In Depth: Thomas Friedman (C-SPAN2 BookTV)

Airing the first Sunday of every month, In Depth is Book TV's LIVE three-hour interview and call-in show with notable authors. Our May guest is New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He is the author of the recently-released "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century."

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.
Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. 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.

Flathead: The peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman

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.

Oh, imagine that! What a wonderful tale! (tears streaming down my face)

Why anyone pays attention to this globalist POS is beyond me.

Many thanks for saving me the trouble of posting a link to that NY Press review of Friedman's latest.

It's been linked by Arts & Letters Daily http://aldaily.com/
and at Crooked Timber http://www.crookedtimber.org/ neither of which is remotely conservative.

Friedman has to be the most over-rated pundit whose on air smugness and on-paper stupidity is finally getting the attention it deserves.

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