of inadvertently supporting a reader's
prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is
true, the writer must 'clear a passage within the agitated world of
passions,' an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers
are never the masters of their own speech.

"Never the masters of their own speech"? Is this compatible with the
writer's stance that he stands by everything—well, most
everything—that he has written? However, if one lives long enough, one
can reconcile this contradiction, in fact, many other contradictions.
One must accept that life offers many instances of disenchantments,
betrayals, and disappointments (as well as triumphs and inspirations,
of course), that in the end one can only endure. It's so difficult as
Albert Camus once advised, to maintain an allegiance to the ideals of
one's youth.

These thoughts struck me when a good friend, Krip Yuson, a fine
writer, was denounced by colleagues and academics when he wrote that
another writer, Bienvenido Lumbera, was the candidate of the
communists for the National Artist award for literature. Not a
communist but a candidate of the communists, or as some people would
say, "leftist" or sympathizer. It's not a question of evidence or
testimony (for which there's none, unless one chooses to "ideologize"
literature of protest), and even so, it seems to me beside the point.

Look at the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pablo Neruda, Nobel awardee in
1971, was a communist, also a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize
(1953). Jaroslav Seifert (1984) broke with the communist party.
Octavio Paz (1990) broke with the communist party but remained a
Marxist. Halder Laxness (1955) and Mikhail Sholokov (1985) also got
the Order of Lenin (1955) and the Stalin Prize (1941). Closer to home,
Pramedja Ananta Toer got the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature
(1995), although another awardee turned in his statue without the cash
because Toer was a communist, but Mochtar Lubis, despite his
identification (probably false) with the CIA also got the same prize:
two ideologically opposed writers but recognized for their merits as
writers. It's true, of course, that some writers are thought by other
writers as unworthy of awards, but on literary not political or
"moral" grounds. As Thomas Mann once said, writing is not virtue but
virtuosity.

Krip Yuson made enemies because of his denunciation of Lumbera on
extraneous grounds, dangerously so, for in this time of witch-hunting,
he puts Lumbera in a precarious position with the government and the
military by his "testimony." It's a throwback to the denunciations
made by writers of the unlamented Stalinist era, on the one hand, and,
on the other, a revival of McCarthyism. And all because, as his
detractors pointed out, his favored candidate for National Artist,
Cirilo F. Bautista, won't make it. Because of what he did and its
consequences, Yuson has resigned as chairman of UMPIL, the writers'
union.

The question in his friends' minds is whether or not he fully
considered the consequences of his denunciation. When asked by another
friend, Virgilio Almario, a National Artist himself, Yuson simply said
(I was told)" Gago kasi ako!" This self-deprecation is neither an
apology nor a withdrawal of his denunciation. It doesn't put Lumbera
in the clear with witch-hunters in these perilous times,
notwithstanding the fact that Amado V. Hernandez, accused and jailed
for 10 years as a communist under the nullified charge of "rebellion
complex with murder," was given the National Artist Award for
Literature during Martial Law.

Both Bienvenido Lumbera and Krip Yuson now know the risks of writing,
albeit differently, since one is in more real danger than the other,
if you consider losing one's friends and admirers to be less dangerous
than risking your freedom.

But a single act should not forever mark a person even if Andres
Malraux once said that every act is immortal. We should judge writers
by their works alone, lest we consider Ezra Pound and Carlos Bulosan
to be bad writers because one was a fascist and the other a communist.
That risk belongs to the philistine. May their tribe decrease! #

A language for nationalism?

