| BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE : OCTOBER 11, 1999 ISSUE | ||||||||
| ||||||||
 | ||||||||
| BOOKS
Was Marcos Misunderstood? AMERICA'S BOY A Century of Colonialism in the Philippines By James Hamilton-Paterson Henry Holt 462pp $30 It was a trying thing to cover the Philippines during the final years of President Ferdinand Marcos. Most correspondents, especially the Americans, developed a fixed smirk during their Manila tours. Tragedy and comedy were everywhere. Every road, bridge, building, and business deal had a story, usually one of chicanery and shameless corruption. You didn't need Imelda's famous shoe collection to see in the surreal First Pair that grotesque Third World mix of greed, buffoonery, and tyranny. Then someone such as then-Vice-President George Bush would arrive. He disembarked from Air Force One shortly before Marcos fell and told him: ''We love your commitment to democratic principles.'' Yes, ''trying'' is a good word for those years. Many books were written about the Marcoses after their inglorious departure in 1986. But James Hamilton-Paterson didn't much like any of them. ''Books written in this period tended to share a specific viewpoint, seeing everything in the slanted light of the time,'' he writes in America's Boy, his history of the Marcos dictatorship. ''Ideally, the sort of account I was hoping for would not treat recent political history solely from the usual perspective of American corridors of power.'' Hamilton-Paterson, a Briton who has sojourned in a Filipino village for 20 years, set out to do it differently. ''The Marcoses would only become comprehensible,'' he explains, ''when put into a much longer context than was fashionable, and seen against the background of coconut palms and paddy fields as well as of executive office furniture.'' It's a laudable endeavor. The cold war gave us many kooky notions, with the casting of Marcos as a committed democrat a premier example. And with those Manichaean years behind us, the case for historical revision is prima facie, for it is time to see people just as they were, not merely as chess pieces in a global game. But Hamilton-Paterson fails to measure up to his own ambition. Poorly researched, pretentiously written, and intellectually flawed, this book doesn't fly. Philippine history, as the author points out, has long been written by foreigners--first the Spanish, then the Americans. Hamilton-Paterson must be counted as part of the problem. For those unfamiliar with the Marcos story, America's Boy is a passable gloss. It covers all the main themes: the concocted backgrounds--including Marcos' ersatz World War II heroics--the creeping grandiosity, the brutality of the martial-law years (1972-81), the slide into delusion and decay, and Washington's support throughout. The nation became a living room--and at times a bedroom--for the tasteless twosome. As Ferdie's philandering humiliated Imelda, Hamilton-Paterson writes, ''the Marcoses began to play out their marital tiffs by means of public monuments.'' After one affair, Marcos built a bridge between Samar and Leyte islands--the latter being Imelda's home province--and publicly declared it ''A Birthday Gift to Imelda the Fabulous by [sic] the President.'' There are hundreds of such tales. At the core of the regime was an intricate, ingrained system of patronage--peculiar to the Philippines in its details but familiar in the Third World. Clan politics made a mess of the economy and condemned Filipinos to poverty and a premodern polity. It could have been different: When Marcos was first elected in 1965, he presided over the most promising nation in Southeast Asia. Hamilton-Paterson doesn't see it this way. The Marcoses were misunderstood, he reckons, for patronage is simply the way the Philippines works. Buying votes with social programs, pork, and pesos may be corrupt, but it still gets resources to the rural poor. When Corazon Aquino succeeded Marcos, it was nothing more than ''musical chairs,'' the author writes. ''It has always been thus,'' he says of the endemic corruption. ''It was so well before the Marcoses came, it was so while they were in office, and it is still so today.'' There's no doubt of the role patronage has played in the Philippines. But Hamilton-Paterson neglects to ask the essential questions about it: Why is it still embedded in the system? Does it persist because Filipinos prefer it--or because the Marcoses manipulated old habits of paternal dependence long after they should have given way to a modern democracy? The missing ingredients here are easily identified: Hamilton-Paterson has left out politics and history and rests his analysis on such things as climate, landscape, and culture instead. That leads to gross misjudgments. He makes much of villagers who miss the Marcoses' handouts, but he fails to see the bitterness and desperation that lay beneath the apparent gratitude. Cory turned out to be less than the new broom the world first took her to be. But to assert that hers was a more-of-the-same administration is simply indefensible. America's Boy is a textbook example of what scholars call a ''national character'' argument: The Philippines is the way it is because that's the way Filipinos are. It's most frequently applied to Germany and Japan. Hamilton-Paterson is one step away from the ''Asian values'' crowd--those who say democracy isn't for Asians because they prefer Confucian hierarchies and personal politics to the rule of law. Few Filipinos will find this book any better than those old histories authored by foreigners. By PATRICK SMITH _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ BACK TO TOP |
|  |
 | |
RELATED ITEMS Was Marcos Misunderstood? PHOTO: Cover, ``America's Boy'' INTERACT E-Mail to Business Week Online | |||
