A better Balikatan

On this week of war, my thoughts go to my many friends in the United States – in California, Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and New Hampshire, among other places – who must be profoundly distressed and embarrassed by the invasion their government has unleashed on a country whose leadership it happened not to like. America’s been on my mind a lot lately, not just because of George W. Bush’s warmongering, but also because my mother’s there this very minute, gone to visit with my sister, who’s chosen to live in Virginia with her American husband – and so, like millions of other Pinoys, I now have a personal connection to the United States, an interest in its welfare and its behavior in the world.

America’s a country with which we’ve had the longest love-hate relationship. Spain left a deep and indelible legacy to Filipinos, but this was almost a grudging legacy, something we wrested despite Spain’s contempt for our abilities. America made it look – at least when the shooting was over – like she truly loved us, like she wanted us to learn something valuable she knew. She was knifing us in the gut and bleeding us for our resources even as she held us in her sweet embrace, but we clung on, unwilling to believe that such a benign countenance could mask any insidious intent.

How easily we forgot that America caused us so much suffering and grief barely a century ago, during a war that claimed, by some estimates, half a million Filipino lives; we were, as I often remind my American friends, their first Vietnam. (And I’m never really surprised, given how insular many modern Americans are, that they profess absolute ignorance of a "Filipino-American War," even as a sidelight to the better-known but less troublesome Spanish-American War; what surprises and dismays me is how many Filipinos seem to have forgotten or never even knew this.)

How quickly we fell in love with the new language, with the new easygoing ways of what Nick Joaquin, born in the cultural cusp, calls sajonismo. Within a decade of the occupation, schooled in "Hiawatha," we were writing and publishing poems in English; by the time another 15 years had passed, we published our first acknowledged classic in the short story, Paz Marquez Benitez’s "Dead Stars." We took to Hollywood, to Coke, and to the automobile with an alacrity that would have put Americans themselves to shame. And when GI Joe gave us a helping hand in freeing ourselves from the Japanese in World War II, we blushed and gave America the best of our natural wealth in gratitude. Some of us grew up knowing both the good America and the bad one; most of us – blinded by poverty and ignorance – chose to see only the good. And now, with American bombs falling on a small impoverished nation that could have been Vietnam – or us – in another time, many of us can’t even bring ourselves to see the patent injustice of the thing, of Bush’s brazen arrogance in imposing his will on the world, against a global wave of protest and indignation.

I feel sick to the pit of my stomach – but better and more productive than puking, I’ve told myself to focus on the good, on the better America, on the knowledge that a critical mass of decent and sensible Americans exists to counterweigh any misimpression that their President may have created of a brutish and brainless bully. After this war, it won’t only be Iraq that will need rehabilitation – so will the US, which, thanks to its ham-fisted leadership, has successfully squandered much of the sympathy and goodwill it generated in the wake of 9-11.

Last Thursday, at the very same minute that the bombs began dropping on Iraq, a joint press conference titled "War Solves Nothing" was held by the University of the Philippines, the Ateneo, and Miriam College to denounce the outbreak of the war.

"We are against weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and oppressive regimes," the Ateneo said in its statement. "But the use of military force to solve these problems is much too laden with human costs, political risks, and human contradictions that it should only be employed as a last resort."

"War solves nothing. The war against Iraq will once again bring destruction, death, and misery. It would be harsh for to those who are most vulnerable, implicate the innocent, and dehumanize everyone…. The call for war is a rite of machismo," noted Miriam College president Patricia Licuanan. "It is bolstered by the patriarchal idea that violence is indispensable."

UP president Francisco Nemenzo put it most starkly: "I have no sympathy for Saddam Hussein. I know he is a corrupt and cruel dictator. But it is not for us, nor for George W. Bush, to decide who should rule Iraq. That is the prerogative of the Iraqi people alone. If Bush really wants to free the world of weapons of mass destruction, he should set an example. The US maintains the biggest stockpiles of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. And he should disarm the only country in the Middle East that admittedly possesses these weapons: Israel, America’s foremost ally in the region."

