Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman's Computer

[stefano]

They Pretend to Think, We Pretend to Listen

Ken Silverstein

Try to conjure up the dullest, most vapid intellectual experience you can possibly imagine. A Matthew Perry film festival. A boxed set of Kenny G’s entire discography. Al Gore “in conversation” with Wolf Blitzer.

Now imagine something worse. Far, far worse. Once you’ve hit the speculative bottom of the unexamined life, you’d be hard pressed to outdo Thomas Friedman holding forth on “Climate Change and the Arab Spring.” What’s still more disturbing is that Friedman’s maunderings—unlike the foregoing litany of intellectual failures—actually took place, and were recorded for posterity, during a panel event this February at the Center for American Progress, America’s most influential liberal think tank. The great globalizing muse of the New York Times op-ed page was joined on stage by Anne-Marie Slaughter, the Princeton University professor and former State Department deputy to Hillary Clinton.

You may be assured that the trite speculations came fast, flat, and furious. Between numerous mentions of his 2008 book Hot, Flat, and Crowded (not to be confused with 2005’s The World Is Flat), Freidman offered a mix of insights, delivered with his trademark flair for anecdotage in the vein of a Mad Libs pamphlet. Friedman informed the audience, for example, that algebra is an Arabic word—and so clearly the challenge ahead for the tumultuous Arab world is to integrate algebra as well as Islam into its emerging governments. He then went on to sagely counsel the crowd that understanding the Islamic world requires examining ethnic and religious divisions, as opposed to more recent national rivalries—as though no one else had ever heard about the nearly 1,400-year-old Sunni-Shia split that emerged after Muhammad’s death.
[...]
Still, Friedman remained the principal fount of corporate-friendly twaddle. At one point he told the audience, evoking Socrates, “It can be dangerous to disagree with me, for one reason: I don’t know anything.” He responded to a question about the future of democracy with this bizarre soliloquy:

We need to do big hard things together. Because all things we have to do are hard and big, and you can only do them together. So when you don’t do big hard things together, what you get are suboptimal responses to every big hard thing, done with no due diligence at the eleventh hour, and that’s basically what our politics has become. So you look at everything that has happened in the last four years, I would argue that they are all suboptimal solutions cobbled together with no due diligence of what world are we in, what would be the right solution done at the eleventh hour, and, um, how long do we remain a great country when everything we do at the national level is suboptimal with no due diligence done at the eleventh hour?

Plenty more - it starts as a poke at Friedman, which is always fun, but makes an important point about how corporate interests have co-opted 'liberal' think tanks (here meaning those aligned with the Democratic Party) and turned them into useless talks shops. First time I've seen this site, The Baffler, but there's some good shit on there.

[Belligerent Savant]

.

As I've alluded in the prior page, I was a fan of NYPress back in the olden days of the early 2000s, at its height of "popularity".

Managed to retrieve a couple articles Re: Friedman from the archives; below is one of them, by none other than forum favorite Alex Cockburn:

http://newyorkpress.com/i-and-i-the-wor ... -friedman/

I and I: The
World According to Tom Friedman

Alexander Cockburn
October 3, 2000

Sulzberger had the graces
of an older world, the decorum of the chancery or the embassy dinner. He slipped
over the side quietly one day and was gone. I miss him, and sometimes, nodding
over the Times op-ed with eyes half closed, I fancy I can hear him still:
"I found some interest in both Cairo and Tel Aviv when I proposed the Rafa-Port
Suez line which was the actual frontier between Egypt and Ottoman Turkey at
the start of World War I… Italy might be heading towards a Chilean solution…
opening to the left… nor does time remain…"


Then came A.M. Rosenthal.
Not technically on the "foreign affairs" beat, but still piling up
the frequent-flyer miles. Do I miss him? Does one miss the lunatic on the corner,
his demented screams audible half a block away? But yes, Abe did have his magnificent
obsessions, like female circumcision in Africa, and his departure left a void,
notably in terms of vulgar self-assertiveness.


A void into which stepped
Tom Friedman. I can’t remember if Friedman actually replaced Rosenthal,
and it would be inaccurate to compare him to the lunatic on the corner. Friedman’s
is an industrial, implacable noise, like having a generator running under the
next table in a restaurant. The only sensible thing to do is leave.


