Ah, The Mustache of Understanding Strikes Again

Hey, Tom, heard of Google?

I am not a fan of Tom Friedman.  As someone who teaches Comparative Government, people ask me if we do or should read his books.  After I am done swallowing the emesis in the back of my throat, I explain that we will never read Friedman in any course I teach.

There are two reasons.

First is that Friedman tends to regurgitate the Davos-ian conventional wisdom ad nauseam.  Hey, the world is flat!  Really?  In what fucking way?  How is even our own country "flat"?  How is the world "flat" when some people have everything and others have nothing?  Seems pretty spiky to me.  And that crack from 2002 about needing to take a little country and throw it up against the wall to show the world we could?  How'd Iraq turn out, Tom?  Maybe we'll know in six months.  I hear that's the critical window.

Second, and perhaps more profoundly for me, he's an awful, awful, awful writer. Cliched thinking is practically a job requirement for a pundit - especially one who wants to show up on Charlie Rose with any frequency.  But cliched and poor writing really burns me.  There are a ton of talented writers who can regurgitate stale talking points, why is Thomas Friedman - who is already married to money - given a well paying gig at the Times?  Frank Rich is gone, Bob Herbert is gone... And we're left with Friedman, Brooks and Douthat?  Really?  How long before Krugman bails?

The latest example of Friedman-esque bad writing takes place in the very first sentence of his piece today:

There is an old saying in the Middle East that the camel is a horse designed by a committee.

I thought, that's not right, and ten whole seconds of Googling led me to discover that this "old Middle Eastern saying" is attributed to Vogue magazine, Sir Alex Issigonis or philosophy professor Lester Hunt.  One of those three.  And the date is usually the late 1950s.

Let's just say this isn't the hadith or the Rubaiyat.  It's not old and it's not Middle Eastern.

He later channels one of the five most hackneyed lines in cinema:

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

Tom, that line became unfashionable about the same time porn mustaches did.  I see that hasn't stopped you from using both.

Later still, he writes:

I don't know Libya...

OK, we can stop right there.  The rest of the sentence is unimportant - though he says he thinks we will need boots on the ground, because... well there is no because, because TOM FRIEDMAN DOESN'T KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT LIBYA!

Thanks for wasting your reader's time, Tom.  You've just written a typically sloppy high school essay:

I haven't done the reading, and I've done no original research, but I have some a priori beliefs that I will graft onto this complicated situation, which I will dodge, by acknowledging that it's complicated.  

I read crap like that all the time.  Tom Friedman: Bringing You C- Commentary From the New York Times.

It reminds me of this video, one of the greatest of all time, that I show when I teach Nigeria:
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-know-situation-in-nigeria-seems-pretty-comp,14171/

The only thing the panelists are missing is that sweet, sweet mustache of understanding.