The affirmative’s strategy of depicting the Philippines as a source of chaos works within a distinctly American history of empire and race.

The strategy of highlighting cultural difference enables Karnow to argue that America's democratizing mission largely failed because of the strength of Filipino traditions. American colonial officials became enmeshed in the same sorts of patronage relationships Filipinos "naturally" formed among themselves. Manuel Quezon, the most vibrant and bombastic of the Filipino politicians, was really a client of the Americans while such a dominating figure as General Douglas MacArthur became entangled in the Filipino web through his role of godfather to Quezon's son. Because Americans in the Philippines tended to become part of the ruling Mafia, they let the oligarchs remain in power. Thus, nothing was done to solve fundamental social problems. In the end, argues Karnow, Americans cannot be blamed for the failures of their ex-colony. No matter how much advice and support they gave to such political stalwarts as Magsaysay and Marcos, all this came largely to naught thanks to the enduring Philippine value system, and the tenacity of the ruling oligarchy. The sense of negative otherness is reinforced by Karnow's descriptions of his frequent trips to the Philippines. Instead of order, he saw and experienced chaos: "The disarray was visible, widespread and, after a while, monotonous. The port of Manila was a hive of graft, with gangs protected by politicians working with customs officials to smuggle in everything ... Violence had reached epidemic proportions ... Ninoy Aquino ... cruised around town in a bulletproof limousine, its upholstery fitted with slots for machine guns ... [President] Macapagal concocted nationalist issues as a distraction." (1989:364) Not even the Communists are exempted from this picture of chaos: ''-{The Communists were] scarcely Robin Hoods, they murdered, plundered and feuded among themselves. But they were far better disciplined than the police and the army, whose abuses drove numbers of normally passive peasants into the Communist ranks ... "(1989:386). All this endemic chaos, tyranny, and abuse "left [Karnow] doubting whether American institutions, implanted there at the turn of the century, could really take root in its soil."(1989:360) What I find intriguing is this so-called Filipino tradition that had always been there, that survived centuries of colonialism and now supposedly underpins a flawed democracy. The Filipino actors in Karnow's text are doomed from the start because they are ruled by their passions, kinship ties, debts of gratitude and personal loyalties, and even exhibit such petty defects as vanity and the propensity to lie. In order to give his view of culture some structure and authority Karnow harnesses highly contentious and often outdated social values and personality studies from the 1960s. There is much to be explored in, say, Tagalog notions of utang no loob ("inner debt") and hiya ("shame") upon which reciprocal social relationships are constructed. Karnow, however, ignores more recent and nonessentializing studies of Filipino culture and politics. His aim is to establish a binary opposition between positive 'American" and negative "Filipino" values and this resonates well with his audience, for much of what he claims to lie beneath Filipino exteriors conforms by and large to Euro-American myths of backward, undeveloped peoples. Karnow, in effect, constructs Filipinos in terms of a variant of America's classic image of their Pacific wards. Images of the Filipino elite (oppressive caciques, bosses, patrons) and masses (blindly loyal and manipulated tao, clients of the bosses) constructed by James Le Roy, Fred Atkinson, David Barrows and many other American writers a century or so ago reappear in modern journalistic garb. But just as these older images are complicit with the colonial project to pacify and tutor the Filipinos, Karnow's portrayal of a starkly different Filipino tradition h6s its political implications. In the book, though the physical setting is the Philippines, the Filipino actors in the drama are outnumbered at least two to one by Americans. The Filipinos are nevertheless crucial to the narrative, as the negative "others" of the Americans whose story the book is really about. The American national imaginary is established and continually reinforced in writings about its cultural"others," and the Filipinos have occupied this position since the so-called imperial "blunder" of 1899.