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The Cliché Expert

He's never met a hackneyed phrase he didn't use-twice.

Jun 13, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 37 • By RANDY BOYAGODA
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The World Is Flat

A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas L. Friedman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 488 pp., $26

THESIS: "CLEARLY, it is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more other people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world--using computers, email, networks, teleconferencing, and dynamic new software." Source: A social studies paper from a middling high school student, or a scintillating study from the New York Times's most prominent columnist?

In its sloppy jalopy cadence and stunning banality, this sentence suggests a tenth-grader's efforts. But to Thomas Friedman's embarrassment, this statement fuels his car-wreck of a new book, The World Is Flat. Subtitled, with criminal deceit, "A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," this nearly 500-page tome is a testament to our age along the lines of London's Millennium Dome--a monstrosity of poor design, cloudy thinking, and rank hubris.

When Friedman visited the headquarters of a software company in Bangalore, he was casually informed that "the playing field is being leveled" between America and Third World giants like India and China, thanks to the rise of global telecommunications networks. Boardroom chitchat led to this horrifically outdated book: "What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened. . . . Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

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