The Fried Man

One of the profounder signs that something has gone deeply wrong with our culture is that Thomas Friedman is widely considered to be a deep thinker. As Matt Taibbi says:

It's not for nothing that Thomas Friedman is called "the most important columnist in America today." That it's Friedman's own colleague at the New York Times (Walter Russell Mead) calling him this, on the back of Friedman's own book, is immaterial. Friedman is an important American. He is the perfect symbol of our culture of emboldened stupidity.

(The other day my brother told me he was listening to The World Is Flat as he painted his new apartment. I was seriously tempted to rescind our relatedness. It turned out he was just high--which is still only a partial excuse--and soon saw the light.)

Anyway, FAIR has been keeping tabs on our greatest public intellectual and noticed some, um, repetition. I don't want to spoil it...you really should go see for yourself. How does no one ever call shenanigans on him?

via The Left Coaster


What the hell, how about some Thomas Friedman poetry, while we're at it?

Friedmandias

I met a traveller from the New York Times
Who said: 'Two vast and Lexus legs of stone
Stand in Bangalore. Near their paradigms
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And open Windows, and sneer of the Berlin Wall,
Tell that its sculptor often ate at Pizza Hut
Which yet survive, stamped on this Lilliput,
T.I. that mocked them as ephemeral.
And on the plinth by this Michelangelo—
“My name is Friedmandias, king of the IPO:
Look on my prose, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing coherent stays. Round the decay
Of that steroidal wreck, boundless and bare
The level playing fields stretch far away.'

Tags: politics, Thomas Friedman, FAIR