TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / 041789 / 04178900.061 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-03-27 | 7.7 KB | 162 lines

<text id=89TT1046> <title> Apr. 17, 1989: Children Of A Lesser God </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Apr. 17, 1989 Alaska </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> BOOKS, Page 76 Children of a Lesser God </hdr><body> By Howard G. Chua-Eoan <qt> <l>IN OUR IMAGE: AMERICA'S EMPIRE IN THE PHILIPPINES</l> <l>by Stanley Karnow</l> <l>Random House; 494 pages; $24.95</l> </qt> <qt> <l>IMPOSSIBLE DREAM: THE MARCOSES, THE AQUINOS, AND</l> <l>THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION</l> <l>by Sandra Burton</l> <l>Warner; 483 pages; $24.95</l> </qt> 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. </body></article> </text>