I join you in your prayer.

We pray that justice for Bubby and his driver, Awel will soon come. God bless!

RGG

as my favorite columnist would say: media is one big business, its motto is profit and more profit.

Your recollection of Manong Bubby’s demeanor and style are vividly accurate.

IUt may please you to know that a reformist wave is sweeping many newsrooms today with mainstream media bearing the onus of cleaning up its ranks as it seeks to recover lost ground with the public increasing accessing new media as their sources of news.

I shall not about to shed a tear for Bubby, aka, Salvador Dacer, a Bicolano mestiso friend about 12 years my senior who once brought me to a stage in one month of April in an public elementary school graduation with sampaguita leis on our necks from swooning school children. I was prepared to voice out my righteous anger.

Yes, he was the guest speaker of that graduation in Parubcan town, now named Presentacion and I was a reporter of a local weekly published in Naga City. He was gunning for a seat in the 3rd District of Camarines Sur. That dream never came. That was pre-martial law.

I saw him again during martial law in his office near the breakwater of Manila Bay few blocks from the headquarters of U.S, Immigration in Roxas Boulevard. This time he was doubling as a recruiter of overseas Saudi workers and as a “media consultant” I came to see him in his capacity as a “Recruiter” to help place a friend. I paid for the “placement fee” which at my circumstance as a novice lawyer, was quite expensive. He was not able to find him job and so he ended up refunding my money.

Bubby did not lose his affable and amiable personality and his partiality toward a special white suite not of the coach Eduque attire, but of the more stylish safari swashbuckler of the Amazon. He is all style; loud and pomp, to compensate for lack of depth and the shrewdness of those people he wanted to serve as a “media consultant”. Once a media practitioner himself, Bubby had metamorphosed to an accomplice media operator whose business is to repackage personalities, corporations or government to an acceptable level.

He became a “paid-hack” but he is more honorable because he donned his professional suit remarkably well and unmistakable, compared to others employed by big media organizations that have the same mendacity as Bubby and yet they had managed to portray half-truths for whole truth, drew an accolade from a preposterous position and dish out the most outrageous fabrication to mislead the unsuspecting populace all in the name of “cash” and in the service of a client.

Bubby did the same, but he has put the public on notice that he is a “media consultant” and put out his best suit to telegraph his trade. Others would trade on traditional commercial asset, Bubby and others like him would trade also on information. This has cost him his life and his driver.

Bubby and his driver, Alex Surbito had paid the ultimate price and there is something bone chilling about it, no doubt. That those personalities, deviant and sick do not have the tolerance to parley from anyone matters that can go out of hand and bring them down in disgrace if they can shoot down the bearer of “ill-tidings”. These deviant characters are government personalities who believe only in the concept that democracy and freedom is the freedom of others to agree with them.

One of these personalities has a grand ambition to come back into the public office of which he had been momentarily disgraced, and another one was kicking so hard from his present political enclave so he can wade into the same political privilege the other has left.

People have not learned and probably will never will. We deserve our chain and enslavement.