The Ugly American - Essay Example

The Ugly American: A Review Introduction The Ugly American was the first novel of American hip to deal with U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. The book has been influential in shaping the paternalistic way Americans have regarded Asians. The novel's real battle is perhaps between the United States and the super-subversive Russians. The Ugly American is set in the fictional Sarkhan, a small country out toward Burma and Thailand. A significant part of the novel revolves around this country which is then the focus of this article. It is seemingly important to assess the mistakes that the U.S. policymakers, journalists, and officers made leading to the loss of Sarkhan to the Communists knowing that Sarkhan has border difficulty with the Communist country to the north. The Failure of U.S. Policy Lederer and Burdick The Ugly American, set in the mythical southeast Asian nation of Sarkhan, is a critique of U.S. foreign policy. Lederer and Burdick point to the willful ignorance, careerist self-interest, and cultural arrogance that confound American efforts to close down the spread of communism. Their novel, essentially a series of loosely linked vignettes relating to the actions of foreign service officials, is meant as a counteractive to many harsh assessment. Even though liberal and unsparing in their representation of administrative incompetence and bureaucratic inertia, Lederer and Burdick appear oblivious of the use of terror by U.S. agents. They attribute the failure of U.S. policy to the lack of ability to distinguish the competent deception of communists, a refusal to learn native languages and customs, a lack of enthusiasm to leave the comforts of the capital city and its American enclave, a preoccupation with diplomatic social life, and an overriding anxiety with large-scale, capital-intensive projects rather than with less significant innovations more likely to develop the daily lives of the native population. The Communist Success On the other hand, communist success is attributed to the careful training of its diplomats, their enthusiasm to respect native language and customs, and their capability to sarcastically prey upon natives' mistaken resentment. Consequently, the communists are on the threshold of world power and domination. As one Sarkhanese states, "America had its chance and it missed. And now the Communists are going to win" (Neilson p. 24). Or as a fictional U.S. senator declares, "we're facing the final crisis with Russia . . . the next few years will decide whether we're going to win or lose" (p. 242). This paranoia about the imagined abilities of communists is seen in the imaginary timetables by which they are said to plot world domination. The Senator in The Ugly American glimpses the fate of the world being determined in the next few years; Soviet agents in The Ugly American plan "to bring [Burma] within the Communist orbit within 30 months" (p. 35), and, according to Time, Anthony Eden's military advisors estimated in 1956 that by 1961 the communists would be ready to endeavor violent global conquest. Despite the fact that their basic thesis is that the United States needs more competent foreign service officers, Lederer and Burdick also give specific examples of policies and programs the United States might adopt that might make a difference in the struggle against communist hegemony: providing Asians with powdered milk to accustom them to fresh milk, which is alien to their diets, so they can begin raising dairy cows; broadcasting surreptitiously taped conversations of Russian field operatives telling their local agents not to "talk about 'socialist ownership of lands' " because that "only scares the peasants. Peasants are backward types" (Neilson p. 63); constructing simple water pumps run by bicycles, without exporting technology or giving aid money, since "Whenever you give a man something for nothing the first person he comes to dislike is you" (p. 216); or teaching Asians to construct and use long-handled brooms (rather than the traditional short-handled native variety), thus keeping elderly peasants from becoming hump-backed. (The American who teaches the Sarkhanese this lesson in mechanical engineering and good posture is rewarded with a small shrine that reads: "In memory of the woman who unbent the backs of our people" [p. 238].) The United States might even employ an agent like Colonel Edward B. Hillandale, who recognizes that "the key to Sarkhan -- and to several other nations in Southeast Asia -- is palmistry and astrology" (p. 181) and who thus becomes "the only living Caucasian . . . graduate of the Chunking School of Occult Science" (p. 177) -- much as Edward G. Lansdale fabricated a book of prognostications by Vietnamese astrologers. Mistakes Towards Sarkhan Lederer and Burdick criticize U.S. policy for the reason that its means are incompetent to achieve its anti-Communist aspirations. One of the bases of the critique is the easy U.S. "dismissal" of the natives that later replaced with "paternalism" by Lederer and Burdick. The novel focuses on two U.S. ambassadors to Sarkhan named Sears and MacWhite. Sears, the first ambassador, is ineffective, to a certain extent because he is only waiting out two years at the post until he is appointed a federal judge, which is his true purpose. Another part of the reason is that he constantly regards the Sarkhanese as "little monkeys," and no one in his embassy