Magic of metaphors : Op-Ed Journey of Thomas Friedman

I love metaphors. Thomas Friedman loves metaphors too. He uses them tellingly. Metaphors have the power to lift ordinary to profound. They arrest one's attention. They communicate ideas by penetrating the perceptive filters individuals raise to shut out the unwanted or inconvenient information, or simply the excessive noise & clutter. Ideas thus find fertile minds to pollinate that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. Metaphors play the role of butterflies in spreading ideas. It is educative to observe this process at work.

What is common between Detroit, Toyota, Jack Kevorkian, Mileage Standards and Assisted Suicide? Who would see such disparate elements as connected? Thomas Friedman! He cleverly unites them in a one liner, 'What is it about Michigan that seems to encourage assisted suicide?' Kevorkian is of course the doctor, whose mission is to support materially the right to euthanasia of terminally ill but mentally sound patients. Euthanasia militates against the sensibilities of devout Christians brought up on the gospel of 'who can't give life, shall not take it'. That leaves the matter of life & death firmly in the hands of God with the exception of capital punishment & wars. Wars in any case are fought against an enemy, often non–Christians, and therefore, exempt from the application of gospel. But how is Toyota playing Dr. Kevorkian? Toyota has the most fuel efficient vehicle in Prius on the American roads giving an amazing mileage of 50 miles a gallon (or 21 Kilometres a litre). Yet, it has joined the Big 3 US automakers in lobbying against the tougher mileage standards in the Senate version of the draft energy bill. Toyota is against forcing US automakers, Friedman says, to innovate & to make more fuel efficient cars, and be competitive. He laments this suicide by Detroit auto-industry assisted by Toyota. His metaphor has made the idea accessible to Americans. The Idea is about Toyota's domination and US auto-industry's downfall while congressmen & senators look the other way.

Friedman is a purveyor of metaphors. When he found time after his labours around 911, he belted out a best-seller book, 'The World is Flat'. The 'Flattening of the playing field' metaphor used by Nandan Nilkeni during a Discovery channel shoot meets the 'World is round' realization, borne out of six centuries’ old misconception that Columbus harboured about reaching India when in fact he had reached America, and Friedman then conflates the two into a heady brew of the World is Flat. True, it does capture evocatively some truths, though may be at best partial. It talks of millions of people being pulled up the economic ladder in India, China & elsewhere by leveraging the technology to out-source and off-shore work in ways previously unimaginable. Yet he fails even to recognise, let alone acknowledge, the reality beyond the narrow islands of prosperity he visits. He implies putatively with facile conscience that what is true for Bangalore is true for India. Yes and No! Bhagwati considers Friedman's vision absolutely flat when from a US perspective he describes the world as Kaleidoscope of comparative advantage. Joseph Stiglitz, no died in the wool protectionist, is more scathing about the mismanagement of globalization to the detriment of many sections of society in his book called Globalization & Its Discontents. Take one more example. 911 produced another book by Friedman & again cleverly titled, “Longitudes & Attitudes”. The subject matter of the book was 'researched' by jetting around from Washington, D.C., to Kabul, to Jacobabad, to Washington, to Brussels, and to Washington again, all in the last three weeks of January 2002, during which time he also contributed seven columns. He says he looked at the world through the super-lens of Globalization and found it evolving through the interactions between states & states, states & the new supermarket, and individuals super-empowered by the web of technologies; finally moderated over by the Superpower. Some sets of individuals are left out of this new emerging world. Too bad, but it is inevitable. They are angry. They are bewildered. They are fanatical. They want to reassert their old ways. They wish to regain their lost comforting cocoon. Unfortunately, his super lens is so huge; the real world, as we know it, is out of focus - almost invisible.

Metaphors are powerful, way too powerful. They simplify and make ideas digestible. They also reduce life to bare-bones of simplicity. What resemblance does a denuded skeleton have to the life which it once supported? Tenuous indeed! That is what metaphors do when one peddles only one commodity. Friedman spews metaphors the way most people breathe. He is good at that. Manifestly, he is by now a skilled entertainer who does not need to be reminded by his editor not to be “too complicated, or too sophisticated” — one of the six rules of the Times Op-Ed page enunciated by the deputy editor of that page in 1989. He stakes his claim to journalistic independence when he affirms that

“I have been the foreign affairs columnist since January 1995, and since then I have never had a conversation with the Publisher of The New York Times about any opinion I’ve adopted — before or after any column I’ve written.”

He doesn't have to. He knows too well where the boundary lies. Trouble is that his influence goes far beyond NYT. He boasts how UK's the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, used his phrase : the 'World is Flat'. Today, his opinions have iconic status. Enough to win arguments simply by quoting, masquerading as received wisdom. This needs to be understood, & in detail. Too much is at risk closer to home.

“Thomas Friedman — New York Times columnist and author of The Lexus & the Olive Tree and The World is Flat — has always been among the first to sense a global trend and communicate it to his readers, often in a single, telling metaphor. - thus spoke Shekhar Gupta when introducing his guest on NDTV 24x7's Walk the Talk show at Davos.”

