"Atlas Shrugged" quiz for Ayn Rand fans

It's been a long time since I wrote on this blog about Ayn Rand and her endless monstrosity, "Atlas Shrugged" but I got into arguments with Rand fans on Facebook recently and put together a quiz for them  - Randroids almost never remember much about AS, if they ever really read it in the first place. 

The quiz gives you a sense of just how illogical Rand was and how much she hated those who did not agree with her "philosophy."

1. When a man inspired by John Galt's endless speech hears a mother tell her child to give away one of his toys, what does he do?

Answer

He slaps her so hard he fractures her jaw.

2. When an old guy in the 20th Century Motor Company's company town finds out that the money he wanted for record albums was given to an 8-year-old girl so she could have braces, what does he do?

Answer

He punches her in the mouth so hard he knocks out all her teeth - it's clear in context that Rand considers this justified - one clue is that the child is described as ugly - almost all villains in Rand's simple-minded tales are ugly.

3. What is Rand's explanation for the existence of Communism?

Answer

Sadism. "And if you ever want to see pure evil, you should have seen the way (Ivy Starnes) eyes glinted when she watched some man who’d talked back to her once and who’d just heard his name on the list of those getting nothing above basic pittance. And when you saw it, you saw the real motive of any person who’s ever preached the slogan: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’"

4. Who forced the 20th Century Motor Company to collectivize?

Answer

The owners of the 20th Century Motor Company themselves. Because you know, that always happens.

5. When trains from California reach New York City, and they have to dump tons of rotten produce they've been carrying, which river do they dump it in?

Answer

In the East River, which is on the other side of Manhattan from where the train line stops - at the Hudson River. This error is made worse by the fact that Rand was living in Manhattan when she wrote this.

6. How do the book's heroes Dagny and Hank convince local officials to allow their train to barrel through towns at dangerously high speeds?

Answer

Local officials were "outargued, bribed or threatened, to obtain permits to run a train through town zones at a hundred miles an hour."

7. How does Rand deal with people on a train who hold pro-government opinions - including the children of those people?

Answer

She gases them, then blows them up.

8. When all industries in the United States are suffering from railroad failure-induced shortages, and cities are starving, what is the one industry that, inexplicably, manages to function perfectly?

Answer

The florist industry: "It was late afternoon when the florist telephoned her. "Our Chicago office sent word that they were unable to deliver the flowers, Mrs. Rearden, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet." This is how Rand decides to have Mrs. Rearden find out her husband Hank is having an affair with Dagny Taggart.

I, Podius

I was really excited to see that John Hodgman was doing a podcast, called I, Podius, an episode-by-episode discussion of the 1976 British television series I, Claudius. I have blogged about my admiration for that series a few times.

Hodgman has a way of referencing semi-obscure culture that I'm interested in. I was disappointed that I missed Hodgman's riff on Ayn Rand, which was on stage right during the time I was working on my play DARK MARKET, which is about the influence of Ayn Rand on the fiscal policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

A play I put aside once the election of Trump made that scenario seem quaint and tame by comparison.

In theory John Hodgman doing a podcast on I, Claudius is great. In practice... not so much.

I don't know how much planning went into the approach of the series, but the first episode seemed to be organized around the idea that Hodgman would be the one focused on I Claudius, while his co-host Elliott Calin, who had not seen the series prior to recording the podcast, would provide commentary focusing on post-I Claudius culture, from Star Wars - released in 1977 - on. I guess in order to make it accessible to the under-40 demographic who make up the bulk of podcast listeners.

This is a mistake. The people who are likely to listen to this series are likely to already be familiar with I, Claudius and don't appreciate the excessive number of asides about things not related to I, Claudius.

I also have issues with the editing, or rather lack of editing of the first episode. There was a moment where they were discussing a scene and they couldn't remember the name of one of the actors (Cheryl Johnson) nor her character's name (Octavia) and they don't even bother to look it up. Why? Instead of including their chatter about not knowing the actor/character they could have edited that part out, and included them saying the character and actor names.

This seems to be a feature of podcasts in general - this refusal to edit anything and let the audience hear plenty of chatter or failed attempts at humor amongst worthwhile content. It was something I noticed about another podcast I blogged about, the Embrace the Void Pod.

All these podcast dudes seem to think their audience wants hear every error or random pointless comment made in the course of producing something worth listening to. Or at any rate, they don't care enough to take out all the verbal excelsior.

Maybe that's why my attempt at podcasting for NYCPlaywrights failed to find an audience - I used to edit the hell out of each episode, including limiting my own voice to the bare minimum. But since many people say they listen to podcasts during their commutes, maybe it's more important to fill up time than to focus on the quality of what is being said.

In any case, I will keep listening since there isn't a lot of new I, Claudius-related content out there and I have hope that they will stop trying to be clever and relevant and focus more on the actual television series I, Claudius.

