TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/041789/04178900.061

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                                                                                BOOKS, Page 76

Children of a Lesser God


By Howard G. Chua-Eoan


    IN OUR IMAGE: AMERICA'S EMPIRE IN THE PHILIPPINES
    by Stanley Karnow
    Random House; 494 pages; $24.95

    IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: THE MARCOSES, THE AQUINOS, AND
     THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION
    by Sandra Burton
    Warner; 483 pages; $24.95

    In 1901 Filipino guerrillas massacred a company of American
soldiers, slicing open the corpses and filling them with
molasses and jam to attract ants. In retaliation, one U.S.
general ordered his men to turn the island of Samar into "a
howling wilderness." Samar has never recovered. Forty-one years
later, Filipinos were risking savage Japanese reprisals to feed
American prisoners of war marching in the notorious Bataan
Death March. At war's end, Filipinos hailed the Yanks with a
band playing God Bless America.

    History has played few tricks with as many odd twists and
turns as the U.S.'s imperial adventure in the Philippines. In
his first book since Vietnam: A History, journalist and
historian Stanley Karnow chronicles 90 years of the U.S.'s
relationship with its former colony with a keen eye for such
incongruities. Beginning with a penetrating look at 300 years of
cruel Spanish rule in the islands, Karnow sketches a history
suffused with politics both Machiavellian and messianic: from
Commodore George Dewey's whipping the Spaniards at Manila Bay in
1898 and America's later subversion of Emilio Aguinaldo's
fledgling government, to Douglas MacArthur's ringing 1942
promise to return to the Philippines and Washington's support
for Ferdinand Marcos until the virtual eve of Corazon Aquino's
"people power" revolution in 1986.

    With sweeping historical breadth, Karnow explores two
countries caught in an obsessive parent-child relationship.
National emotions swing between involvement and indifference,
animosity and affection, pity and fear, longing and disgust. It
is a tale of how the U.S. tried to re-create itself in the
malleable Philippines, an accidental unit of 7,000 islands with
little in common save Roman Catholicism and an ambiguous urge to
be free. It is also the story of how the U.S., though it
succeeded in imbuing the archipelago with aspects of its
likeness, failed at imparting its democratic spirit. In In Our
Image, the sins of the creator are amply reflected in the
faults of its creature.

    After the bloody war to put down the so-called Philippine
insurrection from 1899 to 1902, the prickings of democratic
conscience led the U.S. to transplant its institutions to the
islands and to plan for independence. But it did so grudgingly,
unconvinced that those systems would hold. Expansionist Indiana
Senator Albert Beveridge, for example, proclaimed, "What alchemy
will change the oriental quality of their blood, and set the
self-governing currents of the American pouring through their
Malay veins?" With misdirected liberality, William Howard Taft,
the first civilian governor of the islands, referred to
Filipinos as "little brown brothers." Privately, he thought
Filipinos would take at least 50 to 100 years to learn
"Anglo-Saxon liberty."

    The result of the American colonial experiment was
trickle-down democracy. Concentrating on the practicalities of
ruling the archipelago, U.S. viceroys allied themselves with
the elite who held the rest of the country in feudal servitude.
(Among the descendants of that elite: President Aquino.) The
masses followed their masters who, intent on preserving their
privileges, accommodated their American overlords. In turn,
Filipinos integrated the Americans, turning them into ritual
kin. Americans became big white brothers, inextricably bound to
look after their little brown brethren.

    Thus the Potemkin democrats of the islands idolized
Jefferson but patterned themselves after the master
manipulators of the time. Chief among them: the autocratic
American darling, Manuel Quezon, the first President of the
Philippines, and his prominent partner, Douglas MacArthur,
perhaps the archetypal American for all Filipinos. These
influences helped produce the quintessential Philippine
politician of the later 20th century: Ferdinand Marcos.

    Karnow traces these developments with authority and great
insight, especially his spirited critique of America's
dunderheaded rush into the archipelago at the turn of the
century. Unfortunately, the scope of In Our Image has muted the
drama of Marcos' inexorable downfall. Karnow provides
fascinating new details about Ronald Reagan's reluctant
abandonment of Marcos and his less than warm relationship with
Corazon Aquino. But that story, the most familiar to
contemporary readers, feels perfunctory and overly concise in
the book. Set against the turmoil of the Philippine past, it is
merely a loud echo of older patterns in the historical cycle of
the islands.

    The collapse of the Marcos government, however, is the
paradigm of present--day Philippine politics and, as such, is
well told in Impossible Dream, Sandra Burton's
history-as-I-lived-it account of the assassination of Aquino's
husband Benigno and its aftermath. As TIME's Hong Kong bureau
chief from 1982 to 1986, Burton soaked up the Philippines'
maudlin, heart-tugging, cutthroat, rumor-mad, pious, unethical
spirit. Her book is not only the expected political thriller,
full of intriguing Filipinos and meddling Americans, but a
bizarre feudal drama set in a land where Sancho Panza, not Don
Quixote, tilts at the monstrous windmills.

    In Impossible Dream, the black-and-white and good-and-evil
of modern legend become shades of gray and swirls of clashing
colors. Corazon Aquino may be a housewife in Burton's account,
but she is far from naive. Her husband appears with little of
the sanctity he has assumed since his martyrdom. To many
Filipinos, Burton notes, "Ninoy" Aquino and Marcos were merely
two sides of the same coin. Yet, ultimately, Ninoy is a sainted
Machiavellian. Scheming and plotting, he returns from
self-exile in the U.S., a gambler going for broke. His last
courageous bet: that Filipinos are worth dying for.

    Imelda Marcos' rise from flats to Ferragamos is related with
surprising sympathy. An arriviste in a city of snobbish
aristocrats, Imelda struggled to fit in, fell into depression
and then re-created herself, sometimes pathetically, in her
brilliant husband's image. As for Marcos himself, Burton
writes, "he was the kind of lawyer you would hire to get you off
if you were really in trouble -- particularly if you were
guilty." But, at the end, he is a Filipino Macbeth doomed to
give way to the murdered Banquo's heiress. One worrisome
anecdote Marcos must have heard at the time has the ostensibly
neutral U.S. ambassador warning that if the President cheats
"Cory" of victory, "we will put so much pressure on him that
within 30 days he will disintegrate."

    Currently TIME's Beijing bureau chief, Burton predicts no
outcome for Corazon Aquino's unfinished revolution. While Karnow
alludes to the failures of elite-led Philippine governments in
the past, he too restrains himself from looking too far into the
future. Both authors can only suggest that after so volatile a
passage, Filipinos and their politics can be expected to produce
even more fireworks. And that, for better or for worse,
Americans will be right there with them.