Halfway down the Danube

Balikbayan guest blogging 6: Manila Cha-Cha

HDTD's man in Manila, Noel Maurer, continues his ongoing series, with some impressions of two of the Philippines' "greatest generation".

I have two more planned entries in this blog, one on poverty and one on politics. (It may stretch to more. I hope y’all don’t mind.) [there better be something on Filipino food, otherwise people will claim I am making it all up. -- CY] But before I get to those cheery topics, I want to discuss my meeting with two remarkable 80-something men: Washington SyCip and Bienvenido Tan.

Let’s start with Mr. SyCip. Anyone visiting the Philippines is told to “go see Wash. Go see Wash.” In my case, it was Michael Chen. So we went to go see Wash.

Wash turns out to be the 84-year-old founder of Manila’s most prominent accounting and consulting company, SGV Associates. It’s in a remarkably nondescript building in Makati City. Unlike the palacial tower that houses Cesar Virata’s offices, the SGV building looks almost run-down from the outside. And the lobby is nothing special. Nor is the elevator to the executive suites. In fact, except for the fact that it’s continually crowded with tall Japanese businessmen in black suits and odd haircuts the thing wouldn’t have looked all that out of place in the Stanley M. Isaacs Homes back in Manhattan.

Now, Washington’s suite is, in fact, rather nice. Wood paneling, modern furniture. So it’s nice, but it’s nondescript nice. It’s not the sort of nice that you remember afterwards. The same can be said for his office. Abstract Asian art on the walls, funny Asian sculpture thingys on the table, comfortable couch, computerless desk. Nice, but nondescript nice.

And dark. The shades were drawn. This seems to be a Filipino thing. People like to hold meetings in dark, sunless rooms. The only exception to this has been Aurelio Montinola, the president of the Bank of the Philippine Islands, who walked into a darkened conference room, blurted, “What the heck is this?” and had the shades opened.

I only laugh because it's true. Both parts.

Anyway, we walked into the room and were greeted by this small, wizened, and rather formal old man. Slightly hunched, but moving spryly, he invited us in and asked us to sit down. I mentioned that he was the same age as my father, and he asked me about him. So I spent a few minutes detailing the entrepreneurial adventures of my old man, and then proceeding to start asking my questions.

Which Mr. SyCip didn’t want to answer. Rather, he wanted to answer the question that he thought I should have asked, which is: “Is democracy the right form of government for the Philippines?” To which, he believes, the answer is quite self-evidently “no.”

That threw me less than you might have thought, because it’s an opinion that I’ve been running into a lot in the Philippines. Of course, it’s not one that I share, but what do I know? Commentator after commentator has told me the same thing, sometimes expressed as skepticism that any political system will function; sometimes expressed as a call for much less democracy, but no alternative selection method specified.

It’s an interesting position, and it says something (to me, at least) about how much American modes of thought have faded. It’s certainly an interesting counterpoint to Latin America, where the same modes have become much stronger. After all, I’ve never heard anyone in Latin America speak favorably about Pinochet—well, not outside Chile, not in similar circles to ones the people I’m talking to move in, and certainly not openly.

My first contact with this came in an interview with one of President Arroyo’s former finance ministers—she’s had a lot of them—Lito Camacho. Camacho is a dapper gentlemen who is older-than-he-looks. He left public service under less-than-ideal circumstances, which seems inevitable in the Philippines. So he has many reasons to be unhappy with how politics is done here.

Well, we’re in the lobby of the Makati Shangri-La hotel, sitting under this vasty glass wall and watching the waitresses float around in these tight dresses slit up to the navels—at least I was watching them.

Been there, done that, had the buffet.

Camacho is an HBS graduate, so he asks me what we’re doing nowadays in the course I teach: “When I was there, it was all about Japan,” he says.

So I joke, “Yeah, back in the day we taught mercantilism; today we teach that authoritarianism is good.”

He perked up. “You really teach that?”

Me, somewhat taken aback, “Well, many of the students complain that we do.”

“Ah,” said Camacho, “I would agree with that.”

He went on to make a cogent argument for switching to a Westminster-style constitution, but he lost me completely when he said, “Things are good in Singapore, and the government runs the place well. So why would people want to vote for change, for democracy?”

Isn’t the above an argument that democracy won't make a well-run place any less well-run, because good government is a vote-getter? I might be missing something.

“Cha-cha” stands for “charter change,” or constitutional reform. The Cha-Cha is a popular dance popular among the political classes here, despite the fact that nobody knows the steps. The steps, of course, are just how one goes about rewriting the constitution while remaining with the constitution—nobody’s quite sure how to go about it. (See Article 17 of the Philippine constitution.) And doubly so considering that the polls show that only 43 percent of the public support the idea.

The Cha-Cha is frustratingly vague. The main drift is to switch to a parliamentary system, but few people (Mr. Camacho excepted) seem to have thought through the logic. Some have proposed that a Westminster system, where the government could be yanked at any time by a vote of no confidence, would bring the present tradition of turfing out leaders by big people power demonstrations and impeachment into the constitution. After all, the House impeached President Estrada, but it stalled in the Senate, leading to the demonstration and Estrada’s belated realization that he had resigned without knowing it.

Okay... I can see that. Sort of. Problem is, the other goal seems to be to streamline decision-making, and I just don’t see how moving from a funhouse reflection of the United States to a clear reflection of Italy is going to help. A lot of serious thought will be needed to insure that the new system really produces a government that is both clearly accountable—unlike the current system of divided powers—and sufficiently free from short-term pressure to make tough decisions. Unfortunately, I don’t see many signs of the Cha-Cha proponents putting in that kind of thought.

