Something tells me Tom Friedman would really like Imaginary Girlfriend™!

Via Corporate Engagement comes this from The New York Times' Thomas Friedman:

A bottle of bottled water held 30 little turtles. It didn't matter that each turtle had to rattle a metal ladle in order to get a little bit of noodles, a total turtle delicacy. The problem was that there were many turtle battles for less than oodles of noodles.

...I was sitting in on an "accent neutralization" class at the Indian call center 24/7 Customer.... I gave these young Indians an authentic rendition of "30 Little Turtles," which is designed to teach them the proper Canadian pronunciations.

[snip]

There is nothing more positive than the self-confidence, dignity and optimism that comes from a society knowing it is producing wealth by tapping its own brains -- men's and women's -- as opposed to one just tapping its own oil, let alone one that is so lost it can find dignity only through suicide and "martyrdom."
    Indeed, listening to these Indian young people, I had a deja vu. Five months ago, I was in Ramallah, on the West Bank, talking to three young Palestinian men, also in their 20s, one of whom was studying engineering. Their hero was Yasser Arafat. They talked about having no hope, no jobs and no dignity, and they each nodded when one of them said they were all "suicide bombers in waiting."
    What am I saying here? That it's more important for young Indians to have jobs than Americans? Never. But I am saying that there is more to outsourcing than just economics. There's also geopolitics. It is inevitable in a networked world that our economy is going to shed certain low-wage, low-prestige jobs. To the extent that they go to places like India or Pakistan -- where they are viewed as high-wage, high-prestige jobs -- we make not only a more prosperous world, but a safer world for our own 20-year-olds.

Pitiful elitist myopia derived from tenure. In his usual fine job of gee-whizzing the obvious, what Friedman misses is that in the absence of bling-bling, security becomes a rather academic abstraction. 20 year olds in Ramallah and Sarajevo braved withering crossfire to get to any job. Safety is a luxury when your kids or brothers and sisters are hungry. Scarcity also generates a preterantural social structure that points down, whether you're a 20 year-old in Khe Sanh, or just in Kokomo. William Golding wrote a very interesting book on the tendency.

I guess this means we're about due for Friedman's follow-up to The Lexus and The Olive Tree. Perhaps, "The Rice Rocket and the RPG"?