from -- http://www.observer.com/pages/story.asp?ID=9065
<snip>
Write your own Thomas Friedman column!
1. Choose your title to intrigue the reader through its internal conflict:
a. War and Peas b. Osama, Boulevardier c. Big Problems, Little Women
2. Include a dateline from a remote location, preferably dangerous, unmistakably Muslim:
a. Mecca, Saudi Arabia b. Islamabad, Pakistan c. Mohammedville, Trinidad
3. Begin your first paragraph with a grandiose sentence and end with a terse, startlingly unexpected contradiction:
[...]
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God that's good stuff.
Friedman has inspired the creation of a cottage industry of writers who spend a good amount of time (probably too much, but I undertand -- it's an addictive pastime) dissecting his knumbskullery in one way or another.
Matt Taibbi of the New York Press (and before him, Neal Pollock) has made Friedman the subject of some of his most screamingly funny articles.
If David Brooks isn't careful, he'll become a favored target too, if he's not already.
Guys like Friedman, who irk people like me to distraction, help fill a niche that's also occupied by magazines like "Time" and newspapers such as USA Today. It's a well-meaning, room temperature ice cream soft alternate dimension where people wish all films were "family friendly" all lawns were evenly cut and every city on earth had a good mall with a recognizable chain restaurant serving your favorite 'gourmet burger'. Nothing wrong with malls (well...), nothing wrong with burgers (um...) but for the Friedmans of the world, clutching their copies of "The Lexus and the Olive Tree" these things are not merely conveniences, but indications of a profound progress, marching ever forward into a brilliant future of consumer fueled uber-modernity
The end-point of history is, I suspect, a planetary suburban development, with adjoining malls, in which we'd all live and shop -- more or less in harmony -- until the sun goes nova. Of course, by then, we'll have taken our Lexus and Olive Tree civilizational roadshow to the stars enjoying neat gadgets and good shopping while observing the purple-colored lightning flows coursing through the atmosphere of some far distant, gas giant world. Perhaps we'll even meet some benighted interstellar natives providing future Friedmans, Bermans and so on with "what went wrong" material for their SenseNet bestsellers.
As a vision, it is, I suppose, preferable to the evangelical Christians' war and bloodshed as preparation for the rapture. Still, it's somebody's idea of hell.
Whose idea? Well, mine actually.
.d.