The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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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.