Notes on the Connecticut Yankee

Abstract

Imagine a political cartoon threatening to spark an international incident. It is the mid-1950s, in Sarkhan, a fictional Southeast Asian coun try whose rural peasants farm with pre-industrial methods. While the Cold War threatens to go hot, American ambassador Louis Sears?Lucky Lou?awaits a federal judgeship back in the States. He can't speak Sarkhanese, neither can his staff, but he recog nizes communist propaganda, at least when it is aimed at his van ity: the cartoon depicts a man, Lucky, whose sweaty round face has a mule's braying mouth. He has a leash on a gracefully built Sarkhanese man; a Coca-Cola sign is their destination. When word of the ambassador's anger emerges, local power brokers intervene, cajoling the newspaper's editor to print something that will prevent a diplomatic rift. The next day the Honorable Louis Sears reads an op-ed piece extolling the progress brought by the Americans, and is pacified. The Ugly American (1958) is growing dusty even on the shelves of the Peace Corps library, but a stereotype lives on, and a caricature by donkey emblemizes it. Here is the insensitive loudmouth, the jackass who is not merely culturally obtuse, but willful in his igno rance, the sacred workhorse in the coca-colanization of the world: the ugly American. In their introduction and non-fiction epilogue, authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick bend the fictional genre and insist repeatedly that the book's interlinked short stories are at root fac tual, every element drawn from interviews with members of the diplomatic corps and armed forces, and distilled into a series of tales principally for didactic reasons?to alert the American public to the dos and don'ts of international diplomacy; to galvanize a divided government into refocusing its recruitment and training; and so on. So heavy is the didacticism that no critique could begin elsewhere than with the transparent morals: learning the native language is good, ignoring indigenous ways and beliefs is bad,