For the past couple months the Philippines, or probably servers in the Philippines have been sending out robots to investigate my blogsite. Their “hits” have eclipsed hits from the United States in my blog stats. Other contries have taken the lead before and they have usually been Eastern bloc nations. I don’t think that many real humans from these nations are looking at Lincolndemocrat but I don’t know for sure. It usually is not noticible in the actual count of “Visitors” to the blog which for this month averages 241 a day. In months with especially high school board commentary it can average a hundred more than that.
Here are the US and Ph statistics for this month so far.
Stats…………………pages…..links…..Bandwidth
ph….Philippines…..15,322…16,582….152.18 MB
us….United States…5,882….10,354….337.24 MB
If there are visitors from the Philippines who visit the blog its not because I often write about their fair land. My search engine only counts four such occassions. I also recently mentioned the new Philippine President Duterte who has a ninty percent popularity rate after inaugurating a vigilante mentality in his country that has led to the murders of 2000 people extrajudicially by people who targeted them for being drug peddlers. So much for the rule of law.
One of those previous posts mentions my father’s good friend, Narcisso (Norgic) Tenorio who as a student in an American college found an encyclopedia with a picture of what it said was the typical Philippino wearing a loincloth and holding a spear. Norgic was an attorney and, sans spear, he ripped the page out in a rage.
The Tenorios once invited a number of young Phillipino nursing students to our home and they preformed some native dances for us with bamboo poles snapping together while they jumped between them jump rope style. They also placed plates on their heads and rolled on the floor without the plates falling off.
In my college years I was assigned to write about the government of another nation and chose the Philippines. It had a federal system modeled on the United States government from which the Philippines won independence after World War II. By the time I was in high school a dicator, Ferdinand Marcos, and his shoe infatuated wife, Imelda, had taken over as dictators. Any of a number of other nations might have been their model but not the United States.
During those years tens of thousands of Philippina nursing students, like those who paid a call on our home, emigrated to the United States. In 1966 Richard Speck murdered eight of them one evening in Chicago. That year one of my new favorite music groups, Simon and Garfunkel, recorded Silent Night over the background of the evening news which included a brief description of Speck’s murder. He was only sent to prison because all the Philippinas looked the same to him so that when one of them hid he didn’t notice her missing when he raped and murdered the other eight. His defense attorneys did everything they could to discredit her testimony because they said it was as hard for her to identify the American white man as it was for Speck to identify the Philippina nurses as individuals. A few years later in another southeast Asian nation our soldiers would come to call the natives “gooks” in large part because they all looked the same to the Americans.
My parents would often read to each other much as I read to Claudia. I recall stopping and listening to one of the books being read once which was written by an American GI who fought in the Philippines in World War II. It was one more brutal theaters of war and is probably best remembered for the treatment of American and Philippine soldiers during the Bataan Death March.
The book was set some time after this when Army Rangers or some other special forces snuck into the rural areas of the Philippines to organize a resistance to the Japanese. This organization was much easier because of the brutality of the Japanese Army towards Philippinos. In the passage my mother read the GI was describing how the Philippine insurgents gathered a number of forest deer together outside a Japanese compound they were preparing to attack. The Philippino troops poured gasoline on the stag’s testicles aimed them at the Japanese and set the deer on fire. |
That kinda reminds me of the Trump campaign.
