Tom Friedman Approves Of, and Believes In, America.

The world is flat.  Get rid of GM, it’s a dinosaur.  To hell with its millions of workers and retirees and the people who depend on their wages and pensions; to hell with the entire state of Michigan.  Find a new Google and give it a bailout while it’s still a nonexistent start-up.  Asia is coming.  Must clobber Asia.  America: yea!

These the basic theses of Friedman’s last year or so of columns.  Today’s is a real doozie: it’s all that and more.  He’s in Seoul, chatting with “thinkers” about how awesome it is for America to be more powerful than everyone.  Meanwhile, the South Korean currency has plummeted by 40% and it’s economy has hit the shitter.

Perhaps his most breathtaking bit is our sudden need to attack North Korea, because God knows the US doesn’t have enough on its plate right now.  While refraining from telling North Korea to “Suck. On. This.” in reference to American power, Friedman openly advocates raining war on an alread-isolated nation should it launch another ineffective rocket, as if that were the option left to us after years of sweetheart deals and the Candyland diplomacy we’ve been playing.

But way, way before that is a series of paeans to American greatness and how the present crisis, with its global consequences, cries out for American leadership to solve it.  That’s not how things work.  That’s the plot resolution to “Independence Day.”

Behold the elegant cadences as he elucidates the need for perpetual American dominance of the globe:

It was always easy to complain about a world of too much American power as long as you didn’t have to live in a world of too little American power. And right now, that is the danger: a world of too little American power.

And reporting verbatim an anonymous Korean functionary’s breathless praise for America [ellipsis his].

“No other country can substitute for the U.S.,” a senior Korean official remarked to me. “The U.S. is still No. 1 in military, No. 1 in economy, No. 1 in promoting human rights and No. 1 in idealism. Only the U.S. can lead the world. No other country can. China can’t. The E.U. is too divided, and Europe is militarily far behind the U.S. So it is only the United States … We have never had a more unipolar world than we have today.”

Umm…2 of the 4 things in which the US is number 1 in are actually unquantifiable.  And I hardly think we’re the number one in promoting human rights.

The big trading nations, like South Korea, are particularly nervous that America will succumb to economic protectionism, which would undermine the global trading system.

Right: the rest of the world is quaking because the less powerful a country is, the likelier it will be that the economic calamity will do serious damage.  And a tool in our arsenal to help us weather the storm we’ve created might compound the harm to others.  So naturally there are government officials in South Korea and other places quivering with fear over what the US might do.  It’s in their interest to blow some smoke up our ass via this douche from the Times when he passes through on one of his lucrative peregrinations extolling America’s amazingness.

But it’s the emphasis on military power that’s most disturbing.  This is a financial crisis!  Why do we need to remind everyone of our big stick so badly?

Well, if the Friedmans of the world would have it, it’s nice to have comforting theories about world affairs like how countries that have a McDonald’s never fight each other.  But when push comes to shove, that flattened and globalized world of ours responds best to force and the treat of the US using it to get what it wants–but since we’re so amazing, our interests align rather well with what’s best for the continued flattening and globalization of the world, of course.

That’s why raw, naked applications of the US’s unrivaled ability to maim bodies and turn middle-class countries into corrupt hellholes always linger in the shadows of any Thomas L. Friedman column.  That comes with the territory of being the gentlest neocon, and the one with the most prominent soapbox.

Friedman is both blind and twisted.  His benevolent-sounding, platitudinous regard for the US and its continued role in the world are goals shared with the Project for the New American Century: unending dominion over the earth.

Even when the need to reassert our ability to do it originates in a crisis of our own manufacture.

Friedman/Fried Man

All I can really say about Tom Friedman’s column on Muslim extremism in India is that it vaults to new heights of the insipid.  It’s supremely lazy and bereft of insight.  I’m sure it’s not easy to have to furnish the adoring world with 700-word pearl twice weekly but Paul Krugman does it and he’s a full-time professor on top of that.  So if it’s too hard, do give it up.

Except for Friedman’s access to the Mumbai morgue, everything about this could have been written by an earnest high school senior who’s never left the US.  Plus, you could basically switch out India for Israel and Pakistan for Palestine and the rest of the column could stay the same:

The only effective way to stop this trend is for “the village” — the Muslim community itself — to say “no more.” When a culture and a faith community delegitimizes this kind of behavior, openly, loudly and consistently, it is more important than metal detectors or extra police. Religion and culture are the most important sources of restraint in a society.