(for April 4, 2006)

by Alfred A. Yuson

Of course friends called, texted, e-mailed their support. Some, not all,
agreed with the points I raised in that column a fortnight ago. Most were
privileged to read the pig Latin in my flak vest, so their offers of
assistance stayed private. Some actually said: Hey, own up, you’re playing
rope-a-dope, right?
Well... Okay, let’s be a tad bit serious. A lot of hackles have been
raised, for which I’m sorry. No intention there to raise the rage level on
this
planet. But I should have known better than to provoke a bit of a
firestorm over “nationalism.” So here’s clarifying some points, in
response to those raised.
A pity that poet Joi Barrios’ intended letter-to-the-editor didn’t see
print. Not sure she did send it, but it got first play on the Internet.
Basically, Joi took umbrage over my apparently reckless endangerment of
Bien Lumbera’s person, given the recent crackdown on perceived enemies of
the state.
I’d like to make this clear. I didn’t label Bien a communist.
Even if he
were, which I don’t know, nothing wrong there. It’s legal to be a commie
in this country. In any case, I’m not into that sort of vintage labeling.
What I more than inferred, and decried, was the “nationalist” posturing
(being careful now to employ quotation marks, as an indication of both
eyebrows raised) of his fan base.
The passages in my column that quoted what I’ve heard in beerhouses and
then some (about “communist candidate” and nothing really memorable in his
works, something like that) were meant to add some flavor of reportage. Oh
yeah? What kind of reportage is that when it doesn’t identify the
speakers? Tsismis reportage, that’s what. Hearsay, firsthand.
No need to reveal the identities of those from whose lips I heard those
views, to which I must confess a level of tacit agreement on my part.
But Joi may have been in her rights to raise the alarm. As for
“red-baiting,” no, I assured her by SMS, I’m not into that either. Just as
I don’t have “patrons” whose desires or policies I could’ve been carrying
out. Why, I don’t even dislike communists. What I didn’t text Joi was that
I found them rather funny at best.
The Left, with its wide gamut of ideological predilections, I
respect as a
whole, albeit not entire. I told Joi that I’m with her and “them” when it
comes to mounting any civil struggle against the “pang-gigiit” against
Reps. Beltran, Ocampo and company.
Okey naman kami ni Joi matapos ng mahabang diyalogo sa
selfon. Sa wari ko.
She said I better clarify all of that. I agreed. So here it is: I wasn’t
red-baiting — which would be an even funnier proposition than any
perceived goals of the intended prey. And I’m not a Commie-hater, since
hardly any gander gets up to ever replace bemusement.
As for the reported comments on Bien’s candidacy for the
National Artist
award, to relate these to any Commie witchhunt was a stretch, I thought.
Maybe I’m not given to paranoia where I sit or stand. But if it alarms
friends and colleagues alike, then I regret having included those remarks.
What I found admirable in Joi’s heartfelt communication, in
private, was
her loyalty to her mentor Bien, whose influence she acknowledges with
great appreciation. In gist, she said she couldn’t allow anyone to attack
Bien and get away with it.
Again, I assured her I hadn’t been on attack mode. It was her rejoinder
that was “banat,” I said, before adding facetious remarks like “buti na
lang banat na’ng mukha ko” — to which she replied something about “Botox.”
And that’s how our SMS dialectics ended.

