Most noteworthy were the toll-booth scheme, criminalization of vehicle encounters with the errant dog or cat, $40,000 per head H2 fees and the like. We have a new one in the governor’s proposed epistle for U.N. consumption. He should save himself the embarrassment.
If this rambling, inaccurate, largely baseless and transparently racially biased diatribe is, in fact, to be rendered before the U.N. Decolonization Committee by our governor or delivered on his behalf, it will irrevocably consign him to an obscure and reviled footnote in the history of Guam and the United States of America.
The proposed manifesto — and it’s still hard to believe he actually intends to let this happen — reveals more holes than a Swiss cheese wheel.
Should he go forward with this misinformed drivel it will most certainly assure his defeat in the next gubernatorial election, and serious repercussions will inevitably result; not only some that he may envision, but far more in the nature of unintended consequences.
How can he say that Chamorros suffer disproportionately among American citizens, when in actuality Guamanian Chamorros enjoy entitlement to significant benefits not available to other resident U.S. citizens on Guam? One dollar a year, tax-free land leases come to mind.
How does he rationalize or justify the statistical fact that Guam’s Chamorros top the national list when it comes to welfare, food stamps, direct financial aid to women and children and other federally-dispensed benefits?
How can he state that Chamorros suffer from taxation without representation when the opposite is true? Madeleine Z. Bordallo represents Chamorros and all Guamanians — in limited fashion as with other non-state political entities — while Guamanians pay no federal taxes. Social Security and Medicare withholdings are properly viewed as insurance premiums recoverable in retirement and during times of greatest need.
What’s that about the “advanced and unique people” and comparing latte stones to the Mayan pyramids? Poppycock! Chamorro society was essentially stagnant for those 4,000 years in a Neolithic (Stone Age) population, progressing and prospering only after exposure to Western influences. The latte stone comparison confounds reason.
Does he actually presume to criticize Spanish and other European scholars for penning what little exists of Chamorro history? Perhaps he’d like to describe his version of it without resorting to any of those writings, and tell us where he got his information. In actual fact, most of that which is now promoted as ancient Chamorro culture was recently derived exclusively from those accounts and embellished with everything but the kitchen sink: shamelessly lifted from Hawaiian, Maori, Tahitian, Carolinian and other valid and enduring Pacific Island societies. Some Chamorros have labored mightily for the past 50 years in an attempt to portray themselves and their largely-artificial “ancient culture” as a people and society that is not and never was.
So-called “Chamorro cultural dance” evolved within the past two decades, and the “Chamorro Chant” was created about 20 years ago by a notorious Chamorro con-man for use in his 900-number telephone scam. Early writings mention neither. The Chamorro Language Commission employs learned scholars who eviscerate the English language to create Chamorro-sounding words and phrases of their own design, hoping that subsequent generations will accept them as culturally original.
Early Chamorros were experts in building and sailing fast proas — their improvement on a vessel type widely in use throughout the Pacific — but seldom ventured far from land. The true master navigators in this part of the Pacific were the Carolinians, who retain much of that expertise today.
As case in point, I give you the hyped-and-heralded voyage of a Guam-built Chamorro “Seagoing Proa” last year — constructed under the supervision and with the guidance and assistance of Carolinian master carvers and navigators. It set sail on an epic voyage to Rota fueled by obligatory newly invented chants. It eventually made landfall there following a harrowing three-day, 50-mile voyage during which it became lost at least twice and received assistance from three escort boats, a Coast Guard helicopter and two Rotanese Public Safety boats. The headlines faded into embarrassed oblivion, and rightly so.
What’s written here addresses a mere fraction of the Chamorro activist racial discrimination against all others. The relentless insistence on portraying and promoting those who self-identify as Chamorro as somehow better qualified and deserving of special treatment becomes increasingly noxious and nauseating. Stay tuned for an upcoming series where I will enlighten some, entertain a few, antagonize and doubtlessly infuriate many, and set forth the true extent of Guamanian Contemporary Myth.
DAVE DAVIS
Yigo, Guam
