Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

Rainbow Warriors: The Chosin People

“I never sleep well on warships,” begins one column we read recently.⁴ From the very first line, we are thrown off stride. Our head tilts to the left. What is New York Times opinion‐monger Thomas L. Friedman doing on a warship?, we wonder.

Apparently he is a frequent guest of the U.S. fleet.

We don't begrudge Friedman his celebrity. Still, we can't think of anyone who holds himself up to ridicule the way he does; unwittingly—the only way possible for Friedman—he has become a traveling minstrel, singing the praises of the new delusion. His books are best sellers. His column is wisely admired and widely distributed. His sugary views have become ubiquitous; they have done for American intellectual life what Krispy Kreme has done to its diet.

Writing from the USS Chosin, the imperial hallucinator thinks he has discovered yet more evidence of the empire's superiority:

When the Iraqi Navy drops you off on the , a guided missile cruiser, two things just hit you in the face. One is the diversity of the U.S. Navy—blacks, whites, Hispanics, Christians, Jews, atheists, Muslims, all working together, bound by a shared idea, not by an iron fist.

—⁵

Not only is the U.S. Navy generous in offering bed and board to New York Times journalists, it apparently does so to a wide variety of humans, and all on the same condition: They agree to promote and protect the empire.