Meet Sonia Gupta, bigot and misogynist

Greetings Twitterers 

Some other content for your consideration:

• My many-part series on the connections between evolutionary psychology and "race science" including harsh criticism of "The Bell Curve."
• My analysis of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and why it fails as both a political manifesto and as literature, as well as Rand's influence over Alan Greenspan and how that fed into the financial crisis of 2008
• If you're a playwright, check out opportunities at NYCPlaywrights.org

And FYI - I am anti-hereditarian - which means that I don't agree with those, like Sonia Gupta, who seem to believe that you can judge human beings by knowing nothing more about them than their gender and ethnicity. 

Thanks for visiting my site.

Wow thanks to my writing about toxic bigot Ruby Hamad, I also discovered toxic bigot Sonia Gupta, who agrees with Ruby Hamad that white women are the devil.

After some exchanges with her I was set upon by the misogynist crew who admire her. One of them wouldn't stop sending misogynist trope gifs to me until I blocked him, another one just sent me a string of pointless insults until I blocked him. Then there's this charmer, Andy DeBroux, telling me where I should and should not express my opinions. What is it about developing software that attracts so many misogynists?

Please note that Gupta approved of this comment because of course she would.

Of course DeBroux's tweet did inspire me to write this blog post, so I hope he's happy about that.

Gupta makes clear on her Twitter account that she's not a big supporter of feminism since her devotion is to hating white women. 

I hope to god no white women have to work with Gupta or DeBroux at their software companies, that won't end well.

Gupta describes herself as a lawyer turned software developer, so I've no doubt she has more money than I'll ever see in my lifetime. And yet she seems to consider her struggles in life similar to the struggles of African Americans. She seems to believe that all forms of being non-white are equally oppressed.

Sonia Gupta really really hates white women though. I guess she figures if the computer programming career doesn't pan out, she can get a third career devoted to her resentment and hatred of white women - all the other privileged extremists can contribute to her career via Patreon.

I just hope that Gupta doesn't think she's going to parlay her hatred of white women into a lucrative career as a mainstream writer - Mikki Kendall already tried that but got stopped cold thanks to The Nation. On the other hand, it seems to be working out for Ruby Hamad. 

Fun fact - ole Sonia "I hate white women with the heat of a thousand sounds" Gupta and I have a mutual connection on Linked In - small world!

I really have a hard time believing that people like Gupta and Hamad are for real. They seem like caricatures invented by some Koch brothers-funded think tank to try to portray the social justice left as vicious and hateful and simple-minded bigots, who come from privilege but claim to be as oppressed as the decendents of 300-plus years of slavery and apartheid and abuse. 

But seriously, Gupta is obsessed with her hatred of white women.

The caricature image of "white women" as a snarling witch-type character with an exaggerated hook nose ratchets up the misogyny - and possibly anti-Semitism   an extra notch.

Must attack feminists of course.

This tweet probably explains why misogynists flock to her.

And of course can't forget to attack liberals. It's absolutely stunning how much more often these alleged social justice people attack feminists and liberals than they do conservatives.

Gupta hasn't only gotten pushback from white women though - apparently she has or at least had, at one time, white friends.

Apparently those wacky white people don't enjoy being friends with someone who constantly makes extremist, essentialist declarations about them based on their ethnicity. How does Sonia Gupta withstand such unbearable oppression?

I may have to go see this puppet show

Puppet Ayn Rand

It's been quite a while since I blogged much about Ayn Rand. I was on an Ayn Rand binge three years ago when I was reading "Atlas Shrugged" as homework for an as-yet unproduced play I wrote about Rand and her influence on Alan Greenspan. But once Trump came along the idea of the Chairman of the Federal Reserve being a former acolyte of Ayn Rand no longer seemed wacky and improbable.

But then I read about this puppet show which also features Noam Chomsky and Karl Marx and I am intrigued:

About halfway through the play, Musk puts a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” into the Print-a-Friend, and out pops Ayn Rand, wearing the signature dollar-sign pin she favored in real life.
Mr. Reyes read Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead” as a teenager, but unsurprisingly is not a fan, though he said he appreciates her theatrical qualities.
“She’s a great character for comedy because she’s a sociopath,” he said. “There are so many very crazy things she said.”

I believe she was more likely on the autism spectrum than a sociopath.

Ayn Rand & Steven Pinker

One of those discussing my work re: Steven Pinker over at Steve Sailer's column at Unz, "PhysicistDave" went off-topic to talk about my commentary about Ayn Rand.

Ms. McLernan has a psychologically interesting (negative) fixation on Ayn Rand, which results in some (unintentionally) funny remarks. E.g., 

One of the useful aspects of Ayn Rand is that she hid nothing of what she thought – thanks to her own inability to dissemble (which I suspect is the result of her undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome)…

Note: McLernan is attacking Rand because of Rand’s supposed inability to lie. Alas, anyone who is aware of the details of the famous Rand/Branden affair (as McLernan is) knows that Rand was capable of lying through her teeth. (I suppose McLernan would claim that Rand was not very good at it!)

What a bizarre thing to believe - that I attacked Ayn Rand because of her inability to lie. Who would believe that about even their worst enemy? They attack people for their honesty.

And how do I "attack" her? By suggesting she had Asperger's? 

