Whitewashing America

Reading Our Man in Hollywood had me thinking how Americans put a happy face onto our worse aspects.

WHEN THE FILM VERSION of Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American was released in early 1958 Greene was not happy. He skipped the premieres in New York and Washington, D.C., and later called the movie “a complete travesty.” Greene usually liked to see his novels adapted, but not this time. What Greene was trying to say about American ignorance and arrogance in foreign affairs was distorted—in fact, turned upside down by a Cold War, McCarthy-era fear of bringing a movie to the public that might be seen as “anti-American.”

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Greene’s critiques of Lansdale and other officials’ “innocence” matters still, as new retreats have become necessary, as multi-trillion-dollar dalliances of destruction and bloodshed in theaters like Iraq and Afghanistan pile up, and as civilian casualties are immediately, dubiously, written off as anti-terror successes. When Greene was in Vietnam, he finagled his way into a fly-along with a pilot named Pinquet. During forty minutes of tumult, the French bomber took fourteen dives, from nine thousand to three thousand feet, with Greene’s knees against the pilot’s back. The experience inspired a scene in the novel. Pinquet is renamed Captain Trouin, and a conversation between Trouin and Fowler takes place after the plane returns, with Trouin admitting “what I detest is napalm bombing . . . You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground.” He continues: “But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.”

I read The Quiet American in prison while in prison (I caught up with Graham in prison, I suggest you read him, too). I saw the Michael Caine movie and liked it. Time allowed for a more faithful adaptation. Time also sucked out any possible enlightenment on its viewers. I never had any interest in the Audie Murphy movie.

We still have people claiming we would have won in Vietnam. They say we would have won but for the peaceniks back home. They do not say what we would have won or its costs. They want only to justify their righteousness.

We know there were no WMDs in Iraq. Those protesting the invasion were called anti-American. Have their been apologies they were right?

Are we a stupid, lazy, bovine, spineless people who have not the maturity to be the last, great defender of democracy? This self-righteousness will get only worse if we allow conservatives to control how American schools teach American history 

sch 6/17/22