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May 27, 2007
Lowering the Bar
By Ankush
Thomas Friedman seems very impressed by the fact that young people haven't decided to hole up in their parents' basements and, instead, are still making the shocking decision to occasionally leave the United States. His column today is basically a series of evidenceless impressions about his daughter's friends, who just graduated, and the alleged, unprecedented optimism he sees in their approach to the world. This paragraph alone is filled with a couple types of nonsense:
They are young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America they are about to inherit. They don’t take to the streets much — in part, I suspect, because they do a lot of their political venting online. But it seems to me that they go off and volunteer for public service or for military service with as much conviction as any generation, if not more.
I'm certainly glad that it "seems" to him that today's graduates volunteer for public service and the military with as much conviction as his generation, but, you know, there are presumably numbers that could back up such a claim (which could very well be true in some ways), and one would expect that a man whose only job is to churn out two bad columns a week could trouble himself to find some. "As bad as Iraq is," he later writes, "they just keep signing up." Well, actually, they don't.
Then there's this business about "young people who are quietly determined not to let this age of terrorism curtail their lives, take away their hopes or steal the America they are about to inherit." Here's one obvious reason this may be true: They are simply not that afraid of what they know to be a moderately serious, nonexistential threat to their security in the form of a small number of terrorist groups operating in an identifiable number of countries. Which is to say, they know that Thomas Friedman has been wrong about the boundless war on terror that he's been enabling. Friedman seems not to have considered this possibility, but if we're lucky, a cab driver in the very near future may point it out to him.
May 27, 2007 | Permalink
Comments
I suspect that Friedman, from his beltway perch in Bethesda, believes that the Broderesque "middle Americans" are afraid of terrorism, don't want to take airplanes or travel much because of the risk of the terrorist threat, and that the international skepticism the Iraq war has made them very suspicious, if not disdainful of foreign countries and cultures. So when he sees that his daughter's classmates don't live their lives in constant fear of terrorist attacks, enjoy seeing the world, and don't have an unhinged hatred for France for their sin of being correct about the Iraq war, he marvels at how "The Youth of Today™" are so surprisingly optimistic when, in fact, they're merely acting like rational human beings.
Posted by: Constantine | May 27, 2007 9:26:04 PM
Lanny Davis, While sitting in for Joe Lieberman at a forum at Yale,Tried to Defnd Liebermans position by Actually saying " Someone as great as Thomas Freidman believed we could succeed in Iraq just like Joe Lieberman did."
That may be the exact moment I knew our country was FUCKED. I just threw up my hands and walked away. The scary part I think that idiot,Davis, may have thought I walked because he thought that statement helped his argument.
Posted by: ctkeith | May 27, 2007 9:26:25 PM
Here's what I want to know:
Who's the biggest wanker? Thomas Friedman or Joe Klein?
It's a tough call, I know.
Posted by: lambert | May 27, 2007 9:33:35 PM
I know it's sort of cool to hate on Friedman nowdays, but I fail to see anything objectionable in this column.
And I don't agree that terrorism is a minor threat. Honestly, I am quite worried by the prospect of a nuclear bomb going off in the midst of a major world city.
Posted by: Korha | May 27, 2007 9:43:56 PM
Thomas Friedman is a hack of extraordinary dimensions. How this man of mediocre intellect and truly wretched prose style became considered the serious voice of foreign policy in the Times is baffling. I would call him glib, but glib actually implies having a certain style to cover up the shallowness. Friedman doesn't even have that going for him.
Lambert has raised a question of nearly theological proportions -- Klein (the bad one) v. Friedman. I think Klein is actually considerably smarter, but haughtier, touchier, and more resentful. But he can write at least. As far as I know he has never uttered the words "the world is flat." Therefore, I give it to Friedman by a moustache hair.
Posted by: Klein's tiny left nut | May 27, 2007 9:47:58 PM
I recall that Friedman's wife is an heiress to a multi-billion-dollar real estate fortune, which perhaps raises some questions about to what extent his family's life choices truly represent those of "typical Americans".
Posted by: RKU | May 27, 2007 9:49:47 PM
Funny, this commenter just happens to be on the way to a Muslim country to do human rights work, not to defy the phony beltway shibboleth of terrorism, but because it will be nice to work in a country that gives a flying fuck about human rights.
(Who is this Friedman character, anyway? And why do people care what he writes?)
Posted by: friedman? | May 27, 2007 9:51:19 PM
Why should Friedman actually do research when cute little anecedotes can fill those column inches? It also gives him the excuse for chatting up his daughter's friends instead of working on his column. And you thought he was just procrastinating like the rest of us! He's hard at work!
