« GOP Nomination Mechanics | Main | Judgment! » Quiet Americans10 Oct 2007 10:03 am My jaw is dropping: It’s for all these reasons that I’ve been calling them “Generation Q” — the Quiet Americans, in the best sense of that term, quietly pursuing their idealism, at home and abroad. Have people not read this book? It's a good one. They even made it into a pretty good movie if you don't have the time to read the book. Comments (47)
Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. Of course his crimes against English pale beside his darker crimes against policy prescriptions. Someone who thought that, to bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East, we had to destroy a random country -- telling them to "Suck on this" -- probably thinks that the Quiet American was a good guy. (Pauline Kael says that the 1958 movie made the American heroic -- maybe that's the one Friedman saw.) 
How flat is GenQ?
Wow. Nearly as jaw-dropping is the inclusion of Social Security in the big three. I often think to myself -- what an idiot! But he truly is an idiot.
Your jaw should drop! The Q Generation is not so much a Quiet Generation but a Quit Generation. Friedman is way over his head in foolishness trying to make indifference appear as a virtue. Where has he been if he is surprised that the students at Ole Miss and Auburn parade around in ROTC uniforms? I'd expect to see that in the South because the military has always been a southern thing. It's the Southerners who fight the wars for the neo-cons like Cheney, Kristol, Podhoretz,, who are too busy to fight but willing to have others do it for them. (Has any of the prominent neo-cons put on a uniform? Has any of the big neo-con radio supporters like O'Reilly, Rush or Hanify been in the service? Has Friedman?) If Friedman saw ROTC uniforms at Boston University or the University of Massachusetts that would be worth writing about. He is also highly exaggerating when he talks about the present day college students quietly working in foreign countries and here at home. The great majority are only involved in trying to set themselves up for a better life and are not concerned for others as shown by their inaction. A better name for the generation is the Quit generation. Where are all these college kids when a war is tears at the heart of the country? It seems the best they can do, like Friedman's daughter, is to complain that someone else (the press) is not doing more dealing with the environment? They have Quit on America by stepping away from involvement. Where is the activity on these campuses demonstrating against the upcoming war with Iran, as promised by McCain last night. The Quit Generation is exactly what the Cheneys and Podhoretzs want, college campuses filled with uninvolved students quietly standing by and a few who are willing to serve to carry on the neo-con wars. Friedman's not all wrong, the Quitters are quiet, But not in a good way. They are quiet because they have walked away from their responsibility to act for their own future and are leaving it to others even though the others have already betrayed them.
My jaw dropped when Bush tried to appropriate the Quiet American a few weeks back, essentially calling his foreign policy view "the Graham Greene view." Ugh. Greene is turning in his grave.
Yes, where did that story about global warming go? If only a New York Times columnist would focus on it! Little Tommy Friedman is whining about college kids not holding presidential candidates feet to the fire. Gee, isn't that the press's job? And, as a side note, reforming social security? Errr, he has seen the projections, right? He knows its in better shape then Medicaid...
To be fair, the movie wasn't that good.
Bush tried to "appropriate" The Quiet American? How is such a thing possible? Post a link, man.
Ladies and gentlemen, once again, Tom Friedman, self-centered fucking imbecile. Hold your applause, he'll be here forever.
Reading this Friedman column reminded me what it is about his writing that I can't stand, going back to Lexus & Olive Tree. Apart from thinking that he personally discovered globalization and has some IPR to the concept, it's that Friedman constantly makes rather shallow generalizations and generates stereotypes and tries to pass these off as insights into larger social trends. This may be an occupational hazard of someone who has to write a column several times a week, or who feels compelled to rewrite his one good idea in a new book every few years, but the guy is played out. Some very good NY Times reporters have changed their beats, presumably to inject some freshness into their writing (Frank Bruni on restaurants, William Grimes does book reviews). I think it's time for Friedman to take a long sabbatical. Let him suck on the NY MetroStars (oops, now the RedBulls) beat, since soccer is the global sport.
Graham Greene is great. While Friedman is catching up a amazon, here's another book he may want to check out: Generation Q. (I'm just guessing he hasn't read this one either.)
"...members of Generation Q will spend their entire adult lives digging out from the deficits that we — the “Greediest Generation,” epitomized by George W. Bush — are leaving them." What's up with the "we" white man? Ugh.
