ABSTRACT
My first visit to the Philippines coincided with the first typhoon of the season. As the taxi crawled into Manila from the airport, I was aware of all the crazy contradictions of Filipino society through a curtain of rain. The giant Philip Morris cigarette hoarding towered over the people in the shanty town on the corner of the road from the brand new airport. Others sat out the squall on the embankment beneath the plastic sheets that are their only home, within sight of the massive Cultural Center built by Imelda Marcos on the bones of fallen workers. (Desperate to complete work on schedule for an opening attended by foreign dignitaries, she ordered the concreting over of the bodies of building workers killed when a floor fell in.) Abject squalor sits alongside wealth and grandeur as in many Third World cities, but the pervasive American presence – in accent, currency, cars and commerce, schools and law courts – contrives to make it all the more obscene. It is a moot point as to whether it is despite, or because of, the presence of American-style institutions that gun-toting guards and bloody murder are so much part of everyday life here. In just one typical day, Manila newspapers reported the discovery of a mass grave of 100 unidentified corpses in the Manila South cemetery, the killing of 29 guerrillas and 4 military in three separate clashes on other islands, the death of 18 pirates in a sea battle, the confession of a 27-year-old prostitute drug addict to the slaying of her lesbian lover and allegations of corruption in the Philippine Senate. The more time I spent in the Philippines, the more unreal it became, as if I had wandered on to the location of a spaghetti Western. But instead of Sergio Leone re-creating the Wild West in Spain, this was more like Yul Brynner directing the Magnificent Seven to ride back towards the Seven Samurai. This is not so much where East meets West, as where it has long since submitted to it, and is continually auditioning for a part in it. It is not just the youth who ape every cinematic style and cliche from Hollywood. Many of the politicians seem to have stumbled in from Dallas; and every aspect of the society, its institutions and culture, bears the imprint of the former colonial masters.
