motifs

Benedict Anderson

James Fenton’s Slideshow

Host: What say you to young Master Fenton?

He capers, he dances, he has eyes
of youth, he writes verses, he speaks
holiday, he smells April and May; he
will carry’t, he will carry’t, ’tis
in his buttons, he will carry’t.
The Merry Wives of Windsor, III, 2, 63–67.

Political tourists come in three types, two of them quite traditional, one
suggestively new. On the one hand, there are all those people who see in
dramatic political developments in someone else’s country a hopeful or hellish
vision of the future of their own. Since they set off knowing what they want
to find, they rarely stay longer than is necessary to bring back the illustrative
evidence—what one might generically call the ‘slides’—for their political
prognoses. All the more so if their travel expenses have been paid for by the
foreign country’s regime or by well-heeled sponsors back home. What is
characteristic of their slides is an often touching humility. There may be
photos or vignettes of the tourist being received by Mussolini, Stalin, Nasser
or Nehru, but their inclusion serves mainly to persuade the reader/viewer
that he or she is getting genuine first-hand testimony. The important thing
is that hopeful/fearful future.
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The second type, which, however, is not always easy to distinguish
from the first, is the (usually intellectual) celebrity. Such people do not
have to worry about ‘genuine first-hand testimony’, since the celebrity
is, with luck, much better known than the politics with which he or
she is holidaying. If the first type hopes to show himself in the shadow
of great events, the second expects to show events in the great shadow
of himself. For these purposes, the best events are those which, by
artful chiaroscuro, contrast the tourist as violently as possible with the
political landscape. Since the real interest is the celebrity, it is no surprise
that these holidays are usually paid for by publishers or television
companies. The contemporary doyen of this form of tourism is undoubt-
edly V.S. Naipaul, who loudly proclaims all that nice Englishmen now
feel ashamed to say about the Third World even when they think it. It
is not that Naipaul does not have views about politics, but rather that
there is an instructively photogenic touch to his itineraries: Buenos
Aires (not Caracas), Kinshasa (not Maputo), Kuala Lumpur (not Algiers)
show in sharp, dyspeptic relief the civilized clubman against a backdrop
of ‘Oriental’ savagery, self-delusion, fanaticism and stupidity. The choice
of locations for Naipaul’s slideshows is politically random (except that
they must be Third, not First or Second, World), but they are always
shrewdly aesthetic. (Who will buy Naipaul on Belgium or Bulgaria?)
The third type of political tourist has neither ideological nor aesthetic
objectives in mind. He has no message to bring home, and no grandiose
persona for sale. He is a creature of the media, and his travels to exotic
politics are aimed at the acquisition of slides which will be salable on
the mass market for the vicarious frissons they offer to consumers. This
kind of Jacques Cousteau neither brings back messages from the sharks
and killer-whales, nor poses ironically at their expense: he aims to show
you what it feels like to pat a barracuda on its behind. With always this
humble, democratic touch: you too could have had this type of holiday
if you’d bought the right tickets (but there you were, as the Observer
advised, in Corfu or Bangkok), and had had the guts to walk alone at
night in the Kasbah.
The pastmaster of this third type of tourism is Ryszard Kapuscinski. If
you want to feel how it was when Ethiopia, Iran or El Salvador went
up, or down (Kapuscinski definitely prefers down), in flames, the désabusé
Pole will brilliantly convey it. In his diverting editorial to Granta,
Number 15, William Buford rightly observes that Kapuscinski has
‘spent most of his adult life looking for national disasters’. Nonetheless,
Kapuscinksi is still caviare to the disquieted general. His speciality is
Third World Götterdämmerung, his style ironical and aphoristic, and
his authorial persona coolly nihilist. If he has a certain class that Naipaul
lacks, he nonetheless remains a broker of historical ‘experiences’, not a
prophet in his mother-country. He is fully aware that, shallow-down,
his English-reading audience gives not a fig for what occurs in Teheran
or Addis Ababa, and he can thus afford to let his irony wash evenly
over Haile Selassie, Reza Pahlavi and their variegated adversaries.
If Kapuscinski is the Huysmans of the new political tourism, James
Fenton is its Michener—but all the more instructive for just that. No
one provides better material for the study of the conventions of political
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hols. And no better slideshow presents itself than his ‘The Snap
Revolution in the Philippines’, which Granta advertises, in one of the
most enjoyable of current Colemanballs, as an account of ‘one of the
most historic uprisings in recent years’. It opens with a memorable
passage from an imaginary Guardian Holidays Section which, one feels
sure, Kapuscinski would rather die than have had published:
A man sets light to himself, promising that he will rise again in three hours.
When the time has elapsed, the police clear away the remains. Another man,
a half-caste [sic], has himself crucified every year [sic]—he has made a vow
to do this until God puts him in touch with his American father. A third
unfortunate, who has lost his mother, stands at the gate of his house and has
been there, the paper tells us, for the last fourteen years, gazing into an
empty rubber plantation.

