Thomas L. Friedmandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jonathan Vos Post

I met a traveller from the New York Times
Who said: `Two vast and Lexus legs of stone
Stand in Bangalore. Near their paradigms
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And open Windows, and sneer of the Berlin Wall,
Tell that its sculptor often ate at Pizza Hut
Which yet survive, stamped on this Lilliput,
T.I. that mocked them as ephemeral.
And on the plinth by this Michelangelo --
"My name is Friedmandias, king of the IPO:
Look on my prose, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing coherent stays. Round the decay
Of that steroidal wreck, boundless and bare
The level playing fields stretch far away.'

With respect to the great Friedman's current bestseller "The World Is Flat" -- wow. He's just discovered the world of 1999...

...it's like reading a rewrite of Bill Gates' "The Road Ahead."

Tim Kyger:

But without the insight and characterization of "The New New Thing : A Silicon Valley Story" by Michael Lewis [Hardcover, 268 pages, W. W. Norton & Company, October, 1999] which I greatly enjoyed at that premillennial time. Then the dotcoms crashed, and wiped out my retirement portfolio. I'd like to see the look on Thomas L. Friedmandias' shattered visage when Globalization 2.0 does that to him.

I was sitting in a trendy coffee shop, drinking free trade coffee, and I was thinking about globalization.

While we were fearing it,
that is, globalization,
it came,
whistling through our keyholes like ripe poison gas despite all of our efforts to seal our homes in good Tommy Thompson fashion, and I imagine that it finally came no matter what we did,
but came with less of fear
of the unfortunate consequences of globalization for which we were waiting,
because that fearing it so long,
which we have been doing since the false dawn of the American diminuendo during the troubled days of global stagflation in the 1970s seated the expectations of declinism and global cultural commoditism in our daily lives, altogether, I think that the anticipation of globalization, as it finally has arrived, long expected and normalized in our diminished expectation
had made it almost fair.

My wife was home, trying on bespoke subcontinental saris for which she sent through the internet, and I thought, my home has been outsourced into a clothing store, because in our spare guest room on the second floor, where I keep my spare author copies which I try to sell on ebay to the uncoming global cognoscenti of the Sub-Saharan world, like in a stall at the back of SYMS, and my wife is speaking directly to a seamstress in Bangalore, and when I asked her to parse a phone order so I could use it to write an article she had in her eyes a great disappointment, because the expensive value-added part of shopping at Barney's, that is, the careful assistance of expert fitters and selectors, was no longer in our financial reach.
There is a fitting --a dismay,
because the old certainties of our upper middle class lifestyle are being ruthlessly expropriated and airmailed to Bangalore. My wife tried on another sari, and we saw our future, locked inside of a fortress-like condominium in a reeking slum, my wife in a Burkha.

A fitting --a despair.
'Tis harder knowing it is due,
Than knowing it is here.
The trying on the utmost,
The morning it is new,
Is terribler than wearing it
A whole existence through.

There once was a New York Times columnist,
Whose prose could be summed up "opt-pessimist".
His new book said that
The world had gone flat
Which left more informed readers feeling... irked.

Higgledy Piggledy,
Mister Thomas Friedman
Has a new theory he'd
like to expound,

Unbalanced wealth classes
Anachronisticly
Makes folks like him think the
World is less round.

Glenn Hauman: Higgledy Piggledy,

Glenn Hauman, through your efforts, my screen has been introduced to the delights of V8 Orange Soy Smootie. It would like to thank you.

Ewwwww, V8 and soy in the same thing? Ewwwwww

Not only that, but a Smootie comes in a five-foot-seven-inch glass. And you gotta finish all of it, because it's good for you.

"Smootie" sounds like a 1940s slang-word from a midwestern city for, hmmm, a partially used cigarette covered with gravy you fished out of the trash behind a diner.

Friedman, Friedman,
Mixturing the metaphors,
Earth is flat, just like his head,
It gets him in a tizz,

Friedman, Friedman,
Polishing the posturing,
Hasn't time to notice yet
What horseshit it all is.

Higgledy piggledy
Thomas J. Friedman is
Writing the words that
The right wants to hear

Knowing unfortunately
Econometrically
Right sensu politics
Ain't right 'round here.

To write double dactyloids,
Thomas S. Whitmore says,
Engages a form that
Requires much thought.

Creating such versicles
Extemporaneously
Leads to embarrasment
Often'er than not.

Higgledy piggledy
Thomas J. Friedman can
step on his tongue
when his foot's in his mouth.

Microsoft Bangalore's
globalization
can't level the playing field:
North versus South.

(bad scansion in the second/third line of the second verse, JVP; "can't" falls in the second line, and therefore kills the fun almost as completely as the need for an extra syllable in the second line of the first verse around Friedman.

Which is why I consider both of mine an embarrassment.)

Tom Whitmore:

Thanks! Then I can correct my mistaken line break thus:

==================

Higgledy piggledy
Thomas J. Friedman can
step on his tongue
when his foot's in his mouth.

Microsoft Bangalore's
globalization can't
level the playing field:
North versus South.

==================

The double dactyl requires a single word in line 6 (see http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/dactyls.html); to the extent that I'm channeling clerihews through double dactyls, I've bent the rules by not having line two just be a name, but included in both instances a verb form as well. Which is the source of my personal embarrassment at sharing them here.

From Pope's Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot:
And he who now to sense, now nonsense leaning,
Means not, but blunders round about a meaning.

Tom Whitmore:

Thanks again. I'm not sure if we're converging, but the next iteration is:

==================

Higgledy piggledy
Thomas J. Friedman can
step on his tongue
when his foot's in his mouth.

Microsoft Bangalore's
globalizational
lev'ling the playing field:
North versus South.

==================

Right.

I'll take "Identify of Citizen" for $200, Alex.

Not only that, but a Smootie comes in a five-foot-seven-inch glass.

Just so that you can be sure that someone did get it, cute M.I.T. reference . . .

So I'm not the only one who has "issues" with Friedman's leaden prose!

Last week I posted a somewhat critical review of the portion of "The World Is Flat" that I managed to get through, at:

http://www.silphium.net/blog

Inspired by Jonathan Vos Post above, we just blogged a variation of Kubla Khan, in honor of Tom's favorite colleague at the NYT.

Here's the first stanza (the rest at that link):

In Exurbia did David Brooks
A classless freedom dome decree:
Where profs and hipsters deep in books
And soccer moms and Wasps and kooks
Could live in harmony.
Or rather, in adjacent trenches
Sorted by consumer penchants.
Each latte-drinking bobo her own mentor
In the tribal meritocracy.
For every car on Paradise Drive, an emperor
Of his condo and his SUV.

spam

a link to a detergent supplier, entwined with a stock insult.

Probably?

Why wouldn't you expect spam on a post about Thomas Friedman?

@31

spam