On being Thomas Friedman

Anyone who has read these virtual pages knows I think Thomas Friedman is an egotistical mindless twit. A quick search on this site produced 12 posts with Friedman as the subject matter. I have called him a delusional fat head and an ego about to explode among other things. Today James Wolcott sent me over to this review of clueless Tom's latest book by Richard Adams in the Guardian. He says a lot of really great things I wish I had been smart enough to say first.
About the Book

In The World Is Flat Friedman has produced an epyllion to the glories of globalisation with only three flaws: the writing style is prolix, the author is monumentally self-obsessed, and its content has the depth of a puddle.

Ouch, that hurts
It all starts with the title

Even the title of the book rests uneasily on a conceit. Friedman recounts meeting an Indian entrepreneur: "He said to me, 'Tom, the playing field is being levelled.'" A cliché of the business world, but Friedman's brain digests it thus: "What [he] is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened ... Flattened? Flattened? My god, he's telling me the world is flat!"

Which brings us to Columbus!

This leads Friedman to modestly compare his journey to Christopher Columbus - "Columbus sailed with the Nina ... I had Lufthansa business class" - and lay out a rambling theory about globalisation. It ends with dire predictions of looming international competition, where, in Friedman's terms, industrialised economies will need to produce chocolate sauce rather than vanilla ice-cream.

Talking to the keyboard about a flat earth:

The ultimate example is a detailed report on the computer company Dell's construction of Friedman's latest laptop. Journalists are notorious for interviewing their typewriters, but this must be the longest example of the genre: a typewriter's complete biography.

Throughout the book the metaphor of a flat Earth is reproduced again and again. What was not a particularly useful image to begin with is flogged to death until only the bones remain. At the same time, Friedman's laptop may need the "I" key replacing, such is the hammering it must have absorbed from the author's use of the personal pronoun. In the course of the book we learn much - too much - about Friedman's family, friends and eating habits, culminating in a paean to his school journalism teacher ("I sit up straight just thinking about her!").

Bottom line; he of giant ego has written a book on economics which he knows very little about and his writing is very bad. Well my writing is very bad, I know very little about economics and I was wondering what to do next week. I guess I'll write a book.