A People’s History of American Empire, by Howard Zinn, Mike Konopacki, and Paul Buhle
The Quiet American, by Graham Greene

My reading theme this month has been the American imperial project, which seems appropriate enough this season as I consider a vote for whether or not I want my foreign bombing done to the heady harmonies of the Beach Boys. I had wanted to pull out Greene’s opus on its own merits for a while anyway, and for this series, I wanted to find some companions that took a global historical perspective. It’s not like the U.S. is new at this game, or that we’re the first at it, although when it comes to exceptionalism, we do have our own personalized flair. American Empire isn’t the version of Zinn’s work I’d rather have read–it’s literally the comic book version–but it’s interesting on its merits. There was a third book intended in this bundle as well, but it didn’t turn out to be any sort of policy critique. I’ll roll that one into the next series of reviews.

[Also, the discussion of The Quiet American contains spoilers, if you're the kind of person who cares.]

A People’s History of American Empire is a graphic novel (or rather, in the style of one), adapted from sections of Howard Zinn’s more canonical A People’s History of the United States and his own autobiography. The historian gets top billing, but the actual text and art are by Mike Konopacki, who has been doing cartoons for labor publications for years. (Paul Buhle lists himself as the editor.) The effectiveness of the graphical adaptation is mixed. A couple of Konopacki’s collages were affecting (one was gut-wrenching), and historical photographs were integrated cleverly into the pen and ink stuff–I particularly liked the segues between photographs and cartoon version of the historical actors, really made you appreciate the guy’s eye–but that said, Konopacki clearly takes his inspiration more from cartooning than he does from comic art, and he doesn’t always make the best compromises to get the book into narrative form. There’s something about his dynamics of moving from panel to panel that’s a little bit too sprightly, using too many panels maybe, that makes the thinned content feel even thinner. His somewhat bulbous human forms feel more at home in various newspaper sections than in a graphic novel, and his facial renderings get that vibe too, where the victims of empire are in a constant state of honest sadness or deep, justified anger, and the perpetrators range in expression from self-righteous contempt to paunch-patting superiority, lacking only mustaches to twirl. Konopacki was much more effective when he deviated from the linear strip form, and turned his pen to more realistic representations and cleverer page spreads. I wish he did so more.

A People’s History of American Empire takes us through a short tour of the imperial project, raising a stark and necessary reminder that the U.S. has been hungry for conquest nearly from the get-go. Zinn begins with the final stages of the subjugation of the Sioux (letting a sad-eyed Black Elk speak), the last nail in the artifice of our internal dominion. He gives slavery and our Mexican campaign a quick and ignoble mention, and proceeds to the lowpoints of the adventures in the Phillipines and in Cuba, of the labor movement, and of the first world war, painting a picture of a collaboration between industry and the government that generates or protects profits at the expense of lives. With the opportunity to intervene in Cuba’s revolution against Spain for the cause of freedom, we declined, but as the sugar industry felt threatened, we are told, it gained critical importance. I find many of Zinn’s interpretations difficult to refute, but on the other hand, I am skeptical of right reasons too: helping those serious Cuban peasants for their own good wouldn’t have been any better, or any different, than doing it to protect a pet industry. His economic version of empire is an interesting and almost refreshing viewpoint however, especially when more recent history is concerned. For example, did the U.S. violently hasten Japan’s surrender in 1945 so that they’d surrender to us instead of the Soviets? So that we’d guarantee an economic advantage? The privatization of military services is a fact that’s become blatant over the last couple of conflicts, and it’s depressing enough to imagine a hand in Middle Eastern resources as a motivator for war, doing it to gain exclusive contracts to slop hash and wash uniforms is even more depressing.

Given this sort of thesis, it makes sense for the authors to include the labor movement in the story of American conquest. Zinn’s autobiographical sections are a little more sketchy in their level of relevance, but experiences in the war, and experience with the quantification of the alleged virtue of “hard work” manage to weave in what depth there is in the book. (Fair enough. I’m warped by the life stories around me too.) I felt he went too far to describe youth rebellion as a real movement against the subjugation of peoples (it never seems to stick as they grow up), and while I can dig the disrespect for authority, his lionization of zoot suit rioters is as filthy with nostalgia as anything the boomers produced twenty years later. To put it another way, I saw Kevin Bacon kicking his heels a dozen times in my day, and while I accept the final injunction to live well, I’m still not convinced by the power of the dance. Maybe you need to have a draft hanging over your head to really appreciate it.

