Pressing On

See now some people are just willful about not getting it. Matt Taibbi—the man who is now best known as the author of the world’ most tasteless dead pope jokes—is not happy until he has found a pile of his own shit to goosestep through. In yesterday’s New York Press, he offers his long and ultimately pointless critical attack on Tom Friedman. It comes down to this, folks: Friedman commits the heinous transgression of mixing his metaphors.

For example, Taibbi writes:

“(Quoting Friedman) I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

“Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.”

Only a man desperate to take a contrarian position will waste a thousand words on such trivialities, willfully ignoring the point—if there is one in this simple, throwaway, scene-setting passage. (Nit-picking off-topic metaphors: There is only one level lower on the totem pole of criticism—carping about typos on blogs.) So Friedman isn’t the world’s greatest stylist—does anyone on the planet, other than Matt Taibbi, care that Friedman is NOT James Joyce or Gustav Flaubert?

Now there are many good reasons to disagree with Friedman, and reasons to point out his most glaring blind spot— his unexamined assumptions about globalism. (He has never adequately defended his First Principle—why the slow encroachment of internationalism, i.e. Western style democracy, capitalism, and conspicuous consumerism, is necessarily a good thing for all people in all places.)

Taibbi has the opposite problem that he identifies in Friedman: He is all style and no heart, and most disturbingly of all, no reporting. (If he can accuse Friedman of being a lousy stylist, then we can accuse him of being a bedsit reporter.)

Taibibi writes:

“(Quoting Friedman, again) The walls had fallen down and the Windows had opened, making the world much flatter than it had ever been—but the age of seamless global communication had not yet dawned.

“How the fuck do you open a window in a fallen wall? More to the point, why would you open a window in a fallen wall? Or did the walls somehow fall in such a way that they left the windows floating in place to be opened?

Four hundred and 73 pages of this, folks. Is there no God?”

To which we can only answer: one thousand words of this, folks. Draw your own conclusions about the sacred and the profane.