Could Things Be Worse?

By Melvin Maddocks

AN EYE FOR THE DRAGON: SOUTHEAST ASIA OBSERVED: 1954-1970 by Dennis Bloodworth. 414 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

AT WAR WITH ASIA by Noam Chomsky. 313 pages. Pantheon. $7.95.

The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin once divided thinkers into Hedgehogs and Foxes. The Fox roams freely, a random chaser of unknown intellectual scents, a case of pure curiosity organized only by the zigzag of the hunt. The Hedgehog bounds his territory, reduces it to a unity. He starts with his own terms and squeezes the universe inside them.

Dennis Bloodworth (The Chinese Looking Glass) is a journalist, since 1954 a Far Eastern correspondent for the Observer--and a Fox. Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at M.I.T., a New Left ideologue (American Power and the New Mandarins), a leading protester against the war in Viet Nam --and a Hedgehog.

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.

Chomsky's dust jacket presents a photograph of a beefy American G.I. leading a frail, blindfolded, near-naked Viet Cong out of a helicopter by a rope around the neck. For Chomsky, Indochina is a kind of parable. Viet Nam is the historical misadventure that has exposed the corruption of America--its materialism, its hypocritical democracy --to itself and to the world. If Americans cannot see this and reform, he says, they will destroy themselves and quite possibly everybody else.

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's.

Foreign Devils. Bloodworth cannot resist comparing Indonesia's Sukarno to "a slightly passe 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."

If independence is the shared future dream of Southeast Asia, poverty is the shared present condition that Bloodworth cannot escape, from the crate-size, tin-and-tar-paper shacks on Hong Kong's hillsides to the shantyvilles of Djakarta. Behind all the suicidal politics --the "demons of division" that set Indonesians against Malaysians, Vietnamese against Cambodians, and Cambodians against Thais--leers the real face of the dragon: famine. "By the year 2000," Bloodworth calculates, "Asia will have to feed more people than there were in the whole world in 1968."

Smelly and Enchanting. In contrast to Bloodworth's mixed actuality ("strange, smelly and beautiful, revolting, enchanting, an offense and an addiction") stands Chomsky's loaded abstraction: Asia with the rope around its neck. Chomsky sees U.S. policy as pure imperialism, a conspiracy of Yankee guns guarding Yankee dollars. He believes Washington's intention in Southeast Asia is "to suppress an emerging, peasant-based movement of national independence" under the pretense of fighting Communism. He does not hesitate to make comparisons to the aggressions of Tojo and Hitler.

As might be expected, Chomsky also doubts promises to withdraw from Viet Nam. On the other hand, he says, if U.S. troops stay in Southeast Asia, there may be "a general war with the people of Asia." He assumes America could not survive the economic and moral costs. His position on Viet Nam: "Either the war will have to go, or the democracy."

Hedgehog Chomsky is certain of one thing: the situation could not be worse. Fox Bloodworth knows many things and is certain of none. Chomsky tells what he thinks in black and white. Bloodworth tells what he has seen in Technicolor--and dares his readers to become Hedgehogs if they will. More in agony than in amusement, he quotes the official who spluttered: "Anybody who thinks he understands the situation here simply does not know the facts." Melvin Maddock

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