Exporting Democracy
White, Robert E.
hero who grappled with mountains of doc- uments and emerged with his story--a masterpiece about the tormented General Wolfe. But the story of Wolfe, entangled with the fate of Parkman, soon...
...Though it probably will provoke many readers with its sensationalistic premises or its unyielding sexual politics, it is clearly a work of religious art--the odd contemporary novel that dares to yoke those words together and bear their double burden...
...Overlook the dodgy theology...
...Love comes to him at first sight, for a woman he spots in church--but Leanna Sousa, in one of the bursts of idiom that give the novel its truth and life, tells him she is "strictly P-town...
...busi- ness, U.S...
...The fact that all documents and evidence from the past are in a sense imaginative constructs should not make investigators despair...
...Paul Elie 6 here's really only one question," says Leonard English, the protagonist of Denis Johnson's fourth novel...
...Telling stories about the past is a matter of piecing together fragments--"hailing someone who has just gone around the corner out of earshot...
...In one chapter he uses Benjamin West's epic painting, The Death of General Wolfe (1770) as a document, analyzes its histri- onic qualities and its use of the imagery of Christ's descent from the cross, and shows how the work in effect created one of the British Empire's finest hours...
...The authors believe deeply in democracy but most are skeptical, even cynical, about the motivation of the United States, its consistency, and its commitment for the long haul...
...In place of these principles that have served as the accepted basis of international con- duct among independent states, the United States directed the preponderance of its resources toward strengthening the Latin American military establishments and fighting an ill-defined communism, usually designated as subversion, through over- staffed military missions, huge CIA sta- tions, and public-safety programs...
...When you were hanging, did you come...
...labor and to have no sep- arate discussions of the roles of the U.S...
...Barbaric practices of mass murder, institutionalized torture, and officially sponsored disappearances practically came to an end everywhere except E1 Salvador, Guatemala, and Chile...
...But the story of Wolfe, entangled with the fate of Parkman, soon makes us wonder about accuracy, versions of the truth, identification as distortion...
...The first is the responsibility of the historian...
...The thematic link between Wolfe and Webster, never quite made explicit, involves the nature of violent death, how we record our impressions of it, create it as an event, and store it in our communal memory...
...Robert E. White his study was created to challenge the easy assump- tion, so prevalent in today's Washington, that the United States knows how to export democracy and should make that transfer a principal plank in policy toward Latin America...
...Somoza was thrown out of Nicaragua and in E1 Salvador a reform government and the revolutionaries moved haltingly toward negotiation...
...it questions without erod- ing our sense of coherence...
...English's first task as a detective, it turns out, is to spy on Leanna's lover...
...labor, and U.S...
...By extension the book also explores mythmaking and stigmatizing, rit- uals of celebration and degradation, vari- eties of exoneration and mudslinging...
...Schama's point---embodied in his work is far from the anything-can-mean-anything double talk one hears these days...
...What they could not do is to achieve democracy over our opposition...
...And with it came a dis- respect for listening to all sorts of accounts and an inordinate respect for hard facts...
...business and U.S...
...As I read history, only one succeeded--Jimmy Carter...
...forget that these aren't the questions you generally ask on a first date in a coffee shop...
...Schama delineates the character of a judge who in effect helped the prosecutors by sermonizing, telling moralistic tales, and interpreting the events rather than the law...
...One can only admire him in our time of relentless smrveys and endless unitary interpretations of why we are, like Wolfe and Webster, caught in a violent story...
...One of the aggressive instincts studied in the book is the status drive of the learned people in Cambridge: it amounted to their fastidiousness about the penny press and its "enthusiasts of the gal- lows," yet its accompanying Unitarian- ism--so much more genteel than old time Calvinist fulminating about sin--may have blinded Brahmins to the nature of the evi- dence against Webster and perhaps made them forget that they themselves shared in his colossal sin...
...These are followed by discus- sions of the respective roles of U.S...
...Basically he's implying that the age of Romanti-cism-with its legends, myths, and tales----ended at the time of the trial of Webster in 1850...
...a relationship which permitted Latin Americans to devel- op their own institutions in their own way, a relationship in which the United States helped Latin American states to move toward democracy...
...As its title implies, the novel is crammed full of morbid, paradoxical deaths and rebirths...
...Although only applied intermittent- ly and with great variations from country to country, the Carter human rights policy had profound and beneficial effects throughout the region...
...Attorneys, clergy, teachers, and doctors will unquestionably be absorbed by Schama's weaving of accounts: was Webster's trial and conviction, as one journalist put it, "a hunt of expiation and defamation" or a matter of justice served...
...General Wolfe, in real life an Augustan racist, would hardly have liked this emphasis on the noble savage in the midst of his transfiguration...
...Money obsession, keep- ing up professorial appearances, and the Brahmin idea of the gentleman may well have driven Webster crazy...
...To its credit Exporting Democracy does ask the fight questions and come up with the correct answers...
...Accept that Resuscitation of a Hanged Man is will- fully unorthodox, aggressively out of the ordinary...
