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 This, of course, is the exact inverse of the argument from 2002, and is not compatible with the idea that free markets reduce poverty or, obviously, walls—which are supposed to be being blown down by Friedman’s “flat-world platform.”91
In 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
