Ugly American
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Ugly American is a term used to refer to perceptions worldwide of arrogant, demeaning, unthoughtful behavior of Americans abroad. The term originated as the title of a 1958 book by authors William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, reprinted in 1999, The Ugly American.
The term is actually, in the context of the novel, a positive one. The Ugly American in the novel is one of the only good characters contained therein. He is an engineer who helps the native people with irrigation systems. The authors chose to make a good character "ugly" to create a contrast with the pretty American ambassadors who in fact were not helping the situation at all.
The best-selling, factually-based, fictional account of blundering, corrupt, incompetent behavior of Americans on ventures in Southeast Asia led to a move by President Dwight Eisenhower to study and reform American aid programs in the region.
In the book, a fictional Burmese journalist wrote, "For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious. Perhaps they're frightened and defensive, or maybe they're not properly trained and make mistakes out of ignorance."
The historic criticism has more recently been applied to such U.S. foreign policy ventures as Plan Colombia, a cocaine eradication program alleged to have ties with death squads and official corruption, and abuses by U.S. soldiers and private company employees working in occupied Iraq after the invasion by U.S. military forces. In another recent example, National Review editors were skewered as ugly Americans for comments they published disparaging the Chinese government for the content of Chinese restaurant menus in the United States.
The phrase became the title of a film in 1963, directed by George Englund and starring Marlon Brando. Englund was nominated for a Golden Globe award as director of the film.
Over the years, the book has had less influence on American Literature than it has had on perceptions of American culture, although novels such as One of the Guys by Robert Clark Young have succeeded in incorporating the concept of the Ugly American into contemporary literature.
See also
External links
- Colleges Tell Students the Overseas Party's Over (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/education/23college.html) (registration required)