My Ideal's Underbelly

When I was ten years old, and still a Filipino, my brothers and I would play war games. We had the requisite plastic soldiers, and for other war materiel we made do with matchboxes and domino tiles. We were living in the Philippines. All I knew of America was that it was big, and good, and it always won. In our war games, I was always America.


I chose to be America because, being the eldest, I made the rules. Also, I could see the future. America was my ideal, a shimmering fantasy with rock-hard muscles. America became real for me in 1975, when, courtesy of Rotary International, I found myself in Salem, Oregon, as an exchange student. I remember the scent of evergreens as my foster family drove me from the airport, and into their lives. I was still the oldest child, even in the Fraley family, but how could I, in my mind, represent America now? My new-found siblings were blond, had freckles, and looked good in baseball caps. I didn’t even drink milk!

I did, however, have certain advantages. Having been educated by Jesuits, I possessed a vocabulary larger than any of my classmates’ at South Salem High. My knowledge of geography seemed amazing to kids who thought Hawaii was the capital of Manila. Mr. Manuel, my English teacher, adored my Gothic-horror style of fiction-writing. He said it was a style engendered by a Catholic education. My Americanization, at fifteen, continued, accelerated by hormones and “Saturday Night Live,” which was new on the tube. Through cultural osmosis, I imbibed Dennis Miller’s wry wit, and acquired John Belushi’s accent.

I live in the Chicago suburbs now, where Belushi grew up. I sometimes drive past the former pharmacy where he loitered incessantly as a teenager. My wife’s uncle knew him. As for me, I’m a U.S. citizen, fifty years old, still an admirer of Dennis Miller’s rants. I am, while listening to talk radio, waiting for my turn to bankrupt the Social Security System.

That system is a sham. Being a sham, it shall soon be a shambles. Since Reagan’s time, politicians have used its so-called "trust fund" to pay for general budget expenses, and when the wave of baby boomers retires in a few years, we will all be swamped in red ink. Ah, red ink. The Red Menace!—lurking still in McCarthyites’ paranoia. The Red Death!—born of Poe’s melancholia. We shall soon look universally rosy, but in an appalling way.

I have two children in college. They have, from birth, been Americans. They required no war games to make them love this country. They must love America, right? Why else would they consent to being burdened with thirteen trillion dollars of federal debt? And when Medicare and Medicaid, like aging Godzillas, rear their ugly heads above our empty storefronts and ruined penthouses, what then will become of the America I once knew?

We’re still big—sometimes too big. Good? The notion is fraught with judgmentalism. Do we always win? Winning is antithetical to Barack Obama’s inclusionary vision. America is one nation, under You-Know-Who. In (fill in the blank) We Trust. The mainstream media idolizes diversity. The political establishment on the left, especially, believes that out of diverse individuals should arise…identity politics. Groups, from sea to warming sea, blanket this nation like a suffocating quilt, dividing us according to race, sex, age, income, ideology, weight, language, yes, and religion, too.

Red states!—right out of Karl Rove’s coloring book.

After watching a year’s worth of SNL, I returned to Cebu City in 1976, went to college, and watched Carter flail haplessly amid the Iranian hostage crisis. I read a lot of Newsweek, God help me, in order to augment my already amazing grasp of geography. But the world was changing so rapidly. National borders were being reconfigured, dialects were vanishing, and a new ice age was creeping up on us, an odd precursor to the global warming that was to come, engulfing entire ecosystems, scant decades later. Was America, like the climate, changing?

Oliver North testified before the Senate, while I taught English in China. My students wanted to know how to use the word “glo-ba-li-za-tion” in a sentence, and I, dumb foreigner, showed them. At that moment, they rushed out of the building, joining their families and neighbors to make umbrellas and buttons and sandals and things like that.

I met my wife in Xiamen, China. She was there from Illinois, teaching grammar, and discreetly proselytizing. We married in the Philippines, and after the customary glitch in immigration papers was resolved, we came and settled in Illinois, the heartland of America, which throbbed like a Chevy engine. This was the future I had seen as a combat-eager, clairvoyant ten-year-old.

Today, nearing retirement, I hold a pair of sneakers that some of my socialist Chinese friends have made. What to do? Where to go? Our industrial jobs have been outsourced, and now illegal aliens are swarming over the wall to take our service-sector jobs. Yes, I know I should have said “undocumented workers.” But I am seeing red.