How Can One Mustache be so Wrong?

The most e-mailed articles on the nytimes' website today was an op-ed piece by none other than Thomas Friedman: the Times' resident master of muddled metaphors and poor reasoning, at least until Ross Douthat gets more settled in.

(This is something I promise not to make a habit out of, since I'm far from the first person to do it and wouldn't want to subject you to regular Tom Friedman articles anyway.)

The article comments on a Newsweek piece from the other week that lists the 100 greatest countries in the world, based on varied metrics such as education, health, political dynamism, and so on. America is ranked #11, which Mr. Friedman attributes to our failing school systems by tying in a Washington Post op-ed that widens blame for failing schools to include "shrunken student motivation." Kids today don't want to excel and society's to blame.

After the usual couple of paragraphs of aimless blathering Tom arrives once again, club in hand, to one of his favorite dead horses: Americans need to be more like the Chinese or Indians:

"China and India have been catching up to America not only via cheap labor and currencies. They are catching us because they now have free markets like we do, education like we do, access to capital and technology like we do, but, most importantly, values like our Greatest Generation had. That is, a willingness to postpone gratification, invest for the future, work harder than the next guy and hold their kids to the highest expectations."

This is not what irks me about this article though. The poor wages and living conditions that China and India endure in order to compete globally aside, there's nothing wrong with this somewhat bland, we-can-be-great-again attitude that Mr. Friedman pushes weekly (I used to eat that shit up when Obama would say it). It's the implication that we're out of Newsweek's top 10 at #11 because we aren't more like #59 (China) or #78 (India) that bothers me.

Wouldn't it make more sense to look at the countries who are ranked above the US and try to figure out what they're doing right that we're not? Let's see...

1. Finland

2. Switzerland

3. Sweden

4. Australia

5. Luxembourg

6. Norway

7. Canada

8. Netherlands

9. Japan

10. Denmark

Coming in at #9, Japan is the only country on this list that qualifies for Tom's work-a-holic model of success that our Greatest Generation had, and I'm pretty sure that they just haven't stopped working since the Meiji Restoration unless it's to invade Manchuria.

As for the rest, you guessed it, they're European-style Democratic Socialists with strong social safety nets and national health care systems. We could begin catching up to these models but instead, we're urged by one of the United States' most uncontroversial pundits to work 50-hour weeks and demand suicide-inducing workloads of schoolchildren.

Well that's it. To anyone still reading, I appreciate you letting me vent. This all just boils down to facial-hair envy anyway.

I mean, just look at it...