The Ugly American, revisited

Why things keep getting worse


It often seems to me that the whole basis for our present education and cultural system is to PREVENT children (and others) from learning anything "controversial" which might be directed at or applied to "the powers that be."  This is the theory of totalitarianism, of one-party rule.  

"We know the truth, and we're going to make you believe it, too."  That is what they're  saying.  They're also saying "We're better than you" (more powerful, richer, etc), "so we get to tell you what to do, and make you do it if you refuse to "cooperate."  Certainly, this is the "theory"  of the modern public high school, libraries, museums, symphonies, and other parts of the supposedly highly-educated and sophisticated "cultural infrastructure."  

That's the theory, the principle, upon which our present system rests.  The Republicans might talk about Natural (God-given) Rights, the Constitution, the Rule of Law, and many other good things, but when you corner one and discuss it with her, you find that she doesn't understand those concepts at all, or at most, on an "operational" level.  (How can we use this concept, theory, etc., as a weapon against the Democrats, the Liberals, the Environmentalists, the Socialists, our workers, competitors, etc.?)

The Democrats used to be liberal, for civil rights, for protecting the environment, for curbing corporate power and excess military spending, for public education, public health, universal health care, etc., etc.  The prevailing Democrat Machine, today, has literally and figuratively abandoned every one of those positions!  It's unbelievable!  It's as though Royalists wiped out their own royal family and then went and found some foreign prince to be their king.  

Marxism has an explanation.  It's called "the dialectic."  The process by which things change, and the logical explanations how and why this happens.  It's perennial.  It's universal.  Therefore, it must be part of human "social genetics", which could also include actual cellular genetics, but not necessarily.  It's a "software vs hardware" issue.  

So, understanding what is happening, we can often second-guess the "leaders" who keep repeating the mistakes of the past.  But we can only do so if there is relative freedom to express and communicate what we know.  An "information-free society" is the same as one which is saturated with useless and counterproductive information to the exclusion (and disbelief) in any real truth or understanding.  

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I've just read a fascinating book, a best-selling novel (more than 6 million sold in the 1950's and early '60's) called "The Ugly American."  It was a sensation.  I remember it clearly, from the many book reports on it through my years of Junior High and High School.  I don't believe I completed it, myself, or maybe I couldn't use it because someone else in the class already had.  And the best of it is the last chapter, where these two working journalists (possibly with CIA connections, themselves - that was common, then) wrote about the defeat of the French and the moves by the US to take over and support the French Imperialist project.  Of course, we would have never fought in WWII if we'd known it was to maintain French colonial power in Indochina, and similar things.  India, Burma, and Pakistan explicitly said that they would help the British in WWII only with a firm promise of independence afterwards.  That happened, although the Old Guard monarchists who were still part of the Raj did a lot either to distort or prevent the governments from working.  It was the Partitioning that was disastrous, and we're still maintaining one in the Korean Peninsula, against all good judgement and historical perspective.  

The Ugly American even became an excellent movie starring Marlon Brando, which I've seen a couple of times in recent years.  The title character is a Republican businessman with a working-class wife (he is working-class, himself, but self-made worth $20 million in today's money) who take American values seriously, and help villagers with local materials and means to transform their subsistence economies into something compatible with health and cultural enrichment.  Their programs, which cost little or nothing, are successful while the $100 million "development" projects from the 1st world only lead to wars, ecological catastrophe, and enrichment of prevailing elites.  Almost certainly, Kennedy's Peace Corps was based on many of the same insights and experience.  

All this is clearly dramatized in the book, but is largely absent from the film.  [TUA was published in 1958, but written from experience in the 1954 Dien Bien Phu aftermath, as well as the whole "Asian situation".  The principle setting of the book is a neighboring fictional country which is in danger of collapse from the neighboring wars and revolutions.] The film (which I need to watch, again) seemed more intent on the personalities of the people involved (easier to dramatize than the policies, themselves).  And in a world like today's, where there literally are no "good guys" (and those who are portrayed as such are unspeakably ignorant and self-centered), we have no role models.  The best we have simply refuse to act outside the affective domain.  There is no theory; it's just "feel good and get along."  That's their highest virtue, which is more than most of the sociopaths who run things, now.