Posted by: ronin | May 27, 2007 9:55:21 PM
And I don't agree that terrorism is a minor threat. Honestly, I am quite worried by the prospect of a nuclear bomb going off in the midst of a major world city.
Israel lives with far more terrorism than us and traffic accidents kill more. However, if tomorrow NATO attacked Israel, the tiny country could be bombed flat in hours. Even Israel's state threats can't even try that. If the wonders of the Chinese market brought infected food there or elsewhere far more people could get sick than with almost all known bombs and biological attacks (bioweapons are almost not weapons: very limited, very unstable. Industrial carelessness on the other hand is very hard to contain, especially when regulatory agencies don't want to do their jobs). If a Chernobyl-like event were to happen in a worse case scenario it would be comparable to a primitive nuclear bomb (the ones made in the missile race of the Cold War were several times as destructive). IX/XI would not even register happening in many parts of the world without the ad campaign and flashy technique.
Terrorism not a minor threat? We know there's no reason to consider it major and we know that there are people obsessed with hyping terror. Are you seriously more afraid of terror than drunk driving (which is foolish) or are you wanting us to think so?
Posted by: name | May 27, 2007 10:00:52 PM
And I don't agree that terrorism is a minor threat. Honestly, I am quite worried by the prospect of a nuclear bomb going off in the midst of a major world city.
Korha, if you really mean this and aren't just concern trolling, here's the deal:
Most of us, except maybe Ezra, lived through the end of the Cold War. Between SDI and missile treaties, the threat of total nuclear annihilation was hanging over the world the entire time. Several times, through brinksmanship or technological failure, we came quite close to the destruction of civilization.
As the Cold War was ending, and Tom Clancy was casting about for new plots, he wrote that novel about the nuclear bomb in the Super Bowl. I read it at the time, and thought it sucked, because in comparison with global thermonuclear war, minor atomic terrorism was -- and still is -- pretty small potatoes. A little scary, yeah, but you can't let risks like that paralyze you.
And if you think it's a major threat, you should be doing everything in your power to get rid of the incompetent, mendacious losers who are currently running the US's counterproliferation efforts and foreign policy. No, not just what you're doing already -- twice that.
Posted by: theo | May 27, 2007 10:03:30 PM
Honestly, I am quite worried by the prospect of a nuclear bomb going off in the midst of a major world city.
Then the answer is, clearly, never ever travel anywhere in the world.
But wait! What if it goes off in your city? Then the only chance for survival is if you're off traveling the world.
Merde! (You'd have to go to France to figure out what that means.)
Posted by: Harry R. Sohl | May 27, 2007 10:17:34 PM
ChickenHawks don't say cluck cluck cluck, they say hack hack hack (between all-knowing anecdotes).
Why should we have to choose between Friedman and J. Klein? They can co-captain the hack brigade. Or alternate positions on some schedule that accomdates a flat world and a weekly hack mag. Maybe we should let The Dean Broder into the first team too.
Posted by: JimPortlandOR | May 27, 2007 10:23:57 PM
you don't have to be THAT old to remember the Soviet era and the Cold War, that's the sad thing.
Posted by: r€nato | May 27, 2007 10:49:48 PM
I know it's sort of cool to hate on Friedman nowdays, but I fail to see anything objectionable in this column.
Hey, I hear that kids of Fortune 500 execs are pretty damn upbeat themselves. It's a trend!
Constantine hit it with the very first post. Friedman lives in a multi-million dollar house in Bethesda MD -- one of the most highly-educated and wealthy towns in the world. If he had a brain in his head, a supposedly "worldly" person like Friedman would never dream of suggesting that his family is at all representative of anything more than his own family.
Posted by: sglover | May 27, 2007 11:35:13 PM
What's even sadder is that Friedman used to be quite the reporter. I mean he put his ass on the line during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanon War and reported on the Sabra and Shatila massacres with accuracy and professionalism even if personally it hurt him to criticize the IDF.
But since he's come back to America and reinvented himself as an economics reporter and now a national security reporter...., let's just say that the authenticity is gone. Friedman is a cautionary tale of someone turning his back on his virtues for a more comfortable role in a cage of received wisdom and acceptable platitudes. The media machine turned him into pablum.
Posted by: Northern Observer | May 27, 2007 11:39:48 PM
It is a continuing tragedy that valuable Op-Ed real-estate in the NY Times and WaPo continues to be granted to the likes of Broder and Friedman. Although the value of quantitative data in social science research has been known for decades, "serious" outlets for public discourse continue to employ pundits who lack the training and intellect to make substantive arguments.
Are labor markets efficient? Not when it comes to pundit employment.
Posted by: rk | May 27, 2007 11:44:37 PM
Constantine hit it with the very first post. Friedman lives in a multi-million dollar house in Bethesda MD -- one of the most highly-educated and wealthy towns in the world. If he had a brain in his head, a supposedly "worldly" person like Friedman would never dream of suggesting that his family is at all representative of anything more than his own family.
