Mean Mr. Mustache

Even the "suck on this" version of Thomas Friedman was nicer than this one. Plus, a reader contest

Metaphor master Thomas Friedman, in the New York Times this morning:

Can anyone identify a single U.S. diplomat in Moscow or C.I.A. analyst who is advising [U.S. chief negotiator Steve] Witkoff and Trump today? My bet is there are none, because no serious analyst or expert on Russia would tell them: “We have concluded that you are right and all of us have been wrong: Putin is not a bad guy, he just wants a just peace with Ukraine — and when he tells you he went to church and prayed for President Trump, you should believe him.”

Why wouldn’t Trump want a CIA analyst stapled to his side at all times? That’s a tough one. Can we make a list of possible reasons?

Before Trump was even a Republican nominee, a CIA Director relayed “concerns” to the FBI that “served as the basis” for years of grueling investigation that would paralyze his presidency; after his election, as we’ve learned all summer, CIA then cooked up a bogus intelligence report saying Trump won with Russian help; CIA leaked its balls off to papers like the New York Times about how Moscow worked to “install” Trump in the White House; CIA helped topple Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn by telling every reporter on earth he was a “clown” who said mean things about the CIA and secretly conspired with Russia; CIA warned foreign countries not to share intelligence with Trump because Russia held “leverages of pressure” on him; CIA stuck fictional campaign research about “compromising personal and financial information” Russia had in a report that was leaked to CNN in less time than it takes for fleas to mate; CIA accused Trump of treason; CIA got Trump impeached; CIA leaked stories that Trump let Russians kill Americans for sport; CIA banded together to call a true Hunter Biden story a Russian influence operation; CIA spent the last half-century overturning foreign governments and in this one is trying do the same at home, in such blatant violation of its charter that 77 million people last year voted to have it shot like a lame horse… But sure, yes, let’s make sure the CIA is at the President’s side when we’re trying to negotiate a peace settlement. What could go wrong?

Friedman’s piece today is awful, but I’m here to tell you I miss him. I bet Friedman misses himself. His columns used to feature a charming goofiness that made them fun reads even if you disagreed, but this era has robbed even his work of humor. In the Age of Trump, the old-school folksy columnist who chatted you up in the waiting room of life has been replaced by what Thomas Frank calls the “Utopia of Scolding,” which has no charm at all. Watching this disease overtake the Buster Keaton of American letters has been a colossal bummer, with today marking a new low. The Mustache of Understanding turned mean:

Friedman was once one of Earth’s most distinctive writers. Before AI, he inspired multiple online “Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator” machines because of his predilection for certain phrases, which humorously often had seventies-porn connotations to match his famous mustache (“something very big,” “in three holes,” “secret sauce,” “hot, flat, and crowded,” etc). Years ago I announced a “Come Up With the Ultimate Thomas Friedman Porn Title” contest in Rolling Stone that generated thousands of entries, many classics: The Next Six Inches Are Critical, The Lexus in Miss Jones, Beyond The Green-Technology Door, The Hidden Fist (Up the Arab Street), and Iran‘s Greatest Weakness May Be Her Vagina. My obsession was Friedman’s mismatched imagery (“Iraq: Grabbing the Bull by the Antlers” isn’t a real headline, but could have been), but for millions of others, Friedman was amusing shorthand for conventional newspaper wisdom, which in both style and content was so predictable, a 2012 computer could write it. People clicked on those sites, too, because op-ed schlock was funny before Trump.

Since 2016, “opinion” has become one endless, pounding refrain on the same themes: Trump is Hitler, Putin is Hitler, Elon Musk is Hitler, Hitler is Hitler, voters are racist, listen to experts, we face an existential threat, something something democracy vaccine war derp. An underlying theme of the period is that the public is not a diverse population that needs convincing, but more ideally a monolith that accepts expert instruction without question, and may be threatened if it doesn’t.

