FLATHEAD: The Peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman

http://nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm
. . .
"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."
. . .
more

cutsey poo reviews, and Friedman's politics aside...if you don't read this book you won't know about the huge freight train...actually a huge mag-lev train...coming straight for the US.

many without the semi-fawning, semi-gee-whiz apologist-as-booster approach of Friedman.

to me.I wouldn't at all be surprised that he never left his hotel room and concocted all his conversations from his bed. Why else would a cab driver in Cairo sound the same as an elevator operator in Bombay? And they all agree with Messieur Friedman,no?

Friedman is a spokesman/cheerleader for elitist corporatists. His writing covers the obvious effects (does anyone really need him to tell them about what globalism is doing? Really?), but is completely off base on the cause and cure.

Anything by Friedman is pretty much a waste of time.

This is the main point that Matt Taibi makes. Friedman may or may not be a whore for corporate interests, and he may or may not be a neo-con zombie.

But what most distinguishes Friedman's writing -- and I confess to the suffering the torture of reading almost every one of his columns, because it appears on the same editorial page on which the incomparable Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman appear -- is that Friedman is stupid. It's just this creeping feeling you read, as he makes leaps of illogic or announces common sense as his own profound insight.

Taibi also nails him for truly idiotic metaphors, one of which is the controlling metaphor of the book -- flatness. If he is trying to say that the world is getting smaller as a result of information technologies, actually his metaphor should be that the world is a sphere, because a sphere is the most economical form in which to connect all the points of a surface. Flatness makes things farther apart not closer.

This kind of gradious stupidity is what characterizes Friedman, even more than his loathsome positions on political and economic issues.

of Laizzez-Fairy Land (as someone else here said).