BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE

(Or How One Dearly Hangs On to the Coattails of US Imperialist Nostalgia)

     By Mauro Gia Samonte

          Benigno (Aquino III or Teddy, whoever Benigno you are does not matter), what matters is that you miserably miss the point in the current struggle of the Baguio City people against the environmental destruction Henry Sy is wreaking upon the city of your blog’s writer Midway Haven, 

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          You harp on the goodie ole days of the American occupation when from your too constricted reckoning, the City of Pines was blessed with care and nourishment by Uncle Sam, to wit: “When the Americans took possession of the Philippines, Baguio was selected by a party to become the summer capital of the Philippines. In 1903 Filipino, Japanese and Chinese workers were hired to build Kennon Road, the first road directly connecting Baguio with the lowlands of Pangasinan. Before this, the only road to Benguet was Naguilian Road.

          “The Americans declared Baguio the Summer Capital of the Philippines on July 1, 1903. Every year during the months of March to June, the entire American government personnel from the Governor-General to the humblest clerk was moved to Baguio to escape Manila’s summer heat (abolished in 1913 when Francis B. Harrison took office). The Mansion House was built to become the residence of the American governor-general. The famous American architect Daniel Burnham, one of the earliest successful modern city planners, laid a meticulous plan for the city in 1904. On September 1, 1909 Baguio was declared a chartered city, the second after the city of Manila. They further developed Baguio, building parks and public structures such as Wright Park in honor of Governor General Luke E. Wright, Burnham Park in honor of Baguio city planner Daniel Burnham, Governor Pack Road, and Session Road.”

           And so on and so forth romantic musings about what you, Benigno, and your ilk would love to depict as American goodwill and benevolence, never mind that spreading that goodwill and benevolence needed to annihilate more than 1 million Filipinos, ravage to oblivion the cultural heritage of those who courageously survived, rape their patrimony and sovereignty, ravish Philippine nationalism, and forever fetter country and people to the evil trappings of neo-colonialism.

          You blame Filipinos for the tianges that from your point of view have defaced the beautiful landscape Americans created in Burnham Park. Have you ever paused to ask why? But the heck! In your cramped cerebral chamber crowded even no doubt by bourgeois cobwebs, how would you ever get to reckon that tianges are what Filipinos can only make-do with, as crumbs and morsels from the Philippine economic pie which has been made exclusively up for grab mainly by Taipans and American multinationals!

          “And a big cost it is as many of our slacktivists are now coming to understand,” you declare with ridicule, proceeding to even greater derision, “Then again, maybe they don’t understand,” before proclaiming the ultimate mindlessness: “Protesting SM’s tree-killing expansion in Baguio City is a pointless exercise — because the SM we would like to regard as a ‘monster’ is one created by the Filipino people themselves, not too different from the other monsters that now stymie any of our hare-brained efforts to achieve ‘progress’: the embarrassing size of our population, our imprisonment to reliance on non-renewable sources of the national product (consumption, foreign employment, and extraction), and the chronically stalemated politics further aggravated by the rise to power of a vindictive Chief Executive.”

          Hey, Benigno, you’re barking up the wrong tree!

          Those Philippine social ills are all so true, but your diagnosis is demented. You put poison into a person’s mouth, do you blame the poisoned? Damn the poisoner!

          Capitalism is the least workers would like to swallow. But state power forces it down their throats. So what do you say, suits them fine?

          Or are you doing a Trillianes? Shortly after the failed Oakwood Mutiny, he declared:“The Filipino people deserve the kind of government they have.” Look where he is now, part of the “government the Filipino people deserve to have.”

          Look where you are now? Part of Henry Sy’s apologists: “There are many worthwhile things to protest. The fate of 182 trees being ‘sacrificed’ at the altar of the sort of consumption that has come to define the Filipino is not one of them. It is an issue that merely highlights the oxymoronism of Philippine activism.”

          Oxymoronism, my foot! Typically Teddy.

          But here’s my own califragilisticexpialidocious.

          Consumption, yes. Foreign employment, yes. Extraction, yes.

 
          Yes. Yes. Yes.

          But what are all these? The handiwork of US big capitalists working through the US government and the federal reserve to keep the Philippines ever at their bidding – economically, culturally and, yes indeed, politically.

 
          The rise to the presidency of your namesake, Benigno, is itself testimony to US expertise at propping up presidents of nations in order to advance its imperialist aims.

          By whose grace did that Benigno become president? By the grace of the death of his mother, Cory. By whose grace, did Cory become president? By the grace of US big capitalists who kidnapped Marcos and forced him into exile – thereby making it quite easy for the erstwhile simple housewife to gain what her husband, Ninoy Aquino, failed to do in his long, drawn-out political skirmish with Marcos: the Phili[ppine presidency. (See KNOWING NINOY AQUINO, this Blog, for a comprehensive essay on the subject.)

          The Baguio City folks have all the moral right to combat even to the point of violent confrontation the tree-cutting spree of Henry Sy. Cutting those trees will disturb the chain of processes needed to be maintained in order to keep the balance in the ecology.

           But Henry Sy is a claw on the foot of the monster called US imperialism, and as we say it in Tagalog, “ang kirot ng kalingkingan ay sakit ng buong katawan (pain on the small toe is ache of the whole body). Combating Henry Sy is, in US imperialists’ own chain of processes, combating US imperialism, and so must prompt Benignos in its hire to issue apologias that in the face of the decline US imperialism is imminently heading to can amount to nothing but a feeble pining for what-might=have-beens – the final gasps of imperialist nostalgia.

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