William J. Lederer (1912-2009)

Rambling reflections by John Ballard

Today's New York Times reports the passing of one of the co-authors of The Ugly American,
a work of fiction which influenced a generation through truths that
sometimes only fiction can convey. The book, made into a movie of the
same name starring Brando, depicts  Americans abroad as insensitive,
condescending and offensive in the eyes of other cultures. 

“The Ugly American” portrayed the American foreign
service community as isolated and self-congratulatory, its workers as
inept and smugly arrogant in their dealings with the local population.
The title became an American idiom, a reference to the American
traveler abroad who is oblivious to or disdainful of foreign cultures,
though the title character, Homer Atkins, is actually an exception; he
lives among villagers, comes to understand their problems and actually
solves a few.
Most controversially, “The Ugly American” warned, unsubtly,
that the United States was losing influence in the region to the
Communists in China and the Soviet Union. The book, which was published
by W.W. Norton in 1958, caused a major stir. It catalyzed outrage over
the tax dollars spent on foreign aid, stimulated debate in Congress —
Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas called the book “sterile,
devoid of insight, reckless and irresponsible” — over the efficacy of
foreign aid programs, and in years to come influenced the training of
Peace Corps volunteers.

Some of us who were embarrassed as young adults at the time have lived
to see the compelling truth of that image played out repeatedly ever
since. Of course Nixon famously went to China, Hollywood has Bollywood
echoes in India and one of General Motors' biggest dealerships is in
Moscow, but the overall thrust of America's image in the world has
changed little.

The uncomplicated reality is that rich people intimidate poor people
whenever the two groups come together and no amount of spin can
overcome the effect. The emergence of the US as the world's last bearer
of the label "Super Power" following the collapse of the Soviet Union
underscores the impact of material wealth.

The Eighteenth Century term nouveau riche
captures the subtleties of how wealth affects how people behave before
and after the appearance of money. My favorite example is how Alfred P.
Doolittle in My Fair Lady is "intimidated" by the impact of "middle-class morality" on his previously comfortable life as a poor man.

The final act takes place in Mrs. Higgins’ drawing room. Higgins and Pickering arrive
in a panic because Eliza has disappeared; they have set the police on her trail, much to the chagrin
of Mrs. Higgins. As she is in the process of reproving them, Alfred P. Doolittle arrives, dressed
in the latest fashion, and accuses Higgins of ruining his life. It turns out that Higgins, as a joke,
submitted Doolittle’s name to the Moral Reform Society as “the most original moralist in
England.” The result was that Ezra D. Wannafeller left Doolittle three thousand pounds a year
in his will on the condition that he lecture for the Wannafeller Moral Reform World League six
times a year. Doolittle claims that the money has forced him into the middle class, and ruined his
happiness. LINK

Get me to the Church on Time
is a musical tribute to Doolitle's obligatory marriage to his adult
daughter's mother. Bearing children is normal for everyone, rich or
poor, but an ostentatious marriage is expected when you have money to
spend.

It is not a stretch to project the impact of wealth from cultural to trans-cultural. But gaps separating the Haves from the Have-nots becomes more problematic when the groups do not share other values beside increased material success. Insightful observers like Lederer unfortunately are few in number and bear a message that well-fixed people find unacceptable.

In “The Ugly American,” Ambassador “Lucky” Lou Sears stews in his luxurious compound in the capital, fuming over his Soviet counterpart’s latest checkmate. “The American ambassador is a jewel,” the Soviet diplomat — who is fluent in the local language, customs and religion — cables Moscow. “He keeps his people tied up with meetings, social events, and greeting and briefing the scores of senators, congressmen, generals, admirals, under secretaries of state and defense, and so on, who come pouring through here to ‘look for themselves.’ ” Sears undermines a Wisconsin dairyman’s self-started project to raise nutrition levels in the Sarkhan country­side, thwarts a band of anti-Communist irregulars formed by a militant Massachusetts priest, and orchestrates the dismissal of his more capable successor, who fails to convince Washington of an impending coup.

The Ugly American of the title is not one of these bunglers, but the book’s hero, a millionaire engineer named Homer Atkins, whose calloused and grease-blackened hands “always reminded him that he was an ugly man.” Homer is the very model of the enlightened ambassador (lowercase) the authors thought America should send into the world. He and his wife become a proto-Peace Corps couple, homesteading in an earthen-floored hut and collaborating with villagers on inventions like a bicycle-powered irrigation pump. Homer’s voice sounds surprisingly contemporary, as if he’s channeling “Dead Aid,” Dambisa Moyo’s recent polemic against current global development practices. “Whenever you give a man something for nothing,” Homer warns, “the first person he comes to dislike is you.”

