Tom Friedman: To address the most important issues facing us, we need fifty green states

[DeepModem Mom]

NOTE: Anger at Tom Friedman over the Iraq War is known to all; his is a powerful voice, however, and if he's talking "green," that might be worth our attention.

NYT Magazine: The Power of Green
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: April 15, 2007

One day Iraq, our post-9/11 trauma and the divisiveness of the Bush years will all be behind us — and America will need, and want, to get its groove back. We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It’s called “green.”

In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term “green” was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents — by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as “liberal,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” “girlie-man,” “unpatriotic,” “vaguely French.”

Well, I want to rename “green.” I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century. A redefined, broader and more muscular green ideology is not meant to trump the traditional Republican and Democratic agendas but rather to bridge them when it comes to addressing the three major issues facing every American today: jobs, temperature and terrorism.

How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

Because a new green ideology, properly defined, has the power to mobilize liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists, big business and environmentalists around an agenda that can both pull us together and propel us forward. That’s why I say: We don’t just need the first black president. We need the first green president. We don’t just need the first woman president. We need the first environmental president. We don’t just need a president who has been toughened by years as a prisoner of war but a president who is tough enough to level with the American people about the profound economic, geopolitical and climate threats posed by our addiction to oil — and to offer a real plan to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/15/magazine/15green.t.html?pagewanted=all

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. The Apollo Project...

Has been saying this for quite a while now. Tom's playing catchup.

Now, about those "Friedman Units"...

[Gabi Hayes]

2. what a load of utter, delusional crap, from the maw of THE champion

of globalization

who in the world does he think he's fooling?

does he think the Halliburtons, the BPs, the Sachs/Goldmans of the world are going to change the way they do business in order to allow this 'greening' to take place

what a dick

here...have some fun:

http://newyorkpress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm

[NormanYorkstein]

4. this is the best part

As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: "The playing field is being leveled."

What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!

[Gabi Hayes]

5. it's hard to pick the 'best' amongst all the flotsam. this, from a guy

who has his clean underdrawers UPSed to himself!

what do you expect from someone who's worth MANY hundreds of millions of dollars...and I'm not exaggerating

[Gabi Hayes]

6. if you llked that column......

A Shake of the Wheel
The mixed-metaphor madness of Thomas Friedman.

............


....Reading Friedman is fascinating–the same way that it’s fascinating to watch a zoo gorilla make mounds out of its own feces. The gorilla is a noble, intelligent animal that will demean itself in captivity. Friedman is a less noble animal of roughly the same intelligence, whose cage is the English language. It’s an amazing thing to behold.

The mustachioed New York Times columnist’s May 7 piece, "Needed: Iraqi Software," was the culmination of an incredible two-month stretch of steadily worsening derangement and incoherence. Friedman’s columns during this period contain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, some of the very worst and most confused metaphorical/rhetorical constructions in the history of our language. That’s in addition to being decisively wrong in all of his opinions. It is a veritable mountain range of idiocy. Some of the highlights:

"Needed: Iraqi Software," May 7. The hallmark of the Friedman method is a single metaphor, stretched to column length, that makes no objective sense at all and is layered with other metaphors that make still less sense. The result is a giant, gnarled mass of incoherent imagery. When you read Friedman, you are likely to encounter such creatures as the Wildebeest of Progress and the Nurse Shark of Reaction, which in paragraph one are galloping or swimming as expected, but by the conclusion of his argument are testing the waters of public opinion with human feet and toes, or flying (with fins and hooves at the controls) a policy glider without brakes that is powered by the steady wind of George Bush’s vision.

In this piece, Friedman revives the ancient "Too Much Democracy" argument, a clunky descendant of the theory that giving blacks the vote would rob them of their natural cheerfulness and musicality. Used in Vietnam in 1955 and countless times since, the idea here is that in Iraq, as in all other places where the population is savage and lacking the wisdom and intellectual enlightenment we enjoy in America, too much democracy can be a bad thing. Elections might just be counterproductive.

There are obvious, effective ways to illustrate this idea. Friedman might have said that you can’t put the cart before the horse, or that you need to plant seeds before the harvest, or some variation thereof–there are any number of at least superficially plausible ways of saying that you need civilization and education before you can have the vote. But Friedman, desperate to seem like the hip computer-age priest of globalization he has worked so hard to market himself as, decides instead to say that you need software (free institutions) before you can have hardware (elections).

http://www.nypress.com/16/20/news&columns/cage.cfm

[NormanYorkstein]

7. Free Trade = Flat Earthers

You really can't make this shit up. At least, I'm no Steven Colbert or Jon Stewart or The Onion. *I* sure as hell couldn't make this shit up!

[fujiyama]

3. That's nice and all

but until the US figures out a way to end the damn war he encouraged, none of this is going to go anywhere.

No domestic issues - or even global issues will be addressed adequately as long as we are wasting billions of dollars a month on Iraq.