‘Americawatch’

The Filipino obsession with the United States reaches its peak today and in the coming days as the latest presidential election grips that nation. Will Barack Obama be handed a second term, albeit with the narrowest of leads, or will the Electoral College allow Mitt Romney to steal the show?

This is no surprise as the umbilical cord that linked the Philippines with that country has never been severed despite the lowering of the US flag on July 4, 1946. It just took a little over 40 years of colonial experience for the Philippines to be forever enamored and endeared to Mother America, despite all the oratory about independence and charting our own sovereignty. America remains our biggest recipient of Filipino migrants, with many families there now entering their fourth generation. That is what happens when one’s colonial master reigns supreme (or once reigned supreme) over all other nations.

Officially, we stand on equal footing with this superpower. Yet, unofficially, we clamor for US support most especially now in the face of threats from our mighty neighbor, China. (Incidentally, that nation is also electing its leader for the next 10 years just as Americans trooped to the polls. China, fortunately or unfortunately, is under the grip of one monolithic political apparatus that is virtually communist only in name and only when it selects its leaders. The United States, on the other hand, has to go through painfully divisive elections every four years—a polarization that began when America stumbled and then faltered in Vietnam in the 1960s.)

Already there is talk that the peso-dollar exchange rate will tumble down to P30 to every dollar by December as Filipino contract workers all over the globe are wont to increase their remittance to the Philippines—using American dollars—in time for Christmas. Christmas holidays are, after all, the best moments of status displays for those in the Philippines to show off what their Filipino relatives abroad strove for, braving the cold winters to give them a good life here.

The exchange rate is compounded by the uncertainty hovering over the American economy as it continues to grope in the darkness of deep economic recession. And yet many of us still look up to America for everything that we are not, from our absent public transport system, our flyovers that any American planner would look at with chagrin, our lack of discipline and inability to obey traffic rules on the road to the mangled version of representative democracy that we inherited from the US.

For many, it is as if we too are electing a president, eyes glued to the television, following the blow by blow account of newscasters as the Electoral College begins to indirectly elect the next President to guide this superpower.

There are many interconnecting factors that make this phenomenon so palpable in the Philippines and nowhere else. At its most fundamental is the fact that we were once its only colonial enclave in Asia, where the American version of education, health and sanitation, public service, democracy and capitalism were.

We do not care if, despite America’s tutelage, we turned out so differently (some will even say so badly) from the way she envisioned us.

We do not even blame her. Instead, we laud America for liberating us in 1945. We forgive her for quickly abandoning us by granting us a hasty independence a year later, after seeing the devastation—and the concomitant cost of rehabilitation—that would have crippled her economy the way West Germany suffered after the Berlin Wall collapsed and East Germany had to be reintegrated with it.

In short, many of us still wish we were like America. Never mind if it doesn’t snow here. Never mind the color of our skin. In short, paraphrasing American-era writer and migrant Carlos Bulosan’s ground-breaking book, America has always been in the Filipino heart.