speaks the language. When appointed to the ambassadorship, Sears's statement was, "Now, you know I'm not prejudiced, but I just don't work well with blacks" (Christopher 1995, p. 14). He sends a memo to the state department in which he writes: "These Sarkhanese are really tricky. Sometimes I think they're all Commies" (p. 64). While it is clear that the real problem is that Sears is incompetent, the text portrays the Sarkhanese as "tricky," therefore undercutting its own critique. Sears is compared with Louis Krupitzyn, the Soviet ambassador to Sarkhan. Before assuring his ambassadorship, Krupitzyn spends two years at the Moscow School for Asian Areas along with his wife. They learned to read and write Sarkhanese. They learned that the ideal man in Sarkhan is slender, graceful, and soft-spoken; that he has physical control and outward tranquility; that he is religious (Buddhism is the prevalent religion); and that he has an appreciation of the ancient classical music. The Ambassador-designate shaped himself into this pattern. He dieted and lost forty pounds; he took ballet lessons. He read Sarkhanese literature and drama, and became a fairly skillful player on the nose flute (p. 32). The perception that the Sarkhanese are primitive in such a way that they could not probably appreciate or accept difference is repeated throughout The Ugly American, as in the case of OSS agents who parachute into Sarkhan during World War II: they had been cautiously prepped for their assignment--they spoke Sarkhanese, and "they all had approximately the same size and stature of the average Sarkhanese man. Their faces had been dyed the light brown of the native Sarkhanese" (p. 16). This is a patronizing attitude, rejecting any possibility that a Sarkahanese might be able to take a cosmopolitan outlook. This attitude is deliberately bizarre and meaningless in view of the fact that the leaders of both the DPV and RVN--Ho and Diem--had spent most of their adult lives abroad. Failure of the U.S. Characters The Ugly American can be seen fundamentally as a Cold War tract warning that the United States was losing to its Soviet opposition on the geopolitical battlefield of Southeast Asia. A rising tide of anti-Americanism may perhaps be blamed on U.S. failures caused by the poor training and quality of the overseas American personnel. The authors enlighten the story of these failures through a series of independent vignettes and colorful characters that range from the incompetent to the heroic. Each example brings forth powerful and influential value judgments about U.S. foreign aid programs and the foreign service itself. A persistent theme in the stories is the lack of language expertise and proficiency of Americans abroad and the egotistical ethnocentricity epitomized by golden ghettos, the American cooperatives in foreign countries. The location for a number of these incidents is an imaginary country in Southeast Asia - Sarkhan. The opening vignette (which as well opened the Saturday Evening Post serialization) illustrated the U.S. ambassador to Sarkhan, Louis Sears, a fat, vain, ineffectual, political appointee that is, hack. His Soviet counterpart, Louis Krupitzyn, described as extremely disciplined and well trained, has just comprehensively overwhelmed Louis Sears. These most important characters are diametric opposites, and, like many others in the book, are painted without delicacy. For the reason that Louis Sears and his staff lack language and cultural understanding of the country, the Soviets are able to organize to have U.S. gift bags of grain printed and patterned with the Soviet symbol and hence steal credit for the grain from the United States. Conclusion In the end, The Ugly American shows, in Richard Drinnon's words, "How to Handle Natives So the Fiendishly Clever Russians Will Not Win (without Firing a Shot)" (p. 375). The United States can win the cold war, Lederer and Burdick suggest, by showing how self-evidently hypocritical and deceitful communists are and by providing cheap technological fixes that ignore native customs and suggest instead that complex socioeconomic problems can be solved through Yankee ingenuity. Problems such as the elite ownership of land, lack of access to education, a corrupt and repressive political system, and a practically feudal class division are not impediments to capitalist victory, according to Lederer and Burdick; in The Ugly American these troubling facts do not exist. The significance of coercion as a means of enforcing U.S. policy, the kind of sentiment expressed by General Samuel T. Williams in a letter to Ambassador to Vietnam Elbridge Durbrow -- "the population of South Vietnam . . . is more responsive to fear and force than to an improved standard of living" (quoted in Young, p. 60) -- is likewise absent from Lederer and Burdick's account. References Christopher, Renny. The Vietnam War/The American War: Images and Representations in Euro-American and Vietnamese Exile Narratives. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Drinnon, Richard. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building. New York: New American Library, 1980. Lederer, W.J. & Burdick, E. The Ugly American. New York: Norton, 1958. Neilson, Jim. Warring Fictions: American Literary Culture and the Vietnam War Narrative. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Young, Zo Kil. Chinese Emigration into the United States, 1850-1880. New York: Arno Press, 1978. Read More