Читать книгу The Imperial Messenger - B. Fernandez - Страница 9
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I didn’t start globalization, I can’t stop it—except at a huge cost to human development.
—Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree
With all due respect to 1960’s revolutionary ideology, the wretched of the earth want to go to Disney World, not to the barricades—if they’re given half a chance. If not, they will eat their rain forest, whatever it might be.
—Thomas Friedman, 1998
May 31, 2010. Israeli commandos slaughter nine Turkish humanitarian activists on board the Freedom Flotilla endeavoring to deliver aid to besieged Gaza. The event takes place in international waters. Thomas Friedman’s reaction is to put the word humanitarian in quotation marks and to announce that Turkish “concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with … other horrific cases in the region” that Turkey is risking its “historic role as a country that can be Muslim, modern, democratic.”1
One of the horrific cases cited by Friedman is the recent destruction by “pro-Hamas gunmen”2 of facilities at a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza. It thus appears that, if the Turks do indeed wish to “get back in balance,”3 they will have to ignore not only Hamas’ official condemnation of the destruction in question but also Israel’s history of attacks on regional U.N. institutions, which—unlike Friedman’s preferred “horrific case”—have not been casualty-free.4
Two weeks after the flotilla assault, Friedman travels to Turkey to deliver a scheduled presentation at Istanbul’s Özyeğin University about his latest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution—And How It Can Renew America.5 Although he mercifully refrains from discussing his audience’s lack of balance, it seems more than slightly ironic that an American columnist who has just written off the elimination of nine Turkish activists by a U.S.-funded army as a “setup”6 is now lecturing an auditorium full of Turks on how “a lot of bad stuff happens in the world without America, but not a lot of good stuff.”7 As for Friedman’s ejaculation that “green is the new red, white, and blue, oh yes it is, baby,” this is only subsequently amended to reflect the geographical circumstances: “And it’s the new red and white in Turkey.”8
Near the end of his two-hour lecture, our columnist stumbles into revealing that the book he is promoting “is really about America. It’s not about energy,” and that both The World Is Flat and Hot, Flat, and Crowded “have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart” but are instead “basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself.”9 Lest said country misinterpret these cries as encompassing genuine concern for biodiversity or the possibility that the Internet can lift the global poor out of poverty, Friedman subsequently embarks on the even more transparently focused mouthful That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World We Invented—And How We Can Come Back, which he manages to describe in a 2011 Fox Business interview as “the first book I’ve really written about America.”10
As for Friedman’s qualifications as overseer of the U.S. return to glory, it is helpful to review some of his signature theories and policy prescriptions from past years and to make note of how these have ultimately fared. Given space constraints, it is impossible to devote much analysis to more short-lived gems, such as Friedman’s 1996 suggestion that “the U.S. should flood Iraq with counterfeit Iraqi dinars. It would wreak havoc. Because the U.S. has blocked the sale of money-printing presses, ink and paper to Iraq, Washington can already print better Iraqi money than Baghdad can,”11 or his post-9/11 recommendation regarding potential U.S. partners in the struggle against Osama bin Laden: “The Cali cartel doesn’t operate in Afghanistan. But the Russian mafia sure does, as do various Afghan factions, drug rings and Pakistani secret agents.”12
One of the best-known components of Friedman’s résumé is the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, the birth of which he describes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree:
For all I know, I have eaten McDonald’s burgers and fries in more countries in the world than anyone, and I can testify that they all really do taste the same. But as I Quarter-Poundered my way around the world in recent years, I began to notice something intriguing. I don’t know when the insight struck me. It was a bolt out of the blue that must have hit somewhere between the McDonald’s in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the McDonald’s in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the McDonald’s off Zion Square in Jerusalem. And it was this: No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.13
The Lebanese McDonald’s is invoked as proof of the theory’s validity, with no regard for the fact that Israel is at the time of writing engaged in a continuing military occupation of south Lebanon punctuated by deadly bombing campaigns. Friedman deals with other theoretical complications that have arisen since the release of the first edition of The Lexus in 1999—namely the war by nineteen McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries on McDonald’s-possessing Yugoslavia—by arguing that the outcome of the conflict demonstrates that citizens of nations that have developed economically to the point of being able to host McDonald’s establishments prefer American fast food over wars. Serbia’s capitulation is cast as a result of its citizens’ decision that “they wanted to stand in line for burgers, much more than they wanted to stand in line for Kosovo.”14
Friedman’s additional excuse that “the Kosovo war wasn’t even a real war”15 is meanwhile called into question by such things as his own article from 1999 stating that “Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation.”16 That Friedman’s regular consumption of McDonald’s, designated symbol of the globalization and economic integration that are supposedly “having a restraining effect on aggressive nations,”17 has not had a similar effect on his personal propensities is clear from his encouragement of NATO’s air campaign (“Give war a chance”18) and his repeated entreaties for “sustained,” “unreasonable,” and “less than surgical bombing”19 to prevent the inhabitants of Belgrade from continuing to partake in “Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are ‘cleansing’ Kosovo.”20
Decreeing the need for “a new Serbian ethic that understands how to live in 21st-century Europe,”21 Friedman threatens the Serbs: “Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.”22 This leap onto the bandwagon of ethic-inducing pulverization in a war partly undertaken to expand and empower NATO in the post–Cold War world is difficult to reconcile with Friedman’s own definition of himself as “a long and cranky opponent of NATO expansion.”23
Readers of Friedman’s column are often reminded that New York Times columnists are not permitted to endorse U.S. presidential candidates. The blatant endorsement of war crimes like collective punishment, however, is apparently less polemical, even when columnists cannot keep track of their own reasons for said punishment. In separate reflections on the war with Serbia published two months apart in 1999, Friedman writes in the former that “once the [Kosovar] refugee evictions began … using a huge air war for a limited objective was the only thing that made sense.”24 He then lets slip in the latter that he may indeed understand the true sequence of events: “NATO bombed, and [Slobodan] Milosevic began ruthlessly killing and evicting Kosovar Albanians.”25
When it comes time for McDonald’s installation in the Baghdad Green Zone, the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention is abandoned in favor of concoctions like Friedman’s Tilt Theory of History, which applies to situations in which “you take a country, a culture, or a region that has been tilted in the wrong direction and tilt it in the right direction.”26 Friedman subsequently offers the Dell Theory of Conflict Prevention in The World Is Flat, according to which “no two countries that are both part of a major global supply chain, like Dell’s, will ever fight a war against each other as long as they are both part of the same global supply chain.”27 We are left to assume that pre-war Iraqi oil exports to the United States did not constitute part of a major global supply chain.
