THE UGLY AMERICAN (285 pp.)—William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick—Norton ($3.75).
The British East India Company thought it would be a good idea to annex Sind, a sizable province in what is now Pakistan. General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B., was glad to oblige, and before long he was able to send a progress report to his superiors. He did so, one legend has it, in a signal that represents one of history's more famous puns: "Pec-cam [I have sinned]."
Sir Charles presumably did not feel in the least sinful for adding yet another jewel to Queen Victoria's imperial crown.
But that was in 1843. The Americans who have followed General Napier into Asia are far more apt to say peccavi without intending a pun. Vast numbers of well-meaning Americans are instantly ready to feel guilty and inadequate about their nation's role among the "underdeveloped" peoples. This book is a slashing, oversimplified, often silly and yet not-to-be-ignored attack on the men and women who have taken up the white man's burden for the U.S. in Southeast Asia.
Diplomatic Diet. To document their case, the authors—Captain William J. Lederer, U.S.N., an Annapolis graduate and special assistant to Admiral Felix B. Stump in the Pacific, and Political Scientist and Novelist (The Ninth Wave) Eugene Burdick—have chosen to write a series of fictional sketches "based on fact." They are really a series of crude, black-and-white cartoons.
There is, to begin with, the American ambassador to a Southeast Asian nation called Sarkhan. Louis ("Lucky Lou") Sears is a political hack who does not speak Sarkhanese ("Fifty percent of the entire Foreign Service officer corps do not have a speaking knowledge of any foreign language"). He loathes the people, the place, the climate. By contrast, the Soviet ambassador is a carefully trained career diplomat who reads and writes Sarkhanese, has studied Buddhism. To show his appreciation of the Sarkhanese ideal of slimness, he diets away 40 Ibs.; to indicate his enthusiasm for Sarkhanese music, he becomes "a fairly skillful player on the nose flute." Obviously, the political battle between these two is no contest.
Inept Ambassador Sears is followed by a ragtag succession of diplomatic incompetents. Many of these types undoubtedly have their counterparts in real life, but the authors weaken their case by often carrying ridicule beyond reason. A single minor Navy officer, for instance, is shown as preventing the Indian government from accepting U.S. atom bombs. Captain Boning supposedly is the only American technical expert at an Asian arms conference, and he ruins the whole show by giving a hesitant answer to a question about A-bombs that a bright high school student could furnish (the reason he is hesitant is that he is sleepy, having spent most of his nights with a Communist-Chinese cutie).