SLOW FRIDAY MORNING, DURING WHICH MIKE SHAMELESSLY CHERRY-PICKS LINKED CONTENT FROM A FAR MORE POPULAR BLOG THAN HIS (OR SOMETHING LIKE THAT)

To kick off what should be a very slow blogging day at the head end of a slow blogging weekend, I'll link to a very funny piece by Matt Taibbi, back when he was still at the not-yet-horrible New York Press. It's an ostensible review of whatever book Thomas Friedman was peddling at the time, but it serves mostly as a chance for Taibbi to make merciless fun of a pompous windbag.

(No. He doesn't even know who I am, I assure you.)

A brief excerpt, but I strongly advise you to check out the whole thing (big H/T to Scott at Lawyers, Guns, and Money -- H/T's have to be big when you basically steal from them, methinks):

After golf, he meets Nilekani, who casually mentions that the playing field is level. A nothing phrase, but Friedman has traveled all the way around the world to hear it. Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the course of 2000 years of human thought. That he misattributes his thesis to Nilekani is perfect: Friedman is a person who not only speaks in malapropisms, he also hears malapropisms. Told level; heard flat. This is the intellectual version of Far Out Space Nuts, when NASA repairman Bob Denver sets a whole sitcom in motion by pressing "launch" instead of "lunch" in a space capsule. And once he hits that button, the rocket takes off.

And boy, does it take off. Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce. Moreover, Friedman's book is the first I have encountered, anywhere, in which the reader needs a calculator to figure the value of the author's metaphors.

God strike me dead if I'm joking about this. Judge for yourself. After the initial passages of the book, after Nilekani has forgotten Friedman and gone back to interacting with the sane, Friedman begins constructing a monstrous mathematical model of flatness. The baseline argument begins with a lengthy description of the "ten great flatteners," which is basically a highlight reel of globalization tomahawk dunks from the past two decades: the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Netscape IPO, the pre-Y2K outsourcing craze, and so on. Everything that would give an IBM human resources director a boner, that's a flattener. The catch here is that Flattener #10 is new communications technology: "Digital, Mobile, Personal, and Virtual." These technologies Friedman calls "steroids," because they are "amplifying and turbocharging all the other flatteners."

Again, check the whole thing out. Very funny and very smart from start to finish.