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Anyway, here's the press review....
Meet Dr. Obvious Press Review By Matt Taibbi the eXile
Question: What do you get when you cross the world's easiest job with the world's ugliest moustache?
Answer: Thomas Friedman, columnist for the New York Times.
Welcome to part 1 of "Hurrumphing Columnists", the eXile's newest and most ill-advised made-for-TV drama. Desperate for marketing ideas, we here at the eXile in this issue have decided to go old-school and bring back the mini-series. Remember The Winds of War? V? They were movies you wouldn't have watched in one part, but couldn't miss in three. This new feature will captivate you the same way, profiling in big bunches a group of newspaper columnists so boring and obnoxious that we probably couldn't pay you to read them without the sales gimmick.
Our first such subject, Friedman, is someone Russia watchers should know well. As the guardian of the Times's prestigious Foreign Affairs column, his blundering, irritating columns show up in the Russia debate with more or less regular frequency, unwanted but inevitable, like tests of the Emergency Broadcast System. A native of Minnesota and a veteran of the Times's Israel bureau, Friedman has no special expertise as far as Russia or most other countries are concerned. Nonetheless, like all columnists, he has more freedom to pontificate about Russia or about anything else than the Times reporters based in Moscow. This is a luxury Friedman shares with all full-time columnists; like his peers, he's given license to broadcast his opinions on the Times's editorial page precisely because opinions, as opposed to actual knowledge, are his expertise.
Columnists can use this freedom in a variety of ways. Dave Barry works tirelessly to convince you of his wackiness. William F. Buckley tries to make reactionary snobbery an art form. What makes Friedman remarkable is that he has no schtick at all - - his whole style is centered around a thoroughly deadpan commitment to a literary legacy of naked, obvious opinion.
Friedman's specialty is the urgent news flash filed ten years after the story broke under everyone else's bylines. Consider, for instance, these insights from his column last week- - the April 18 piece on Russia, "BizCzarism":
'At every level, different ministries, department heads, agencies, governates and mayoralties have gone into partnership with private businesses, local oligarchs or criminal elements, creating a kind of 21st-century Russian feudalism -- I'd call it "BizCzarism." Last week one newspaper ran a graphic of deputy ministers at the Ministry of Energy, with lines tracing which oil company each of them works for -- in tandem with their government jobs.
'The different K.G.B. clans, intelligence services and police forces have driven the mobsters out of business -- not by putting them in jail, but by taking over their protection rackets. Now your bank might pay the K.G.B. for what Russians call "roof," a k a protection, and the bank next door might pay the Interior Ministry for the same protection.'
This is classic Friedman - - swooping in on a phenomenon every reporter in Russia wrote about years ago, slapping a grotesquely maladroit catchword on it (what kind of mind thinks up "BizCzarism" and expects anyone to remember it?), and then quickly leaving town, apparently satisfied that he's placed his stamp for good on the matter.
The fun part about following Friedman, as he passes in and out of the world of Russian commentary, is that you never know where he'll go from here. The job he has allows him to be an expert on anything at anytime, a situation which must make his world forever filled to the brim with narcissistic temptations. The internet may frighten me because I have no hands-on knowledge of the technology, but Friedman doesn't have that problem; who needs to worry about understanding something, when you can just cut straight to the chase and start writing about it right off the bat?
The result, inevitably, are pieces like his February 16 column "Lessons in Cybercivics". From the headline alone you can see where this is going - - New York Times columnist goes from 0 to lesson-giving in no time flat. The sum of Friedman's observations in this piece basically amount to such trenchant insights as the revelation that the internet is changing the world forever:
'When the walls between nations start to get blown away, and the world gets increasingly wired into networks, everyone becomes potentially super-empowered, including individuals and vandals. What makes an Amazon.com so potentially powerful and possibly lucrative? It's the fact that in a wired world a single bookstore can now reach into 180 different countries, and be reached into from 180 different countries. Amazon is a super-empowered library.'
Friedman may be obvious, but he's no genius, either. As uninteresting and unoriginal as he is, he still almost always manages to be a wrong-headed reactionary on any issue he writes about. You always know what stance Friedman is going to take on an issue, and usually you don't need to read past the headline to catch his drift. After the WTO riots, for instance, there were few sights less surprising than Friedman's "Senseless in Seattle" headline blasting the protesters. (He liked that one so much, he wrote it twice-- Senseless in Seattle II ran a few weeks later). Before the recent IMF protests, Friedman wrote not one but two columns blasting the protests ("Saving the Lost World" and "Parsing the Protests"). In the latter piece, he pulled out his trademark wit to suggest that the protesters be renamed "The Coalition to Keep the World's Poor People Poor." For good measure, he gave a lift to the D.C. police by saying the demonstrators should get "the back of your hand."
But through the miracle of the internet- - Cybercivics, if you will - - U the eXile reader can now experience the Friedman phenomenon in three dimensions. That's because Friedman has a homepage for his new book, a dense piece of Friedmanesque Obvious Wisdom on the globalization phenomenon. The book has the kind of heavyhanded title that would make any Hurrumphing columnist proud: "The Lexus and the Olive Tree". And the site that goes along with the book offers, hilariously, audio recordings of Friedman thinking out loud. If you're anywhere near a computer, get online right now and log on to www.lexusandtheolivetree.com. You should see in the middle of the page a real gem: Friedman's "gas station" analogy. In it, Friedman says that the whole globalization phenomenon can be broken down into four basic models, which he says are like four types of gas stations. The first gas station is Japanese and has great service, four attendants in white suits who wash the windows, free air fresheners, etc., but the gas costs five dollars a gallon.
Then, proceeds Friedman, there's the American gas station, in which gas costs a dollar a gallon, but you pump it yourself. Then there's the European gas station, where gas also costs five dollars a gallon, but now there's only one worker who only works 36 hours a week and leaves the station closed for lunch (in the audio version one can hear at this point a single faint, halting laugh come from an elderly member of Friedman's audience).
Then, lastly, Friedman cites the communist gas station, where gas costs fifty cents, but there isn't any. That's his laugh line, the last one. Communist gas-- there isn't any! This is followed by his point, which is that the whole world now desperately wants our American kind of gas station. And that's it, that's the point. If you didn't know any better, you'd think you'd missed something. But you didn't.
Welcome to the world of commentary!
Next week: another colunist!