no, no. I want it to just be a camera:
DB: One of the things we're all wondering is, who will fill out Obama's cabinet? But, throwing out all of the actual cabinet positions for now, if you could assemble an all-star environmental advisory board for Barack Obama?ThFriedman iv/HuffPo 11.Nov.08
TF: I wouldn't want to get into that. I think there are a lot of good people and I wouldn't want to leave anybody out.
I think the big challenge for Obama on this is finding someone...
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A little self-quoting, from June just past:
Friedman's being hyped steadily and consistently as central man in the conflict, a peerless warrior on the balancing edge of the green transformation.
"Far more surreal was Thomas Friedman's hyping his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded on CSPAN's BookTV.
I don't want to get lengthy on either topic right at the moment, but a thought I had earlier today, under trees I knew well in a park I played in as a boy many years ago, was how much there must be out there now - the debilitating sense of hopelessness hitting the best of us, the clearest-eyed, the most knowledgeable.
Friedman comes on like this is all fresh news and he's in on the ground floor, ready for the green revolution. But I was hearing people talk about global warming inducing catastrophic climate change back in the 80's. The mantra of "We need to do something now, before it's too late" began then, or even more marginally, before then. [the first Earth Day was in 1970]
Where are those voices today? I don't mean voices like that, I mean those same people. How false to pretend they were never there.
They were right, this is obvious, but there's a mask on the public face of things, a rigid mask that doesn't allow that kind of acknowledging, that kind of historical deference. It has to own everything the common folk think about the world - it has to hand-feed knowledge to them.
What's under that mask?
But he has peers, he isn't peer-less, only they're mostly running around the boardrooms of Wall Street
He's presented and presenting himself as a problem-and-solution node, a lightning rod for positive environmental change, a calm far-seeing leader of the new paradigm etc etc etc etc; which is mostly all a lie.
Besides that he sounds like M. Crichton or that Toffler person - all ego and scientifically dumbed-up common folk vocabulary in thought strings Ayn Rand would have found comforting.
It's an especially crafty lie, because it's not saying anything false. It's a lie because of what it leaves out.
The New York Times for years intentionally blocked by trivializing and marginalizing the "environmental" bad news, did that for decades, delivering it in lukewarm non-committal style mostly with "quotes" around it, making things sound as though there was still a lot of information yet to be gathered and processed (global warming - just a theory!) and everything was too complicated still, no solid conclusions were yet possible.
That was a lie. Obviously now. Straight up lie intentionally told to keep the big machines running.
Delivered to a wide audience at the same time there were reputable scientists standing up all around in growing numbers, we're talking the 80's here, and those guys and their interpreters and translators in the responsible press were ignored by important at the time public information systems like the NYTimes.
Many of them, those reputable science and environment voices, are still out there, here, wherever. Here in the sense of alive and working, able to be called on to speak.
Friedman's role is to act as though we're all just waking up now, together, and he just happens to be in that central slot, and just happens to have the backbone and clarity of vision to lead us forward into the bright green future.
It's a lot like Larry Summers or one of his cohort being brought in to fix the economy.
Who should tell us, who can lead us?
Friedman doesn't want to "get into that", doesn't want to "leave anybody out".
Horseshit.
He doesn't want to be associated, doesn't want the affinities made plain, doesn't want to publicly commit to supporting the big money beards and stooges waiting in the wings. Because the scam isn't set up all the way yet.
Friedman doesn't have time or inclination to talk about traditional indigenous attitudes toward land and water, toward sky, toward obligation and stewardship, our responsibilities to the wholeness of the place we live our lives in and pass on to those who come after.
He certainly isn't telling people to read Aldo Leopold. Or even mentioning prominently, from his highly visible platform, anyone above him in the chain of knowledgable minds.
There's a lot of voices already there, people like Wendell Berry, Rachel Carson, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, to name a random handful among many others who've written in the common tongue about these complex and dangerous things, long before Friedman jumped up and started pretending to be a revolutionary.
But he's too busy now to point to any of them, too committed to the task at hand, Thomas Friedman's too preoccupied with saving the world to throw attention toward anyone else whose stature and credentials by contrast would make his current grab for prominence in the green revolution look like the grasping opportunism it really is.
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Unlike Neil Young, who has no need whatsoever for more fame and fortune, who doesn't need to create a spotlight for himself if he wants some attention. Neil Young who's spent most of his professional life juggling the risk of looking like a self-indulgent fool with the chance to conduct, in the sense of having pass through your being, numinous inspiration of the highest order, and raw human passion at its fullest and most honest.
He's got a piece in Huffington today that says among other clear pragmatically solid earnest things:
It is time to change and our problems can facilitate our solutions. We can no longer afford to continue down Detroit's old road. The people have spoken. They do not want gas guzzlers (although they still like big cars and trucks). It is possible to build large long-range vehicles that are very efficient. People will buy those vehicles because they represent real change and a solution that we can live with.The government must take advantage of the powerful position that exists today. The Big 3 are looking for a bailout. They should only get it if they agree to stop building autos that contribute to global warming now. The stress on the auto manufacturers today is gigantic. In order to keep people working in their jobs and keep factories open, this plan
