somehow, we must rid ourselves of thomas friedman. one problem is that you always know what he's going to say before he says it, thus rendering his saying of it always already redundant. how has he addressed the total revolutionary upheaval of a whole gigantic region? his first suggestion was coating the region in no-child-left-behind schools. and now he takes the bold step of suggesting as a solution a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax, a position that, for friedman, every event of the last three decades has demanded. his world is flat indeed: it has no terrain whatever since he coated the whole thing in a homogeneous layer of horseshit.