Are Filipinos really incapable of self-rule?

As this newspaper is sent to the newsstands for sale to our readers, the US presidential elections will already be underway, if not finished. Whether the new President of the United States is Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. John McCain is something you’d probably know as you are reading this article, after all, we sent this column way ahead of our deadline before the voting even started in the United States and what an election it was!

I’m sure glad that this presidential race is over and done with, because it took too much of our time when we should all be focusing on our economic or political problems. However for what it is worth, I can only hope that the whole world that is watching the US presidential race learned something about this democratic process, especially us Filipinos, who were one of the first recipients of the American democratic style, after all we have the honor to be called Asia’s first democracy. But what kind of democracy do we have today? What happened to Filipinos after the EDSA Revolt is too much demo-crazy! This is why Pinoys have grown tired and weary of street revolts.

If today Filipinos are still considered politically immature or incapable of giving ourselves a better government despite our independence, it is probably due to what the Americans thought of us a long time ago. Perhaps the most intriguing of all came from the book I got some years ago, entitled, “Native Resistance: Philippine Cinema and Colonialism 1898-1941” a book written by Clodualdo A. del Mundo. Let me quote an excerpt on this.

“In 1904, the Filipinos were made into a major exhibit in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis. Over 1,200 natives were transported to the United States. The contingent was composed of a variety of Filipino ethnic groups – Visayans, Moros, Bagobos, Negritos, and Igorots. A Philippine village occupied a 47-acre site around Arrow Head Lake to the southwest of Forest Park. The exhibit highlighted “dog-eating, Igorots and stone age cannibals”; but, so as not to miss the point of the exposition, the “savage” lived side by side with the disciplined native constabulary that was formed by Philippine Governor William Howard Taft. The Filipino was displayed, studied, and culturally graded. When a few natives died on the site, anthropologists could not help but measure and analyze their brains.

Robert Rydell (author of All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions) sums up the message of the Philippine exposition: Under the primary direction of government – appointed scientists, the reservation affirmed the value of the islands to America’s commercial growth and created a scientifically validate impression of Filipinos as racially inferior and incapable of national self-determination in the near future.”

Wow! Filipinos were studied and culturally graded? Of course this book was written about American imperialism and their commitment to spread American democracy into other shores. But what was quite telling was that, many Americans considered Filipinos as an inferior race and I would like to believe that this sentiment is still generally true to most Americans who are not familiar with the Pinoy race and culture.

Yet 62 years after the United States gave us our Independence, the Philippines has drifted from second to Japan, to second to the last! Singapore which was considered a backward place has overtaken us, so too with Malaysia and yes, even Indonesia despite its huge population and I can only blame this on our present political system that promotes self-serving politics where it could never shift into a politics of good governance. So we ask are the studies about Filipinos (that we are an inferior race) at the turn of the century still relevant today that we Filipinos are still incapable of a national self-determination? Hmmm, it is time to prove the Yanks that they are wrong!

Our politicians may disagree and even howl at the suggestion that we are incapable of running a good government. But alas history teaches us that our political system has gone from bad to worse, which could only mean that the studies of Filipinos by American anthropologists were true. So should we disprove those scientific studies and show to the Americans that we were misunderstood by their anthropologists? 

If there is anything we should learn from these last US presidential elections, it is the political stability of the two-party system. They have the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, while we used to have our Nacionalista Party and the Liberal Party. Today, we have a multi-party system, which is based on a “me-first” ideology. This is what we get from having a multi-party system filled with immature and crooked politicians whose only objective in life is to amass wealth and power all in the name of the poor Filipino. The question is who will move for a return to a two-party system?

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For email responses to this article, write to [email protected]. Bobit Avila’s columns can also be accessed through www.philstar.com. He also hosts a weekly talkshow entitled, “Straight from the Sky” shown every Monday only in Metro Cebu on Channel 15 on SkyCable at 8 in the evening.