That’s why India’s Muslims, who are the second-largest Muslim community in the world after Indonesia’s, and the one with the deepest democratic tradition, do a great service to Islam by delegitimizing suicide-murderers by refusing to bury their bodies. It won’t stop this trend overnight, but it can help over time.

“The Muslims of Bombay deserve to be congratulated in taking this important decision,” Raashid Alvi, a Muslim member of India’s Parliament from the Congress Party, said to me. “Islam says that if you commit suicide, then even after death you will be punished.”

The fact that Indian Muslims have stood up in this way is surely due, in part, to the fact that they live in, are the product of and feel empowered by a democratic and pluralistic society. They are not intimidated by extremist religious leaders and are not afraid to speak out against religious extremism in their midst.

It is why so few, if any, Indian Muslims are known to have joined Al Qaeda. And it is why, as outrageously expensive and as uncertain the outcome, trying to build decent, pluralistic societies in places like Iraq is not as crazy as it seems. It takes a village, and without Arab-Muslim societies where the villagers feel ownership over their lives and empowered to take on their own extremists — militarily and ideologically — this trend will not go away.

I realize the irony of including a very long excerpt to prove how boring and unenlightening a particular column is, but the point is the same.  The interchangeability of wisdom from supposed experts might actually be one reason why discourse on such conflicts is so fraught with dishonest, self-serving or unexamined ideas, and why these wars seem intractable.

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Oh, fuck it.  Tom Friedman is dumb.  Gross fried things are better.  So look at thisiswhyyourefat instead, it’s totally amazing.

The bacon cheese pizza burger looks like Pac-Man had an autopsy.

Tom Friedman’s Use of the Word “We”

So Tom Friedman went to Davos and wrote us all a little column about his experiences there.  Well, except that the entire column is devoid of anything to do with being present at the World Economic Forum, unlike this “Editorial Notebook” piece on the ed page, which is highly critical of Davos.  That’s kind of a strange omission.  Tom Friedman, purveyor of chitchat with movers and shakers on a galactic scale, has nothing to report from the preeminent meeting of globalization’s staunchest advocates.

Is this because the stirrings of remorse in his recent columns have hit a fever pitch and he’s basically renounced the WEF as a dog-and-pony show that accomplishes absolutely nothing and where business leaders pay exorbitant admission fees for influence over heads of state?

No, not really.  The column more or less cobbles together things you already knew if you haven’t had your head so far up your ass that the name Bernie Madoff means nothing.  If you exceed that standard, there’s not much else to glean.

But the juxtaposition of cliches is truly sterling!  With a title like “Elvis Has Left the Mountain,” you can be sure you’re in for a real hootenanny of mixed metaphors.  They’re strung together like pearls on which the washing is hung out to dry in the transparency-inducing sunlight of a leaner, greener future.  Or some shit.  Suck on this gem:

A broker friend told me [the financial crisis] reminded him of when he was a teenager and his doctor first diagnosed him as unable to digest wheat products.  He said to the doctor, “Well, just give me a pill.”  And the doctor told him: there is no pill.   “You mean, I’m just going to have to live with this?” he asked.  That’s us.  There is no pill — not for this mess.

The fact that there is no single pill doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done.  We need a stimulus big enough to create more jobs.  We need to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets.  We need the Treasury to close the insolvent banks, merge the weak ones and strengthen the healthy few.  And we need to do each one right.  But even then, the turnaround will be neither quick nor painless.  Indeed, the whispers here were what has been an exclusively economic crisis up to now may soon morph into a domino of political crises – as happened in Iceland, where the bankruptcy of the banks toppled the government on Monday.

(Davos humor: What is the capital of Iceland?  About $25).

Second, we’re going to have to get used to a lack of trust…Never before in my adult life have I looked around at every bank in my town and said, “I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to put my paycheck in a mattress.”

Paraphrase: I have a friend who grew up to be one of the people that got us in this mess.  I may or may not have spoken to him at Davos.  When he was a teenager, he spoke to doctors with the flip, arrogant sense of entitlement that underpinned the failures of global finance.  Our future, which has to be gluten-free, will require more than a simple catch-all answer or “pill.”

Specifically, my three-fold solution is an incredibly vague version of what people have been already advocating for months except I refrain from words like nationalization because they alarm Davos attendees who might pull their shrunken but nonetheless vast capital to safer havens.  Trust me, I’m an adult.

We need to do what I say–and what’s more, do it correctly–or else there is a chance that there could be consequences for governments.  Like the consequences that already happened in a peripheral European nation now run by a lesbian and which I will proceed to joke about as a means of telegraphing to you, my readers who are sitting in this auditorium with me, that I remain as ever one of you, gleefully above the suffering that your actions and my boundless cheerleading of them can bring, even to the most prosperous corners of the earth.