Next came a diatribe from Gary Devilles of Ateneo something or other, in
very angry Filipino. I can’t comment on his protest over what I wrote on
the National Artist awards, as I sense from his language that he’s so used
to denounce anything in high dudgeon. Aba’y palengkero daw ako, eh siya
yung nag-gagalaiti at halos makita na’ng tumiklop ang mga litid sa leeg.
Rosario “Chari” Lucero’s letter, published in this space last
week, I can
appreciate for its relative elegance and elements of humor, irony, sarcasm
and hyperbole. The valid points raised are marred somewhat by academically
liberal — in more ways than one — leaps of deconstruction. I never equated
“nationalist” with “communist.” That inference she made on her own.
Neither have I ever put myself “forth as a spokesperson for Philippine
literature.” Maybe for beerhouses, even as I favor whisky.
I agree that Dr. Lumbera enjoys a “primary position”
in “Philippine culture and literature.” Never mind the academic “canon”
to the left and right of us. Her proposal to thresh out matters of
literary evaluation in a conference would be welcome had it not betrayed
unfair terms of engagement, as well an assumption that a rep from the lush
life can’t partake of an educated exchange.
Jonathan Chua was most civil, for which I am thankful. He too
raised valid
points that can be properly addressed, most soberly indeed. He credits Dr.
Lumbera with having co-pioneered the “Bagay” poetry movement together with
the multi-genre genius Rolando Tinio. All I know, in my semi-illiteracy,
is that some lines of Tinio’s “Valedictory sa Hillcrest” are still recited
from memory by lushes like myself. I’m sorry, but I can’t recall a single
poem title by Bien. True, he still qualifies as an artist, because he has
written exemplary librettos, some early poetry, and voluminous critical
work.
I don’t dismiss all that. Bien deserves to be a National
Artist all right,
but for his art and not for his perceived “nationalism.” (More on this
later.) What I maintain is that if the choice should be between Cirilo
Bautista’s and Bienvenido Lumbera’s totality of artistic merits, the
former would undoubtedly be more formidable. Bien has been a
scholar-critic more than a literary artist. But his lifework and influence
have also been formidable, for which he also deserves the highest award
imaginable. And yet, to my mind, not over Cirilo. The problem, as I saw
it, is that ideological accommodation played a part in the choice.

I would’ve been very surprised if Paolo Manalo hadn’t joined the Internet
critics. This fellow has long had it in for me, for reasons we both know
but which would be irrelevant to mention here. I just wish that as
literary editor of Philippines Free Press, Manalo makes a better effort at
ensuring that contributors receive their fees, for it is a more
fundamental responsibility than writing precipitate poetics.
Reuel Aguila was right. I made dabog. Naiintindihan ko rin
kung saan siya
nanggagaling. Nirerespeto ko ang kanyang kakayahan at mga akda, at ang
bunga ng kanyang batikos ay isa na rin sa aking pinagsisisihan. Hindi ko
naman gustong makipag-away sa mga Filipinista. Dapat nga tayong
magtulungan.
As expected, the most sophisticated and enlightening take on
the brouhaha
has been Adrian Cristobal’s. He intelligently takes me to task, but seems
to exonerate me even before he engages in subtle excoriation. Whee! And I
can only agree with his closure:
“We should judge writers by their works alone, lest we
consider Ezra Pound
and Carlos Bulosan to be bad writers because one was a fascist and the
other a communist.
“That risk belongs to the philistine. May their tribe decrease!”
Others have joined the fray in strange ways, like e-mail-baiting in
private and then sharing the exchange in public, while masking themselves
with pseudo-addy-nyms. Oh, well. Blithe as blithe goes, to each his
perverse pleasure.