That's true-- it's lazy and ignorant for a journalist to use his friends and family as fodder for a column about greater trends. What's equally as lazy and annoying is that his perception of Americans is based on a stereotype of how he thinks they act. When his friends and family act differently, he doesn't think to ask himself whether either (a) his perception of "what Americans think" might be wrong or (b) his family and friends might not be representative of "what Americans think" in the first place.
For the record, it sounds like the young people Friedman knows are acting like normal members of the upper-middle class. I mean, who does curtail their lives because of terrorism, if they have the economic means to travel or get a job in in a distant location? I wonder why he would expect them to act otherwise. Perhaps he labors under the delusion that more than 28% of the country takes the president's fearmongering seriously.
Posted by: Constantine | May 28, 2007 12:42:29 AM
Ton Friedman is a classic example of the Peter Principle in action. He was a pretty good Middle East reporter -- that is, given the biases and pre-conceptions that almost all American establishment journalists bring to the region. He was a very bad economics reporter, and had (and still has) absolutely nothing original to say about globalization. And he's an embarrassment and a joke as a foreign affairs columnist, even though the New York Times and most of official Washington either doesn't get the punch line or pretends not to. Friedman's curse is to have everyone around him take his pomposity and raging egotism as seriously as he does -- which means he can never see where and why his career has gone so disastrously wrong.
Which I guess means the guy has actually done the Peter Principle one better. He's risen several levels ABOVE his own incompetence, putting him on par with George W. Bush, Bernie Kerik, Al Gonzalez and, by all recent evidence, the United States of America.
Posted by: peterp | May 28, 2007 1:37:17 AM
Frankly, I would be far more interested in reading a column written by one of Friedman's daughter's friends - who undoubtedly opposes the never-ending disastrous Iraq war - rather than one written by Friedman himself, who cheerled the unprovoked occupation of a land-based sovereign Arab country.
But perhaps it's too soon to really be able to form an enlightened opinion...maybe I should wait for six months or so...
Posted by: patroclus | May 28, 2007 2:51:05 AM
The sad thing is, most folks just posting comments here write better, are more entertaining... and more informed then Friedman. (Guess you just need connections).
A Times editor could randomly pick anyone here and get better copy.
Gotta be scary for the poor fool.
Posted by: yill | May 28, 2007 4:34:59 AM
I was a bit concerned about living in Belfast in the early 90's. The lovely people at Queen's, the Guinness and the fact it was a free roll helped me overcome my fears. It is amazing how great opportunities help recent college grads cope with the infinitesimal chance they may be killed by terrorists.
Posted by: London/Derry | May 28, 2007 6:21:10 AM
To answer a commenter's question above, Thomas Friendman is definitely a bigger wanker than Joe Klein.
At least Joe Klein has the stones to engage with his critics a bit.
Posted by: Joe | May 28, 2007 6:58:06 AM
"The media machine turned him into pablum." Oh please! No one but Friedman turned his writing into pablum. He alone is responsible for the path he took.
Posted by: donna | May 28, 2007 7:13:44 AM
I couldn't agree more with what everyone here has posted. But I also want to point out another factor in the amazing and disgusting Lanny Davis quote from the comments. Lanny Davis thinks Tom Friedman is smart and knows stuff because *Lanny Davis* isn't reading any more widely than that. To an educated person the newspapers offer a tiny fraction of the knoweldge that we know is out there on any given topic. Most reporters report "news" which is breaking, scarce, sets of facts that a serious researcher or thinker hasn't yet been able to get their hands on. But most columnists write opinion pieces based on other people's research, writing, and thinking. Friedman, whatever his original merits (and I must have blinked and missed them) writes an opinion column for g-d's sake.
If *Lanny Davis* mistakes the opinions of a jumped up journalist for actual informed, critical opinion on weighty political and economic issues of the day we've got a much, much, much bigger problem than the mustache of misunderstanding can cover. It means a minimally well educated, upper class, mover and shaker in our political system simply doesn't have a clue that there are actually subject matter experts out there to whom questions of state could be referred before, you know, blowing the shit out of someone else's country.
aimai
Posted by: aimai | May 28, 2007 8:26:08 AM
It is Memorial Day.....time to think of my father, uncles, grandfathers, those who died in Vietnam, all our past wars, and those serving in Iraq...not some insignificant dweeb shill who, like his master, jr. bush...left others in my generation to fight and die in Vietnam while they prepared for their life's work...being dickheads...
fuck you and those like you friedman
Posted by: Dusty - West Springfield, MA | May 28, 2007 9:16:08 AM
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