Just when even the ultimately acerbic political critic Matt Taibbi began (New York Press, 1/14/09) “to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything,” he notes New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman, “resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism”:
Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a Green Revolution? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95.
While this hypocrisy is galling, Taibbi admits to finding Friedman’s writing hilariously bad: “When you tried to actually picture the ‘illustrative’ figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school.” But the wholly unfunny part is “whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors”; see the recent FAIR Action Alert: “Terrorism on the New York Times Op-Ed Page: Friedman Supports Civilian Suffering as ‘Education'” (1/14/09)
This is just another example of the corporatization of “green”.
It’s pretty goddamn depressing to see the incessant cheerleading on corporate “greening” and “investment in ‘green’ technology”. There’s money to be made, and the futhamuckas that have polluted and continue to pollute the planet want to be sure they control the “green economy”.
Of course, the bottom line is that if that happens, we’re doomed. We may be already … but that would definitively put the final nail in the coffin, wouldn’t it?
Keep that in mind the next time you see a Chevron, BP et al ad touting their “commitment to the environment”. The only commitment they have is to squeeze as much green from being “green” as they can possibly manage.