Another overly simplistic theory that somehow continues to elude the very minimal amount of scrutiny that is required to debunk it is Friedman’s First Law of Petropolitics, which I will refer to by its convenient acronym. The FLOP, which debuted in Foreign Policy magazine in 2006, posits that “in oil-rich petrolist states, the price of oil and the pace of freedom tend to move in opposite directions.”28 According to Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the thought process culminating in the discovery of the FLOP began after 9/11 when, allegedly emboldened by the high price of oil, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez announced that British Prime Minister Tony Blair as well as U.S.-sponsored free trade coalitions could “go to hell.”29
Additional oil-related coincidences accrue over the years, as Friedman observes that Bahrain, the first Persian Gulf oil state to start running out of oil, is not only “the first Gulf state to hold a free and fair parliamentary election, in which women could run and vote” but also “the first Gulf state to hire [consulting firm] McKinsey & Company to design an overhaul of its labor laws … and the first Gulf state to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States.”30 The evidence of the correlation between the price of oil and the pace of freedom becomes insurmountable one afternoon in 2006 over lunch with Foreign Policy editor Moisés Naím, and—after sketching a graph to this effect on his napkin—Friedman woos Naím with such statistics as that “when oil was $25–$30 a barrel, George W. Bush looked into Russian president Vladimir Putin’s soul and saw a friend of America there,” but that the current view consists of oil companies and democratic institutions “that Putin has swallowed courtesy of $100-a-barrel oil.”31
Friedman fails to mention that, around the same time that Bush was reading Putin’s soul, Friedman himself was encouraging his readership to “keep rootin’ for Putin,” whom he touted as “for real,” “Russia’s first Deng Xiaoping,” and the architect of the country’s transition from “Das Kapital to DOS capital.”32 As for Friedman’s assertion in The World Is Flat that the primary cause of the demise of the Soviet Union “was the information revolution that began in the early to mid-1980s,”33 this notion is discarded in favor of the new FLOP-friendly argument that high oil prices in the 1970s followed by $10-a-barrel oil prompted the Soviet collapse.
That the 2007 edition of The World Is Flat, released the year after the FLOP’s birth, is not amended to reflect the new thinking could be construed as a sign that manuscript size and frequency of publication may sometimes trump content and conviction. Undeterred by the possibility that the abandonment of past predictions might encumber one’s current credibility as foreign affairs sage, Friedman is tasked by Naím with turning his napkin into an article.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded outlines the expansion of the napkin into four separate graphs:
On one axis, I plotted the average global price of crude oil going back to 1979, and along the other axis I plotted the pace of expanding or contracting freedoms, both economic and political—as measured by the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” report and the Fraser Institute’s “Economic Freedom of the World Report”—for Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Nigeria.34
According to Friedman, the resulting four graphs indicate that
as oil prices went down in the early 1990s, competition, transparency, political participation, and accountability of those in office all tended to go up in these countries—as measured by free elections held, newspapers opened, reformers elected, economic reform projects started, and companies privatized. But as oil prices started to soar after 2000, free speech, free press, fair elections and freedom to form political parties and NGOs tended to erode in these countries.35
This correlation sounds delightful, especially when it is compounded by compelling evidence such as that “a Westernized Iranian woman reporter in Tehran once said to me as we were walking down the street: ‘If only we didn’t have oil, we could be just like Japan.’”36 The project’s flaws, however, are numerous, and cannot be compensated for via Friedman’s simple disclaimer that “this is not a scientific lab experiment.”37
First of all, the graphs do not take into account the wide range of freedom indicators listed by Friedman.38 The graph on Iran, for example, plots crude oil prices against “Freedom to Trade Internationally,” which in the Iranian context is presumably a reflection of the intensity of sanctions by international actors. It is difficult to argue that this specific category is at all representative of the general level of domestic freedom.
The Nigeria graph plots oil prices against “Legal System and Property Rights,” while the Venezuela graph plots oil prices against the country’s Freedom House rankings. All of the graphs indicate an inverse relationship, but a glance at the Freedom House “Freedom in the World” data from 1973 to 201039 turns up contradictions such as these:
1. Following a string of “Partly Free” years, Nigeria’s Freedom Status switches to “Not Free” in 1993. This is precisely the year of the Nigerian oil field privatization that appears on Friedman’s cumulative FLOP graph as one of three global historical events signifying an increase in the pace of freedom.
2. Venezuela has maintained a “Partly Free” status since 1999, even when Chávez was telling various international entities to go to hell.
3. Bahrain transforms from “Partly Free” to “Not Free” in 2009, despite Friedman’s insistence—undeterred by his own discussion in The World Is Flat of the Bahraini regime’s Internet censorship and reliance on walled palaces and Sunni dominance—that dwindling oil reserves have forced the country’s democratization.
More important than any of these contradictions, however, is Friedman’s cheerleading of the U.S. war on Iraq “to create a free, open and progressive model in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world to promote the ideas of tolerance, pluralism and democratization”40 when he is already convinced in 2002 that unless the United States “encourage[s] alternative energies that will slowly bring the price of oil down and force [Arab/Muslim] countries to open up and adapt to modernity—we can invade Iraq once a week and it’s not going to unleash democracy in the Arab world.”41 This same year he nonetheless classifies the invasion of Iraq as “the most important task worth doing and worth debating,” even while admitting that it “would be a huge, long, costly task—if it is doable at all, and I am not embarrassed to say that I don’t know if it is.”42
Taking into account the speculation by oil economist and World Bank adviser Dr. Mamdouh Salameh in 2008 that the invasion of Iraq has thus far trebled the price of crude oil,43 Friedman’s 2006 proposal for a Geo-Green party in the United States to “advanc[e] political and economic reform in the Arab-Muslim world, without another war”44 acquires an even more tragicomic hue. According to Friedman, “however the Iraq war ends,” the Geo-Green party will stimulate alternatives to oil and thus “gradually bring down the price, possibly as low as $25 to $30 a barrel”—i.e., the approximate price of oil in 2002.45
Recent years have seen a surge in Friedman’s insistence on the need for “nation-building at home,”46 in order to resolve issues ranging from the United States’ “mounting education deficit, energy deficit, budget deficit, health care deficit and ambition deficit”47 to Penn Station’s “disgusting track-side platforms [that] apparently have not been cleaned since World War II”48 to the fact that, while China spent the post-9/11 period enhancing its national infrastructure in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, “we’ve been building better metal detectors, armored Humvees and pilotless drones.”49 Friedman’s fury over funding cuts to the National Science Foundation might be more understandable, however, had:
1. The NSF appeared somewhere on the 2002 hierarchy of most-important-even-if-impossible-tasks.
2. He specified that the Iraq war be fought without Humvees.
3. He not advised Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 to “connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: ‘Does this man understand that we have real enemies?’” by “drop[ping] everything else—health care, deficits and middle-class tax cuts—and focus[ing] on this issue. Everything else is secondary.”50
Consider for a moment that over half of U.S. government spending goes to the military,51 an institution Friedman lauds as the protector of American economic hegemony in The Lexus:
Indeed, McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps. And these fighting forces and institutions are paid for by American taxpayer dollars.52
Consider, then, the 2007 estimate by the American Friends Service Committee that the hidden fist’s not-so-hidden maneuverings in Iraq were costing $720 million a day. The Washington Post reports that this sum alone “could buy homes for almost 6,500 families or health care for 423,529 children, or could outfit 1.27 million homes with renewable electricity,” as well as making substantial contributions to the U.S. education system, which Friedman has categorized as one of the many areas in which the country “has been swimming buck naked.”53
This is not to imply, of course, that had these funds not been used on war they would have been used on these specific domestic nation-building projects, but rather to point out the sort of self-contradictions one invites by maintaining unwavering commitment to few principles aside from the idea that America should dominate the world.
Despite Friedman’s newfound annoyance that the United States is preoccupied with nation-building abroad and that “the Cheneyites want to make fighting Al Qaeda our Sputnik”54 while “China is doing moon shots”55 and turning from red to green, he credits the U.S. army with “outgreening al-Qaeda”56 in Iraq. In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, we learn that this has been achieved via a combination of insulation foam and renewable energy sources, reducing the amount of fuel required to air condition troop accommodations in certain locations.
