By 2015, the Philippines would have become merely a "geographic location"; at best, a virtual nation. Home would be nothing but a staging ground for an overseas career, an issuing authority for passports.

by Manuel L. Quezon III

	Illustration by Karlo de Asis

IT TOOK the children of the First Quarter Storm to realize just how thoroughly the circle had been broken. Their parents, at least, had been able to remember the Old Society, which, for all its many imperfections, could still be dreamed of as on the verge of being replaced by the New. The truth that the New Society was novel only in its ruthlessness could never overcome how fundamentally revolutionary its legacy was. So colossal was its greed, so utterly beyond redemption its hypocrisy, so thorough was its tyranny, that only those who had lived to see its dawn could remember that not all that came before was darkness.

The Marcoses were not just dynasty, they were dead end. Not just for a political way of life, but for a culture that claimed to crave the sunshine and fresh air of liberty and democracy as branded by the U.S. stars and stripes. The problem had been that the aspirations of the U.S.-educated had been nurtured on the corruption and stench of robber-baron, yellow-journalist-era America. Church, club, college: all had been nurtured in America’s image but that image was the mirror of an America dominated by Tammany Hall, the Pendergast Machine, William Randolph Hearst, John Rockefeller and Pierpoint Morgan. Reformist, populist America had yet to be born when U.S. proconsuls and educators came to the Philippines; the great, muckracking changes of a Theodore Roosevelt, the pious internationalism of a Woodrow Wilson, the exhilarating progressiveness of Franklin D. Roosevelt were alien things to the Americans teaching Filipinos to be little brown brothers. And so it was inevitable that having been taught by entirely a different sort of Americans, Filipinos saw the new America and wondered how different it all seemed.

When Marcos put an end to the U.S. experiment, he did so not only as one of the finest examples of U.S. education, but as one of the supreme examples of what was then known as the Filipino way of life. Church, club, and college were all there to be used, just as they used those who used them. America had separated Church and State, not in the manner envisioned by the propagandists and revolutionists of the 19th century, the Rizals and Mabinis who hoped to establish a secular religion of consecration to the nation; instead, church was transformed into finishing schools, where private faith couldn’t interfere with public hypocrisy. The patriotic clubs of the past were supplanted by the Kiwanis and Rotaries of an enterprising new middle class convinced of the irrelevant quaintness of the Masonic lodges of old. The sons and daughters of this rising middle class, if not polished by church-run schools, could get their education in public schools, themselves institutions that preached that everyone could get ahead.

And get ahead they did, by hook or by crook: sell the farm, subdivide the hacienda, go to school; study abroad and be a pensionado through the patronage of a politician; attend college and make sure to join a fraternity, where the fundamentally American lesson that it was all right to endure the unendurable, so long as you proved you belonged, was taught all too well.

This was the genius of 19th-century United States, and it was the genius of 20th-century Philippines: belong, and all crooked paths lead straight to success. If you couldn’t actually join the oligarchy, you could work for it. There was plenty for everyone. There was nothing—a revolt here or there—that couldn’t be solved through a combination of the mailed fist and the bribe. But such was the egotism of Marcos that he thought he could eliminate the only thing that kept things together, and that thing was a turnover in the cliques that embodied success. Hope sprang eternal so long as one’s hopes weren’t eternally postponed; not just presidents, but mayors, prelates, petty bureaucrats and managers, principals and physicians, all of whom got ahead depending on who they knew and who could offer them a place in the system.

MARCOS BROKE the circle; he stopped the wheel from spinning; he shut down the pump. Politically, the effects of his attempt to establish an everlasting dynasty soon showed. Politicians became restless, and while their heretofore natural progression in the pecking order was retarded for a generation, they eventually displaced him and were proud of it.

Society, of course, has never been just about politics. Yet the repercussions of his actions were magnified so slowly as to leave the majority of those involved unaware of their extent. Change coincided with the passing of generations. Marcos’s wartime generation, frightened of change so that it embraced reaction, survived, grew fat, and thought it redeemed itself by kicking him out when their pocketbooks began to look empty. Their sons and daughters expended their energies in much the same manner their parents did, though cloaked in the rhetoric of the First Quarter Storm. Sooner or later it was back to church, club, college: first as a means of aiding and abetting resistance to the dictatorship, then to attempting to build a comfortable world to replace it.

Having wrecked the country, the dictatorship had preached finding opportunities abroad as a safety valve for the young and a means of life support for the economy at home. It worked better than anyone could imagine because although the policy failed to assure dynastic rule for the Marcoses at home, it extended the illusion of the system still having a pulse. Church, club, and college were the path: the sons and daughters of the established and the aspiring could still belong. The new could be like the old. Except the old did not realize that to them the old were not as the old viewed themselves: despise or criticize their World-War-II-era parents though they might, the generation of the First Quarter Storm still shared their culture. They could embrace or reject it (or having let go, embrace it again), but they couldn’t help but live it, at least for a time. Their children had no such luxury.

The children of the First Quarter Storm had another name: martial law babies. Born in the darkness of dictatorship, enlightenment, if it ever came at all, was expressed in terms of sudden disappointment. Bewilderment was their experience—at the crumbling of a dictatorship they had been indoctrinated to adulate; at the exhilaration of restoring democracy, only to be told it was a refurbished oligarchy; at the inability of democracy to equal economic improvement; at the shortsighted hypocrisy of it all. They lacked the ability, delusional or not, to look back to halcyon post-Huk but pre-martial law days; their heroes were not living statesmen but dead politicians on airport tarmacs; their destiny could not be a comfortable corporate job or a profession imbued with prestige. Their lot was to find their future elsewhere.

Their grandparents, more often than not, had gone from province to national capital, there to stay, prosper a bit, and perhaps come back to the old hometown. A large percentage of their parents had tried this path but perhaps an even larger number had tried their luck abroad. Church, club, and college were increasingly inhabited by ghosts: parishioners overseas, club members networking in sister organizations abroad; alumni in increasingly comfortable exile. This didn’t mean, of course, that church, club, and school were physically empty: there were far more people in them than had ever been before.

Manuel L. Quezon III is a columnist and contributing editor of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and history curator of the Ayala Museum.

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