Thomas Friedman Takes on ISIS
Thomas Friedman’s “Cabs, Camels or ISIS” column this week is either a brilliant self-parody, or a plant in the Times by the Pentagon to confuse the Islamic State:
“DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Today, I’ll talk about the Paris attacks, but before I do I want to share two news stories here, in case you missed them: The first calf to come from a cloned camel was born at a research center in Dubai and a local taxi start-up is taking on Uber in the Arab world.
“You may think that these emirates start-ups — cloning camels and cabs — have nothing to do with Paris, but they do. Bear with me.”
When Friedman writes, “Bear with me,” it’s serious. This is a man who thinks nothing of plunging readers into an essay comparing occupied Iraq to a rental car (without a steering wheel) or the Ukraine crisis to a hockey game (without a referee). So it’s a somber thing when even he feels a need to brace his audience for a coming literary trapeze act.
This week’s piece has everything. There’s the oratorial opening, one of the mustached one’s favorite lede structures: “Let me sit you on my knee while we talk about the Middle East.” (The ingenious Friedman bot, ThomasFriedmanOpEdGenerator.com, uses at least one opening line that reads like this).
Then there’s the goofball alliteration, the birth imagery (policies and plans are always going through messy figurative births in Friedman’s work, often with the aid of a midwife), and the self-flagellating reference to taxis in the headline (Friedman is even more famous for interviewing cab drivers than he is for mixing metaphors).
Then there’s the premise. The occasion, the horrific Paris attacks, seems to cry out for humble, shtick-free commentary. Instead he offers the same ham-fisted column about the wonders of globalism he’s been writing since the Clinton administration.
For two decades, whenever anyone has waged war or committed acts of mass murder anywhere on earth, Friedman appeared in the Times within a few weeks offering to cure the problem with modems and cheeseburgers. Now he’s going to take a figurative walk into Mosul and cheerfully suggest to ISIS fighters that they lay down their arms and invest in “the start-up of You.”