Farewell to Lehmann

Unless we are totally mistaken (and that’s certainly within the realm of possibility) today marks the final Washington Post book review by deputy editor Chris Lehmann, who’s moving on to New York Magazine to assume duties as a features editor. Hopefully the magazine will let him write long, thoughtful pieces on (more than) occasion, because dammit, we like ’em. Anyway, for the last review, he picks on Francis Wheen’s IDIOT PROOF, which delves into the “erosion of common sense” among major players and media reporting. The money quote:

In the main, however, “Idiot Proof” is welcome balm to anyone who has weathered the past two-plus decades’ worth of reason-free intellectual movements and social policies. And it ends, naturally but sadly enough, with an inventory of the many present-day triumphs of unreason, from the fever dreams of the dot-com bubble and the Bush tax cuts to the “coolly supercilious relativism” of leftists laying the bulk of the blame for Sept. 11 on the United States. Wheen calls this chapter “Voodoo Revisited,” and it sounds an appropriately somber closing note. One is less and less sure about history, but it remains a cinch that those who do not learn from nonsense are condemned to repeat it.