Great news, Friedman haters! Tomorrow is the official release of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedmanat Work by Belén Fernández.  It’s the book I was born to read (or write, if I was smarter and not so lazy).   Get this: Ms.  Fernández actually read every Tom Friedman column since 1995 — 3 times each!  I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy so I fanboyed Ms. Fernández a slew of questions and she was gracious enough to answer.  Part 1 of our interview is below.  I’ll  post part 2 in the next day or two.  To learn more about the book, please visit: http://www.versobooks.com/books/1024-the-imperial-messenger.

Why Tom Friedman? And can you talk a little about how the book is organized?

My decision to write the book was not the product of any sort of long-standing obsession with Thomas Friedman, whose journalistic exploits I remained mercifully immune to for most of my existence up until 2009.

Then, about midway through that year, the idea came to me suddenly when I noticed the $125 “Russian breakfast” option on the room-service menu at my five-star Havana hotel.

going on safari in Botswana.

Later that same year, Friedman’s decades-long lecture to the Arab/Muslim world on how to behave reached new levels of absurdity with his pronouncement according to which:

A corrosive mind-set has taken hold since 9/11. It says that Arabs and Muslims are only objects, never responsible for anything in their world, and we are the only subjects, responsible for everything that happens in their world. We infantilize them.

Arab and Muslims are not just objects. They are subjects. They aspire to, are able to and must be challenged to take responsibility for their world.

Arab/Muslim subjectivity was of course called into question not only by the fact that Friedman in this very same article instructed the Islamic world to engage in a civil war equal in ferocity to the US civil war, but also by the fact that—approximately 10 days prior to criticizing the infantilizing of Arabs and Muslims—he had remarked to an amused Fareed Zakaria of CNN that Afghanistan was like a “special needs baby” adopted by the US. (Friedman had refrained in this case from throwing in his regular complaint that the US was “baby-sitting a civil war” in Iraq—a complaint he apparently felt was not irreconcilable with his own declaration of the need for an Iraqi civil war.)

Anyway, it was this imperialist hubris and unabashed Orientalism that originally motivated me to write the book, which stars Friedman as mascot for the degenerate mainstream media in the US. Friedman’s treatment of the Arab/Muslim world is the subject of the book’s second section; the first deals with his views on the need for US dominance in the world and the third deals with his special relationship with Israel.

Did you really read every Friedman column since 1995?  For me, getting through two a week is challenging enough.  What was that like? Were there surprises?  Was there a point when you were like, “What did I get myself into?”

Read More: http://www.nytexaminer.com/2011/11/the-imperial-messenger-tom-friedman-at-work-an-interview-with-belen-fernandez/