And whenever I say we you can be sure I mean, “We the powerful, whose power must continue,” unless I use the word we in the sense of “We are just going to have to live with it,” in which case I mean we as in “Everyone living in a country that permits investing,” a group in which my personal responsibility can be diluted to invisibility.  In any case, there is nothing wrong with the World Economic Forum in Davos, which I really like attending, and any association of it with the fucked-up shit about the world today represents a major logical fallacy on your part.

Thanks, Tom!

Media Circle Jerk

I blame VH1 for the resurgence of meaningless lists over the past decade, since they started with the 100 Greatest Bands of All Time.  (None was more self-serving and ridiculous than Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, which had “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones at no. 1 and no. 2).

But this is bad too.  Forbes ranked the 25 Most Influential Liberals now that Obama’s in charge.  Some are good (Rachel Maddow, Jon Stewart, Matthew Yglesias, Kos) and some are a little inexplicable (I would hesitate to categorize Oprah with the rest of them; I would relegate her to the category of the social rather than to the political, in academic terms.  And no Olbermann?  I don’t like him but he’s def waxing gibbous).

And some are awful–and they’re mostly towards the top.  Maureen Dowd is in there, presumably at her scratching post.  Chris Matthews, also listed.  As is Christopher Hitchens, which shows you that being an atheist is so freakish and unacceptable in America that supporting Bush and advocating torture won’t get a nonbeliever listed as a neocon. Andrew Sullivan?  Oh right, you can’t call yourself a conservative and also be one if you’re gay.

And Tom Friedman is no. 4.  Why, why, why.  At least Paul Krugman is no. 1.  (His column today is pretty good, by the way).  A Nobel trumps two Pulitzers.

I think Forbes felt left out by a few inaugural parties and wanted to remind people they they service other purposes besides telling them how much money they’re losing.  Namely, informing the glitterati how great they are.  Oh, the politics of politics.

Tom Friedman, Yesterday

It’s beyond axiomatic that you can’t make a living off of writing.  However, if you’re Tom Friedman, you can make a very lucrative living off of writing extremely shittily.  In spite of his noxious, self-serving ideas, I really will never stop my pointless crusade against him on the grounds that he simply can’t write at all.

In yesterday’s column, about the economic stimulus, he writes:

If China and America each give birth to a pig – a big, energy-devouring, climate-spoiling stimulus hog – our kids are done for.  It will be the burden of their lifetimes.  If they each give birth to a gazelle – a lean, energy-efficient and innovation-friendly stimulus – it will be the opportunity of their lifetimes.

Much has gone afoul here.  First, gazelles are agnostic on innovation, as far as I can tell.  Second, the pig seems to eat a stimulus while the gazelle…is a stimulus.  Third, references to “our kids” probably need to be taken as “people who are currently children or who are not yet born” although the median age of a newspaper reader is like ninety-three, so their children are currently adults who will not be inheriting the consequences of “our” stimulus decisions.  So those decisions probs won’t be the opportunity of a lifetime (hyperbole alert) to those who are already middle-aged or not yet alive.  And note how China’s potential bad decision could create huge problems for “our kids,” when the situation at hand is mostly the US’s fault.  I mean, damn.

Goddamnit, doesn’t this man have copy editors?  This is the same NY Times that still says Web site instead of website, so you’d think they’d be sticklers for precision and accuracy.

In terms of actual substance, the column advocates abolishing federal income taxes for public school teachers and double the salaries of math and science teachers so we’re better prepared for stomping on Asia, Friedman’s bete-noire and the continent we will always need to be beating somehow.

Except, what we really need are mathematicians, engineers and scientists.  No tax break for you people, though.  Bunch of nerds.  You get nothing.  Just teachers, of whom we all have fond memories and one of whom is married to Tom Friedman.  Basically, this reasoning is as simplistic as Bill O’Reilly’s, only he isn’t screaming about Reverend Wright or Plaxico Burress.  I mean, how un-clever and un-ingenious are these proposals, really?  This is what he came up with.  He’s such a middlebrow demagogue.  He reminds me of me when I’m really drunk, only he’s not arguing that gay people should get over marriage or that the US should have full employment.  That would be radical.  And to Thomas L. Friedman, anything to the left of Thomas L. Friedman is radical, or loony, or not-serious.  Ask David Brooks.

Lastly, in the print version, the headline-that-goes-in-the-middle-of-the-column-to-catch-your-eye-by-digesting-its-thesis (or whatever the fuck it’s called) reads Can we have a stimulus that also stimulates? Oh, the wordplay.  I’m dazzled!

