It never ceases to amaze me how
Thomas Friedman can write such asinine strings of cliches and pass them off as newspaper columns.
Like virtually every Friedman column, there is the phrases "the other day" and "as I looked at this" somewhere in the first two paragraphs.
This particular column's buffoonery tried to compare and contrast Al Qaeda with the Indian software company Infosys. In Friedman's mind, both run on "the Internet, fiber optic communications and e-mail" and both challenge America, one through terrorism, the other through outsourcing. (That last seems even more incongruous given Friedman's status as perhaps the most badly written free-trade advocate in America, but I digress.)
But what bothers me the most is how little understanding he shows of India and its people. "India has a free market, a flawed but functioning democracy and a culture that prizes education, science and rationality, where women are empowered" he writes. Yup, faithful capitalism conquers all.
No mention of the 250 million people trapped in near-apartheid conditions of caste discrimination. No mention of the fact that women face intense discrimination even as infants, widespread practices like dowry murders, and abortion and infanticide of girls.
He writes complete nonsense, like claiming that " young men and women get their first jobs and technical skills servicing the global economy and calling the world". Please. Less than 1 percent of India's 1 billion people work anywhere near the outsourcing industry. Hundreds of millions of people spend their entire lives working in grinding poverty in rural farms, often under appalling conditions.
It galls me that Friedman can have spent the past month writing from Bangalore, writing paeans to globalization, and ignore much more important issues in that country, like child labor, hunger, and state-sponsored communal violence.
Friedman lives in a bubble world, where globalization produces shiny happy people everywhere, and if an issue affects millions of people but not his pet cliches, he simply ignores it. He is the epitome of callow, utterly useless writing.