Walk This Way!

Carlos Celdran is a genius.

The next day I was feeling good. I'd gotten a little overview of the Jeepney system with Ruthie the day before, so after grabbing my breakfast I hopped a Jeep up to the Intramuros district with some assistance from a security guard and a couple of my fellow passengers. It deposited me about two blocks from my destination, where I waited for about half an hour with a slowly gathering crowd that eventually turned into almost fifty people, fairly evenly divided between Filipinos and Caucasians.

Most of the visitors I met were where on business, not pleasure, either researching or working some job that put them in the country for several weeks and using their weekends to tour the place. I thought it might be nice to have a job like that, where I get to travel that far afield, but oh well.

Eventually, our guide showed up. Imagine a half-Mexican, half-Asian cross between Napoleon Bonapart and The Mad Hatter and you've got the visual about right. Now make that person one of the best orators and actors you've ever met, and you're there. He arrived in a preposterous top hat, assembled his amplification kit, and walked us through fort Santiago. He told us, as we went, about the architecture (all Bamboo) before Spanish occupation, how all the 'good' stone you see is imported for China and the local stuff is volcanic ash--he compared the walls of the fort behind us to "making your house out of chocolate cake", and then he went into the most remarkable lessons about the history of the Philippines.

I can't expound upon them all here, as it would take me hours and I would still leave out the vast majority of it.

I'll summarize this way though: no study of history has ever left me, as an American, feeling more responsible for a situation than the one here.

Let me tell you a parable, rather than the history, and you can see what you think.

My name is Sam. I am a farmer, I own about thirty franchise ranches that are all quite spread out--organized under me but independently owned and run. I get in an argument with my neighbor, Jose, who owns five small farms outright. When the dust settles, he gives me all five farms for very little money.

So now I have the thirty independent franchises, and the five places I own directly.

Some of those places are very far from me, and in fact, some of them are much nearer to another Farmer, let's call him Hiroshi. But this farm is great, as it allows me to grow exotic goods, and also trade in them with other farms nearby that I don't own, so I pour many resources in. I help import foreign technology and I make my little farm the jewel of all its neighbors--it flourishes under me, but its people are still slaves, not franchise owners like the rest, but there are promises that all that will change in the next few years. Meanwhile several major diseases are wiped out, I send schoolteachers to help all of the local children learn to read and write, and I even help them build the first air transport service and train line of any farm in the area to serve the far reaches of the farm.

But Hiroshi has an eye towards unifying all the farmers near him. He wants to rule as lord over them all.

So he sends his heavily armed and totally heartless farmhands to all the farms near him (including two of farmss--which some of my own hired men are guarding), now my men are asleep when Hiroshi attacks, because they're slovenly, inattentive and overconfident, and so my farm is captured.

Over the next three years, I slowly send men to fight back, and Hiroshi has to abandon the farm, but his men cannot leave easily, and so he commands them to murder every man, woman and child in my farm before killing themselves.

To stop this quickly, I burn the farm to the ground. Twenty percent of the farm workers die as a result of Hiroshi's soldiers and my fire.

The farm never recovers, even as it's neighbors are slowly pulling themselves back up, all is lost. My thought to make them a franchise is changed--instead I franchise the little place where Hiroshi attacked first, even though his attack at this farm began a mere 6 hours later, and previous to the war it had been our jewel. I abandon them, they become a farm of poor men, while the other farms around them flourish, this little farm struggles to find any identity left amid the rubble.

This is the story of the Philippines. And you and I, as Americans, were the farm owner.

In Berlin, in Hiroshima, we devastated cities of civilians, yes, but still cities in enemy territory. In the Philippines we surrundered Manila through poor military action, and then, to stop the murder of Philipinos by the trapped Japanese (and it was a massacre--75,000 murdered in three weeks) we bombed the whole city to the ground. No allied city save Warsaw took more damage than Manila, and it was from American bombs. 120,000 civilians died in the bombing of Manila. People who had depended on us, people we had shamelessly bought from the Spanish and then turned into the gateway the orient--people dependent on technology we sold them. People who, to this day say "Kodak" as a verb meaning "to take a picture". We abandoned them to the Japanese, then slaughtered them en masse on our return trip.

