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Can’t Make Dogs into Cats: Democracy Can’t Be Franchised |
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By John Freivalds
Duluth News Tribune
August 31st, 2021
While the politicians and pundits in Washington keep fervently trying to find some ONE person to blame for what is happening in Afghanistan, the discourse should focus on who we are as a people. Americans are optimistic: we send people to the moon, invent electric cars and daily mail delivery, create Disneyworld, have school board elections, fly 747’s, find cures for disease, and invent the internet and soap operas. But with that comes the belief that we can transfer all that made America great and democratic (overnight!) to another country suffering from despotism, bad roads, and poverty for centuries.
We believed all that using that phrase “nation building.” We used the phrase to justify interventions, conflicts and wars: Vietnam, Cambodia, Iran, Iraq and now Afghanistan. All have been flat-out nation building failures that cost tens of thousands of Americans and hundreds of millions of natives their lives. Did I mention the financial cost and damage to our reputation?
But you can’t make Cats into Dogs. A specific set of circumstances and diligent people and leaders created America. To those circumstance add the evangelism that “we have God on our side,” as Duluth’s Bob Dylan’s song about all of America’s war goes. The phrase is taken from the Bible Psalm 108:13.
You just can’t put this cultural baggage in a carry-on bag and take it to a dictatorial and poverty-stricken society. Ok look at it this way, we can’t assume America is a franchise like McDonald’s or Starbucks and implant it wherever.
But American culture rests on the optimistic belief in cultural franchising that every American president and administration brings to the table. It is this inability to see our culture for what it is that led William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick to write The Ugly American in 1958 (yikes, 63 years ago!) which spent 63 weeks on the bestseller list -- JFK took out a full-page NY Times ad extolling the book. The NY Times wrote “the Ugly American was a scathing critique of our bad behavior abroad. “ The book depicts the rampant arrogance and ineptitude of Americans going overseas, from tourists to diplomats. President John F. Kennedy read it and was totally taken by it that he sent a copy to every member of Congress. And the book inspired him to start the Peace Corps. Ok I’m prejudiced as I served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Panama and Colombia. One of my classmates at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service was Michael Metrinko. He was a former volunteer and one the 70 US hostages held by the Iranians in 1979 and the only one at the US Embassy who spoke Farsi. Even today bi-lingual people are suspect.
Timeline Review of the book stated, “American envoys were unwilling to learn their new environs, their insistence on knowing what was better for locals without ever speaking a word to them or for busying themselves with galas or entertaining Congressmen on visits.”
Combine this attitude with the US military role. We fail to see that the military, apart from being a symbol of our patriotism, is a bureaucracy. And like any bureaucracy the world over always seeks a bigger budget and a reason to exist. This why President Eisenhower said “beware the military industrial complex“(he should have said bureaucracy). But the military’s use of force has an immediate visual and political impact.
But as I write this do you think it will make one bit of difference? Following the 9/11 attacks (remember those), a Boston Globe reporter asked one of the authors in 2005 “has anything changed since you wrote the book?” His answer “It pains me to say this, but our military leaders and CIA agents and diplomats are still ignorant of the countries their assigned to. We’re still fighting poor, hungry, angry people with bombs and tanks when what they would really respond to is food and water, good roads, health care and a little respect for their religion and culture.”