Right-wing racists really do think differently from the rest of us.

The entire remark I made about Rand's inability to dissemble is here:

One of the useful aspects of Ayn Rand is that she hid nothing of what she thought - thanks to her own inability to dissemble (which I suspect is the result of her undiagnosed Asperger's syndrome) combined with her publisher's disinclination to edit Atlas Shrugged for fear of a Rand tantrum resulting in the loss of income, we get a pure unfiltered hit of the belief that: 

(quoting Corey Robin here)

a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.

Boy howdy, is that the essence of the Rand world-view. And because she was such a bad novelist, not only is the world of Atlas Shrugged ugly, brutish and dull, as the result of the tyranny of the worser men over the better, but the worser men themselves are ugly, brutish and dull.

PhysicistDave mentions my play with a Rand character, DARK MARKET. 

Thanks to the Trump administration I dropped that play, for now anyway. The bad decisions of Alan Greenspan influenced in part by Ayn Rand seemed like a big deal during the Obama administration, but they seem like nothing compared to the treasonous insanity of the Trump administration, so it doesn't seem worth talking about right now. Once the Trump administration is over... hopefully soon...

Anyway as far as Ayn Rand's inability to lie: she could not dissemble about her "premises." And dissembling is not the precise same thing as lying.

But also as these statements from September 1968 make clear, Rand had help when lying about her affair with Branden - including from Alan Greenspan. It's my understanding that after this letter she refused to talk about Nathaniel Branden at all. So she'd hardly have an opportunity to lie, alone and off-the-cuff, about the Branden affair.

I certainly did write a lot about Ayn Rand on this blog for a period of a couple of years, but for the past almost two months my fixation is on Steven Pinker and his connections to the alt-right, which very much includes his connection to Steve Sailer.

While looking at other comments on Sailer's post, I was amused to see echoes of what others, including me have been saying:

Yes I agree that Pinker is crafty about where he stops defending honest people by name, and switches to a broad-based blanket-defence, simply arguing for allowing honest discussion of all viewpoints. So for example he was willing to defend Lawrence Summers by name, but only would defend Jason Richwine and James Watson in a general sense. So, yes, he does scamper away when the SJW lynch-parties get truly fierce. Is that smart or cowardly, or a little bit of both?

I believe the mot juste is "weaselly."

The most telling aspect of Pinker's denial that he agrees with racialists about black intelligence, I think, is that he never explains why he thinks the racialists are wrong. It's a pretty important issue, you'd think he would address it. Instead he consistently pivots to talking about the meanies who criticize, for instance, The Bell Curve, for its racism.

But isn't it nice that I can find common ground on at least this one thing with people I agree with about nothing else?

Steven Pinker, art critic

"The Gates" - Christo and Jeanne-Claude 2005
No fun in Pinkerland

As New Yorker reviewer Louis Menand notes, in Steven Pinker's chapter (yes a whole chapter) on the Arts in "The Blank Slate" he misunderstands something Virginia Woolf said:

"The giveaway may be found," Pinker advises, "in a famous statement from Virginia Woolf: 'In or about December 1910, human nature changed.' " She was referring, he says, to "the new philosophy of modernism that would dominate the elite arts and criticism for much of the twentieth century, and whose denial of human nature was carried over with a vengeance to postmodernism," which is "more Marxist and far more paranoid," and which gave us "Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a crucifix in a jar of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary smeared in elephant dung," and similar outré fare. But "Woolf was wrong," he tells us. "Human nature did not change in 1910, or in any year thereafter."...

...Jesus wept. To begin with, Virginia Woolf did not write, "In or about December 1910, human nature changed." What she wrote was "On or about December 1910 human character changed." The sentence appears in an essay called "Character in Fiction," which attacks the realist novelists of the time for treating character as entirely a product of outer circumstance—of environment and social class. These novelists look at people's clothes, their jobs, their houses, Woolf says, "but never . . . at life, never at human nature." Modernist fiction, on the other hand, because it presents character from the inside, shows how persistent personality is, and how impervious to circumstance. Woolf, in short, was a Pinkerite.

It seems that Steven Pinker really doesn't like modern and postmodern art:

Once we recognize what modernism and postmodernism have done to the elite arts and humanities, the reason for their decline and fall become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of human psychology, The Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most vaunted ability - stripping away pretense - to themselves. And they take all the fun out of art!

Pinker reminds me of Ayn Rand who hated all forms of modern and postmodern art except modern architecture. She wrote:

the non-objective artists have not achieved a free, joyous, triumphant sense of life, but a sense of doom… read the stories of O. Henry or listen to the music of Viennese operettas and remember that these were the products of the spirit of the “cold, dissecting” hand of reason. And then ask yourself which psycho-epistomology is appropriate to man, which is consonant with the facts of reality and with man’s nature? 

… Modern art is the most eloquent demonstration of the cultural bankruptcy of our age.

For Pinker it's The Blank Slate vs human nature for Rand it's irrationality vs man's nature.

We've seen how essentially authoritarian Steven Pinker is - if you don't agree with him that race is  more than a social construction you are denying reality itself. And now we see him declaring that modern/postmodern art has taken all the fun out of art.

