The Imperial Messenger. B. Fernandez
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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