I don’t know when it was that I began to notice stories like these, or began
to think that the Philippines must be a strange and fascinating place. Pirates
came from there last year to attack a city in Borneo. Ships sank with
catastrophic loss of lives. People came from all over the world to have
psycho-surgeons, rummage through their guts—their wounds opened and
closed in a trice. There was a Holy War in Mindanao. There was a communist
insurgency. Political dialogue was conducted by murderers. Manila was a
brothel.

It was the Cuba of the future. It was going the way of Iran. It was
another Nicaragua, another Cambodia, another Vietnam. But all these places,
awesome in their histories, are so different from each other that one couldn’t
help thinking: this kind of talk was a shorthand for confusion . . .

But still at this stage, although the tantalizing little items were appearing in
the English press, I have not seen any very ambitious account of what was
going on. This fact pleased me. I thought that if I planned well in advance,
engineered a decent holiday [sic], and went off to Manila, I would have the
place to myself, as it were (p. 35).

This is the dream political hol: pirates, Holy War, quacks, crucifixions,
brothels, shipwrecks—plus the whole place to oneself. Unluckily, while
the holiday was being planned, President Ferdinand Marcos, responding
in part to pressure from the American government, announced a ‘snap’
presidential election.
By now everybody in the world seemed to have noticed what an interesting
place the Philippines was. There would be a massive press corps running
after every politician and diplomat. There would be a deluge of background
articles in the press. People would start getting sick of the subject before I
had had a chance to put pen to paper. I toyed with the idea of ignoring the
election altogether . . . If I stuck to my original plan, I would wait till Easter,
which is when they normally hold the crucifixions. I wasn’t going to be
panicked into joining the herd. Then I panicked and changed all my plans
(pp. 36–37).

On 30 January 1986, he boarded his plane for Manila.

