The Cosmic Unity of the Tom

I can no longer tell if Thomas Friedman is the 21st century's Confucius, Marx or Sun Myung Moon. All that was left out of this New York Observer dispatch from China was a disquisition on the four modes of nano alienation and how "hurry-up time" is fast approaching for McDonald's:

He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.

"It was when he asked me to pull one of them that I began to suspect Mr. Friedman was not the inscrutable prophet of neoliberal economics I'd imagined."

But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”

There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.