The Continuing
Nuisance of Thomas
Friedman
In my occasional and
continuing
irritation at Thomas Friedman, I contribute a few choice links here.
Friedman
continues to be the most uninformed, inarticulate, and yet highly feted
journalist in the American media empire. Look no further than Thomas
Friedman
to see how utter mediocrity can rise to the top in a system that values
glib
and jingoistic observations of a world beyond Manhattan, observations
as facile
and empty as the space between Friedman's ears. 
There are many writers
like
Thomas Friedman in the American media. So why does he
irritate me more
than
others? Maybe it's because it is deeply disturbing and depressing to
see banality being rewarded like this, week after week in the pages of
the New
York Times. On the subways, on
buses, in
parks, I see people reading his recent book The World Is Flat. I too read a part of it. I grew puzzled,
mystified, then
simply awed at his superficial generalizations of the world, and
particularly
his contradictory and confused observations about his favorite fetish
of the
period, the joys of globalization. And his writing is style is
so....well, so fetid. It's obvious comparison point is a typical tenth
grade essay by an ambitious yet misguided kid who decides to throw in
big
concepts h/she thinks it will make him/her look erudite
and articulate. This is what
people are reading and
discussing in this country? This is what the educated consider informed
discourse on the world outside?!
Below I
provide links to
a
spectrum of intelligent critiques of the recent book, all of which
dismantle
Friedman's arguments and unwrap the self-important commentatorspeak
that he
deploys to embellish his claims about a world whose
reality
bears
little or no resemblance to the one he visits on his travels abroad. I
provide these links not only as part of a personal crusade against
rewarding mediocrity but also to implore you, nay beseech you,
not to buy this man's awful canon of work.
"Falling
Flat: Thomas
Friedman's
Recycled View of Globalization," Washington
Monthly, May 2005.
"Adventures
in
Flatland," The
Village Voice, August 26, 2005.
"Once
Upon a Time in America," Guardian
Unlimited Books, May 21, 2005.
"Confusing
Columbus," The Economist, March 31, 2005.