The next selections are from
his column in the Philippines Herald.
This column appeared thrice
weekly, from February to June 1972. Some of the events he wrote about then
seem remote today - the antics of the Constitutional Convention,
the Vietnam war, some of his betes noires - Imelda Marcos,
Kit Tatad - are still very much around. Some essays have a
somber, even poignant, tone; most reflect the impish glee with which Gerry
punctured the more mindless pronouncements of high officialdom.
The columns written in the
Standard
weekly
magazine from 1992 to 1994 seem fresher and less dated than those of the
Herald 20 years earlier. This is due in part to the fact that when
"Methinks" comments on the current scene, that scene is obviously more
recent; in part it is because Gerry felt freer to write columns about matters
somewhat farther removed from the day's headlines, which were adequately
covered in his editorials. The editorials, more serious and weighty, were
marvels of construction, clarity, and phrasing. The columns had all of
the latter, plus a bit more whimsy and wordplay.
In between Gerry's Herald
columns
and his Standard columns in this book are his letters to the
editor, written in the mid-eighties, when the Philippine press had
begun to show signs of life again, after the tameness and insipidity induced
by martial law.
He was teaching at the time
at UP, Ateneo, and the Asian Institute of Journalism, and was not employed
by any newspaper. I imagine he wanted to test the waters. So he fired off
letter after letter to Veritas, Malaya, Mr. & Ms. Special Edition,
the Daily Inquirer, and so on.
Danny Gil has analyzed the
computer disks and determined that Gerry wrote over 300 letters from November
1984 to May 1986 when he accepted an editing job in Hong Kong. But he didn't
just compose letters; he created personas for their authors. Gerry wrote
under 42 different pseudonyms. Some he used just once or twice; others
20 times or more. In Danny's analysis some writers had personalities as
distinct as their signatures.
Alice Moranas and Jordan
0. Dy were at UP in the fifties. Belinda Mojica was an Ortanez student
who wrote poor and bombastic English. Benjamin Lozada was a stickler for
journalistic ethics. Carlota Salvador was a public high school teacher.
Donald Villablanca used to live in Honolulu. J. Pedrosa Ramas was scholarly
and Wilson G. Abaya was sportsminded. Quirino Torres was a lecturer in
computer science, quite philosophical. Peria Gosingco was playful. And
Rosemarie Abundo defended Jolly Benitez. (Some of Gerry's friends will
recognize certain pseudonyms, like Franklin Tan and Delano Drilon, as inspired
by their own names. Benjy Lozare taught at UP Mass Comm. Salvador Carlota
was Gerry's dormmate and Juan Pedroza Ramos was UPSCA president in 1960.
Margie Gosingco Holmes was Gerry's student and Romy Abundo was a colleague
at the Press Foundation. Hernando J. Abaya, it will be recalled, sued Gerry
for libel.)
The comic potential inherent
in this elaborate setup is not always realized. The majority of Gerry's
letters went unpublished. Those that were sometimes suffer, from the perspective
of a decade later, from topicality and being dated, and from the kind of
enforced brevity that a letter writer must impose upon himself. The editorial
writer or columnist has a certain space to fill up, but can pretty much
choose his topic. The letter writer competes with others of his ilk for
a few column inches of space, dares not write about matters too distant
from the current scene for fear of not being usable, and has to make his
point as quickly as possible, without the depth and amplification afforded
to the columnist or editorialist.
Still a good number of Gerry's
letters - some brash and flippant, some pensive and philosophical, some
indignant, some mocking - are, like the rest of his output, delightful
reading. And if the whole setup was in part joke and elaborate hoax, Rosemarie
Abundo was the punchline.
Gerry's letters heaped scorn
on many targets: the Marcoses, Jaime Laya, Larry Henares, Blas Ople, BAYAN,
and GABRIELA - but his favorite whipping boy was Jose Conrado Benitez of
the Ministry of Human Settlements. Jolly's and Gerry's friendship went
back a long way; they were schoolmates at Stanford, and Gerry was godfather
to Jolly's son Albee. But Gerry always held the view that the Benitez clan
- not just Jolly - was a pretentious and elitist lot, and that to protect
their privileged status they had kowtowed to power too much. As early as
1972, Gerry's Herald column had ridiculed Jolly's aunt, Senator
Helena Benitez; 13 years later the letters of Alice Moranas, Karla V. Castillo,
Quirino Torres, Carlos Alfaro, and Carlota Salvador resumed the barrage.
But Gerry gave the Benitezes
a defender: Rosemarie Abundo, who hailed the statistics of housing starts
under the Ministry of Human Settlements as Jolly's "solid record of achievement,"
and demanded to know why Helen, of all the Marcos supporters now professing
support for President Aquino, was being singled out as a balimbing.
Then Gerry, writing as Eric
Ferrer, triumphantly exposed Ms. Abundo. She was unknown at her given address,
which was not a residence but a business establishment. False name, false
address? But Rosemarie insisted on the last word. She confessed to the
fraud, but explained her use of a pseudonym: "Much as I may value Dr. Benitez's
reputation, I do not value it highly enough to besmirch my own!" (Her letter
was not published, but it survives in Gerry's computer files.)
The bulk of the selections
in this book are Manila Standard editorials, written while Gerry
was associate editor from late 1989 to mid-1995. This period was the longest
that Gerry stayed with a newspaper, and since he wrote the editorials virtually
every day, it coincided with his largest body of work. As with everything
else, I've been selective, and chosen about ten percent of the total for
republication.
I think it best not to approach
the entire collection as a record of Gerry Gil's weightiest pronouncements,
or as a mirror of his times. I've left out too much; where I had to choose,
due to space limitations, between a judgment on some issue of national
import, and something that stood a better chance of remaining fresh and
readable over time, I consistently opted for the latter. In his valedictory
piece for the Herald, Gerry spelled out a limited objective:
JIMMY S. ONG