James Fallows

Twenty-three years ago, shortly after Corazon Aquino had replaced Ferdinand Marcos as president of the Philippines, I traveled through the country and wrote an Atlantic article called "A Damaged Culture." Mrs. Aquino was then still in the late stages of being perceived as a world hero. Her husband, Benigno, had become the martyred symbol of the anti-Marcos resistance after he was murdered by government goons as he got off a plane on his return to Manila. (His body on the tarmac, below.) Mrs. Aquino was the living symbol of the "EDSA revolution" of 1986, which with relatively little violence* had succeeded in driving Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos from power and appearing to open a new age of reform and promise for a long-suffering people. After the revolution, Mrs. Aquino had addressed a Joint Session of the U.S. Congress and been chosen Time magazine's Woman of the Year.

In a sociological sense the elevation of Corazon Aquino through the EDSA revolution should probably be seen not as a revolution but as the restoration of the old order. Marcos's rise represented the triumph of the nouveau riche. He was, of course, an Ilocano, from the tough, frugal Ilocos region, in the northwest corner of Luzon. Many of those whom he enriched were also outsiders to the old-money, old-family elite that had long dominated the country's politics. These elite groups, often referred to in shorthand as Makati (the name of the wealthy district and business center of Manila), regarded Marcos the way high-toned Americans regarded Richard Nixon: clever and ambitious, but so uncouth. 

Corazon Aquino's family, the Cojuangcos, is part of this landowning elite... Since the Spanish days land has been concentrated in a few giant haciendas, including the 17,000-acre Hacienda Luisita of the Cojuangco family, and no government has done much to change the pattern. "You could argue that real land reform would lead to more productivity, but it's an entirely hypothetical argument,' an Australian economist told me. "This government simply is not going to cause a revolution in the social structure.' Just before the new Congress convened, as her near-dictatorial powers were about to elapse, Aquino signed a generalized land-reform-should-happen decree. Most observers took this as an indication that land reform would not happen, since the decree left all the decisions about the when, where, and how of land reform to the landowner-heavy Congress.

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A Filipino-American friend, who works for an American high-tech firm and is now based in China, writes about the reaction to Corazon Aquino's death inside the Philippines. So much about this note brings up the powerful and opposing feelings that I have had on every experience in the country: admiration for the heart and passion of so many individual Filipinos, and pretty much outright despair at the predicament in which they all seem trapped.

I'm in Cebu, visiting my mom and dad for the weekend. I was here the morning Corazon Aquino passed away. The outpouring of emotion and respect across the country has been tremendous. Coverage has been literally nonstop on [the main news channel] ANC (they're actually showing a live shot now of her body being prepped for transfer from La Salle Greenhills after the public viewing) and they've been replaying and reliving memories of her rise to power and the EDSA revolution....

I was just a little kid in 1986 (I was 10), and for me, it is a very powerful reminder of how passionate the Filipino people can be and how this became such an iconic moment of democracy for the rest of the world.

A few things struck me as quite interesting about "Tita Cory's" passing:...I thought Hu Jintao's statement of condolences was also gracious and obligatory, but colored by the idea that People Power didn't go so well in Tiananmen Square in 1989. (Media here is even citing people in Beijing shouting "Cory! Cory!" during the TS protests, but I've never heard that before).

The fact that she will not receive a state burial befitting a former president is also fascinating. The idea that, even in death, she and her family opted to continue her life as a private citizen is a strong statement for leaders everywhere. As her family has stated (starting with Ninoy), public service is just that: Service. "After that, you're done. You're nothing," said Ninoy. [Ninoy = her assassinated husband, senator Benigno Aquino.]

And finally, after taking my father to an afternoon of sabong (cockfighting) here in Mandaue City, we talked about the state of the country in his eyes since EDSA. He came to the U.S. in May of 1972, just four months before Marcos' declared martial law. He is a former priest who was in seminary since the age of 15 and witnessed the US routing of Japan from Sorsogon as a small boy at the end of WWII. Now he and my mother are back to live the rest of their lives in their home country. What's changed?

"A lot has changed. Nothing has gotten better." And he's right.

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In an item yesterday about the distinguished Filipino novelist F. Sionil "Frankie" Jose, I mentioned that I'd taken a road trip with him to the northern reaches of Luzon and written about it in the Atlantic in 1991. Thanks to our web team, especially Cotton Codinha, that article is now online, here.

I hadn't looked at the article in a very long time and was disconcerted to find that the comparison I used yesterday to describe Jose's gusto was the very same one that came to mind 18 years ago. I hope that this unintended self-plagiarism says as much about the rightness of the comparison as it does about the limits of my imagination. It comes at the end of this part of the original article:

José is a short, plump, nearly bald man of sixty-six, who would not look out of place wearing the baggy shorts and basketball-style undershirt of the typical Chinese shopkeeper in Southeast Asia. When I see him, I am reminded of a little boy--in the way he carries his body, in his quick and unconcealed switches from desolation to glee. On our five-day trip last summer, when he was driving me and a young Soviet academic to see the sights of his youth, we passed a railroad siding where the teenage José had been held by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. "I was so scared," he said, his face clouding like a ten-year-old's. "I was so little and skinny then--ho ho ho!" he roared, slapping his round belly. We stopped every few miles so that José could see whether the cane-sugar sweets, or the little roasted birds, or the other regional delicacies were as tasty as he recalled. When he was not planning the next meal, he sat watching women with a blissful look. "Ah, I tell you, Jim, the eye never dulls!" he said in a restaurant after four stunning young women walked by our table "Only the flesh becomes weak--ho ho ho!"

Eventually I asked him how his wife, Tessie, whom he married forty-two years ago, after both had been students at the University of Santo Tomas, in Manila, feels about the adoring descriptions of young women that fill his work. "She knows I am devoted to her," he said, serious for a moment. "And she forgives me my pecadeeeeyos!" A rich roar of laughter. This, I thought, is what it must have been like to be on the road with Rabelais.

Because Frankie Jose has been so centrally involved in debates about the effects of Philippine culture on the country's political and economic destiny, for the record I include a link to my 1987 article "A Damaged Culture," which also cites Jose's works. This article generated a lot of heat, and some support, in the Philippines. From what I can tell similar debates still rage.