Aficionados of accounts of pre-industrial tourism in the darker conti-

nents will remember the essential figure of the colourful, faithful
dragoman who, often accompanied by one-name ‘boys’, carefully steers
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the traveller from one exotic site to another. This type of figure
Kapuscinski dispenses with, since the presence of any kind of guide
would destroy the illusion of perilous solitude in the midst of social
cataclysm which gives his rapportage its cinematic brio. Fenton, how-
ever, is a traditionalist, and thus quite content to be taken round the
sights by an American emigrée called Helen, and her one-name ‘boys’—
Fred, Bing, Harry, Jojo, and so on. Helen’s authority as political
dragoman is from the start confirmed by her speaking English with a
Filipino accent, her extensive political contacts, her apparent commit-
ment to local revolutionary change, the loyalty of her ‘boys’, and just
a touch of Lady Hester Stanhope in Palmyra.
The first sights to see are a typical slum, a couple of street demon-
strations, and drug-addicted child scavengers at ‘Smoky Mountain’, one
of Manila’s largest municipal garbage-dumps. Helen, who ‘seemed to
know everyone on the street and most of them by name’ (p. 41), takes
him to a party at the house of her friend Pedro, a squatter in the vast,
abject slum of Tondo. Fortunately, squatter Pedro has a large fridge,
stocked with beer, to which local reporters, photographers and theatre
people, as well as American journalists (also friends of Helen’s), liberally
help themselves. On to the demos. ‘Going on a demonstration with
Helen is like being taken to an enormous cocktail-party, which happens,
for some reason, to be winding its way through the Manila streets’ (p.
52). The slides promise to be outstanding: ‘the defiance of the slogans,
the glamour of the torches, the burning tyres, the masked faces—it was
a spectacular show’ (p. 47), Fenton notes with enthusiasm. Then to the
equally spectacular garbage-dump with Lady Hester: ‘coming here with
Helen is like trailing in the wake of royalty’ (p. 54).
Next a quick pre-election excursion to the provinces—the town of
Davao in the southern island of Mindanao. The travellers get to see a
typical night-time arrest, and talk with a typical Marcos crony, the
owner of a vast banana plantation (but not with any of his 6,000
labourers). Nonetheless, one gets the impression that this far from
Manila the tour-guides are a bit out of their depth. They completely
fail to remind Fenton of his original plan to drop in on the ‘Holy War
in Mindanao’. He thus misses the opportunity to see a single Muslim,
let alone an Allahu Akbar-shouting insurrectionary. This does not
appear to have been a later disappointment, as Islam is never mentioned
after his opening page, perhaps because he is unaware that the 13-year
rebellion of the ‘Moro Nation’, precipitated by Marcos’s seizure of
dictatorial power in 1972, has proven a key long-term factor in the
regime’s decline and fall. In Davao itself, a smaller tourist opportunity
is missed. At a local restaurant, Fenton notes in passing, the television
was showing a programme of Sumo wrestling, with commentary in
Japanese; ‘even the adverts were in Japanese’ (p. 57). A pity that Helen
did not tell him that Davao is famous for its Japanese population, the
descendants of turn-of-the-century agricultural colonists.
Back in Manila for Election Day itself, Fenton is taken to see his first
Catholic and goes to the Malacañang to attend a Marcos press confer-
ence. An accomplished leg-puller like Kapuscinski keeps as close an eye
on his trousers as on his wallet. Fenton, however, is very much the
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trusting innocent abroad. A Jesuit he encounters tells him that in times
past Marcos would invite members of the order to join him in spiritual
retreats at a presidential mansion in Bataan. The host had ‘kept retreat
in the most pious manner. He had offered them [the clerics] the chance
to go water skiing, but the coastguard had said there were too many
jellyfish.’ Sensing a good slide, Fenton asks: ‘What would the Pope
have said if you’d gone water-skiing? Would he have approved?’
‘Maybe not,’ deadpans his interlocutor. ‘Skiing yes, water-skiing perhaps
no’ (pp. 61–62).
The Marcos press conference proves disappointingly undramatic. ‘His
mouth was an example of a thoroughly unattractive orifice’, is the
traveller’s well-turned verdict. No less unslideworthy is the election
itself. ‘The next evening I was sitting with some Americans in the foyer
of the Manila Hotel, wondering whether perhaps we might not have
preferred to be in Haiti. There was after all something gripping about
the way the people there had dug up Papa Doc’s bones and danced on
them’ (p. 66).
Meeting the Communists

Failing Port-au-Prince, what next? Anxious to keep one step ahead of

other tourists, Fenton heads for the Communist jungles of Northern
Luzon, accompanied by the faithful Fred, ‘my new guide’. (He has done
this sidetrip before, north of Saigon, and it proved well worthwhile.)
An overnight stop at the exotic ‘Café at Kilometre Zilch’ produces one
of the outstanding slides of the whole trip. ‘That night I returned to
my book while Fred read Granta. Helen had given him my account of
the fall of Saigon, which had been much passed around. I was like a
bird of ill-omen in the Philippines; people said, “So you’ve come for
the fall of Manila, have you?” And indeed there was something eerie
about meeting so many foreign journalists whom I had known from
Indochina, and watching the past intertwine with the present, the
previous and next Grantas coiling like sea-snakes’ [sic] (p. 77). (Here is
a frisson peculiar to political tourism. Poor Baedecker could never
include among the curiosities of Andalusia a local campesino thumbing
through his Portugal.)
Among the Communists of the New People’s Army, the friendly bird-
of-ill-omen has a wonderful time. ‘The women were very friendly and
I was amused to see that one of them was wearing a Mickey Mouse T-
shirt’ (p. 89). The unit he visits is said to have a Betamax, with the
video version of Rambo a great favourite. Best of all, he manages to
find another reader for Granta 15—i.e., Fenton’s The Fall of Saigon—in
Comrade Nicky, a senior member of the welcoming guerrilla group.
He asks the young native fighters if there is not something special they
do to prepare for battle with Marcos’s soldiers. ‘I was so hoping for a
small thing, an eccentricity or a superstition’ (p. 96). Disappointed on
this score, the traveller is nonetheless cheered up by some spirited
political discussions.
Somebody said that I had remarked that the NPA were more sophisticated
than the Khmer Rouge. Why was that, asked the girls. ‘Well, for a start, the

