Give Me a Break

I hate writing like this (from a New York Times Magazine article on Toyota):

"And yet deconstructing Toyota means breaking down a corporation that uses all its resources, and more than 295,000 employees worldwide, to construct things that are not meant to come apart."

I don't quite know what's so galling about it. I think it's that tone so clearly trumps content. It's a sort of Tom Friedman line, that starts out meaningless and gets worse and worse the more you think about it. Everyone makes mistakes, but the line is so actively stupid that it ruins the writer's credibility. No one trusts people who use light years as units of time, and no one trusts NYT Magazine writers who are so enamored of their subject matter that they come up with gems like this one.