Read Tom Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree which, about three years ago was considered the book on globalization.
Holy Mary Mother of Spiderman's Baby, this thing aged worse than the Rolling Stones' Steel Wheels album.
It's not just the "show me the money"-type references Friedman that dominate the book (you can practically feel Tom elbowing you and arching his eyebrows), nor is it simply the fact that world has kind of gone hellward since the book was published in 2000. Some parts of a 450-page book are going to turn out to look mightily unprescient.
But not this unprescient. When Tom looked out his airplane window down at the West Bank and wrote, "You know, in raw power terms this place really isn't very important anymore. Interesting, yes. But geopolitically important, no," I actually slapped myself in the head. This guy was on the Israel/Palestine beat for years, and he thought the region's time as flashpoint were permanently behind it?
This bizarre Friedman-grade strain of bemused credulity runs on and on. He must have written the thing like Kerouac: get your big bag of stimulants, lock yourself in a room with a typerwriter, and ride the snake until it tells you to get off. Except Freidman's stimulants seem to be Aaron Sorkin scripts and old E-Trade commercials.
At one point when he's peaking, eyes dilated, seeing little green George Soroses everywhere, he suggests that a sovereign nation could, theoretically, "outsource your commando operations and border guard jobs to the Russians."
Oy, my head.
Yes, you could do that. But before you did, you might want to note that similar things have been done before, and they often didn't turn out well. Like when Serbian mercenaries were hired to protect the borders of Zaire so that the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide could escape justice. (Red mark, shape of palm, forehead.)
I mean, cripes on a cracker, this three-time Pulitzer prize winner couldn't ask one expert about the (already quite obvious by the time of Olive Tree's publication) ethical dilemmas inherent in outsourcing the military?
Dr. Pangloss in Candide wasn't this full of it. Those vast lagoons of pig feces that occasionally swell up with methane and explode in the heartland aren't this full of it. You can pack ten pounds of it into a five pound bag and still not be this full of it. The book: don't buy it.
Your weekend. Get to it.
