Photo:Charles Haynes, Creative Commons, Flickr
No sooner did New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman finish his latest column on the forlorn state of America than his detractors rose up to bite his ankles.

One of the most verbal (if not exactly verbose) of these critics is Warner Todd Huston. Huston, using a curious form of circular logic, uses Friedman’s (accurate) assessments as a weapon against the columnist, until finally charging Friedman, and the New York Times, with fostering the very anti-American sentiments Friedman deplores.

I have to wonder if Huston actually read Friedman’s words, or simply adopted a negative take-away attitude before he put on his reading glasses (assuming he wears such).

I grant you, the New York Times employing the likes of Bill Kristol is a lapse bordering on ignorance. Kristol is sneaky (he praised President Bush’s second inaugural address without divulging his role in helping write it), lacking any real sense of the political scene (his opinions on the progress of the Iraq war have consistently been disproved) and a poor fact checker (Barack Obama was not at Trinity United Church on July 22, 2007). But his employment as a Times columnist is not treason, and not even necessarily a demonstration of liberal media self-loathing (as Arianna Huffington claims). I’d rather see Kristol scribbling his predictable, little homilies than advising a president. Things are bad enough as it is.

I, like Huston, think the Times is somewhat culpable for leading the American people down the garden path to a non-thinking, and non-caring, sort of totalitarian single-mindedness that is in direct contravention to its mission to inform. I don’t agree that a newspaper, or a columnist, can destroy a nation. I rather like Friedman, and find his views both remarkably similar to my own and a breath of fresh air in what is otherwise becoming a Republican (read neo-con) mouthpiece rather than a newspaper.

In fact, mainstream media’s silence surrounding truly critical and highly revealing issues – like the warming of Russia’s Lake Baikal – would alarm all serious thinkers if we didn’t realize that Big Business controls Big News, at least in this country. The Times coverage of Lake Baikal pales in comparison to coverage in the Daily Galaxy, an online newspaper most people have never even heard of. If not for the Internet, we would all be like the proverbial blind men trying to decipher the nature of the elephant.

This isn’t the fault of newspapers so much as the people who read them (or, more often, don’t). If you eat oatmeal for breakfast, the addition of a jalapeno is going to annoy you; if you like your news as bland as your breakfast, Lake Baikal is going to upset you. We get what we ask for, and if we never demand better our news will be served up as pale as that oatmeal, with just enough sweetening to appeal to our palates. Jalapeno news is an acquired taste.

If I have any quibble with Friedman, it’s his rather shortsighted assumption that a single building in Singapore (or its investment in the U.S.) represents the whole of Singapore. This, again, relates to elephants and perspective, and suggests that, by the same measure, the U.S. is Penn Station, which it is not. Singapore has appalling slums (which Friedman clearly did not visit) and might do well to rectify this before investing abroad. America has its heartland, or breadbasket, though this is rapidly being emptied of foodstuffs by the continued push for ethanol.

Nothing is ever as simple as we would like to make it. The natural world devolves infinitely in both directions, from the microscopic ever smaller to the macroscopic ever larger. This is the lesson of physics and it applies across all systems, whether social, political, economic or ecological. We dumb it down so that we can take it in, but the elephant is not an ear, or a leg, or a trunk. It’s an elephant, even when we can’t quite see the whole of it.

Disclosure: I don’t own NYT stock.

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