The wisdom of Thomas Friedman

Posted by mcm

November 25, 2008

From Bruce J. Miller:

Thomas Friedman’s Wise Words

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman has always struck me as a buffoon. I know it’s unkind to comment on his double chin, but, with the Thanksgiving holiday on the horizon, his resemblance to the holiday bird, particularly when he shakes his head for emphasis and the ample neck follows, eager to be in agreement with its headmaster, is hard to ignore.

I saw him on Meet the Press November 16th, appearing as part of a round table with Katty (can you believe that name?) Kay, Tavis Smiley, and some others. I didn’t see the entire segment, but it seemed as though Tom the Friedman took more than his allotted time. Tom the Brokaw was happy to let this media-anointed wise man gobble gobble on as long as possible, so the languid former TV anchorman could pass meet-the-press-muster without undue stress. Thus the Toms did their two-step.

Thomas Friedman had come to mind that same morning, just before I spotted him on TV, as I was reading an article in the New York Times about Danny Boyle, the British director whose new film, “Slumdog Millionaire” was just released. The writer of the piece, Somini Sengupta, tells us that Mumbai, where the film was shot, “is not only crowded, it is also a city where tens of thousands of people live on the streets.” Thus, filming outside of a studio is rare, unsafe, and unpredictable. I thought of Friedman because he has spent so much air time mouthing the grandiloquent cant of free trade. “Tens of thousands on the streets, but the streets are paved and there are port-o-potties where before the resplendent call centers there were 100 times as many and nary a latrine” he might have said.

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