Moustache of Understanding, continued

I feel like my previous post was a little short. Making fun of Thomas Friedman is almost absurdly easy, and Friedman smackdowns are a dime a dozen. That said, I don't feel right just glibly tossing out a one sentence post; Friedman, for all his one-sentence platitudes and vapidities, deserves more than he gives.

A couple of years ago, Matt Welch called Friedman's latest magnum opus, The World is Flat, "an embarrassing reverie of self-discovery". Embarrassing both for the simplicity and superficiality of his revelations and for the absolute, unbelievable, thundering wrongedness of them. In some ways, Friedman is like a goldfish. A well-paid, well-respected goldfish. As the article I posted earlier pointed out, the man makes heart-stoppingly bad predictions, generalizations, and conclusions about the world around them, changes those conclusions every 6 months or so (I don't remember where I saw it, but someone tracked his Iraq-centric editorials, and they are possibly the most flagrant examples of this). As the scope of his sloganeering increases, so too does his ability to generate meaningless, abstract extrapolations. He'll spend a day golfing in India with a CEO and have a resulting eureka moment that the entire fucking world is so economically and politically integrated as to render geography irrelevant. Then, 3 years later, as the global system lurches drunkenly into a swamp of debt and inflation, the man is still paid good money and good attention to coin horrible one-liners that do nothing but obscure the complexity of real international situations. And if this weren't enough to earn him heaping piles of deserved scorn, I don't think he's ever publicly expressed humility over his various predictions. Only someone who could be wrong as consistently as he is could carry himself with the amount of confidence and self-certainty that he does. Ben posted this video before, but it is too perfect a summation of all of his worst qualities as a journalist for me not to include it. The shallowness. The smugness. The conceit of having reached a dramatic ground-breaking conclusion. It's all there, piled endlessly like a quadruple-bypass burger of idiocy. Ladies and gentleman: Suck. On. This:



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As a side note, we should all pick our least favourite New York Times editorialists and vent a little. It's much more therapeutic to write it out than to semi-drunkenly moan and groan every couple of months when one of us brings it up.