Ben Stein Watch: October 28, 2007

If last week's Ben Stein column was a reversion to mean, a bad column following a vaguely reasonable one, then this week's is a momentum trade. You thought that Stein couldn't get any worse than he was last week? Well, you weren't being imaginative enough. It's true that it would be hard for him to be more wrong than the was last week. So instead he has managed to file 860 words of utter gobbledegook: nonsense masquerading as syntactically-correct English. (It might have been easier for him just to write "colorless green ideas sleep furiously", and leave it at that.) Yves Smith gets to the point:

I assume this piece is meant to be humorous, because it certainly can't be taken seriously. But Stein's not a skilled enough writer to pull it off, so it comes off as being merely unhinged.

Stein devotes most of his column to an idea which is so "painfully silly," in the words of Dean Baker, that I can't even bring myself to summarize it here. Dean has a go at finding a kernel of meaning amidst the gibberish and poppycock: he's a stronger man than I. If you wanted to be really, really charitable you could consider Stein's column to be a reworking as reductio ad absurdum of Michael Kinsley's famous 2004 column on social security privatization. Except that Kinsley's column makes sense, and Stein's, well, doesn't.

Amazingly, however, Stein has managed to retain the same ABA formula for his column that he always uses: he starts off saying something utterly uninteresting about his personal life, he then gets a bunch of economics wrong, and then he repeats what he first said about his personal life. Last week we were told that Taco Bell is tasty; this week we learn that Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho is "beautiful and yet empty". Stein says he's going to buy a home there, which does raise one interesting explanation for this week's column.

Any sensible person, on reading this column, will react to Stein in much the same way as they would to that muttering crazy person on the subway: by giving him a very wide berth indeed. So maybe Stein's just trying, with this column, to ensure that no one else even thinks about moving to his particular pocket of North Idaho. It might be a fair trade: if all of us promise we'll never visit Lake Pend Oreille, might Stein promise to never again write for the New York Times?

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