Obsession

Radical left groups are promising to burn a hundred American flags on the day George Bush comes to visit us. That is unfortunate. It is pure gimmickry in an atmosphere already charged with silly acts of political grandstanding.

For the money they will consume to buy a hundred flags to incinerate, the radical groups might consider treating a hundred street children to a day in the mall. A day without begging. A day of joy.

What a waste this is, this burning of a hundred flags. What an atrocity this is, buying all those flags with money most likely extorted from small rural businessmen forced to bankruptcy by the terror of inane "revolutionaries."

What a childish spectacle this will be. It is so, well, sixties.

I am sure this infantile carnival will be led by people in their sixties, or at least by those who play out an old mindset. The world is haunted by ageing Hippies and by the tired keepers of obsolete orthodoxies.

Anti-Americanism is a dead horse we have kicked way beyond the bounds of mercy, beyond the bounds of enlightenment.

It is not the dead horse that is pitiful. It is those who continue kicking the dead horse that deserve our charity. For the nuances of contemporary life escape them and they could seek out their symbols only from a past long gone and in the language of an epoch that had long ago dissipated.

The tragedy of Filipino nationalism is that it has failed to mature into authentic patriotism.

Filipino nationalism has been nothing more than an elaborated siege mentality rather than an affirmative ideology of what we are and what we can become. It is an ideology whose utopia is autarky and whose demons are foreign influences.

It is an ideology of cultivated helplessness, of fear and insecurity. We are made to be insecure about our role in the modern world. We are asked to fear foreign conspiracies intending to strip us of whatever self-inflicted poverty has left us with.

Faced with the complexities of modern life, we are asked to huddle in our caves, seeking solace in the disabilities we share. Faced with the scourge of "globalization", the prophets of autarky ask us to close down our borders and commonly share starvation if that need be the cost of conserving national patrimony. We should speak only a language entirely our own and converse only in the idioms of parochialism.

The vapid ideology of defensive nationalism was exploited by unholy forces in our society. It was used by the native oligarchy to resist the forces of efficiency brought about by free competition. It was used by a native dictatorship to provide a garb of legitimacy to its regime of greed. It was used by protectionists as a shield to preserve an economic order where the choices of local consumers were limited to what is lousy and overpriced.

Visits here by American chiefs of state have been rare and far between. It is not because such visits are worthless. It is because such visits are an inconvenience.

Unlike other countries in this region that have become more confident of their abilities to command their destiny, our society continues to harbor groups that nurse ideologies from the 19th century. In 2003, they are still there trying to win the war of 1898.

Every visit by an American head of state becomes a bizarre provocation for these queer groups. The rarity of the opportunity makes them more virulent. They will bring orgies of protest to the streets, attempt every form of disruption possible and cause as wide an embarrassment for the whole nation as possible.

And all in the service of a dead ideology whose flagstaff is anti-Americanism.

The orgies of protest slated for the next month has nothing to do with George W. Bush himself. It is all about parochial and ideological issues defined through the blinders of that dead ideology.

The visit by the US head of state will be seized upon by a variety of partisan forces and ideological groups for narrow goals that will likely baffle the Americans.

Among those interested in displacing President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in May 2004, the protests will be undertaken to embarrass her government and contain whatever positive impact such a visit might have on her political stock. They had tried to forestall the visit by destabilization projects. Failing in that, they will create the maximum annoyance to grab public attention away from whatever diplomatic gains might be established during the brief visit here of Bush.

Among the leftist groups gearing up for political orgies in the streets, the visit will be used to as a platform to rally the people against "US imperialism".

In the name of rejecting "imperialism", these groups have stood against the common front set by the world’s democracies against the threat of terrorism. In the name of rejecting "imperialism", they have stood against the formation of just rules governing global trade so that the beneficial intercourse between nations will not be shaped – as it was in the past – by who has the more powerful navy.

In a word, the visit will be used to help revive a totally bankrupt view prescribing that we treat our economy as a fortress, keeping our own inefficiencies intact by rejecting global benchmarks for technical and organizational effectiveness. They wish to rally the least modern among us to resist the forces of modernization.

The very existence of boisterous neo-Luddite groups in our midst is an embarrassment in itself. Apart from the Philippines, only Nepal has such a backward level of political discourse as to allow a Maoist insurgency to persist. Even China, home of Maoism, has long rejected the bankruptcy of the "know-nothingism" associated with this anti-progressive orientation.

Obsessed with anti-Americanism, the radical left groups will likely lead to way to create maximum disturbance next month. They might block the routes with their bodies and precipitate confrontations with police crowd control units.

In the process, they will not only cause the entire nation embarrassment. They will also unwittingly serve the goals of fascist politicians seeking to scorch the earth of our economic life, produce chaos in our national life and pave the way for the rule of demagogues.

Unfortunately, in the name of democracy, we are all obliged to tolerate a high degree of stupidity in our politics. That high degree of stupidity has enforced a political culture that is constantly highly charged because the debate is often settled by the ability to produce noise rather than the ability to convey substance.

When leftist fanatics occupy our streets on October 18, they will be attempting to block Bush only symbolically. But they will actually be blocking the modernization of our political discourse in reality.