"Generation X" was a cool name, and aptly described the "jaded slacker" stereotype attributed to its cohort. "Generation Y" is a lame rip off of the "Generation X" name, but at least make sense in as much as Y comes after X. "Generation Q" is just sad. It makes little sense beyond another attempt to pair the word "Generation" with a relatively underused letter. And referring to the "Quiet" generation is a second lame throwback to the "Silent" generation that was born in the 1930s. The trend toward "Generation Pick-A-Letter" must stop. There are so many better possible names that are both more descriptive and more original.
Another mention of Bush's Pyle reference at Editor and Publisher, by Greg Mitchell. Like Mitchell and many others, I'm not exactly sure what Bush meant. My first impression was that he was trying to label the anti-war movemennt as the naive, idealistic Alden Pyles. The other interpretation was that he believed Alden Pyle would've succeeded if not for critics of American intervention - that Bush was actually identifying with Pyle. I'm not sure which interpretation is worse, but it's extremely odd that his speech-writers even brought up The Quiet American in a discussion of American foreign policy.
If the US still had a military draft, those generation Q folks would not be quietly going about their business but would be up in arms and demonstrating against the war in Iraq. Just like us old fogies from the sixties.
I think they are Generation (Square root of -1). Imaginary Generation. They are quiet because they are listening to their iPods.
I read most of Greene many years ago, & the Quiet American was one of my favorites. I always thought it provided a lesson to us: that even well meaning idiots who go into another country knowing nothing about it & refusing to learn can really screw things up. (I identified much more w/ the Brit narrator, although i don't have a drug habit.) The results are far worse when you substitute imperialist chickenhawks for the "well-meaning". I wish I could say I didn't believe it when bush invoked Green a couple of weeks ago--there is no floor to bush's idiocy.
Not to reproduce the "Bush is stupid" meme -- nobody truly stupid could wreak as much insidious damage -- but are we sure He didn't mean Gomer Pyle? You know, the "Shazam" part?
Point taken, Lambert. What if I retract "idiot" in favor of "clueless malignant ass"?
Doubly pathetic because Krugman nailed a Talking Heads reference in his last column. This is not my beautiful house. THis is not my beautiful wife. How did I get here?
Spike-Gen X comes from it being approximately the 10th generation since the founding of the US (technically the Revolution).
Does Generation Q live on Avenue Q?
I am guessing that calling it plagarism would be out of the question? What is your plan for dealing with the deficit — so we all won’t be working for China in 20 years? Aren't you one of the assholes that thought screwing the left-handed widget makers of SOuth Dakota was an excellent plan, nay, a blow for justice? DEAR GENQ STOP max
the credit card companies have labelled them "Generation P", for plastic. im for generation doomed v1, cause theyre fucked.
Actually, Rob, Generation X comes from the title of a book by Douglas Coupland. That was an early 90's slacker novel, that also coined the term "McJobs". There was an Atlantic article a number of years back that identified Gen X as the 13th generation since the original settling of America in the 1600s. I think thats a better starting point for counting than the revolution - American history didn't begin in 1776, after all.
Clearly we are looking at Generation L, as in Generation Lame. Not only are they politically apathetic and lame, their music blows.
Ah, yes. "The Peculiar Genius of Thomas L. Friedman" http://www.nypress.com/18/16/news&columns/taibbi.cfm Don't miss this one--nails Friedman to the floor and gently eviscerates him
There was also a book that came out in '93 titled Gen 13: Abort, Retry, Fail. But Coupland's '92 Generation X had already "won" the naming rights battle, so to speak.
There was also a book that came out in '93 titled Gen 13: Abort, Retry, Fail">Gen 13: Abort, Retry, Fail. But Coupland's '92 Generation X had already "won" the naming rights battle, so to speak.
Thomas Friedman -- the only man in the universe who could make David Brooks look deep. Christ, is being a moron a bona fide occupational qualification for half the Times' Op-Ed staff? Is it some sort of demented affirmative action program -- Freidman, Brooks, MoDo, Cohen. Oy. They did kick Tierney to the Science pages, but the man still has a job for on discernible reason.
Read Friedman this AM. In the first 3 paragraphs the pronoun "I" was used 8 times. "My" was used once.
How about Generation: Who the Fuck Is Tom Friedman?
Firstly, it should be clear that Friedman's "in the best sense of that term" implies familiarity with the complexity surrounding "Quiet American."
"'quietly pursuing their idealism, ... abroad" Maybe because that's because they're all foreign students. What a nimrod.
