Think about it
Fast changing times
By Jun Velasco
THIS crisp broadsheet, Asian Journal, must be today’s largest Fil-Am broadsheet circulating in the US and parts of the Asia Pacific, with something like 50,000 copies of news articles about the Philip-pines.
So what of it? Well, the paper is printed somewhere in Pangasinan. Yes, somewhere in the press row of our beloved province. Publisher Roger Oriel, is a Binalonian, about 50 and the son of our late friend, Jovita Oriel, a woman activist, who was a critic of the municipal government of Binalonan. She became a friend however of Mayor Monching Guico.
In Los Angeles and San Francisco, you’d never think the paper is printed in Pangalatok country. Which goes to show that publishing-wise, the presses in the woodlands of the Philippines could produce modern newspapers.
We pick the subject because on August 2, we are attending an Asia Pacific Publishing convention in Malaysia, which should give us an opportunity of a lifetime. We don’t know if publisher Ermin is attending, but we know that he has had a lot of involvement in such activities.
There you are. Bob Dylan’s, “The times they are changin’, has hit home again, and if we don’t look hard enough, we would be overtaken by events. Listen to this true story.
* * *
After a year of hibernation, a friend, Bobby Enciso, one of KBL’s candidates for senator in the last elections showed up. We asked him how he benefited from the last polls. A superb singer, we also asked him to sing in our breakfast club meeting in Manila, and what a rendition he did. We told him had he sung on the campaign trail, he would have multiplied his 3 million votes by a million, but his companions who knew his special talents diverted their program. Bob should have dislodged Koko Pimentel from the l3th slot.
Bob said he ran for senator just to have a ringside view of what it was to be a candidate for a national position. It’s crazy, he said, people didn’t know whom they were voting for, and so, next time, he said he would do better, perchance, to win by a “landscape.”
* * *
In that breakfast forum in Manila, a lady prosecutor of the Justice department — Carrie Junio, from Bayambang, Pangasinan — resurrected the celebrated Nida Blanca case because it was she who was handling it until she was asked to give way to a colleague because she was closing in on the truth.
We are all scandalized by this miscarriage of justice because Nida was someone dear to most of us. So here is a determined prosecutor succumbing to the blandishments of power thru political pressure. Many of those who heard Fiscal Junio, urged her to revive the fight. Blanca’s friend, actress Delia Razon, was inspired by the group, even if she knew that witnesses have disappeared one by one.
Where do we go from here?
(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/think-about-it/)
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