Lazy Start-Up Commentating for 2009, Part II: The Pangandaman/ Dela Paz Issue -- some more thoughts on it

In the previous post (written rather messily, having been under the influence of drowsiness), I tried to tie together some thoughts (and admittedly, very messily) on the issue of the still-hot Delpazandaman golfing/mauling incident.

To a certain degree, it seems that the issue is beginning to die down in cyberspace. It looks as if the blogosphere is now paying more attention to other matters.

Shades of ningas-cogon? I don't know... although I'm certain that other bloggers have decided to do so in keeping with their own personal preferences.

That said, I'm going to ramble a bit more on the Delapazandaman issue, in terms of things I've observed, read, and heard.

***
On quite a number of blog post comments and forum threads, there's been some who have taken a rather racist point of view. Consider this comment found in a Filipino Voices post:

Culture yan ng mga Maranao, pati na ng mga Maguindanao at Tausug, talagang marahas sila. Laging may baril at patayan ang labanan. Bakit ba di umaasenso ang Mindanao? Kasi naman mga corrupt mga politicians dyan. At talaga namang puro sila kunsintidor. Matatapang lang naman dahil santambak ang bodyguards na puro may baril pa.

The racism is not one-sided, however. Here's another comment found in another post:

It is not a surprise the way muslim in the Philippines act. Normal sa Mindanao yan and if you cross their path. Patay ka. That is the way life is in the philippines and sila pa yung victim. hooraayyy filipino muslim!!!

In this issue, I've taken the position that the ethnicity and religious belief of the parties are irrelevant, and thus was pissed off by both these parties. Thinking a bit more about it later, I wondered -- could it be that ethnocentric biases be part of the fuel in this fire?

Perhaps there could be. Even among those I've known personally for years, I've heard people quite unashamedly express their dislike for people who are of the Muslim faith or are of Mindanaoan descent, taking the view that such people are naturally, well, bad. Conversely, I've heard people who call themselves Muslims say rather derogatory stuff about people who do not belong to their faith and community, simply because these people are not members of their faith and community; more than that, there seems to be an automatic assumption that such people do not like Muslims, and that quite a number of them believe that one automatically distrusts and dislikes Muslim Filipinos simply because one is a non-Muslim Filipino.

There's the bias on one side, and there's the bias and defensive attitude on the other. Rather unfortunate, I'm sure many will agree.

However, I am glad that very few people in the blogs I've read encourage these behaviors; more to the point, I am very happy that there are a lot of bloggers who are likewise angry at folks who do. Here's a comment on another Filipino Voices post:

This is not an issue between Muslims and Christians, but it was becoming due to irresponsible comments from others. Kawawa talaga Pinoy, imbes na makatulong nakakagulo pa lalo. Why don’t we just pray for justice be serve(d) to those who deserve the verdict, and our country be in peace. Humility should prevail not only during EID or CHRISTMAS seasons.

Don't we wish. Well, if wishes were bicycles, we wouldn't need a Clean Air Act.

If anything, I hope that bloggers learn to help fight the negativity of the biases and prejudices reflected in and propagated by such comments.

Yes, fellow members of the Pinoy niche of cyberspace, this is something we should watch out for.

***
But on to the cases themselves. Now that the both parties have filed their cases in court, how will the cases go?

Here's how I think it will all boil down to (opinion of someone interested in law but not practicing, of course):

- Whether or not the Dela Pazes instigated the fight, the Pangandamans used too much force to repel the alleged attack, so that the legal defense of self-defense will probably not be appreciated.

- Having beaten up a minor (and with all evidence unequivocal), the Pangandamans will have to face child abuse charges. The charge of child abuse against the Dela Pazes will be harder to prove.

- The charges of threats by both sides would be a matter for each to try and prove, but yet again with the Pangandamans being men in power as well as having bodyguards, it will be less difficult on the part of the Dela Pazes.

