SubscribeHis talk, titled “Green is the new Red White and Blue” was about how corporate environmentalism...can restore America to its “natural place in the global order.”
"If NATO's only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let's at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are 'cleansing' Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted."
"If [the Sunnis] come around, a decent outcome in Iraq is still possible, and we should stay to help build it. If they won't, then we are wasting our time. We should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind. We must not throw more good American lives after good American lives for people who hate others more than they love their own children."
So I once opened up one of Friedman's books, and there on the first page was a little intelligence test. Friedman wrote something like 'if it goes down thirty percent and then goes up thirty percent, it is unchanged at the endYou can read the first pages of all of his books on Amazon. None of them appear to have any such thing.
My Brandeis U. roommate, Charlie, has lately taken a keen interest in a certain video game you might have heard of: Breakout. The concept is simple, with your paddle at the bottom of the screen, hit a ball and break all the bricks at the top of the screen. It's worth remembering, however, that Breakout builds on an earlier game named Pong. In Pong, the object was to get the ping-pong ball past your enemy to score points.
I couldn't help but thing that Pong was perfectly representative of our nation four years ago. As you will recall, it was when president Nixon made the decision to send no new draftees to Vietnam. It was at that time that the ping-pong ball of national opinion was slapped by unwashed protesters past the paddle of sound foreign policy.
Now, however, a new ripple has been added, and boy is it big as all-get-out. Breakout is, arguably, an order of magnitude more complex than Pong, and the stakes increase proportionally. For every level of blocks that get broken through, the ball travels faster and faster. I recently spoke with Anthony Ferrita, the co-owner of Ferrita and Sons Pizzeria and the newly attached Arcade-o-Rama here in Waltham – which he had recently saved from bankruptcy and merged with his own operation – about this incredible advance in "video game" technology.
"It's been a good addition to the shop," he said in his thick, Sicilianly-affected English.
"You kids just come in and pump quarters into the damned video game things day-in and day-out. And for what? I don't know. By-the-slice and soda sales have gotten really big, especially since we broke down the wall and merged the pizzeria and the arcade. I really didn't think this would work out the way it did, but there you have it. Let me get back to the oven, son. I'm busy."
All this seems pretty straightforward, but in my experience, nobody with the wisdom of Tony Ferrita speaks literally. Breaking down walls? Merging? Back to the oven?
I think I understand. My word, how incredibly, poignantly insightful Tony is. His own business and a simple "video game" masterfully reflect the larger reality in East Asia. Just last week, on the 2nd of July, North and South Vietnam united to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. The breakout is complete.
The dominoes are starting to fall, folks.
-TF
... Predictably, Friedman spends the rest of his huge book piling one insane image on top of the other, so that by the end—and I'm not joking here—we are meant to understand that the flat world is a giant ice-cream sundae that is more beef than sizzle, in which everyone can fit his hose into his fire hydrant, and in which most but not all of us are covered with a mostly good special sauce.
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Did he really say that? I hope someone kicked him in the arse too!
posted by furtive at 4:13 PM on April 23