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Either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will soon be the president-elect of the United States. In choosing between the two – which we have often been told is the choice between a lesser evil and a greater evil – the American people will also be making a tactical decision about a strategic issue, which is how to maintain American global hegemony, and whether it will be led, or at least represented, by a Quiet American or an Ugly American.
These characters are Cold War literary tropes, but we are still living in a bipolar world defined as the opposition between freedom and terror, at least from the perspective of the West. The West is a euphemism for colonialism and empire, but most Westerners are not aware of the euphemistic connotations. This is particularly true in the United States, where the invocation of freedom evokes deep mythological feelings. To be American is to be free, and it is the divine obligation of Americans to maintain their freedom at all costs, as well as to export this freedom everywhere.
But the freedom of Americans has always come with the terror Americans have inflicted on others, beginning with the conquest and colonization of Indigenous peoples and the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans. This original evil, already found in the Garden of Eden that serves as the American New World, is still present in the United States, a fallen country that paradoxically and perpetually believes in its innocence rather than its guilt. This innocence is the emotional mechanism of denial and delusion that allows the American empire to grow.
The Quiet American vs the Ugly American
Graham Greene, an English novelist, understood this. In his 1955 novel The Quiet American, the title character is an articulate, intelligent, sincere, and open-minded CIA agent, in love with a Vietnamese woman. While the CIA agent will eventually pay with his life, his commitment to anticommunism and the freedom of the Vietnamese people leads him to counterinsurgency tactics which kill innocent Vietnamese civilians in a mass bombing. Greene’s parable foreshadows the eventual tragedy: tens of thousands of Americans dying in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia, their names commemorated on a wall, while many of the millions of Southeast Asians who also perish remain anonymous, forever unremembered.
This logic of conquest and colonialism is embedded in the American psyche, where any guilty feelings about the piles of dead are suppressed through the perpetual turn to innocence.
This vast disproportionality – the consequence of freedom and terror converging – goes back to white settlers massacring native peoples, who were only engaged in their own self-defense. While natives killed a certain number of settlers, settlers responded with genocide. The only good Indian was a dead Indian. The only good Vietnamese was a dead Vietnamese. The only good Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. This logic of conquest and colonialism is embedded in the American psyche, where any guilty feelings about the piles of dead are suppressed through the perpetual turn to innocence.
Every presidential election is an opportunity to witness the repetition of innocence. When Barack Obama, the Quiet American, was elected, a surge of innocent joy erupted among those wearing the Democratic face of America. At last, here was the moral America! Then Donald Trump, the Ugly American, was elected, and for those wearing the Republican face of America, there was likewise a wellspring of ecstasy. Finally, the great America!
Both sides were correct. The moral America and the great America, the Quiet American and the Ugly American, are manifestations of the freedom and the terror that have co-existed since the country’s founding. American liberals and the postwar Democratic Party (one might ask which war I am referring to, when the United States has participated in so many wars, but that is for a different essay) are beneficiaries and inheritors of the genocidal policies of the Ugly Americans. The liberals of today prefer to export the terror overseas, where every foreign country can be the frontier in the American imagination, and where the quiet tactics of drone missiles, proxy states, and special ops can do their work. Meanwhile, at home in the settler colonial state, freedom becomes realized as a happy multiculturalism, an inclusive diversity where everyone possesses a share in the equity of the war machine.
But the Ugly American refuses to be pacified. In the 1958 novel of the same title by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, set in a fictional Southeast Asian country besieged by communism, the writers make clear that the Ugly American is a threat not only to the Southeast Asians but to American interests. Their work is a condemnation of the Ugly American, but not of the right of Americans to lead the world toward freedom. And yet the persistence of the Ugly American’s efforts to maintain control of the war machine, nearly seven decades later, is testimony to how that war machine has its origins in what the poet William Carlos Williams calls the “orgy of blood” from which America sprang. The Quiet American is embarrassed by this orgy and prefers it to be conducted beyond our borders. The Ugly American is not ashamed, and would like to bathe in this blood yet again. …
