THOMAS FRIEDMAN, YOU'RE FULL OF COW PIES!

 THOMAS FRIEDMAN, YOU’RE FULL OF COW PIES!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© December 27, 2012

GRANDPA AMERICA!

When I was an executive in Europe for Honeywell in the 1980s, and we would visit Norway, where my wife BB’s relatives still name in the hundreds, I called her uncle “Grandpa Norway” because he had all the answers to what ailed society. 

Over the last decade, I have watched opinionated commentator Thomas Friedman assume the mantle of  “Grandpa America” playing a similar role.  For instance, he concluded that the “world was flat” consistent with what pre-Christopher Columbus Europeans thought only his was a digital flatness that encompassed the globe. 

He has become the darling of those who choose to be stuck in the past, as others like Tom Brokaw have championed the “Greatest Generation,” always a backward glance to the past going forward looking through the rearview mirror.  It is indigenous to our nostalgic mentality.  The only way apparently to endure the pain of going forward with the appearance of confidence is to treat virtual reality as actual reality.

It seems to escape pontificators that a debtor nation has never long remained a superpower in the history of mankind.  Not to be dissuaded, however, confidence is celebrated as the American doctrine despite the evidence to the contrary that we lag in competence. 

In standards of math competency at the high school level, Korea is first and the United States is last.  In terms of confidence, the United States is first and Korea is near the bottom.  What does that tell us?  Sadly, I believe it tells us nothing.

We have had a half-century of advocates of “self-esteem” being careful not to often anyone who appears stupid or lazy or self-indulged or addicted to some manufactured disease by the American Psychiatric Association. 

Behaviors have become a cornucopia of syndromes, which is a polite way of saying those so addicted are not responsible because the offenders have no control over the "disease."  They are conveniently victims of such “diseases,” thus exonerating them from having made poor choices.  "Circumstances" are responsible for their condition.  This lets them off the hook of being responsible for the stupid behavior that led to the "disease." 

We have a whole society that has perfected the excuse syndrome to perfection.  As a consequence, anyone who would suggest that such an inclination is wrong if not stupid (I love using that word because language has been so euphemized), or would have the audacity to use a pejorative or expletive to describe the behavior would be tantamount to heresy.  Moreover, it would be blasphemous to suggest Americans were looking for a free lunch and were free loaders.  We like to hear we are a nation of hard workers when many of us are actually foot draggers not hard chargers at all.       

So, you ask, where does Grandpa America come in?

For the past decade, I’ve read his columns and some of his books, always exasperated in the end because they seem to make such sense when they are literally poppycock. 

Meanwhile, he is the darling of The New York Times, New York literary society, as he speaks the same doublespeak as others such as Charlie Rose, et al.  They allow such timid voices as David Brooks to interrupt their soliloquy occasionally, but nobody is really listening.  It does make the liberal establishment feel democratic and altruistic for allowing them to parrot their sentiments. 

The cable networks are strange societies of celebrity entertainers masquerading as journalists.  Fox and CNN are equal comfort zones for obligingly skewed audiences to the far right and far left, elevating common occurrences to "breaking news."    Hyperbole has found a home.

Liberals turn to CNN and conservatives turn to Fox hearing precisely what they want to hear while forever being stuck in views that no longer either serve liberals or conservatives.

But I wander. In this Thomas Friedman column, Grandpa America is telling Republicans what is wrong with their party, and why they lost the last election, and what they should do about it.  This is really crazy.  Here is a proposed rescue strategy for Republicanism when he would just as soon see the party go over the cliff that is now shaping up for the Obama administration.  Erasmus would see this as a “praise of folly,” but it is much more personal than that.

MANIA FOR THE QUICK FIX

The mania for the quick fix is not new, but has accelerated since the last decade or so with the electronic boom.  Grandpa America has climbed on to this missile and now soars with it in a new career.  He deduced that America was stuck on a lot of things but failed to understand it was stuck on the present.  We have lost the meaning of time, the importance of sacrifice, the necessity of grinning and bearing it, the inevitability of stumbling, and the constant need of picking ourselves up because it was not the responsibility of anyone else to do so. 

Instead, Grandpa America celebrates the “Relaxation Revolution,” a sensual insurgency, a living self-indulgency without pending consequences, a permanent coffee break while the rest of the world carries our note, and puts us in a coffin. 

A high school in one of the most liberal states in the union has a high school in which 75 percent of the students have cell phones, and nearly a 100 percent of the students are below the poverty line, while the school struggles to get above a “D” rating. 

Phones in the pockets of everyone have transformed responsibility from us to a new kind of degeneracy, a kind of infant dependency in which the state has the responsibility to manage our lives, which is ultimately a form of dictatorship.  But is anyone noticing?

An army of self-help gurus follows the dictates of Grandpa America everywhere advising grown ups how this newest gadget age shall become their ultimate salvation. 