In Friedman’s case
the opening sentence is usually enough. July 7: "With the Democratic Convention
around the corner, I would like to join those offering advice to Vice President
Al Gore." July 18: "Visiting Beirut for the first time in 16 years,
I was asked by Lebanese friends what my impression was. Two things stand out–one
new and exciting, the other new and troubling." And so off one scampers
as happily as a schoolboy cutting class.


Friedman exhibits on a weekly
basis one of the severest cases known to science of Lippmann’s condition,
named for the legendary journalistic hot-air salesman, Walter Lippmann, and
alluding to the inherent tendency of all pundits to swell in self-importance
to zeppelin-like dimensions. Friedman’s conceit is legendary. "I have
won not one, but two Pulitzer prizes, and I won’t stand for being called
a liar by the next president," George Stephanopoulos recalls in his memoir
Friedman as shouting down the phone during the Clinton transition in early 1993.


Over Washington dinner tables
people delightedly swap stories about Friedman’s monumental conceit. Not
so long ago St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, held an anniversary bash. During
one session in which a passel of alumni offered their reflections on the state
of the world, Friedman finally burst out, "I’ve got the best job in
the world, and you’re all jealous of me!"


From time to time Treasury
Secretary Larry Summers holds soirees at which pundits and wonks in high standing
muster to chew the fat and ponder the great issues of the day. The morning after
such a session Friedman called one of Summers’ assistants to offer his
postmortem. He had found it irksome, he said, to listen to opinions other than
those of Treasury Secretary Summers and himself. Surely it would have more edifying
for the company, Friedman confided, if the evening had consisted simply of a
dialogue between the two great men.


Just as C.L. Sulzberger
grazed happily across the Olympus of decaying Balkan monarchs, Friedman is never
happier than when foraging in corporate suites. Open The Lexus and the Olive
Tree to almost any page and one finds something like this: "In October
1995, I flew out to Redmond, Washington, to interview Microsoft’s number-two
man, president Steve Ballmer, in order to ask him one simple question."
(So why didn’t he e-mail him?) "In the summer of 1998, Guilherme Frering,
chairman of the board of the giant Brazilian mining company Caemi Minerção
e Metalurgia, described for me the incredible changes in Brazil’s economy…"


It’s not just that
there are a great many uses of the first person pronoun in Friedman’s work
(e.g., 20 uses of the first person singular by Friedman in the course of one
34-line paragraph that begins on page 20 of the paperback reissue of The
Lexus and the Olive Tree). This endlessly intrusive I is permanently locked
in an elevator at a Davos Summit of the world’s Important People, to whom
he pays fervent tribute: "…Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Federal
Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Bank of Israel Governor Jacob Frenkel, economists
Henry Kaufman and Ken Courtis, New York Fed president William J. McDonough…
[I omit some names in the interests of brevity] World Bank president Jim [not
James, please note; the affectation of intimacy is important to Friedman] Wolfensohn
all took the time to discuss their views of globalization with me. From the
private sector, Monsanto chairman Robert Shapiro, Cisco Systems president John
Chambers…"


Like most journalists who
spend their time in the corporate elevator, Friedman is an assiduous bootlicker.
Out of interest I checked his citations of the Monsanto chairman, Robert Shapiro.
Page 87: "Robert Shapiro…is a classic example of a chief executive who
revamped the center of his company so the buck could start, not stop there."
Page 182: "Robert Shapiro…once remarked to me that his company is not
on a crusade for spreading anticorrupt practices. But not paying bribes is how
it does its own business, and he is keenly aware that in so doing Monsanto is
helping to seed the world with people who share its values." Page 226:
"Robert Shapiro…likes to say that there are always a few things that
it pays to keep secret…" Page 281: "As Robert Shapiro of Monsanto
likes to say: ‘Human population multiplied by human aspirations for a middle-class
existence divided by the current technological tool kit is putting unsustainable
strains on the biological systems that support life on our planet.’"


Yes, this is Robert Shapiro,
the world-class asshole who took a company making a buck or two out of Roundup
and who almost destroyed it with megalomaniacal overreach with bioengineered
crops; whose influence-peddling rampages constitute some of the slimiest pages
in the history of the Clinton administration; whose technological tool kit in
Bt corn has threatened to wipe out the monarch butterfly.