I don't know how Pinker defines "fun" but although my preference tends towards pre-20th century art, there's lots of modern and postmodern art that I think is lots of fun.

Granted "The Gates" were not installed in Central Park until 2005 a few years after The Blank Slate was published, but I know people loved it - and not just arty people. And Spiral Jetty has been around since 1970. I think that's plenty fun.

Spiral Jetty, Robert Smithson

Pinker seems to especially hate Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" which pissed off the Catholic Church, which I thought was a ton of fun.

Does Pinker know any artists? I went to art school and I can promise him that nobody was looking to deny "human nature" - they don't think like that. But Pinker has decided that evolutionary psychology - the antidote to The Blank Slate  - is the answer to everything and so it can even explain why he doesn't like modern/postmodern art. He says:

The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is ugly, baffling and insulting art. The other is pretentious and unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are staying away in droves.

Pinker's prescription to fixing the world of art is like that of any reactionary's - go back to the good old days.

But the art world seems to be doing just fine by ignoring Pinker's advice since 2002. The work of Cindy Sherman, she of the "photographs of grotesquely assembled bi-gendered mannequins" mentioned on page 411 sells for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per photographic print according to the Christie's catalogue. Who does Pinker think is bidding on all these high-priced objets d'art? A bunch of human nature-denying feminists, Marxists and left-leaning academics?

But far from denying human nature, consciously or unconsciously, the world of art, including modern and postmodern, actually embodies something that Pinker himself discussed in the same chapter. He writes: art - especially elite art - is a textbook example of conspicuous consumption. 

What could signal "I am rich" more effectively than buying a $100K print by Cindy Sherman?

As to why modern and postmodern art took a turn away from the figurative, that's pretty damn easy to understand - by the early 1900s photography was everywhere and the movie industry was getting started. A big part of the reason why figurative art was all the rage pre-20th century was because there were no alternatives to having an image of something you loved to look at whether it was your mistress or the English countryside. And once the hoi-polloi could afford photographs and movies, the ability to own something that really looked like something lost its cachet . And then there was the influence of technology and science on the status-signaling of art itself. I wrote up a whole theory about that four years ago.

But since Pinker thinks that everything is an evolved trait, of course he's going claim that some styles of art - those he likes - present an embrace of human natures and those he doesn't like, a denial of human nature. Menand drolly notes:

Many impulses are channelled or suppressed, and many talents and feelings are acquired, and have no specific genetic basis or evolutionary logic at all. Music appreciation, for instance, seems to be wired in at about the level of "Hot Cross Buns." But people learn to enjoy Wagner. They even learn to sing Wagner. One suspects that enjoying Wagner, singing Wagner, anything to do with Wagner, is in gross excess of the requirements of natural selection. To say that music is the product of a gene for "art-making," naturally selected to impress potential mates—which is one of the things Pinker believes—is to say absolutely nothing about what makes any particular piece of music significant to human beings. No doubt Wagner wished to impress potential mates; who does not? It is a long way from there to "Parsifal."

I've already shared that passage in this evo-psycho bro series but that crack about Parsifal is so good I had to share again.

But even more important is the part about "no evolutionary logic." Pinker's rigid belief in the all-consuming explanatory power of evo-psycho leads him down ridiculous paths. Just like his fanboys who, instead of focusing on the conspicuous consumption aspect of the arts and humanities since the ancient Greeks, are so mesmerized by "evolutionary logic" it doesn't occur to them that it's silly to use childless Immanuel Kant to illustrate strict adaptationism.

The last book published by anthropologist Marvin Harris was Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times. Harris was very much opposed to postmodernism as an approach to scientific study. But he also had problems with rigid sociobiology explanations for human culture. He wrote:

The overwhelming majority of cultural innovations, however, do not get selected for or against as a result of their contribution to the reproductive success of the individuals who adopt the innovation. Edison's electric light bulbs did not spread around the world in twenty years because Edison or his relatives were reproductively more successful than people who used gaslight or kerosene lanterns. Indeed, electric lights spread laterally within a single generation among childless couples as rapidly as among couples who had children by the dozen. 

This capacity for the lateral transmission of socially learned behaviors and thoughts is a distinctive attribute of cultural phenomena not found among nonhuman species, except in the most rudimentary form. True, sexually reproducing organisms exchange genes, but not genes for thoughts and behaviors acquired socially during an individual's lifetime. Many generations are required for genetically controlled innovative behaviors and thoughts to spread throughout a population and become part of the genome. New species (even under punctuated equilibrium scenarios) take on the order of hundreds of thousands or more years to evolve, whereas new societies and cultures appear and disappear on the order of, at most, a few thousand years.

It turns out that Steven Pinker has something to say about Marvin Harris in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." I'll talk about that next.

The Mercer Family: subverting our democracy with big wads of cash

Robert Mercer the patriarch of the Mercer alt-right family is a nut job.