Now, for more provocation, possibly, owing to the sensitivity that has
only led to token politeness, and, well, tokenism.
But let’s get “nationalism” out of the way muna. The reason I
place that
term within quotation marks is that I find the manner in which it is
commonly claimed credit for as unbearably proprietary. The trouble with
“nationalists” is that they love to proclaim themselves as such, as if
everyone else who doesn’t cannot be a nationalist.
It’s become a matter of seething too much, denouncing too much, bearing
too much of a humongous chip on the shoulder for too long, while taking
too much credit for being the only lovers of country.
I agree with Jimmy Abad. (I hope his letter to the editor appears
somewhere on this page.) There’s no monopoly on nationalism, which is not
gauged by the language one uses or where one lives. I love our country for
all its faults, our faults, and our own brand of occasional idiocy. But I
do not have to proclaim myself a “nationalist” to the exclusion of most
everyone else. And I’m tired of having to walk on eggshells due to PC
awareness of sensitivity.
Ma. Luisa Igloria, recent winner of the highly prestigious Stephen Dunn
Award for Poetry, is no less of a nationalist for writing in English, let
alone for choosing to teach literature out there in Virginia, USA. By the
by, she competes in a much larger, more challenging arena. And yet she
does us all proud with her Filipino poetry in English. Heck, make that
poetry, period.
When Eric Gamalinda gets a story accepted by Harper’s, it’s
an honor for
all Filipinos, whether they write in Filipino, English, or Spanish. Heck,
whether they write at all.
I am not advocating that we all write in English. I try to write in
Filipino, but am better trained in English, as was most of my generation
that grew up in Manila. Let us strengthen Filipino, and all other
languages in our regions. Let us not however equate writing in Filipino
(or Tagalog), or favoring the writing of Filipino (or Tagalog), with
stronger or more authentic nationalism.
The demographics alone are against that sort of reckoning. We
still have
more Cebuano speakers. Ilocano writers write in Ilocano, Ilonggos in
Ilonggo or Hiligaynon, Bicolanos in Bicolano. Sure, there are exceptions:
a few Ilocanos, Ilonggos and Bicolanos write or also write in Filipino.
But more of the same can and do write in English.
Contrary to doomsayers for English literary use at the height of the
bilingualism debate of the ’70s, greater numbers of Filipino poets and
writers are writing in English, I believe so much more than the increasing
numbers of writers in Filipino. That’s because Filipinos outside the
Tagalog region have not yet reached any proficiency in Filipino. Someday
it’ll happen, when the electronic media — radio, TV and film — manage to
eventually improve that proficiency.
For now, there are hardly any venues for literature in Filipino. Hardly
anyone even engages in travel writing in Filipino, or creative non-fiction
in Filipino. Which is not saying that it’s an inferior language. It’s just
younger than major literary languages of the world.
When a Filipino writes in English, he necessarily takes on a tougher
challenge — that of participation in the continuing evolution of a
language that has been used for centuries, by the likes of Chaucer and
Shakespeare and Oliver Wendell Holmes and Salman Rushdie and Michael
Ondaatje.
When a Filipino writes in Filipino, yes, he is writing in the
language of
his blood, and yet — and this is no invidious comparison — he is
upholding, enhancing and reinventing a much younger tradition that “only”
goes back to Balagtas and Lazaro Francisco and Amado Hernandez and
Virgilio Almario.
When Cirilo Bautista writes in English, he vies against the
standards of
excellence that continue to be set in that yet dynamic language. When
Bienvenido Lumbera champions Filipino literature almost to the exclusion
of the merits gained by Filipinos in literary English, I believe he does a
bit of disservice to scholarship and criticism.