Friedman is so marinated
in self-regard that he doesn’t even know when he’s being stupid. "While
the defining measurement of the Cold War was weight–particularly the throw-weight
of missiles–the defining measurement of the globalization system is speed."
Sounds good in a corporate roundtable, means nothing. The man just isn’t
that smart, beyond the dubious ability to make money out of press releases praising
the New Globalism and American power.


At the start of The Lexus
and the Olive Tree Friedman boasts: "How to understand and explain
this incredibly complex system of globalization? The short answer is that I
learned you need to do two things at once–look at the world through a multilens
perspective and, at the same time, convey that complexity to readers through
simple stories, not grand theories. I use two techniques: I do ‘information
arbitrage’ in order to understand the world, and I ‘tell stories’
in order to explain it."


That’s one way of putting
it. There’s another. Back in 1984 I remember my brother Patrick, then working
for the Financial Times in Beirut, describing an exacting day covering
bloodshed and mayhem in the company of Friedman, at that time the Times’
Beirut correspondent. They returned to the Commodore hotel, thankful to be alive.
Friedman went up to his room to file. Patrick went to the bar, which was deserted.
He poured himself a stiff whiskey and sat at a table sipping quietly. Enter
a Shiite gunman, who reviewed the bottles of booze with displeasure and proceeded
to smash them methodically with his rifle butt. He didn’t notice Patrick,
who was glad to be thus unperceived, concluding that (a) journalists drinking
Scotch were unlikely to be viewed with fondness by the fundamentalist gunman,
and (b) he was drinking the last Scotch likely to be consumed in the Commodore
for quite a while.


Eventually Friedman descended,
and Patrick described the episode. A couple of days later a Friedman dispatch
noting it appeared in The New York Times. But it wasn’t long
before the "I" took command. In Friedman’s 1989 book From
Beirut to Jerusalem we find, "My first glimpse of Beirut’s real
bottom came at the Commodore Hotel bar on February 7, 1984… I was enjoying
a ‘quiet’ lunch in the Commodore restaurant that day when…"
And lo, suddenly it’s Friedman who sees the bottle-smasher at work, Friedman
who vividly recounts how the Shiite "stalked behind the bar" and Friedman
who arbitrages the story toward a Deeper Note: "The scene was terrifying
on many levels…"


He wasn’t there, according to my brother. I’ll bet that by now Friedman probably
believes that he was. In the capsule of his immense ego, the world is what he wants it to be.

[stoneonstone]

I always assumed Scot director Bill Forsyth created the Thomas Friedman character in his film Local Hero; just back then he was called 'Moritz', Happer's sycophantic psychologist.

[stefano]

Ha, thanks Savant. And of course there's Matt Taibbi's 'with tears in my eyes' go at The World is Flat (written for NY Press as well, I think): Flathead: The Peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman

Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

[stefano]

Taibbi has another go at Friedman, who has a new book out:

You're still wondering what happened to that elephant reading a newspaper about a black swan roasting in the desert when Friedman moves on to the next space-devouring exercise, telling us about the four phrases we need to master to learn "climate-speak."

All four sound like the same idea and are immediately forgettable:

"Just a few years ago... but then something changed."

"Wow, I’ve never seen that before."

"Well, usually, but now I don’t know anymore."

"We haven’t seen anything like that since."

Quick, name any of those phrases you just read. You can't! But you "have to master" all of them to grasp the rapidity of climate disturbances, which Friedman now describes as Mother Nature moving into the "second half of the chessboard."

This is a reference to a metaphor from an earlier chapter recalling the ancient tale of the mathematician who asked a king for a reward. The master asked to have one grain of rice put on one corner of a chessboard, and then to have twice as many put on the next square, and to keep going, on and on to the end. The punchline is that after doubling down 64 times, you end up with 18 quintillion grains of rice or something – more than you'd have guessed!

[Belligerent Savant]

.
Thanks for passing along, Stefano.

This one is also worth reproducing in full, from 2009:

http://www.nypress.com/flat-n-all-that/

https://pulsemedia.org/2009/01/23/flat-n-all-that/

EDIT: never mind. AD posted the article already in the OP. Would help to re-read at least the first page to avoid redundancy, huh?

Slapped myself on the wrist.