It's not the usual drivel you've grown to expect from a relic of a bygone era who tosses "trendy" words around about as convincingly as Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes so-called love affair.
It's much worse because my husband Thomas Friedman has a different status problem.
It is the fact that he's no longer clear where he stands. Or to put it more musically, were he swiping from Joni Mitchell and being confessional, he would have entitled his column "I Don't Know Where I Stand" and not "Run, Dick, Run."
With a book that didn't even spend more weeks at number one than "the actress" did with her book, and caused far less excitement than she did, Thomas Friedman's latest appears to ride the charts in a holding pattern that can only be called malingering.
Any original thought my husband Thomas Friedman once had, however slight, long ago was disproven. Thomas Friedman 2.0 is as ineffective as the early version only, these days, people have caught on.
And that explains, in part, why his op-ed space seems like a landfill not even Greenpeace would attempt to rehabilitate.
His mouth will go on, but his brain expired somewhere around 1994.
So what we're left with is the bag of goodies that has no rhyme or reason other than appearing to be everything he could order off the dollar menu at Wendy's in one visit. Saying that it aimlessly drifts would be giving Thomas Friedman's column too much credit because it's not unmoored sail boat, it's something far less friendly.
If Thomas Friedman had a following, or even a brain, he wouldn't seem so disconnected from the problems facing the country.
"If Thomas Friedman had a brain, or some approximate, he wouldn't scatter shoot in his attempts to appear 'balanced' and he would attempt to actually have a point of view beyond 'I want to run my country into the ground,'" said Jess, a neighbor who lives upstairs and throws a great party.
But if one looks at the ramblings Thomas Friedman has chosen to inform, or not to inform, on his recent writings come off like the lonely rants of the guy at the end of the bar who's forever going home alone.
"Thomas Friedman is not thinking of the bigger implications" for the years on down the road, Jess added.
For instance, the whole "world is flat" theme was flatter than a Diet Coke opened an hour ago and left parked on a picnic bench in the noon time sun that sizzles hotter than Colin Farrell in a nudey scene that will never make the final cut of a major motion picture coming to a theater near you soon.
It will be a fluke of immense proportions, akin to the fleeting period where many Americans actually thought Ashlee Simpson could sing, if anyone continues to take my husband Thomas Friedman and his onanistic frenzy for "free market" principles seriously.
Thomas Friedman's uninformed devotion to year zero policies meant that his brain bought the farm many, many years ago and that, as awareness is raised, his looney rants will be neither cute nor tolerable.
If Thomas Friedman had even one original thought, he might be dangerous and inspire heirs who would wish to carry on his "legacy" but instead he repeatedly mines the cannon of pop culture to dress up failed policies that have resulted in strife and despair in the third world.
One thing for sure, there's some severly sad about a man his age working the likes of Britney Spears into his columns and if he can't grasp that he just needs to picture the joke Bob Dole has turned himself into.
But instead of grasping reality, Thomas Friedman seems to think he has all the creativity of Ava and C.I. penning one of their hilarious TV reviews. Somebody break it to him, his e-train ticket got punched long, long ago.
Thomas Friedman seems to be "musing" as if his past columns were a monument not of failed predictions and philosophies, which they are, but instead of the visionary work one expects from great thinkers or even Joey Heatherton.
It's been so beyond, "I'm playing the lobby and might make the main room" in Vegas for so long now that even Tina Turner's fabled comeback in the eighties offers no hope that Thomas Friedman can latch on to to carry him through this "If he sings 'Midnight at the Oasis' one more time, I'm asking the management to comp my drinks!" period.
With newspaper circulation dropping like a bad can of Raviolios, and the biggest beneficiaries being the Greenspan Wrecking Crew Thomas Friedman hitched his jet ski to decades ago,
it is blindingly obvious that Thomas Friedman can't even phone it in these days.
As a columnist, he has utterly failed.
To listen to the youth of America today is to hear their strong criticism of his dialing in column after column for the contestant that got kicked off American Idol a season ago while mumbling that he will bring William Hung back, he will!
To listen to the youth is to hear from a group of emerging adults who know that the very "world is flat" theories he preaches have destroyed pensions, employee benefits such as health care, and reduced seniors to living below subsistance levels.
We have a country that's teetering on the edge of total destruction and Thomas Friedman wants to drop kick it over the edge.
Instead of focusing on ways to mend the broken system and repair the social fabric, Thomas Friedman's jerking off to his own echo chamber of globalization.
It won't fly. Yes, Thomas Friedman has attacked the French, Americans, the youth, and just about any other target that comes into his limited range and he has gotten left behind in his "free market" religion that believes that not God, not man, but the almighty market will correct all social ills. A person with a brain in his head would have long ago adjusted his devotion to market unconstrained. At the very least, he'd wear a girdle to reign in that flabby rear when running around the apartment in his shorty robe.
Thomas Friedman would also not be taking the head-up-his-ass position in opposition to all concerns of the various citizens who make up the very planet his much pushed "world is flat/globalization" junk theories are supposed to exist in while mixing in a few references to music and film.
Just this month, we have seen what happens in a nation, Bolivia, where the people are placed dead last and the free market reigns supreme. If Thomas Friedman hopes to become a respected observer, or at least a non-dangerous one, he would have focused on issues such as the public commons and given some thought to the social fabric he seems bound and determined, like a businessman on an out of town trip relentlessly visiting a dominatrix, to destroy.
If this is how he intendes to go out in the last days where sanity is still a possibility, that's his business. But if Thomas Friedman had a brain or sense of perspective, I have to believe he
would not only be more aware, he would be saying: "Hey boss. I've lost all ability to reach the public. I'm about as useful as as someone trying to do an intervention on Bobby Brown. Put me out of my misery and fire me already!"
