Herbie Gomez I WILL miss reading and going over the opinion pieces of columnist Butch Bagabuyo. His column, “Emerging Ideas,” graced the opinion pages of this paper for years, and his demise on Thursday night, June 16, would leave a space in this paper that no other columnist can fill with mere letters. It would take more than printed words to fill that empty space. In my nearly three decades of career in journalism, much of which I spent editing in the sidelines, I have never encountered a columnist in the city as fiery as Bagabuyo. He was fearless in expressing his ideas in his writings. Bagabuyo was very opinionated; he was a man of tenacious and infectious opinion who effectively defended his positions against nonsensical jumble of words yet he was also tolerant of views that differed from his whenever the argumentation was sound. He was a fearless maverick who knew when to behave like a lawyer, and when to engage in humorous trash talk, a writing style which he mastered, apparently to taunt and give his subjects a bad hair day. He understood full well the difference between a courtroom and the bar of public opinion, and knew exactly what kind of language to use as a weapon in the two battlegrounds. If there was one columnist in the city who was really effective in afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, it was Bagabuyo. He was the nemesis of the most recent leaders of Cagayan de Oro, fearlessly calling them what he thought they deserved to be called. No columnist has driven them crazy the way Bagabuyo did. He repeatedly called one “he/she/it,” and another “kapayason” in his column. He was kind of consistent with the use of the pronoun “she” in reference to the former, a politician who is undoubtedly male, even in the courtroom. Councilor Roger Abaday remembers politely calling Bagabuyo’s attention because the lawyer repeatedly used “she” whenever he referred to the male politician in a written pleading that was submitted to a judge on behalf of the councilor and other complainants. Abaday recalls the lawyer’s reply: “Leave it, that’s correct.” According to Roger, the judge grinned as he or she went over Bagabuyo’s pleading in connection with the case filed against the politician. I remember discussing with him some time in 2013 what I thought was his liberal use of unpalatable adjectives whenever he wrote about a very powerful man at that time. He told me he was doing that on purpose because that was exactly what he wanted the politician to do--he wanted the politician to bring him to court so that he could ask the judge to compel the official to present documents. Besides, said Bagabuyo, he already had an encounter with that politician in a courtroom or a quasi-courtroom in Manila years earlier, and he swore seeing the man wet his pants on the hot seat while being subjected to legal grilling. Ah, I see... End of the story. That was Butch Bagabuyo who successfully defended me from my recent libel cases in court. In one of the cases, he simply talked one plaintiff in a libel case into dropping me from the list of accused people knowing full well that I had no hand whatsoever in the publication of a public notice in a commercial space in this paper. And so, I was dropped from the case. I didn’t agree with him all the time, vice versa. Yet he was the kind who would defend another’s right to express himself and even argue with him for he understood very clearly what such freedom means. Sadly, not all columnists and media people have grasped the meaning and importance of such freedom. But he understood it perfectly. Butch Bagabuyo lived a full and a colorful life which is as colorful as the man himself. Farewell, my friend. You lived a tsada life. Let me rephrase the favorite lines he used to end his opinion pieces: Bagabuyo pa more! Tsada, di ba?
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There has been some changes in the schedule. Butch’s son Jobags announced on Saturday that the body would be brought back to the city tomorrow morning, and the wake would be at the Cosmopolitan. The date of interment will be announced later.