At the end of the day, of course, we will continue to wonder whether or not the administration will exert some influence such that the cases will be won in one form or another by the Pangandamans.

Sucker bet? Mm-hm.

***
Related on the court battle and the war for public opinion, in his post entitled Impunity, Manolo predicted this scenario:

So we have here a clear clash of civilizations: between the entitlement and warlord culture of the provinces, which compels obedience by force, and which doesn’t hesitate to use that force to compel submission by anyone who isn’t part of the ruling clan’s pecking order of enforcers; and the national capital culture which expects self-control of officialdom, which doesn’t think twice about standing up to official bullying; which, even if beaten to a pulp thinks it’s possible to rally support from like-minded people who actually believe in justice and notions of equality -because there are more decent people than the bad.

Still another irony is that People Power is now being mobilized -its first stirrings being the sharing of officially embarrassing news, the stoking of popular outrage, the expression of public opinion, the coming together of a constituency mobilized by shared values- among the sort of people who’d shrugged off so many other acts of official impunity. There is a lesson here somewhere: and it’s a simple one. Impunity eventually sows the seeds of its own destruction. There will always come a time when a line will be crossed, and it’s a line too far.

Which is not to say that this incident will cause a revolution; but it is proof of how reality will always intrude into even the politest of conversations.

The coming year is going to be a showdown, of sorts, between the exponents of the culture of impunity, from the President to her allies on the official and local level. It is a showdown between those who furiously resent a political culture where public opinion matters, where impunity is challenged, and where privilege is supposed to be something subjected to questioning.

...

My point is we see this impunity all the time, in small ways, and shrug it off -oddly enough, in the same manner we shrug off the big, spectacular, cases of impunity, too- when we ought to start tying it all together.

And their project next year is to basically abolish public opinion; to reduce it to its component local parts, where public opinion has been muted, and where it can be treated in such a way and such a manner as to be beyond questioning, court cases, heckling, letters to the editor or blog entries demanding resignations: because the trump card of an official when it comes to the provinces is the message every bodyguard represents: you can run, but you can’t hide.

Whether or not the the ending of the court cases will be predictable -- in so far as the Pangandamans having access to the rarefied corridors of power -- public opinion is something that they no longer will be able to harness. Public opinion, that is, in the realm of the urban and connected.

Having been able to harness early on the blogosphere, the Dela Pazes have enjoyed the high ground, with the Pangandamans sufficiently beaten down. With the Dela Pazes having some understanding of the vagaries of the blogosphere, and with the Pangandamans relying on the old methods of attempting to shape public opinion, the result was a flat-out rejection of the Pangandamans, even after some rather damaging "evidence" was brought out against the Dela Pazes' account.

In his column, veteran journalist Amado Doronila puts forward a decidedly insightful take on it, one even more insightful coming from one who is quite possibly less techie than the current crop of mainstream media practitioners today:

The force that has intervened to influence public opinion on the side of powerless victims of violence and injustice is a new element feeding on the swiftness and untrammeled flow of information facilitated by the Internet. It cannot be censored by authorities just as the Xerox machine could not be censored by dictatorial regimes of the 1970s who felt challenged by the duplicating machines and not by the bulky printing presses used by independent papers to denounce regimes and their abuses.

Media studies have identified the blog, a creature of the Internet, as an instrument of what is called “interactive journalism” or “citizens’ journalism,” in which eyewitnesses of events write their own reports without formal accreditation as members of the institutionalized media organizations. This is what media studies call grassroots journalism with basic citizen participation, feeding the votaries of information with a variety of sources and perspectives. This approach has superseded the structured reports of the traditional reporter and news story seeking to describe all angles under the two-witness corroboration rule. This is the approach and the elemental dynamic of Internet-based journalism that the Pangandamans and people in public authority are contending with. It has been harnessed by the bloggers.

Harnessed, yes, but there was no concerted effort to do so -- it just happened that way. This is why I'd venture to caution Carlos Conde's call to action, where he says:

Now, for Bambee and her supporters, the inevitable question arises: Is this it? We have demonstrated that we have so much power as bloggers, and is this it? What next?

