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James Ledbetter and Katharine Mieszkowski

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McPeace in Our Time?

By James Ledbetter
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 10, 1999, at 5:51 PM ET

The most soothing thing I can think of is that rarely has Tom Friedman coined any phrase or concept that has really stayed with the culture. He is a smart man with a distinguished journalistic career. At the moment, however, he's most identified with the McDonald's Pacification Theory (I call it MPT): that is, his thesis that no two countries with a McDonald's in them have ever fought a war against each another.

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The MPT started looking shaky almost immediately after Friedman introduced it in December 1996. Just days after Friedman's first MPT column, a riot broke out at a McDonald's in Minsk, where citizens thought that they would get food for free. As soon as NATO bombing began in Yugoslavia this year, the MPT reached its rightful place in the Dumpster of history, though Friedman rather stubbornly maintains that it was the exception that proves the rule.

So even if I share Friedman's antipathy to cell phones in restaurants, I don't think Y2K rage will catch on. As we're typing this stuff, I see from CNN.com that five people have been shot in a Jewish community center near Los Angeles--a reminder that the world already has enough viable categories of rage.

Until tomorrow,
Jim