Wednesday, October 26, 2005

The Idiot in The Olive Tree

A friend of mine recently said that he was going to buy Thomas Friedman's new book "The World Is Flat." I think Friedman is an idiot, so I suggested reading Dr. Suess' "Oh the Places You'll Go" because I figured it held the same sort of cartoonish optimism, and was undoubtedly much better written. Anyway, for the past year or so I have really enjoyed reading Matt Taibbi's political articles in Alternet and Rolling Stone. I was searching for his latest and I happened to come across his review of Friedman's book from back in April. Now, I know I am posting this seven months after the fact, but I found it to be the funniest book review I have ever read.
Read the whole thing if you can because Taibbi is just brilliant. Here's a sample:

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.

...

[Two major steps towards globilization were] the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of the Windows operating system.

In a Friedman book, the reader naturally seizes up in dread the instant a suggestive word like "Windows" is introduced; you wince, knowing what's coming, the same way you do when Leslie Nielsen orders a Black Russian. And Friedman doesn't disappoint. His description of the early 90s:

The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been--but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?


BTW, Taibbi's RS article which I was originally looking for, is here and also well worth your time.