[Reader-list] Rescue the Rescue by Friedman

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

HI Tara
Just finished reading your text. It's quite eerie how both both James
McDonald and Matt Taibbi have zeroed in on Friedman's "Cinnabon" as a
target for irritation.

Friedman has a thing for fast food and theory.

He famously said two countries that both had McDonalds would never go
to war with each other.

Guess again...

http://www.siberianlight.net/2008/09/16/russia-georgia-mcdonalds-theory-of-war/

> From: "TaraPrakash" <taraprakash at gmail.com>
> Hi all and Naeem.
> Thanks for this wonderful post responding to Friedman's false claim that the
> world has become flat. Someone on a blog entry said that the world is flat
> as Friedman's head is flat.
> I wrote a detailed critique of the book in the backdrop of the name change
> farce from Bangalor to Bangaluru. Both always existed, Friedman could see
> the former; Bangluru, the native Kanadigas  are feeling left out in the
> "flattened world" is ready to assert.
> Let me see if I can fish the entire paper out for the list. Till then, here
> is an excerpt
>
>
> The Bangalore he describes in his book has nothing intrinsically Bangalorish
> about it. In his narrative, he plays at the golf courses, attends meetings
> in five-star hotels and western-looking multi-storey office complexes.
> Friedman's Bangalore is a debangalorized, deterritorialized, delocalized
> Bangalore, which can be found in any city of America. About this Bangalore,
> Friedman says in The World is Flat, "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas. It
> didn't even seem like India." He further asks, "Was this the New World, the
> Old World, or the Next World?" (Friedman 13) The answer perhaps should be
> the third one. Whereas "the old world", for Friedman, represents India, not
> developed and, due to poor infrastructure, not easily accessible to all,
> "the new world" represents very well developed American cities with very
> restricted access to outsiders. "The next world" perhaps can be said to
> exist anywhere, anytime. It is not constrained by any place or time, and
> Friedman thinks, is open to all. As self-styled discoverer of this new
> world, Friedman has absolute right to compare himself with Columbus, and he
> makes full use of the opportunity by doing so at the very outset of his
> scripture.
>
> An avid student of history, even though one does not have to be so to know
> this, surely knows that explorers like Columbus, in order to motivate
> royalty and aristocrats to support their further voyages, did inflate their
> successes by means of concocting fabulous and misleading yarns about the
> discovered places, with one fundamental moral: the place promises
> prosperity, you must invest in it. Columbus did sell to some European
> aristocrats the idea of concentrating on the new world he discovered, for
> economic prosperity; Friedman seems to be doing the same in a different
> context. His motive is to give a favorable publicity to Bangalore, so that
> people from out of Bangalore do not mind shifting to this new world.
>
> After reading his book (which in addition to other epithets, calls
> Bangalore, "the Silicon Valley of India",), if one, ignorant about the real
> Silicon Valley, decides to move to Friedman's Bangalore, as Indians from
> various parts of the country are doing for employment, one will find a very
> squalid picture of the real Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley, for him,
> will have dirty, narrow, polluted roads with lots of potholes, with traffic
> hardly moving on them. On the other hand if a resident of America visits the
> real Silicon Valley to have a feel of Bangalore, he will find Bangalore a
> sophisticated city with very well developed infrastructure. He won't mind
> relocating to the city his boss wants him to, to manage the back office of
> his firm. Firms in the U.S. increasingly want their employees to relocate to
> Bangalore so that the management of those firms remains in "trained,
> trustworthy" hands. This trend is likely to intensify with the time. Such a
> "feel good factor" offered by Friedman helps to convince a reluctant
> American employee to move to Bangalore. Friedman is really so much like
> Columbus, when it comes to exaggeration about the newly discovered
> territory.
>
> However, there is one fundamental difference between Columbus and Friedman
> as explorers. Whereas Columbus's faulty calculations about the earth led him
> to a new scientific discovery that the earth is round, Friedman's incorrect
> calculations about the new world led him to an incorrect economic discovery
> that the world is flat. This discovery is based more on faith than reason,
> therefore, requires a religious zeal to be believed.
>
> But then there are heretics who challenge Friedman's sermons on
> Globalization. Friedman, evidently, has not been successful in selling his
> theory of "the world is flat" to many nonbelievers. He has been criticized
> by various globalist writers. But more interestingly, he has earned a
> significant amount of bad publicity even in the blog literature. It is
> notable to read the following poem "On first looking into Friedman's
> Flathead" by James D. Macdonald
>
> Criticizing Friedman's romantic ideas about Globalization, composed in the
> fashion of one of the romantic poets, John Keats. The reference, in the
> context of Friedman, to Don Juan and Jose Canseco, perhaps symbolizing
> villainy, mendacity and dishonesty undermining the flat, level playing
> field, are very remarkable. Here, interestingly, the poet is using for his
> heresy, the same medium, communication technology, which, in the first
> place, made the religion of Globalization possible, and the same as the
> auspex used for disseminating his prophesy of Globalization to the world.
>
> Much have I travell'd in a chartered jet
> And munched betimes upon a Cinnabon;
> Upon my iPod listened to Don Juan
> Which I downloaded from the wireless 'Net'.
> I did not understand the 'Nineties lore
> Of Windows systems and of Pizza Hut,
> How one was opened and the other shut,
> Till I heard Friedman speak in metaphor.
> Then felt I like a steroid in a vein:
> Jose Canseco on a level field,
> Whose random thoughts of glory and of pain
> Were like an ice-cream sundae all congealed.
> The moral is, when put by words in train,
> That which does not exist can't be revealed.