Flathead: The peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman
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The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:
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.
DONE IN THE SUN
OLD-MEDIA MALAISE SOURS MOGULFEST. . .
Meanwhile, while the weather was sunny, the moods of many of the executives from the so-called "old media" firms was anything but. These execs spent much of their week courting the Internet firms and upstart tech companies such as YouTube.
"Everyone wants to get back into the Internet," said one executive in attendance.
"It's kind of a dour mood. Media stocks are in the toilet, DVD sales are down and movie attendance is down."
MSM moguls agree - Old Media's future looks dim: [Pinch] Sulzberger says that the American newspaper industry is facing its greatest crisis in its 400-year history. RUPERT MURDOCH has sounded the death knell for the era of the media barons. Warren Buffet sees no clear way for papers to stem recent circulation declines or turn Internet operations into highly-profitable enterprises.