by MICHAEL ARRIA
It has been over thirty years since readers of the New York Times were first subjected to the vacuous prose of Thomas Friedman. Back then he was simply a reporter covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, not yet the full-formed apologist for Empire…
Journalist Belen Fernandez has done the world a selfless favor and read every word that Friedman ever wrote so that others don’t have to. The result of her foray into this dark world is an infuriating, yet hilarious, polemic called The Imperial Messenger, part of Verso’s Counterblast Series. The book brilliantly deconstructs our subject’s remarkably horrendous views and attempts to pinpoint Friedman’s perplexing allure. I talked to her about the writer Alexander Cockburn calls “the silliest man on the planet.”
I have long been perplexed by the allure of Friedman’s shtick: in many ways he comes off as this no-nonsense guy simply telling it how it is, an act in tune with the Bill O’Reillys of the world, and he certainly shares a lot of the jingoism associated with the Fox News set, yet he is a self-professed “liberal” who definitely positions himself on a more dignified plane. For instance, he compares the Tea Party to Hezbollah. Why do you think so many people, who might scoff at the idea of taking Murdoch journalists seriously, read and appreciate what Friedman does?
It’s curious that Friedman regularly trashes Fox News but then somehow also regularly appears on Fox programs being chummy with the presenters.
I think one of Friedman’s great feats has been to conceal his right-wing tendencies with liberal jargon and a purported concern for social safety nets and other liberal trappings—which of course hasn’t stopped him from advocating for planet-wide entitlement cuts or railing against the ability of elderly Brits to ride local buses for free.
It has been over thirty years since readers of the New York Times were first subjected to the vacuous prose of Thomas Friedman. Back then he was simply a reporter covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, not yet the full-formed apologist for Empire and dispenser of clunky wisdom that we know today. Friedman has been wrong about so many things for so many years and his dubious indiscretions have earned him a handful of Pulitzers, astronomical speaking fees, and (according to a 2011 story in the NYT) President Obama’s ear.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, he actually quite nicely sums up his effort to shift the spectrum of political discourse to the right with his announcement that the Iraq war is “the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the U.S. has ever launched”, an analysis he offers while simultaneously defining himself as “a liberal on every issue other than this war” and the war as part of a “neocon strategy”.
As for the liberal following he has accumulated, I think Mike Whitney explained the phenomenon well in a CounterPunch article:
Friedman offers… outrageously callous judgments using his ‘trademark’ affable tenor that oozes familiarity and hauteur. The normal Friedman article assumes the tone of a friendly stranger, plopped on a neighboring barstool, pontificating on the world’s many intricacies to a less-knowledgeable companion. Isn’t that Friedman? ‘Let me explain the world to you in terms that even you can understand.’ And is he good at it? You bet. American liberals love Friedman; his folksy lingo, his home-spun humor, his engaging anecdotes. Beneath the surface, of course, is the hard-right ethos that pervades his every thought and word but, ‘what the heck’, no one’s perfect.
When I look at how wrong Friedman has been, especially when it comes to foreign policy issues, and how these errors have, seemingly, done nothing to dull the arrogance of his prose, it’s striking. Could you talk a bit about how his positions have been modified without a blip, specifically in relation to his columns on Iraq? He doesn’t exactly have a track record readers should feel comfortable about.
Well, the fact that there was no uproar among Friedman’s following (and not even a peep of objection from Charlie Rose) when Friedman announced on Rose’s show that the entire nation of Iraq needed to “suck. On. This” as punishment for 9/11—after having recently debunked the notion himself of a link between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden—suggests that we are not dealing with a very discerning audience.
Regarding modifications of his positions on certain issues, it becomes glaringly obvious when one reads through the Friedman oeuvre that he is simply not required to maintain a coherent discourse. For example, in 2003 he tells us the Iraq war is “partly about oil”, then later that year he tells us that only “Saddamists” think the war has anything to do with oil, then the next year we are informed that in fact it is the fault of Hummer drivers in the U.S. that American troops are dying in Fallujah.
In 2002 we learn that “For too many years we’ve treated the Arab world as just a big dumb gas station, and as long as the top leader kept the oil flowing, or was nice to Israel, we didn’t really care what was happening to the women and children out back”; in 2005 we learn that “It is not an exaggeration to say that, if you throw in the Oslo peace process, U.S. foreign policy for the last 15 years has been dominated by an effort to save Muslims… from tyrannies, mostly their own theocratic or autocratic regimes”.
Among his fluctuating notions and self-contradictions, Friedman’s most frequent justification for his sustained effort on behalf of the Iraq war was the importance of encouraging a regional democratic model. Reflecting on the war’s effects, one can say from an objective standpoint that Friedman was wrong to support a war-based approach to democracy installation. However, given that the devastation of Iraq and the prolongation of conflict in the region is fundamentally in line with U.S. and Israeli interests, this may explain why his track record has not resulted in a loss of credibility among relevant elite sectors.
Another example of a situation in which Friedman was quite clearly wrong involves his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, which posits that no two countries that both possess McDonald’s establishments have gone to war with each other since acquiring their respective McDonald’s. As I point out in my book, Friedman invokes the Israeli and Lebanese McDonald’s as proof of the theory’s validity, with no regard for the fact that Israel is at the time of writing engaged in a continuing military occupation of south Lebanon punctuated by deadly bombing campaigns. He meanwhile manages to cast the outcome of the war that promptly breaks out between 19 McDonald’s-possessing NATO countries and McDonald’s-possessing Serbia as evidence that the Serbs “wanted to stand in line for burgers, much more than they wanted to stand in line for Kosovo”.
Vice for more