Lost in this is that the more grown up our gadgets the more childish we all become.  We brag about children still in the crib who can use these devices, and they can, because the devices spawn the infantile, the coddled, and the look, point and click generation.  Also lost in this is the more infantile we are the more we are stuck in the present. 

Grandpa America is scolding the Republican Party for paying attention to the Tea Party that wants us to behave as grown ups, pay our bills when they are due, live within our means, not make apologies for people who want to be carried but are put to work or put out to pasture by the choices they make. 

If people want to kill themselves with drugs or drink or gambling or promiscuity or some other addiction, the Tea Party is saying, “it is not our problem.”  Why?  Because it is not. 

People don’t grow up if they don’t have to, and when they don’t have to, the nation that spawns them will pay the ultimate price.  History like nature has no conscience.  Are these Tea Party people terrible for wanting us to get our house in order, and for people to get off their behinds and take responsibility for their lives?  No, they are grown ups acting like grown ups and asking us to join their ranks.

Yes, the Republicans lost the election!  Yes, members of the House of Representatives refuse to budge any further to what President Barak Obama says is “a perfectly reasonable compromise,” when it clearly isn’t.  The president initially proposed tax revenue of $800 billion, then raised it to $1.6 trillion, but “compromised” by rolling it back to $1.2 trillion to look as if this is a generous move on his part.  Grandpa America doesn’t point this out. 

You are always seen as the heavy, as the person who is “angry” who points out a bad trend and goes against the grain of popular sentiment, not out of spite, but out of a sense that it is both the necessary and sufficient condition to survival.

The American character has always been flawed.  Reality has never found a comfortable place in our mentality, and so it has been throughout our history.  One hundred and forty two years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:

“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on the midnight tables (he was referring to the fad for séances), to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology (fad for linking personality traits with the contours of the head), or skill without study, or mastery without an apprenticeship.”

Shortcuts were already a national trend, which was infusing the national character, and which has since been perfected by corpocracy.   Emerson went on as if he were talking to us today:

“Excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise.”

The television program “American Idol” is indicative of this trend and this misplaced and unearned confidence, as literally tens of thousands of youngsters compete for their moment of fame without a bit of talent, and which would be an embarrassment if they had even a remote notion of reality.

I wrote in an essay thirty-five years ago before it was published:

“The president became a law unto himself, Congress stayed the same, missed the changes, wouldn’t face them, and left the future up for grabs.”

Being stuck in the present boils down to choosing the comfort of gridlock to the pain of growth.

Grandpa America brings up in this piece the Sandy Hook tragedy of the innocent being killed by the mad gunman, and in the same voice, Hurricane Sandy that hit the North East.  Never having owned a gun, and not being interested in weapons of any kind, I still defend the rights of Americans to have their guns, and see no correlation between these guns and Sandy Hook.  Nor do I find a correlation with Hurricane Sandy and global warning, which has scientists divided on the issue. 

But leave it to Grandpa America to make the most of the moment correlating the availability of guns with violence, and this hurricane with global warming. 

Grandpa America fails to mention that in survey after survey gun owners are known to be the most law abiding citizens in the country; they work a job; they pay their taxes; they are home owners; they are community leaders; and they have an indigenous resemblance to the Minute Men of our American history.  Grandpa America knows this but it doesn’t gain much resonance with his audience.

If we don’t go over the Fiscal Cliff on January 1, 2013, wait until Obamacare and all these other entitlements kick in the next year, while we remain essentially a debtor nation.  What then?  For the record, I’m not a Tea Party member, and I voted for Obama in his first term, but was so disappointed I voted for Romney in this past election. 

Historian Christopher Lasch warned that Grandpa America would appear as apologist for the “Age of Narcissism,” and he was prophetic.  He also predicted the decline in the “culture of competitive individualism.”  Lasch would not be surprised, had he lived, to find a presidential candidate get into trouble for pointing out that half the people in the nation paid no federal income tax, while the top 10 percent, who already paid more than 60 percent of all federal income taxes, were expected by Grandpa America and his legions to pay even more. 

Thomas Friedman as Grandpa America is full of cow pies, and any Iowan knows precisely to what I am referring.  The common thread to his hosannas celebrating the Information Age is the permanence of impermanence as this age is totally materialistic and devoid of any spirituality.  The most obvious outcome of the Information Age, which is already apparent, is a straightforward celebration of the self. 

A psychologist wrote a book on America’s self-indulgence in psychotherapy, calling it “The Shrinking of America.”  My sense, as we become increasingly confident without competence, continue to inflate our grading system while lowering our expectations of young people, and depend more on devices to do the hard work with little personal involvement, is that this represents another kind of American shrinkage, both economic and prominence on the world stage.

*    *     *