World Is Round: The World is Flat...and Thomas Friedman Just Slid off the Deep End

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Lawrence of Arabia
This movie is by far my favorite of the old 1960s period epics of the Dr. Zhivago / Ben Hur variety. Like the others, it's great eye candy (and by eye candy I mean both David Lean's stunning visual interpretation of the desert and a very yummy young Peter O'Toole). But it's also a lot smarter, darker and complicated as T.E. Lawrence, at least according to Lean, was a man of some demons. Prefer to read the book? Check out Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence's detailed account of his escapades in what is now Egypt and Saudi Arabia as a young British officer.

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Nick Flynn: Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
I'm reading this book right now. Apparently it will soon be a movie starring someone in 2006. I checked out from the library (it's about a month overdue) and I had to repeat the title to the librarian about six times until we were both thoroughly embarassed since I don't think he quite believed me the first five times. Memoirs are something of a fad now, but this book is arguably the best one out there.
Jeffrey Herbst: States and Power in Africa
I first realized I wanted to be a political scientist while reading this book for the second time. Stresses imposed borders, population density and distribution, and the problem of "broadcasting" authority across vast tracts of sparsely populated lands as key challenges of African political development.
Jeanette Winterson: The Passion
The Passion, a story of a French peasant boy who cooks chickens in Napolean's army and the cross-dressing, web-footed Venetian daughter of a boatman he falls in love with, I fell in love with for its language. I haven't read a book this beautiful The Great Gatsby. Incidentally, I saw Jeanette Winterson at PEN World Voices 2006. She was humble and frank and really next to Chinua Achebe the most impressive person there.

November 20, 2006

The World is Flat...and Thomas Friedman Just Slid off the Deep End

I saw Thomas Friedman speak at the Bookworm last week on his "prophetic" newish book, The World is Flat. When I said saw, I mean saw the first 10 minutes of his talk on telecast before promptly falling asleep with my head nuzzled between the wall and my second cappuccino.

I could go on and on about everything I think is wrong about Friedman as noble prophet of globalization, but then I would be all ranty and ineloquent and I'm sure no one is interested in reading that.

Instead, here is some satire:

I was changing planes at the new airport in Jakarta the other day, on the way to Stockholm from Vladivostok. Three young Bangladeshi boys sat in the passenger lounge, watching The Power Rangers on satellite TV. Their mother--garbed in the traditional sari--talked to her cousin, a migrant worker who sold German-designed Walkman knockoffs in Hong Kong, on a shiny new Samsung cell phone. Sitting to one side of them was a young Chinese émigré on his way to Toronto to work for a software company, and on the other a business-suited Rastafarian making a connection to Bratislava. Meanwhile, a couple of Tuareg tribesmen sat cross-legged in front of the ticket counter, cooking yams over a flaming mound of ticket stubs.

What's my point? I don't actually have one--but opening my columns with strings of clichéd cultural juxtapositions really cuts down my workload. (From "The Datsun and the Shoe Tree," The American Prospect - please read this. It will make your sides hurt.)

And here is some real live Friedman:

The fall of the wall, and the rise of the windows
A kabbalistic accident of fate
Globalization 2.0
"The rise of the windows" is for me the rise of the Windows-enabled personal computer, which allowed this whole individual era of globalization
Allowed individuals to become authors of their own digital content
Ever since cavemen etched on walls, humans have been authors of their own content.

Folks, I could not make this stuff up if I tried. And I did try - I tried to take a transcript of the entire talk, konking out while my fingers were still typing.

Mr. Friedman actually had to say "kabbalistic accident of fate" four times before moving on to the next several lines. Someone in the audience was fidgeting or got up to get a glass of water and he had to start and stop again because he lost his train of thought (apparently he memorizes his talks verbatim). He was not pleased.

Anyhoo.

I take issue with talks given by Friedman and authors like him who come to the Bookworm to reveal the hidden truths of the most painfully obvious trends or present us with some cute cultural artifact they tripped over on the way out of the hutong this morning. It may sell books to naive audiences back home, but doesn't cut it here.

((I went to a talk a few weeks back where a man went into this long passage about his Ayi (Chinese housekeeper) for the benefit of a room full of post-neocolonial expats, most of whom, like me, already have their own living, breathing Ayis.))

Similarly, Friedman came to us to proclaim that 9/11 had made the world (him, the United States) forget about every country that wasn't four degrees separated from Israel, and while we (him, the United States) weren't looking, globalization started happening, and now it's really huge, man, and you know all of this outsourcing to India and all of these Chinese programmers and wow, who would have thunk? Asia exists. Mr. Friedman, forgive your audience of Chinese and multinational expats, many of whom have been living here for years, if not decades, for forgetting to blink.

But I guess when you have three Pulitzer prizes, you no longer have to be interesting or relevant.

Just because I'm evil, check out The World is Flat at Metacritic, the Rotten Tomatoes of the book.

Edit: I'm sorry, this just gets better and better. From Wikipedia (emphasis added):

One of Friedman's theses is that individual nations must sacrifice some degree of economic sovereignty to global institutions (such as capital markets and multinational corporations) in order to achieve Western-style economic prosperity. He termed these restrictions the "Golden Straitjacket."

While Friedman is an advocate of globalization, he has also points out (in The Lexus and the Olive Tree) the need for a country to preserve its local traditions even as it globalizes, a process he termed "glocalization".

01:40 PM in Books, China, Society | Permalink

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November 20, 2006

The World is Flat...and Thomas Friedman Just Slid off the Deep End

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