The World is Round

On the many fatal conceits of Mr. Thomas L. Friedman

(NASA responding to Thomas Friedman’s book, The World is Flat. Source: Getty Images)

Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Paris, France...

The big story in France is that the French are pulling out of Africa.  

Visitors to Paris are often surprised by how many immigrants are in the city. They come from all over the world. But many come from North Africa and the Sahel (the vast region south of the Sahara). This is the legacy of colonialism. Some areas of Paris, near the Gare du Nord, for example, look more ‘African’ than ‘European.’

Naturally, some native Frenchmen don’t like having so many non-French people (many of whom receive social benefits from the government) around. And naturally, too, the immigrants aren’t always as grateful as the French think they should be.

But our focus today is not on France, but on the US…and not on immigration either. Instead, we look at what led France to create its overseas empire in the first place…and more specifically, at one of America’s leading empire cheerleaders, Thomas L. Friedman.

Unexamined Certainty

We lived in Paris for many years. Each morning, we would read The International Herald Tribune, which had been taken over by The New York Times. And we’d laugh.

Here’s what we wrote 20 years ago:

We always try to get our day off on the right foot by reading Friedman’s column before breakfast. There is something so gloriously naïve and clumsy in the man’s pensée, it never fails to brighten our mornings. It refreshes our faith in our fellow men; they are not evil, just mindless. We have never met the man, but we imagine Friedman as a high school teacher, warping young minds with drippy thoughts. But to say his ideas are sophomoric or juvenile merely libels young people, most of whom have far more cleverly nuanced opinions than the columnist. You might criticize the man by saying his work is without merit, but that would be flattery. His work has negative merit. Every column subtracts from the sum of human knowledge in the way a broken pipe drains the town’s water tower.

Not that Mr. Friedman’s ideas are uniquely bad. Many people have similarly puerile, insipid notions in their heads. But Friedman expresses his hollow thoughts with such heavy-handed earnestness; he seems completely unaware that he is a simpleton. That, of course, is a charm; he is so dense you can laugh at him without hurting his feelings.

Friedman’s oeuvre is a long series of “we should do this” and “they should do that.” Never for a moment does he stop to wonder why people actually do what they do. Nor has the thought crossed his mind that other people might have their own ideas about what they should do. There is no trace of modesty in his writing—no skepticism, no cynicism, no irony, no suspicion lurking in the corner of his brain that he might be a jackass. Of course, there is nothing false about him either; he is not capable of either false modesty or falsetto principles. With Friedman, it is all alarmingly real. Nor is there any hesitation or bewilderment in his opinions; that would require circumspection, a quality he completely lacks.

It must be unfathomable to such a man that the world could work in ways that surpass his understanding. In our experience, any man who understands even his own thoughts must have few of them. And those he has must be small enough to fit into a carry-on bag.

But we enjoy Friedman’s commentaries. The man is too clumsy to hide or disguise the awkward imbecility of his own line of thinking. The silliness of it is right out in the open, where we can laugh at it. 

Because We Can

And today, twenty years later, we are still laughing. Friedman is entitled to his ideas, but why not use a question mark from time to time? One of the dumbest columns by Friedman was one in which he urged the Bush administration to “delegitimize suicide bombers” by embarking on a huge propaganda campaign in the Arab world. Here was a thought that desperately needed question marks. When were suicide bombers ever ‘legitimate?’ Besides, wasn’t it a problem that took care of itself? Suicide bombing may be criminal, but there are few repeat offenders.    

(In a selfless act of charity towards Friedman, and mercy for his readers, we will send him a whole box of question marks, suggesting that he sprinkle them through his columns.)

But in 2003, the US government tossed the question marks aside and invaded Iraq (which had nothing to do with suicide bombings or terrorism). And now with the passage of time…and with the corpses, from two-decades of empire building, now stacked to the rafters…we still laugh, but it’s less jolly laughter.

Ten years after the Iraq invasion, Charlie Rose on NPR asked Friedman if he still supported the war. Here is his reply:

What they [Islamic extremists] needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house—from Basra to Baghdad—and basically saying:

Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think we care about our open society? You think this [terrorism] fantasy [you have]—we're just gonna let it grow? Well, suck. on. this. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We coulda hit Saudi Arabia… We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

How’s that for deep thinking? We hit Iraq because we could. And now we can hit Russia! Why? Because we can!

“Progressive Conservatives”

At the time of the Charlie Rose interview, George W. Bush was gone. Barack Obama was in power. But no matter which party held the White House, American foreign policy was firmly in the grips of a group of pompous, self-congratulatory, empire-building nitwits, who described themselves oxymoronically as ‘progressive conservatives’– David Frum, David Brooks, Bill Kristol and the king and queen of neoconservatives, Robert Kagan and Victoria Nuland. They were neither progressive – since they aimed to restore a very ancient authoritarian system…nor were they ‘conservative;’ they were the exact opposite, activists. They were all determined to counter the ‘corrosive cynicism about public action” (the sort of thing you are reading now).

They urged “action.” They wanted “leadership.” They wanted an empire that the whole world would admire. Or, if not admire, at least fear. And they got it!

David Brooks described it as “national greatness conservatism.” It was more muscular…more focused…with a greater sense of purpose than real conservatism.  “Wishing to be left alone isn’t a governing doctrine,” he and co-author Bill Kristol pointed out in The Wall Street Journal.  

Being left alone was okay for real conservatives and for a modest constitutional republic, but it wouldn’t do for an empire. And it fell to Tom Friedman to sell it to the masses. And even though his many suggestions and ideas have proven either idiotic or disastrous, he is still employed by The New York Times as a columnist. It devoted a full page and a half, in its 16^th of September international edition, to his views on the Russo-Ukrainian war.

The man is still a bad writer. But he is no ordinary bad writer. He is one with a real talent…for taking complicated, nuanced subjects…and making them seem not only simple, but simpleminded and absurd.

And still, he is desperately in need of question marks.

More to come…     

Regards,

Bill Bonner