Thomasites [Print by Pandy Aviado]

AT THE same time, however, the people who held those institutions together — who made them work — were getting fewer and fewer. World War II and First Quarter Storm generations were linked by teachers who transmitted from one generation to the next not just the learning of the past, but the manners that all assumed ensured getting ahead in the future. When the older teachers retired, and the younger teachers joined the ranks of those going overseas, there were precious few to pass on the manners and the illusions.

Not that, in a sense, it mattered. Hypocritically maintained or not, respectability had been the key to understanding the older generations. The World War II generation embraced dictatorship out of a confused and desperate dedication to upholding the respectability of their way of life; the First Quarter Storm generation had junked middle-class respectability in order to replace it with the enthusiasms that may have been revolutionary on the outside but craving a kind of respectability nonetheless. The martial law babies did not experience it, believe in it, or want it. The good days for them were their childhood days in the devious era of Marcos, or a tender childhood in the first heady years after his fall. Adolescence in any case was chaos, coups, plunging peso dollar rates, and more and more fathers, mothers, aunts, and uncles abroad, trading respectability for overseas opportunity. At home were the fabulously new rich, or the increasing new poor: staying at home didn’t get you into the former (there were too many to compete with) and unless one was already in, wanted to join, or was content being associated with, the latter, that wasn’t the way to go. The only way to go was out.

Church, club, and school had conspired to suffocate the very class they were meant to nurture. There could no longer be a middle in a nation with everyone desperate to get ahead. Church, club, and school had trained those upon whom it conferred respectability. The respectable matched their political disrepute with economic opportunism inspired by the ineptitude of the dictatorship that proclaimed itself the salvation of the middle. Too late, in its senile dotage and in its increasingly gouty middle age, World War II and First Quarter Storm generations decried what was, crying it was nowhere near what they’d set out to do. The political classes chattered about fixing the broken circle, the priests prayed that God might will it so; the educators, themselves increasingly uneducated, the professionals, depressingly unable to eke out a living at home, all tried to make it so. The circle had been broken too long. Too many alternative paths had been opened.

Parliamentarism, Federalism, Socialism, Prayer—all were dead ends because they were espoused (in the view of many martial law babies) by the deadbeat. The professions of the past became merely a means to the globalized sweatshops of the present: as call center operators, AutoCAD drafters, programmers, animators, medical transcribers at home, operating to the rhythms of foreign time zones, earning relatively splendid salaries that made the carping of the traditionally respectable Cassandra-like wailings of the quaint (so what if the services they provided might be lost to other countries? They could shop, and on credit!). Better yet, church, club, and school might be stepping stones to a life abroad, where legally or illegally, earnings could be made in undebased currency, a kind of stability and even equality, enjoyed. All it took was to follow the traditional shortcutting ways, albeit cut even shorter. Schooling was not a grounding in a way of life, it was a process to obtain certification for work in other lands, certificates obtained, incidentally, much more easily if cheating and bribery was involved.

	American soldiers in the Philippines [Print by Pandy Aviado]

AND SO it was, that in the year 2015, the Philippines—as Metternich had once contemptuously said of Italy—had become “merely a geographic expression.” It was, at best, a virtual nation, but more aptly a gigantic nursery for those who would consider the world their home. Home was not native land, a nation, in the sense understood by previous generations. It was still a place, but this time just a staging ground. It might be where property could be obtained; it would always be where a never-ending line of poor suckers not as clever (or far too lazy) compared to you were stuck waiting for your monthly remittance.

Country was an issuing authority: for passports and permits; a place where nothing worked as well as where you were working, but which you fondly remembered as the place that allowed you muddle through. Your parents and grandparents talked politics; you provided them appliances for karaoke when the politics got them depressed. Your parents and grandparents talked of school and church; you could email and text your classmates the world over and were likely to belong to a different church than them. You were different from those who came before because, unlike them, you felt you were truly free.

Country was the place where your foreign exchange could build a house, brand new, beside the decaying homes of the local gentry. Country was where your siblings waited their turn to go to another land. Country was where you went for funerals and weddings; it was where you could come back, without that “proper” accent, and without the “right” manners, and be able to afford to hobnob with the sons and daughters of those who had employed your parents. Home was land, increasingly urban, or at the very least, as urbanized as your remittances could afford to make it. Home was about handouts: for thieving officials, for relatives to indulge. But as for the rest, home was where you might be, comforted by the songs from home, played on your mp3 player; entertained by movies you could see on DVD; illuminated by the gossip on shows you could watch on cable; driven by the jokes sent by email and text by your compatriots inhabiting the four corners of the world.

The First Quarter Storm generation had hoped they might do a stint overseas and come back to build a good life. Many of them did. They fulfilled filial duty and cared for their parents, and brought up their children the best way they could. That their children did not share their romantic illusions was painful. The more reflective among them may have paused to think they were getting a taste of what they, in their hippie-haired rebellion, had inflicted. The less reflective may simply have thought that they should have done less rebelling and more scheming.

Most of them would miss friends permanently abroad, and children already there. The middle class would bewail the loss of the respectable certainties of their day: where to be a dentist was to be not only a person of importance, but of near-certain financial worth. Where to be a doctor conferred standing; an engineer, prestige; a lawyer, hopes far surpassing the notary public rubber-stamping of the present. Like their parents, they blamed the politicians who couldn’t even be as brilliantly crooked as the ones of their youth. And yet, they couldn’t help see that their sons and daughters, eternally martial law babies, were now babying them. They might speak better English than their children, but, babysitting their grandchildren, they would be thankful they had a DVD player on which to play a Walt Disney movie that started with some sort of song about the circle of life. A circle had been broken, a new one had been formed.