This Saturday, more than a thousand of America's top military and government leaders and their guests are scheduled to gather at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC, for a secretive tribal rite called the 103rd Annual Wallow of the Military Order of the Carabao. And they won't be singing "Kumbaya."
In fact, on what these days feels like the eve of war, nothing says "imperialism" better than the annual Wallow, which celebrates the bloody conquest of the nascent Philippine Republic a century ago in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War.
The exclusive Military Order of the Carabao (named after the mud-loving water buffalo) was founded in 1900 by American officers fighting in the Philippines, so naturally there will be a lot of singing and cigar smoking by the 99.9 percent male crowd. Recent guests have included Colin Powell and General Richard B. Myers, current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and many of the country's top military leaders are listed as members. (You have to be an officer to even be considered for membership.) Acting like a cluster of Klingons, the guys will toss around revered imperial slogans, such as "Civilize 'em with a Krag!" referring to the rifles used by Americans to kill thousands of Filipinos, who had fought Spain for their freedom and didn't want to be handed over to another colonial power....
One thing that fires up the bulls never changes: the bellowing of the Carabao anthem, "The Soldier's Song." At the 2002 Wallow, the room was already thick with smoke --every place setting had been adorned with (forget that embargo) an authentic Cuban cigar -- when a voice said, "Gentlemen, please turn to your songbooks," and the US Marine Band, seated to the side, struck up a tune. The Carabaos, most of whom seemed to know the words by heart, lustily sang the first stanza's story of the dreaded "bolo" (the Filipino revolutionaries' machete -- they had few guns) and deceitful "ladrones" ("thieves"):
In the days of dopey dreams -- happy, peaceful Philippines, When the bolomen were busy all night long, When ladrones would steal and lie, and Americanos die, Then you heard the soldiers sing this evening song:
And then the bulls and their guests rhythmically banged their fists on the tables during each rendition of the chorus:
Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos! Cross-eyed kakiac ladrones! Underneath the starry flag, civilize 'em with a Krag, And return us to our own beloved homes.
The chorus originally began: Damn, damn, damn the Filipinos! The US soldiers chanted the second line's surviving racial slur about Filipinos as "khaki-colored thieves" while marching through the jungle. Some accounts say that, as the Americans marched and sang, some of them carried ears they had lopped off the Filipinos' heads and kept as souvenirs. ...
(Ian Urbina is a journalist based at the Middle East Research and Information Project in Washington, DC.)
[The full text is available at <http://www.merip.org/newspaper_opeds/insurrecto/empire_strikes_back.html>.] *****
Cf. Ian Urbina and Chris Toensing, "In the Good Old Wallow Time," _The Baffler_ (January 2003), <http://www.merip.org/newspaper_opeds/insurrecto/good_wallow_time.html>.
Ian Urbina, <http://www.merip.org/newspaper_opeds/insurrecto/frolicking.html>.
-- Yoshie
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