Weeks 11 & 12 -- Overcome

This is my last update of the summer, and I will try to write honestly about what I got from this trip. For the young, white, adventure-seeking, leisure-oriented swashbuckler in each of us, the Philippines hovers as an unspoiled Bacchic mirage on the rim of Asia, hot, cheap, sandy, and filled with drooling women -- a fragment of an old (and, notably, racist) paradise where upstanding men and women grovel before your wad of greenbacks, where dropping the S bomb gets you laid faster than ice melts in hell, and where everything from Lacoste shirts to lobster bisque can be had for an unthinkable pittance. But these tangibles turn out to be mere garnishes on the icing -- the real hardon comes when you realize the whole country, rich and poor, dark and not-so-dark, from farmers to fishermen, bartenders to strippers to politicians, thinks you are The Shit.

The Philippines is obsessed with you from the moment you step off the plane. They want you -- they really, really want you and everything you stand for. They want you desperately, burningly: you are their every hope and their greatest dream. It is hard to understand the intensity of their infatuation! They want your Stanford shirt and your white skin, and they want to go to America and earn dollars and spend dollars, and come back home and tell their friends about San Francisco and New York, and one day they want to move there (even if they are penniless), and they want to go to In 'n Out and Krispy Kreme, and they want to wear real Polo, and they want to hear everything about what its like to live in the States, and they want you to point out everything wrong with their country, and they'll buy you beers to do it, and if you don't or if you're too tired they'll do it for you, and they don't care if its hard or cold in the US because it's the US and everything will work out there, and they wear Lakers jerseys and sport sideways caps and say 'nigga' to each other even though they'd back down to Aron Heygi, and they want to wear Abercrombie and UCLA shirts even though they dont know what those are or what they stand for, and they say 'hella' and 'sketchy' and 'shady' and 'big pimpin', and they do all kinds of drugs, and all kinds of vices, and they rap and freestyle and breakdance, and they want to sleep with you, and if you dont want to sleep with them they'll even offer you money for your sperm (not a lie), and they really, really want you to be friends with them, they want your approval, and if you don't give it they'll often pay you for that too, and if they are tactful, they'll get away with it, and the hookers fall in love with you and offer themselves for free, and they cry to you about how horrible their lives are, and they ask you about your life and how good it is, and how graceful and handsome you are and how could you like the Philippines since its so worthless, and they pay you to wear a speedo and frolick in front of a camera; and the boys want to play football but find it too hard so they play flag football instead, and they're amazed you played football in high school even if it was only for a year and you were a skinny lineman, and the girls dump their boyfriends to hang around you because their boyfriends are Filipino, and the boyfriends don't do anything about it except cry and cry and cry and threaten to commit suicide, and even if they did do something you have a bodyguard who would kill them if they came near you, and even if they did something your family would hunt down their family and put them out of work or murder them all. With every model you fuck, with every drug you do, with every picture they snap of you, with every love note they slip you on a napkin, with every beautiful beach you sail past, with every Lacoste shirt you get for $2, with every basketball player who lowers his eyes to you, your ego gets bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And it is an amazing 3-month high -- incomparably complex, indulgent, radiant, selfish, even religious; the resolution of all desires, insecurities, etc. -- that vice and money could purchase this, and for so little! This, the psychological terrain of the country, is the icing on the cake.

But when you have your fill of this lovely icing, and it takes about three months, you dig further and find, to your great surprise, that there is no cake. The icing seems to go on forever -- it is woven very thick, and it tastes so good that few people actually make it to the other side; most languish here and there, dreamily enjoying their girls or their lobster or their beaches, until they inevitably leave for home, satisfied, unconcerned with more. But if you are resolved to dig, and if you keep digging, the icing thins slightly after a while, and what you begin to taste is revolting. Rot. Shit. Offal. Pain. Beyond the island mirage of the Philippines is a realm of sadness, disillusion, and real, abject inhumanity. The Filipinos have lost their identity to the West, and with it they have lost their sanity. The poor lurch on in a haze of struggles, fighting now for food, now for medicine, now for clean air, unresolved to do anything but outlive the day, bereft of all intuition, faith, vision, emotion -- they are really the closest things I have seen to robots or monsters; the rich (the young) are even more pitiable, in that some glimmer of humanity still dies within them -- feebly limping towards others to imitate, now America, now Japan, now Europe, backs broken by corruption and murder, clinging to this and that, addicted, decadent, miserably feigning happiness, they are a sin on their legacies. What ridiculous waste is in this country, what spoiled flesh -- I never thought I would pity a whole nation!

And there are sad, wise old men like Ed, Filipinos who have struggled through decades of corrupt regimes, clinging to their Bibles, noble hopes alive (not for foolish imitation, like the young, but for forging a nation), only to see their dreams shattered again and again by the decadence, impulse, and poison of the young, the immoral, and the treacherous. I am the saddest for these wholesome men and women, who try as hard as they can to save their race, but cannot, in their age, see down to the rot spreading through the culture of their young. My respect is immense for these patriots, and I wish them strength and godspeed in their work. Their time is certainly running out.

As for me, I am on my way home. Veni, Vidi, Vici, and I feel filthy for it. But through filth I have learned more about myself than I expected, and, perhaps, absorbed a little of Plutarch's old motto: "The mind is a fire to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled." I have had my fill of cheap tricks and Stoli 7s, martingales and models, beaches and big rollers. It has come time to move past this place of illusion to the real business that awaits.


Pretty much sums it up