I was fascinated by my friend Rodel Rodis’ column last week about the political mindset of Filipinos in the United States. “The most disturbing development in the 2012 US presidential elections,” he wrote, “is not the National Asian American Survey showing that more Fil-Ams are registering as Republicans (27%) than as Democrats (24%) but that a large number of these Fil-Am Republicans have embraced the extremist views of the far right Tea Party.”
He cites the example of pediatrician Marisha Agana, a Tea Party member who ran for Congress in the 8th district of Ohio, who gained some measure of notoriety by tweeting “History has a way of repeating itself: Stalin, Hitler, Mao Tse Tung and now Obama!!!” Her tweet drew furious, and contemptuous, reactions from the public.
I was fascinated by it because of what it says about us. Which is how we are utterly out of touch with America and the world, as much as the Republicans. Or, put another way, how we are the most clueless, or aberrant, group of immigrants in the United States. Or still put another way, how we are the odd man out in Asia, an example of a people so thoroughly brain-addled by colonialism.
The election results were nowhere near as close as the polls projected. The one who got it right, or nearly so, quite incidentally, was not any of the people spewing figures about demographics, it was Bob Dylan who interjected while singing “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Don’t believe the media. I think it’s going to be a landslide.” It wasn’t exactly so as far as the popular vote went—Obama won by 2.6 million votes—though that is impressive enough. But it was so as far as the electoral-college vote went, Obama taking 332 to Romney’s 206 (Obama won all the swing states including Florida). Artists, particularly musicians, have been known to feel the public pulse better than the number crunchers.
The Republicans, and their loudest cheerleader Fox TV, were out of sync with that pulse. As were the Filipinos in the United States. Al Cardenas, a Latin American Republican, said it best: They lost the elections because the Republican party has become “too old, too white, too male.” That was what doomed Romney. When the smoke cleared, Obama had 60 percent of the youth vote, 75 percent of the Latin American vote, and 55 percent of the women vote. Most Filipinos were on the side of the too old, too white and too male. Which, psychologically at least if not physically, is what they are: They are too old, too white and too male.
How explain this phenomenon? Or how explain this perverse behavior?
I personally am not surprised not just that more Filipinos would prefer to be Republicans but that some Filipinos would embrace extremist Tea Party positions. I saw that in pristine and terrifying form after 9/11 when Filipinos in the United States and in the Philippines were loudest in condemning the atrocity and vowing death to America’s enemies. The more ferocious the reflexive American response to it, such as calls to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone age, the better we found it. America in fact did that, or an approximation of it, to the wrong country—Iraq. But we applauded it anyway, when the rest of the world gazed at it with a horrified look.
The only explanation for it goes beyond the fact that we sympathize greatly with old, white and male America. It is that we identify completely with old, white and male America. It is that most of us see ourselves, in mind if not in body, as old (ultra-conservative), white (lighter than the negro in the color spectrum), and male (patriarchal).
A century of being made to believe we are America’s “little brown brother,” such as colonial rule could ever be regarded as brotherly, has taken its toll on us. Over time, the “brown” has disappeared and turned colorless, if not white. In many ways, we do not really see ourselves as immigrants in the United States. Though we never attained statehood—and not for lack of trying—we see ourselves as part of the mainstream, part of the “heartland,” a big strand in the fabric of American life.
Certainly we do not see ourselves like other immigrants. We see ourselves as special. We are not like them, we are different from them. We are different from them because we are psychologically white, we are different from them because we speak English. Having constant reminders like Frank Miller’s girlfriend calling Dindi Gallardo an “ugly Asian” and Sharon Stone telling her Filipino maid not to talk to her kids because they might not learn to speak English have not made a dent in our psychological armor.
Until recently, when a younger generation of Filipinos has rebelled and striven to recover roots, the “Fil” in Fil-Am was being vigorously erased in the vain hope that the more it disappeared, the more “Am” the Fil-Am became. Which was done by being more “American” than Americans, by being more old, white, and male than Americans, by saying such things as Obama is a Hitler. An ironically insane statement given that Agana and ilk resemble every inch the demagogic, intolerant, and the fascistic Hitler Youth of Weimar days, even if they’re not very young.
That’s the epic tragedy of it. At the very least, the Latino community has every right to collect on a debt, telling Obama you owe us, we want to be paid in full. What can we ask from the reelected president, if only to help our veterans, if only to improve the way we’re treated there? Nothing.
At the very most, quite apart from making ourselves the laughingstock of the immigrant population, trying to make the “Fil” in Fil-Am disappear doesn’t make the Fil-Am more American, it makes him less. Less so than the African-American, less so than the Latino-American, less so than the Asian-American. More than even the Tea Party agenda, that’s the best recipe for being:
Losers.