The Ugly American by William J. Lederer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
A little sensational, but not a bad book. Fictional with some air of truth. Scandalous. This book shows how badly American foreign policy is surrounding the time of Vietnam. By the end of the book you’ll get a sense of the stereotypes this book outlines in the kinds of characters that populate American foreign policy.
What’s unsurprising is that this book does not question American ingenuity, the brilliance of the American people in production and care and pragmatism although it does heavily criticize our attitude of insularism, superiority and our fear and misunderstanding of foreign cultures. At the root of this book is an unquestioning of American ideology and capitalism — its promotion throughout the book as an undercurrent of how top-down decision making and bureaucratic jockeying for position bungled the gift Americans have to give the world is an understatement, and by the time we read this book in 2010, cliches in themselves.
While entertaining and thrilling to read (a great insight into what the authors think of the fateful decades of the 50s, 60s and 70s for American implemention of the start of American’s downfall as a hegemonic power) this book is missing a deeper analysis as to how groupthink and unwavering faith in American pragmatism and American superiority led to the creation of this bad American foreign policy. In this sense, the book doesn’t go far enough, it doesn’t highlight how our belief in our gift to the world (of capitalism and American pragmatism) goes hand in hand with how the authors highlight we have mismanaged our relationship with other people.
I still like the book however, as it was well written. It aims to be more illustrative than a treatsie and in that sense, it does exactly what it sets out to do. Still, we should read more carefully between the lines. True, foreign people do not have American values. But they are not Americans waiting to be awakened to the brilliance of our engineering and enterprising spirit. The first chapter seems to show this, but it blames everything about this disbelief in how great America is on the communists. In that sense, this book writes about a blind spot by standing in the shadow of the blind spot and being blinded by it.