Friedman’s old “Let me pull up a barstool and walk you through how things are in Syria” style therefore doesn’t fit the spirit of this era. The updated editorial form is the style of Charles Blow, who doesn’t affect friendliness when he tells you to stop aspiring to “racial harmony” or using phrases like “race relations,” because there’s no such thing, just white supremacy and not white supremacy. In the Trump era, things are beyond argument, so there’s just X=X, 0=0, and What I Said is What I Said. (That particular Blow column is titled, “Call a Thing a Thing.”) Virtually every editorial is a wagging finger. It’s “You’re against democracy unless…” and “You’re against science if…” and especially, “You’re a Russian if…” To use rhetoric at all means you accept that readers must be convinced, which in turn means recognizing their intellectual independence as legitimate, and we can’t have that.

Poor Friedman, who by all accounts is a kindly sort in person, had trouble adapting to a world in which the op-ed writer is a scold and not a convincing machine. Here’s a guy who spent his whole life thinking up pitches to readers. Diplomacy without the threat of war? See, it’s like playing baseball without a bat… The Israel-Palestine conflict? It often previews coming political trends, so Think of it as Off-Broadway to Broadway. War in the Middle East? Iraq is like a pottery barn… That image changed history! Colin Powell used it when he told George Bush that “If you break it, you own it.” Dopey as he was, Friedman tried to make things fun for readers. He wanted to convince folks, so he came up with catchy phrases. The golden straitjacket! The electronic herd! Scapegoat or Sputnik! Cabs, camels or ISIS!

He got excited during wars, but always seemed far more crazy than mean. Even Donald Rumsfeld had to feel uncomfortable reading pieces like “Chicken a L’Iraq,” which advised American military planners that “the best way to win is, before the race even starts, to take out a screwdriver and very visibly unscrew your steering wheel and throw it out the window,” so Iraq knows that, “I’d love to chicken out and get out of your way, but I just threw out my steering wheel.” Even his infamous “Suck on this” speech to Charlie Rose began with a long diatribe about taking out a big stick and going house to house in the heart of the Arab world bursting bubbles before asking, “What part of this sentence don’t you understand?”

What part don’t I understand? All parts! But whatever he was saying, it was entertaining.

Friedman wrote about four thousand “The world is increasingly hyperconnected” columns, so he has tolerance for repetition, but even he got bored early by the Trump-Putin-Deplorable-Racism-Derp takes that filled the Times opinion section beginning in 2016. In April 2018, he tried to have fun with it, writing, “Is Putin a CIA Agent?” He laid out the premise in the lede: “If I were a Russian citizen, I’d be asking this question: Is Putin a U.S. agent?”

The Big Question Lede is a favored Friedman technique. My favorite ended with “‘Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?’”

The “Big Question Lede”

But why would Evil von Putin be an agent of the wondrous CIA? Friedman jumped for one of the last times in his happy-metaphor bath to explain:

Why? Because Putin has undertaken so many actions in recent years that contributed to the weakening of Russia’s economy and human capital base that you have to wonder whether he’s secretly on the C.I.A.’s payroll…

Here’s the real truth: Putin consistently acts like a farmer who sells his most valuable beef in return for cubes of sugar. That is, he looks for short-term sugar highs to boost his popularity with his Russian nationalist base because he is insecure, and pays for it by giving up real beef, leaving Russia weaker in the long term.

Beef for sugar — not a good trade…

The core image made no sense. No farmer in history ever sold all his beef for sugar cubes, so asking us to picture it didn’t clarify anything or recall familiar associations, but just forced us to spend mental energy considering a weird new concept. Also, even if a farmer did sell beef for sugar, couldn’t he or she just sell the sugar for money? Why is “beef for sugar” a bad trade? Friedman was trying to say Putin feeds his people sugar highs instead of lasting policy. That line alone would have worked fine. He didn’t need the beef part at all, especially because you get stuck right away on “most valuable” beef.

Why just the most valuable? If no farmer ever sold his beef for sugar, fewer than no farmers ever sold their most valuable beef for sugar. Moreover, if that did happen, what did the farmer do with the less valuable beef? Eat it? Sell it for something better? Once, you could get lost for a lifetime in a Friedman column.

