Home
>
Political
>
The Ugly American Returns!

executive chauffeured services Westchester Cadillac Deville rentals Deerfield Cadillac Deville rentals Oakbrook limousine airport Highland Park Addison shuttle .. Drug testing

The Ugly American Returns!

Originally published in 1958, "The Ugly American" (Lederer & Burdick) documented American blunders abroad and our failure to identify that what we termed communism in undeveloped countries was merely the screams of hunger and hopelessness becoming manifest. 15 years later, we extricated ourselves from Vietnam and licked our wounds for 30 years, finally coming to some sort of accommodation with free fire zones, Agent Orange, and My Lai. Never again, we swore. We would protect our nation's security but only move into war zones when gross injustice or humanitarian concerns demanded a response -- Somalia, Bosnia, the first Gulf War.

We felt relief: a line in the sand had been drawn that we would not cross. The new American protocol called for self-protection but also restraint, a hint of nobility, and the belief that, above all, we were the primary bastion of freedom, diversity, and the rule of law.

September 11 shook that hard-fought-for ideal. No longer must we simply protect our borders but now we had to look around us wherever we were - at the stranger waiting for a train, the sweating, swarthy fellow traveler at the airport, the foreigners in the upstairs apartment.

We felt betrayed. The quid pro quo of "You leave us alone and we'll leave you alone" went awry. Those who hate us were intruding into our private space. We felt violated. In a predictable reaction, we struck out, seeking the enemy in the hills and caves of Afghanistan where our agony had been meticulously planned with premeditation and cold indifference to our pain.

For two years, we slowly revised our goals, our ideals, our national commitments. Our outraged sense of self, revulsion, and anger gradually overcame our democratic belief in the rights of all to national self-determination. To fight the enemy, we became him. We adopted his mindset of the ends justifies the means. Angry and frustrated at his ability to strike at our very heart and make our world fearful and dangerous, we morphed into him, using offense as a means of defense against the terrifying vulnerability we feared to face.

In 2003, the decision was made to openly attack a sovereign nation state which, although famous for verbal saber rattling, posed no direct threat to us nor had it committed an illegal invasion or recent attack on anyone else since the last Gulf War.

With guns blazing, we marched into the OK Corral. Despite the absolute predictability of enemy combatants fading into the general population rather than standing their ground and being annihilated, we were "surprised" at the ease of entering Baghdad. We had forgotten the lessons of our own Revolutionary War when it became clear that standing face-to-face with well-supplied redcoat squares was a recipe for total destruction.

"Mission Accomplished" trumpeted the President, the Administration, the temporarily impotent and sleeping media. The worst was over. There were now simply "mopping up" operations left in a country which should be overwhelmingly grateful for what we had achieved. Instead, of course, more U.S. troops would die after our mission was "accomplished" than in the hot war itself.

Why the surprise? Once again, as in the days of Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, the bombing of Cambodia, once again the face of the Ugly American was exposed to the world.

Why are we hated? We are the superpower, the bully in the school yard.

Difficult as it is to forge an uneasy truce with us when we act with restraint and decorum, it becomes impossible when we throw our weight around and beat our collective chest with pride, hubris, and the will to move alone without trying to rally allies or international support. The Ugly American is loose in the streets of the Middle East, a target for all, a friend of none: arrogant, defiant, outcast, and alone.

Never again, we said. Oops - the isolation and the hate is back. We can now have the satisfaction of knowing we generated it all by ourselves. Who needs an enemy when we have us?

Virginia Bola is a licensed clinical psychologist with deep interests in Social Psychology and politics. She has performed therapeutic services for more than 20 years and has studied the effects of cultural forces and employment on the individual. The author of an interactive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://www.virginiabola.com

limousine chicago service

In The News:

Cell phone customers are fuming and they’re refusing to extend their long term service contracts, or at least that's the message based on recent subscriber numbers released by U.S. carriers.

The 16th annual Webby Awards took place Monday night in New York City at the Hammerstein Ballroom, where winners and celebrities walked the red carpet in support of innovation.

No more violent shaking. No more tapping the “57” logo. And certainly no more ketchup left to waste at the bottom of the bottle -- all thanks to PhD candidate Dave Smith and his team of MIT researchers.

Israeli archaeologists have discovered a 2,700-year-old seal that bears the inscription "Bethlehem," the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday, in what experts believe to be the oldest artifact with the name of Jesus' traditional birthplace.

They floated like butterflies, now they are being stung -- for a second year running. Eleven months after officials in China were ridiculed for some of the worst Photoshop efforts on record, they are at it again.

The designer behind many of Apple's most popular gadgets will be knighted Wednesday at Buckingham Palace in London.

Your sneakers will come alive with the soon to be released-- Nike+ Basketball and Nike+ Training—apps plus shoes.

The first commercial spacecraft ever launched toward the International Space Station is playing a game of catch-up today (May 23) as it heads toward an unprecedented rendezvous with the orbiting lab.Dragon, built by commercial rocket firm Space Exploration Technologies Corp.

The Boy Scouts of America is trying to recruit a new generation of kids to join its troops with high-energy, high-tech activities that include thrill-inducing zip lines at a new adventure camp, apps and a television show.

The next iPhone or iPad from Apple is surely around the corner, and Google is getting into everything from cloud computing to car making. But what the cards hold for $100 billion behemoth Facebook is far from clear, experts say.

Rumors of the hairy humanoid known variously as the yeti, bigfoot and sasquatch have persisted for decades. Now scientists are hoping to make more of a case for the creature -- with the help of genetic testing, Reuters reported.

Scotty has finally been beamed up. The ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the 1960s television series "Star Trek," were launched to space this morning (May 22) on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Cows are a red herring. The most dangerous potential source for methane release lies underneath thinning permafrost and glaciers in the Arctic. Ecologists have just mapped the seeps where methane is bubbling up, and they found more than 150,000 of them.

At a time when black magic was relatively common, two curses involving snakes were cast, one targeting a senator and the other an animal doctor, says a Spanish researcher who has just deciphered the 1,600-year-old curses.

Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, U2 frontman Bono and more honored the memory of late Apple founder Steve Jobs Monday in New York City at the 16th annual Webby Awards.

Humans' close relationship to dogs has so far obscured their history so much that it's not yet possible to use genetic data to tease out the details of their domestication, new research indicates.

A Jurassic mom's almost certainly painful death is perfectly preserved in a rare fossil skeleton, one of the many unique items that will go on display in the Houston Museum of Natural Science's $85 million dinosaur hall when it opens to the public June 2. We take a first peek at the exhibit.

A Jurassic Mom's almost certainly painful death is perfectly preserved in a rare fossil skeleton, one of the many unique items that will go on display in the Houston Museum of Natural Science's $85 million dinosaur hall when it opens to the public June 2.

The rise of Kickstarter's crowdsourcing platform means consumers can now vote with their dollars, investing in unique new projects that they believe in, from smartphone watches designed from e-paper to coffee joulies that keep your drink at the perfect temperature. Here are the 12 most funded design projects.

Jodie Foster may have seen proof of alien lands in the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film "Contact," but the real life astronomer the filmmakers based their sci-fi odyssey on didn't find so much as a tentacle.

The Ugly American Returns!

Political Political