The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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business and business reporting. The process of mutual aggrandizement in this case is straightforward: Friedman writes book about globalization under guidance of corporate executives, corporate executives hail book as ingenious blueprint for world, accolades propel Friedman’s fame, Friedman exploits fame to further reinforce elite power structures while occasionally attributing his project to more sentimental motivations such as those cited in The World Is Flat:
When done right and in a sustained manner, globalization has a huge potential to lift large numbers of people out of poverty. And when I see large numbers of people escaping poverty in places like India, China, or Ireland, well, yes, I get a little emotional.59
As for Friedman’s genuine motivations, he regularly advertises his subscription to billionaire investor Warren Buffett’s theory that everything he has achieved in life is a result of having been born in the United States, and reiterates his duty to pass his situation on to his children. Given that the overwhelming majority of offspring produced in the United States—not to mention the world—cannot aspire to situations that involve belonging to one of the country’s hundred richest families, it goes without saying that Friedman fully endorses the perpetuation of a system of institutionalized economic inequality.
As he himself notes in The Lexus and the Olive Tree with regard to the “Darwinian brutality” of free-market capitalism: “Other systems may be able to distribute and divide income more efficiently and equitably, but none can generate income to distribute as efficiently.”60 Friedman’s tendency to convert victims of imposed economic systems into victims of natural selection is symptomatic of his categorical dismissal of the realities affecting the global poor (see, for example, his response to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz’s observation in 2006 that “The number of people living in poverty in Africa in the last 20 years has doubled” with the statement: “But India matters”61). Such tendencies are meanwhile rendered all the more grating by Friedman’s occasional assumption of the role of capitalist victim himself, as in the following scenario from 1998:
While waiting to see if the U.N. Secretary General’s 11th-hour visit to Iraq can avert a war, I sought some diversion by catching up on the sports news. Talk about depressing. If you want to see how the other great superpower at work in the world today—the unfettered markets—is reshaping our lives and uprooting communities, turn to sports.62
The superior depressiveness in this case is in part a result of adverse effects of unfettered markets on Friedman’s NBA season tickets, such as that “teams are being forced to trade away high-priced stars left and right.”63
Friedman’s prophecies and directives do not all emerge from the depths of corporate libido. He is also equipped with a “brain trust,”64 a group of academics, experts, and rabbis with predictable views who are personal friends of Friedman and are quoted so regularly at times that one finds oneself wondering, for example, if Johns Hopkins professor Michael Mandelbaum, Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen, and Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi might not be nominated honorary New York Times columnists. Mandelbaum and Cohen also share the distinction of being Friedman’s “soul mates and constant intellectual companions,”65 while Cohen is graced with the additional denomination “soul brother.”66
As late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said notes in his 1989 essay “The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps Up the Middle East”—in reference to Friedman’s blissful reductions of Arabo-Islamic peoples in From Beirut to Jerusalem—Friedman “palms off his opinions (and those of his sources) as reasonable, uncontested, secure. In fact they are minority views and have been under severe attack for several decades now.”67 Other passages from Said’s essay are useful for comprehending the triumph of the persona of Thomas Friedman on the journalistic stage:
It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner … It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility—qualities that may explain [From Beirut to Jerusalem]’s startling commercial success. It’s as if … what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks.68
As for what happens when Friedman himself thinks that Iraqis should “Suck. On. This” as compensation for 9/11, we can only assume that haughty refrains of sexual-military domination find resonance among audiences seeking to defy feelings of individual and/or national inadequacy. It is meanwhile not clear why Friedman subsequently purports to be scandalized by the sexual-military goings-on at Abu Ghraib.
In this book, I draw primarily from Friedman’s dispatches as New York Times foreign affairs columnist (1995–present) and his five books. I draw to a lesser extent from his pre-1995 articles and from select interviews and public appearances.69 (Iraqis may be interested to know, however, that contemporary inciters of bloodshed have in past decades pursued more innocuous subjects, such as how “Iowa Beef Revolutionized Meat-Packing Industry.”70) Section I of the book, “America,” will focus on Friedman’s view of the role of the United States on this earth. Section II, “The Arab/Muslim World,” will address Friedman’s commitment to Orientalist traditions, with a focus on his post-9/11 radicalization and the war on terror. Section III, “The Special Relationship,” will deal with Friedman’s double standards vis-à-vis Israel.
Regarding the future of the Friedman phenomenon, a television anchor from Israel’s Channel 2 informs him during a 2010 interview that he is an “endangered species” and poses the question: “Ten years from now, will an institution like Thomas Friedman be possible?”71 She is referring not to the possibility that by the year 2020 journalists who assign “moral clarity” to George W. Bush will no longer receive Pulitzer Prizes for “clarity of vision,” but rather to current trends away from print media.72
Friedman laughs and suggests that the substance of his work will ensure his continued relevance. But you never know. After all, as Friedman himself has reasoned, it would be crazy to pay a lot of money for a belt if you already have suspenders, “especially if that belt makes it more likely your pants will fall down.”73
1 AMERICA
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,