Exhibit A against American imperialism

We were in the American cemetery in Manila, an oasis
of clipped lawns and neat graves.
Manila days often had me thinking of Gunter Grass's
summary of Calcutta, where he lived for six months: "a
shitpile topped with Victorian excrescences inhabited
by maggots in white shirts. "
Manila was more modern, the city having been destroyed
during the war; but the maggots in white shirts were
inescapable, even here: thrusting their diseased hands
into your taxi, or selling knickknacks on a
handkerchief sized piece of cardboard that floated on
a monsoon soaked pavement
Then my friend gave out a cry. "Those bastards!"
"What?!?"
"Look at those skyscrapers. They weren't here last
time."
It was fairly common for foreigners to run verbally
amok in Manila. I followed his gaze, above the verdant
trees where a line of unfinished skyscrapers, spitting
sparks from their skeletal innards
"They have destroyed the view. You could forget for a
moment you were in Manila."
Detouring past the site, a sign: "Luxury Apartments
with Superb View" And then, in small print: "in
collaboration with the Deichi corporation, Tokyo,
Japan", we left the American cemetery., with its
trimmed lawns, its neat rows of crosses, its memorial
buildings that sheltered you from the rain with
dignified mosaics of the theatres of war and the names
of the dead.

Many Filipinos were very grateful for liberation, in
1944, by their colonial power between 1898 and 1940.
Strongly pro-American feelings grew even stronger. The
country was given its independence in 1946 but in a
world where America's stock is slowly sinking,
Filipinos remain staunchly pro-American - they are the
only population in the world to give Bush net positive
approval ratings - and thoroughly, unashamedly engaged
in American culture.
Filipinos in baseball caps in Gap shorts take SAT
tests at eighteen, and learnt about Neil Armstrong,
Douglas MacArthur, George Washington and Buffalo Bill
Imperialists everywhere shake their heads in amazement
and admiration. Filipina women journalists pep each
other's Jane Fonda exercises with Southern California
lingo: "Go for it hon", "yea-yeah~yeah"; or "Go for it
girl" before writing opinion pieces that
contemptuously note how Filipino politics falls short
of the ideals of Thomas Jefferson (ironically), or the
Federalist Papers. When a former president Joseph
Estrada once sang "Kiss me Kate:, followed by a medley
of Frank Sinatra, on the day the country's single
foreign policy issue was resolved - the return of US
bases - on the national day, his audience of "poor
people" in New York knicks T-shirts, feasting on
hotdogs and hamburgers at a sports stadium dedicated
to basket ball, knew the words to sing along with him.

From the morning skateboard ride to school, or pick up
truck s with shot gun racks ­journey to work
accompanied by Country and Western on the car stereo,
to a home life of American soap operas on HBO while
scarfing down Oreole cookies and a fast food supper at
Kenny Roasters, or Jollibees, or perhaps a reading
evening of Bill Gates's Good advice book or one of the
other American self help books that crowd Manila's
bookstore shelves to the exclusion of European
literature....the American influence is overwhelming.
The rich go to the US often and have property there;
the poor dream, of doing so. There is little news from
Europe. US issues predominated to a degree exacerbated
by its superpower status.

The Filipinos worship America; but I do wonder if
America has been good for the Philippines. The country
was the region's richest in 1950; now it's one of the
poorest. Of course you might say: it's because the
American left that they fell back. Another argument
is: it is the inquitous influences on the Filipino
mindset in some way or another, the ideology and the
legacies of occupation they have left behind (which
maybe works in America) that has keep the country so
poor. The history and induced mindset of Islam,
Shintoism, confucianism, communism, and even whatever
the British empire left behind, have all worked better
in a relative way for Asians than the US ideology for
Filipinos - if you look at a starting point in 1945.
China has long since swept past on a per capita basis.

Why is this? It's a pretty profound question for our
times, since America is the world's superpower, and -
if you take the best intentions of the neocons at face
value - is trying to democratise the Middle East along
American lines. The last time such a colonial project
was attempted by Washington was in the first decade of
the 20th century, when Teddy Roosevelt and his
administrators set out to civilise the Philippines.
There are many contenders for solutions,not related to
American influence: geography, anthropology,
resources, island culture, land ownership, even
genetic endowment. (Although some of these
disadvantages are shared by far more succesful
countries such as Malaysia; Malays are of similar
stock.)
But I am going to nominate the following set of
causes. The Americans were brutal, perhaps more brutal
than the Japanese in Manchuria. They slaughtered half
the population of the large island of Samar in 1901
and ruthlessly bombed Manila to bits in 1944 to save
US lives but without regards to Filipino ones. In
early days they killed off the intellectual elite.
Then they brainwashed the rest, who had already
suffered 500 years of Catholicism from Spanish friars,
into the supremacy of America's religious-based
exceptionalism, shining city on a hill and all that.
Asian leaders had nativised versions of socialism or
communism or Islam that bound them to their countries,
traditions and peoples. Filipinos - and especially
their elites - had a perverted sense of Christianity
that told them that virtue rested not in staying in
the country but in leaving for the shining city on the
hill.

The sleazy self enrichment of the rich landowning
oligarchy was justified in the poor people's terms
because the rich too, by saving up for their green
cards and estates on the US west coast, could justify
by seeking virtue, that of entering Christ's kingdom
of earth, that of America itself.

The home country is neglected; after all it was only
the fallible kingdom of man. No country is less
nationalistic, patriotic, than the Philippines. No
people, incidentally, is so associated with low status
jobs. In the west, Malays and Indians become
entrepreneurs or doctors, or even scientists.
Filipinos, well, I don't need to spell it out. The
story that the fluorescent light was invented by a
Filipino called Flores is just that, a joke. It's
almost as if the whole American association has put
the country and people down.

So this is just kite-flying and spoeculation on my
behalf, and I make it gleefully, but here is what I
further propose. Christianity is based on surrender,
and what the Filipinos need is something that teaches
them to fight, metaphorically of course. They need to
work for their country now, and believe in it, rather
than have this passive faith that the green card will
deliver them unto fulfilment on earth.
Since the rot is so far gone, and in the absence of
strongmen that made Malaysia and Singapore what they
are, colonisation by Japan - which was attempted in
1941 - would be a second best option: teach them to
fight (metaphorically) the west, not surrender to it.
Perhaps, indeed, it would have been better for
America's colony at least, if Japan had won the war.
But those ugly skyscrapers showed a second chance at a
promising development.
I say the following now with relish, for some one who
has grown up with the FDR version of history, that the
French and British empires were wicked and America was
going to set them free. Their own colony, hidden from
the world by America's own historians' code of omerta,
shows the disasters consequent upon America's own
particular flaws.
If I may conclude. The lesson for the rest of the
world is that America has its own colonising,
manipulative ways, connected to US imposing a
religious exceptionalism, and in surrendering to a US
way of life.
No other country has gone as far as the Philippines,
but it stands as a warning to us all