Thomas Friedman Parody of the Week

Alex
Pareene is doing his annual hack list at
Salon, and the conceit this year is that he writes each
entry in the hack’s own voice. This means, among other things,
that he has posted a Thomas
Friedman parody.

This raises the issue: Does the world need another Thomas
Friedman parody? At this point literally every single Thomas
Friedman column is itself a self-parody, and if that doesn’t
exhaust your appetite there’s a website that generates still more
parodies automatically.
It is possible that Friedman himself uses that site to create a
column when he’s feeling rushed, which would explain how
this managed to make it into the paper.

But Pareene took an extra step by asking: You know how
people love to complain about how awful Thomas Friedman is? What
would their complaints sound like if they were written by Thomas
Friedman? Here is what he came up with:

When I was in Singapore, I talked to hundreds of Asian
college students, business people and diplomats, and while none of
them said this to me, exactly, it’s basically my thesis and

so I’m going to put it in quotation marks as a sort of
“distillation” of things I probably was told by people: “Is
everything going all right over there in America? How could the
people who gave us Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, H.P. and Google
also have so many people, many of them in positions of authority,
who take a clown like Thomas Friedman seriously? Most of his
columns are just
nonsensical buzzwords he’s been repeating for literally 10
years and his foreign policy analysis is usually either
incredibly facile or actively offensive to Arabs and Muslims. It’s
actually terrifying how influential he is. Like it legitimately
makes me despair of anything improving anywhere in the world for
anyone but the super-rich. Also there is probably some Times rule
about not putting ‘distilled’ quotes in quotation marks,
right?”

When I heard that—or rather when I didn’t hear it but when I wrote
it, just now—I thought “we’re
gonna need a bigger boat.” And that boat better have
Wi-Fi.

Friedman-bashing aficionados can read the rest here.