I mean, they let just anybody sit in what would be the Prime Minister’s office under a parliamentary system, man.

The only thing which does make clear sense is getting all these weird ancillary policies out of the constitution and into statute law. I mean, Article 16 of the 1987 Constitution is actually entitled: ”Education, Science and Technology, Arts, Culture and Sports.”

That said, the real driver here seems to be a fundamental disillusionment with democracy, only nobody—and this flabbergasts me, in the land that produced Ferdinand Marcos—seems to have thought through what a lack of democracy means for accountability. You get the impression that “parliamentary” is shorthand for Lee Kwan Yew Two.

Only how would Lee Kwan Yew have done if he’d been put in charge of the Philippines? I have my doubts. “Better than Marcos” is all I can say, and that’s about as high a bar as long-jumping over a curb cut.

Many people, of course, recognize that the Cha-Cha isn’t really about democratic reform. “We’re still looking for a king,” said another former finance minister, Cesar Purisima.

Anyway, I said little of this to Mr. SyCip. It wouldn’t have been appropriate. The situation was one of a young man seeking wisdom from someone older and wiser; when he sidestepped a question, I didn’t make much effort to follow up.

And then, suddenly, the ambience changed. I asked him, almost idly, what he’d done in the war. I’m used to hearing people switch languages, lo hago todo el tiempo. What I’m not so used to seeing someone switch body languages mid-stream, because all of sudden I was no longer learning from an older and wiser Asian man; I was chatting with an older American guy full of interesting stories.

“The war? Yeah, I was in New York, at Columbia, when one of my buddies comes running into my room yelling, ‘Hey, Wash, didja hear? They’re bombing your home!’ So I enlisted, of course, and got stuck in intelligence. Somehow, I wound up in Bombay doing cryptography.” He went on to complain about how the U.S. Army, in its infinite wisdom, forced him to go all the way back to New York to be discharged, since that’s where he’d signed up. “The Army,” he said, shaking his head. “Nuts.”

It wasn’t quite backslapping, but it was unexpected, the sudden cultural shift from a stereotyped version of the deferential Far East to, uh, feeling like I was home kibitzing with my Pops back in Brooklyn. SyCip also had some rather bitter memories of the American mission that rewrote the country’s economic policies in the 1950s; although he seemed angrier that they demanded a uniform minimum wage in order to eliminate “cesspools of poverty” than that they wrecked the de facto customs union with the United States. Me, I’d have to see some evidence that minimum wages really distorted the Philippine economy during the 1950s, but it certainly gave me something to look into.

Plus, like I said, it was a lot of fun. I might not agree with him about the whole democracy thing, but Washington SyCip is a very smart man.

The evening I had a meeting with another very smart 80-something, Bienvenido Tan. The name kinda threw me at first; I kept wanting to ask, “¿Y qué?”

This meeting was fully American from the start: Mr. Tan doesn’t stand much on formality. He had already started drinking with Mike Chen when I arrived, and I suspect that my presence might have prompted a little bit of code-shifting: Mike seemed a little discombobulated for a brief moment, and I suspect that a precipitous alteration from Overseas Chinese to Expat American might have thrown him off.

The fun part, of course, was Tan’s welcome tales of trying to increase tax collection during Cory Aquino’s term. He didn’t want the job, but Cory convinced him that it was his patriotic duty. “I would say to them,” he said to us, “’C’mon, fellas, give me something here. Otherwise we’re gonna hafta shut down the whole gravy train.’ And it worked! We doubled the tax take. Of course, it cost me my job, but those are the breaks.”

More than that—his tax deals eventually got him indicted. The Supreme Court finally cleared in 2005. The wheels of justice grind slowly in high humidity, it seems. Anyway, we could have been having the exact same conversation in Schaumburg, Illinois, and be talking about Daley the First instead of “corazón sí, aquí (points to head) no.”

Of course, I asked him what he did in the war. Turned out that he was an officer cadet when the Japanese invaded. “They gave each of my men two bullets. The soldiers asked me, ‘What the hell am I going to do with two bullets?’ Well, I told them, ‘Shoot a Jap, then shoot yourself.’”

His men demobilized and spread out, some joining the guerrillas in the hills, others (like Tan) fading into occupied Manila. The entire outfit was known as the “Hunters or ROTC Guerrillas” because they couldn’t decide whether to call themselves the ROTC Guerrillas, the Free Philippine Troops, the Hunters, or... and I am not making this up... the Green Archers.

The funniest—sort of—incident from the war was the time a Japanese soldier stopped Tan while he was carrying a bunch of underground newspapers. (The ROTC Guerrillas put out a sheet called, in character, Thunderclap, but there were many others. The soldier took them, stared at them upside down, and let Tan go.

It was a good dinner, and while he wasn’t fond of Philippine-style democracy, he didn’t think anything else would work better. I can’t say whether his war experience, or his work in government, or just his outwardly cynical (but really idealistic) Americanness made the difference. Anyway, Tan brought home to me how the Philippine upper class has been un-Americanizing over the past few decades, both in little things (business card rituals, conversational styles) and big ones (that whole democracy thing).

On the other hand, Raul Relente’s friends and family do believe in democracy, even though they’re not too fond of their government, and they don’t stand much on ceremony or go through little rituals when greeting each other. The more I find out about this country, the less I know.