Because my father’s brother-in-law was a captain,
it happened that I was born at an army hospital named
after the 25th president of the United States, the one
who dropped down on his knees when he realized
that the Philippines had dropped into [their] laps, some gift
apparently from a higher force that gives nations and people
like us wholesale to the ones who hold the reins of power.
Two summers ago when I returned to that city, even at midnight
the heat was oppressive. The taxi drove past the camp enclosure,
past row after row of billboards and ragged palms, the outline
of the city’s new high rises crowding out the shanties and back
alleys the poor inhabit, where they sleep and eat and try
to ply their various tinkers’ trades, where they die almost nightly
now in the streets, targets of random vigilante killings. O manifest,
O destiny. McKinley said he slept soundly: …and the next
morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department
(our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines
on the map of the United States (pointing to a large map
on the wall of his office), and there they are, and there
they will stay while I am President! I too dropped
into the world, though not quite in the same way: my origins
a murky destiny that passed through bodies annexed
in furtive and unexpected ways. Was there joy,
was there defeat in surrender? There was nothing left…
to do but to take them all, …educate [them], and uplift
and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s
grace do the very best we could by them.
In response to Via Negativa: Talking head.