If you look back on British colonial history, say, it’s not hard to pick apart the root drivers: it was a money maker, at first kept breathing under government approval, and then government protection, and then finally absorption of business interests by the state. Missionary zeal for the betterment of backwards peoples may have been red meat to the masses by design or by apology, and relief of demographic pressures for the homeland (too many people with not enough to do) had its importance at different points in history too. I’ve read similar economic models advanced (by astute amateurs) for the Roman empire, and I’d map similar mechanisms of conquest for the other European colonial powers. When the naked lust for dominion is thrown around as a motive, it’s reserved for ancient empires, or the imperial ambitions of our mortal enemies, but it’s not as if Americans are made of different genetic stuff. Probably it’s well that I’m reading a cartoon book to support my own casual view of history, but enhancement of money and power are usually safe bets for motive, and they give Occam a closer shave than the litany of “existential threats,” that in the case of our own empire anyway, have proven either vastly overblown or, perhaps, orthogonal to the underlying point. And here’s why we need a guy like Howard Zinn: America, as a world power, is as hungry and as ugly as any other, and someone has to give it scholarly weight.

And maybe it takes last season’s empire to explain the bloody game to fresh-faced new kids. The Quiet American is narrated by an English journalist, reporting from Vietnam during the French occupation, and it’s a nation whirling in colonial and civil conflict, with bloody front lines protecting unsteady cosmopolitan zones of Vietnamese urbanites, Chinese businessmen, French authorities, American missions of various types, and any number of international correspondents. Pyle, as the title says, is a quiet American, a bookish, well-bred kid from Boston who is set apart from his loutish countrymen by what the narrator, Thomas Fowler, repeatedly calls innocence. Part of Greene’s brilliance is in setting up a contrast between what’s shown and what’s told, and to pick apart Pyle as a character (about half of my scribbles are attempts at dissecting him) takes some serious wringing of that noun. Innocent? Pyle is far from guiltless, and if he’s deluded, whih the cheap explanation, then you must realize it takes a cold intelligence to be that selective about expressing his naivete. Here’s Pyle poling his barge alone in the dark up a river swollen with floating corpses, here he is wooing Fowler’s girlfriend, there he is reducing lives to bloody bits exactly as planned. Pyle does those things competently, and without damage to his self image. His ego is not fragile, and if there’s innocence, it lies wrapped up in childish beliefs about the value of love, chastity, friendship, the magic of growing up, and, perhaps especially, of Democracy. His courtship must be played out on a fair field with unspoken rules, a friendly competition, but the lives of soldiers and bystanders are beneath his notice. If Pyle were written as a caricature, he’d be funny, but he’s taken seriously by Fowler and certainly taken seriously by himself. If his warped morality is just an affectation, Greene never lets the shell break, not even under the force of Fowler’s exquisitely bitter verbal assaults.

Pyle’s interest in war is an academic one, some wonky understanding of currents of big ideas (democracy and communism, a “third force”), and Greene is good at pointing out how grand designs are reduced to practice: young soldiers huddling in a guard tower, casually murdered families, a peasant boat obliterated without warning from the sky, the banal lies about the necessity of murder. Fowler the reporter gets a view to different official and on-the-ground version of the conflict, and maintains a stated neutrality on the conflict. He witnesses horrors with a steady, cynical eye, but every one adds up and weighs on him. On the outside, it could be believed that his betrayal of Pyle (there’s the spoiler) was over romantic contention, but it’s clear by the text that the man had seen one too many children killed for idealistic ends. Pyle is not the man that’s forced to grow up in this novel.

It can’t have been lost on Fowler (who’d reported in India) that Britain has as bloody hands as any Empire. Indeed, his self-awareness is his misery. While Greene, through the journalist, makes brilliant rhetorical points on the American character, the difference between the older and younger world-spanning brothers is one of style, the distaste is for the particular set of lies Americans tell themselves as they repeat another cycle of history. Fowler’s cynicism is based on experience, his contempt is for youth as much as for anything else, and not just Pyle’s youth, and maybe not just America’s. Near the end of the novel, Fowler finally sees fit to reminisce on his own idealism in context of the dead young American’s. Fowler claims neutrality in the local events, but it’s really just a different version of Pyle’s put-upon innocence, a more developed, grown-up version of it. Fowler’s neutrality, his love, his very horror at the conflict, also have the consequence of murder.

At the heart of a cynic, you’ll often find a broken romantic. Greene’s touch is often droll, and while love, pain and guilt are what this novel is about, the main characters habitually hide these things behind various masculine (and probably undiscovered feminine) disguises. It’s spare, it’s bitter, it’s witty, but it’s not that Hemingway he-man crap, there’s no hidden nobility in the pose. When Fowler admits that he hurts, that he causes hurt, it’s the more powerful. This is a novel to break through detachment, or at least get you really close.

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