Word: bloodworth
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Dates: during 1970-1970
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Corruption of America. Bloodworth sees Southeast Asia as so complex, so varied and contradictory that he can hardly write a book about it. His chapters, like his subject, separate into archipelagos and a thousand tiny islands. The dust jacket shows the head of a dragon: violent, mysterious, serpentine, finally inexplicable except as a myth...
Alongside Chomsky's apocalyptic posture-historian as moralist and trac-tarian-Bloodworth has the slouch of a cynic. He is the professional journalist, selecting the amusing or exotic tidbit for the reader's jaded palate. He has seen too much to be shocked by anything or to believe in anything. He survives by his reflex for flippancy. Yet, by a curious paradox, Bloodworth's book eventually seems wiser and even more serious than Chomsky...
Foreign Devils. Bloodworth cannot resist comparing Indonesia's Sukarno to "a slightly passé Hollywood corespondent on the beach at Cap d'Antibes." Nor can he pass up the insignificant but tourist-thrilling fact. Example: anyone can buy a murder contract in the Philippines for as little as $250, $25 down. (Try a syndicate called the Beatles...
Despite his role as lively guide, Bloodworth, by a kind of Oriental indirection, gets his major points across. He makes it unmistakably clear that the one goal all Southeast Asian countries share is independence-merdeka in Malay, doc lap in Vietnamese. Big Brother is not wanted, whether he is American, Russian or Chinese...
...Bloodworth makes it equally clear that even without its foreign devils, Southeast Asia would be no Garden of Eden; its corruption is not an Occidental import brought in by missionaries and gunboats. The native pattern has found "browbeaten peasants" regularly caught between bandits and greedy oligarchies. Revolution, the "habit-forming" coup, has meant exchanging one tyrant for another. "Communism," says Bloodworth, is just "the devil the poor don't yet know...