Taibbi on Friedman II 1/2: The Smell Of Fear

OK, I wish he hadn’t opened with a but-John-Edwards-lives-in-a-big-house fallacy, but you’re looking for the quality of the venom rather than the quality of the ideas, and once again Taibbi delivers:

But whatever, let’s concede the point, forget about the crazy metaphors for a moment, and look at the actual content of Hot, Flat and Crowded. Many people have rightly seen this new greenish pseudo-progressive tract as an ideological departure from Friedman’s previous works, which were all virtually identical exercises in bald greed-worship and capitalist tent-pitching. Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, it’s the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes.

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

And it gets better, especially with regards to Taibbi’s Friedmanesque contributions to social science. (See the previous iteration here.)