Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Friedman and the summer of war

Excerpted from a longer post, I particularly appreciated the zing on Friedman and the "summer of war" metaphor:
Egregious Moderation: Andrew Northrup on the Journamalism of Tom Friedman

... Of course, this is the same Tom Friedman who was telling us at the time that we needed to invade Iraq because we just had to kill some Arabs. We just had to, OK? Something about a bubble or something, too - you had to be there, man, it all made perfect sense. I know it seems weird now, man, but it was this magical time, like the Golden Age of Athens or some shit - The Summer of War! - when we all just knew we were going to change the world. All that stuff our parents told us about Vietnam and all that shit? We were just going to blow that away, man, just tear down their world and build it all up new, like better than ever, like nothing you’d ever seen before! Reynolds was the man, and den Beste was the brains, and everybody was in it together, for freedom and shit. It was great. And the music … well, the music kind of blew, actually. Nickelback was big. And the drugs were pretty crappy. No sex to speak of. But the blogs! Man, you shoulda seen the blogs! Outtasite!

And where are they now? Steven den Beste has stopped illuminating the great cycles of human history, and now writes exclusively about porny Japanese schoolgirl cartoons. Reynolds never got past that summer, never learned how to change with the times, and now he’s Kid Charlemagne. I don’t know what happened to Friedman - he’s behind the Times Select wall now, probably writing about globalization or whatever, or whatever anime den Beste was into 6 months ago. Funny how everyone grew up.

The past really is another country. I would like to bomb it.
The trajectory of some of these neo-con bloggers is noteworthy.

In a related post, a former neo-con invade-Iraq culture warrior blogger virtually flagellates himself and the world of the blogs. I'm ok with the his flagellation, but I think he should have limited his blog-attack to the ones he reads.

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