...Elections were scheduled in Honduras and Peru...
...military and the CIA is to confuse sub- sidiary forces of occasional importance with primary actors which, either separate- ly or together, have held the whip hand over key elements of U.S...
...The accomplishments of the Carter administration in foreign policy have never received adequate recognition from U.S...
...The leading hanged man is English--a nervy, vaguely Catholic, Kansas-born drifter who knows himself as "one of those men in their thirties with- out much to recommend them" and who strikes others as "kind of always in the wrong lane...
...During Carter's term of office the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Bolivia returned to constitutional government...
...Having survived a bungled "try at self-murder" a few months back, he has come East to try, through work and love and the sheer act of starting over, to put his life together again...
...With its shuttered resorts, its fog and wind, and its populace of Vietnam vets and cross-dressing homosexuals and parishioners "lugging themselves like laundry toward the big doors of the church," the town has "every quality of the end of the line...
...The book closes with two chapters of con- clusions, mostly cautionary, about the value of direct programs to promote democracy...
...To forget this is to be seduced by scientific exactitude or ideological right- eousness, both dangerous temptations for people entrusted with evaluating the plauDEMOCRACY "SI," EXPORT "NO" sibility of narratives...
...The leaders and peoples THE SHAPE OF DISTANT THINGS of Latin America have always had the will and the capacity to transform their countries into democratic nations...
...Did God really kill himself...
...Five chapters then focus on case histories of U.S...
...Two major ideas emerge from this cat's cradle of conflicting stories...
...By the end of the volume Schama is slipping in another idea, essentially an affront to smug deter- minists of every stamp...
...In any event, the culpability of the case adhered to the prosecution side as well...
...Schama quietly laments this tendency, and, like Herodotus, prefers to be the kind of historian who collects seemingly fanciful bits and pieces in order to arrive at his ver- sion of the past...
...These curious plots thicken as we become aware of the fact that the book is about "the teasing gap separating a lived event and a subsequent narration...
...It begins with four chapters of historical overview, pre-World War II, post-World War II, the Alliance for Progress of John F. Kennedy, and the Reagan era...
...Press freedom gained substantial ground and a national debate got underway in every nondemocratic state (except Cuba) regard- ing the abuses of the regimes under which they lived and the need for political free- dom if bloody revolution was to be avoid- ed...
...Part 2, called "Death of a Harvard Man," is a concatenation of voices--people who felt sorry for the Webster family, President Spark ("Harvard professors do not often commit murder"), attorneys (with agendas and sometimes with consciences), and a large cast of Brahmins and ordinary work- ing people...
...The authors call instead for restrained, respectful, sensitive, and patient diplomacy which would emphasize the protection of fundamental human rights, 520: Commonweal and showered it with grants and loans...
...Yet Exporting Democracy, which gives over an entire chapter to "The Reagan Years" substan- tially ignores the presidency of Jimmy Carter and his human rights policy...
...Webster, who was probably guilty as hell, nevertheless was convicted on very soft evidence...
...government from start to finish...
...It's a revolt against dead certainty without being a rejection of truth...
...Always a dissolver of certainties, Schama points out the falsifications in the canvas, includ- ing the use of a contemplative Indian in the foreground...
...Schama presents an oftentimes unsettling search for "alternate accounts," a polyphonic recounting of stories about a hero and a criminal that "compete for credibility...
...As he trails her to a cabaret where people remake themselves as transvestites, as he eaves- drops on the lovers in bed by means of a mike-and-fishing-pole device, he thinks that his own attempt to remake himself in this seaside town has run aground: "He 522: Commonweal...
...In the long run, those who share our common principles of freedom are the best guarantee of stability and har- mony in the Americas...
...With this action the United States left the path of judicious application of diplo- matic influence and respect for sovereignty, juridical equality, and territorial integrity...
...scholars...
...No one has ever bothered to deny that this was an initiative of the U.S...
...attempts to advance democracy in Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Nicaragua...
...In Latin America, however, democratic leaders saw in the Carter human rights policy the promise of a new rela- tionship where our actions did not regularly give the lie to our words...
...policy toward the region for decades...
...EXPORTING DEMOCRACY The United States and Latin America Edited by Abraham F. Lowenthal The Johns Hopkins University Press, $55, 422 pp...
...RESUSCITATION OF A HANGED MAN Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus, Giroux, $19.95, 257 pp...
...We still have not learned there is no basis for democracy when we support governments that manip- ulate their peoples for the benefit of a tiny domestic elite...
...Work, for English, is a pair of squalid jobs--as a jack-of- all-trades at a small radio station and as a detective for its owner, Ray Sands...
...hero who grappled with mountains of documents and emerged with his story--a masterpiece about the tormented General Wolfe...
...To devote an entire chapter each to U.S...
...What his new friend wants to know is: "Did it feel sexy when you killed yourself...
...Since World War II, no president has failed to announce that his priority for Latin America was to advance democracy...
...economic policy...
...But the place he has come to is the "phony peninsula" of Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the off season...
...Exporting Democracy is a serious work by serious scholars...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 15
