Here’s a quote from James Hamilton-Paterson’s book America’s Boy — one of the best accounts of the Marcos era, putting it in the context of both village life and global politics. From the chapter The Politics Of Fantasy: “There are moments when it seems that the world’s affairs are transacted by dreamers. There is a sadness here in the spectacle of nations, no less than individuals, helping each other along with their delusions. This way what is thought to be clear-sighted pragmatism may actually be shoring up a regime’s ideology whose hidden purpose is itself nothing more than to assuage the pain of a single person’s unhappy past.”

And these quotes from Imperial Grunts: “Just as the stirring poetry and novels of Rudyard Kipling celebrated the work of British Imperialism… the American artist Frederic Remington, in his bronze sculptures and oil paintings, would do likewise for the conquest of the Wild West… ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain I heard from the troops from Colombia to the Philippines, including Afghanistan and Iraq… the War on Terrorism was really about taming the frontier.”

These two quotes encapsulate for me why I am here in the Philippines. Granted it is a very short trip. And at a peculiar time of year. The Here Lies Love music project might be about this conflation of fantasy, personal pain and politics that runs through history and played itself out here in a dramatically obvious way. Hamilton-Paterson nails it better than I could.

— DB, Manila, December 2005
[Link to journal entry]