For use: Sunday, August 12, 2000 and thereafter

Future Shoes: "Imelda's Closet"

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when God was in his heaven and Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos ruled Manila.

The Marcoses were the supposed stand-ins for democracy in the Philippines. The U.S. was dedicated to maintaining them in power, for while they were too uninterested in democracy to lift the boot of martial law for eight critical, freedom-killing years, they did represent a reliable anti-communist presence in that part of Asia, and they allowed the U.S., its neo-colonial protector since the days of the Spanish-American war, to anchor its warships in their arbors and to maintain several major military bases.

If you are of the postwar generation, your first impression of the Philippines under the Marcoses was news footage of the Beatles visit in the heyday of Beatlemania, 1964.  The busiest four people on earth that year, the Beatles arrived in the Philippines imagining they were there for a quick concert and a quick getaway. Accordingly, they said "Thanks but no thanks" to an invitation by the presidential couple to appear in a special concert for Filipino dignitaries.

When the Marcoses were unable to bend the Beatles to their will, they encouraged mob action against the Fab Four. Angry crowds, protesting the perceived discourtesy, rocked the group's getaway limo and plastered it garbage, driving them back to the hotel until the sanctioned siege was lifted. In numerous biographies, the Beatles said they feared for their lives at the hands of Ferdinand and Imelda, and that the whole affair was occasioned by the socially ambitious Imelda's desire to be seen with the Beatles.

Now we are allowed glimpses into the live the Marcoses lived apart from their people. Nightly banquets, warehouses full of gifts and tribute, artwork, technology, and jewels. An entire ballroom had been converted to a karaoke hall for Imelda to lipsynch pop songs to. Hundreds of hours of videotapes show her entertaining her captive guests in song.

And then there were the shoes. Imelda Marcos liked shoes. She had a special section of the presidential palace, comprising five separate rooms, which housed over 1,220 pairs of shoes -- pumps, hells, go-go boots, sandals, formalwear, casualwear. It is hard to grasp how many shoes the collection encompassed, but 1,220 pairs is more than your local mall shoestore has in stock. Only these shoes were for one person, not an entire city. The collection was simultaneously beautiful and horrifying. Like Nero fiddling while Rome burned to the ground, Imelda Marcos put the delectation of her feet above the empty bellies of the children of the country that looked to her for leadership.

Additional statistics? Besides the 1220 pairs of shoes, Imelda left behind 500 gowns and 300 bras, one of which was bullet-proof. Since leaving the palace, Imelda Marcos cheerfully claims to have bought another 300 pairs of shoes, according to Indian Express. She is also suing for an ownership role in every major Philippine corporation, based on $12.5 billion in secret investments made by her husband Ferdinand before he died in 1989.

For 30 years, most Filipinos believed there was no one who could or would look out for their interests as honestly or as capably as Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos. Accordingly, Filipinos placed their future, their hopes, in the hands of these people. The clear sign of this betrayal were the five roomfuls of shoes.

Now is as good a time as any to ask, What are future shoes? Future shoes are our outward sign that we are ready to embrace change, while retaining the best that the past has bestowed on us. Future shoes are essential virtues -- courage, versatility, humility, a capacity for humor and paradox, and a predisposition to learn, even when the lesson at hand guarantees pain. Future shoes include an adult's sense of the cost of things, and a child's radar for fun.

Imelda's shoes do not rate as future shoes. Gathering dust in their boxes, they are stubborn anchors to the rigidities and and closed mindsets of the president and his first lady. Instead of inspiring hope, they smothered it under the weight of all those buckles and straps. Every visitor to the presidential palace looked at the mountain of footwear and thought, "How foolish we were."

I want to suggest a trivial analogy and compare Imelda's shoes to the Cuban heels of the Beatles. The Beatles rebounded nicely from their scary visit to the Philippines, and went on to do much more than sell millions of records. They played a remarkable role in anticipating and painting a new world and a new culture people could live in almost immediately. They extolled the 60s values of curiosity, experimentation, tolerance, and joy. In truth, the Beatles nearly invented the 60s single-handedly, the excesses of the time but also their best ideals -- pro-community, pro-creativity, anti-war, anti-authoritarian. They were heroes of the possible. Those Cuban heels were future shoes of the first order.

So there's the paradigm. From the ludicrous example of the tinpot Marcoses we know what future shoes look like, and what they don’t look like. But have we learned the lesson well enough to identify bad shoes when the tyranny is less obvious, the villainy less laughable?

The challenge, of course, goes beyond identifying the footwear of our leaders. A greater task is equipping ourselves with the shoes we need to achieve liftoff in the age now dawning. Can you learn to take those new kinds of steps? Your life and your world may hang on that curious question.

Michael Finley's FUTURE SHOES

1841 Dayton Avenue

St. Paul, MN 55104

Phone 651-644-4540