What I spent another night doing...

Le Corbusier dreams of Buenos Aires
* * *

Our enemies long for our retreat. They
question our moral purpose. They doubt
our strength of will. Yet even after five
years of war, our finest citizens continue
to answer our enemies with courage and
confidence. Hundreds of thousands of
patriots still raise their hands to serve
their country; tens of thousands who
have seen war on the battlefield volunteer
to re-enlist. What an amazing country to
produce such fine citizens.
– George Bush, 28 May 2007
(http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/05/20070528.html)

George Bush frequently chooses to define reality rather than acknowledge it when talking about American policy abroad, picking and choosing from reality's corners the statistics, beliefs and moments that spell out what is closest to his idea of what reality will be. In this he follows a high modernist tradition that James Scott, in Seeing Like a State, defines as a "claim to speak about the improvement of the human condition with the authority of scientific knowledge and its tendency to disallow other competing sources of judgment" (Scott, 93). George Bush follows a long line of American adventurers in foreign soil, all of whom tended to shower their purpose in language celebrating perceived American values such as liberty and uplift. Without these values, civilization withers and searches, Telemachus-like, for a father-state that might lead that more primitive civilization toward the light that is the modern future. As this idea gives meaning to attempted assertions of power in Iraq, so it did when the United States invaded and attempted to organize the Philippines. As I thought about American adventures in the Philippines and Iraq, I thought again and again of Le Corbusier, who, like these adventurers, insisted on a reality that heeded his definitions of what reality was, and who saw opportunities everywhere to remake landscapes in ways that denied meaning to the past in anticipation of the future. How different does he sound when he asks: "[h[ow many of those five million [those who came from the countryside to make their fortune] are simply a dead weight on the city, an obstacle, a black clot of misery, of failure, of human garbage?" (Scott, 116) from Arthur Stanley Riggs, a military officer and contributor to the Manila Freedom, who wrote during the American occupation in the Philippines, of Filipinos that they were "[b]arren to bleakness in literature, void of that finer feeling and sense of fitness which makes for a high conception of life and its possibilities to both individual and people" (Kramer, 198)? While Le Corbusier, commenting after the First World War, might not make as grand a distinction between whites and other races as does Riggs, they seem to share an idea that in planning society, nothing can be destroyed if it is broken to begin with. A policy of destruction to an entity that does not live up to the controlling power's idea of what a thing should be, following the line of reason established by Le Corbusier and Riggs then, is a policy of creation and thus any destruction in the pursuit of the creation of what the power wants is justified. When an American major in Vietnam claimed that it was necessary to destroy a village in order to save it, he was following a line of logic that had asserted itself long before he entered the arena and which basically asserted that any idea with force behind it is greater than any reality which only asserts the society it exists within. Fallujah then, is only the latest city to witness that the power to define means the power to destroy.

The United States has always defended its adventures abroad by clothing the goal of the adventure in terms like "liberty" and "progress." In the current conflict, Bush argued from well before war's start that the goal of the engagement was "not to conquer but to liberate" (), this sounds similar to the Thomasites' description of their tasks in the Philippines as teachers of the Filipino students as a project of "`regenerating' the islands and their people" (Scott, 170). The United States occupation of the Philippines, as much as it might have relied on the Filipino elite for legitimacy and support, relied still more on the language it chose to define its mission. Without the sense that this was not simply about the venture capitalists who descended on the meetings and ports of the Philippines, that it was not about the blind ambitions of empire, but was in fact an opportunity for the ideals of the United States to assert themselves in the fallow fields of the once unbelieving and still primitive (because they were not filled with the ideals yet that we could give them), then what meaning and effort could the newspapers and middle class give the horrific stories and deaths of so many Americans? Language was used to create mission and drape the mission in the language of sacrifice, heroism and virtue. While Filipino elites might decide certain local matters, the meaning, and hence the managing of the whole operation had to be tightly controlled by the Americans, for the meaning was not for the Filipinos, but for the Americans who would read about the Philippines and the Filipinos, volunteer to serve there and connect the meanings of that war to the meanings they had ascribed to the American creation of itself and its government, without necessarily granting that Filipinos were ready, or even worthy, of inheriting that mantle of democracy for themselves. American imperialism and occupation, perhaps less centralized in the Philippines than other forms of imperialism as practiced by the British or French elsewhere, or the Spanish there before them, in its form may have helped many Americans accept that the mission there, while having definite financial benefits, was really about something nobler and more necessary, as Christians might understand it, bringing light to darkness.