After speaking with army energy consultant Dan Nolan—whom he “couldn’t help but ask, ‘Is anybody in the military saying, “Oh gosh, poor Dan has gone green—has he gone girly-man on us now?” ’57—Friedman announces that the outgreening of Al Qaeda constitutes a typical example
of what happens when you try to solve a problem by outgreening the competition—you buy one and you get four free. In Nolan’s case, you save lives by getting [fuel transportation] convoys off the road, save money by lowering fuel costs [from the quoted “hundreds of dollars per gallon”58 often required to cover delivery], and maybe have some power left over to give the local mosque’s imam so his community might even toss a flower at you one day, rather than a grenade.59
The fourth benefit, courtesy of Nolan, is that soldiers will be so inspired by green efforts at their bases in Iraq that they will “come back to America and demand the same thing for their community or from their factory,” which Friedman reports as unquestioningly as he does the allegation that the U.S. army prompted the desegregation of America by “show[ing] blacks and whites that they could work together.”60 As for the first three benefits gotten for “free” with the Al Qaeda outgreening purchase, it should be recalled that the very appearance of Al Qaeda in Iraq was itself no more than a free benefit of the U.S. invasion, as were convoy fatalities, heightened fuel costs for the U.S. military, and grenades. A deal indeed.
It is no less than remarkable that, in a matter of six pages in a book purporting to serve as an environmental wakeup call, Friedman has managed to greenwash the institution that holds the distinction of being the top polluter in the world.61 The feat is especially noteworthy given that, smatterings of insulation foam and solar panels notwithstanding, the U.S. military’s overwhelming reliance on fuel means that its presence in Iraq is not at all reconcilable with Friedman’s insistence that dependence on foreign oil reserves is one of the greatest threats to U.S. security. The greenwashing incidentally also occurs after Friedman has decreed that the United States should cease operations in Iraq so as not to “throw more good lives after good lives.”62
In 2010 it is then revealed that certain branches of the armed forces are strategizing to outgreen not only Al Qaeda but also the Taliban and the world’s petro-dictators. Friedman exults over the existence of aviation biofuel made from pressed mustard seeds and the existence of a green forward-operating Marine base in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, offering encouragement such as “Go Navy!” and “God bless them: ‘The Few. The Proud. The Green.’ Semper Fi.”63 It is not clear whether Friedman has forgotten that he is vehemently opposed to the military escalation in Afghanistan.
Returning to the subject of the hidden fist’s role as safeguard of McDonald’s and Silicon Valley, Friedman worries in the 1990s that the fact that “America truly is the ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer”64 might impede the exploitation of the post–Cold War international system, which has been summed up as follows: “Globalization is us.”65 A list of hegemonic achievements from this time period would thus appear to include benignly dispatched cruise missiles, the benign elimination of half a million Iraqi children via sanctions,66 benign support for various dictators, and benign economic policies that Friedman himself acknowledges have had “enormously socially disruptive” effects, such as widening gaps in income distribution.67 Rather than encourage any sort of in-depth consideration of these effects, however, Friedman prefers to focus attention superficially on the salary discrepancy among professional basketball players, devoting approximately nine pages of The Lexus to the idea that “you can learn everything you need to know about [the socially disruptive impact of globalization] by studying just one group of people—the National Basketball Association and, in particular, the bench of the 1997–98 World Champion Chicago Bulls.”68
In the introduction to The Lexus, Friedman responds to allegations that he “loves globalization” by comparing his feelings for the phenomenon to his feelings about the dawn: “It does more good than harm, especially if you wear sunscreen and sunglasses.”69 He protests that he is “a journalist, not a salesman for globalization,”70 although readers might be forgiven for mistaking vacuous corporate name-dropping formulas like “Attention Kmart shoppers: Without America on duty, there will be no America Online”71 for something other than journalism.
As for Friedman’s assertion that “globalization is bringing more people out of poverty faster than ever before in the history of the world,”72 this is slightly irreconcilable with such details as Russia’s post-communist transition from a country with less than 2 million people living under the international poverty line to a country with 74 million living under the same line.73 That Friedman is not completely oblivious to the utility of the democratic alibi in globalizing economic oppression is clear from his announcement in 1995 that “I now understand that graffito that reportedly appeared on a wall in Poland last year. It said: ‘We wanted democracy but we ended up with capitalism.’”74
In The World Is Flat we learn that there is “only one right direction”75 that states can pursue, and Friedman professes to “get a little lump in my throat when I see countries like China, India, or Ireland adopting a basically proglobalization strategy, adapting it to their own political, social, and economic conditions, and reaping the benefits.”76 The lump merits some additional examination for several reasons.
For starters, it is only after 546 pages of manuscript, many of which are devoted to India’s reaping of globalization benefits—Friedman even spends two pages transcribing sound bytes from an Indian call center, such as: “Woman operator in Bangalore after someone has just slammed down the phone on her: ‘Hello? Hello?’”77—that we are instructed to “have no illusions” and that the Indian high-tech sector “accounts for 0.2 percent of employment in India.”78
Curiously, Friedman appears to have abandoned his Lexus-era claim that he is not “particularly happy”79 about the adoption of Western names and accents by Indian call center operators, and he reports after participating in an “accent neutralization” class in 2004 that watching young Indians “earnestly trying to soften their t’s and roll their r’s … is an uplifting experience.”80 Reviewing how many of these workers now have credit cards and can purchase American goods, Friedman determines that “there is nothing more positive than the self-confidence, dignity and optimism that comes from a society knowing it is producing wealth by tapping its own brains—men’s and women’s—as opposed to one just tapping its own oil, let alone one that is so lost it can find dignity only through suicide and ‘martyrdom.’”81
The drawbacks of lost societies are illustrated through Friedman’s recollection of a previous encounter with three young Palestinians in Ramallah who “talked about having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all ‘suicide bombers in waiting.’”82 This confirmation allows Friedman to defend the outsourcing of American jobs “to places like India or Pakistan” as a means of “mak[ing] not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds,” who will presumably then only have to worry about potential suicide bombings conducted by the 99.8 percent of Indians not employed in the high-tech sector.83
As for India’s unique historical circumstances, such as its freedom from occupation by Israel, the version of Friedman’s Ramallah encounter provided in The World Is Flat reveals that the young Palestinian who speaks of his brethren as “martyrs in waiting” specifies that this is due in large part to Israeli treatment of Palestinians at checkpoints.84 Friedman also notes in this case that one of the other two young men is an engineering student whose dream of attending the University of Memphis has been thwarted by the difficulty of obtaining a U.S. visa, another situation that will not be rectified by the transfer of “low-wage, low-prestige jobs”85 to India. As author Naomi Klein points out in response to Friedman’s promotion of call centers to the frontlines of World War III, simpler and more relevant solutions to terrorist proliferation at the time might have included ending the Israeli occupation and recognizing that the exploitation of Iraqi reconstruction as “a vast job-creation program for Americans” was fueling the insurgency in Iraq.86
Friedman’s portrayal of India as a model for the globalization era is meanwhile hardly consistent. For example, in The Lexus he categorizes India as a “budding kleptocracy.”87 Then in 2002 he credits Indian “democracy” with the fact that “rioting didn’t spread anywhere” after what he acknowledges was a pogrom incited by the Hindu nationalist government of the state of Gujarat, in which several thousand Muslims were massacred.88 In this same article— perplexingly titled “Where Freedom Reigns,” in spite of the massacre of Muslims—he announces that “50 years of Indian democracy … and 15 years of economic liberalization” have resulted in “all this positive energy” in Bangalore, “where the traffic is now congested by all the young Indian techies … who have gotten jobs, apartments—and motor scooters—by providing the brainpower for the world’s biggest corporations.”89