Broken Clock Reads Actual Time

Thomas L. Friedman’s column today is quite accurate.  Pleasantly so.  Unfortunately, the requisite Cliche/Mixed Metaphor is actually two cliches, which earned their own paragraph:

Have a nice day. It’s morning again — in Saudi Arabia.

But the rest is good.  The alignment of bad writing with a trenchant analysis of the need for a national gas tax is almost as disturbing as the fact that I filled up my mother’s SUV for about $35 even after coasting beyond E.

Why is it so unsettling that this man would be right?  Partly, it’s because his column kind of undermines his general thesis, expounded over the years: that private enterprise and free trade are good, so good that the function of the US government should be to do whatever necessary, even make war on and wreck the entire world, to keep us competitive with–meaning richer than and militarily unchallenged by–Asia.  Today, he writes:

It makes no sense for Congress to pump $13.4 billion into bailing out Detroit — and demand that the auto companies use this cash to make more fuel-efficient cars — and then do nothing to shape consumer behavior with a gas tax so more Americans will want to buy those cars. As long as gas is cheap, people will go out and buy used S.U.V.’s and Hummers.

There has to be a system that permanently changes consumer demand, which would permanently change what Detroit makes, which would attract more investment in battery technology to make electric cars, which would hugely help the expansion of the wind and solar industries — where the biggest drawback is the lack of batteries to store electrons when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining. A higher gas tax would drive all these systemic benefits.

Permanent change of consumer demand?  Whoa now, that’s some serious statism you’re calling for.  It almost sounds like the thing we will never, ever have: industrial policy.  While Friedman isn’t someone who shrieks “socialism!” at every proposal that doesn’t showcase a tax cut for the haves, it’s still surprising given how he champions unfettered globalization.  This would be the very opposite of Letting the Market Decide.

He deserves credit for calling for a national gas tax many times over the years.  But this column’s purpose is to challenge what he sees as the political consensus wherein higher taxes are completely unacceptable–a bipartisan credo reinforced by the axiom that you don’t raise taxes during recessions.  Why are things this way?  Because the Thomas L. Friedmans of the world have been clamoring for years for anti-statist and Clintonian tax structures.  As “liberals,” they aren’t inclined to calling people too poor to pay any income tax at all “lucky duckies,” nor do they advocate ridiculous things like abolishing the capital gains tax (particularly in a year like 2008, when nobody has any capital gains).  That’s a liberal in the traditional media: someone who peppers his conservative corporatism with horrified protest against the truly hideous right-wing ideas, drawing the line at himself or herself and lecturing the Democrats to inch no further.

Friedman recognized that war(s) in the Middle East would generate millions of people who hate the US and who live, unemployed and uneducated, in corrupt petrogarchies with high birth rates.  But, weighing that against the possibility of retracted American wealth and influence, he “reluctantly” supported the neocon wet dreams of the ’00s.

Now, sunnily as ever, he repeats his call for a gas tax, for all the right reasons.  And phasing it in at $.10/month over a year is pretty smart, too.  But if it looks like even a President Obama, with 82% approval 3 weeks before taking office, might lack the political capital to overcome the resistance, it’s partly because pro-corporate, pro-empire “liberals” with prominent soapboxes have actively tugged the already-drifting discourse rightward for years.

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Also, check this delicious auto-petard-hoisting of Friedman out.  Totes hilaire.

Tom Friedman is an idiot who can’t write

The lead paragraph to Thomas L. Friedman’s column today:

So, I was speaking to an Iranian friend about what a mind-bending thing it must be for people in the Middle East to see Americans, seven years after 9/11, electing someone named Barack Hussein Obama as president. America is surely the only nation that could — in the same decade — go to war against a president named Hussein (Saddam of Iraq), threaten to use force against a country whose most revered religious martyr is named Hussein (Iran) and then elect its own president who’s middle-named Hussein.

Is this a great country or what?

Isn’t this a terrible op-ed or what?  Maybe it’s just ambiguous wording, but it sounds as if behind the “Gosh!  America is just so darn great!” thesis there is equal admiration for Obama’s winning as there is for the US’s war-mongering ways.

Hussein is a common name.  This is like marveling over how Illinois and Oregon, two states with cities called Springfield, could be so different.  I mean, one is really flat and the other is a big lesbian.  And that’s the only salient fact about either of them.  Amazing.

I guess when you think every country in the world is simple and one-dimensional, and you can simultaneously be the expert on them all, the slightest bit of complexity might really startle you–into reaffirming your belief in American exceptionalism.