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 Khmer Rouge didn’t wear Mickey Mouse T-shirts,’ I said. They looked
puzzled. I was a puzzle to them. I was a bit of a puzzle to myself. Why did
I want to know about the NPA? I explained to them that most of the articles
about the Philippines began with the fact that the communists were now
increasing in strength, and it was clear that the Americans were worried. To
write about the place without having met the NPA would be a great pity. I’d
managed to meet all kinds of people so far: I’d met a Marcos crony, some
goons, the loyal Marcos man, scavengers, nuns, seminarians, jesuits, a KBL
mayor who had defected to the opposition, and an independent would-be
mayor who had just joined the KBL. I’d seen remarkable events, but there
was still one thing missing, and I didn’t have much time left, unfortunately
(p. 90).

Fortunately, the young communists are very understanding about the

busy tourist’s tight sight-seeing schedule, and quickly buckle down to
some comradely strategic arm-wrestling with the visitor. Fenton expres-
ses his puzzlement at the natives’ superstitious hostility to the American
bases.
It seemed obvious to me that if there were any way for the Philippines to
avoid a direct confrontation with the Americans in the future, it should be
tried. If the objection to the bases was that they guaranteed American
interference in domestic politics, would it not be possible, I asked, to
negotiate a deal whereby the American presence was greatly reduced but not
abandoned altogether? The Americans would still have their bases, would
still be, as it were, denying them to the Russians. But they would be a token
presence, and the size of the US Embassy staff would be severely restricted.
What were the insuperable objections to such a scheme? (p. 102).

No one laughs.

One of the big objections was that the American presence made the Philippi-
nes a nuclear target—and this was hard to deny. The ancillary objections
were that the bases could be used in operations against other people’s
movements in South-east Asia.
‘What other people’s movements?’
The uneasiness began. ‘In Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand . . .’
I said that if they thought there was a chance for a communist movement
in Thailand, after what had happened in Indochina, they were mistaken. It
would be absurd for the NPA to risk battle with the Americans on behalf of
communist movements which really didn’t exist.
‘Well,’ they said, looking somewhat dismayed, ‘they might start up again.
And anyway it’s not just communists . . .’ I tried to say that anything was
better than a full-scale war. The NPA might take on the Americans, might
even win against them, but the cost would be so prohibitively high that it
would surely be better to decide precisely what was so unacceptable about US
involvement in their country, and what would be—by way of compromise—a
working relationship.
It was at moments like this that our conversation was least happy (p. 102).

