The Crazy American

Sound familiar?

He entered the territory of lies without a passport for return.

Thus did Graham Greene predict the Bush administration in 1940's The Heart of the Matter. Fifteen years later, Greene wrote The Quiet American, a book The Miserable Failure mentioned yesterday in a breathtakingly dishonest revisionist speech to a VFW crowd in Kansas City. Here's what he said about Greene's book:

It was set in Saigon, and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism -- and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused."

Read the entire speech for context, but be prepared for a jolt of Cold War propaganda. When I was growing up, our superpower foe the Soviet Union employed Pravda to fantastically twist, spin and rewrite history to justify what I was taught were the Soviets' evil intentions.

TMF's speech yesterday, which also invoked the Vietnam War as proof the US should stay in Iraq, would have been rejected by Pravda's Soviet editors for tearing the bounds of believability.

Greene is one of my favorite novelists; The Quiet American was required reading in a college course I took on the Vietnam War. I also saw the movie a few years back. Still, I won't pretend to be an expert. These guys are:

Pyle ultimately assists an urban bombing to be blamed on Viet Minh insurgents, and many civilians die. Greene observes that "a woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat." Fowler asks Pyle how many such deaths he would accept in "building a national democratic front." Pyle responds: "Anyway, they died in the right cause ... They died for democracy."

Bush would never say something like that but plenty of Greene’s comments about Pyle would apply to him. (Philip Noyce, director of the recent film based on the book, has said "Bush is the ultimate Alden Pyle.") Greene's description of the character even sounds like the young Bush, with a crew cut and a "wide campus gaze." If only he was merely "reading the Sunday supplements at home and following the baseball" instead of mucking around in foreign lands.

Pyle, he writes, was "impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance ... Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. You can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity."

--Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher

By reminding people of Greene's book, Bush was inviting listeners to recall the mistakes his administration made in entering and prosecuting the Iraq War. Did he really want to do that?

Even more astonishing is that Bush's speechwriters included in the president's speech a mention of the very fictional character some of the president's critics have used for years to lambaste him for what they consider a major strategic blunder.

The thinking goes, Bush may have been well-intentioned like Pyle but, also like the Greene character, Bush's efforts are ultimately doomed.

--Frank James, The Swamp

For the first time since moving to Australia, I read the news today and felt afraid for my homeland. The US is too great a country to allow a failed frat boy to revise its history -- and pervert the lessons of a 20th century literary classic -- but does anyone care? Or has Bush fatigue set in?