Tom Friedman Strikes Again
by Matt Taibbi
April 22, 2009
Swimming Without a Suit
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
"Speaking of financial crises and how they can expose weak companies and weak countries, Warren Buffett once famously quipped that 'only when the tide goes out do you find out who is not wearing a bathing suit.' So true. But what's really unnerving is that America appears to be one of those countries that has been swimming buck naked -- in more ways than one.
Credit bubbles are like the tide. They can cover up a lot of rot."
-- Op-Ed Columnist - Swimming Without a Suit - NYTimes.com.
The other day I was thinking about how I’m going to turn forty soon, how scary that is and what it means going forward. And one of the things I thought, when I was thinking about this, was, “I’m going to have to stop picking on Thomas Friedman after I turn forty. Forty is way too old to still be picking on a guy just because he happens to have been born with a big hunk of granite in his metaphor center.”
But now, I don’t know. I may be getting older and weaker, but Tom Friedman just gets stronger and stronger with age. He just rolls on and on, like a goddamned steamroller. Like a steamroller with flippers. Soaring, on the waves of time.
A friend of mine sent me this latest effort of his. It’s awesome — a true Friedman classic. The title alone is a signal of what is to come. Friedman has tried a version of this same premise, the “Doing dumb thing X is like sailing without a boat” theme, several times. In the past it’s never worked because inevitably makes the wrong analogy. For instance, you can say, “Giving out foreign aid without conditions is like milking cows without a pail.” Or you can say, “Threatening war without leaving diplomatic channels open is like fishing without bait.” But you can’t say, “Negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.”
Because that doesn’t make any fucking sense at all. You can’t play baseball without a bat; the game can’t even start. So what Friedman ended up saying in that column is, “When one side negotiates without leverage in the Middle East, it is like a game in which both sides stand around in an equal state of helplessness, waiting for someone to give them a bat so they can start playing.” Friedman doesn’t get that the first part of any analogy actually has to match the second. But he creates second halves of analogies/similes that don’t match anything. If the second half of your sentence reads, “…is like using a moray eel for underwear,” you’re not going to end up making sense, no matter what the preceding part was. Hence his well-documented struggle to make his “invading Iraq is like driving on the highway without a steering wheel” bit work.
This latest thing is different. One actually can swim without a bathing suit. In some circumstances it may even be preferable to swimming with a suit. The problem is that I’m not sure how possible it is to swim “buck naked — in more ways than one.” It may be (and I’d be inclined to believe it, if evidence were to surface) that Friedman is actually a member of an alien civilization that recognizes not two genders but nine and has fifteen different ways to be naked. But I don’t think “buck naked — in more ways than one” is something we understand here on earth.
Then there’s the line, “Credit bubbles are like the tide. They cover up a lot of rot.” Friedman is trying to say that credit bubbles cover up economic problems, much the way Buffet’s high tide covered up some investors’ lack of foresight. And that would have been fine, if he’d just said it like that. The problem is that Friedman fucks up the whole “tide” image by adding the two image-wrecking words bubble and rot. Only Thomas Friedman wouldn’t notice the natural relationship between the words “bubble” and “tide,” and wouldn’t realize that readers would see those two water words lumped close together and frantically search for some kind of figure of speech there. But there isn’t one: Friedman only means “credit bubble” in the sense of a “credit bubble,” so while you’re trying to figure out what the tide has to do with the bubbles, Friedman is on the other side of the room covering up rot, which most people cover with paint, using ocean water. It’s far from his best work, but bubbles are like tide covering rot is a solid base hit in the Friedmanisms game.
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