Many pages later, after a quick tour of the old Spanish inner-city of
Intramuros, the traveller ingenuously reflects: ‘I realized that I still
hadn’t the slightest idea of historic Manila. I hadn’t looked at anything
old. I hadn’t done the sights. Instead of beginning with history, I’d
gone straight into the thick of things. My feet had hardly touched the
ground’ (p. 147). Out of the mouths.
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A Little History
Real history is always a stumbling-block for political tourists because
it moves deep within memory, experience, consciousness and custom.
It manifests itself in tidal economic, social and political changes that
work themselves out over decades and even centuries. And it does not
lend itself that easily to photo-opportunities or piquant interviews. Had
Fenton read anything about the history of the Philippines—Granta 15,
the only text he names, appears as his Bible in Spain—at least some of
the cheerful buffoonery above might have been avoided. He would have
reminded himself, and perhaps his readers too, that Filipinos fought the
first successful anti-colonial war of independence in Asia, and were then
robbed of this freedom by the Americans, for whom, at the turn of the
century, the islands were important above all for the naval bases that
they could provide. And from these bases, later also air bases like Clark
Field and intelligence ‘bases’ such as San Miguel, grew the vast American
imperial presence around the Pacific Rim. He would have recalled that
American colonialism consolidated the political and economic power
of a mestizo upper class by violently suppressing its domestic enemies
and encouraging the expansion of its plantation agriculture within the
walls of the imperial tariff system. He would have noted that the first
targets of Japanese imperialism in the islands were the bases, and that
the American reconquest of the Philippines produced the greatest
collective loss of life in the islands’ twentieth-century history. It might
have struck him as significant that two of the great streets of contempor-
ary Manila that he mentions—J.P. Laurel Street and Roxas Boulevard—
commemorate two of the outstanding scoundrels of recent times: the
first—father of ‘Doy’ Laurel, Corazon Aquino’s vice-president—was
puppet president of the war-time Japanese regime; the second, a
seasoned trimmer who also collaborated with the Japanese, became the
first president of the independent Republic of 1946, in part thanks to a
$500,000 bribe paid to General MacArthur, who once again presided
over the vital bases. He would have reflected that it was again in
part from these bases that Colonel Lansdale and his protégé Ramon
Magsaysay successfully suppressed the great Hukbalahap insurrection
of the late 1940s and early 1950s. He would have understood that the
firm backing given by Nixon and Kissinger to the installation of the
Martial Law regime, signalled by massive increases in military aid, was
grounded in their conviction that no one could better guarantee the
permanence of the bases than the ineffable Imelda’s dictator-husband.
Finally, he would have been aware of what Ferdinand Marcos conceded
publicly in the last months of his power, namely, that the reason the
Philippines would be a prime target in the event of nuclear war is that
large quantities of nuclear warheads are stored at the bases. In effect,
he would have been aware that throughout this century the bases have
been central both to American domination of the Philippines and to
American military hegemony in the Western Pacific. Of this history all
politically-conscious Filipinos—supporters as well as opponents of the
Marcos regime—are fully cognizant, and it weighs heavily on their
calculations and aspirations for the future.
Given the importance of the matter, the reader briefly encourages
himself to hope that Fenton will hurry to impress the importance of
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his compromise on American officials at the Embassy or at the bases;
or at the very least drop by the Embassy or Subic Bay to discuss the
question. This never happens, nor are the bases ever mentioned again.
Complex, substantial issues are of no real interest to the political tourist.
Having ‘puzzled’ and outdebated the rustics, he hurries back to Manila.
As he justly explains, ‘I had an errand in Baguio. After that, back to
work in London’ (p. 105). The faithful Fred asks him, just before they
part, ‘Do you have enough for your article? You said you’d have
enough if only you got to see the NPA.’ ‘Yes, I’ve got plenty to describe
. . . I’d just like one more thing.’ ‘One more thing?’ says Fred. ‘What
sort of thing?’ ‘That’s it. I don’t know. Just one more thing to round
it out’ (p. 106).
Fenton is in luck. On the point of returning to Gatwick and work, he
learns that the Secretary of Defence, Juan Ponce Enrile, and General
Ramos, Chief of the Constabulary, have taken refuge from anticipated
arrest behind the perimeter of Camp Aguinaldo. The regime suddenly
begins to unravel very rapidly. Our thrilled traveller stays on, the master
very much on his mind: ‘I thought: Kapuscinski has scripted this. I
looked around for him. It was like his account of the fall of Haile
Selassie, only speeded up so that what had taken a year or so—a gradual
elimination of a court—seemed to be happening in seconds’ (p. 118).
The final section of Fenton’s account covers the five tumultuous days
from the flight of Ramos and Enrile to that of Ferdinand and Imelda.
It shows the agitated tourist rushing from sight to sight, frisson to
frisson. A nerve-tingling brush with street demonstrators leads him to
