What we thought of America

The ninth anniversary of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks has signaled numerous throwbacks to the day when more than just the music died, but also the morning the only living boy in New York lost his innocence. Suddenly there was a sense of vulnerability for a nation of storied greatness, whose image filled my childhood with combat and missions impossible on a flickering black and white TV screen.

Granta 77: What We Think of America, a special issue of the paperback magazine of new writing that was released in the spring of 2002, has been retrieved from the stacks for a careful rereading of the day certainly picked by the suicide jihadis for its code of panic and call for help in America, but when transposed to this part of the globe resembled, somewhat flippantly, a late dictator’s birthday and if you stretched the ones further, a number for pizza delivery.

In the Granta special issue several name writers reminisce on America post 9/11, the effect of the attacks on their lives and respective countries, a refracted view of a nation one of whose symbols of commerce and might was reduced to rubble. Some of the writers may be familiar: James Hamilton-Paterson, who once resided part-time in Mindoro island particularly when he was writing his book on Marcos, America’s Boy; Doris Lessing, Ivan Klima, Fintan O’ Toole and Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk of Turkey, site of the current FIBA world basketball championships where in a preliminary round game US battled Iran.

Mostly they wrote of the America they knew as they were growing up, and at that time the issue came out, the US’ relevance to them when the last superpower was clearly at a crossroads. Granta 77 also includes a photo album of Afghanistan in autumn by Thomas Dworzak, shots of life on the front with the Northern alliance and soldiers playing soccer during a lull in fighting, and a panorama of the old city of Kabul as if untouched by time or memory, through the filtered lens of desert dust.

Well, what do you yourself think of America, aside from its McDonald’s of the golden arches and dancing ambassadors of low-intensity conflict? The question is no longer as academic as it seems, especially with 9/11 commemoration and America recently having pulled out of its seven-year war with Iraq, Granta 77 begging to be reread and making the reader pull out his own memories like rabbits out of a hat. And who knows if Osama hasn’t bin hiding and getting Laden fed in the caves off Khyber Pass?

There was Dick and Jane what fun we had with them and Spot too, run Spot run. It was the ratty blue covered copies of Fun with Dick and Jane in the class of Mrs. Gamad that taught basic English. Later it was Lucy and Charlie Brown and Snoopy, the gang going out trick or treating without Linus who was waiting for the Great Pumpkin, even if there was no such holiday in the backwoods of Diliman.

On the black and white Magnavox, Sergeant Saunders led his squad of Kirby and Cage and Little John through occupied Europe, capturing a young boy’s imagination and leading to a collection of toy soldiers light years away from the now-voiceless superstar Nora Aunor saying, “My brother is not a pig!” with Karen Carpenter whose voice now is the only living thing in New York Street Cubao singing, “Long ago, and oh so far away…”

Of course that’s Leon Russell’s Superstar, whatever happened to the old bullfrog, I hope he hasn’t croaked the way so many soldiers have in the northern plains of Afghanistan, in the jungles of Jolo, in the secondhand planes and helicopters of third world countries.

In 1974 was the first time I visited America, a 15-year-old exchange student bound for Texas. The entry point was Anchorage, Alaska, and all I remember was the cool air-conditioned building, the almost antiseptic surroundings. When the group landed in San Francisco there was the cold whip of air, the freeways mind boggling, and somewhere Eric Clapton on the radio singing about Willie and the hand jive. A batch mate bought his first pack of American cigarettes, True, from a vendo machine.

American football I never could understand, never could get the hang of. A mass of aimless muscles going after a weird-shaped ball. Even then I preferred basketball, in Texas and back in Manila, the game which anyway was another American invention, as great as jazz and the Kennedys.

In the local basketball leagues the teams with imports always had the advantage — there was a time Mariwasa had four in the MICAA — as it still holds true today with the onslaught of Fil-Ams and other Pinoys of mixed lineage in the pros, and foreign students in the collegiate circuit.

America was playing on the radio all the time, not least a British rock star named David Bowie singing This is Not America, I’m Afraid of Americans, and Young Americans.

It’s no accident that Bowie’s eyes have different shades, one blue the other green, without benefit of lenses. Even then it was love hate with America, or was it loveless love, his brother’s eyes were not a pig’s.

“A little piece of you, a little piece of me, will die… for this is not America.” But let’s go back to the back cover text of Granta 77:

“The September 11 attacks on the US provoked shock and pity in the rest of the world, but mingled with the sympathy was something harsher: anti-Americanism. It wasn’t confined to the West Bank or Kabul. It could be heard in English country pubs, in the bars of Paris and Rome, the tea stalls of New Delhi. ‘Hubris’ was the general idea: in one opinion poll, two-thirds of the respondents outside the US agreed to the proposition that it was ‘good that Americans now know what it’s like to be vulnerable’.”