Has Therapy Killed Conversation?

Ever since Freud told his patients that they had to say whatever came to mind, no matter how repulsive or trivial, psychotherapy has been undermining the art of conversation.

Think about it… if you follow Freud’s rule of free association you will become, alternately, a boor and a bore. Try engaging a good conversation by following that rule.

Many of today’s therapists no longer require their patients to free associate. Yet, they encourage their patients to give full throated expression to their deepest feelings, regardless of how a sentient human listener might react. Patients are taught that they have a right to offend with impunity and that anyone who thinks otherwise is being judgmental.

Try engaging a good conversation by making it all about you.

Then again, does anyone really care about learning how to conduct a good conversation? The signs are not encouraging.

The most conversationally deficient among us, that would be young men, now take seminars in pickup artistry. Apparently, they believe that the ne plus ultra of human communication is finding the clever quip, the dazzling one-liner that will entice a woman they do not know to allow them to show off their sexual prowess.

Young people, and some not-so-young people have been taught to express their feelings openly and honestly. When they discover that this dubious talent does not produce anything resembling a human connection, they fall back on the random, anonymous hookup. They believe that it’s better than nothing.

Therapy has not merely taught people to speak about themselves. It has told them that others are obliged to listen to them, no matter how offensive or numbing their discourse. It has told them that anyone who does not reciprocate their shameless oversharing is emotionally repressed, in sore need of whichever medication is currently supposed to cure the condition.

It’s not a formula for good conversation. It’s a formula for permanent psychodrama. 

Let’s assume, for the sake of this post, that many people do not know how to conduct a good conversation. If conversation is a skill, it needs to be learned and developed.

Anyone who imagines that if he feels good about himself, through a combination of therapy and meds he will automatically know how to converse has overdosed on therapy.

If you want to develop your conversational muscle you can do a lot worse than to read the advice offered by Cecil Hartley in his book The Gentleman’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness. As the title suggests it was written over a century ago, in 1875. This makes it mid-Victorian, but it also makes it pre-Freudian.

In his book Hartley offered a list of the rules for good conversation. They have been reprinted on the blog: The Art of Manliness.

Perhaps these rules are offered to men because men are more likely to manifest conversational incompetence, but they are not, you will be pleased to note, gender specific.

As Hartley prescribes, conversation should be more about light than heat. He counsels against heated discussions, pitched arguments, raised voices and dramatic displays.

Thus, he recommends that you avoid controversial topics. If a point of disagreement threatens becoming an argument or a fight, you should back away from it as quickly as possible.

At the risk of being obvious, this perspective differs radically from that of those therapists who teach their patients how to fight and argue constructively.

There is no redeeming virtue in arguing or fighting. There is no ultimate reward for making a display of intemperate emotion.

One understands that in our narcissistic age, people have been trained to speak about themselves. They do so because they believe it to be therapeutic. To Hartley, it is rude and arrogant.

Hartley explains:

Never, during a general conversation, endeavor to concentrate the attention wholly upon yourself. It is quite as rude to enter into conversation with one of a group, and endeavor to draw him out of the circle of general conversation to talk with you alone.

And also:

Speak of yourself but little. Your friends will find out your virtues without forcing you to tell them, and you may feel confident that it is equally unnecessary to expose your faults yourself.

The same applies to bragging or touting one’s own achievements. Men (and women) of accomplishment are modest about their achievements. If you brag about yourself you are putting down your interlocutor, and this is not the formula for good conversation. Besides, if you have really done well, your achievements will speak for themselves.

Hartley also suggests that you not bring up technical topics that you alone understand. Showing off your intellectual prowess is not the way to connect with another person.

Being good at conversation means knowing how to sustain a harmonious exchange. To do so you must be a good listener.

What does it mean to be a good listener? First, it means not interrupting someone who is speaking. Second, it means not completing or correcting someone else’s sentences. Third, it means not affecting an air of boredom or disaffection while someone else is talking. Fourth, it means never trying to speak over another person. Fifth, it means paying close attention to what you are hearing, even to the point where you can make remarks that will allow the speaker to elaborate his points.

