Two Ugly Americans

It’s fascinating to re-read a book nearly forty years later. To look back upon historical events through the eyes of someone on the other side of the process. Today, when we think of Vietnam, images of helicopters franticly scurrying away from the US embassy in downtown Saigon come to mind. Boat people braving uncertain seas and predictably vicious pirates to escape a concealed holocaust. The killing fields of Cambodia.

American ‘baby boomers’ reflect upon the forced draft anxiety that overheated our youthful years. Country Joe and the Fish’s Fixin’ to Die Rag was an anthem of sorts:

    And it’s one, two three, what are we fighting for Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn Next stop is Vietnam And it’s five, six, seven, open up them pearly gates, Ours is not to wonder why, Whoopee! I just know I’m gonna die.

As the 2004 presidential campaign revealed, resentments over what was widely seen to be an unnecessary defeat still smolder. For the first time, the triumphal American saga of winning every war “we” got into crashed and burned. Pop culture of the 70’s disco era tried to bury the shame in nihilistic silliness.

An unnecessary defeat. This is one theme of the book We Were Soldiers, Once, and Young. Political computations relegated a live war, with American kids bleeding and dying, to the status of a low budget sideshow, fought to tie, not to win. In the aftermath of Watergate, a rabidly partisan American congress cut off South Vietnam’s air supply, violating treaty obligations in order to sever the lifeline of materiel. The careers of an elite political class took precedence over the lives and deaths of real human beings, American and Asian.

An unnecessary defeat. Yet, as the 1958 book The Ugly American (William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick) pointed out, the battle for hearts and minds in southeast Asia was actually a myriad tiny battles, conversations with people one at a time. All too often, the Americans were the amateurs, political hacks who lived well hobnobbing with one another and wealthy locals. Foreign aid, you recall, is when poor people in rich countries are taxed to engorge rich people in poor countries. It’s still going on. See the irate legate’s blog http://diplomadic.blogspot.com/ for current illustrations of this dismal practice.

The Ugly American alternates heroes and villains, helpful folks and pompous buffoons. The “good guys” are those who actually live with the people, learn their languages, and offer real-world solutions to grass-roots needs. (Kennedy’s “Peace Corps” pursued this ideal.) The black hats are the guys in pin stripes, tax-consuming elites with no regard for the real people sacrificed on the altars of their massive projects.

Yet, how can poverty be overcome? Can a well-intentioned philanthropist actually make a difference? A good friend who worked as an engineer in an Asian country for nearly two decades says “third world” squalor can be conquered – but it’s a multi-generational project. The most frustrated students in tropical agriculture schools, rumor has it, are burned-out Peace Corps volunteers.

OK, so we can’t change the world in three easy steps. Can we just turn our backs on our world, and go off to create a new world of our own? The Southern Agrarian writers so beloved of certain “kinist” and “communitarian” groups thought so.

A novel worth considering in this context is Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast. Mr. Fixit goes to jungle, gets mugged by reality, self-destructs. Imagine Swiss Family Robinson meets Lord of the Flies. The inventions burning in protagonist Allie Fox’s mind turn fire into ice. He names these emblems of secular American transformative power “little man” and “fat boy.” As Fox carves his rigidly secular techno utopia out of the jungle, his children join local kids to create a secret place of their own, complete with everything the father hates – play money, a pretend school and church, indigenous resources. In the end, the godless superman brings nothing but death to his brave new world.

After wading through nearly 400 pages of vivid description and gripping psychological narrative, I recommend the movie by that title, starring Harrison Ford as Allie Fox. The film is faithful to the book in plot, characterizations, and atmosphere, and takes less time.

Once again, this is a story that resonates with people “of a certain age.” As the Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 24) indicates, it’s normal for people to confuse the end of their world with the end of the world. When America’s self-image deconstructed in the late 60s, several apocalyptic movements emerged. Drug-dazed hippies “turned on to Jesus,” dropped out of school and adult life, and created a plethora of Christian communes. These bastard hybrids of family and church exploited the inconsistencies of both, while undermining the ability of the communards to function as church men, as family men.

On the other extreme, pagan gaeia worshippers went “back to the land,” seeking to return to the womb of Mother Earth. Peasantry, subsistence living, acquired an ideological cachet among the true believers. Very few men wearing Harley Davidson tee shirts actually own a hawg. Very few subscribers to Mother Earth News know how much capital and sheer hard work it takes to wrest a living from the soil. But, the agrarian ideal still holds appeal to those daunted by the complexities of life. The Y2K craze revealed the market for this view of life, this desire to see the world around smashed down to size, in order to provide opportunities for those who could not excel in the world as it is.

The bottom line? History can be warped, but not finally shaped, by the personal or corporate schemes that self-anointed elites make for others. Speaking as a Christian, I must assert that what happens in my house matters more than what happens in the White House. In a normal home, men and women made in the image of God grow up to become producers, not parasites. With an independent streak, not conditioned to bow before Caesar’s bloody altars. Truly creative thinkers, who will find new resources in the created order around them, rather than docile pawns of statist “wise men.” As J.R.R. Tolkein said during his nation’s apocalypse, “No man can estimate what is really happening at the present sub specie aeternitatis. All we know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success – in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.”

February 21, 2005