In 2004, however, we learn that the Bangalore government is “rife with corruption,” that the public school system is dysfunctional, and that infrastructure is falling apart while “beggars dart in and out of the traffic”—a scene contrasted with the “beautiful, walled campuses” of the high-tech firms that “thrive by defying their political-economic environment, not by emerging from it.”90 This, of course, is the exact inverse of the argument from 2002, and is not compatible with the idea that free markets reduce poverty or, obviously, walls—which are supposed to be being blown down by Friedman’s “flat-world platform.”91
In 2006 Friedman promotes India as “a beacon of tolerance and stability” and encourages “finding a creative way to bring [it] into the world’s nuclear family,” i.e., to violate the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty via the Bush team’s arms deal with New Delhi without losing the ability to invoke the NPT against other nations: “India deserves to be treated differently than Iran.”92 It is not clear how nuclear deals with India are congruent with Friedman’s goal of defusing anti-Americanism in Pakistan. Indian author and activist Arundhati Roy has meanwhile pointed out Friedman’s curious choice of the adjective tolerant given, for example, the thousands of Indian political prisoners, the caste system pitted against the indigenous and the poor, and India’s insistence on perpetuating “one of the most brutal military occupations in the world” in Kashmir.93
In 2011 Indian Muslims resurface in Friedman’s seemingly platitudinous but actually nonsensical assertion that “they are, on the whole, integrated into India’s democracy because it is a democracy,” followed by the proof: “There are no Indian Muslims in Guantánamo Bay.”94 If the current standard for judging whether democracies are really democracies is whether or not any nationals have been held in illegal U.S. detention centers, Friedman should perhaps reconsider the democratic credentials of Britain and Australia.95
As for the issue of traffic congestion in Bangalore, for years Friedman pushes the idea that the earth should host as many “Americas” as possible, encouraging his readership to “imagine how beneficial it would be for the world, and for America, if rural China, India, and Africa were to grow into little Americas or European Unions in economic and opportunity terms.”96 He then decides that “there are too many Americans in the world today”—“in American-sized homes, driving American-sized cars, eating American-sized Big Macs”—and that “the good lord didn’t design our little planet for this many Americans.”97 Rather than revisit his own past recommendations—such as that, in the interest of Balkan stability, “Bosnia needs big tanks, big roads and Big Macs,”98 or that the proliferation of the Golden Arches is the key to global conflict prevention—Friedman announces the latest solution to the world’s problems and the means by which “we can get our groove back”: the United States must be the leader in a clean energy revolution necessitated by U.S. planetary leadership in the first place.99
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman expresses his annoyance for the claim that a green revolution is already under way in the United States: “Really? Really? A green revolution? Have you ever seen a revolution where no one got hurt?”100 It is not clear who is supposed to be getting hurt when Friedman’s argument that the “old system … has reached its financial and environmental limits”101 is juxtaposed with his 2008 response to the U.S. government bailout of the very banks and corporations Friedman accuses of financially and environmentally unsustainable behavior: “You have to save the system.”102
Friedman’s wish that “America could be China for a day—just one day. Just one day!”103 is meanwhile a reference to the advantages of systems free of such obstacles as permanent presidential campaigns and gerrymandered congressional districts, which according to Friedman have inhibited the launch of the required revolution in the United States. His fear that China is going to “clean our clock”104 via its “Green Leap Forward”105 suggests that he was perhaps naïve to welcome Chinese globalization strategies with the aforementioned lump in his throat.106 It also confirms the baselessness of his 2003 ultimatum to China that, unless the country begins fulfilling its duties as part of “the World of Order”—i.e., signing off on American military schemes to “manage the World of Disorder”—it risks a reduction to “only exporting duct tape.”107
The third of the three listed recipients of the globalization throat lump is Ireland, where Friedman’s lump-related exuberance has spawned economic prophesies ending in dismal failure. Friedman first celebrates Irish passage from potato famine fame to hub for U.S. corporations like Dell during a visit in 2001, when he somehow determines that his experience trying to check out of his hotel—“a real stone castle” whose computer system has just crashed, preventing Friedman from retrieving his bill—“pretty well sums up the conflicting trends in … the European country that has been the biggest beneficiary of globalization and the one that is most ambivalent about those benefits.”108
Ambivalence disappears in honor of Friedman’s next visit in 2005, and he instructs his audience to “Follow the Leapin’ Leprechaun”:
It is obvious to me that the Irish-British [economic] model is the way of the future, and the only question is when Germany and France will face reality: either they become Ireland or they become museums. That is their real choice over the next few years—it’s either the leprechaun way or the Louvre.109
The French are regularly targeted by Friedman for a litany of perceived abuses, among them transforming from “our annoying ally” to “our enemy” who “wants America to fail in Iraq”110 while in the meantime “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.”111 Friedman appears to find nothing contradictory in advocating for impossibly extended workdays when he has both reported the confirmation by an Indian call center worker that when one works through the night one’s “biological clock goes haywire”112 and has himself asserted that “the problem is that human beings simply are not designed to be like computer servers. For one thing, they are designed to sleep eight hours a night.”113
As for Friedman’s self-described “poking fun at France” via personalized pep talks to Chirac—“Yo, Jacques, what world do you think you’re livin’ in, pal? Get with the program! It’s called Anglo-American capitalism, mon ami”—and references to “antiglobalist Gaullist Luddites,” there is a decided double standard that Friedman maintains with regard to the technologies he insists are necessary to achieve wealth and productivity.114 Quoted in Foreign Policy as saying “I talk the talk of technology, but I don’t walk the walk,”115 Friedman elsewhere admits to not knowing how to program his VCR,116 and announces to the graduating class of Williams College in 2005: “And don’t leave me a [mobile phone] message, because I still don’t know how to retrieve them and I have no intention of learning.”117
That Friedman is exempt from the get-wired-or-die options he bestows on the rest of the world, with the accompanying warning that “the fast eat the slow,” is thus clear.118 What is not clear is how he feels entitled to complain about the effects of the very technological ubiquity he has demanded. On the one hand, he condemns the lack of wireless infrastructure in the New York subway, expresses extreme displeasure at the number of times his phone calls get dropped on “America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train” (a.k.a. the Acela),119 and devises a hypothetical election campaign based “on a one-issue platform: I promise, if elected, that within four years America will have cellphone service as good as Ghana’s.”120 On the other, he announces he cannot “wait for the day that Motorola comes out with a device that enables you to jam all the cell phones around you”121 so that his restaurant meals are not tainted by other people’s conversations, and laments his inability to interact with Paris cab drivers and passengers on Colorado ski lifts thanks to the monopoly on their attention by technological gadgets.122
It is meanwhile important to recall that, as tough as conditions may be on the ski lift, the level of personal suffering involved undoubtedly pales in comparison to that experienced in other venues on the receiving end of Friedman-sanctioned modernization crusades. Iraq comes to mind, where citizens perish by the hundreds of thousands while Friedman unearths encouraging indications of the possibility that democracy-resistant Arab political culture can change (“Consider what was the most talked-about story in the Arab world in recent weeks. Iraq? No. Palestine? No … It was the Arab version of ‘American Idol’!”123). Other candidates include the countless numbers of people across the globe whose health and livelihoods have been adversely affected by the business practices of biotech giant Monsanto and Canadian gold-mining company Goldcorp Inc., the CEOs of which appear in The Lexus and The World Is Flat, respectively—the former as a humble, principled, and environmentally conscious businessman, the latter as the source of ingenious ways of using the Internet to find gold.
