Here’s another installment of Barrett Brown’s “Freelance Wasteland,” logo forthcoming. Check out last week’s piece.

Notes from Bushwick

It would probably be best if Hunter S. Thompson had never lived, or, rather, if he were to be kept secret from certain people, such as those who want to write like Hunter S. Thompson.

I myself have encountered here in Bushwick some half a dozen young males who had gotten it into their heads that, by virtue of having done a few drugs and perhaps gone on a wacky road trip one time with their kooky friends including one totally craaaaazy guy they met in college who was always doing craaaaaazy stuff and was totally a huge druggie and once smoked a joint, like, just walking down the street in broad daylight, man, that they would thus write a successful book. Perhaps they would weave in some politics by way of dialogue, such as when they arrive at a friend’s house the next state over and split two grams of shrooms between the five of them and talk about how Cheney is the antithesis of the American dream.

One fellow actually handed me a manuscript of this sort and asked me to read it. From what I could tell of the single scene I read after having promised to read all of it, the characters were doing the whole talking-like-real-people-talk thing with regards to sex and relationships, and then they discussed selling a hit of ecstasy to somebody. Later, there was some driving.

I occasionally wrote crap of this sort when I was 18, stupidly exuberant, and starting out as a freelancer. It’s a fine thing that these articles are no longer accessible via the web, because if they were I’d have to kill myself, and that’d be even more cliché than the other stuff.

Notes from the Outside World

A lot of people other than me should be killing themselves over Google.

Among the nation’s many institutional failures that have risen to obviousness over the past decade, there is one that may be pointed to as having been partly responsible for all the others, but which will nonetheless never be addressed by the American punditry as a whole. This failure is that of the American punditry as a whole.

I’m not referring here to the most egregious and well-known examples of the manner in which failure is rewarded in the realm of professional political opinion; anyone who’s been paying attention is aware that William Kristol spent much of the past decade filling his columns and television appearances with predictions that turned out to be dead wrong, but that he was nonetheless provided with additional columns in both Time and The New York Times even after his failures had become undeniable. The incompetence of the hard right in dealing with facts and the indifference of the moderate media in dealing with the hard right is no secret to anyone except those among the hard right, who remain convinced that the liberal media is out to get them and will tell you as much in their columns, themselves duly published by outlets of the liberal media.

What has gone less noticed even among the well-informed, though, is the widespread incompetence of many of our nation’s most respected left-of-center columnists. New York Times staple Thomas Friedman, for instance, won the Pulitzer for commentary back in 2002, and his several books are fairly ubiquitous features among the nation’s more expensive, wood-paneled bookshelves. He has meanwhile developed into something of a hero among upper-middle class moderates, leftists, and even some conservatives, together finding themselves in rare agreement concerning Thomas Friedman’s alleged talents as a chronicler of the world and related subjects.

Friedman does deserve some credit for having managed to cloak his mediocrity for years and in full view of millions of newspaper readers. But as I recently demonstrated at greater length, it takes only a few minutes with Google to reveal that Friedman couldn’t predict a menopausal chick’s period. In 2001, for instance, he called on the American citizenry to "keep rootin’ for Putin," whom he described in glowing terms as a positive force in Russia’s struggle to adapt free market policies, transparency, and the rule of law. This is not just a ridiculous prediction of the sort that takes years to disprove; it was demonstrably ridiculous at the very moment when it was written, by which point Putin’s fascist tendencies had already been on display for years (as other, more competent analysts had already pointed out, Putin was almost certainly involved in orchestrating the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings, a probable false flag attack intended to provide Russia with a casus belli against Chechnya, which it subsequently re-subjugated with typical viciousness). He stated several months into the ongoing U.S.-Afghanistan conflict that he had "no doubt, for now, that the Bush team has a military strategy for winning a long war," objected to the idea that Afghanis were concerned about civilian casualties, and proclaimed early in 2002 that "the Taliban are gone." And, of course, he called on the Democrats to start thinking "seriously" (Friedman-speak for "hawkishly") about Iraq lest the party "become unimportant." This was in 2005. And there are dozens of similarly  assertions to be found among the poorly-written annals of Thomas Friedman. This will not deter The New York Times from providing him with a platform from which to infect the American reading public with his nonsense because the editors of The New York Times simply don’t give a shit.

Also, just look at the guy. Look at him. He’s all like, "Hey, let’s have a dialogue!"

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