Definition and the right to define in the Philippines was tightly controlled, Kramer notes in The Blood of Government, any freedom of speech promised, would be severely limited, especially with the passage of the Sedition Act of 4 November 1901 (and perhaps this prefigured the shrill Espionage Act of World War One which limited speech by equating dissent with disloyalty and put Eugene Debs behind bars while he ran for president). With the Sedition Act, any subversive text could be suppressed, so that what emerged was an illusory unity of purpose of Filipino and American aims for the future of the Philippines. Like so many blue thumbs, pro-American Filipino newspapers gave Americans an image of a Philippines largely pro-American, with violence brought down on the process by so many savages and those, like the playwright Aureliano Tolentino, who would move others to "`meet together for unlawful purposes…[and] incite rebellious conspiracies and riots and to stir up the people against the lawful authorities" (Kramer, 177). It does not matter if the dissent is reality, the sedition act established those that ruled as the arbiters of truth and gave legitimacy to their version of reality, to further the appearance of their legitimacy, it was important to report that the truth emerging from American organs as to the Filipino situation were "experts."

How did experts establish their expertise? In the case of Dean Worcester, who came to be acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on the Philippines and who was quoted widely and acknowledged by institutions as entrenched as The New York Times as a respected expert on the Filipino, his "manners and habits" as well as the Philippines' "material resources, and its commercial possibilities" (17 January 1899, New York Times) one wrote. And wrote a lot. And defined, defined, defined. Kramer reports that Worcester "ranked `more than eighty distinct tribes,' from the `lowest' Negritos -- `incapable of civilization' – through the Moros, `pagan' Malyas, and `civilized' Malays" (Kramer, 180). He wrote articles, he wrote books, as well, and he was appointed to Taft's Philippine Commission to define what the Philippines offered and who the Filipinos were. He had credibility because, as The New York Times reported, he had

lived for years in the Philippines, hunted with the
wildest of the Moros and Sulus, attended their tribal
rites, and studied the political economy of the islants
at close range. he has written a book on the Philippines,
which is considered a standard reference work and
recently contributed an interesting series of articles on
the Philippines to The Century Magazine. (17 January 1899).

That he had traveled widely with Spanish sugar planters and government officials while learning about the Philippines and the Filipinos, that he had mostly stayed on estates while traveling did not receive consideration from The New York Times or those governmental officials. That he offered little pearls of wisdom such as "[t]oo much kindness [shown to a Filipino laborer] is very likely to spoil him…and he thinks more of a master who applies the rattan vigorously, when it is deserved, than of one who does not" (Kramer, 179), thus was not considered the voice of an ignorant and racist fool, but a voice to counter anti-imperialist arguments, for after all, it was an expert voice. That voice had hunted, it had counted and it had defined. It had earned the right to determine what the truth was. Much too, once upon a more recent time in certain circles, was made of the travels of Vice President Cheney to the capitals of the Middle East. His definitions too, served as the justifications for American policy in far away lands.

While the American policy of occupation in the Philippines does not, on the surface, have much in common with the work of Le Corbusier, as it was not necessarily centralized in structure, the spirit of the occupation and of imperialism in general makes itself apparent in his work. I found myself thinking about this quite a bit, wondering why Le Corbusier seemed to inform my sense of American occupation not just in the Philippines, but in Iraq as well. Finally I came to see the connection, it was faith.

Although I do not have the book in front of me, I remember reading Celine's Death on the Installment Plan. With its claustrophobic rendering of early 20th Century Paris, full of bad air, infection and violence and from there, Le Corbusier's insistence on what Scott calls "universal new standards for all buildings – standards that would cover lighting, heating, ventilation, structure, and aesthetics and that would be valid in all latitudes for all needs" (109) becomes something more than sympathetic, it is seemingly necessary. Cholera epidemics, revolutionary agitation, crime, small pox, alcoholism, lassitude, tuberculosis, prostitution, decrepitude, for many, these were not characteristics of some distant shore's hovel-filled cities, these were Paris, New York, London. If Paris was to be recreated, its streets widened, neighborhoods rearranged, if New York was to be a series of right angles and parks planned to the tree by Olmstead and Vaux, if London was to construct a subway of intersecting lines, was the idea of transforming Manila by wiping it clean really all that radical an idea? It was not even a new idea.

Le Corbusier saw the construction of things as exercises in central authority. Construction, he seemed to argue, was an organizing principle for a society and, as such, should emanate from some central source. He says of his plan for a centralized business development in Paris that "`[f]rom its offices come the commands that put the world in order. In fact, the skyscrapers are the brain of the city, the brain of the whole country. They embody the work of elaboration and command on which all activities depend'" (111). These commands were not to be made arbitrarily, nor in the heat of some political passion, instead he argued that the commands would come from

[T[he Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that
will provide your solution once the problem has been
posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony.
This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in
the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the
electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been
drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account
of nothing but human truths. (112)

In other words, Le Corbusier praises the rise of the expert. The expert however is who authority says it is, and authority in the Philippines argued that expertise was a province of those, like Dean Worcester, who named and defined the Philippines in a way that satisfied rather than challenged the desires of those who held the power to decide policy and planning. In occupied Philippines, strange, threatening and primitive in the sense that its structures did not reflect the current technologies and designs of the Western infrastructures, it must have seemed necessary to create a platform of Western design from which to plan the rest of the country and from which to destroy or marginalize those structures most in opposition to the uplift promised by the future, best represented by emerging technologies and current design practices as established in the chosen place. In other words, what existed against the Plan had to be destroyed in order to create the necessary city, the necessary village. This did not just mean buildings and roads in the Philippines, it meant populations and social organizations that failed to support or even uphold the values being ushered in from the United States. Power sharing might work on matters of local importance, but only in so far as it did not go against more national or international plans for what the Philippines were to be as defined by the United States.