Monsanto holds the distinction of being a Vietnam-era manufacturer of the lethal defoliant Agent Orange, now specializing in genetically engineered crops and the infamous herbicide Roundup, which is toxic to soil, animals, and humans alike. Goldcorp, for its part, is responsible for things like open-pit cyanide leach mining in Guatemala, which results in arsenic-contaminated rivers, deforestation, and a host of physical afflictions for the local population, among them persistent skin rashes and an increase in spontaneous abortions.124 It is fairly obvious that there should be no words of praise for either of these corporations anywhere on the résumé of anyone who feels comfortable beginning sentences with the words “As an environmentalist.”125 It is also fairly obvious that such a person should not announce two months after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster that “I have no problem with more nuclear power, if you can find a utility ready to put up the money,”126 or dismiss European aversion to genetically modified organisms—the cultivation of which is environmentally destructive—as merely another example of the “Euro-whining” that characterizes opposition to war on Iraq.127
Dining at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Davos, Switzerland, in 2003, Friedman is irked to discover a “tiny asterisk”128 on the menu indicating the potential presence of GMOs in meat imported from the United States. The combination of the asterisk and the fact that Europeans continue to smoke cigarettes permits Friedman to arrive at the conclusion that arguments against war by the leaders of Germany and France are “deeply unserious” and that said countries are merely pursuing “an assertion of identity by trying to be whatever the Americans are not.”129 The reason for this behavior is that “being weak after being powerful is a terrible thing. It can make you stupid.”130
The tone of this analysis signals a marked departure from Friedman’s pro-European jubilation of 2001: “I am now officially declaring my total affection and support for the European Union. I love the E.U. I wish there were two. May it go from strength to strength.”131 Acknowledging that the European “version of capitalism will always stress social welfare more than ours,” Friedman argues that it is nonetheless hugely valuable, “in this world of increasingly messy states, for us to have another version of the United States across the Atlantic.”132
This brings us back to the subject of Ireland in 2005, a country that has apparently avoided stupidity by going from potato famine to Dell rather than from strength to weakness, and has proven itself a more loyal replica of the United States by favoring corporations over workers. Friedman informs us: “The Irish have a plan. They are focused. They have mobilized business, labor and government around a common agenda. They are playing offense.”133 Outlining the “leprechaun way” that must now be adopted by Germany and France if they want to avoid economic irrelevance and decline, he states: “One of the first reforms Ireland instituted was to make it easier to fire people.”134
Friedman, whose views on labor rights include that “the most important thing [Ronald] Reagan did was break the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which helped break the hold of organized labor over the U.S. economy,”135 has long seen job security as an impediment to innovation and progress because “the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people.”136
Actually, the easier it is to fire people, the easier it is for Dell to close its manufacturing center in Limerick, lay off 1,900 employees, and transfer major operations to Poland in 2009, invalidating do-it-yourself guides by New York Times columnists on how to “become one of the richest countries in Europe” through globalization.137 As Sean Kay, chair of the International Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan University, notes in an article on Foreign Policy’s website, Friedman might have avoided his premature leprechaun celebration had he relied on more thorough investigative techniques than, for example, emailing with Michael Dell about the perks of Irish industrial and tax policies.138
Responding to Friedman’s “wildly inaccurate” statement that, “because of all the tax revenue and employment the global companies are generating in Ireland, Dublin has been able to increase spending on health care, schools and infrastructure,” Kay writes: “In reality, the government at the time was not only not generating revenue, its investment in education was declining and it was beginning to accumulate massive debt. Today, Ireland’s deficit is at 32% of GDP—the highest in the Eurozone.”139 Kay concludes that Friedman “owes it to both the people of Ireland and his readers to correct the record,” given that his flawed theorizing was “embraced and celebrated by an Irish government that was reveling in excess and deeply entangled with corrupt bankers” and that it “reinforced a doubling down on damaging economic and political actions in a small and vulnerable country that is now suffering deep pain”—which will presumably only intensify in accordance with the EU-IMF bank bailout.140
Admitting when one has erred certainly enhances one’s overall credibility and coherence as a journalist and economic commentator, even when one might prefer to distance oneself from past analyses such as that “there is never going to be any European monetary union. Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”141 It also aids in the recuperation of one’s license to criticize others for pursuing the very policies or ideas one previously promoted. The obstacles to a Friedman apology in the case of Ireland, however, are threefold.
First of all, Friedman has a knack for putting optimistic spins on “deep pain.” See, for example, his reaction to the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “Yes, many Thais are now hurting. But at least the country is finally building some of the regulatory institutions it needs to insure that global funds cascading into Thailand are not so easily misallocated … That’s no crisis in my book.”142 The real cause of the crisis, of course, was not the Asian misallocation of funds but rather the machinations of the neoliberal international economic institutions now tasked with rectifying the crisis via an intensification of the same policies encouraging unregulated financial speculation and permanent “hurting” of the non-elite.143 Undeterred, Friedman announces: “I wish everyone could come to democracy by reading Madison, but sometimes the push has to come from Merrill Lynch.”144
That systems imposed by Wall Street investment firms do not by definition qualify as democracy becomes all the more apparent when popular opposition to the IMF drives the outcome of the 2001 Thai elections, despite Friedman’s previous quote from a Thai newspaper editor who assures him that “We do not see the IMF as the enemy.”145 It is meanwhile unclear why Friedman is concerned with combating corruption in Asia and introducing financial responsibility and the rule of law when he is at the same time making such arguments as that “some of Italy’s vices during the cold war—its weak governments, its epidemic of tax evasion, the penchant of Italians to work around the state rather than through it—have become virtues in this era of globalization.”146
As for Friedman’s assessment in 1998 that “the turmoil and pain in Indonesia are obviously tragic, but they are not the fault of currency traders,” this occurs in the same article in which he explains that, when the “huge electronic herd of traders … stampedes, small and large countries that have opened their economies up to it can be crushed—far beyond what they deserve.”147 Friedman additionally reasons that, because the hammering of Indonesia by the markets has “exposed and helped topple possibly the most corrupt regime in the world today, led by President Suharto,” the turmoil and pain are—as in Thailand—“no crisis in my book.”148 This is the same Suharto regime, of course, that is defended by Friedman the previous year when the U.S. Congress moves to block the sale of certain fighter jets to Indonesia and to freeze the training of Indonesian military officers in the United States on account of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, where one-third of the population was eliminated in the invasion of 1975 that was also conducted by the Suharto regime. (Friedman opines: “Indonesia is too complex to be a pariah.”149)
The second obstacle to an apology from Friedman for his failed prognostications on Ireland is thus that, given his views on the utility of pain, it is unlikely he detects any fundamental conceptual errors on his part. That the Irish system is, as Kay points out, already clearly failing when Friedman pens his extended ode suggests that reality is accorded minimal importance in Friedmanomics. His reaction to its decisive failure would presumably entail prescriptions for the “Root Canal politics” he urges in 2010 as the necessary response to the global financial recession and the profligacy of the baby boomer generation—defined simultaneously as the offspring of “The Greatest Generation” and the offspring of “the Tooth Fairy.”150
Writing in the context of the hung parliament in the UK and the Greek riots in opposition to forthcoming draconian austerity measures, Friedman declares:
Britain and Greece are today’s poster children for the wrenching new post–Tooth Fairy politics, where baby boomers will have to accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debts tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re headed for intergenerational conflict throughout the West.151
Friedman does not delve into the details of what exactly a Western intergenerational conflict would involve or why it is more worrisome than an inter-class conflict or an international “war of choice”152 on Iraq costing the United States an estimated $3 trillion. As journalist Joshua Holland points out, Friedman’s proclaimed “meta-story” explaining why the events in the UK and Greece may soon be “coming to a theater near you” fails to consider the possibility that 90 percent of U.S. public debt results from past military spending.153
Instead, we learn that the Tooth Fairy is to blame for engaging in “bogus accounting” and for “deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising home values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.”154 However, because we are now in a situation in which “that Tooth Fairy, she be dead,” it apparently follows that the blame for Western debt must be reassigned:
In Britain, everyone over 60 gets an annual allowance to pay heating bills and can ride any local bus for free. That’s really sweet—if you can afford it. But Britain, where 25 percent of the government’s budget is now borrowed, can’t anymore.155
Aside from elderly bus riders, other culprits requiring retaliation include Greeks employed in hazardous professions who have been permitted early retirement with full pensions.156 As for those persons and firms who physically carried out the Tooth Fairy’s bogus accounting and false creation of wealth, financial speculators are rehabilitated into “lords of discipline, the Electronic Herd of bond traders,” also referred to as “Mr. Bond Market of Wall Street and the City of London.”157 Mr. Bond Market is the Tooth Fairy’s sole surviving sibling and the appointed custodian of her progeny—i.e., the overseer of the job cuts, pay cuts, benefit cuts, education cuts, and entitlement cuts that will supposedly spare baby boomers the wrath of their own children.
