Thu 24 Apr 2008
Notorious windbag and NYTimes columnist (yes, I realize that’s redundant) Thomas Friedman has a fond relationship with Williams College, appearing multiple times over the last few years, even delivering the commencement address in 2005. I can’t find a transcript of that address online, but if you’d like to know what he said, you can create a simulation of it here. Willipedia calls him “Williams College’s favorite columnist”, which I think is a base and vile slander against our school.
The two times I saw Tom Friedman at Williams, I left the hall feeling frustrated and impotent because I had not been able to express my feelings fully during the Q&A session. Fortunately, two Brown students have shown us the way. They have increased my respect for Brown tremendously - no longer will I refer to Brown primarily as an object of ridicule and pity; no, Brown University is an institution which breeds courageous benefactors of humanity.
I have been recently scolded for posting irrelevant videos, so here’s a link to the best thing you will see today (or your money back).
April 24th, 2008 at 1:48 pm
Friedman is an Eph, both as an honorary degree recipient and as a parent, so anything and everything associated with him is fair game. Feel free to add the video in to the post.
April 24th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
And his daughter attends Williams now… I wonder if he’s in town for family weekend?
April 24th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Say what you want about Thomas Friedman, but those students are pretty ridiculous. Look at “the reasons he deserved a pie in his face” and you’ll see that this group is accomplishing nothing. If they had pied him, and then threw leaflets in the crowd with specific solutions for the problems they see, that would be fine.
But instead they’re just being self-righteous, immature idiots.
April 24th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
If if the pie was somehow justified, which I don’t believe, it completely failed in terms of accomplishing anything besides making them feel proud they snuck a pie into a lecture. That was just dumb.
April 24th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Self-righteous, immature, dumb? Perhaps. But in our increasingly interconnected, flat, “Web 2.0″ world, isn’t it possible that some poor African farmers accessing YouTube on their hand-cranked $100 laptop might be a little happier because they can now see Tom Friedman covered in lime jello? Or think of the hardworking call-center operator in Bangalore, whose dreary nocturnal shift has been brightened up because they can now watch this video at work. Maybe our common ability to laugh at Tom Friedman getting pied-in-the-face could even bring peace to those Middle-Easterners fighting over that olive tree.
This kind of cultural transcendence is reason enough to celebrate Globalization 3.0, or whatever version we’re up to now.
April 24th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Add puerile.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Just like his columns!
April 24th, 2008 at 5:42 pm
With the pie in the face, they meant to turn Friedman into a prop. It’s disrespectful. It’s their chosen expression and it’s an assault. As others have pointed out, they asserted no alternative viewpoint so it was rude and inarticulate.
I pains me to no end that war cheerleaders like Friedman, pay no professional price for being so wrong but I prefer Elsinora’s approach (Knox College) with former AG John Ashcroft.
Keep the posts coming: Everything is related to Williams.
April 24th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
The hosts at Brown should have told Mr. Friedman to just wait one more “Friedman Unit” for a towel to clean up.
BTW, did anyone else note the precision? Exactly one Friedman Unit after Patraeus announced future troop drawdowns last fall, he announced that it would no longer be possible to draw down from Iraq and that we need to wait yet another Friedman Unit and then we’ll surely be able to start drawing down.
April 24th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Here’s a philosophical queston: If Tom Friedman deserves a pie in the face for his war cheerleading, what does Judith Miller deserve? An IED?
April 24th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Transcript of the address here. Once more - all hail the power of Google.
To be honest, his commencement address was more palatable to me than his columns usually are. Of course that might be because one expects overly long-winded unsolicited advice at such occasions.
I would encourage folks to check out this column he wrote just after graduation. It made Williams look great. It is all about the awards that are given to high school teachers nominated by outgoing Williams seniors. That has always been one of my favorite parts of graduation, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it in the Times.
April 25th, 2008 at 12:05 am
You know, I don’t want to be the contrarian, but while Friedman’s work of late has been pretty blah, “From Beirut to Jerusalem” is still a fantastic book. In fact, when I hear someone ardently weigh in on the Israel/Palestine question, and if I think they are full of crap, I like to ask what, specifically, they think about what he has to say in that book. If they have not read it, odds are they are full of it about both friedman and the Middle East, which is a nifty little BS daily double.
dcat
April 25th, 2008 at 12:22 am
This is an especially egregious example of Thomas Friedman’s perfidy. In this example, Mr. Friedman quotes at length from “The Onion” before making several completely nonsensical comments. The fact that the Grey Lady (RIP) permits its highly paid columnists to essentially regurgitate humor columns over its OpEd page is especially embarrassing. You could ask, rhetorically, “does Tom Friedman have any shame?” but the answer is very obviously, “absolutely not.” No, Tom Friedman can’t be bothered to generate 500 words of original thought, which is a decline from his earlier career when he would at least mangle and combine cliches in an unprecedented (if not original) fashion.
On another note, Peggy Noonan is the finest opinion writer operating today. But inside the blue bubble too few read the Wall Street Journal.
April 25th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
I agree on Peggy Noonan.
April 26th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
When I was chair of the Lecture Committee during the Eisenhower Administration we had James Reston of the New York Times to lecture. Reston is maybe the Times’ most well known columnist in its entire history. What a bore he was. I have not forgotten my disappointment more than 50 years later.
Reston presented his theory on the decline of American politics. It was all because college had gotten too hard. When his own son came home for vacation he would ask him about current affairs. His son barely knew that Ike was president. His son would explain that they worked him so hard he didn’t have time to read the NEW YORK TIMES. Reston was sure that Williams (even the Williams of the 50’s) must be as hard as Chapel Hill so that we didn’t have time to read the TIMES either. Reston’s solution was to get our teachers make college easier so the kids would have the time to read his columns.
Practically no on at the question period in Baxter Hall had the slightest trouble finding the time to read the TIMES. So we greeted his remarks with scorn. We were much too polite in the Eisenhower era to throw a pie at him.
The best minds of that generation did not go into journalism. Times haven’t changed. I’m not sure what we can do. We might make a start by shutting down journalism schools. Columbia Journalism School reports that it best students want to go into TV sports.