Not Since Nixon—Friedman in China, Sells Tom’s World
Times Columnist Exports Adage, Aphorism, Metaphor: Opening Big Book Market. Mr. Ham—Hold the Mao! Explains Much to Beijing: ‘The World. Is. Flat.’
By: Tom Scocca Date: 11/20/2006
BEIJING—I had just begun haggling for a silk comforter at the Yuexiu Market on Chaoyangmen Street when I got a phone call saying that New York Times Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman was on his way to a bookstore nearby. I wrapped up the deal, disadvantageously, and grabbed a cab.
You can learn a lot wandering around a foreign country in the first person. Mr. Friedman does it all the time. He looks around and talks to somebody and learns something important. Now I was the one in a cab in a foreign country. Conversations with cab drivers are the sort of things that lead Mr. Friedman to larger truths about globalization and the world we live in today. ...
The bookstore was packed and steaming. All the rooms, the lecture room and the TV rooms, were full of people. It was so crowded that most people didn’t see Mr. Friedman come in—a small, roundish figure escorted by the Bookworm’s owner, a woman much taller than him. He wore black trousers and a dark sweater with a zipper at the neck.
With a smile, Mr. Friedman perched on a tall stool. He had the genial assurance of a children’s television host. “If you get a small enough room, you can feel really important,” he told the audience.
His talk, he said, would be an update on his thinking about his latest book, The World Is Flat, which he said is now out in its 2.0 version. His new thoughts will be incorporated into a 3.0 version. “The whole subject is alive,” he said. ...
Mr. Friedman moved on to the subject of what he called “Ten Days That Flattened the World.” He was speaking without notes, playing on names and numbers, repeating his points. The first world-flattening day was 11/9, he said. Not 9/11. No, 11/9 was, by “Kabbalistic accident,” the date of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Someone moved around, breaking his train of thought. He went back to 11/9 and 9/11. A young woman came in, carrying shopping bags, distracting him again. “Everybody settled?” Mr. Friedman asked. “Anybody want to stand up and say something?” 11/9. A cell phone rang.
The awkwardness passed, and Mr. Friedman settled back into his timeline of global techno-unification and leveling: Microsoft Windows, the Netscape I.P.O., the fiber-optic infrastructure buildout. The “workflow revolution.” Mr. Friedman speaks with his hands and arms, sometimes his whole body. He pantomimed an old-fashioned worker hand-carrying a piece of paper from one place to another. He pulled and stretched imaginary objects in the air, as if he were in one of those notebook-computer commercials like Jay-Z or Shaun “The Flying Tomato” Wright. He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.
The language was flourishy to match: “Beijing, Bangalore and Bethesda” … “from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China.” Metaphors flourished themselves into trouble. “What these steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration,” Mr. Friedman said. Also: “Mother Nature always bats last.”
“Whatever can be done will be done,” Mr. Friedman said. “Will it be done by you or to you?” He repeated the question. By you or to you?
He told a story about going to Hungary and being driven around. His driver had asked him—“Mister Tom, Mister Tom”—to refer friends to him, if they visited Hungary. The driver, Mr. Friedman said, had given him the U.R.L. of his Web site: a hired Hungarian driver with his own Internet presence. Imagine!
More metaphor: Mr. Friedman compared the C.E.O.’s who understand the scope of the ongoing transformation to the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They know the secret. “None of our political leaders were talkin’ about it,” Mr. Friedman said. Mr. Friedman was with the pods.
“The world. Is. Flat,” he said.
In the question-and-answer period, ... [a] tall young man in a Brandeis T-shirt raised the issue of Mr. Friedman’s personal wealth, and whether that might shape his views of globalization. “If George Soros were here, giving a speech from the far left, would you have asked him that question?” Mr. Friedman asked.
“Um, sure,” the questioner said.
But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”
On it went, prosecution and defense, in one man. He has been called a “spokesman for global capitalism.” A “shill.”
“It’s stupid,” Mr. Friedman said.
His foes have their facts and figures, criticizing him for not weighing the costs of globalization. “Thank you very much for those statistics,” Mr. Friedman said, apostrophically. “They’re all from my book.”
There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side. ...
<http://www.observer.com/20061120/20061120_Tom_Scocca_pageone_offtherec.asp>
Carl
_________________________________________________________________ View Athlete’s Collections with Live Search http://sportmaps.live.com/index.html?source=hmemailtaglinenov06&FORM=MGAC01