The second point has a certain amount of amusement value. How many times have you heard people tell you that they discovered they were in love when either they saw that they were completing each other’s sentences?

According to Hartley, such activity is rude and disrespectful.

Conversation is an exchange. It is not a theatrical performance. It is not stand-up comedy. Those who fashion themselves fascinating creatures, great jokesters or brilliant raconteurs end up being anything but:

Be careful in society never to play the part of buffoon, for you will soon become known as the “funny” man of the party, and no character is so perilous to your dignity as a gentleman. You lay yourself open to both censure and bad ridicule, and you may feel sure that, for every person who laughs with you, two are laughing at you, and for one who admires you, two will watch your antics with secret contempt.

As for how a Victorian gentleman should converse with a Victorian lady, Hartley has sound advice:

Avoid flattery. A delicate compliment is permissible in conversation, but flattery is broad, coarse, and to sensible people, disgusting. If you flatter your superiors, they will distrust you, thinking you have some selfish end; if you flatter ladies, they will despise you, thinking you have no other conversation.

A lady of sense will feel more complimented if you converse with her upon instructive, high subjects, than if you address to her only the language of compliment. In the latter case she will conclude that you consider her incapable of discussing higher subjects, and you cannot expect her to be pleased at being considered merely a silly, vain person, who must be flattered into good humor.

Are you surprised to see a Victorian man advising other men to speak respectfully to women, to engage them in conversation on “higher subjects?” It’s a long way from pick up artistry.

President Obama's G8 Debacle

In 2008, when the cognoscenti were talking themselves into voting for Barack Obama, they came up with several rationalizations.

They couldn’t say that they liked Obama because he was one of their own. That would have smacked of narcissism. So, they declared that electing an African-American would atone for the great American sin of racism.

Apparently, they believed that a little psychic healing would fix the broken financial system and the deal with the national debt.

But, that was not all. These same deep thinkers convinced themselves that electing Barack Obama would restore America’s standing in the world. After all, Obama had come across as a “rock star” in Berlin, and what could enhance American prestige more than having a celebrity president?

Europeans hated George Bush and loved Barack Obama. What could go wrong?

A great deal, as it happened. Apparently, our thinking class does not know that it is generally a bad idea to take advice from the competition. Have they forgotten that the European Union was created as a counterweight to American hegemony. To imagine that Europeans want what is best for America bespeaks an astonishing level of naiveté.

Now, our intellectual elites are discovering just how wrong-headed they were. Reports from the G8 summit suggest that Europe has fallen out of love with Barack Obama. In the eyes of European leaders, American prestige and standing has also fallen.

They looked at America and saw a nation that could elect a man who was perfectly unqualified to hold the office of president of the world’s leading superpower. They concluded that America was a nation in decline. Thus, they no longer need to show its president respect and deference.

The National Journal reports on the Obama G8 debacle:

President Obama's honeymoon with the world is over.

What was it, exactly, about Obama's controversy-marred trip to Germany and the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland that fell so flat? Ummm, how about … everything?  

There were the snarky words from Vladimir Putin, who expressed an almost Soviet-esque distance from Washington in his views about Syria. "Of course our opinions do not coincide," the Russian leader said bluntly. There was the coded warning from Chancellor Angela Merkel about spying on friends, and her and Obama's continuing frostiness over the issue of economic stimulus versus austerity. Above all, there was Obama's vague attempt at the Brandenburg Gate to capture some wisp of his past glory by pledging vague plans to cut nuclear arms and an even vaguer concept of "peace with justice."

The "peace with justice" line was a quote from John F. Kennedy, Obama's attempt to steal just a little of JFK's thunder from 50 years before. He didn't come away with much, winning just a smattering of applause from a crowd that was one one-hundredth the size of JFK's. A crowd that, at about 4,500, was also much, much smaller than Obama drew as a candidate in 2008.

Of course, anyone who thinks that conducting foreign policy is analogous to a love affair deserves to be disappointed.

