09.19.10

The Man In Need of Pie

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Made in China, Rock 'n' Roll, Stumble and Fail at 10:24 am by George Smith

The class war continues on all fronts. The great general of the fancy and fine, Tom Friedman again leads the charge in today’s New York Times.

It’s the relentless China-is-wonderful gig. Reporting from Tianjin, Tom advises that Chinese are set to beat us again, this time in above-ground “green” plastic-mining.

He finds two sources, one a flack for Chinese innovation, another someone named Mike Biddle, the standard American businessman — this one rationalizing the shipping of most of his work overseas because he just can’t afford enough lobbyists to get Washington to listen to his plan to create plastic mines from discarded computer junk for him. All our fault!

This is Friedman’s brain at work. Meet a flack and a businessman at some economic meeting of the wealthy where he can undertake the job of official ass-sniffer while masquerading as someone sifting through cutting-edge brain power. Then whip out a column on the farting. wisdom emitted.

For example, the last book I read by Friedman was stuffed with material he’d gathered over strawberry lemonades at a posh faculty lunch villa on the grounds of CalTech in Pasadena.

It’s always the same.

“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,??? said the flack for Tom. Tom would have said it, but since he had the p.r. person for the “Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy” around …

Last week, Tom told us we all needed to adopt more Confucian values because we aren’t sacrificing enough.

If you Google Tom Friedman and pie you get pages of stuff on the man being pelted with green whipped cream while onstage at Brown in 2008.

Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was rooting for the pie throwers — before and after.

The video is on Youtube in a couple spots. It’s great footage of Friedman slipping about and eventually giving up. If you were a two-time Pulitzer winner, would you have let a couple pies upset you? No! I bet you’d just have smiled, shouted some defiance at the auditorium and continued your speech.

Here’s this blog’s Tom Friedman Blooz, homemade video of the pie incident with a hodgepodge of senseless quote taken from Friedman columns (including today’s) on China. It’s set to the “China Toilet Blooz Reprise,” a Captain Beefheart-styled outro to the original I’ve been flogging.

The Biddle fellow, according to Friedman, is based in California. And he’d keep 250 whole jobs here. But we just don’t have those booming above-ground plastic mines.

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