Joseph Pearce on Graham Greene and George W. Bush
Graham Greene
Joseph Pearce is writer-in-residence and associate professor of literature at Ave Maria University in Florida. He is the author of biographies of G.K. Chesterton, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Oscar Wilde, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien, and is editor of the Saint Austin Review. He wrote in the recent issue on The American Conservative an article entitled The Unquiet Graham Greene:
There was something bizarre, indeed something almost surreal, about George W. Bush’s recent reference to Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American in his speech to the National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Attempting to draw a parallel between the conflict in Vietnam and the current conflagration in Iraq, Bush criticized Greene’s suggestion that the “quiet American’s” patriotism was dangerously naïve:
In 1955 … Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. 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 naïveté.
Bush’s unexpected sortie into the fictional world of Greene was itself dangerously naïve, especially as several commentators had already suggested that Bush is little more than a real-life incarnation of Alden Pyle. It was also both bemusing and amusing to see Bush reference a work that almost everyone presumed he had never read. Certainly, if he had read The Quiet American, he would not have made the rudimentary error of referring to Pyle as the novel’s “main character,” a distinction that belongs to Thomas Fowler, a disillusioned and cynical English journalist. Such is the pitiable state of American politics in these sorry days that an uncultured president relies for his semblance of erudition on equally unlettered speechwriters.
Be that as it may, The Quiet American is a good place to look at the relative merits of Messieurs Bush and Greene and serves as a meditation on the relationship between New World naïveté and Old World cynicism. If, for example, there is a great deal of George W. Bush in the transparent (and dangerous) shallowness of Alden Pyle, there is more than a hint of Graham Greene in the world-weary depths of Thomas Fowler. Pyle is certain that “Democracy,” “Freedom,” and “America” are not only inseparable but synonymous. It is almost as though they form an indivisible trinity as holy as the Trinity of the Christians and as worthy of praise. This quasi-religious zeal turns every war for Democracy into a jihad, with Pyle emerging as a fanatic for the cause of “America” in much the same way that the new breed of Muslim terrorists emerge as fanatics for “Islam.” It must be said, however, that Pyle is much more likeable than any Islamic fanatic and is even disarmingly charming in his simple, unquestioning faith in the Motherland. Parallels with Bush are not only palpable, they positively palpitate from the pages of The Quiet American!
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Back in 1987, Greene was one of the most vocal critics of the Israeli government following the abduction of Mordechai Vanunu from Italy by Israeli agents. Vanunu’s “crime,” in the eyes of the Israelis, was to have exposed the fact that Israel possessed nuclear weapons that, by any stretch of the imagination, can be described as “weapons of mass destruction.” Why is it, one wonders, that some countries in the Middle East can possess weapons of mass destruction, with Bush’s blessing, while others cannot? Why did previous American governments arm the Taliban and Saddam Hussein in the name of “Freedom” and “Democracy”? Why did Bush’s own government declare war on the only secular government in the Middle East capable of resisting Iran? These are questions that only George W. Bush or Alden Pyle could answer. The rest of us remain baffled.
Bush quoted a character in The Quiet American who said of Pyle that he had never known a man “who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.” Like Pyle, Bush is well-intentioned. Like Pyle, he is dangerously naïve. Like Pyle, his noble motives have caused a lot of trouble. And, like Pyle, he needs reminding of the old adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/article3.html
Quote of the Day:
By the time that Greene wrote his play “The Potting Shed” in 1957, even old friends and allies, such as Evelyn Waugh, were losing patience with his heterodox dabblings. The play was “great nonsense theologically,” Waugh complained, “and will puzzle people needlessly.” Three years later, after Greene wrote to Waugh of how his latest novel, A Burnt Out Case, was intended “to give expression to various states or moods of belief or unbelief” and that the characterization of the doctor had represented “a settled and easy atheism,” Waugh replied impatiently that many would see the novel “as a recantation of faith”: “To my mind the expression ‘settled and easy atheism’ is meaningless, for an atheist denies his whole purpose as a man—to love and serve God. Only in the most superficial way can atheists appear ‘settled and easy.’”
—Joseph Pearce in the article Unquiet Graham Greene