Since we prefer substance to show, what about the substance of Obama’s speech? Nile Gardiner sums it up in The Telegraph:

In stark contrast to that of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama’s message on Wednesday was pure mush, another clichéd “citizens of the world” polemic with little substance. This was a speech big on platitudes and hopeless idealism, while containing much that was counter-productive for the world’s superpower. Ultimately it was little more than a laundry list of Obama’s favourite liberal pet causes, including cutting nuclear weapons, warning about climate change, putting an end to all wars, shutting Guantanamo, ending global poverty, and backing the European Project. It was a combination of staggering naiveté, the appeasement of America’s enemies and strategic adversaries, and the championing of more big government solutions.

Do you find that inspiring? Do you believe that the speech will earn Obama any respect? Or, did it sound like amateur hour in Berlin?

When Chris Matthews starts blaming it on the sunlight, you know that Obama did not do well.

Even the New York Times cannot find anything to cheer about in Obama’s relationships with foreign leaders. As is painfully well known, Obama does not know how to cultivate relationships with other human beings. His dealings with world leaders have put his inadequacy on public display.

Leaders of China and Russia think nothing of treating him with contempt.

The Times reported that when Obama tried recently to extend a hand of friendship to Chinese President Xi Jinping and to Russian President Vladimir Putin, they both responded by giving him “cold shoulder.”

The Times explained:

While tangling with the leaders of two cold war antagonists of the United States is nothing new, the two bruising encounters in such a short span underscore a hard reality for Mr. Obama as he heads deeper into a second term that may come to be dominated by foreign policy: his main counterparts on the world stage are not his friends, and they make little attempt to cloak their disagreements in diplomatic niceties.

And also:

For all of his effort to cultivate personal ties with foreign counterparts over the last four and a half years — the informal “shirt-sleeves summit” with Mr. Xi was supposed to nurture a friendly rapport that White House aides acknowledge did not materialize — Mr. Obama has complicated relationships with some, and has bet on others who came to disappoint him.

Of course, Obama’s apologists blame it on the Bush administration. They believe that Obama has disappointed other foreign leaders because he has not conducted foreign policy as they would have wished him to conduct it.

To me this feels like a typically empty rationalization. Leaders of great nations do not think less of other leaders for doing what they believe is in their national interest.

Of course, Obama did try to develop warm personal relationships with some world leaders. Like Turkish Prime Ministre Erdogan and Egyptian president Morsi… to say nothing of former Russian President Medvedev.

How are those working out? The Times explains:

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, whom Mr. Obama views as a new kind of Muslim leader, has used tear gas and water cannons against protesters in Istanbul. Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader whom Mr. Obama telephoned repeatedly after he became president of Egypt, later granted himself unlimited powers, though he also cut off ties with Syria.

Mr. Obama spent nearly four years befriending Mr. Putin’s predecessor, Dmitri A. Medvedev, hoping to build him up as a counterweight to Mr. Putin. That never happened, and Mr. Obama now finds himself back at square one with a Russian leader who appears less likely than ever to find common ground with the United States on issues like Syria.

Erdogan is a petty tyrant who is Islamicizing his country and suppressing dissent. As everyone has noticed, Obama has had nothing to say about it. Morsi is presiding over an ongoing national calamity. Obama is sending him more weapons.

When it comes to Medvedev, the Obama administration obviously miscalculated. Surely, it is not George Bush’s fault that the crack Obama-Clinton foreign policy team got it so wrong.

Those who continue to defend President Obama say that it doesn’t really matter how foreign leaders treat him in public. What matters is whether or not they can do business with him in private.

Call this an especially feeble rationalization. When someone shows contempt for you in public, whether through his words or his body language it means that he is diminishing you. He is according you less prestige.

When the President of the United States does not respond by asserting himself he is accepting that his nation deserves a position of lower respect.

As the Middle East Disintegrates

Those who have followed the turmoil in the Middle East through the lens offered by Tom Friedman are borderline clueless.

On this blog we have kept well-informed by reading David Goldman, aka Spengler.