conclude: ‘If we were to go in with the rabble, I wanted to be with the
friendly, not the hostile rabble’ (p. 136). He has a chance to trump the
natives again when a doctor tells him: ‘Nobody will call us cowards
again. We’ve done it. We’ve had a peaceful revolution. We’ve beaten
Poland.’ At first Fenton is befuddled. ‘I thought at first he was talking
about football.’ But then ‘I realized he was the first guy who had drawn
the comparison which had been regularly in my mind for the last few
days. The nationalism, the Catholicism, the spontaneous organization,
the sheer power of aspiration—that’s what Poland must have been like’
(p. 139). The befuddlement continues when he enlightens another
Manilan: ‘Congratulations. You’ve just had a real bourgeois revolution.
They don’t often happen nowadays’ (p. 143). Only in Gdansk, perhaps.
The ultimate frisson, as one might expect, is the visit to the abandoned
Malacañang. Fenton and the good Bing ‘decided we must see the
crowds coming over the Mendiola Bridge. The experience would not be
complete without that’ (p. 143). Inside the Palace itself? A little
souvenir-hunting and a final slide. Our tourist steals a couple of Imelda’s
monogrammed towels, and strums Bach’s Prelude in C on one of her
pianos, while, as Granta burbles ineffably, ‘the population of Manila
rioted’. After all this excitement, no wonder that ‘like Helen, I was
revolutioned out’ (p. 147). What better way to rest up than to hold a
Granta-funded beach-party for the dragoman, the ‘boys’, and their girl-
friends, especially as one of the girls brings along a last whiff of the
mysterious Orient in the form of a bodyguarded Chinese lover.
*****
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The reader of what would be more appropriately called ‘The Snapshot
Revolution’ might, in an indulgent mood, feel that it represents Fenton
on vacation or on a bad day. But in fact his ‘The Fall of Saigon’ is cut
from exactly the same cloth. Granta No. 15’s characteristically foolish
blurb warns in advance: ‘And when the first North Vietnamese tank
entered the city, lost, unable to make its way through Saigon’s maze of
streets, James Fenton jumped on the back, an unlikely navigator,
directing the tank commander to the Presidential Palace. . . . Witty,
bizarre, and verging on the lunatic—who in his right mind would hop
on the back of an invading army’s tank?—James Fenton’s account of
the fall of Saigon is an extraordinary and historically important record
of the collapse of a city at war.’
Needless to say, Fenton’s own account shows that he encountered the
tank, certainly not the first to enter the city, and certainly not lost,
right in front of the Presidential Palace! Far from directing the tank
commander anywhere, he was ordered by the commander to get out of
harm’s way—the tank was about to batter down the Palace gates—by
climbing to safety on the back! One might even ask who in his right
mind, under such circumstances, would not ‘hop on the back of an
invading army’s tank?’ All the rest of Granta’s claims are just as
comically false (unless the magazine’s idea of wit is genuinely exemplified
by such Fenton one-liners as ‘The coffee at breakfast tasted of diarrhoea’
(p. 34).
‘The Fall of Saigon’ shows exactly the same insouciant illiteracy about
Vietnam as ‘The Snap Revolution’ about the Philippines. Fenton boasts
that the Vietnamese ‘were a people about whose history and traditions
I knew so little. I had read some books in preparation, but the effect
of doing so was only to make the country recede further. So much had
been written about Vietnam. I hadn’t even had the application to finish
Frances Fitzgerald’s The Fire in the Lake’ (p. 33). It also shows the same
fundamentally apolitical search for the next frisson: ‘But I wanted very
much to see a communist victory . . . I wanted to see a war and the
fall of a city because—because I wanted to see what such things were
like . . . The point is simply in being there and seeing it. The experience
has no essential value beyond itself’ (p. 31). So much for Granta’s
‘extraordinary and historically important record of the collapse of a city
at war’.
What both these texts perfectly demonstrate is that, for the Fentons of
this world, politics an sich are wholly unimportant and uninteresting.
They become interesting only insofar as they produce brief, torch-lit
spectacles in exotic places. For in this way they can be transformed into
advertisable commodities to exceptional advantage. The ordinary tourist
goes to Machu Picchu, the Taj Mahal or Niagara Falls with a humble
sense of their ancient durability; millions of other tourists have visited
these sights before him, and millions will follow in his footsteps. Even
those photographically adept tourists who are capable of publishing
coffee-table picture-books of their pilgrimages know only too well that
these volumes will quickly be buried under an avalanche of other
picture-books. The rest are barred from the bazaar, and their slides are
for the consumption only of family, friends and pupils. By contrast, the
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political tourist of Fenton’s type shrewdly exploits the market scarcity
of historical events. If you were not in Manila in late February 1986 or
in Saigon in April 1975, you will have missed a once-only spectacle
forever. But you will have no idea of what, or how much, you have
missed, unless, via Fenton’s hyper-ventilating prose, you can be shown
the slides, and, via Granta’s hucksterings, that the slideshow has lasting
commercial value.

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