Falling Off the Flat Earth
The two most destructive, and ultimately false, proclamations of the first decade of the twenty first century were GWB’s assertion that Iraq had WMD’s, and Thomas Friedman’s grandiose and best selling theory that “The World Is Flat”.
Let this be a lesson:
Hoaxers, however misinformed or well intentioned, come in all shapes, sizes, and political orientations.
A painfully long and widely acknowledged line of dominoes have fallen as a result of GWB’s flailing reaction to both 9/11 and the Iraqi plans to kill Poppy Bush (don’t tell me sonny boy wasn’t trying to show daddy he had the right stuff). Among the dominoes are lost and ruined lives, military and civilian, American and foreign. There are billions of wasted dollars that could and should have gone to educating the next generation and re-educating the obsolete unemployed. And worsening relations with just about every civilized, and even worse, uncivilized nation on the face of the earth. And on and on and on.
Far less attention has been paid to the damage done by the eurekas and subsequent glee of those who bought into the notion that, due in large part to our new found abilities to communicate and travel like never before, a far more level global playing field had arrived, and was going to prove a boon to all kinds of economic and cultural advances. Advances bordering on the miraculous, if you bought into the hype.
Instead, we’ve seen the outsourcing of so many American jobs that every couple of months Congress has to approve yet another extension to unemployment benefits (using, incidentally, money we’re borrowing from China), so that we don’t have even more foreclosures, or even more kids who can’t afford to go to college and may have to drop out of high school to help make ends meet at home. I don’t even want to get started about how those checks are just barely forestalling some sort of civil insurrection pitting the haves against the have-nots.
And we’ve seen cultures that should have had minimal contact while they developed according to their own histories, pace, and cultural norms, clash violently and become bitter enemies once they’re thrust into close contact with each other. It wasn’t enough that we needed stuff, like oil, from them, and they wanted stuff, like dollars, booze they drank on the sly, and DVD’s from us. We had to impose our style of democracy on them, which itself is increasingly dysfunctional as far as the American public’s concerned, and we imposed it like a demented Captain Kirk who forgot that he wasn’t supposed to interfere with the development of alien civilizations.
The last straw, as far as I was concerned, was hearing that Afghanistan’s poppy farmers were being given a pass by the American military so that we didn’t alienate them in our hunt for Osama and company.
So let’s keep that heroin and hash flowing to our inner cities; let’s keep our prisons populated, and our lower class right where they are. Protect America but kill the American dream.
Thomas Friedman seems like a man with a high IQ and a good heart who missed the obvious: the world is way too jarring and unwieldy to be flat.
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Just watched Daily Show reporting on Whamo (frisbees) moving factories from China back to the US. Some flat earth when we are cheaper than China. Then the Chinese rep comes on and says they ony care about high-tech jobs and that Americans should make their own cheap stuff.
Nicely put. I particularly like your conclusion about Friedman, and the world. I think you’re spot on.
I find it hard to believe that you’ve read any of Friedman’s books. He is saying that globalization will in fact be good for humanity, not the immediate economic outlook of the United States. The leveling of the playing field may have some adverse effects to the American economy, but that’s because they’ve been bullying the world around for a bit, and reaping the benefits. The US will be forced to stray away from its completely de-regulated market, and adopt some more sound social and economic policies, visa vie the Scandinavian nations, Canada, and others, in order to survive. No big deal.
As far as the American military tactics regarding Afghan poppy farmers go, they really don’t have that much to do with globalization.