“Our aim is not to embarrass individuals,” the authors declared in their introduction, “but to stimulate thought — and, we hope, action.” One person it inspired was John F. Kennedy, who mailed a copy of “The Ugly American” to each of his Senate colleagues. The book’s epilogue argues for the creation of “a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals” fluent in the local language — not unlike the Peace Corps, which Kennedy proposed in 1960.

And stimulate thought they did. Such were the seeds from which the Peace Corps grew, but in the passing of time hard truths have a hard time growing in the rocky ground of Washington. (Witness the health care flap and just about anything else these days. The list of lessons not learned gets longer as the years go by.)

Obama’s 2010 budget proposes increasing the Peace Corps’s financing by 10 percent, to $373 million, though that will not come close to covering his proposal to double the number of volunteers to roughly 16,000, close to the 1965 peak. As Mark Gearan, a former Peace Corps director, lamented to The Boston Globe, “We spend more on the military marching bands.” LINK

The Wikipedia article carries this fascinating story I never heard before.

An interesting piece of history contained in Our Own Worst Enemy [another of Lederer's writings] is the story of a young Navy Lieutenant, Junior Grade having a chance meeting in 1940 with a Jesuit priest, Father Pierre Cogny, and his Vietnamese assistant, "Mr. Nguyen," while waiting out a Japanese bombing raid in China. Father Pierre asked William Lederer if he had a copy of the Declaration of Independence on his gunboat. He said yes, and invited the two men to accompany him back to the river boat. A copy was provided to these men. It turns out "Mr. Nguyen" later adopted an alias that he became more commonly known by, Ho Chi Minh. The Declaration of Independence for Vietnam (1945) contains much of the very same language that the American Declaration of Independence contains.

I'm left wondering if the passing of time and better data-mining on the part of our ever vigilant scramble to uncover the roots of terrorism, will reveal that some now-unknown American may have put some equally inflammatory document into the hands of people we now call terrorists. I recall when the name of Ho Chi Minh was as reviled as that of OBL today.

Sleep well, Mr. Lederer. Your message is still not being heard by many but it has not been forgotten altogether. Perhaps the Haitian earthquake will help us better understand that in addition to being the World's Policeman, the US is also the de facto first response team for events more complicated that can be addressed with military force alone. In future budgets maybe the Peace Corps will fare better than marching bands. 

One final thought...

In a way Hispaniola is a microcosm of the world, with a stable and relatively prosperous Dominican Republic on one end and Haiti, the world's first Black republic, at the other. Another Wikipedia snip from the Dominican Republic article is revealing.

A system of racial stratification was imposed on Santo Domingo by Spain, as elsewhere in the Spanish Empire. Its effects have persisted, reaching their culmination in the Trujillo regime, as the dictator used racial persecution and nationalistic fervor against Haitians. A U.N. envoy in October 2007 found racism against blacks in general, and Haitians in particular, to be rampant in every segment of Dominican society.  According to a study by the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, about 90% of the contemporary Dominican population has West African ancestry to varying degrees.  However, most Dominicans do not self-identify as black, in contrast to people [who?] of West African ancestry in other countries. A variety of terms are used to represent a range of skintones, such as moreno/a (brown), canelo/a (red/brown) ["cinnamon"], indio/a (Indian), blanco/a oscuro/a (dark white), and trigueño/a (literally "wheat colored", or olive skin).

Oops. Sorry about that. Did someone mention skin color? I forgot. We Liberals are not supposed to mention skin color lest we fall into the trap of accusing anyone who disagrees the president or anything he does of being racist. It's okay for Rush to make inferences to the contrary, but supporters are to remain mute.

In his show on Wednesday, Limbaugh had blasted the president for "leaping into action" to help Haitians less than 24 hours after the disaster, yet taking three days to respond to the attempted Christmas Day attack on a Northwest Airlines plane bound for Detroit.

"And when he came out after those three days, he was clearly irritated that he had to do it. He didn't want to do it," said Limbaugh. "Oh, this is what he lives for. He lives for serving those in misery... So the country that he runs around the world apologizing for... he now turns to as its president and asks people who have lost their jobs because of his policies to donate to WhiteHouse.gov to the people of Haiti."

"This will play right into Obama's hands. He's humanitarian, compassionate. They'll use this to burnish their, shall we say, 'credibility' with the black community -- in the both light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made-to-order for them," he added, referring to the "light-skinned" description Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) had said of Obama in the 2008 race.