Today, Spengler has a new sobering article on the crises in Egypt and Syria:

Syria and Egypt are dying. They were dying before the Syrian civil war broke out and before the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Cairo. Syria has an insoluble civil war and Egypt has an insoluble crisis because they are dying. They are dying because they chose not to do what China did: move the better part of a billion people from rural backwardness to a modern urban economy within a generation. Mexico would have died as well, without the option to send its rural poor - fully one-fifth of its population - to the United States. 

Spengler sees nothing good coming out of Egypt:

No-one has proposed a way to find the more than US$20 billion a year that Egypt requires to stay afloat. In June 2011, then French president Nicholas Sarkozy talked about a Group of Eight support program of that order of magnitude. No Western (or Gulf State) government, though, is willing to pour that sort of money down an Egyptian sinkhole.

Egypt remains a pre-modern society, with nearly 50% illiteracy, a 30% rate of consanguineal marriage, a 90% rate of female genital mutilation, and an un- or underemployment rate over 40%. Syria has neither enough oil nor water to maintain the bazaar economy dominated by the Assad family. 

As for the situation in Syria, Spengler believes that arming the rebels will do little more than soothe Western consciences. We should also note, as Reuters reports today, that the anti-Assad rebellion is increasingly controlled by Islamists.

Spengler writes:

Even if the Sunnis could eject the Assad family from Damascus and establish a new government - which I doubt - the best case scenario would be another Egypt: a Muslim Brotherhood government presiding over a collapsed economy and sliding inevitably towards state failure. It is too late even for this kind of arrangement. Equalizing the military position of the two sides will merely increase the body count. The only humane thing to do is to partition the country on the Yugoslav model, but that does not appear to be on the agenda of any government. 

As an addendum, here is Nicholas Thompson’s analysis of Obama’s Syria intervention, on the New Yorker site:

Nonetheless, too much about this intervention seems perilous, uncertain, and imprudent. We are joining a Sunni-Shiite civil war, and on our side we find Al-Nusra, perhaps the strongest rebel faction and an affiliate of Al Qaeda in Iraq. Some of our weapons will likely end up in their hands. Meanwhile, the rebels we support appear to be splitting apart, not pulling together. By joining the fight this way, we take on the risks of a superpower—embassy attacks around the world, hostility, hatred—but enjoy none of the benefits. We are unlikely to win any time soon; it is not even clear what a win would look like. Obama wants to stop the slaughter and remove Assad, but there is no indication of a plan for an endgame, or even a next step—except, it seems, putting off any next step and any escalation. He may have a master plan that he hasn’t told us about. But one doubts it. The President didn’t even announce the news of our engagement; an aide did, which suggests that Obama wants to distance himself from his halfhearted policy.

Thompson is correct to point out that Obama was not facing a choice between arming the rebels and doing nothing:

There were other options. Obama could have continued imposing sanctions and sending non-lethal aid to rebel groups. If the goal is to save lives and give comfort to the victims, we should give further support to the refugee camps. Joining the battle, though, transforms it. Now our weapons will be killing people. We will be tied by blood to one side in a sectarian civil war that seems likely to spread in an unpredictable fashion. We are now part owners of the pain it will cause—in Syria, Lebanon, and elsewhere.

We are part owners of a situation that, if we believe Spengler, cannot turn out well.

Call it “leading from behind,” but it seems more like our president is floundering. Clueless Obama is being thrown around by circumstances. It might be better to see him as history’s plaything.

Righteous Anger from a Boston Marathon Victim

If you want to live a therapeutically correct life you must express your feelings. You have been told that bottling up your feelings will cause immense psychic, and perhaps even physiological damage.

Unfortunately, no one seems concerned about the damage done by using such idiotic metaphors.

This instruction applies especially to the toxic emotion of anger. The culture considers anger to be toxic so it advises you to spew it out, lest it poison your soul. It isn’t quite as bad as the bottling-up metaphor, but still it’s a metaphor.

The result is that too many people express too much anger too often. Having been taught that expressing anger is therapeutic, they feel obliged to get angry on a regular basis. If they cannot find anything to get angry about they get angry because they have nothing to be angry about.