I have to admit that, as a trained propagandist myself, I often just let statements like this go over my head. But these arguments hit home, because they made a whole lot more sense to me than anything George Bush and Tony Blair have been able to come up with to convince me that Baghdad needs to be bombed–now.

When I want to restore my faith in a better America, I turn to examples like those of Jerry Burns, a professor of English who came here some years ago on a Fulbright grant and who, after immersing himself in our literature, returned to the States to teach it to his students, as a way of opening their minds to a world bigger than themselves. Jerry teaches at Franklin Pierce College in Rindge, New Hampshire; I’ve never been to Rindge, but I imagine it to be the kind of hometown with steepled white churches and riotous autumnal colors and football-crazy Saturdays that we reserve our warmest American memories for – and that, in some strange way, breeds future Presidents and molds their values while they lie soft in the teacher’s hand. I think of people like Bob Boyer and John Holder, professors both in another small but progressive American college in De Pere, Wisconsin, frequent Philippine visitors who for years have sponsored Filipino academics to teach their students, again to expose them to a world of equals. The last time Bob wrote me, last November, it was to say, prophetically, that "We are, of course, mourning the Republicans’ sweep in Congress, which, among other concerns, heightens the likelihood of war in Iraq. So I will go out and stand on the corner with my ‘Beep for Peace’ sign as people drive off to the Packer game."

Jerry Burns developed a course, titled "Beyond Britain and America: Other Literatures in English," that featured a segment on the Philippines, for which Jerry set up an e-groups that included not only Jerry and his students, but a number of Filipino and Filipino-American writers who he had invited to participate in online discussions. These were, among others, Jessica Hagedorn, Luisa Igloria, Luis Cabalquinto, Vince Gotera, Neil Garcia, and myself. For several weeks, questions and answers flew across the wires on subjects as diverse as – in Jerry’s own musings – "family structure and gender relations, Catholicism, the period of Martial Law under Ferdinand Marcos, nationalism versus the heritage of colonialism, food as a preoccupation of daily life, and many others, (which) received detailed, often personally reflective replies from the writer-critics. Sometimes class members got more than they bargained for, when a question would prompt musings on the creative process or a trigger an extensive debate on, for example, the differences between Filipino and Filipino-American writing.

"Not surprisingly," Jerry continues, "some of this discourse went over the heads of students with little prior background in Philippine literature, not to mention the cultural politics of emigration to the US. Nor was this the only problem encountered in the course of the experiment. Technical difficulties accessing the electronic discussion board frustrated a good many participants." Burns was also disappointed not to have been able to fulfill an intention to bring Filipino students into the exchange, and by the fact that "most of the true dialogue that occurred took place among the writers rather than between them and his students. Nevertheless, many on both sides expressed appreciation for the quality of the learning experience. The communications network ‘did have its share of problems,’ noted student Pattie Byrne, ‘but the depth of responses to our questions made it all worth it.’" Another student, Rebecca Thibault, said that "I was a little skeptical at first because I did not want to ask a ‘real writer’ some menial question that would probably sound so stupid to them.... But I was so excited when I came back to the Yahoo site and my question had a lengthy reply. I really wish this could be done for more English classes.’ For his part, Manila-based poet and critic J. Neil Garcia found some of the students’ questions taxing: for all their apparent simplicity, they were so broad as to ‘devour any simple answer that anyone can give.’ But he credited the project for pushing him to think about Philippine literature and his own work in unexpectedly fruitful ways."

To advert to that controversial military exercise between American and Filipino troops in the Muslim South, this was another kind of Balikatan – the kind we won’t earn too many dollars from, but which will do much more to guarantee a future of real peace and understanding in a world benighted not so much by mustard gas but by sheer ignorance.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.