“THE UGLY AMERICAN”

(I am presently interrupting my entry selections from the Philosophy section. This mainly reference entry is being posted in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of a once very popular American movie, starring the great Marlon Brando, yet in our day somehow forgotten, quite unjustly and certainly unprofitably, although today it is needed much more than it was needed back in 1963. This entry is by no means a judgment, but a sober and well-intentioned reminder, coming not too soon, and hopefully, not too late.)

The title phrase is the conspicuously unflattering epithet directed at American arrogance abroad, as exhibited both by individuals and at the nation as a whole, as represented by her government in Washington, D.C., in its conduct of American foreign policy.

Judging by the times we live in, it seems as though the phrase was invented only recently, as America’s push for world hegemony has reached its peak. (Yes, I think that the peak has indeed been reached quite recently, for it is only down the slope from here!) But, in fact, it is an old phrase, made current more than half century ago, during what may seem from the distance as the Golden Age of American goodness and innocence.

The Ugly American was the famous title of the 1958 novel cowritten by the American political scientist and author Eugene Burdick and the American author William Lederer. It immediately became a huge bestseller, and in 1963 it was made into a movie, starring Marlon Brando.

Here is a short synopsis of the novel, deliberately taken from the internet sources, primarily from the Wikipedia, to ascertain a certain formal objectivity.---

The novel takes place in a fictional nation called Sarkhan (imaginary country in Southeast Asia, somewhat resembling Burma or Thailand, but meant to allude to Vietnam), and includes several real people, most of whose names have been changed. The book describes the United States losing struggle against Communism (what was later to be called the battle for hearts and minds) in Southeast Asia, because of innate arrogance, and the failure to understand the local culture. The title is actually a double entendre, referring both to the physically unattractive hero Homer Atkins, and the ugly behavior of the American government employees.

In the novel, a Burmese journalist says “For some reason, the [American] people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They’re loud and ostentatious.” Ultimately, the phrase “Ugly Americans” comes to be applied to Americans behaving in this manner, while the positive contributions of the Homer Atkins character are forgotten.

But, despite the dual meaning, the “ugly American” of the book title fundamentally does refer to the plain-looking engineer Atkins, who lives with the local people, who comes to understand their needs, who offers genuinely useful assistance with small-scale projects, such as the development of a simple bicycle-powered water pump. It is argued in the book that the Communists are successful because they use tactics similar to those of Atkins. (In my elucidation of this, the problem was that the good American patriot Atkins was alas, an exception, whereas the same approach by the Communists was the rule.)

Even from this short summary it is clear that the novel was written with the best intentions as a good lesson to learn from. It is most regrettable that the American government in Washington cannot learn not just from history but also from such explicitly honest and good-intentioned advice of America’s well-wishers, including its patriotic and knowledgeable citizens. It is also frighteningly obvious by now that America may have become incapable of learning even from her own mistakes.

Alas, poor Yorick…