Tom Friedman lays down the law. [This would have been better posted on Friday, when the column appeared, but I've had some connectivity issues.] Thanks to eRobin at Fact-esque, I see (since I never willingly read the stupid son of a bitch unless provoked) that Thomas Friedman has just written the latest chapter in his post-9/11 moral collapse. Having famously—or infamously—approved the war of opportunity in Iraq in the starkest kindergarten-playground terms ("we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could"), Friedman on Friday responded to the London bombing with another call to retailiatory violence:

Maybe the most important aspect of the London bombings is this: When jihadist-style bombings happen in Riyadh, that is a Muslim-Muslim problem. That is a police problem for Saudi Arabia. But when Al-Qaeda-like bombings come to the London Underground, that becomes a civilizational problem. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. ...

Because there is no obvious target to retaliate against, and because there are not enough police to police every opening in an open society, either the Muslim world begins to really restrain, inhibit and denounce its own extremists - if it turns out that they are behind the London bombings - or the West is going to do it for them. And the West will do it in a rough, crude way - by simply shutting them out, denying them visas and making every Muslim in its midst guilty until proven innocent.

I'm a little surprised that nobody else has taken much notice—perhaps its says something about our current climate of opinion—that a New York Times columnist has this immediately and unself-consciously advocated for what amounts to a program of collective punishment against Muslims in the West: not just Muslim immigrants, mind you, but against our own fellow citizens of Islamic faith. Of course, it may be that "advocated" is stretching a point. Friedman insists that the prospect of such a "rough, crude" program is "deeply troubling" and "profoundly disturbing"—but that just means that he's mastered the Instapundit trick of seeming to deplore an assault against civil liberties without bestirring himself to repudiate it.

It would be "a disaster" if "the West" were to react this way against its Muslim population, Friedman says: but responsibility for averting said disaster, in his book, doesn't lie with the ones doing the reacting—the self-governing peoples of Britain and America. No, it's up to "the Muslim world [to] wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst." Which means that not only is Freidman completely unserious about actual politics—the only politics a Times columnist can plausibly hope to affect—and about the workings of a democratic society: his "disaster" talk is just so much pious humbug. There's no content to it, no sense that Friedman thinks of it as something having consequences for him and his (as opposed to those Muslim Others)—he's just making an exercise in plausible deniability. After all, the program (retaliation against a ready-to-hand target, regradless of its having nothing to do with the thing you're retaliating against) is something Friedman already found to his taste once before, in the invastion of Iraq: his recurring to it here shows just how much this sort of thing is in his sweet spot. (Not to mention how little the last couple of years have managed to teach him.)

It's easy to have fun with Friedman's ineptitude—his absolute, unwavering ineptitude—as a writer. (Matt Taibbi sets the gold standard for it, here.) And it's on full, priceless display in Friday's column:

The Al Qaeda threat has metastasized and become franchised. It is no longer vertical, something that we can punch in the face. It is now horizontal, flat and widely distributed, operating through the Internet and tiny cells.

Somehow a cancer has started selling franchises, and in doing so fallen into a horizontal position, where it can no longer be punched in the face (but couldn't we then just kick it in the nuts?). If there were a Nobel Prize for metaphor mixing, Friedman wouldn't just win it, he'd lock it up for the duration of his natural life. (Not to mention how impressive his presence of mind is, to be able to work in a plug for his recent flat-world book while writing in the immediate aftermath of a shocking terrorist attack against a Western capital. Brit Hume's got nothing on our boy Tom.)

But the fun of this sort of thing rather curdles when you consider what it's in the service of. In fact, I wonder if Friedman's way with metaphor isn't something more than just a weird kind of literary anti-talent. It seems to have deeper roots than that: to be an index of his essential thuggishness. Friedman is a fantasist, like the neocons he apologizes for: like them, an intellectual mediocrity and a moral cretin, who nevertheless believes unreservedly that the world owes him the simple tribute of never ceasing to vindicate him. And when it fails—as it must, since it has the defect of being real—to match his fantasies, Friedman's characteristic, not to say his only, response is violence. It may be the violence against conceptual and rhetorical order that crops up everywhere in Friedman's prose: or it may be stupid, cowardly, scarcely veiled threats against people and "civilizations." Whatever has to give, will give; whatever it takes to keep Tom Friedman secure on his imagined perch, dictating terms.

Which, sadly, makes Tom Friedman a genuinely representative American of our moment.

posted by michael  10:56:43 PM  
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