According to the March 2017 article in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer (also the scourge of the Koch brothers):

During Bill Clinton’s Presidency... Mercer insisted at a staff luncheon that Clinton had participated in a secret drug-running scheme with the C.I.A. The plot supposedly operated out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas. “Bob told me he believed that the Clintons were involved in murders connected to it,” Patterson said... 

Two other sources told me that, in recent years, they had heard Mercer claim that the Clintons have had opponents murdered. 

...Mercer arguing that, during the Gulf War, the U.S. should simply have taken Iraq’s oil, “since it was there.”  

...Mercer, speaking of the atomic bombs that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, argued that, outside of the immediate blast zones, the radiation actually made Japanese citizens healthier.  

...Mercer, for his part, has argued that the Civil Rights Act, in 1964, was a major mistake. According to the onetime Renaissance employee, Mercer has asserted repeatedly that African-Americans were better off economically before the civil-rights movement. (Few scholars agree.)  

...Mercer proclaim(ed) that there are no white racists in America today, only black racists.  

...Mercer said that concerns about (global warming) were overblown. After Patterson shared with him a scientific paper on the subject, Mercer and his brother, Randall, who also worked at the hedge fund, sent him a paper by a scientist named Arthur Robinson, who is a biochemist, not a climate expert. “It looked like a scientific paper, but it was completely loaded with selective and biased information,” Patterson recalled. The paper argued that, if climate change were real, future generations would “enjoy an Earth with far more plant and animal life.”  

...Mercer’s political opinions “show contempt for the social safety net that he doesn’t need, but many Americans do.” He also said that Mercer wants the U.S. government to be “shrunk down to the size of a pinhead.” 

Several former colleagues of Mercer’s said that his views are akin to Objectivism, the philosophy of Ayn Rand. Magerman told me, “Bob believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make. A cat has value, he’s said, because it provides pleasure to humans. But if someone is on welfare they have negative value. If he earns a thousand times more than a schoolteacher, then he’s a thousand times more valuable.”  

...Another former high-level Renaissance employee said, “Bob thinks the less government the better. He’s happy if people don’t trust the government. And if the President’s a bozo? He’s fine with that. He wants it to all fall down.”

The notion that Mercer is fine if the government fell down makes him the perfect donor for Trump, and that is what he is.

I was surprised that Mercer wasn't quoted as actually being a devotee of Ayn Rand since his views align perfectly with hers.

And of course we can blame the ability of the Mercers to do so much evil on Citizens United. As the article notes:

After the Citizens United decision, in 2010, the Mercers were among the first people to take advantage of the opportunity to spend more money on politics. 

The Mercers, being a bunch of nuts, of course support other nuts besides Trump:

DeFazio’s Republican opponent was Arthur Robinson—the biochemist, sheep rancher, and climate-change denialist. The Mercers became his devoted supporters after reading Access to Energy, an offbeat scientific newsletter that he writes. The family has given at least $1.6 million in donations to Robinson’s Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. Some of the money was used to buy freezers in which Robinson is storing some fourteen thousand samples of human urine. Robinson has said that, by studying the urine, he will find new ways of extending the human life span.

And of course the Mercers are in league with the Kochs. At least the Koch brothers will have company when going down in history as the people most responsible for killing the planet with their science denialism and money.

By 2011, the Mercers had joined forces with Charles and David Koch, who own Koch Industries, and who have run a powerful political machine for decades. The Mercers attended the Kochs’ semiannual seminars, which provide a structure for right-wing millionaires looking for effective ways to channel their cash. The Mercers admired the savviness of the Kochs’ plan, which called for attendees to pool their contributions in a fund run by Koch operatives. The fund would strategically deploy the money in races across the country, although, at the time, the Kochs’ chief aim was to defeat Barack Obama in 2012. The Kochs will not reveal the identities of their donors, or the size of contributions, but the Mercers reportedly began giving at least a million dollars a year to the Kochs’ fund. Eventually, they contributed more than twenty-five million.

Possibly the biggest monster in the Mercer family is Robert's daughter Rebekah and her ties to the neo-Nazi monstrosity Breitbart:

Rebekah Mercer is highly engaged with Breitbart’s content. An insider there said, “She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos.” Though she doesn’t dictate a political line to the editors, she often points out areas of coverage that she thinks require more attention. Her views about the Washington establishment, including the Republican leadership, are scathing. “She was at the avant-garde of shuttering both political parties,” the insider at Breitbart said. “She went a long way toward the redefinition of American politics."

The three evil Mercer sisters also run a shitty bakery "Ruby et Violette" although it is only online.

Penn Jillette vs. Oskar Eustis: Should government fund the arts?

I forget down what Internet rabbit hole I fell in order to end up reading about Penn Jillette, but I found him explaining how he became a Libertarian. Jillette wrote for Cato, reprinted in Newsweek:

There was a theater in Philadelphia called the Walnut Street Theatre—it’s still there—and upstairs at the Walnut Street Theatre was Theatre 5, which was a little tiny room that sat 100 people. And they had local grants, federal grants, just grants, grants, grants to put together little experimental theater shows in this 100-seat theater on the 5th floor of the Walnut Street Theatre. 

