Thomas Friedman’s piece today on the link between Cancun and the war on terror is a little flip, a little glib, but basically on the money.
Reminds me of Will’s monologue in Good Will Hunting on why not to join the NSA …
(though of course Friedman’s less sharp, less funny and also, sadly, not Matt Damon).
WILL (cont’d)
Say I’m working at N.S.A. Somebody
puts a code on my desk, something nobody
else can break. So I take a shot at
it and maybe I break it. And I’m real
happy with myself, ‘cause I did my job
well. But maybe that code was the
location of some rebel army in North
Africa or the Middle East. Once they
have that location, they bomb the
village where the rebels were hiding
and fifteen hundred people I never had
a problem with get killed.
(rapid fire)
Now the politicians are sayin’ “send
in the Marines to secure the area”
‘cause they don’t give a shit. It
won’t be their kid over there, gettin’
shot. Just like it wasn’t them when
their number got called, ‘cause they
were pullin’ a tour in the National
Guard. It’ll be some guy from Southie
takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he
comes home to find that the plant he
used to work at got exported to the
country he just got back from.
And the guy who put the shrapnel in
his ass got his old job, ‘cause he’ll
work for fifteen cents a day and no
bathroom breaks.
Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes
the only reason he was over there was
so we could install a government that
would sell us oil at a good price.
And of course the oil companies used
the skirmish to scare up oil prices so
they could turn a quick buck. A cute,
little ancillary benefit for them but
it ain’t helping my buddy at two-fifty
a gallon. And naturally they’re takin’
their sweet time bringin’ the oil back
and maybe even took the liberty of
hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes
to drink seven and sevens and play
slalom with the icebergs and it ain’t
too long ‘til he hits one, spills the
oil, and kills all the sea-life in the
North Atlantic. So my buddy’s out of
work and he can’t afford to drive so
he’s got to walk to the job interviews
which sucks ‘cause the shrapnel in his
ass is givin’ him chronic hemorrhoids.
And meanwhile he’s starvin’ ‘cause every
time he tries to get a bite to eat the
only blue-plate special they’re servin’
is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.
A beat.
WILL (cont’d)
So what’d I think? I’m holdin’ out
for somethin’ better. I figure I’ll
eliminate the middle man. Why not
just shoot my buddy, take his job and
give it to his sworn enemy, hike up
gas prices, bomb a village, club a
baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join
the National Guard? Christ, I could
be elected President.
I am not at all sure that this liking of Matt Damon is official editorial policy.
Boo hiss! I bet, with my massive knowledge of movie star trivia, that I can make a Matt Damon connection in practically everything I write…
Sigh, he’s just dreamy.
>It’ll be some guy from Southie
takin’ shrapnel in the ass. And he
comes home to find that the plant he
used to work at got exported to the
country he just got back from.
And the guy who put the shrapnel in
his ass got his old job, ‘cause he’ll
work for fifteen cents a day and no
bathroom breaks.<
Brief, and entirely accurate, summary: Free trade is an elite plot to destroy the jobs of the patriotic working class and deliver those jobs to foreigners living in hostile countries in Africa.
Not a terribly admirable judgement, and not one with an awful lot of supporting data. Matt Damon says it, and so does Pat Buchanan, and so do all the worst EU politicians, and so did Bush when he imposed steel tariffs.
That said, it is always enjoyable to ask right-wing warmongers why they haven’t spent any time in the military- see Mark Steyn’s current mailbox, for example.
Friedman is saying that free trade is a good thing, indeed vital because without it people in the underdeveloped world will get poorer and angrier.
Matt Damon is saying free trade is a bad thing, because the honest working stiff in the US will get ripped off, and the working stiff in the third world won’t be any better off, or will be better off because he won’t play fair (>he’ll
work for fifteen cents a day and no
bathroom breaks<).
Not the same thing at all. Is this just a cunning ploy to get us sympathising with Friedman?
d-squared forgive me for defending (or explicating) Good Will Hunting, but the key point isn’t to be anti-free trade; it’s to be anti-the bastards who set things up to benefit themselves, and don’t give a shit about anyone else.
I think Friedman’s point is related in part because he suggests that the collapse in Cancun indicates that “the bastards…” don’t care about free trade, nor about Will’s buddy from Southie, nor his buddy’s enemy in wherever.
I might add that this is, fundamentally, the position of nearly all those who are lumped together as “anti-free trade.” The free trade that dan and Brad D and others all extoll is a potentially excellent thing. Not unlike peace, love, and understanding. The trouble is that the institutions that are in place to promote/enforce “free trade” are run by “the bastards…”, and therefore are much more likely to result in Will’s scenario of a poor, wounded vet than in, say, Brad’s fantasy of a single mother with ample disposable income and a pen-pal correspondence with the upwardly-mobile Guandong sweatshopper who makes her clothes.
Is Thomas Friedman ever anything but glib and flip?
I must be falling asleep, but isn’t the point that if the boy does the work a the NSA , then the bad things happen?
DSW
Ophelia nailed it.
I think a decent case can be made that the Damon character is speaking ironically at this point, by the way …. certainly, this speech invites the rejoinder:
“Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first year grad student. You just got finished readin’ some pop antiglobalisation book — Michael Moore probably probably. You’re gonna be convinced of that ‘til next month when you get to Noam Chomsky, and then you’re gonna be talkin’ about how the real issue is global hegemony and media domination. That’s gonna last until next year — you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Amartya Sen and talking about the necessary preconditions of development in viable political institutions.”
“So Asians ‘will work for fifteen cents a day with no bathroom breaks’? You got that from Pat Buchanan ‘The Death of the West’ page 98, right? Yeah, I read that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or do you…is that your thing? You come into a bar. You read some obscure passage and then pretend…you pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some girls and embarrass my friend? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in 50 years you’re gonna start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and you’re gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don’t do that. And two: You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f——n’ education you coulda’ got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.
“
D - It’s all been done - BNL. Maybe it is not obvious to you, but people can come to the same conclusions about the world with out reading the books on that subject. The books become the voice that they did not articulate, but were drawn to by life experience. Please try to view the world from someone else’s perspective.
Greg: What I’ve done is take an earlier speech by the same character in GWH (here and substituted a few references. The point is that actually at this point in the film, the Matt Damon character isn’t necessarily speaking sincerely; he’s just decided that he doesn’t want to work for the NSA, and he’s reeling off a patter-speech from the books he’s memorised, just as he did in the bar earlier.
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