Three years ago, I formally argued for a National Artist award for
Virgilio Almario because I believed in the total creative worth of his
literature in Filipino. I even said it was high time another NA award went
to a writer in Filipino, after Amado Hernandez. I would have argued the
same for Dr. Lumbera, but not at the expense of Dr. Bautista.
Of course all this has been moot, even when I first wrote on the matter
(which is why Reuel is right in saying na nagdabog lang si ako) — given
the fact that Lumbera was already chosen as the sole finalist for
Literature. Even as this is being written, he could well be on his way to
gaining the award. I cannot begrudge him or any other writer or Lotto
winner any prize.
On an aside, as I texted Jonathan, bigyan naman sana ko ng
konsiderasyon
na sa tanda kong ito, alam ko namang ang nakikitang pagbatikos ko kay Bien
ay malamang na mag-garantiya na maging NA nga siya. Alam naman natin ang
sikolohiyang bumabalot sa mga nagdedesisyon.
No claiming of any credit, however, in hindsight or with
foresight. I just
had to say what I believed in, maybe because I have the guts, or chutzpah,
or moxie, or apog. Na magdabog.
But again, at the risk of offending sensibilities, even those of my
ka-barkadang mga Filipinista, uulitin ko ang aking paniniwala na mas
mahigpit pa rin ang hamon ng pagsusulat sa Ingles. Kayat ang dapat ay
galingan pa ang pagsulat sa Filipino. Mas madaling mangyari ito kung
ilalapag na lang muna ang bagahe ng ideolohiya.
Sa ganun ay dadami ang magsusulat ng mga kaakit-akit na kakaibang mga
tula tulad ng mga gawa ni Freddie Salanga, Pete Lacaba, RayVi Sunico, Beni
Santos at Allan Popa — na siyang mga aral din sa Ingles at nagamit ang
kanilang natutunan dito. O mga akdang pang-awit tulad ng mga hinahangaan
natin mula kina Heber Bartolome at Joey Ayala — at panibagong hinahangaan
kong si Israfel Fagela ng sisikat na bandang Los Chupacabras.
To my calumnists, please understand that not everyone can
have a regular
newspaper column. Some of us are asked to fulfill the role. I try to
popularize literature, mostly Philippine — more often those in English
because there are more works in English. I am not a critic but a reviewer
and a tsismoso. I also try to be light, which is why I dub someone like
the young Angelo Suarez “the Kobe Bryant of Philippine Literature.” Sorry
if I can’t similarly laud efforts to tack on to a topical-trendy term like
“jologs” for perishable poetry.
I am so sorry to Bien and Shayne for the hurt I caused.
Couldn’t help it;
it couldn’t be helped.
Let me end with gravity and flippancy: two sides of the same coin of
eloquence (ahem). “The language of nationalism is in the heart, while the
art of literature is in the mastery of universal craft.” That is mine.
“Thanks for the intellectual discussion. It’s always hard to defend a
losing argument. But you did a decent job of it.” — From the Cleveland
Cavaliers message boards, and which we’re all free to say to one another.

* * *


The Editor,
Philippine Star

Letter to the Editor


National / Nationalist Artist Award

I’ve been mentioned in Alfred A. Yuson’s column and in Joi Barrios’
response to it. I wish to contribute a thought on the matter.
All Filipino writers in whatever language are nationalists,
unless it can
be proved beyond reasonable doubt that, following the definition of
“nationalism” in the document on National Artist Awards, a writer does NOT
“promote national cultural identity and the dignity of the Filipino people
through the content and form of their works.” As Sir Walter Scott has so
well put it, “Breathes there the man with soul so dead, / Who never to
himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!” I believe that
“nationalism” is what is meant by the word “National” in the title of the
Awards.
Yet “nationalism,” as defined for the Awards, is hardly an artistic
criterion. There are many nationalists who, not being writers or artists,
cannot be given the Award. The key word is Artist. The Award then is to be
conferred on the sole ground of a nominee’s inimitable achievement in Art
as a rich and distinctive contribution to our national cultural heritage.
In that light, if by literature as Art we mean “literary
works” or “works
of imagination” (poetry, fiction, drama), I believe Cirilo F. Bautista
fully deserves the National Artist Award in Literature. Since 1963 to the
very present, he has wrought a considerable body of works in Literature,
in English and in Tagalog-Filipino – epic and lyric poetry, the short
story, the novel – all of exceptional worth and quality. I make no
invidious comparisons. I only insist on Art and artistic merit.
Incidentally, I cannot see why, in a given year for the
Awards, there may
not be two or even three, National Artists in one or the other artistic
field. On artistic merit alone is the decision based, not on budgetary
allotment.

Gémino H. Abad
U.P. Department of English
March 22, 2006

The Twilight of Objectivity

How opinion journalism could change the face of the news.
By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, March 31, 2006, at 6:08 AM ET


CNN says it is just thrilled by the transformation of Lou Dobbs—formerly a
mild-mannered news anchor noted for his palsy-walsy interviews with
corporate CEOs—into a raving populist xenophobe. Ratings are up. It's like
watching one of those "makeover" shows that turn nerds into fops or
bathrooms into ballrooms. According to the New York Times, this demonstrates
"that what works in cable television news is not an objective analysis of
the day's events," but "a specific point of view on a sizzling-hot topic."
Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia Journalism School, made the same point in
a recent New Yorker profile of Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Cable, Lemann wrote,
"is increasingly a medium of outsize, super-opinionated franchise
personalities."

