Jonah Goldberg steamrolls America’s silliest would-be grand thinker:
All this reductio ad flatus stemmed from a conversation Friedman had with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, in Bangalore, India. Nilekani said something that was intellectually, uh, flat about the effects of globalization on international competition: “Tom, the playing field is being leveled.”
“As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore,” Friedman explains, “I kept chewing on that phrase: The playing field is being leveled.” Indeed, he masticated it to the point where it was meaningless cud and then had his eureka moment: “What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened . . . Flattened? Flattened? My God, he’s telling me the world is flat!”
The rational response to this is: “My God! That is so not what he’s saying!” As countless others have noted, saying that a playing field is level is not remotely the same thing as saying that the world is flat, even metaphorically. Playing fields are defined by rules, often highly complex, that the participants agree to in advance; “leveling the playing field” means making competition in a specified arena fair….
He claims to be simplifying complex ideas and making them more understandable. But what he is in fact doing is taking an already simple idea — say, that of a level playing field — and making it meaningless. You can boil something down to the essentials, but if you keep boiling it you’re just left with nonsense. The level playing field is already a boiled-down idea, comprehensible by high-school sophomores and Charlie Rose alike. Friedman’s alchemist’s brain transmutes the dross of the banal into the bullion of bull.
Unlike Paul Krugman, however, Friedman’s ideas are essentially harmless. Although some of them, such as his wistful advocacy of totalitarian rule in the Chinese mode, would be rightly seen as dangerous in the mind of a more substantive writer, Friedman’s essential silliness which is best exemplified by his incompetent abuse of metaphors renders him little more than a delightfully comic figure. He is the funny pages of the NYT op/ed paper. When the intelligent reader reads a Krugman editorial, he often finds his eyes narrowing as he thinks “that bastard damn well knows better than that!” But when he reads Friedman, he can always relax and chuckle at the absurd literary juggling in the knowledge that no matter how important the editorial purports to be, it is no more to be taken seriously than a Maureen Dowd column.