Llyonnoc wrote: Where has he been if he is surprised that the students at Ole Miss and Auburn parade around in ROTC uniforms? I'd expect to see that in the South because the military has always been a southern thing. It's the Southerners who fight the wars for the neo-cons like Cheney, Kristol, Podhoretz,, who are too busy to fight but willing to have others do it for them. Excuse me, but that's just not true. The five states that have lost the most sons and daughters in Iraq are California, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio. On a per-capita basis, the top five are Vermont, Nebraska, South Dakota, Alaska, and Montana. Young women and men from every state are risking their lives for Bush's fiasco. It's the height of arrogance for you to suggest that it's primarily southerners who are fighting. Ultra-Yankee, blue-state Vermont's politicians didn't vote for this war, but she has sacrificed more than any state.
Only in the bizzaro world of the Bush years that we are now living in could a scathing indictment of bumbling, naive American idealism abroad be appropriated as some sort of positive model -- above all by Bush, the Alden Pyle president. And Bush isn't the only one who is unable to read:
I think Friedman is playing a little trick on you. Please check out the colleges he mentions and their student bodies.
J: It was not my intention to denigrate the sacrifices of any of those who fight for the country, least of all those who gave the ultimate sacrifice. But when I served it seemed to me the Southerners were a majority of the armed forces. So I had to look up some statistics which seemed to confirm my experience: the top four states are California, Virginia, Texas and North Carolina. Three being Southern states.) I don't understand why my belief that the Southerners do most of the fighting is somehow offensive. My point is that the South is more militaristic than the North, so Friedman seeing students walking around in uniforms is not unusual there, whereas it would be in Vermont. (You do know most of the bases are in the South and in Southern California.)
jim, I think completely missing the point of any complex book, movie or song is pretty much standard fare on the right. Besides thinking Pyle was the hero of TQA I'm sure they considered Nicholson the hero of a Few Good Men. Did you ever catch the hilarious lists they link to on NRO? Best conservative Rock Songs, best Conservative movies and so on? Some hilarious follow up posts had MIller talking about how great Neil Young's Rockin' in the free World captured the sentiment when the Berlin Wall fell, aparantly he never actually read the lyrics. Of course there is George Will back in the day famously thinking Born in The USA was a great patriotic anthem. Springsteen really gets them confused. K-Lo the other day was bitching about Bruce making a politcal statement and saying he should shut up and sign, apparantly she's never understood that virtually his entire catalog is a leftist based attack on everything she and her cohorts stand for. A really funny one was Derbyshire going on about how The Shooting Party was the greatest movie ever made (it is very good) He was doing this last fall without getting the irony at all that he was touting a movie whose major plot element is a callous, shallow rich guy at a private hunting party accidentally shooting a man in the face! The movie is a condemnation of the privlidged upper class Brits, the people Derbyshire thinks should be running the world. And we recently have them jumping over each other to praise The Lives of Others, apparntly oblivious to the fact that the movie is about the government spying on people, uh hello, crowd at NRO, you're the ones who think that is a perfectly fine thing!
Llyonnoc, it's probably not worth arguing over this; I just was annoyed at the rather sweeping claim ("It's the Southerners who fight the wars" and "The military has always been a southern thing"). As of 2003, the states with the largest total number of recruits were California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Ohio. The largest per capita were Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, Maine, and Florida. And my comment above had the stats for casualties in Iraq. People from all over the US are serving in the armed forces. Enlistment rates and war casualty rates from the south are no higher than in many rural areas of the west, the plains states, or northern New England. See http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/upload/cda05-08_t6.gif and http://icasualties.org/oif/stats.aspx
Actually, they made two pretty good movies out of it. The first version, made in 1958 and starring Sir Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy is very interesting in its own right; it is very interesting to look back 50 years at the film done through Hollywood's prism at the time, so soon after McCarthyism and starring a war hero (although a wooden actor). It tries very hard not to look anti-American, and, since it was filmed in Saigon, gives an interesting view of the city. And Redgrave was terrific.
TF is the most-overrated public "intellectual" of our time.
Derbyshire is actually from a working-class family whose members are all Labour supporters except him, and although his own views are much farther to the right, he has said more than once that he has no particular love for the British aristocracy or even for the royal family. He is now an American citizen.
What's stopping HIM from going out and marching in the street? And if it's not rational for him to do it, why does he expect young people to do it for him?
I don't know which generation all of you belong to, but SLC has it right...if there was a draft, the kids would march. None of the kids I know in college these days is remotely lame, or *quit*...they are intelligent, engaged and wholly enjoyable to be around. Have any of you taken to the streets, written your representatives, made a phone call to anyone registering your seemingly never ending complaints? Or are you satisfied with posting on a blog for your contribution to society?
Comments closed October 24, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
Love how Friedman believes the great calling of our time is to balance the budget.
Posted by Peter K. | October 10, 2007 10:15 AM