They had all their money paid by the government, and they had to put up one new show, I think it was every six weeks. Teller and I, at this point, were street performers. 

We went out to Head House Square in Philadelphia, and I would do a 12-minute juggling show, and I would then pass the hat. I was a very, very successful street performer.
We had a dream of doing a full evening show indoors. We needed a place, and Teller had gone to college with one of the guys who had these grants. But we didn’t know they had grants—we thought they were the same as us, that they made money from ticket sales. 

They said that they couldn’t get their show together (six weeks with nothing else to do and they couldn’t do a show? Shakespeare’s in the public domain!) so they said, “You can have our theater to put your show on—you’d only have to pay us a little bit of money, and you can have the whole space and do the whole show.” 

We were thrilled to pieces. Just thrilled to pieces! And we worked really hard (I mean, hard for show business.) We went out and did press releases and got reviews. And that 100-seat theater, when we were in there, was sold out for the whole six weeks.
Then the head of the Walnut Street Theatre found out that our show had been so successful—they’d never been successful in there at all—and came and talked to us. We didn’t know we were blowing the G on the joint—to use carny terms. We didn’t know we were giving up a secret, to use, I guess, regular-people terms. 

He said, “How much of the grant money did you get?” And we said “Grant money? No, we just happened to have the theater — thank you so much, sir, we really appreciate it. It’s really helpful, you know, that small amount of rent we’re paying.” And he said, “Rent?!” I said, “This has been wonderful! We’re making our living, it’s going great.”
Well, anyway, they lost all their grants. And then there were all sorts of articles written on how Penn and Teller were destroying the arts in Philadelphia because we had lost the federal grants because we went and ratted out the people that were doing the real, important, significant work that we weren’t doing because we were “commercial.” 

Then the 80s came around and there was all that controversy over a few artists— there was the Piss Christ art, and there was a New York artist named David Wojnarowicz. They did art that was very, very controversial, and very, very blasphemous. 

They lost some of their National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants, and I was then in a very awkward position. I was a freedom of speech nut, and I thought that they absolutely should have the right to do whatever art they wanted. 

But I was also remembering my Theatre 5 days in Philadelphia—and I didn’t think that the government should pay for them. And although I was—am—an atheist, my mom and dad were very strong Christians, and I was very close to them. 

And I had that image in my head of the gun. I looked at this art that I loved, that was so blasphemous to my mom and dad, and I was appalled by the idea that my mom and dad were having a gun held to their head to pay for art that I loved, but they didn’t.
And that to me was libertarianism in a nutshell. I wanted those artists to have their work everywhere. I wanted those artists to be very, very successful—but I did not want anyone that did not like that art to pay for it, and certainly not to be forced. 

So when Wojnarowicz lost the grants from the NEA, I went over to his studio. He was a little surprised that I’d showed up there, because I’d been on TV a few days before saying that I didn’t think the NEA should exist at all, and he shouldn’t get any money whatsoever. I said, “I’d like to buy a lot of your work. I want to buy it because I really, really like it.”

So what Penn Jillette wants, essentially is a return to the days of patrons of the arts - people with money who could buy the work of artists, rather than artists being subsidized by the government.

I've long debated to myself whether or not government should fund the arts, in part because my art has never been the beneficiary of government largess. But if Penn Jillette is opposed to something political it tends to push me in favor. Jillette is not only a libertarian, he loves Ayn Rand. It's amusing to see Jillette go on about the evils of government power, when as I and others have pointed out, Rand herself had no problem with her Atlas Shrugged ubermensch using force whenever it suited them. I've been talking here for a couple of years about what an absurd, unedited, a-logical wreck Atlas Shrugged is.

Jillette loves Rand so much he says in this video he would have had sex with her.

It just so happens that I recently saw a video of Oskar Eustis giving a TED talk in which he points out that Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA was developed over six years thanks to government grants.

I don't know if Penn Jillette is a fan of theater, although I assume not since his argument against the limitations of a six-week development period is to stick to producing Shakespeare plays. He prides himself on the fact that his magic show made money at the Walnut Street Theater. But what value is Jillette's work, ultimately? People will pay to see it, mainly in Las Vegas, as a break from gambling and drinking. But once Penn and Teller are gone, what is left? A few TV specials? Their show Bullshit? Does the entire body of work of Penn and Teller equal ANGELS IN AMERICA? I think not. And I suspect that future generations of intellectuals will agree with me. And future generations of  drunken gamblers won't care.

But without government subsidy, could ANGELS IN AMERICA have ever been created? Eustis, who worked with Kushner to develop the play says in the recording above:

The National Endowment for the Arts gave a grant to Tony, to an individual artist, to write this play. It's important to say that as often as possible: made possible by public support... 

Eustis goes on to argue against art as commodity.

Now if the development of ANGELS IN AMERICA was left entirely up to the market, it's unlikely to have ever been made -  I'm sure Jillette's strong Christian parents would approve of ANGELS no more than they'd approve of PISS CHRIST. And even I, an ex-Catholic liberal atheist, while I might not disapprove of ANGELS would not consider a play about AIDS - assuming that's all I knew about it - as something I could relate to.

