The Wily Filipino

Books for Bush.

The other day I received, via the Flips list, a mass e-mail message from E.R. Escober, author of Not My Bowl of Rice, a book I still have yet to read. Included in the thank you note (which I'm posting here without permission) -- it was for a reading at the SF Public Library, which I didn't get to attend -- was this:

Special thanks to Pres. and Mrs. Bush who requestedfor a copy of the book (& sent mea nice,personalized thank you note for it) . Perhaps they requested copies of all exisiting Filipino/ Fil-Am books to acquaint themselve with our culture, etc for their forthcoming visit to the Philippines.

We-hell.

Mr. Bush, may I suggest, as first on your list, The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, edited by Daniel Schirmer and Stephen Shalom? The title will put you off, I know, but it has short pieces in it -- perfect for bedtime reading just before you nod off to sleep. And perfect for people with short attention spans like you! (I'd bet, though, that you'll probably read Stanley Karnow's In Our Image: America's Empire in the Philippines instead -- it's a lot more reassuring of America's "good motives" regarding its colonial empire.)

But there's always Raymond Bonner's Waltzing with a Dictator: The Marcoses and the Making of American Policy, or maybe James Hamilton-Paterson's America's Boy: A Century of Colonialism in the Philippines, just to bring you up to speed on the feller your dad praised for his "adherence to democratic principles."

And these are just books you can get pretty easily in the U.S. via Amazon.com -- no need to send your flunkies on a hunt for Filipino bookstores in the U.S. (though it's probably a lot easier than, say, finding WMDs in Iraq).

And if non-fiction isn't your thing -- it might be a little too heavy, and too close to, um, reality -- then maybe some poetry instead? Here's the last stanza from the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga's "War, Like Fever," found in Luis Francia and Eric Gamalinda's Flippin': Filipinos on America:

So must you clinic the world
and make us patients of your peace,
a strange love that breeds sanitation
but without sanity, the last physic
gulped by the physician, the majesty
of his cure more fearful
   than the pox itself.

Anyone else have any recommendations for George Bush? (And make the readings simple, folks -- we're talking a C-average here!) (No offense to E.R. Escober, by the way.)

Posted by the wily filipino at September 24, 2003 02:52 PM