Bill McKibben may turn out to be the George Orwell of this age. Like Orwell, he writes in crystal-clear prose about the most important issues of our time—climate change, overpopulation, globalization—and much of what he has forecast since his book The End of Nature (1989) has come to pass. McKibben carries little ideological baggage; he writes without blinders or a safety net, leaping ahead of everyone else into the blue yonder of ideas.
Yet Thomas Friedman, who writes on many of the same issues as McKibben, is far better known, even considered a visionary by the people who pay him $50,000 a pop for speaking engagements. For one night's bloviating, Friedman makes more than most of the rest of us do in a year.
In a recent review of Friedman's newest thumb-sucker, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, in the New York Review of Books, McKibben captured the author's essence in his opening sentence. He is "the prime leading indicator of the conventional wisdom, always positioned just far enough ahead of the curve to give readers the sense that they're in the know, but never far enough to cause deep mental unease." For the next three pages, McKibben calmly and with admirable civility says that Friedman is full of, uh, hot air.
Reading McKibben's takedown, I had a vision of Friedman as a butterfly collector, flitting after every bright set of wings—globalization, Iraq war, green-ness—and wrestling it onto the pages of Tommy's Scrapbook of Excellent Ideas. But as McKibben points out, Friedman is late to the table with his cards—in the case of his "green" fantasies, 20 years late. The rest of the world has sped past the U.S. while Friedman was doing lap dances for George W. Bush and the Iraq war.
McKibben writes of Hot, Flat and Crowded, "It's out of date even before it's published& He doesn't even mention the largest story of the year, and indeed the dominant new trend-line of our time: the sharply rising cost of oil." Friedman spends a lot of time on the road, but misses the most obvious things: "He's still describing a world, completely consonant with his 'flatness' metaphor, where the number of American airline passengers will double by 2025. But in the real world, air carriers are shedding routes and parking planes." Air traffic, in the non-Friedman world where the rest of us live, is expected to fall by 40 percent by 2025.
It will either double by then or be halved—a rather big discrepancy in forecasting. But to Friedman it's all the same as long as the books sell and he's still perceived as the avatar of "conventional wisdom." Since 2004, Friedman has become such a reliable puppet for conventional wisdom that Internet bloggers have coined the term "Friedman Unit" to indicate an extra period of time needed after a deadline for success has passed. The Friedman Unit is like the Mulligan shot in golf: you always need an extra one.
Friedman embodies the disconnect at the heart of America's decline on so many fronts—economic, infrastructure, air and water quality, international reputation. Though pretty much wrong about everything in the last five years, he retains a job as a New York Times columnist, sells tons of books, gets top dollar for speeches. The same can be said for many of the TV pundits paid 7-figure salaries to bloviate: Bill Kristol, Dick Morris and Bill O'Reilly come speedily to mind. They should be renamed "Wrong, Wronger and Wrongest." Ditto for CEOs and top executives who've run their companies into the ground and bankrupted investors. Though they are failures, they get $700 billion of our money while making obscene salaries with obscene "golden parachutes" attached to them for when they say, "So long, suckers."
Maybe our current state of affairs has a simple explanation: we have most handsomely rewarded those among us who are the most miserable failures.
