[Peace-discuss] The NYT's Flathead Friedman

[Lisa Chason]

FLATHEAD
The peculiar genius of Thomas L. Friedman.

By Matt Taibbi
I think it was about five months ago that Press editor Alex Zaitchik 
whispered to me in the office hallway that Thomas Friedman had a new
book 
coming out. All he knew about it was the title, but that was enough; he 
approached me with the chilled demeanor of a British spy who has just 
discovered that Hitler was secretly buying up the world's manganese
supply. 
Who knew what it meant-but one had to assume the worst
"It's going to be called The Flattening," he whispered. Then he stood
there,

eyebrows raised, staring at me, waiting to see the effect of the news
when 
it landed. I said nothing.
It turned out Alex had bad information; the book that ultimately came
out 
would be called The World Is Flat. It didn't matter. Either version 
suggested the same horrifying possibility. Thomas Friedman in possession
of 
500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be
a 
very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose
in 
the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that
could 
keep you awake well into your 50s.
So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually

coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be
asked 
to write the review. 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.
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.
It's impossible to divorce The World Is Flat from its rhetorical
approach. 
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. Like George Bush,

he's in the reality-making business. In the new flat world, argument is
no 
longer a two-way street for people like the president and the country's
most

important columnist. You no longer have to worry about actually
convincing 
anyone; the process ends when you make the case.
Things are true because you say they are. The only thing that matters is
how

sure you sound when you say it. In politics, this allows America to
invade a

castrated Iraq in self-defense. In the intellectual world, Friedman is
now 
probing the outer limits of this trick's potential, and it's absolutely 
perfect, a stroke of genius, that he's choosing to argue that the world
is 
flat. The only thing that would have been better would be if he had
chosen 
to argue that the moon was made of cheese.
And that's basically what he's doing here. The internet is speeding up 
business communications, and global labor markets are more fluid than
ever. 
Therefore, the moon is made of cheese. That is the rhetorical gist of
The 
World Is Flat. It's brilliant. Only an America-hater could fail to 
appreciate it.
Start with the title.
The book's genesis is conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani,
the 
CEO of Infosys. Nilekani causally mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing

field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase-the

level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock

ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes 
after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van
on 
the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:
As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to
Bangalore, 
I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."
What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being 
flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is 
flat!
This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is
totally 
fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely 
different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and
competitive

balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember,
is 
openly contrasting-ironically, as it were-with Columbus's discovery that
the

world is round.
Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that
on a

round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a
round 
earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on
a 
flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning
the 
"flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore,
he 
is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, 
geographically isolated, unconnected world.
"Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude

that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel 
backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.
To recap: Friedman, imagining himself Columbus, journeys toward India. 
Columbus, he notes, traveled in three ships; Friedman "had Lufthansa 
business class." When he reaches India-Bangalore to be specific-he 
immediately plays golf. His caddy, he notes with interest, wears a cap
with 
the 3M logo. Surrounding the golf course are billboards for Texas 
Instruments and Pizza Hut. The Pizza Hut billboard reads: "Gigabites of 
Taste." Because he sees a Pizza Hut ad on the way to a golf course, 
something that could never happen in America, Friedman concludes: "No,
this 
definitely wasn't Kansas."
After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing
field 
is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around
the

world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut 
billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book

reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he
misattributes 
his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only
speaks 
in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat.
This is

the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob 
Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of
"lunch"

in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.
And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his
huge

book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end-and
I'm

not joking here-we are meant to understand that the flat world is a
giant 
ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can
fit 
his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are 
covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is
the 
first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a
calculator 
to figure the value of the author's metaphors.
God strike me dead if I'm joking about this. Judge for yourself. After
the 
initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and
gone

back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a
monstrous 
mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a
lengthy 
description of the "ten great flatteners," which is basically a
highlight 
reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the
collapse

of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and
so 
on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, 
that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new 
communications technology: "Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual."
These 
technologies Friedman calls "steroids," because they are "amplifying and

turbocharging all the other flatteners."
According to the mathematics of the book, if you add an IPac to your 
offshoring, you go from running to sprinting with gazelles and from
eating 
with lions to devouring with them. Although these 10 flatteners existed 
already by the time Friedman wrote The Lexus and the Olive Tree-a period
of 
time referred to in the book as Globalization 2.0, with Globalization
1.0 
beginning with Columbus-they did not come together to bring about 
Globalization 3.0, the flat world, until the 10 flatteners had, with the

help of the steroids, gone through their "Triple Convergence." The first

convergence is the merging of software and hardware to the degree that 
makes, say, the Konica Minolta Bizhub (the product featured in
Friedman's 
favorite television commercial) possible. The second convergence came
when 
new technologies combined with new ways of doing business. The third 
convergence came when the people of certain low-wage industrial 
countries-India, Russia, China, among others-walked onto the playing
field. 
Thanks to steroids, incidentally, they occasionally are "not just
walking" 
but "jogging and even sprinting" onto the playing field.
Now let's say that the steroids speed things up by a factor of two. It
could

be any number, but let's be conservative and say two. The whole point of
the

book is to describe the journey from Globalization 2.0 (Friedman's first

bestselling book) to Globalization 3.0 (his current bestselling book).
To 
get from 2.0 to 3.0, you take 10 flatteners, and you have them 
converge-let's say this means squaring them, because that seems to be
the 
idea-three times. By now, the flattening factor is about a thousand. Add
a 
few steroids in there, and we're dealing with a flattening factor
somewhere 
in the several thousands at any given page of the book. We're talking
about 
a metaphor that mathematically adds up to a four-digit number. If you're

like me, you're already lost by the time Friedman starts adding to this 
numerical jumble his very special qualitative descriptive imagery. For 
instance:
And now the icing on the cake, the ubersteroid that makes it all mobile:

wireless. Wireless is what allows you to take everything that has been 
digitized, made virtual and personal, and do it from anywhere. Ladies
and gentlemen, I bring you a Thomas Friedman metaphor, a set of 
upside-down antlers with four thousand points: the icing on your 
uber-steroid-flattener-cake!
Let's speak Friedmanese for a moment and examine just a few of the
notches 
on these antlers (Friedman, incidentally, measures the flattening of the

world in notches, i.e. "The flattening process had to go another notch";
I'm

not sure where the notches go in the flat plane, but there they are.) 
Flattener #1 is actually two flatteners, the collapse of the Berlin Wall
and

the spread of the Windows operating system. In a Friedman book, the
reader 
naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like
"Windows" is

introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when 
Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint.
His 
description of the early 90s:
The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world
much 
flatter than it had ever been-but the age of seamless global
communication 
had not yet dawned.
How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point,
why 
would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall
in 
such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?
Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God? 

_