The head of CNN/US, Jonathan Klein, told the Times that Lou Dobbs' license
to emote is "sui generis" among CNN anchors, but that is obviously not true.
Consider Anderson Cooper, CNN's rising star. His career was made when he
exploded in self-righteous anger while interviewing Louisiana Sen. Mary
Landrieu after Hurricane Katrina and gave her an emotional tongue-lashing
over the inadequacy of the relief effort. Klein said Cooper has "that
magical something … a refreshing way of being the anti-anchor … getting
involved the way you might." In short, he's acting like a human being,
albeit a somewhat overwrought one. And now on CNN and elsewhere you can see
other anchors struggling to act like human beings, with varying degrees of
success.

Klein is a man who goes with the flow. Only five months before anointing
Cooper CNN's new messiah (nothing human is alien to Anderson Cooper; nothing
alien is human to Lou Dobbs), he killed CNN's long-running debate show
Crossfire, on the grounds that viewers wanted information and not opinions.
He said he agreed "wholeheartedly" with Jon Stewart's widely discussed and
uncharacteristically stuffy remark that Crossfire and similar shows were
"hurting America" with their occasionally raucous displays of emotional
commitment to a political point of view.


But that's just a personal gripe (I worked at Crossfire for six years),
easily resolved by a slavish apology. More important is that Klein is right
in sensing, on second thought, that objectivity is not a horse to bet the
network on. Or the newspaper, either. The newspaper industry is in the midst
of a psychic meltdown over the threat posed by the Internet. Internet panic
is a rolling contagion among the established media. It started with
newspapers, now it's spreading to magazines, and within a year book
publishers will be in one of their recurring solipsistic frenzies.

No one seriously doubts anymore that the Internet will fundamentally change
the news business. The uncertainty is whether it will only change the method
of delivering the product, or whether it will change the nature of the
product as well. Will people want, in any form—and will they pay for—a
collection of articles, written by professional journalists from a detached
and purportedly objective point of view? The television industry is panicky
as well. Will anyone sit through a half-hour newscast invented back when
everyone had to watch the same thing at the same time? Or are blogs and
podcasts the cutting edge of a new model for both print and video—more
personalized, more interactive, more opinionated, more communal, less
objective?

Objectivity—the faith professed by American journalism and by its critics—is
less an ideal than a conceit. It's not that all journalists are secretly
biased, or even that perfect objectivity is an admirable but unachievable
goal. In fact, most reporters work hard to be objective and the best come
very close. The trouble is that objectivity is a muddled concept. Many of
the world's most highly opinionated people believe with a passion that it is
wrong for reporters to have any opinions at all about what they cover. These
critics are people who could shed their own skins more easily than they
could shed their opinions. But they expect it of journalists. It can't be
done. Journalists who claim to have developed no opinions about what they
cover are either lying or deeply incurious and unreflective about the world
around them. In either case, they might be happier in another line of work.

Or perhaps objectivity is supposed to be a shimmering, unreachable
destination, but the journey itself is purifying, as you mentally pick up
your biases and put them aside, one-by-one. Is that the idea? It has a
pleasing, Buddhist flavor. But that's no substitute for sense. Nobody
believes in objectivity, if that means neutrality on any question about
which two people somewhere on the planet might disagree. May a reporter take
as a given that two plus two is four? Should a newspaper strive to be
open-minded about Osama Bin Laden? To reveal—to have!—no preference between
the United States and Iran? Is it permissible for a news story to take as a
given that the Holocaust not only happened, but was a bad thing—or is that
an expression of opinion that belongs on the op-ed page? Even those who
think objectivity can be turned on and off like a light switch don't want it
switched on all the time. But short of that, there is no objective answer to
when the switch needs to be on and when it can safely be turned off.

