There were Filipinos who rejoiced when Barack Obama won; there were Filipinos who were crushed. There were those who celebrated, those who mourned, and possibly many more who simply didn’t care.

The face of celebration was a young face; that of disappointment, an older face. There were many—often, younger—Filipinos who campaigned mightily for Obama as Filipino-Americans, and others who cheered him on out of sympathy. And there were Filipinos, both American citizens and not, who cheered on John McCain out of deep conviction or because they had surrendered to bigotry, racism, ignorance and fear.

The old faces that frowned over the election of Obama are too often those that have been nodding in support of our own President, although to be fair, there are many other faces, also older, who shake their heads at the sight of our President and who vigorously nodded their assent to Obama and his message of hope.

If some (myself included) were gladdened by Obama’s victory because it marks a return to a more familiar America, and a repudiation of the nasty, sinister place it has become during the benighted Bush years, many more, I think, view his election with alarm. Such alarm, to my mind, should be a cause for mingled horror and fascination over the image it portrays of a particular kind of Filipino both at home and abroad.

The face of that Filipino has its features twisted by fear and loathing of the poor, and contempt for the majority. It is a face that sneers at the motive power of the spoken word, disbelieves the inspiration that words can bring, whether written or spoken; and furthermore stares impassively at first, then grimaces with hostility and skepticism, at the first mention of the idea that government can—and should—be a force for good, and that the interest of the individual must always be tempered with compassion for the underprivileged.

This is the face of the kind of Filipino who has little patience for debate, who views authority as something instinctively to be obeyed and who puts a premium on personal privilege and property while holding any effort to embrace civic values and achieve collectivist aspirations with deepest suspicion.

It is the face of someone who says democracy is wonderful in public while grumbling in private that the vote is in the hands not just of propertied, salaried, people like themselves, but of the ignorant and unwashed. It is the face of the kind of Filipino (there are many more of these faces among younger Filipinos at home though in America that face is often older) who responded to the E-VAT with hostility because “why should our earnings be deducted to feed and house the stupid, lazy poor?” The same face nodded every time McCain warned of “socialism” in America.

It is also the face of someone who may not explicitly state it but implicitly affirms it with every statement dismissive of the poor and a particular face of the poor: that of the African-American, the black. The sort of sour face that belongs to someone who instinctively assumes the superiority of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, that views the Filipino as a natural subordinate of whites, but who derives a weird kind of satisfaction from an accompanying assumption of the superiority of the brown over the black. Never top dog, but at least a contented lapdog, never the underdog.

Oddly enough, this is more often than not, a blue-collar and not a white-collar face; there seem to be many more white-collar Filipino-Americans of a liberal persuasion, but they are a minority both over there and over here.

But whatever their income or educational level, there is also another kind of face that viewed Obama with horror: the face of the pious conservative.

Archbishop Raymond Burke, prefect of the Apostolic Signatura of the Holy See, gave an interview to ‘Inside the Vatican’ magazine at the eve of the American polls. His words might as well have been a manifesto for the faithful in America and the Philippines:

“The Democratic Party, however, has, over the years, put forth and defended a political agenda which is grievously anti-life, favoring the right to procured abortion and ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex. One can legitimately question the wisdom of the decisions taken in the war in Iraq, but war in itself is not always and everywhere evil, as are, for example, procured abortion, human cloning, embryonic stem-cell research, and the so-called ‘marriage’ of persons of the same sex.

“Engagement of the nation in a war cannot be placed on the same moral level as the nation making laws which permit the wholesale killing of the unborn or the artificial generation of human life or experimentation on embryonic human life or ‘marriage’ between persons of the same sex.”

His attitudes reflect the attitudes of Filipino prelates and Catholics who view the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration’s many crimes against the people as lesser evils compared to the great moral good she can accomplish if she vetoes the Reproductive Health bill. It is a face veiled in the kind of religious conservatism many (but, I believe, not as many as we might think) younger Filipinos find incomprehensible, even frightening.

If there was much to be disgusted about the comments of an older generation of conservative, Republican Filipino-Americans and their ilk, there was much to take heart from the counter-arguments and reactions of younger Filipinos on both sides of the Pacific. There was a gentler, kinder, more generous face to be seen: eyes moist with emotion, moved by words and deeds, by a sense of collective achievement and destiny instead of individual isolation and selfishness. And there, was, too, the wistful moment, reflected in so many different variations on a single theme: Look at their new president and, horror of horrors, look at ours.