Friedman’s insistence on the necessity of these punitive measures would not seem to be entirely congruent with his definition of himself as an “Integrationist-Social-Safety-Netter,” one of four identity options contained within the “Friedman matrix of globalization politics” devised in the 1990s.158 The “matrix” consists of two perpendicular lines, the “globalization line” and the “distribution axis.” Friedman invites readers to discover their own compound identities by plotting whether they are Separatists or Integrationists on the first line and whether they are Social-Safety-Netters or Let-Them-Eat-Cakers on the second.159
The metaphor-heavy discussion of the matrix in the (already metaphor-reliant) Lexus results in a cluttered scene of trampolines, trapezes, wheels, and turtles thrown in among Japanese luxury automobiles and olive trees. Suffice it to say that Integrationist-Social-Safety-Netters believe that “we still need traditional safety nets—social security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare—to catch those who simply will never be fast enough or educated enough to deal with the Fast World, but who you don’t want just falling onto the pavement,” since this would inhibit globalization.160 Let-Them-Eat-Cakers meanwhile believe that “globalization is essentially winner take all, loser take care of yourself.”161
Flash forward to 2009 and Friedman’s recognition of the fact that the recession-inducing capitalist system wrongfully “relied upon the risks to the Market and to Mother Nature being underpriced and to profits being privatized in good times and losses socialized in bad times.”162 That Friedman decides that the proper response to this scenario is to further socialize losses suggests the potential utility of a new matrix category such as the “Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too-ers,” especially given that Friedman has been aware at least since 1999 of the hazards of the system:
Global financial crises will be the norm in this coming era. With the speed of change going on today, and with so many countries in different stages of adjustment to this new globalization system, crises will be endemic. So, dear reader, let me leave you with one piece of advice: Fasten your seat belts and put your seat backs and tray tables into a fixed and upright position. Because both the booms and the busts will be coming faster. Get used to it, and just try to make sure that the leverage in the system doesn’t become so great in any one area that it can make the whole system go boom or bust.163
Several years before determining that elderly patrons of the British public transportation system should absorb the fallout from the neoliberal airplane ride, Friedman announces his belief that “history will rank [Tony] Blair as one of the most important British prime ministers ever” for making British liberalism “about embracing, managing and cushioning globalization, about embracing and expanding freedom—through muscular diplomacy where possible and force where necessary—and about embracing fiscal discipline.”164 Blair is alternately praised as the only adult in the room during UN deliberations about Iraq and as someone who is “always leav[ing] you with the impression that for him the Iraq war is just one hammer and one nail in an effort to do tikkun olam,” a Kabbalah concept meaning “to repair the world.”165
The socialization of losses incurred via the adult-like forcible expansion of world-repairing freedom becomes a dubious business, however, when the columnist proposing it acknowledges that “in deciding to throw in Britain’s lot with President Bush on the Iraq war, Mr. Blair not only defied the overwhelming antiwar sentiment of his own party, but public opinion in Britain generally.”166 What is even more intriguing is that Friedman intends this as a reason Blair should be enshrined in history as a top British leader, and salutes his tenacity: “He had no real support group to fall back on. I’m not even sure his wife supported him on the Iraq war. (I know the feeling!)”167
The resulting argument is that it is laudable to promote democracy abroad by anti-democratically taking your country to war. Despite initially throwing in the towel on Iraq in 2006, Friedman continues in the midst of global recession to churn out justifications for the price tag of military excess, and announces in 2009 that, “as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems.”168 The evidence is that “few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda,”169 which once again highlights how much better Friedman’s time would be spent were he to cease repeatedly questioning whether Saddam’s personality is a result of the nature of Iraqi society or vice versa and to instead focus his chicken-or-egg philosophical musings on what came first, the U.S. war or Al Qaeda in Iraq.