The United States was able to justify such an invasive approach to occupying the Philippines because of how it racially and technologically defined civilization and savagery. In a letter to his wife summarized in the 28 April 1900 edition of The New York Times, Captain T. R. Hayson of the United States Army supposed that

the Filipino regards self-government and liberty simply
as avenues of escape from the duties and responsibilities
of organized social life. According to [Hayson], if the
United States leaves the islands, and no other foreign
power assumes control of them, in two or three
generations the natives will be indistinguishable from the
ordinary Malay savage. Yet Capt. Hayson speaks with
marked kindness of the Filipinos. He declares that their
personal habits are cleanly, though their village streets
and the surroundings of their houses are in a state to
explain fully the large amount of sickness from which
they suffer. The newly installed native officials, he regards
as honest and well-intentioned, but as to their competency
he has the gravest doubts. `The people have not,' he
concludes, 'the slightest conception of the idea of
government that derives its force from the consent of the
governed. And the duties of a citizen are to them an
absolutely unknown quantity. (28 April 1900, New York Times)

Hayson, in his assertions, supports the idea that the Filipinos, like the millions of unwashed Parisians Le Corbusier describes, must be led and taught by authority the subservient role they will play in the mechanization of the state or territory. The biggest difference, as mentioned earlier, is the racial component found in the American response to his mission in the Philippines and his attitude toward the Filipino. However, in their faith they are almost the same.

Hayson goes on to report, in the 28 April editorial that he believes that "when the light [of a government arising from the consent of the governed] does strike them, they will be a highly appreciative people, and make good citizens" (28 April 1900). When the Filipino is transformed into a new being, he will understand that what has been done to him and his country was good and necessary. However, if the Filipino were to remain what he is at present, then it follows, from Hayson's logic, that he will fail to be a good citizen. He must be transformed entirely from what he was. Le Corbusier, writing on reform had this to say, "`[w]e must refuse even the slightest consideration to what is: to the mess we are in now….There is no solution to be found here.' Instead, he insisted, we must take a `blank piece of paper,' a `clean tablecloth,' and start new calculations from zero" (Scott, 117). Uplift and liberty are found in disposing the past and the contemporary and creating a vision of the future that must be followed, and what does not follow that vision of the future must be destroyed. In this, Le Corbusier espouses a model for planning that was followed to such disastrous effect in the Philippines.

"`We claim,'" Le Corbusier said, "`in the name of the steamship, the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection'" (107). Promise and hope consumed Le Corbusier when he considered the future. Humanity, in approximating machines, promised to become less a mass of contradictions, inefficiencies, diseases and conflicts and would more or less distill with in itself a utopia of reason and right angles born of its technological advances and appropriation of machine logic and design. As Scott notes, Le Corbusier

returned repeatedly to the contrast between the
existing city, which is the product of historical chance,
and the city of the future, which could be consciously
designed from start to finish following scientific
principles. (111)

For many Americans, the Philippines represented a similar opportunity to re-make the world and bring uplift of a sort to a people imprisoned in the darkness of savagery. Perhaps these Americans, like Hayson, did not necessarily believe in the steamship, the airplane and automobile, but they did believe that principles like free speech, democracy and free enterprise represented the path to modernity, true religion and economic well-being. Other Americans may have gone along for the ride, taking advantage of the opportunities afforded by American occupation, but it was the believers, like Hayson, who allowed American institutions and people believe in the occupation of the Philippines.

The reality of the Philippines was less abstract, perhaps, than Le Corbusier's conception of uplift and advancement, and the end results hoped for were not quite as utopian, which is why the racial component may have been so necessary in explaining the narrative of the occupation of the Philippines by the United States. Whereas in Le Corbusier's vision, the result would be heaven, it was understood by people in the United States reading about the Philippines that the Philippines could never be quite so free as the United States. After all, they were more primitive, racially than Americans were, the thinking went, so it was not a utopia hoped for, however, in creating a vision for the future of the Philippines in which it was hoped the people would advance, learn and gain deeper understanding of what would be more successful action by them, occupation and profit were justified to a large enough percentage of the populace that those with much to gain, were not kept from doing so, no matter the cost in human life for the Filipinos or the other Americans, who gained nothing from the adventure. What Le Corbusier and planners and commentators on the Philippine occupation have in common, is a sense that government is going to transform society, in Iraq there seems to be no such thing. Current United States policy in Iraq seems to ignore any possibilities of real government. Any sense of management in Iraq by non-military agencies are so obviously more concerned with the private interests of massive multi-national corporations than any destiny or purpose to be created in Iraq that the cynical enterprise cannot be accepted by any other population than the most hard-core believers in U.S. exceptionalism