Would it be the end of the world if American newspapers abandoned the cult
of objectivity? In intellectual fields other than journalism, the notion of
an objective reality that words are capable of describing has been going
ever more deeply out of fashion for decades. Maybe it doesn't matter what
linguists think. But even within journalism, there are reassuring models of
what a post-objective press might look like.

Most of the world's newspapers, in fact, already make no pretense of
anything close to objectivity in the American sense. But readers of the good
ones (such as the Guardian or Financial Times of London, to name the most
obvious English-language examples) come away as well-informed as the readers
of any "objective" American newspaper. Another model, right here in America,
is the newsmagazine. Time long ago abandoned the extreme partisanship and
arch style of its founder, Henry Luce, but all the newsmags produce
outstanding journalism with little pretense to objectivity.

Opinion journalism can be more honest than objective-style journalism
because it doesn't have to hide its point of view. It doesn't have to follow
a trail of evidence or line of reasoning until one step before the
conclusion and then slam on the brakes for fear of falling into the gulch of
subjectivity. All observations are subjective. Writers freed of artificial
objectivity can try to determine the whole truth about their subject and
then tell it whole to the world. Their "objective" counterparts have to sort
their subjective observations into two arbitrary piles: truths that are
objective as well, and truths that are just an opinion. That second pile of
truths then gets tossed out, or perhaps put in quotes and attributed to
someone else. That is a common trick used by objective-style journalists in
order to tell their readers what they believe to be true without inciting
the wrath of the Objectivity cops.

Abandoning the pretense of objectivity does not mean abandoning the
journalist's most important obligation, which is factual accuracy. In fact,
the practice of opinion journalism brings additional ethical obligations.
These can be summarized in two words: intellectual honesty. Are you writing
or saying what you really think? Have you tested it against the available
counterarguments? Will you stand by an expressed principle in different
situations, when it leads to an unpleasing conclusion? Are you open to new
evidence or argument that might change your mind? Do you retain at least a
tiny, healthy sliver of a doubt about the argument you choose to make?

Much of today's opinion journalism, especially on TV, is not a great
advertisement for the notion that American journalism could be improved by
more opinion and less effort at objectivity. But that's because the
conditions under which much opinion journalism is practiced today make
honesty harder and doubt practically impossible. Like the mopey vicar in
Evelyn Waugh's novel Decline and Fall, who loses a cushy parish when struck
by a case of "Doubts," TV pundits need to radiate certainty for the sake of
their careers. As Lou Dobbs has demonstrated, this doesn't mean you can't
change your mind, as long as you are as certain in your opinion today as you
were of the opposite opinion a couple of days ago.

But if opinion journalism became the norm, rather than a somewhat
discredited exception to the norm, it might not be so often reduced to a
parody of itself. Unless, of course, I am completely wrong.

Nothing Personal Here

Paolo Manalo reacts to Yuson's 2nd column.

Original entry here.

I've been a busy fellow at the 45th UP National Writers Workshop but thanks to e-mails and text messages, it was hard not to miss "A Language for Nationalism?", Alfred Yuson's reply to the various responses to his recent rant.

In this recent column Yuson wrote: "I would've been very surprised if Paolo Manalo hadn't
joined the Internet critics. This fellow has long had it in for me, for reasons we both know
but which would be irrelevant to mention here. I just wish that as literary editor of Philippines Free Press, Manalo makes a better effort at ensuring that contributors receive their fees, for it is a more fundamental responsibility than writing precipitate poetics."

For those who keep asking, sorry but I do not "have it in" for Alfred Yuson. If we go back
to my response, I was soberly objecting to: 1) Ian Casocot's reaction; 2) the binary oppositions in Philippine literature that Yuson's column was suggesting; and 3) the ad hominem statements and name dropping that Yuson practices in his column.

And that's that.

(via Plaridel Papers)