How to Write a Column About Nelson Mandela, If You Are Thomas Friedman
Tips from the master. Or from somebody, anyway.
How to write a column about Nelson Mandela, if you are Thomas Friedman:
1. There's no need to spelunk through the man's life for something to write about. Remember that movie Invictus? The one where Morgan Freeman played Mandela? Talk about a scene from that. You can even quote one of Freeman's lines, because why bother digging up anything the actual Mandela actually said?
2. Don't bother interviewing any experts on South African history or politics. Just talk with the author of a management self-help book. He's sure to have lots of insights into Mandela's leadership secrets, so give him several paragraphs to express himself.
3. It's good to take a look at the big picture too, so you should suggest that the failures of democratic movements in Egypt, Ukraine, and elsewhere show that they need "a leader, but the right kind of leader." Like Morgan Freeman, I guess.
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What do you expect from a man with a helmet and crayons?
It pains to think that he makes more than most of us ever will.
*pains me
/stickler
First try was also correct.
I don’t know what he’s paid, but I think his hypocritical lifestyle is mostly funded by his wife’s family fortune.
With any luck his columns are actually paid advertisments.
I also admire the grace and calm that Nelson Mandela showed when comet Wolf-Biederman was going to hit the earth. Thomas Friedman should write about that.
That took a real leader too. We need leaders like that.
China has leaders like that. We should be more like China.
Like the leadership that Jackie Chan showed in The Drunken Master.
He had the power to throw Tea Leoni in jail to keep her quiet about the comet, but he had the courage not to do so. Truly an inspiration for us all.
She got what was coming to her in the end.
As did Frodo Baggins and Leelee Sobiesky who got stuck with the baby. BOO-URNS.
Also when Bob Roberts was in prison with him. Bob never would have made it through that difficult time without Mandela.
In the next six months we should have a clearer view of Mandela’s impact on the world.
This has probably been posted before….still though it’s like a mini nut punch every few minutes…for those of you into that sort of thing.
https://twitter.com/stopandfrisk
How to write an honest column about Mandela.
(And you’ll bloody we’ll turn blue before you see one here.)
We got the message the first ten times you posted this
Hard to believe this guy won the nobel prize in economics…
I do find that hard to believe.
That’s Krugman, not Friedman. (Were you joking? I can’t tell.)
He’s jokingly confusing Milton with Tom.
The one being one of the clearest-thinking public intellectuals (if not economists, as our monetarist friend BB has taught us) of the past century, the other innovating an artform in which the transcendent union of philosophical incoherence, mixed metaphor, and leaden phraseology becomes the apotheosis of NYT/Pravda blather.
But which is which?
But Krugman is a joke. Making the case for bubbles before they happen and thinking that the standard of living can be improved thanks to natural disasters (or alien invasions in his view).
Or perhaps just make up a quote from someone else.
“Free Nelson Mandela? Okay, I’ll take one.”
– God
Don’t try that in the UK, BP.
I trust you saw what happened to the guy who named his PC “Nelson Mandela” because it took so long to shut down.
Over the mountain and through the woods. WOw.
http://www.Anon-Go.tk
The New York Times, who needs it. I prefer the Reason comments where people link to more important publications like Autostraddle
Where else but the NYT with its Nobel*-prize-winning economists and columnists could we learn that the demand curve doesn’t slope down?
Anyway, the Internet is for two things: vicious ridicule of the other and pornography. Reasonoids perfectly synthesize the two.
The fact that Krugamn has a Nobel Prize should embarrass the Nobel commitee. That fact that it doesn’t is evidence of their delusion.
Work in a passing reference to the enlightened leadership of China, where they really know how to get things done. None of this gridlock nonsense.
“a leader, but the right kind of leader.”
Moving on from his infatuation with Politburo’s to an infatuation with Great Leaders. Next up, a tingle in the pants for theocratic dictatorship.
Thomas Friedman is one of the worst, most insufferable exponents of the intellectual lamestream: a college-trained, postmodernist gibberish-wrangler who writes about backwards, rationalistic bullshit economics and political collectivism.
Whenever you can discern any idea of what he’s actually talking about, you know it’s statist-collectivist bullshit. Tom Friedman is just god-awfully bad.