The thing about blogging is that it is so personal that whatever you post on your blog naturally flows from your experiences. So one moment you raise hell about the arrogance of those in power and, the next, you wonder aloud why the lip gloss you just bought doesn’t seem to have enough sheen. Truth be told, movements like Bambee’s are few and far between. Much of the blogosphere is inundated with stuff that are irrelevant, inconsequential and, well, personal. Then again, as I pointed out above, that is the original nature of blogging.

The key word is “original” because, as we’ve seen, blogging is evolving. Blogging today is much different from blogging four or five years ago. Five years ago, blogs are like Twitter today: the medium is there and you’re still figuring out how to use it, so you publish just about anything, such as the crappy movie you and your girlfriend are watching or the hot chick you are ogling at the supermarket counter. These tell a thing or two about you or what you are doing but, in the larger scheme of things, they are meaningless and irrelevant. But is this all that we can do with a medium so evidently powerful?

Today, blogging, apart from being both a narcissistic and cathartic exercise of self-expression among millions, is a potent information tool. News organizations use it to complement their journalism (take note: complement, not supplant). Activists use it to promote their cause. Victims use it to right a wrong.

I guess what I’m saying is that bloggers like Bambee can – and should – use their newfound power and influence to right the wrongs done on other people. And, by God, there is so much injustice being committed out there! Yet, except in the circles of activists and human-rights advocates, I have not seen the same level of outrage in the blogosphere over the disappearance of Jonas Burgos, of Karen Empeno and Sherlyn Cadapan, of the atrocity done to Remegio Saladero Jr. and the hundreds of human-rights victims in the Philippines as we have witnessed in the Pangandaman incident.

A post thanking your multitude of supporters is nice but not quite enough. Bloggers who benefited from the power of blogging to correct the injustice done to them have a duty, I believe, to pay society back. And the only way I can think of is for them to raise hell, too, about the injustice done to other people, particularly the oppressed ones – those who are too poor and marginalized to even own a computer, let alone know that there is such a thing as a blog.

with his own words, Conde must have been able to recognize what is probably the primary reason why these and other similar issues have not been top-of-mind for the average blogger (I say this, of course, hoping for slack from folks like Shari, the Filipino Voices crew, Noemi, among others, who have written about similar stuff).

Conde said this: "Blogging is, by its very nature, a personal medium. This is why bloggers tend to write much more forcefully about an injustice if it hits them on a personal level, as it did the dela Pazes." This is quite possibly why the issues Conde mentioned have yet to be top of mind.

For the issue and condemnation of an injustice to become viral in the blogosphere, because of the nature of cyberspace, I would guess that it should have the following characteristics:

- The issue must be something that the general online public can readily identify with; more or less the immediate belief that "that could've been me."

- The issue must be something that the general online public can readily empathize with, along the lines of "yeah, I'd probably have done the same thing, if it were me."

- The issue must be something that strikes the general online public on an emotional, even visceral, level. It must be something that they FEEL, as having to THINK it over gives pause, and that pause can and does eventually lead to the blogger writing about something else.

- The initial posts must be SEO and SERPS-friendly, as well as link and copy-paste friendly. There is no getting around the technical nature of the blogosphere. No matter how strong is the political or social nature of the stand you take, objective conditions are at work that can prevent your posts going viral.

Not that Conde is wrong, of course. We as bloggers do have some sort of responsibility to the general online public and our readership to disseminate information that mainstream media cannot or does not cover or continue to cover. I would guess that this responsibility is tempered by our personal beliefs and principles.

Or, more cynically, our personal levels of interest in such matters. Even bloggers can get tired of writing in support of causes -- it's sad, yes, but it's human nature. Remember how the Cris Mendez killing issue petered out eventually, even in the blogosphere?

Just like that. 'Nuff said.

***
Later, folks. I've other stuff to deal with today.



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