Those in the US must recuperate their ability to "do big, hard things together", insists NYT columnist in new book.
Belen Fernandez, Last Modified: 15 Oct 2011
Belen Fernandez is an editor at PULSE Media. Her book The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work will be released by Verso on November 7, 2011.
In a January 2011 Fox Business interview, three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman - famed begetter of the notion that the US military should make Iraqis "Suck. On. This"- described his forthcoming book That Used to Be Us as "the first book I've really written about America".
Published last month with the subtitle How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented - And How We Can Come Back, the treatise is co-authored by Friedman's proclaimed "intellectual soul mate" Michael Mandelbaum, a Johns Hopkins professor who appears on an excessive basis in Friedman's columns and who is credited with coining the mantra that "people do not change when you tell them they should; they change when they tell themselves they must". Said mantra does not stop either character from cheerleading the US war on Iraq, which Friedman additionally manages to cast as "the most radical-liberal revolutionary war the US has ever launched" despite simultaneously defining himself as "a liberal on every issue other than this war".
As for Friedman's assertion that the current book is the first one he has really written about America, this is not entirely reconcilable with his announcement during a 2010 presentation at Istanbul's Ozyegin University that his then - latest bestseller Hot, Flat, and Crowded "is really about America". He adds that The World Is Flat, as well as Hot, Flat, and Crowded, marketed as groundbreaking texts about globalisation and the environment, respectively, "have nothing to do with technology or environment at heart" and are instead "basically cries of the heart to get my country focused on fixing itself".
This particular presentation occurred two weeks after the Israeli commando attack on the Turkish Mavi Marmara, part of the Freedom Flotilla endeavouring to deliver aid to besieged Gaza. It may appear more than slightly illogical that a US columnist who has just written off as a "setup" the slaying of nine Turkish humanitarian activists by a US-funded army in international waters - and who has furthermore placed the word "humanitarian" in quotation marks - is now lecturing an auditorium full of Turks on how "a lot of bad stuff happens in the world without America, but not a lot of good stuff".
remainder:
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/20111012111830751959.html
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