The editor of Indian express proved an adept disciple. He asks at one stage,

“So are you saying oil under your soil produces dictatorships?”,

and then he continues on to burden,

“That’s been the burden of your writings lately. That high oil prices give rise to dictatorships. Chairing the session here on India and the global services economy with my two-bit theory, I think I made a half-facetious point that democracies do well with the services business because it requires certain creativity, the intellectual flexibility that democracies give you. But the flip side of that, which I couldn’t find an explanation for, is how come dictatorships make for more energy, a great deal of more oil. How come the bad guys have more oil? Bad guys, I say in the democratic sense. The most undemocratic countries have the most oil.”

One has to only turn to the pages of history to ascertain the veracity of these aphorisms. When America can sleep in the same bed with the autocratic, and often theocratic, rulers of Saudi Arabia & Kuwait, why so much fuss over Iraq & Iran? Answer is obvious. It has nothing to do with democracy. Simply put the latter didn't or don't see US interests as their own. Instead of delving for long to challenge these fatuous remarks, it would suffice to refer to 3 articles by Richard Behan; Mega lie called War on Terror, Connecting the Dots with Oil & Petro-Cartel almost has Iraq's oil. Friedman used to gush about US war ventures abroad. Here are a few samples :

1. “One of the noblest things this country has ever attempted abroad. - Iraq War, 30 November 2003.”

2. “Give war a chance - NATO bombing of Serbia, 23 April 99.”

3. “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist - The Lexus & the Olive Tree.”

4. “McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15 - The Lexus & the Olive Tree.”

Somebody has even developed a McDonald's Index as a measure of the economic freedom & relative purchasing power, and ranked the world on it. These glib ideas are highly contagious.

However, recently he seems have lost his appetite for the Iraq war & has begun distancing himself from it in tune with current fashion. If you were to read his column of 8 September 07, you won't believe he was earlier hooked on war. Yet, he has lost none of his clever word-smithy. He writes here of his 3 impressions while on an embedded visit to Iraq. The first one is about a Sunni neighbourhood, which is now collaborating with the US field troops. He tells,

“Ameriya Knights," who, as Gen. David Petraeus put it to me, "are not a rugby team”.

His views unmistakably echo those of the Bush administration when it claimed success in the surge strategy. The second impression is about the talks with an Arab businessman on his way to Iraq and the last is of a visit to a field hospital. The 3 disjointed views are meant to convey his bewilderment over what has gone wrong and he bemoans,

“We don’t deserve such good people (i.e. US soldiers) — neither do Iraqis if they continue to hate each other more than they love their own kids”.

It appears as if the guy doesn’t see reality. He disregards the tragedy gifted to the poor Iraqi civilians by the US warfare state. His world view is limited by his columns, and its continuity is hampered by his thrice a week frequency in NYT. Without batting an eyelid, just 3 weeks later, on 30 September 07, he quotes,

“the Satirical newspaper The Onion ran a fake news story that began like this: At a well-attended rally in front of his new ground zero headquarters, Monday, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani officially announced his plan to run for president of 9/11. ‘My fellow citizens of 9/11, today I will make you a promise,’ said Giuliani during his 18-minute announcement speech in front of a charred and torn American flag. ‘As president of 9/11, I will usher in a bold new 9/11 for all.’ If elected, Giuliani would inherit the duties of current 9/11 President George W. Bush, including making grim facial expressions, seeing the world’s conflicts in terms of good and evil, and carrying a bullhorn at all state functions”.

And today, on October 10, he laments the legacy his generation is leaving behind,

“It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them 'Generation Q' — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad. But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good. When I think of the huge budget deficit, Social Security deficit and ecological deficit that our generation is leaving this generation, if they are not spitting mad, well, then they’re just not paying attention. And we’ll just keep piling it on them. There is a good chance that members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,” epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them.”

I would have loved to use the metaphor of 'Roller Coaster Ride' to describe these abrupt perambulations of ideas. But, it wouldn’t be fair. Roller Coaster at least has a continuous motion, though the sudden change in gradients and directions may leave many nauseated. Friedman's ideation is more like discrete and unpredictable quantum jumps of an electron. Truly governed by the Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty, 'It is either possible to appreciate Friedman's idea, or to know a fact, but never both at the same time'. Most people in this age of quick fire '20-20 matches' have very little time for themselves to notice this schism. Friedman suffers no such disconnect. He is very comfortable doing it. He knows what he is doing. He recognises early which way the winds are blowing. He is sensitive to what his employer & other stakeholders want. He masterfully adjusts the radar to deliver his message. He is artful to package it all in a metaphor.

Then, metaphor turns into truth. Reality check becomes superfluous. Scholarship seems a luxury – an activity fit to trash. Manufacture of reality is complete. Now one begins to see the method in the madness.