I hate to say I told you so

A handful of former classmates sent me text messages a few days after the Malu Fernandez controversy really exploded in the blogosphere.

“You’ve seem to distance yourself from that controversy,” a friend SMS-ed. “I was expecting you would blog about it.”

I smiled.

I would have wanted so much to post something about the column Malu Fernandez wrote degrading—without provocation other than, apparently,  the fact that she couldn’t comfortable fit her frame into an airplane economy seat that [I wonder why, sarcasm intended] a 6-foot-9, 270-pound behemoth like Asi Taulava had no problems getting comfortable with—our hardworking overseas Filipino workers.  Our OFWs, who happen to be the biggest (legal and honest) dollar-earning sector today.

I wanted to pull heavy words out such as bigotry, racism, socio-economic differences and elitist ideologies and find a way to string them up in a decent sentence.

I wanted to come up with something dramatic, something passionately written to rouse a reading public into a state of rebellion so that people would march straight into the Manila Standard Today office armed with everything from AK-47’s, broken bottles, flaming pitchforks and torches to demand for the writer’s resignation.

But, hey. What’s the use?

For one, the tirade-laced column, which looked more related to someone butchering a rat out of penis envy than a supposedly witty—acerbic, I think, was how the columnist described it—piece of written work, has had its share of backlash already.

In fact, while writing this, I wanted to post a link to direct you to blogs or sites dedicated to burying Malu Fernandez’ career below six feet of dirt. But then, really, all you need is google her name and you’ll get an avalanche of URLs (izzat what you call ‘em?)  with posts containing words one regularly finds in hate mails.

What more can one more post from me do?

Science tells us that at a certain point, an elephant can carry enough on its back to no longer notice another pound of brick added to the load. That’s what a post of mine, sir, would have been. Just another pound of brick to the load already heaped on the back of an elephant.

Oh wait. I didn’t mean that Malu Fernandez is an elephant. Or looks like one. It was simply a metaphor. Of me blogging, I mean. Not a metaphor of the columnist. I am not that acerbic.

But more importantly, I stayed away because I know what would eventually happen. Hate posts would finally break her into resigning. Only for her to use her newfound infamy and resurface again. Because newspapers can be capitalists, too, like that.

Like that, as in, anybody who sells is worth newspaper space. Like, say, if Willie Revillame came cheap, all he needs now to earn a column is another game show scandal like, maybe a sexual harassment suit from one of his gypsy-like gyrating girls.

In fact, as I had commented here, it was premature to celebrate Malu Fernandez’s resignation from Manila Standard Today and People Asia.

As it turns out, I may be right.

Because que horror or que barbaridad or whatever phrase of disbelief is popular among members of her socio-economic stratum is, she’s back. Or will be back, depending on when you’re reading this.

In a day desk meeting with fellow Inquirer editors, word circled that Manila Standard Today refused to accept Malu Fernandez’s resignation. She will start writing anew for the paper on September 3.

For the first time in my life, I wished the editors were wrong. I wished that it wasn’t true that the paper wrote a media forum citing press freedom as one of their reasons for not accepting her resignation. That the paper would have followed the lead of People Asia and simply let Malu Fernandez go quietly in the night.

That we will no longer have to deal with someone who tries too hard to write like Jessica Zafra and sound like Howard Stern but ends up coming pitifully across as nothing more than a bitter soul who knows her grammar straight but misuses that knowledge to mask her own insecurities.

Because, really, I hate, hate, hate to say I told you so.