In Our Image:

...After the Mass there was a reception at the former home of Benigno (Ninoy) Aquino, the murdered husband of Corazon (Cory) Aquino, who shortly thereafter became, and still is, president of the Philippines...

...Perhaps Cory Aquino tired sometimes of listening to her talkative husband...

...John C. Cort In February of 1986, during the counting and miscounting of ballots in the election that led to the departure of Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino community in the Boston area organized a Mass to pray for a successful outcome...

...The quote is close enough, but the origin is not...

...But I would hope that she might reflect on that quote from the apologia pro vita sua that he wrote in the prison where he underwent his own conversion to a more meaningful Christianity and expressed his faith in democratic socialism...

...Karnow quotes remarks of Aquino in which he cited as models "Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore and General Park Chung Hee of South Korea, both rigid rulers...

...No mean feat...

...Still, for the most part this is an excellent book...

...Who else has any chance of doing that...

...You can be authoritarian in Asia,' he held, 'provided there is an economic tradeoff.'" I wish Karnow had also cited the passage from Aquino's 145-page defense against the sentence of death handed down by Marcos's military tribunal during his seven-year jail term...

...That she was able to exorcise the evil genies of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and their thieving cronies when, probably, no one else could do it, is enough to warrant our eternal gratitude...

...But the truth of Winston Churchill's more pragmatic aphorism applies even to them: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time...

...This should be taken as seriously as inexplicit references to Yew and Hee...

...I noticed a T-shirt inscription on the back of a young Filipino in attendance: '"Man's sense of justice makes democracy possible...

...she has intelligence and Christian faith...

...It contains almost all you never knew you wanted to know about the Philippines and manages to deliver it without boredom...

...man's injustice makes democracy necessary'-Ninoy Aquino...

...since, right through the failure of Cory to do something really substantial about land reform and the privileges of the rich-it is all there...

...All she needs is the guts to do something meaningful about land reform and the privileges of her rich relatives and friends and she could still confound talented cynics like Stanley Karnow...

...Although Karnow pays tribute to aspects of the lives and personalities of Ninoy and Cory Aquino, he does have a tendency toward that "acid impartiality as respects parties or individuals" that John Ludlow found in the historical works of Karl Marx...

...For example, even as he describes Cory's remarks at her husband's funeral, Karnow notes that she spoke in "a nasal tone...

...She still has immense popularity among the Filipino people...

...Finally, there is the uneasy reminder that the president's failure has given the Communist rebels a continuing grip on life, when she might have knocked them out after that marvelous nonviolent revolution that raised her popularity and power to their zenith...

...Stanley Karnow's In Our Image is probably the most insightful as well as the most factual and readable book ever written on the Philippines, but he does not even give Ninoy Aquino credit for believing what Niebuhr wrote...

...From centuries before the discovery by Magellan in 1521 through the exploitation by the Spaniards to 1898 and the sometimes brutal, sometimes more subtle, ambiguous exploitation by the U.S...

...And a few pages later: "Her Joan of Arc image, though a tired stereotype, was nevertheless real...

...What did you expect of a quiet, pious housewife who had lived so long in the shadow of her dynamic, voluble husband...

...He wrote, "My ideology flows with the mainstream of Christian democratic socialism as presently practiced in Austria, West Germany, and the Scandinavian countries....It grieves me profoundly to be carelessly branded a Communist by those who never bothered to understand the difference between communism and Christian socialism...

...Reinhold Niebuhr is the man who wrote words to that effect in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, perhaps his most insightful book...

...Niebuhr himself, of course, wavered in his faith in that aphorism, especially as regards underdeveloped and Oriental countries, which in his later, elitist years, he thought lacked the economic and ethical qualities necessary...

...And given the concentrated job training and hardening that she, a gutsy, intelligent woman, has acquired over the last three-and-a-half years, perhaps she can yet prove the truth of Niebuhr's aphorism...

...One wants to complain: Come on, Stanley, make up your mind: "tired stereotype" or "real image...

...Let's be fair, Stanley Karnow...

...This lends an air of credibility when used in moderation, but when overworked can be an irritant...