For All the Trouble He Caused


Books discussed:
"Cousins and Strangers: America, Britain, and Europe in a New Century"
By Chris Patten
Uncorrected Proof, from the free table at work
"The Quiet American"
By Graham Greene
About $6 at a used book store in Minnesota


Let's start with a quote from the introduction to "Cousins and Strangers" by Chris Patten. Patten was chancellor of Oxford and Newcastle universities and held many offices in British government (among other offices, he was the last British governor of Hong Kong before it was handed back to the Chinese. Although he's a Tory, I thought he did an admirable job in that capacity, trying to ensure that the Hong Kong people would be treated fairly and not stripped of their rights. It was too little too late, but that wasn't his fault. Margaret Thatcher had set up the handover many years before without giving much thought to the Hong Kong people. Anyway, here's the quote :

"The suprising realization that you are very foreign in many parts of the United States comes hand in hand with the shock of discovering how difficult it is to generalize bout the country as a whole. That, in a way, is what makes me question the endlessly parroted observation that we are all, Europeans and Americans, much the same, and share basically the same values. Which Americans are we talking about? Do we mean those who are more obese than any people I have seen anywhere in the world, or those who live a life governed by ascetic fitness regimes with carefully controlled diets of vitamin supplements and steamed broccoli? Do we compare ourselves to evangelical Christians, who wait expectantly for Armageddon and a rather dramatic end to the Middle East peace process, or to those whose religion is an intolerant gospel of political correctness ... Which America shares European values?"

Don't you hate reading what other people think about you? And, as Americans, isn't it scary to think that, just when the Bush Administration is finally starting to understand that it might need "Old Europe" after all, Europe is beginning to think it doesn't need America?

Graham Greene's "The Quiet American" revolves around of the most vivid depictions of Americans as perceived by Europeans that I've ever read. The novel was published in the mid-1950s, but you might catch yourself checking the publication date again and again, thinking it must have been in the late '60s or last week.

The novel concerns Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged British foreign correspondent in Saigon who loses his Vietnamese girlfriend, Phuong, to an endearingly naive but infuriatingly self-serving American agent named Alden Pyle. The book's most famous line: "I never met anyone who had better motives for all the trouble he caused" refers to the Pyle's pursuit of Phuong, but it applies perfectly to Pyle's clandestine political efforts. Pyle has read some books by some great thinkers and he is convinced that what he is doing is right for Vietnam. Fowler is not cynical -- in fact, he hates the knee-jerk cynicism of his fellows in the press corps -- but he is older and less idealistic and he sees Pyle as making things worse.

And the reader today knows that things did indeed get a whole lot worse with regard to American involvement in Vietnam. It's hard to miss the parallels with the neoconservative push to bring democracy to the Middle East by bombing it to pieces. And yet, Greene was writing this a good ten years before the Gulf of Tonkin incident and nearly 50 years before the invasion of Baghdad. So, it comes back to a maddeningly accurate portrait of Americans.

As Chris Patten points out, it's almost impossible to generalize about the nearly 300 million people who make up this country, but I feel like I've met Pyle.