TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/041789/04178900.061

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 7KB | 134 lines

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.