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JAMES GILBERT
of American society and culture as if it were a bad student performance,
to which he has given low marks.
Paul Cowan's
The Making of an Un-American
is a successful and
very interesting book in spite of some abrasive moments of autobiog–
raphy. Cowan, a writer for the
Village Voice,
a SNCC worker, and with
his wife Rachel, a Peace Corps volunteer, recounts living the experiences
which intruded into the reporting of Renata Adler and which are never
quite mentioned by Andrew Hacker. They are as central to the meaning
of the sixties as almost any could be, and Cowan tells them often with
great skill and compelling interest.
The best part of the work is clearly the long middle section on his
experience in the Peace Corps in Ecuador, telling of his struggle to
master his own reactions to the experience and get up the courage to
fight what he came to see as the racism and pure venom of the frustrat–
ed zealots who had joined the Peace Corps and been dumped, seemingly
without purpose in an alien culture. The story is almost a conversation
between himself and another, more detached, self which kept urging the
absurdity of the mission, the imperialism of the program and the in–
sensitivity of Peace Corps volunteers. Gradually, Cowan and his wife
made their criticism of the Peace Corps and American foreign policy
more vocal, more insistent, until they broke entirely from it. Cowan's
last thought in his book is a fantasy imagining what it would have been
like to be a Viet Cong invading the American Embassy in Saigon: "How
I would have loved to invade that segregated building and give all the
information I could find there to my government's enemy, the people."
Thus the author defines himself as an opponent of America's presence
abroad.
Cowan's experience in the Peace Corps strikes a true note. I hap–
pened to be visiting friends in the Peace Corps in Colombia about the
same time Cowan was nearby in Ecuador. I could not help being struck
by the senselessness of dropping middle-class Americans into the vast
swamps of poverty filling those countries. One encountered among
volunteers a variety of reactions, from open dislike for Colombians
to
lethargy and resignation. Stories about the American Embassy, the CIA
and AID, and about the limitations which the Peace Corps placed
on any possible work by the volunteers, seem to have been much the
same for Colombia and Ecuador. I did know volunteers, rare perhaps,
who found that the absurdities of their positions were, after all, a way
of relating to the members of another culture they met, those for whom
the Peace Corps experience became a test to see if they at least could
survive. What they had, and what Cowan lacked, was a sense of the bitter
