There's a saying: It's impossible to win an argument with an ignorant man. Given the year that this has become — and given the strange period we are living through — it is time to attach a corollary to that: But that doesn't mean that we ought to capitulate to ignorance.
Which calls to mind Nicholas Lemann's book report on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in this week's New Yorker. First, it must be said that Lemann is an esteemed figure, a longtime writer and editor for Texas Monthly and the Atlantic and now for The New Yorker, and, as the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, is the very soul of Ivory Tower journalistic probity.
It is, of course, Lemann's position and stature that make his failure to commit journalism in his piece on the pivotal Nevada Senate race all the more puzzling. No, it is worse than a puzzling failure: It is a capitulation to ignorance. Somehow this year, in our zeal to understand the madness around us, we have all gone a bit mad.
I'll explain.
In Lemann's piece — which finds Reid at the center of the great and angry storm sweeping across the country — his brand of journalistic probity apparently requires a journalist to give equal weight to both sides of an argument, however unhinged those sides may be (and please, decorum insists that you be more polite than to point out derangement when it looks you in the face), and to ascribe rationality where rationality is nowhere in evidence. ...
Ditto that
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