What did Friedman consider Russian sugar highs? One was “ordering of the use of a military-grade nerve agent… to poison the former Russian spy Sergei V. Skripal.” The second, “memories of historical greatness,” seemed a little trickier because that would be a sugar high lasting since 1945, or maybe Gagarin’s flight in 1961… a long sugar high either way! Then you learned that a “weak, isolated Russia” is a “dangerous animal” which in order to thrive needs to press a reset button, but Putin won’t press it, and it had to be him because animals don’t press buttons. Except chimps. And orangutans... Of course, we were talking about beef and sugar:

It’s sad to see a country that gave us Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy, Spassky, Sakharov, Stravinsky, Shishkin, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn, Pushkin, Nureyev and the Google co-founder Sergey Brin become better known for giving the world Novichok, the deadly Russian nerve agent used in Britain; “little green men,” the disguised Russian soldiers who seized Eastern Ukraine; and Guccifer 2.0, the Russian cyberagent who hacked the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

It’s all beef for sugar — and that’s Putin’s legacy.

That was classic Friedman: inspired nonsense with a heart. Unfortunately, he got hammered on social media for this one (he was accused of eating “meth-covered cornflakes” and writing “8 of the 10 dumbest paragraphs in the history of the New York Times",” among other things). It was different from the ribbing he used to get. In the new landscape, no need for arguments at all. Just say Putin and Trump are bad and accuse people who disagree of treason and leave it there. Friedman started doing that a few months later, and hasn’t returned to Mr. Toad’s Metaphorical Ride since. His new schtick is just dull red-baiting that any AI could do. Take today’s column, titled “Ukraine Diplomacy Reveals How Un-American Trump Is”

The only sustainable way to stop this war and prevent it from coming back is a massive, consistent, Western commitment to give Ukraine the military resources that will persuade Putin that his army will be chewed apart… Putin’s punishment for this war should be that he and his people have to forever look to the West and see a Ukraine, even if it is a smaller Ukraine, that is a thriving Slavic, free-market democracy, compared with Putin’s declining Slavic, authoritarian kleptocracy.

But how will Trump ever learn that truth when he basically gutted the National Security Council staff and shrank and neutered the State Department, when he fired the head of the National Security Agency… and when he appointed a Putin fan girl, Tulsi Gabbard, to be his director of national intelligence?

It’s almost Chicken a L’Ukraine: we’d like to chicken out of this war, but we threw away our wheel, so Putin better step aside. Of course, we have a wheel, called elections, and the public voted to turn away last year. But the Times exists now to describe the American public’s desire to think for itself as illegitimate. So Friedman says Trump needs a “CIA analyst,” and rewrites the same smears of Tulsi Gabbard that Ken Dilanian was writing years ago.

In every direction, it’s the same dreck. Every movie is about a CIA operative with a heart of gold (who’s a perfect killing machine and a loving Mom or Dad, home in time for Little League), the cable stations still in business are infested with on-air ex-spooks, and newspapers that once merely shaded reports for CIA sources now share a full-on Vulcan mind-meld with Langley. Not even Thomas Friedman gets to sound different. Bring back the original! Bring back Mr. Metaphor!

NOTE: READER CONTEST!!!

Write the best Friedman-themed “Mean Mr. Mustache” lyrics, to the tune of “Mean Mr. Mustard,” and win an autographed Rollie Fingers jersey. I was stumped when I tried (see below). No using AI. Racket merch to solid runners-up. Submissions to taibbi@substack.com

Mean Mr. Mustache, mixed metaphors,

In Bangalore, gonna take a cab,

Digs when he’s stuck in three holes,

Hurls his steering wheel on the road,

Says “Suck on This” when on Charlie Rose!

Such a big mustache,

A serious stache…

His farmer Vlad, sells his best beef…

I couldn’t go on from there, was laughing too hard. But a prize to the more intrepid reader.