Not everything that is chosen to be funded by the government is guaranteed to be a masterpiece like ANGELS. It would be strange if it was - Sturgeons law applies to government grant-produced art the way it does to everything else. But I think it's likely worth it to fund a bunch of crap in the hopes of eventually hitting on a masterpiece.

Leaving everything up to the market will only serve to limit the possibilities. I'm working on a production of my play about Marilyn Monroe. It has everything that the market likes - a story about a celebrity, a beautiful woman, in danger. It happens that I am genuinely interested in Monroe's story, especially when I read her own account of her stay at the Payne Whitney - I saw it would make a great play and I wanted to get it done before somebody else did it.

 But I also know that I have a better shot than usual of getting people to come out to see my play because of the subject. People perk up a little when I tell them my play is about Marilyn Monroe trapped in a psych ward, which doesn't happen when I tell them what DARK MARKET is about: "Alan Greenspan's devotion to the work of Ayn Rand and how that caused him as Chairman of the Federal Reserve to promote deregulation which led to the 2008 worldwide financial meltdown."

That's just not sexy - Penn Jillette's feelings about Ayn Rand notwithstanding. And it also requires six actors, which isn't huge by old time theater production standards, but NORMA JEANE requires two actors (maybe three I haven't decided yet) and has a simple, one-location set.

But not every play can be a two-hander about Marilyn Monroe. Do we as a society want to limit our arts to whatever is an easy sell?

And the irony is that ANGELS IN AMERICA is so hugely popular that if they ran it on Broadway now I guarantee it would make money. When they did an AIA revival in 2010 at the Signature Theater I tried to go see it, having fallen in love with the Mike Nichols directed version shown on HBO in 2003, but it was sold out on the first day - virtually the entire run. So it isn't like the public is paying only for work nobody wants to see - it's that work has to get past the public's skepticism first.

Jillette admits that his buying the work of David Wojnarowicz ended up being a good investment on his part. But the almighty market was unlikely to offer Penn Jillette the chance to buy David Wojnarowicz delightful blasphemy because it wouldn't have existed without the government funding.

I'm not sure exactly what if anything the government gets back directly from money-making projects it initially funded although it certainly gets repaid in the form of taxes paid from the jobs created - I'm sure Kushner pays his taxes at the top-most rate, and I'm sure he pays it without looking for tax dodges since he supports taxes in principle, as much as Jillette opposes them in principle. Although Kushner's income is high more because of his screenwriting career than as a playwright - but without his impressive, government-sponsored playwriting career Stephen Spielberg would not have heard of him.

I am not impressed by Penn Jillette as a thinker, he's not rigorous. But then his entire life is based on a career in which you fool people. Penn and Teller might not tell people they are doing actual mystical magic, but it's still about trickery. They made a pile of money doing it and now they don't want to pay high taxes on that income. And they don't have to present arguments to the people they disagree with - even people who would be pretty easy to argue against. As this Onion AV Club review notes about their show Bullshit:

The show is one-sided by design: P&T's field interviewers rarely confront their subjects with the evidence against them, preferring to let the crackpots ramble on so that Jillette's voiceover rejoinders can score points without inciting a real argument. 

One-sided arguments - a rigged situation in which Jillette can confidently predict the outcome. It's a great bubble of smug certainty that he lives in. As another fan once said of Rand:

She had certainty. This is what really attracted me emotionally to her that night. She was the first person I had ever met who projected it—she projected that what she knew was true, and that she was sure of it.

For the record, I'm sure Ayn Rand would have wanted to have sex with Jillette right back, especially if he kept telling her how great she was. 

Waiting for Krugman

Here is a photo of Krugman vs. Ayn Rand from
the Atlas Society - they hate Krugman, of course
which is one way you know how great
Krugman is. 

Ever since I read Krugman talking about how he runs in Riverside Park I've been hopeful:

If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere is friendly – New Yorkers tend to be rushed, but they’re not nasty – and, well, nice.

I've walked in Riverside Park on a few occasions but I will be doing it much more often now that I know there's a chance I'll bump into The Mighty Krugman. And yes, I will insist he take a selfie with me. Whoohoo!

Speaking of Ayn Rand and Krugman - yes, I still plan to do something with my play DARK MARKET which focuses on Ayn Rand's influence on Alan Greenspan and how that contributed to the 2008 meltdown of the economy. It's just that with six actors its more expensive than NORMA JEANE which is a two-hander. And not just to produce - since I pay actors to do readings, six actors can add up.

I give Krugman a shout-out in the intro of the play - I quote him from his blog:

After all, what is "Atlas Shrugged" really about? Leave aside the endless speeches and bad sex scenes. What you’re left with is the tale of how a group of plutocrats overthrow a democratically elected government with a campaign of economic sabotage.

Peter Thiel: worst person ever

I've been a Paypal user since its very earliest days, but I've recently discovered what a pack of rightwing assholes its founders are.