More and more people can fly into a rage over political disagreements. They take offense at the drop of a politically incorrect pronoun and shout down the opposition. They consider thought crimes to be grievous aggressions and respond to them with a full-throated assault.

In the old days, people who were too quick to take offense were said to be thin-skinned. In the old days people were advised to control their emotions: never let them see you sweat; keep a stiff upper life.

They knew, as we do not, that when you self-respect hangs on a verbal trifle, you are undermining your confidence.

Sadly, but predictably, when you waste your anger on trifles you will not have very much in reserve when you really need it. You will take serious umbrage and launch a barrage of venomous criticism against anyone who dares offer a politically incorrect opinion, but when a terrorist blows up the finish line of the Boston Marathon, you mutter something about the religion of peace.

For that reason Michelle L’Heureux’s comments strike a chord. Waiting at the finish line of the Marathon to see her boyfriend finish the race L’Heureux was struck by one of the bombs that the Tsarnaev brothers planted.

According to The Boston Herald (via Instapundit):

L’Heureux lost most of her left knee in the blasts, and 30 percent of her hearing in her left ear. Her left arm is riddled with shrapnel scars, and there’s a piece of metal still inside her leg.

As opposed to most commenters, L’Heureux is angry, about the bombers, about their mother and about their religion:

A Boston Marathon bombing victim hospitalized for weeks after the blasts lashed out at the mother of the accused bombers, calling Zubeidat Tsarnaeva “vile” for her jihad-laced rants and denials.

Michelle L’Heureux, a 38-year-old John Hancock consultant, told the Herald yesterday it’s time to stop being “politically correct” and speak out — making her one of the first victims to stand up to the terror-talking Chechen family.

“I feel a little bit of hatred towards her. I think she is a vile person,” L’Heureux said of the mom. “If you don’t like our country, get out. It’s as simple as that.”…

“To come in and hurt all these children and people. ... I don’t know any other religion that kills for their religion and think they are going to heaven. That part’s tough to understand,” she said. …

A Muslim terrorist bombed us, and people need to start talking about that more, instead of being so politically correct,” L’Heureux said. “The more politically correct we are, and the more ‘Oh, let’s not hurt their feelings,’ the more they’re going to be able to do these type of things.”

Would that we could hear such remarks more often. Perhaps we should judge the culture by  the anger that no one dares to voice.

A Nation Divided

As Republicans despair of ever again being the majority party, Joel Kotkin sees glimmers of geopolitical hope.

The fastest-growing, most prosperous, most business-friendly and family-friendly regions of the nation are in the South and the Midwest, thus, in Republican strongholds.

Like states, regions can be laboratories for public policy and the South, in particular, has been leading the way toward a more prosperous future.

In what appears to be an ongoing competition for jobs, the South seems to be winning out over the liberal, blue North.

Kotkin sums it up:

One hundred and fifty years after twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg destroyed the South’s quest for independence, the region is again on the rise. People and jobs are flowing there, and Northerners are perplexed by the resurgence of America’s home of the ignorant, the obese, the prejudiced and exploited, the religious and theundereducated. Responding to new census data showing the Lone Star State is now home to eight of America’s 15 fastest-growing cities, Gawker asked: “What is it that makes Texas so attractive? Is it the prisons? The racism? The deadly weather? The deadly animals? The deadly crime? The deadly political leadership? The costumed sex fetish conventions? The cannibal necromancers?” 

He continues:

The South, along with the Plains, is focused on growing its economy, getting rich, and catching up with the North’s cultural and financial hegemons. The Yankee nation, by contrast, is largely concerned with preserving its privileged economic and cultural position—with its elites pulling up the ladder behind themselves.

Kotkin believes that the North is resting on its laurels, but that is only part of the story. As Gawker demonstrates, the North is fighting back, with its own cultural psy-ops.

As Texas Governor Rick Perry keeps trying to lure blue state businesses to Texas, Northern intellectuals are letting fly with slander, derision, ridicule and defamation.

They are not working to create economic opportunity in their own states, but prefer stigmatizing the more dynamic South. If you can't beat them and can't join them, convince them to self-deconstruct.

