THIS MODERN WORLD

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

More!

Wonder how much damage Bush can still do.

So I’m reading a book about writing by Russell T. Davies, the showrunner for the new Doctor Who series. It’s in the form of a year-long email exchange between Davies and a journalist, following the creation of a season of Doctor Who from start to finish. Might not make as much sense if you’ve never seen the show, but it’s full of insight and angst about the writing process, universal stuff in which any creative person will immediately see their own experience reflected.

More to the point: on maybe the third page in after you get past the foreword and the intro and so on, there’s this little bit:

Anyway I’m off to bed. Not because I’m tired, but because I’m reading a brilliant book, Prisoner of Trebekestan. The Trebek is Alex Trebek, who’s presented the US quiz show Jeopardy for over 20 years. It’s the story of a man who dedicated his life to getting on the show. It’s so brilliant and so funny and even heartbreaking in small and beautiful ways. A man who’s devoted to telly. No wonder I like it.

Many fine entries, few of which seemed to express much admiration for the outgoing president. Odd. Anyway with a belated drumroll, here’s one that pretty much sums it up, from reader Thomas M:

Obama: I think it’s great that we can come together like this despite our ideological differences and the disagreements we’ve had about policy.

Bush: I like to eat paste.

From Salon:

Maybe everyone on the left shouldn’t be so quick to condemn Karl Rove. He is, after all, willing to deliver your mail. Really.

This is the last message posted to his Twitter account:

Send a farewell letter to President Bush—Email gwbfarewell@gmail.com [no attachments] and I’ll give him your note on January 20.

Another note says the deadline to send in the letters is 6 p.m. ET on January 19th.

Consider yourselves opportunified.