The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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car and crash into it anyway”—an option that would seem to have been obviated by removal of the Bush team’s navigational instrument.36 A different sort of metaphorical pile-up occurs when Friedman visits Afghanistan, and readers are bombarded with an image of Kabul as a smashed cake-like Liberia-esque Ground Zero East covered with snow, ice, and aspects of Dresden, the Beirut Green Line, and Hiroshima.37
Alas, the point of this book is not to laugh at Friedman’s bungled metaphors, or the number of times he devises foreign policy prescriptions based on experiences in hotel rooms, restaurants, and airplanes. Rather, it is to demonstrate the defectiveness in form and in substance of his disjointed discourse, and in doing so offer a testament to the degenerate state of the mainstream media in the United States.
Friedman’s reporting is replete with hollow analyses (e.g., an American victory in Afghanistan is possible as long as it recognizes that “Dorothy, this ain’t Kansas”38) and factual inaccuracies, ranging from the relatively trivial (Chile shares a border with Russia but Poland does not39) to the sort of deliberate obfuscation of fact that is condoned by the establishment (the Palestinians were offered 95 percent of what they wanted at Camp David). Self-contradictions abound, and, two hundred pages into The World Is Flat, Friedman defines Globalization 1.0 as the era in which he was required to physically visit an airline ticket office in order to make his travel arrangements—whereas, according to the definition he provides at the start of the book, Globalization 1.0 ended around the year 1800.40
As for contradictions in matters of greater geopolitical consequence, these include the aforementioned continuous adding and subtracting of motives for the Iraq war, which is alternately characterized as evidence of the moral clarity of the Bush administration, evidence of the U.S. military’s ability to make Iraqis “Suck. On. This,”41 and simultaneously a neoconservative project and “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched”42—indicating that “the left needs to get beyond its opposition to the war and start pitching in with its own ideas and moral support to try to make lemons into lemonade in Baghdad.”43 The supremely liberal nature of the war is especially confounding given that Friedman also defines himself as “a liberal on every issue other than this war.”44
Whatever era of globalization we are currently in, it is one in which news professionals are increasingly poised to influence the outcomes of the very world events they are reporting. Friedman’s contributions are not limited to Iraq, as is clear from the following passage from veteran British reporter Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East:
How many journalists encouraged the Israelis—by their reporting or by their willfully given, foolish advice—to undertake the brutal assaults on the Palestinians? On 31 March 2002—just three days before the assault on Jenin—Tom Friedman wrote in The New York Times that “Israel needs to deliver a military blow that clearly shows terror will not pay.” Well, thanks, Tom, I said to myself when I read this piece of lethal journalism a few days later. The Israelis certainly followed Friedman’s advice.45
That Friedman discredits himself as a journalist by championing the killing of civilians has not prevented him from being hailed as a master of the trade, an objective commentator on the Middle East, and a foreign policy sage sought out by Barack Obama in times of international uncertainty (such as the 2011 Arab uprisings, when Obama is presumably pleased to discover that he himself is one of the catalysts of the very uprisings he is seeking to understand46). Friedman appears as required reading on university syllabi and receives compensation in the form of $75,000 for public speaking appearances.47 He occupies slot No. 33 on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2010, accompanied by the reminder that “Friedman doesn’t just report on events; he helps shape them”—despite minor setbacks such as the disastrous fate recently met by his thoughts on the Irish economy.48
Friedman’s latest incarnation as award-winning conservationist has spawned a whole new level of irony as he has endeavored to reconcile this identity with preceding ones: “The neocon strategy may have been necessary to trigger reform in Iraq and the wider Arab world, but it will not be sufficient unless it is followed up by what I call a ‘geo-green’ strategy.”49 Readers may question how many true “geo-greens” would advocate the tactical contamination of the earth’s soil with depleted uranium munitions. Why not introduce a doctrine of neoconservationism?
A more critical question, of course, is how a journalist whose professional qualifications include rhetorical incoherence has nonetheless ascended to an internationally recognized position as media icon. (Friedman even suggests at one point that Osama bin Laden has been perusing his column.50) Hardly a fluke, Friedman’s accumulation of influence is a direct result of his service as mouthpiece for empire and capital, i.e., as resident apologist for U.S. military excess and punishing economic policies.
Naturally, Friedman is far from alone when it comes to co-opted media figures providing a veneer of independent validation to state and corporate hegemonic endeavors in which they are entirely complicit. Friedman’s exceptionalism lies simply in the extent of his symbiosis with centers of power. Let us briefly reconsider the evolution of The World Is Flat, which begins with Friedman’s hobnobbing with the Infosys CEO in Bangalore.
A favorable profile of Friedman from a 2006 edition of the Washingtonian specifies that Friedman’s flat-world theory was developed in collaboration with the vice president of corporate strategy at IBM, and that—in addition to remaining on The New York Times bestseller list for over a year—the book “jump-started a national debate over American competitiveness that was picked up in President Bush’s State of the Union address.”51 An article from the Financial Times website the previous year meanwhile announces Friedman’s receipt of the first annual £30,000 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for The World Is Flat; Friedman is quoted as repaying the compliment by declaring the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs “two such classy organizations, who take business and business reporting seriously. I’m thrilled and honoured because the judges who made this award are such an esteemed group.”52
Among the “esteemed” components of the “classy” Wall Street firm is executive Lloyd Blankfein, a member of the judge’s panel for Friedman’s award who, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown, reiterated his commitment to serious business by lying under oath to Congress about Goldman’s classy defrauding of clients. In an indispensable exposé for Rolling Stone, investigative journalist Matt Taibbi provides the following analogy about the firm’s self-enriching exploitation, “at the expense of society,” of the meltdown it helped to create:
Goldman, to get $1.2 billion in crap off its books, dumps a huge lot of deadly mortgages on its clients, lies about where that crap came from and claims it believes in the product even as it’s betting $2 billion against it. When its victims try to run out of the burning house, Goldman stands in the doorway, blasts them all with gasoline before they can escape, and then has the balls to send a bill overcharging its victims for the pleasure of getting fried.53
Friedman, despite criticizing U.S. investment banks in 2008 for deviating from the corporate ethics set forth in his friend Dov Seidman’s book How: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life), by bundling together risky mortgage bonds in order to “engineer money from money,”54 continues throughout 2008 and 2009 to quote Goldman Sachs executives and analysts on how the U.S. government should respond to the financial crisis—namely by throwing more billions at banks.55 It is not until 2010 that Friedman directly denounces Goldman as “the poster boy for banks behaving by ‘situational values’—exploiting whatever the situation, or rules that it helped to write, allowed.”56 Another Seidman concept, situational values are the opposite of “sustainable values” and are consistently decried by Friedman, who fails to explain how intermittent denunciation of Goldman Sachs is indicative of a sustainable value system. He meanwhile continues to campaign against entitlements and to encourage the slashing of corporate and payroll taxes,57 policies obviously not designed to punish the poster boy.
Aside from Blankfein, the judging panel for the 2005 FT–Goldman Sachs award also happens to include the Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys, star of The World Is Flat. Though £30,000 may be an insignificant sum for a character who accumulates at least seven