Carols and plagiarists

By JUAN L. MERCADO,  juan_mercado77@yahoo.com
November 22, 2012

“It’s par for the course in a country where an ‘elite of thieves’ govern.”

“Please tell me what this word means Lolo,” asked our grand-daughter Kristin, 9. She pointed to a headline in the papers and spelt out the word :“P- l -a-g-i-a-r-i-z-e.”

Senator Tito Sotto’s filching of Senator Robert Kenndy speech wouldn’t ring bells for her and grand-daughter Katarina, 6. Would the 1933 Cebuano carol: “Kasadya Ning Takna-a” do?

“Someone took Kasadya Ning Takna-a, titled it Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit but in Tagalog. They didn’t tell anybody. What is that?”, we asked the two kids. “Stealing?”, Kristin asked. “There. To plagiarize is to steal.”

A week from now is first Sunday of Advent. Manila Bulletin columnist Jullie Yap Daza will hammer a plagiarism she exposed since 1978. "This country boasts of the longest celebration of Christmas", she wrote. "It remains supreme irony that not the slightest effort has been made to attribute the beloved carol ‘Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit’ to it’s author: Vicente D. Rubi” of Cebu.

Panorama Magazine recalls that, in 1933, Cebu Christmas festival officials asked Composer Rubi to sign up for a carol or dayegon competition: Rubi did and asked the equally-young then Mariano Vestil to scribble the lyrics for his music. Their carol – Kasadya Ning Takna-a. (“How Joyous Is this Season.”) – won hands down. “Today, wherever Cebuano is spoken – Bohol, Negros Oriental, Southern Leyte, Northern Mindanao, Cebu and elsewhere – carolers still belt out the same infectious beat that Rubi and Vestil blended so brilliantly (79) years ago,” Philippine Daily Inquirer noted.

A Manila record company hijacked Rubi and Vestil’s carol for P150. Nong Inting, who died in 1980, “was denied what was due him in royalties,” Daza wrote. The platter firm conned Rubi and Vestil with legal dodges until their deaths.

It’s par for the course in a country where an “elite of thieves” govern. And those who crassly exploited Rubi and Vestil have kindred spirits here in the onerous levy of coconut farmers, loggers who trigger today’s flash floods – to plagiarists.

Nong Inting became an impoverished widower. Until his death in 1980, he’d shuffle to his gates and teach startled carolers how to sing his dayegon. And in 2004, lyricist Vestil went to his grave, bereft of benefits other than an inside-page-below-the-fold newspaper obituary.

In Charles Dickens 1843 classic “A Christmas Carol”, the miser Ebneezer Scrooge dismissed as "humbug" what Vestil and Rubi celebrated as Christmas is not about tinsel, red-nosed reindeers, even shattered diets.

“We must be quiet and not fear the night, (or) else we will hear nothing”, the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner wrote. “For the ultimate message is uttered only in the night's stillness ever since, through the gracious arrival of the Word into the night of our life, Christmas' silent night, holy night came down among us. The meaning of Christmas is that the emptiness of death is filled with the 'nameless incomprehensibility of God'.

Advent 2012 finds star lanterns, Nativity belens and Christmas trees lit up. The “tambourine brigade” is out in full force. Scrawny school dropouts bang flattened bottle caps, tacked to sticks, to accompany off-key carols. A few are Badjaos from Mindanao, who scrape for a living from city streets.

They sing – well, sort of – at doorways. Some do on rickety jeepneys they scamper into. Their repertoire is limited. Some belt a few bars from “Silent Night”, or “Kasadya" a.k.a. "Ang Pasko.” Their unvarying finale is: “We Wish You A Merry Christmas”. They stretch open palms for handouts. If you drop an extra coin, they’ll chime: “Thank you / Thank You / Ang babait ninyo."

These grimy “street troubadours” never heard of a former president who’ll listen to carols in a Veterans Memorial Hospital suite-as-prison-cell. Tell them about a former First Lady and son, in hot water with US courts, for looting. All you get is a blank stare.

These mean nothing to often food-short kids who should be in school. Here, 22 percent of people are undernourished. (Compare that to Malaysia's two percent.) Poor nutrition stunts almost a half (47 percent) of kids in Negros Occidental and Northern Samar. They're dwarfed by better fed kids in Beijing, Seoul or Hong Kong. Many of them are frailer, and lag academically behind Korean or Singaporean counterparts.

“The Bethlehem story, in Luke’s Gospel, gives us an ‘array of luminous images’, the theologian Catalino Arevalo SJ writes in: “They Shall Call Him Emmanuel”. (We see) “the night sky alight with bright angels, simple shepherds startled from sleep, magi…It is a happening, above all, for the deepest heart.

"Christmas is not, first of all, a revelation for the intelligence. It is looking at a Son who was born for us, who would die for us, because we mattered to him, because we are infinitely cherished, infinitely loved. At the crib, the first task is to look, and looking to adore. ‘Venite adoremus’. Come let us adore him.”