MUCH has been written about Juan Mercado, one of the greats of Philippine journalism. And with the end of his earthly sojourn at 94 on the 16th of July this year, it must be said that more needs to be written about him who wrote much because he loved much.
Sir Johnny was a nation’s guardian and memory keeper. He typically combined analytical depth and variegated, credible sourcing with his long, vibrant memory to produce eye-opening development news and high-powered opinion that demanded both accountability from public officials and responsible citizenship.
Scribes across the archipelago recognized that. Publishers and editors-in-chief knew: a Mercado was a premium writeup.
When I entered journalism in 2002, Sir Johnny already was perhaps the most ubiquitous among senior Filipino journalists. His works appeared on the Philippine Star, Philippine Daily Inquirer, Sun.Star Cebu, Cebu Daily News, Bohol Chronicle and Visayan Daily Star, among others.
I had grown up learning from the vigorous, dictionary-draining prose of Myke U. Obenieta, the silvery thought of Mayette Q. Tabada and the lilting, laughing essays of Simeon Dumdum, Jr., who themselves have written for Sun.Star and other papers.
Sir Johnny’s writing was something else, and it was a grace for me to have sub-edited his columns at Cebu Daily News for a few years.
He was a master of crisp and clinical. His word-craft was timeless, lyrical, original. He would use “cribbed” instead of “stolen,” “stack that against,” instead of “compare that with,” or “nub” where others would use “crux” or “main point.”
He was artful with his allusions. He went for “Galilean teacher” or “the Crucified” instead of “Jesus Christ,” rapping shenanigans in power’s corridors with a prophet’s voice rather than a preacher’s pretense.
Sir Johnny knew his poetry.
I miss his columns especially in a month like August, when the solemnity of Our Lady’s being taken up into heaven approaches. Around this time, he would write something about Mary, whom he, like Wordsworth, held as “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”
He would not hesitate to bring the Virgin to bear on topics like solidifying common ground between Muslims and Christians, who venerate her.
Sir Johnny saw much of the world and deep into the Philippines from his eyrie.
He loved the earth. I never found another columnist hammering away at the catastrophe of water shortage and saltwater intrusion into Cebu’s aquifers as passionately as he did.
He loved people and he loved their children. While headlines proclaimed the vagaries of politicos, his words held us all responsible for our little ones — malnourished, stunted, underschooled.
He did more than a million history teachers could have ever done to secure our nation’s collective memory, consistently recalling Associate Justice Cecilia Muñoz Palma’s dissent, from the highest of courts, to the elder Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship and inserting into the canon of historical literature Alfred McCoy’s Dark Legacy, which documents martial rule’s rotten fruits.
And because of his love for truth, Sir Johnny knew our songs as well as he knew poems. He was the crusader who etched this into the Filipino conscious: a Christmas carol, by Vicente Rubi and Mariano Vestil, was the Cebuano Kasadya before it became the Tagalog Ang Pasko ay Sumapit.
I do not know whether his own sense of timing or direct providence decided the date of his last column for Sun.Star: a 27th of December, the feast of his namesake St. John, eagle of the evangelists, Mary’s custodian.
But eternity definitely thundered that rainy 16th of July, when he gave up his soul while the world celebrated the Christ-child of the carols and Lady of Mount Carmel — “our tainted nature’s solitary boast.”