These words uttered by General Douglas McArthur as he left Corregidor for Australia in 1941 shaped his place in history as well as the strategy of the Pacific Command and his own behavior for the next three years. It also pretty much sums up what most Americans know about the Republic of the Philippines today.
I first visited Manila almost exactly twenty years ago as I was surveying possible new locations to plant the my company’s flag in Asia. My mind was pretty much made up as I left the doors of the worst airport I’d seen in Asia and entered what Dante might have called the gates of hell. It surely had the same climatic conditions, and the sights, sounds and smells also suggested some connection to the nether regions. It was a most unpleasant visit characterized by monumental traffic jams, bad food, dirty hotel rooms, and no visible redeeming virtues. Even a dinner at the home of the resident Bank of America representative was negatively shaped by the security guards with automatic rifles at his door. No flag planting was contemplated for the foreseeable future.
So you might appreciate, I wasn’t expecting much. The two hour delay at DFW and the three hours huddled in a smallish, smelly “executive lounge” of Philippine Airlines in San Francisco didn’t help to enhance my attitude either. The good news was that we didn’t have to stop in Guam for refueling which allowed us to land an hour early at a sparkling new airport in Manila. I’d slept well in uncomfortable first class seats of an aged 747, and was served well by a cabin staff that outnumbered the two of us in the eighteen first class seats. The hour and a half wait for my luggage was not an auspicious start however. Now back on my original schedule, I was met by my handler, ushered to a car and driver, and whisked to the Makati Shangra La where I was coddled through check-in to my room before 7:00 am. Time for a rest, much needed ablutions, and preparation to reintroduce myself to Manila.
I know you didn’t sign on to this for a history or geography lesson, but some context setting is essential, so be patient. The Philippines is an archipelago (for you illiterate philistines that is “a large group of islands”). 7,000 of them to be exact. To be less exact, one wag told me the number depended on whether we were at high or low tide. All but about 4000 of them are uninhabited, but Luzon in the north and Mindinao in the south are the two largest and contain the vast majority of the population. In fact, Manila, with a population of eleven million give or take a million, has almost 15% of the eighty some million of the country. Religion defines culture so I might as well tell you that the distribution is about 7% protestant, 7% Muslim, 85% Catholic, and 1% all other. Count me as an all other. The Muslims are heavily concentrated in two provinces in southern Mindinao where we still read almost daily about guerrilla violence. I can’t quite figure out who they are violent against or why. I also hear vague references to Al Qaeda, but that term now applies to all bad guys everywhere. The Philippine archipelago is just a few hundred klicks from the mainland of SE Asia. Short jumps by air to Malaysia, Vietnam, et al, but for most people, the Philippines are not on the way to anywhere. And it’s next door neighbor is Indonesia, another archipelago, with more than twice as many islands and a lot more muslims as well.
I’m gonna give you the cliff notes version of Philippine history, because I don’t suspect you would stand much more. I’ll divide their history into four vastly oversimplified eras. The indigenous era, the immigration era, the Spanish Colonial era, the American era, and now. Well, I guess you can tell that’s five eras, and to get it into five I had to collapse the four years of Japanese domination into the American era, and I completely skipped three years of British rule in the 17th century. Even this Cliff Notes version of history is pretty hard to get organized or to keep simple.
Here’s the thing I like about history….there are some really pretty big gaps that no one seems to care much about. For example, the earliest remains of human kind in the Philippine archipelago, according to the Philippine National Museum of Culture, were from about 20,000 BC. Of course, that makes no sense. Java Man, otherwise known as homo erectus was identified in central Java, a little over 1400 miles from Manila with an age of over 700,000 years. What happened in that other 680,000 years? No baby making? They stuck close to their own campfire.? So much for the indigenous era. The immigration era (my own term btw) is where things start to get interesting. About 3000 years ago the negritos, well they weren’t called negritos then (the Spanish hung that on them because they were “little black people”) came overland, by boat or dropped from the sky and settled the central part of the archipelago. Then about 2000 years ago the much taller and fairer skinned Indonesians came in several waves. Ok, what happens when you cross a tall green tomato plant with a short yellow tomato plant?
Answer, you get a medium greenish/yellow tomato plant. And that’s what happened here. Everything would have been ok except that the pesky Spainards figured out that you could grow lots of stuff here, and the women were pretty easy to look at as well. They hung around for 500 or so years until we kicked them out at the end of the 19th century. They left the catholic church behind and took a craving for mangos with them. So much for the Spanish colonial era.
The American era started out with a fake big bang. I say fake only because we said they did it, and history pretty much shows that we did it to ourselves. In any case, when the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor, we used it as an excuse to help along our manifest destiny. Does this have a familiar ring to it. Gulf of Tonkin anyone? Or how about the fake WMD instigated Iraq war authorization. It’s pretty clear from several hundred years of activity, if we don’t have the facts, we just make s**t up and start shooting. In this case, the shooting didn’t last long. About six months in several different locations around the world, including Manila, where Spain had the temerity and the ammo to shoot back. In the fine print of the Treaty of Paris (1898) they agreed to sell us Puerto Rico, Guam, and, you guessed it, the Philippines for the princely sum of $20 million. I never did figure why we didn’t get Cuba in the deal, but not bad, eh. Well, maybe not Guam.
So democracy had triumphed over evil once again and the American century was under way….off to a great start as we say. Oops, one tiny detail that doesn’t get a lot of play in our 8th grade US history readers; we spent the next four years putting down the “Philippine Insurrection” as we then referred to it. They like to call it the Philippine-American War. We lost a few thousand troops, who had absolutely no idea that they were fighting and dying for a diplomatic fine point, and as for the Philippine people, they lost a lot of citizens and suffered extraordinary destruction of villages, cities, and what little infrastructure they had. But we had to give democracy a chance.
I won’t spend a lot of ink on the Nipponese interlude as it has been well chronicled. One little nugget on McArthur. It seems that we had more than one Pacific surprise in December of 1941. Several hours after the Japanese caught us with our pants down in Hawaii, they did it again at Clark Field near Manila. McArthur was caught sleeping, literally. General Doug did come back and pounded the bejesus out of the Japanese, unfortunately they were in Manila at the time and once again, the Philippine people were the recipients of some pretty severe “collateral damage”. I guess in a fit of remorse or guilt or whatever, we tried to make up for it by granting independence to the New Republic on July 4, 1946. Wonder how they come up with that date? It’s worthy of Karl Rove and Karen Hughes and they weren’t even there. So ended the American era and began the now era.
I’m going to save my in depth reporting of the “now in the Philippines era” until my next segment, but let me give you a teaser. Their professional basketball teams are named after their sponsors. So the following headline in the sports page is not out of the question. “The Coca Cola drowns Pepsi in Title Game” I’m not kidding. Got so much to say and so little patience from my readers.
I shall return…..
