"Tuesday Morning" - The Pogues
(WIth Spider Stacey on vocals rather than Shane McGowan.)
Everyone should read this fine piece on Thomas Friedman by Tom Junod over at Charles Pierce's new Politics blog at Esquire -- a really welcome addition. Pierce is a great and funny guy -- hearing from him regularly should be a treat.
Junod really captures the manner in which Friedman appeals to a certain upper middle class sensibility -- the anxiety-riddled strivers who make up our professional class and who desperately want to transmit their own success to their offspring. These are Friedman's people -- smart, but not intellectuals, prosperous, but still in need of a paycheck, worldly, but not really. Not to go all David Brooks on them, but these are people who have by and large played by all the rules and it has paid off for them, but they retain a sense -- appropriately -- of insecurity, especially about their kids.
And Friedman is their go-to guy to explain the world to them -- not so much as a public intellectual (although he appears to be what passes for one these sad days), but as a kind of bourgeois moralist. Friedman's message is that the world is constantly threatening to shift from under your feet -- no matter how good you are at what you do, some kid in Shanghai or Bangalore is out there ready to do it better and cheaper. Or more painfully for this set, better than your kids can. Junod perfectly captures Friedman's ability -- the "make your kids do more homework, it's their only hope" schtick -- to stir angst in the hearts of this demographic as the center of his appeal. (The New York Times Op-Ed page is currently crammed with these upper middle class moralists -- David Brooks and Ross Douthat work the same beat in different fashions.)
What Friedman can't say -- probably because he doesn't really understand it -- is that this is a sucker's game that no one can win. Well, they can win via luck and happenstance, but not likely just on the basis of their own efforts. The global ebay for people's services that he describes is really a nightmarish Hobbesian vision. In essence, a world in which someone, somewhere will always be available to do what you do more cheaply. What's not to like?
Junod also does some good work discussing the endless allure of the sensible center and how people like Friedman and Jon Stewart continually fall prey to this delusion. Neither can seem to admit that what is needed now is for people to engage in concerted, effective political activity in which a vision of the world that is humane, egalitarian, and founded in notions of solidarity is the only way to avoid the nightmare of rapacious global capitalism.
- Tim Noah is also now blogging over at TNR -- it's great to see him back with a steady gig. Interestingly, he has a piece today about one of the great investors of the age, Bill Gross of PIMCO, arguing that what we really need is not the world that Friedman embraces, but rather one in which labor is paid well for its efforts. Only then, Gross notes, can investors be assured of decent returns on capital. What a radical notion.
Once I figure out how to do it, I'll be adding both of these guys to our blogroll.
What's going on with you?
