How to Write A Friedman Column

A terrible storm is brewing—a bubble, if you will—in a territory uncomfortably close to our allies. Our open society is at stake if we do not rise to address the threat of the property bubble enveloping Manhattanville. Columbia University is a force for good in the world—a green-friendly power hoping to globalize upper Manhattan and bring prosperity and openness to the native people in this flat world.

I met Brandon, an astounding young man, on my recent trip to what was South Harlem. He is a Columbia University student who, like all of our allies in Morningside Heights, has already benefited from our generous policies in the post-1968 world. Despite what those who opposed Columbia’s gentrification efforts—let’s call them the “Property Generation”—would have you believe, Columbia has brought a green revolution and a jobs revolution to the neighborhood.

This “Property Generation” needs to take a lesson from China and India, where the principles of civic and social responsibility are merging with the technology boom. The next six months—which will be the decisive test for Columbia’s Manhattanville strategy—are the most important six months in Columbia history. Now is not the time to give up hope in the gentrification revolution. In six months we will find out whether we have liberated a neighborhood from the property bubble and brought security to both our allies in Morningside Heights and the natives of Manhattanville.

The residents of Manhattanville have been living in their property bubble for too long. What they need to see is Columbia boys and girls going house to house, from 125th Street to 135th Street, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?” You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.

We are writing a satire, but these four paragraphs are the basic Thomas Friedman op-ed template: an ominous cloud manifested as a bubble of some kind, a whitewashed oversimplification of the “good guys,” a generalized demonization of the “bad guys,” a few generalizations about the state of the world, references to “greening” and “revolutions,” and a moralistic statement of the proper path to follow—typically over a six-month “Friedman unit.” Throw in one of his favorite topics—India, IT, China, globalization, or Iraq—and you have a Friedman column.

When Friedman’s follies transitioned from laughable to frightening, he began to spew some of the most potent examples of American jingoism. Take, for instance, a shocking statement in an interview on the Aug. 16, 2007 Charlie Rose Show—and paraphrased earlier—that he has since repeatedly tried to deny: “What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand?’ You don’t think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna to let it grow? Well, Suck. On. This.”

Aside from the political ramifications of telling the heavily armed citizens of a volatile Middle Eastern country to suck on anything, especially after knocking down their doors, the moral implications of this approach to foreign policy are troubling, at best. We have come to expect such cavalier disregard for the lives of foreign people and the reality of the Iraq-Sept.11 connection from neoconservative cheerleaders like Norman Podhoretz and John Bolton, but an upstanding New York Times columnist should have the intellectual breadth and moral authority to avoid such statements.

Since Friedman is so excited about the technological and economic achievements of Hyderabad and Bangalore, the political achievements of Beijing, and the strategic progress in the Middle East, we have a proposal for the New York Times: outsource Friedman. His pay grade must be enormous, and the paper could easily save money (and its reputation) by hiring a low-paid replacement. The articles could be written while we sleep (Friedman sleeps through most of his, anyway) and printed in the paper in the morning. If the Times editors find themselves missing the Friedman touch, they can simply pass along the template we have created above to the new writer. As long as he possesses a fifth-grade education, a thesaurus, and a map of the developing world, the article will practically write itself.

Stephen Cox is a Columbia College junior majoring in earth and environmental sciences.