Williams Guest Op-ed: W. and Graham Greene
John S. Williams writes:
"One of the most curious comments in Incurious Boy George's recent speech before the Veterans of Foreign War in Kansas City was his totally uninformed reference to Graham Greene's novel about American involvement in Vietnam, The Quiet American. Perhaps the best article on the matter I've read thus far is one by Frank James entitled "Why would Bush cite 'The Quiet American'?" that I quite accidentally stumbled upon.
I have long been interested in the themes of naive idealism, frequently taking the form of innocence (as in ignorance, in the religious sense of ignorance of good and evil, the dreaming innocence of childhood, immaturity), and the evil and havoc that can be the consequence of such innocence or equally important the discovery of the power of evil through the loss of innocence. Think Fitzgerald's Gatsby, or Melville's Billy Budd, or Faulkner's Sutpen for the former; or Twain's Huck Finn, or Salinger's Holden Caulfield or Faulkner's Ike McCaslin for the latter.
Graham Greene, a Brit, understood this aspect of the American character just as well as do American writers. But in the article I've linked above and in the other things I've read, all have missed the crucial sentence in Greene's great novel that stands as an indictment of Alden Pyle, the young naive, idealistic, innocent (Greene's word, not mine) CIA agent. This sentence is equally an indictment of our strutting, smirking President and apparently his current speech writers who put the words in his mouth. Greene's indictment is: "He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance."
Incurious Boy George may have not learned about irony in a literature course in college, but one would have hoped his speech writers had! "
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/27/2007 09:49:00 AM
|
Facebook
8 Comments:
You'll forgive me if I am skeptical of the idea that George W. Bush, anyone in his administration, anyone in the Republican leadership, and any of their financial backers, has "good intentions" or any intentions above and beyond stealing as much money and power as they can simply because no one can stop them.
It is my considered opinion that Mr. Bush and the aforementioned believe that they are the only true humans in the world, and that the rest of us exist for no other reason than to serve them and their interests.
More practically, I believe we should save the psychoanalysis for later and concentrate on removing them all from power (and bringing them to justice when necessary) and doing everything we can to see to it that they and their kind never hold such positions of authority ever again.
It's naive of me to think so, of course, but that's how I see it.
Frank James, http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2007/08/bushs_quiet_american_reference.html
It's funny, I posted about this and cited Frank James' article on my blog this morning also.
I think BushCo must be irony challenged. I have to wonder who's minding the store when Bush cites The Quiet American and makes comparisons to Viet Nam. Don't these guys even bother to check and doublecheck when they are speech writing? Wouldn't that be political speech writing 101? Literary, historical references to be flatteringly relevant to the cause?
That is strange, we been told that Americans fighting in Iraq to bring Democracy and freedom as part of the Greater Middle East Project. That Iraq is going to be a showcase state for others in the region to follow with envy. Now they are talking VIETNAM!!!!
Asking us to learn from Vietnam experience and fight a better war than the one fought in Saigon. Should I laugh or cry?
I think one can also add, to that list of ignorant reference, the refrain that those who haven't read the book should not throw about the label "Uncle Tom" - something I learned from watching TV...
;)
There are so many things wrong with Bush's reference to Vietnam, as with his reference to World War II, which is an obvious attempt to drum up that sorry beast of "Islamo Fascism" - which in itself is quite Quixotic, don't you think?
Anyway, I have a more detailed rant against Bush's stumbling over al-Maliki and Vietnam on my blog, but I do want to point out that, for someone who apparently knows how the Vietnam War could have been won, Bush sure did pick the wrong place to fight it from in the 1970s... I mean, the last I heard, there were no VC or ARVN/NVA in the jungles of Alabama. Texas, of course, is quite another story.
The Trojan Elephant
Final departure of Gonzales after the months of US attorneys scandal is a clear signal that the whole neoconservative structure goes through the really painful transformation. It started from Wolfowitz leaving the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was the next, just recently the invincible Rove resigned, now it is the turn of Gonzales.
Under any normal circumstances, all this would indicate a major victory for the dems. But, unfortunately, recent developments still look more like futher shift from McCain to Giuliani within the GOP than a real change in favour of the dems. The reason for such pessimism is that, unless the pre-election dynamics will change radically, the Trojan Elephant is still well within the dem ranks.
Why should the GOP put its powerful anti-HRC machine online now, when there is still time to replace her by some other candidate? Good guess is, the best time is much later, somewhere in the late summer or autumn of 2008. Then it will be a good time for a sure kill. Even without Rove, the GOP has no lack of talent for this purpose. Those who rememeber the trajectory of Michael Moore’s sad little movie in 2004, have all the reasons to expect pretty much the same bubble effect in 2008.
Perhaps the speech writer just used a book of quotations instead of reading the book and understanding the irony. An earlier version of 'hacking'.
This must be Bush's greatest achievement: he has cast aside the mask of good intentions, given up the pretense of almost all his predecessors that he is acting in the interests of US citizens and/or foreigners.
Post a Comment
<< Home