9/11 are incidentally shed, we are told in the “Diary” section of Longitudes and Attitudes, at yet another national appreciation moment taking place in the context of his daughters’ academic and musical formation. This time the event is Back to School Night at Natalie’s junior high, which features “a Noah’s Ark of black, white, and Hispanic kids, singing ‘God Bless America’ and the school orchestra plucking out the National Anthem.”195 Friedman concludes that “Natalie’s school and the World Trade Center actually have a lot in common—both are temples of America’s civic religion,” which is defined as being anchored in the “faith” that everyone can aspire to come to the United States and make of themselves whatever they want.196
The need for a civic religion is, it appears, a result of the failure of “bin Laden & Sons”197 to appreciate that America is not godless and materialistic and that “we are rich and powerful precisely because of our values—freedom of thought, respect for the individual, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, women’s equality, philanthropy, social mobility, self-criticism, experimentation, religious pluralism—not despite them.”198 The similarity between Natalie’s school and the Trade Center, “a place where thousands of people were practicing this civic religion—kissing their spouses good-bye each morning, going off to work, and applying their individual energy in a way that added up to something much larger,” is a function of the number of different nationalities contained therein.199
Potential drawbacks to American values such as freedom of thought are underscored a bit further along in the Longitudes diary when Friedman takes on the “political correctness”200 of college campuses in the United States shortly after 9/11. Making college rounds, he confronts the grim reality that some U.S. academics do indeed disagree with analyses of delicate anthropological phenomena by columnists who end their first post-9/11 dispatch with the words “Semper Fi.”201 However, rather than cast said disagreement as a manifestation of the freedom of ideas, Friedman does exactly the opposite. Proclaiming an “intellectual hijacking” under way that is being conducted by persons disingenuously assigning their own preferred motives to Al Qaeda, such as a concern for Palestinians or a dislike of U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia—the latter motive which Friedman himself incidentally invokes at times—he testifies: “The idea that there are radical Muslims who hate us because they see us as ‘infidels’ and blame us for all the ills that plague their own societies is simply not allowed to be said on most college campuses. Sorry, but this is true.”202
At one campus, Friedman finds his sole ally in the security guard that has been provided him: “He was an off-duty fireman or policeman—I forget. Anyway, he was a wonderfully earthy guy, the sort of cop or fireman America is built on.”203 The issue of freedom of thought meanwhile once again comes into play when, presumably in response to self-flagellating college faculty overcome by the “impulse to blame America first,”204 Friedman declares that his college visits “prompted me to turn to my daughters at the dinner table one evening and tell them, ‘Girls, you can have any view you want—left, right, or center. You can come home with someone black, white, or purple. But you will never come in this house and not love your country and not thank God every day that you were born an American.’ ”205
Another advantage to the civic religion of the United States is that, whenever its “bedrock values are threatened,” various civically religious individuals can be mobilized “into a fist.”206 The multicolored composition of the fist is such that, while on a post-9/11 jaunt to Afghanistan, Friedman experiences a “flash of déjà vu” at Bagram Air Base:
I felt like I was back at Natalie’s Eastern Middle School. I looked around the room at the Special Forces A-teams that were there and could see America’s strength hiding in plain sight. It wasn’t smart missiles or night-fighting equipment. It was the fact that these Special Forces teams each seemed to be made up of a collection of black, Asian, Hispanic, and white Americans.207
The melting pot that is the U.S. military is marveled at time and again, as are the opportunities the institution provides for showcasing the superior U.S. commitment to dismantling traditional gender barriers. At Bagram, for example, Friedman engages in Orientalist exultation over the “mind-bending experience” offered to POWs who have gone from “being in Al Qaeda, living, as James Michener put it, ‘in this cruel land of recurring ugliness, where only men were seen,’ and then suddenly being guarded by a woman with blond locks spilling out from under her helmet and an M16 hanging from her side.”208 In another instance, Friedman advertises a “fascinating article”209 in The Atlantic Monthly about a U.S. F-15 jet fighter with a female bombardier who drops a 500-pound bomb onto a Taliban truck caravan. Friedman summarizes: “As the caravan is vaporized, the F-15 pilot shouts down at the Taliban—as if they could hear him from 20,000 feet—‘You have just been killed by a girl.’”210
Gender-conscious ejaculations by F-15 pilots seemingly unaware that life is not a video game are not, of course, remotely indicative of female empowerment. Undeterred, Friedman collects additional evidence during a visit in 2005 to the U.S.S. Chosin, a guided-missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf that contains not only “blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, [and] Muslims” but also various women officers.211 After speculating as to what local Arab fishermen must think hearing female voices over the Chosin’s loudspeaker and radio, Friedman boasts of U.S. military accomplishments in Iraq: “In effect, we are promoting two revolutions at once: Jefferson versus Saddam and Sinbad versus the Little Mermaids—who turn out to be captains of ships.”212
The fact that the female crew is still conceived of by non-Iraqis in terms of “Little Mermaids” who are simultaneously permitted to serve as ship captains suggests that fundamental obstacles to gender equality still exist in supposedly post-revolutionary societies. Other obstacles to the U.S. army-as-vehicle-for-women’s-rights model include Time Magazine articles that begin: “What does it tell us that female soldiers deployed overseas stop drinking water after 7 p.m. to reduce the odds of being raped if they have to use the bathroom at night?”213 According to the 2010 article, the Pentagon estimates that the number of female soldiers sexually assaulted by their male counterparts while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan rose 25 percent from fiscal year 2007–8, and that 80 to 90 percent of sexual assaults in the military go unreported.
Friedman, however, prefers to focus on the cheery cohesion of the armed forces, while devising new ways for America to simultaneously engage in military destruction and societal improvement abroad. Among the most bizarre of these is his “new rule of thumb” proposed in 2010 following a visit to Yemen: “For every Predator missile we fire at an Al Qaeda target here, we should help Yemen build 50 new modern schools that teach science and math and critical thinking — to boys and girls.”214
The new rule of thumb is the product of Friedman’s experience chewing qat—“the mildly hallucinogenic leaf drug that Yemeni men stuff in their cheek after work”215—at a meeting with Yemeni officials, lawmakers, and businessmen, primarily U.S.-educated or with children currently studying in the United States, who complain about the Yemeni education system. Having thus swiftly and scientifically analyzed a country he has never before visited, Friedman urges: “If we stick to something close to that ratio of targeted killings to targeted kindergartens, we have a chance to prevent Yemen from becoming an Al Qaeda breeding ground.”216 It is not explained whether the kindergartens will teach children not to feel anger when Yemeni civilians are killed by U.S. drones.
Friedman’s frequent inclination toward specific cohorts abroad, especially in the Arab/Muslim world, can also be observed in his 2002 publicizing of the existence of “a secularized, U.S.-educated, pro-American elite and middle class in Saudi Arabia, who are not America’s enemies. They are good people, and you can’t visit Saudi Arabia without meeting them.”217 What is implied by such sentence structures is that religious, non-U.S.-educated, and non-elite Saudis are America’s enemies and are not good people, which automatically obliterates the hope that any fragments of human reality might survive Friedman’s prattle.
As for other varieties
