April 22, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:Flattened
Ain't nothing finer than Matt Taibbi on the subject of Tom Friedman:
Thomas Friedman in possession of 500 pages of ruminations on the metaphorical theme of flatness would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be like letting a chimpanzee loose in the NORAD control room; even the best-case scenario is an image that could keep you awake well into your 50s.So I tried not to think about it. But when I heard the book was actually coming out, I started to worry. Among other things, I knew I would be asked to write the review. The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of each single word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays. I'll give you an example, drawn at random from The World Is Flat. On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:
I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.
Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
For my take on Tom Friedman's abusive, even criminal, deployment of metaphor, click here. Meanwhile, does the man know how many calories there are in a Cinnabon? I mean, seriously, now. What was he thinking?
Posted by Jane Galt at April 22, 2005 7:01 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksHyenas? Wolves? Lions? Someone want to explain to me the difference between a pack and a herd (and no, please no Instapundit references)?
And the hand-waving. Have you seen him on TV? Arrgh. Chris Matthews (or someone, anyone, else)genuflects at him, and Friedman can't say "Hello" without gesticulating wildly.
How did this guy (Friedman)get such a "smart" rep, anyway?
I missed your original 8/27/03 piece, but in reading it now, I can't help but trade snark for snark, vis-vis the quoted Matt Taibbi article:
"(Is there a place in the world where one can pop one’s own popcorn and then "pay money" to watch something?)"
It's called a family room in my house, where the thing called "cable TV" has "pay-per-view".
A pack is organized, well tuned, and designed to hunt. A herd is a bunch of dopey vegetarians all waiting to be eaten by the obviously superior predatory species.
I'm sorry but certainly people could have found a worse example than this? Perhaps you people have a lot of time on your hands but I simply cannot get upset at a passage where a writer describes being herded onto a plane and then hunting for an overhead bin.
Do you actually object to any ideas Friedman argued in either his book or columns?
Stephen Green found possibly Mr. Friedman's most amusing bad analogy :
And this poker hand is seven-card stud, no-limit Texas Hold 'Em.
Those are two different games. You can't be playing seven-card stud at the same time as Texas Hold 'Em. Just stop.
Matt Tibbi is too enthralled with nitpicking TF's choice of words.
One can try to herd an animal that is not a herd animal.
Every try to herd cats?
Verb vs adjective.
Of course, one can be herded but then engage in hunting within the confines. (i.e. kids herded into a school bus and then they hunt for the 'cool seats' in the back).
Hyenas? Wolves? Lions? Someone want to explain to me the difference between a pack and a herd (and no, please no Instapundit references)?
The essential difference is that one can't really "herd" a pack, pride, etc. because its instinct will be to regard the herder as food. But aside from the fact that the fellow is technically correct I just don't see how mismatched metaphores are a very big problem in the scheme of things, especially since the mismatch itself conveys information that might well be intentional, and if not is still useful. Anyway, the proper question would have been: "name me an omnivore that can be herded and that also hunts," and the response is obvious. Chimpanzees, right?
The whole "make-fun-of-Friedman" thing is quite amusing, but what the heck was this?
"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."
Apparently, Mr. Taibbi's literary skills do not extend to economics. He's certainly free to disagree with the benefits of "free-trade," but surely the increasingly globalized world would seem to indicate that "free-trade" was more than "leg-humping," to use Mr. Taibbi's eloquent and insightful phrase.
"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"
He's certainly allowed to slam Friedman for such mundane examples, but if detailed technical information being retrievable in 5 minutes after being beamed through the air from a little box on the other side of the planet into something that fits in your palm isn't all but miraculous to Taibbi, then I hate to see how he would have philosophized about the invention of fire.
"Well, it just makes your food hot. Why would anyone write books about it?"
Or this:
"[Friedman's Book] It's brilliant. Only an America-hater could fail to appreciate it."
Does he think Friedman is some kind of Republican cheerleader? Wow, the Republicans aren't going to like this. I don't care about Friedman's literary lack of style, or even his philosophy. But it says something about Taibbi that he thinks that amazing technology and free trade are passe ideas that people should'nt even bother commenting on.
"If you're going to split hairs, I'm going to piss off."
The word hunt can mean to look for suitable vegetation to eat.
Free Market Fairy Tales just happens to have posted about someone who mixes metaphors even more hilariously than Friedman: http://www.fmft.net/archives/000915.html
Seems like a nitpick to me. I think you could argue that herd animals hunt for some things, e.g. grass, their car keys, space.
I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.
The words herd and hunt are so commonplace in everyday English that only an utterly persnickety jackass would take their mutual appearance in the same sentence as an indication that the author was attempting to employ a sloppy metaphor that confuses livestock and predators.
One might say that Taibbi is both grinding an axe and clutching at straws here, but he would no doubt take great offense at this suggestion. I mean, who has a free hand to clutch at straws while he's busy sharpening an axe?
For what it's worth, there were probably ample opportunities to rip apart that sentence for hackishness without getting worked up over imaginary zoological metaphors. "Stomped off" and "glumly sat" is not exactly the stuff of lean, mean prose. And was he really sitting down while on the line to board? Was he really waiting to be herded on board so that [he] could hunt for space, or just maybe was the core purpose of all that waiting and herding to, oh I don't know, fly somewhere? Finding a place to cram your carry-on items is just an annoying feature of commercial flight, not the reason you board a plane, and there are many ways to work this annoyance into the sentence without using the word "so".
I can write much worse stuff than TF. Attempting to find emerging paterns in the news years before more academic commentators or data digesting studies could confirm that indeed some important tilt in the flow of power or cash had been afoot is, of course, a risky business. Whoever among us has demonstrated the least preference for being interesting over being accurate may throw the first stone. At least Mr. Friedman isn't telling you what stocks to buy. How do YOU convey the "big picture" of history's currents turning awry? Nit picking the style of a writer who sells a lot of books and gets a full hour to tell Charlie Rose about his vision of things has a faint wiff of jealousy about it.
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