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PRESIDENT Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo is “part of the process” in
the search for truth, says the Catholic Bishops Conference of the
Philippines. So the CBCP refused to join the current secular
campaign for the resignation of the President.
CBCP President Angel Lagdameo, after the CBCP
meeting last Tuesday, said “…we did not ask for resignation.”
The CBCP instead issued a pastoral letter that brings the reality
“that we expect the President to be part of the efforts to seek
reforms to find the proper pathway for our nation to comde to
political reality.”
The letter frustrates the demand by some
business, civic, and church groups and parts of the academe and
leaves former Speaker Jose de Venicia and his favorite religious
backer, the Jesus is Lord Movement, high and dry.
The bishops, in their letter, envision the
participation of the President “in the reforms we have
underlined” and insisted that they did not find sufficient grounds
for the President’s resignation.
But the process of trotting out various
witnesses to the cancelled ZTE-NBN deal continues at the Senate. As
it turned out, Sen. Panfilo Lacson admitted that even before their
national hero, Jun Lozada, skipped out to Hong Kong last month, he
knew he was coming back and was going to testify. In fact, as of
late last year, Senators Lacson and Jamby Madrigal have been meeting
with some of the witnesses testifying before the Senate. As expected
the administration dismissed the testimonies as hearsay.
In our postmodern world, it is not enough to say
something is so. This is a reaction to the Modernist view that the
truth is out there and, with science, we can know the truth and the
truth shall make us free or some such thing. In Modernism,
statements are tested for their truth-value by being measured
against their rational conformity to the demands of the scientific
method. Do they conform to the facts?
Over the last few years, some of us realized
that science has not brought us the life and prosperity that
we expected but instead even became a threat to our existence, such
as nuclear disasters, pollution and the like. So a new kind of
thinking has come up to question the efficacy of science as the
answer to our problems.
This postmodern thinkers have come up with a new
vision of reality. They say what is out there is the world and it
cannot be said to be either true or false. It is easy enough to say
what your senses tell you about the world around you. But it is a
different matter when you try to communicate this to others.
Let’s go back to something much simpler as an
essay or a news story. What we read in news reports, and see and
hear in electronic new media are significations of events and
incidents that are signified by text, sound or images. But what
happens is that these significations become what is signified in
subsequent reports so that as the story progresses, we forget what
was originally “signified” and only accept what we see at the
moment.
For example, the current hero of the media is
Jun Lozada who was pictured as a fugitive running away from being
made to testify at the Senate. But as Senator Lacson has suggested,
he was actually getting ready to “squeal.” And in the process he
was actually “setting up” his friends
Let us go back to what was originally
signified—the fugitive witness. Given the adulation and
hero-worship he is getting today, there are those who say that
Lozada is a hero the way Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. was; that he could
be the incentive to a new people power revolution that will topple
President Arroyo.
Let’s go back to what Ninoy Aquino and Jun
Lozada originally signified. Would the original signification of
their persons, deeds and achievement be even comparable?
If we bracket our subjective preferences, may we
say that the phenomenon of Jun Lozada today is comparable to the
phenomenon of Ninoy Aquino in 1986? Are we ready to demean Ninoy as
a hero by putting Lozada in his category? That’s up to the public
to answer. One of the most avid fans of Lozada is former President
Corazon C. Aquino. Perhaps she should answer this question.
I bring this up to remind us that technology has
made media a two-edged tool. We should be careful we
don’take media run our lives and thoughts. And tell us what
shampoo or deodorant or sanitary napkin to use.
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