One likes to assume that we are naturally inclined to emulate our betters. And Kotkin does note the cases where Northern governors have been working to emulate the pro-growth policies that are afoot in the South. But, there is always possible that the South will choose to emulate policies that have failed in the North.

Kotkin explains:

It’s unlikely, though, that the South will emulate the North’s social model of an ever-expanding welfare state and ever more stringent “green” restrictions on business—which hardly constitutes a strong recipe for success for a developing economy. It’s difficult to argue, for example, that President Obama’s Chicago, broke and with 10 percent unemployment, represents the beacon of the economic future compared to faster-growing Houston, Dallas, Raleigh, or even Atlanta. People or businesses moving from Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago to these cities will no doubt carry their views on social issues with them, but it’s doubtful they will look north for economic role models.

Blue staters who believe that they have righteousness on their side are happily trying to persuade Southerners to adopt their very own self-defeating policies. Don’t count out the effectiveness of their psy-ops.

The South has become the most business-friendly region because it has low taxes, fewer regulations and less unionization. It doesn’t take a very high IQ to figure it out:

While the Northeast and Midwest have become increasingly expensive places for businesses to locate, and cool to most new businesses outside of high-tech, entertainment, and high-end financial services, the South tends to want it all—and is willing to sacrifice tax revenue and regulations to get it. A review of state business climates by CEO Magazine found that eight of the top 10 most business-friendly states, led by Texas, were from the former Confederacy; Unionist strongholds California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts sat at the bottom.

One needs to point out that New York and other blue states have become a bastion for what I would call “clean” jobs. Those involve finance, the media, the law, education, entertainment and high tech. The South has energy, industry, manufacturing and agriculture… thus, dirty jobs.

But now, the South is beginning to poach serious technology jobs. Kotkin draws the comparison:

More recently, the region—led by Texas—has moved up the value-added chain, seizing a fast-growing share of the jobs in higher-wage fields such as auto and aircraft manufacturing, aerospace, technology, and energy.

And, the South is rising in terms of financial services jobs. North Carolina comes immediately to mind and, Kotkin reports, the new owners of the New York Stock Exchange are located in Atlanta.

In the past, the South was synonymous with poverty. Today, New York has more poverty than Mississippi:

While the recession was tough on many Southern states, the area’s recovery generally has been stronger than that of Yankeedom: the unemployment rate in the region is now lower than in the West or the Northeast. The Confederacy no longer dominates the list of states with the highest share of people living in poverty; new census measurements (PDF), adjusted for regional cost of living, place the District of Columbia and California first and second. New York now has a higher real poverty rate than Mississippi.

At the moment, the South does have fewer citizens with Bachelor’s degrees, but it has been attracting more and more educated young people.

In Kotkin’s analysis:

To be sure, some Yankee bastions, such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, enjoy much higher percentages of educated people than the South. Every state in the Southeast falls below the national average of percentage of residents 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree—but virtually every major Southern metropolitan region has been gaining educated workers faster than their Northeastern counterparts. Over the past decade, greater Atlanta added over 300,000 residents with B.A.s, more than the larger Philadelphia region and almost 70,000 more than Boston.

Southern states are attracting more immigrants and producing more family members. Quality of life, cost of living and quality of public education explains why it is more affordable to raise children outside of a place like New York City.

Tom Friedman Returns to Egypt

Two years and a few months ago Tom Friedman was camped out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square breathing the fetid air of the new Egyptian democracy.

Now, Friedman returns to Egypt to assess the outcome of the revolution he so fervently supported. The reality on the ground has dashed his hopes, so he calls for more revolution.

Don’t expect Tom Friedman to admit that he was wrong. He has not yet been cured of his pathological altruism, pundit version.

