Too big to fail

In a few days, there will probably a new American president. If the polls are to be believed, Donald Trump, for all his rightist rhetoric, has succeeded dividing the American people, leading observers to conclude that America is in irreversible decline and that the death of American democracy is at hand. This is not the first time this conclusion is made. In the recent past, American public intellectuals – their feet on the ground, their eyes to the future – have mourned America’s “decay” and isolation. But in the face of domestic and international turmoil, the United States survived, rejuvenated and triumphed. Granted that America becomes No. 2, or even if America changes its form of government and perhaps be either dictatorial or socialistic, it will still be a nation to contend with. It is one of the five countries in the world that will likely survive political and economic catastrophes because of their sheer size and the fact that it will be difficult to sunder them. The first, America, then Brazil, China. India and Russia.

The collapse of the Soviet Union within our lifetime did not mean the demise of Russia as a great power, as we can see in its resurrection even after large chunks of the former Russian Empire broke away and became independent.

The United States is very important to us. For many Filipinos, it is our second country. Oldsters like myself were educated primarily in the public school system that is our brightest legacy from the United States. Every morning in the flag ceremony before classes open, we sang the Star-Spangled Banner. When I was in Grade Five, I memorized Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. We were weaned on American history and literature. The first Filipinos who went there to work as laborers brought back goodies and stories, and we came to believe that the United States really is the land of promise. It was much, much later when we studied history that the underside of the American story was opened to us. Still, the attraction of the United States continued, a lot of it nurtured by the gratitude of Filipinos liberated from three brutal years of the Japanese Occupation.

I first went to the United States in 1955. Those six months introduced me to the realities of the American way of life minus the tinsel and the neon; I got to know firsthand what was wrong: The first and most obvious is racism and, most recently, much of that resurfaced during the last two years of the Trump regime. The second is wastefulness – there is so much waste in America, food most of all. And finally, smugness – the thinking that there is an American solution to all problems.

In 1955, I witnessed racism at its worst when I spent a weekend in Atlanta, Georgia and saw segregation and the humiliation of the Negroes as they were called. But who in 1955 would ever think that a Black man will become the president of the United States? I cite this as an example of the many significant changes that have also occurred in America during the last few decades. What draws many of the world’s talented people to go there is this: it is where innovation and change are vastly possible. The American dream can be realized.

America is a nation of immigrants; the real natives of the country, as we all know, are the Indians who were decimated by land-hungry colonists. How did America become so powerful? It did not have the history of Greece or Rome. Like us, it is a very young nation. Part of its creative striving, its reaching for the sky, is in the nature of the people themselves, immigrants cut off from traditional sources of support, immigrants eager to form not just fortunes for themselves but free from archaic societies, free from the rigid social structures of the old world. America means freedom and it is this freedom more than anything that is the motive behind American growth. Sure, that growth has been corrupted for as the poet, Robert Frost, told me in 1955 that a country which won its freedom through revolution is now engaged suppressing that freedom.

Perhaps the United States cannot escape destiny, for when a nation is strong it expands and looks for raw materials, and when a nation is weak it contracts and looks for markets. This is the objective of nations and certainly, the United States with its vast resources had become an imperial power consuming much of the resources of the world.  However, its imperialism is different in the sense that it imposes no religious beliefs and no actual control of power in the countries it dominates, a kind of colonialism wherein the colonized get to love their chains and even defend their colonial status itself. This is particularly true with us. By transporting its political system and many institutions to the Philippines, the United States had high hopes that their only colony would reflect American success in nation building. Unfortunately, for most of us, we have not truly imbibed the fundamentals of the American experience, and the most important of this is the American nationalism itself, the way Americans celebrate themselves, the way they pride themselves in their work, in their history and in their own country.

America is not invulnerable; it has gone to war and lost (Vietnam), but it will not be invaded. It’s much too big and powerful, and its population is well armed: America’s gun culture is its strength but also its curse. American agricultural production is one of the world’s highest; in fact, America can feed the world. Pax Americana will be with us for a long time.

How long will the American empire last? China and India are “civilizations” shaped by thousands of years. America, like us, is in the process of being, of evolving. In the next hundred years, much of America will be hispanized and with more Asians coming in. It will not be necessary to annex Canada to the United States but it will become more and more American. The Monroe doctrine holds, and as South America develops, a common language and history makes for a union that will be drawn closer to the United States as an equal. If the leaders of the world will be able to control their egos, there will be world peace and prosperity; they should all heed the lessons of Japan and Singapore, how small countries with almost no resources except their people can survive and prevail and survive hegemony.