Posted on 09/30/2005 3:21:41 PM PDT by SinisterDexter
THE United States is “America” to most people. But that word refers to the continent. When applied to the United States, it is better spelled with a “k,” as in “swastika.”
It’s the country most Filipinos want to visit. But if you’ve ever been involved in any group or activity faintly progressive; if you have relatives or friends who have been there; or you’re from a country that its officials say harbors “terrorist groups,” you’d be tempting fate to go there. No matter how vague or past your involvement, it could earn you a strip search, an interrogation session with the FBI or immigration, summary deportation, or even indefinite detention.
Retired Philippine Army general Raymundo Jarque and his wife Xenia found this out last week when they landed in Dallas. Singled out for interrogation, the Jarques, both in their 60s, were also denied food while awaiting deportation, and jailed in their underwear. The charge: possible terrorist links because Jarque was a National Democratic Front consultant in the peace talks in the 1990s.
The Jarques went to the United States to visit relatives. Like many Filipinos, they’re linked by blood to that country through sons and daughters, cousins and uncles, nieces or nephews who live there.
The United States is not a nice place for non-whites and dollar-poor people to visit even in the best of times. You don’t really want to live there -- not if you think there’s more to life than McDonald’s, a gas-guzzling car, Mickey Mouse prancing around Disneyland, and indulging one’s earthly appetites at the cost of one’s dignity and self-respect. But I confess: I’ve visited the United States several times to see relatives, and even briefly lived there during arguably better times.
In 1978, Jimmy Carter was US president. Carter had inherited the US policy -- in place since the Johnson administration -- of supporting dictatorships. But Amerika tolerated opponents of dictatorship within its borders. Many Filipino exiles opposed to the Marcos regime were there in the late 1970s, and they could lobby Congress, publish anti-dictatorship tracts, and hold public discussions without fear.
But while dissenters were tolerated, the US government continued to support Marcos with economic and military aid. The conflict was between the United States’ supposed adherence to democratic rights and the demands of its imperial interests. Those interests the architects of its foreign policy sought to defend and advance at all costs, including mass murder.
Since the Reagan presidency, the contradiction has been resolved in favor of repression at home and naked aggression abroad. The Republican gang of George W. Bush has also savaged due process and other individual rights on the excuse that it’s necessary to defeat “international terrorism.”
If Nixon bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, and George W. Bush Iraq, the Democrats’ Bill Clinton did the same to Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. It’s in the policies at home, not abroad, where the Republicans and the Democrats differ. At least at home, minority and immigrant rights, as well as those of visitors, were to some extent respected by Democratic administrations.
US immigration treats every visitor from a poor country as a potential overstaying alien whatever party is in power. But nowadays if you’re Asian, or just look different, you’re likely to be regarded as a possible terrorist as well. The worst thing is to be a Muslim and/or Arab, which makes Indonesians, Malaysians and some Filipinos, but especially Middle Eastern folk, likely victims of racial profiling at US immigration counters.
There are enough horror stories about the treatment of “terrorists” to fill a hefty volume. This is so because the US Patriot Act permits the summary deportation or indefinite detention of suspected terrorists without the benefit of lawyers and visits by relatives, among other reasons.
But the scramble to visit and live in the United States continues because the poverty rampant in the United States world order (800 million people go to bed hungry daily) drives millions from their countries to look for opportunities abroad—especially in the United States.
And yet poverty is no stranger to millions of US residents. Some 37 million are poor, and millions of US children often go hungry. Amerika is also an extremely violent place, with some 30,000 people shot dead every year, and 65,000 more injured. School shootings by students have been described as “an epidemic.” Assaults, rapes and armed robberies are common, with one violent crime for every 47 US residents occurring yearly. Two million people are in US prisons, in the construction of which Amerika excels as it does in war and mayhem.
Racism is as common as grass in the United States, where everything’s right if you’re white, but everything can be wrong if you’re not. And they start them young. Grade school children blithely hurl such racial epithets as “Nigger,” “Spic,” “Chink,” etc. at each other when they quarrel.
It’s a habit of thought that stays with them all their lives, whether on the job, in school or on the street -- where your being a “Slope” (Asian) or a homosexual can earn you a beating by racist gangs.
“America” isn’t in the heart. It’s in the colonial mind, “Amerika” being the reality. You don’t really want to live there, and visiting it is like visiting Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Except that today you don’t have to be Jewish; you just have to be different.
Luis V. Teodoro is a professor of journalism at the University of the Philippines.
"not if you think there’s more to life than McDonald’s, a gas-guzzling car, Mickey Mouse prancing around Disneyland, and indulging one’s earthly appetites at the cost of one’s dignity and self-respect. But I confess: I’ve visited the United States several times..."
Ha Ha!
I had him pegged as a professor of creative fiction. Journalism's close enough.
"Faintly progressive"?
The FBI must have known enough about this guy to want to take a close look at him when he arrived.
Fess' up ~ send him a check. We don't need this.
Michelle Malkin is Filipino, and she can kick this jerk's ass.
Exactly. And make sure you spread the word around, we've got enough America haters here as it is without letting more of them in.
University of Practically Anywhere is more like it.
Maybe this means that the good professor will not be gracing our shores anythime soon. We should all hope....
I never write a check for less than a buck.
The illegal alien Mexicans disagree, all 15? million of them. They not only come here illegally, they collect every benefit possible, thanks to non-enforcement of immigration laws where Mexican slave laborers are concerned.
Professor Teodoro is simply parroting what is regarded as received truth among the intellectual classes in the Philippines and elsewhere. You could make a perfect translation into French or German without losing a single cliche.
If you think this is pure ignorance you ought to have read the crap in the Manila papers leading up to our exit from that country. This is mild by comparison in tone but no less ignorant.
*snicker*
...permanently.
And they stick around so this guy must be totally full of it (and himself)
Yeah, boo hoo. Ask the Filipinos who have immigrated if their lives are better or worse here than they were in the fatherland. Most will say "better." The ones who say "worse" or either criminals or liars.
Please tell the mexicans also. And stay home.
so let's talk poverty in the phillipines, let's talk terrorist attacks in the phillipines, let's talk about all the women that have to go into the sex trade to feed themselves, let's talk about what an idiot this particular author is,,,,and let's hope he visits us again so HE can be strip searched and held without food - stay where you are in your own impoverished country, you're not welcome here.
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