The only place I know where Americans behaved worse might be in our treatment of the American natives during the early 1800s under Andrew Jackson.

And then, as far a I can tell because Hawaii was in the popular eye as the point where we'd 'first' been attacked in Asia, we made Hawaii our fiftieth state instead of the Philippines, and left the devastation of an island that had been our responsibility to a man named Ferdinand Marcos, who seemed hellbent on making sure no one really rebuilt with any success during the cold war.

As an American, if you contribute money to overseas relief, if you feed starving children, if you do any of that, consider changing your donation and finding some worthwhile charity here in the Philippines to support. It will never cancel the national debt we owe this place, but it might in some small way atone for your personal contribution--we won the war in Asia by walking on the broken spines of these Islands that we owned and abandoned.

The tour obviously left an impression. I was sad that he wasn't doing his Chinatown or Corregidor island tours during the rainy season, and that I'd missed the Imelda tour on the previous day. When I come back to Manila, if he's still doing this, I will be sure to attend another time.

When the tour was over, I wanted to walk back through the area that Ruthie and I had wandered in the gathering dusk the night before, and so I got directions from Carlos that would take me back to the bridge to Chinatown on foot, so that I could walk it then.

A pleasant young Czech named Martina, who is currently a student in Sweden studying abroad and performing research in Singapore, overheard me, and she asked if she could tag along. I said of course, and we wandered through old Intramuros and Chinatown taking pictures and talking. I did find the Capitol theatre again without trouble, though the weather was bad, so the pictures will need extensive post processing if they're to be worth much.

After we'd wandered for perhaps an hour, we realized we were both hungry (my appetite was still depressed from being sick) and so we stopped at a small Chinese Dim Sum place and sat and ate and talked politics and history. She told me about the frustration of being from a place everyone associates with Russia, even though their connection with Russia was only 40 years, and is now long past. She also explained to me the distinction of "central" Europe, so I wouldn't carelessly lump the Austro-Hungarian Empires holdings into Eastern Europe as I have been doing.

I told her that I've been considering my next few long trips in earnest while I've taken this one, and that one of them might be through Russia, Scandanavia, and Central Europe, but I wasn't sure, and she gave me good advice and told me I would enjoy myself there.

She spoke about the alliances of Europeans in words that almost mirrored the stories that Washington would tell about soldiers in the new world--she would say that no matter how much she might change, she'd never really be Swedish, even if she became a Swedish citizen she'd still be a Czech in her heart, and the differences ran too deep.

I thought about the EU and the strides they have made, but about how long those divisions have been present in Europe, while in our little confederation of states the lines were new and everyone was an immigrant from somewhere else besides. Making Americans of immigrants may prove to be easier than making Europeans of natives.

I'm curious to see how the next fifty years of European politics play out, because so many of the steps are there for them to become closer and closer knit, and yet the differences run so deep. We shall see.

When I was done I rode the LRT for a while, seeing different parts of Manila to the north, and then met Zel for dinner.

When I decided to try to make friends in the Philippines, I made the mistake of contacting several people all at once, assuming that some would be busy and some would be uninterested in meeting a visitor.

Of the ones I contacted, several wrote back and expressed interest, and so my time in Manila has turned into a series of blind dates with locals, which has been fun, but challenging to juggle.

Zel turned out to be a tiny (like, maybe 4'7") cheerful bio/chem student in her final year of University, and since the weather had been so treacherous earlier in the week, we stuck to the mall and talked instead. First we went and had the most amazing tea (although I think we might have inadventently gotten each others orders, I wound up some an amazing morrocan mint tea slash hot chocolate that was to die for) and sat and told stories about school, and afterwards we split a pizza and talked about travel and life in the Philippines until it was time for her to catch a bus for her Uni around 9pm.

It was Sunday, which meant the LRT closed early (surprise!) but thankfully I half-understood the Jeepney system by then, so I found one that ran within a few blocks of my hotel and used that to get home.