It’s almost a month into the second semester and people from the campus are already asking when the next issue of our school paper will be out. “Wait, I told them.”
Last semester’s issues created a lot of trouble for me and the editorial board; I was threatened with physical harm, with libel, and voodoo. And I learned from that experience.
“George what is the matter with you?” A student my age asked me. “What are these things you wrote about? You’re attacking the instructors, the campus and the university!” You’re crazy.
They’re waiting for the next issue.
What is this old crazy student up to now?
The libel thing was crazy. I was playing Red Alert when a member of the editorial board texted me and told me that the paper will be sued for libel. I looked at the celphone and almost loss my bowel control. My gulay, there’s a possibility that I may go to jail because of an item in a grammatically and stylistically unacceptable student paper’s blind item section. I’m not afraid of jail term, what I’m afraid of is that the paper might be read in the courtroom, and the judge instead of finding me guilty of libel might charge me with a higher crime—murder in the first degree!!! I murdered English!!!! Instead of being sentenced to be hanged, I might end up getting a worse deal—reading the paper over and over again.
I was thinking about libel and did a little reading about the creature called libel. Of course, I don’t know German and the only part that I understand in the is that there must be an imputation of a crime, identity, and all those jargons here and there that is meant to make legal literatures strictly within the confines of people who studied Latin and mastered the art of lying and compromising and ethical exhibitionism and still look respectable. But what stood out in the annotated law about libel is malice, what stood out in my readings about libel is to prove malice in the articles to show libel.
Malice, malice, pagbilan ng ulam ka Alice.
Malice is a one of those words, easy to define hard to prove to exist technically.
Off I go to Quezon for the regional press conference.
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