The nation's ghosts.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

THE TWO days we troop to the cemeteries and remember our dead offer a welcome respite from the charges and counter-charges of corruption in the military. We all know we cannot wish the scandal away, but today and tomorrow we can at least turn our thoughts elsewhere.

But there is no getting away from the unsettling notion that, in this particular season, we as a nation have more to mourn than the mere absence of our dearly departed. We approach these holidays with a sense of gloom, wearied by the same old stories of corruption in the government and crisis in governance.

The truth is, we may have buried our dead, but their ghosts continue to haunt us.

We may have buried the colonial experience, but we continue to believe in the myth of a special relationship with the United States. Even many of those who are terminally anti-American place an undue emphasis on US intervention, as though nothing substantial happens in the country without an Ugly American behind it pulling the strings.

Even today, 58 years after the United States formally granted independence to a devastated nation it was not in its interest to rebuild, we continue to practice a foreign policy measured in terms of closeness to or distance from US goals.

Distant, according to conventional wisdom, after the closing of the American bases in 1992; close, according to the Arroyo administration, especially after the September 11 terrorist attacks pushed the country into the so-called Coalition of the Willing; allegedly distant again, according to the political opposition, after Philippine troops pulled out from Baghdad.