This brings us to the third impediment to a Friedman apology on Ireland, which is that, in cases where he does accept some degree of personal miscalculation, he still appears to be under the impression that continuous self-contradiction suffices in lieu of a straightforward admission of error. Following his declaration of 9/11 as the onset of World War III, Friedman complains that the United States has become “the United States of Fighting Terrorism,”170 an entity that makes Friedman check his tweezers at the airport;171 he later surmises that he overreacted to 9/11,172 but nonetheless reaffirms the worthwhile nature of the part of the overreaction that involved outrageously expensive and uncertain pluralism-building experiments resulting in the deaths of over a million Iraqis. Reasoning that “if Disney World can remain an open, welcoming place, with increased but invisible security, why can’t America?,” Friedman announces: “We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back.”173 He meanwhile goes from declaring in April 2003 that “One hopes Americans will now stop overreacting to 9/11. Al Qaeda is not the Soviet Union. Saddam was not Stalin. And terrorism is not communism”174 to warning, less than nine months later, that “as dangerous as the Soviet Union was, it was always deterrable with a wall of containment and with nukes of our own. Because, at the end of the day, the Soviets loved life more than they hated us.”175
No apology ever accompanies acknowledgement of overreaction, nor does Friedman resurrect the details of his prolonged warmongering effort based on “fight[ing] the terrorists as if there were no rules,”176 “us[ing] whatever tactics will make the terrorists feel bad, not make us feel good,”177 and recognizing the occasional Arab need for a “2-by-4 across the side of the head.”178 None of these sentiments is in turn affected by his warning in 2001 that “if we are going to be stomping around the world wiping out terrorist cells from Kabul to Manila, we’d better make sure that we are the best country, and the best global citizens, we can be. Otherwise, we are going to lose the rest of the world.”179 Initial suggestions to Bush regarding the pursuit of optimal U.S. behavior abroad include launching a program for energy independence and donating solar-powered light bulbs with American flag decals on them to African villages, “so when those kids grew up they would remember who lit up their nights.”180
Bush’s response on the global citizen front is, needless to say, largely unsatisfactory, though he does pull through in other areas: “All hail to President Bush for how he has conducted the war against Osama bin Laden.”181 The ensuing upsurge in global anti-Americanism is described as the result of a range of factors, not only the 9/11 transformation of “Puff the Magic Dragon—a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally … into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily,”182 but also the tendency of Arab/Muslim leaders to deflect popular discontent from themselves onto America, as well as “the real reason … that so many people in the world dislike President Bush so intensely,” which is that “they feel that he has taken away something very dear to them—an America that exports hope, not fear.”183
It is debatable, of course, what percentage of people being “militarily touched” by Godzilla have come to the realization that what they are really disgruntled about is Bush’s destruction of their idyllic conception of America. As for European anti-American sentiment, Friedman discovers in 2005 that this is indeed not entirely reducible to “classic Eurowhining,” and that some of the current European discourse vis-à-vis the United States is “very heartfelt, even touching.”184 The following analysis is offered after a round of interviews conducted at a “trendy bar/beauty parlor” in East Berlin: “Europeans love to make fun of naïve American optimism, but deep down, they envy it and they want America to be that open, foreigner-embracing, carefree, goofily enthusiastic place that cynical old Europe can never be.”185
Again, it is impossible to determine the percentage of U.S. inhabitants who would define even pre-9/11 existence in the country as one of goofily carefree enthusiasm. Severe discrepancies in the distribution of wealth and opportunities, for example, are hinted at in Friedman’s scattered mentioning of things like American “inner cities where way too many black males are failing.”186 This occurs as a side note in an article about his younger daughter’s Maryland high school graduation ceremony in which he transcribes thirty-four student names to highlight their “stunning diversity—race, religion, ethnicity” and announces that he is “not yet ready to cede the 21st century to China” because “our Chinese will still beat their Chinese.”187
Friedman is slightly more subdued the following year when Asian names dominate the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute commencement at which he is speaking, and he warns that “if we can’t educate enough of our own kids to compete at this level, we’d better make sure we can import someone else’s, otherwise we will not maintain our standard of living.”188 Friedman sees the “foreigner-embracing”189 nature of the United States, endangered by 9/11, as ensuring continued power and innovative advantage in the midst of the flat-world dichotomy between “high- and low-imagination-enabling countries,”190 and regularly stresses the importance of America’s ability to “skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world.”191 He rues the fact that green cards are not being stapled to the diplomas of foreign students who obtain advanced degrees at U.S. universities, although his magnanimous immigration policy is not limited to the hyper-educated: “I would never turn back a single Haitian boat person.”192
As for black males who have managed to elude failure in inner cities, one of these stars in the concluding paragraphs of The Lexus as proof that “America is not at its best every day, but when it’s good, it’s very, very good.”193 The year is 1994, and Friedman has just attended a Christmastime performance by local elementary school choruses, among them his older daughter’s, which kicked off with the Hanukkah classic “Maoztzur”:
Watching this scene, and hearing that song, brought tears to my eyes. When I got home, my wife, Ann, asked me how it was. And I said to her: “Honey, I just saw a black man dressed up as Santa Claus directing four hundred elementary-school kids singing ‘Maoztzur’ in the town square of Bethesda, Maryland. God Bless America.”194
I highlight such passages not so much to catalog instances of clichéd feel-good nationalism on Friedman’s part but rather because America’s multiethnic identity serves, in his view, as one of the reasons the country is entitled to its position as global role model and educator—in both its Puff the Magic Dragon and Godzilla incarnations.
Friedman’s first tears over 9/11 are incidentally shed, we are told in the “Diary” section of Longitudes and Attitudes, at yet another national appreciation moment taking place in the context of his daughters’ academic and musical formation. This time the event is Back to School Night at Natalie’s junior high, which features “a Noah’s Ark of black, white, and Hispanic kids, singing ‘God Bless America’ and the school orchestra plucking out the National Anthem.”195 Friedman concludes that “Natalie’s school and the World Trade Center actually have a lot in common—both are temples of America’s civic religion,” which is defined as being anchored in the “faith” that everyone can aspire to come to the United States and make of themselves whatever they want.196
The need for a civic religion is, it appears, a result of the failure of “bin Laden & Sons”197 to appreciate that America is not godless and materialistic and that “we are rich and powerful precisely because of our values—freedom of thought, respect for the individual, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, women’s equality, philanthropy, social mobility, self-criticism, experimentation, religious pluralism—not despite them.”198 The similarity between Natalie’s school and the Trade Center, “a place where thousands of people were practicing this civic religion—kissing their spouses good-bye each morning, going off to work, and applying their individual energy in a way that added up to something much larger,” is a function of the number of different nationalities contained therein.199
Potential drawbacks to American values such as freedom of thought are underscored a bit further along in the Longitudes diary when Friedman takes on the “political correctness”200 of college campuses in the United States shortly after 9/11. Making college rounds, he confronts the grim reality that some U.S. academics do indeed disagree with analyses of delicate anthropological phenomena by columnists who end their first post-9/11 dispatch with the words “Semper Fi.”201 However, rather than cast said disagreement as a manifestation of the freedom of ideas, Friedman does exactly the opposite. Proclaiming an “intellectual hijacking” under way that is being conducted by persons disingenuously assigning their own preferred motives to Al Qaeda, such as a concern for Palestinians or a dislike of U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia—the latter motive which Friedman himself incidentally invokes at times—he testifies: “The idea that there are radical Muslims who hate us because they see us as ‘infidels’ and blame us for all the ills that plague their own societies is simply not allowed to be said on most college campuses. Sorry, but this is true.”202
At one campus, Friedman finds his sole ally in the security guard that has been provided him: “He was an off-duty fireman or policeman—I forget. Anyway, he was a wonderfully earthy guy, the sort of cop or fireman America is built on.”203 The issue of freedom of thought meanwhile once again comes into play when, presumably in response to self-flagellating college faculty overcome by the “impulse to blame America first,”204 Friedman declares that his college visits “prompted me to turn to my daughters at the dinner table one evening and tell them, ‘Girls, you can have any view you want—left, right, or center. You can come home with someone black, white, or purple. But you will never come in this house and not love your country and not thank God every day that you were born an American.’ ”205
Another advantage to the civic religion of the United States is that, whenever its “bedrock values are threatened,” various civically religious individuals can be mobilized “into a fist.”206 The multicolored composition of the fist is such that, while on a post-9/11 jaunt to Afghanistan, Friedman experiences a “flash of déjà vu” at Bagram Air Base:
I felt like I was back at Natalie’s Eastern Middle School. I looked around the room at the Special Forces A-teams that were there and could see America’s strength hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t smart missiles or night-fighting equipment. It was the fact that these Special Forces teams each seemed to be made up of a collection of black, Asian, Hispanic, and white Americans.207
The melting pot that is the U.S. military is marveled at time and again, as are the opportunities the institution provides for showcasing the superior U.S. commitment to dismantling traditional gender barriers. At Bagram, for example, Friedman engages in Orientalist exultation over the “mind-bending experience” offered to POWs who have gone from “being in Al Qaeda, living, as James Michener put it, ‘in this cruel land of recurring ugliness, where only men were seen,’ and then suddenly being guarded by a woman with blond locks spilling out from under her helmet and an M16 hanging from her side.”208 In another instance, Friedman advertises a “fascinating article”209 in The Atlantic Monthly about a U.S. F-15 jet fighter with a female bombardier who drops a 500-pound bomb onto a Taliban truck caravan. Friedman summarizes: “As the caravan is vaporized, the F-15 pilot shouts down at the Taliban—as if they could hear him from 20,000 feet—‘You have just been killed by a girl.’”210
Gender-conscious ejaculations by F-15 pilots seemingly unaware that life is not a video game are not, of course, remotely indicative of female empowerment. Undeterred, Friedman collects additional evidence during a visit in 2005 to the U.S.S. Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf that contains not only “blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, [and] Muslims” but also various women officers.211 After speculating as to what local Arab fishermen must think hearing female voices over the Chosin’s loudspeaker and radio, Friedman boasts of U.S. military accomplishments in Iraq: “In effect, we are promoting two revolutions at once: Jefferson versus Saddam and Sinbad versus the Little Mermaids—who turn out to be captains of ships.”212
The fact that the female crew is still conceived of by non-Iraqis in terms of “Little Mermaids” who are simultaneously permitted to serve as ship captains suggests that fundamental obstacles to gender equality still exist in supposedly post-revolutionary societies. Other obstacles to the U.S. army-as-vehicle-for-women’s-rights model include Time Magazine articles that begin: “What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night?”213 According to the 2010 article, the Pentagon estimates that the number of female soldiers sexually assaulted by their male counterparts while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan rose 25 percent from fiscal year 2007–8, and that 80 to 90 percent of sexual assaults in the military go unreported.
