Monday, February 18, 2008 Amante: Jun Lozada meets Walter Lippmann By Isolde D. Amante
AT LEAST thrice last week, the witness Rodolfo “Jun” Lozada Jr. commented about his appearance—his thinning hair, particularly, and his simple clothes. It seemed to be an attempt to point out how ordinary a life he leads compared to the powerful men and women he now accuses of corruption in the aborted national broadband deal.
On Saturday night, resigned elections commission chairman Benjamin Abalos visibly bristled when Lozada apologized for appearing (in the ABS-CBN show “Harapan”) in a plain white T-shirt, while Abalos and his lawyer were decked out in their Barong Tagalog. “Even at home, I am never seen in public in just my undershirt,” Abalos huffed. Lozada’s apology was pointed. He didn’t mean to poke fun at Abalos, he said, but neither did he mean to cause offense by wearing such humble threads. “Matagal na po kasi akong hindi nakakauwi (I haven’t been able to go home for a long time),” he said.
Like most of you, I have not met Lozada. What I know of him comes from the broadsheets, the blog entries for or against him, his appearances in the Senate. Yet even as I remind myself to suspend judgment until the facts are in, I cannot help but feel sympathy for the man. His family’s life and livelihood upended by the controversy, Lozada faces a future more uncertain than that of the other protagonists in the NBN-ZTE deal.
What’s at play here are what, eight decades ago, the journalist Walter Lippmann called “the pictures in our heads.” These are composites of the words and images we obtain about our political leaders, colored by our experiences, stereotypes and opinions. My “mental picture” of Abalos, for instance, will always be marked by his disastrous turn at the Commission on Elections.
My “mental picture” of presidential spouse Jose Miguel Arroyo is hardly any better. It depends largely on what I remember of the transcripts of the “Hello, Garci” tapes, his tendency to sue journalists who dare question his role in public transactions and his apparent fondness for sharing the stage with boxing champions.
I know how limited these “mental pictures” are and remind myself to be open to revising them, in the light of new evidence. Our access to the facts, wrote Lippmann, is limited by many things, among them “the distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages, the difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world, and finally the fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men’s lives.”
The Pulitzer Prize winner’s proposed remedy was “an independent, expert organization for making the unseen facts intelligible.” (He didn’t mean the press, either.) Accosted by a screaming rallyist, the former socioeconomic planning secretary Romulo Neri said, “There is more to the truth than what’s being made to appear.”
That’s the obvious part. What’s frustrating is the executive department’s refusal to make public the facts and to take cover instead behind the same old bogeys of destabilization or assassination plots.
It used to be enough for the state to allow access to the information it held. Not anymore. A greater demand for transparency has redefined the right to information, so that it now includes a duty among governments to collect new information and to publish it. As long as that duty stays undelivered, public appearances and “the pictures in our heads” are the sand on which public opinions are built.
(Let’s talk: isolde.amante@gmail.com or http://peryodistang-pinay.blogspot.com)