Yesterday, Friedman offered a sobering picture of the everyday life of the average Egyptian, living through the revolution that he, Friedman thought was such a good thing:

ON Tuesday, I visited a bakery in Cairo’s dirt-poor Imbaba neighborhood, where I watched a scrum of men, women and children jostling to get bread. You have to get there early, because the baker makes only so many subsidized pita loaves; he sells the rest of his government-subsidized flour on the black market to private bakers who charge five times the official price. He has no choice, he says, because his fuel costs are spiking. You can watch the subsidized-flour bags being carried on shoulders out the side door. “This is the hardest job in Egypt,” the bakery owner told me. Everyone is always mad at him, especially those who line up early and still leave with no bread.

These are difficult days in Egypt. It is running out of hard currency and can’t buy enough gasoline and diesel for power stations. Long lines are forming at gas stations, worsening Cairo’s titanic traffic jams, and electricity cuts are commonplace. Around the corner from the bakery, on an unpaved street, a small knot of men have two manhole covers lifted, exposing a sickening black sludge that has backed up almost to street level; they’re fishing down the hole for the blockage with a long, thin rod. There is much arguing about how best to solve this problem. In the background, through an open window, you hear children in a Koranic school cheerfully repeating verses for their teacher.

Apparently, all of those Egyptians who put the Muslim Brotherhood in power did not know what they were voting for. One must add that the Obama administration, in its wholehearted support for the Morsi government, is another part of the problem.

In any case, Friedman’s friends in Cairo do not much like the Muslim Brotherhood:

When you talk to these lemon squeezers today — the liberals, conservatives and nationalists who make up the opposition — you can feel a palpable hatred for the Muslim Brotherhood and a powerful sense of theft: a widespread feeling that the Brotherhood tricked the lemon squeezers and the poor into voting for its members and now they have failed to either fix the country or share power, but are busy trying to impose religious norms. This opposition has mounted a nationwide petition drive that has garnered 10 million signatures so far calling on Morsi to resign and to call new elections. On June 30, their campaign is set to culminate in a nationwide anti-Morsi protest. Morsi still enjoys support in the more traditional countryside, so this could get very ugly.

After a promising start, Friedman’s column veers off into self-parody. It isn’t surprising; he has become a master of the genre.

When he asks how Egypt is going to solve its myriad problems, Friedman recommends “environmentalism.”

Yes, indeed, Egypt will be saved by an army of lawyers litigating on behalf of four-inch smelts.

To be fair, Friedman does not quite put it that way. He believes that Egyptians cannot function as a society until they find common ground. In itself, the idea makes some sense. Unfortunately, he takes it a bit too literally and declares that common ground means Mother Nature and government infrastructure projects:

That is the real cultural revolution that has to happen for Egypt to revive. And that’s where the environmentalists here have such an advantage over the politicians, because all they think about is the commons — resources that have to be shared. Egypt’s commons — its bridges, roads, parks, coral reefs — are crumbling.

Actually, Egypt needs a good dose of private enterprise. Capitalism is propelled by people negotiating business deals. In making these deals people find common ground. That is the only productive way to find common ground.

America was not built by environmentalist scolds. It’s recent economic growth has been seriously inhibited by “green” attorneys.

China wasn’t built by environmentalist scolds either. You might note, correctly, that today’s China is drowning in pollution. Apparently, the managers who are running that country decided to put economic growth in the forefront, even at the detriment of the environment. Come to think of it America and Europe industrialized first and cleaned up the environment later.

Friedman summarizes his big idea:

The only way Egypt and the other Awakening states will have sustainable democracies with sustainable economies is to elevate an environmental ethic to the center of political thinking. Without that, it’s all just musical chairs.

Of course, China is anything but democratic, but Friedman’s notion, that sustainable economies require an “environmental ethic” seems idiotic, even for Tom Friedman.

When You've Lost Chris Matthews...

When you’ve lost Chris Matthews….

I don’t know how I missed this, but last month Chris Matthews launched into an epic rant about the executive incompetence of one Barack Obama. (h/t J. David Adler)

Matthews is railing about the IRS scandal, a scandal that he believes will linger in the public mind for decades and cost the Democratic Party a serious number of votes.

Of course, Matthews does not bother to point out that he himself has been propagandizing for this very same president for five years now.

Oh well, you can’t have everything.