Friedman, however, prefers to focus on the cheery cohesion of the armed forces, while devising new ways for America to simultaneously engage in military destruction and societal improvement abroad. Among the most bizarre of these is his “new rule of thumb” proposed in 2010 following a visit to Yemen: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.”214
The new rule of thumb is the product of Friedman’s experience chewing qat—“the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work”215—at a meeting with Yemeni officials, lawmakers, and businessmen, primarily U.S.-educated or with children currently studying in the United States, who complain about the Yemeni education system. Having thus swiftly and scientifically analyzed a country he has never before visited, Friedman urges: “If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”216 It is not explained whether the kindergartens will teach children not to feel anger when Yemeni civilians are killed by U.S. drones.
Friedman’s frequent inclination toward specific cohorts abroad, especially in the Arab/Muslim world, can also be observed in his 2002 publicizing of the existence of “a secularized, U.S.-educated, pro-American elite and middle class in Saudi Arabia, who are not America’s enemies. They are good people, and you can’t visit Saudi Arabia without meeting them.”217 What is implied by such sentence structures is that religious, non-U.S.-educated, and non-elite Saudis are America’s enemies and are not good people, which automatically obliterates the hope that any fragments of human reality might survive Friedman’s prattle.
As for other varieties of U.S.-administered education, Friedman’s solution for quelling the Abu Ghraib torture scandal is to “close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training.”218 He meanwhile swears his commitment to “dismantling Guantánamo Bay and replacing it with a free field hospital for poor Cubans,” a curious solution in a country that already offers free universal health care.219 The real tragedy of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo in Friedman’s view is, of course, that they have exacerbated the lack of “moral authority” on the part of the Bush-Cheney team, which is nonetheless still described in 2007 as possessing “moral clarity.”220
It is important to emphasize that Friedman is often critical of the United States. However, criticism is levied solely to discourage behavior Friedman sees as jeopardizing U.S. power, the maintenance of which remains his supreme goal. For example, his berating of U.S. administrations for failing to launch a green revolution is a result of his conviction that “making America the world’s greenest country is not a selfless act of charity or naïve moral indulgence. It is now a core national security and economic interest,” necessary for restoring the United States to global preeminence.221
As one might expect, Friedman’s view of what qualifies as proper environmentalism is in constant flux. He alternately: demands a Manhattan Project for renewable energy;222 advocates for the import of Brazilian sugar ethanol;223 demands that Europe abandon its opposition to GMOs, “which will be critically important if we want to grow more of our fuel—à la corn ethanol or soy biodiesel”;224 warns against “end[ing] up in a very bad place, like in a crazy rush into corn ethanol, and palm oil for biodiesel”;225 declares that he is “wary of biofuels” and that “what makes sense in Brazil does not make sense in the United States”;226 announces that “all environmentalists have their favorite ‘green’ energy source” and that his is “called coal”;227 cautions: “Let’s make sure that we aren’t just chasing the fantasy that we can ‘clean up’ coal”;228 resurrects the “heretofore specious notion of ‘clean coal’”;229 characterizes a Manhattan Project for clean energy as an “easy sound bite” for politicians and a “cop-out”;230 and advises the Tea Party to improve its image by becoming the Green Tea Party (“I’d be happy to design the T-shirt logo and write the manifesto”).231 Additionally, he goes from harping on Bush for Kyoto Protocol–related unilateralism, “selfishness and hubris”232 to deciding that Kyoto is unfeasible and that if the United States simply unilaterally stages a green revolution, the world will forget its resentment and follow.
In Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Friedman proposes, “with tongue only slightly in cheek,” the following bumper sticker formula to express the goal of a Clean Energy System: “REEFIGDCPEERPC < TTCOBCOG.”233 This stands for “a renewable energy ecosystem for innovating, generating, and deploying clean power, energy efficiency, resource productivity, and conservation < the true cost of burning coal, oil, and gas.”234 A response to Google’s proposed formula of “RE < C—renewable energy cheaper than coal,” it is a rare example of an instance in which Friedman’s normal tendency toward reductionism might have proved more effective.235
As for the Friedman formula according to which “the only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market,” the idea that a system that runs on greed and the exploitation of resources and humans in the interest of profit can somehow provide a solution to the very ills it creates is fanciful, to say the least. In 2006 Friedman reasons that “there is nothing wrong about” China’s (not Mother-Nature-friendly) extraction of natural resources from Latin America because “America and Spain did the same for years—and often rapaciously” and because China’s “voracious appetite … is helping to fuel a worldwide boom in commodity prices that is enabling a poor, low-industrialized country like Peru to grow at 5 percent.”236 For an example of what can happen when commodity booms do not benefit poor people who also possess appetites, see the Arab uprisings of 2011.
Friedman applies the logic of greed in his tirade against the “ridiculous” World Trade Organization protests of 1999, entitled “Senseless in Seattle.”237 Praising the conditions of a particular Victoria’s Secret underwear factory in Sri Lanka that “I would let my own daughters work in,” Friedman lectures the opponents of globalization:
You make a difference today by using globalization—by mobilizing the power of trade, the power of the Internet and the power of consumers to persuade, or embarrass, global corporations and nations to upgrade their standards. You change the world when you get the big players to do the right things for the wrong reasons.238
This particular strategy has already been test-driven in Brazil, where Friedman discovers in 1998 a “global triple threat” to the Pantanal region from “external forces of globalization,” such as international energy companies.239 Ford Motors’ financing of various initiatives in the region by Conservation International is cast as being based on the calculation that “they can sell a lot more Jaguar cars if they are seen as saving the jaguars of the Pantanal,” and Friedman concludes that “if that’s what it takes to save this incredibly beautiful ecosystem and way of life, then God bless Henry Ford and the Internet.”240 There is no detectable concern for the fact that the initiatives do not reverse any of the listed threats or Ford’s contributions to global pollution.241
“Senseless in Seattle II” is meanwhile penned as a follow-up to the original article, which elicits a response from his “environmentalist allies” regarding its depiction of the WTO protests as wholly unserious.242 In the sequel, Friedman permits that “there were some serious groups there raising serious points” but still maintains that it is wrong to oppose the WTO when serious activism can be accomplished by simply ignoring the organization in order to save Flipper and make the Mexicans save him too:
