The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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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