Tom Friedman and Israel will save US democracy and blow your mind

Al Jazeera English

Back in 2009, heavily remunerated multi-Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman – who has been employed by the US newspaper of record since 1981 – wrote with characteristic eloquence: “Many big bad things happen in the world without America, but not a lot of big good things.”

This was presumably news to the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the myriad other locations on the planet that have been on the receiving end of “big good things” from America. 

Sadly, according to Friedman, the United States has lost its way in recent years, afflicted by a crippling partisan “polarisation” that is preventing it from being the best big good superpower it can be. . . .

In his January 2021 New York Times column titled Biden-Cheney 2024?, Friedman urges the US to recuperate its democracy by following in the footsteps of Israel, where a new national unity government . . . has been “getting stuff done and muting the hyperpolarisation that was making Israel ungovernable”.  Indeed, nothing says democracy like a racist apartheid state that bombs, tortures, and ethnically cleanses Palestinians. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Me versus myself: Imposing order on chaos

 Al Jazeera English

When I was growing up in Texas, I was organised and tidy – annoyingly so. I went to sleep at night looking forward to making the bed the next morning, and took great delight in meticulously washing and drying the dishes by hand and ensuring that the vacuum cleaner left precisely proportionate tracks on the carpet.

Somewhere down the line, my daily routines underwent a radical change. After graduating from college in New York, I commenced a life of almost obsessive-compulsive itinerancy, darting between countries and continents and fleeing the notion of a fixed residence. I nonetheless continued to accumulate possessions in all of these countries, which, given the impossibility of travelling with all of them at once, I proceeded to scatter across other countries at the abodes of friends and lesser acquaintances.

While the chaotic arrangement was certainly liberating in its own way, it also resulted in a scattered sense of self – even as I feigned some sort of control over my universe by scribbling lists of what belongings I had left where. . . READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Life and death on the ‘beach of death’

Al Jazeera English

On June 23, 2020, a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck off the coast of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, not far from the coastal town of Zipolite where I had taken up accidental residence at the start of the pandemic in March. I had just sat down to work when the room began to shudder violently as though on the verge of self-combustion, and I dashed out the front door of my house to find the power lines sparking all over the place in a world that was suddenly frighteningly precarious.

Adding to the apocalyptic feel was the vehicle that then came flying by with passengers hanging out the windows, shouting at bystanders to run for the hills or else be killed by an alleged incoming tsunami. This was no doubt a fitting end, I told myself, to my stay in Zipolite – a place whose very name, so it is said, means “playa de la muerte”, or “beach of death”, in the Zapotec language.

There were various theories as to the origins of the name, the most obvious being that this was a lethal stretch of sea, where waves and riptides had caused the demise of countless bathers over the years. Some observers also contended that regional Indigenous populations had viewed Zipolite – positioned as it is at the southernmost point of Oaxaca – as an underworld of sorts. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH. 

The US opioid epidemic, edition 2021

 Al Jazeera English

The other day in Mexico, I fell into conversation with an older gentleman from Virginia who had recently lost a brother to cancer. Choking up as he recalled how, as a child, his brother would approach parents on the street to compliment them on the beauty of their offspring, the gentleman added that cancer had not been his brother’s only affliction. He had also, he said, been a victim of “the other epidemic” – meaning the opioid crisis that caused some 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States between 1999 and 2019, while destroying countless more lives through addiction.

The coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the overdose phenomenon, with deaths in the US now surpassing 100,000 per year. Approximately 75 percent of these are attributed to opioids – a class of drugs that includes heroin, synthetic fentanyl, and prescription painkillers like oxycodone. READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.