And especially Thiel:

Exhibit A:

Thiel, a self-avowed Ayn Rand fan who thinks that women’s suffrage has undermined the greatness of capitalist democracy and that freedom and democracy are incompatible, is a rather more familiar figure: a man with a distaste for the messy realities of the political present, over-enamored with his own intellect, and unaware of his own blind spots. If you’ve spent enough time on Twitter, or in the great comments sections of the internet, you know this type depressingly well. In truth the only thing really scary about Peter Thiel is that he has enough money to buy his own serious reception.

Exhibit B:

Thiel has been secretly financing lawsuits against Gawker Media for several years. He recently confirmed his involvement in Hulk Hogan's invasion of privacy suit against the company and said he is supporting other suits as well.

In Silicon Valley, where both liberals and libertarians have deep-seated fears about Donald Trump's candidacy, Thiel is something of a rarity: a billionaire tech entrepreneur who openly supports Trump.

Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, is an active venture capitalist. He is slated to be a California delegate for Trump at next week's convention.

In a recent interview with CNN, Trump said "I have great respect for Peter."

It's hard to figure out if Thiel has any ongoing association with Paypal, which is now owned by Ebay. If I find out there is still a connection I will find an alternative to Paypal. I don't want a single dime of my money going to misogynist, fascist-dictator-loving Peter Thiel.

Suck it Ayn Rand LOL

My daughter, who has a good sense of what shows I'm going to like (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Orphan Black) recommended "Frankie and Grace." I had heard of it, and knew it starred Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, so I was definitely already intrigued. Well it was available on Netflix, which I caved in and subscribed to, so I tried it out. I definitely like it. It's more complex than I had expected. And by the seventh episode I really liked it because Lily Tomlin's Frankie, who is kind of a hippie, decided to start a Twitter account.

The dialog:

          Mike 

      (tech support guy)
Are you sure to send your first tweet? 

          Frankie
I sure am Mike.

           Mike
And you're sure you want to make it that profane?


          Frankie
Abso-fucking-lutely.


          Mike
OK bring the cursor up to the blue button and three, two, one click it.


          Frankie
Did you get it?

           Mike
Yeah. The whole world did. You're part of social media now baby.

          Frankie
You're the best.

           Mike

No you are @suckitaynrand

How can I not love that? I really like the Frankie character more than Grace, but  I have to say, Jane Fonda especially looks amazing.

More Shakespeare in Central Park

Titania and her fairies exit, stage left.
The fairies, left to right, are Moth, Mustardseed, Cobweb and Peaseblossom

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM is Shakespeare's best comedy, and I'm saying that as someone who came to Shakespeare via AS YOU LIKE IT and have honored MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING as the original romantic comedy. But MIDSUMMER is just about perfect and especially for outdoor productions. Although it doesn't have to be performed in a park to work, one of the best versions of MIDSUMMER that I saw was on the Philadelphia waterfront.

I saw New York Classical Theatre's production Friday night on the north-west section of Central Park, right near The Great Hill, which I finally got to see. It was a pretty good hill. I don't know about great. Although I got a good photo out of it.

Flying a kite on the Great Hill

I didn't stay for the entire show, partly because they didn't have one single staging area but instead kept the audience hopping about every twenty minutes from one location to another and I got tired of it. I really didn't see any good reason for it, and it was quite a large audience so it was a mass exodus every time.

Also I wasn't crazy about how manly this production was. Usually the Fairy Queen's attendants (Moth, Peaseblossom, Mustardseed, Cobweb) are played by women, but in this production some of the guys who played the "rude mechanicals" (Bottom, Snout etc.) doubled as the fairy attendants, although they were more like a pack of irritable, semi-sane homeless men. But it wasn't bad, just different. But what that choice meant was that there were only three female actors in this production. I understand that doubling is cheaper, and these actors were (hopefully) getting paid. But still. The first production of MIDSUMMER I saw had a women playing Puck, which they could have done here, just to be fair with the gender switch-up on the fairies. Although Matt Mundy was excellent as Puck. Pretty much every Puck in a given MIDSUMMER production will be one of the best actors in the show. I'm not sure why that is, but that's been my experience. The interactions between Oberon and Puck are often the highlights of the show, and this production had a neat trick of having Puck from far away "throw" the purple flower to Oberon, who through sleight-of-hand appeared to suddenly have the flower. Very well done.

This production was very musical - the fairy folk sang their lines quite a bit. Which worked OK, I didn't mind that. It was a nice variation.

I was prepared to go with the flow, but then somebody got in my face to tell me I couldn't take pictures. Presumably because this is an Actors Equity production but he didn't bother to tell me that and how could he expect me to know the rules of the AEA? And there was nothing in their web site's "planning your visit" page nor their program that said no photos allowed, and unless you had a program (which I didn't until I asked for one from no-photos-please guy) or know something about the theater company (which I didn't) how would you know this was an Equity production, even if you knew about Equity rules in the first place?

And in any case the rules of the AEA are idiotic when it comes to outdoor productions. This production was in the middle of a public park and not only did it have no clearly-delineated staging area but the staging area itself kept changing. And you could easily take a photo from a little ways off. I have to wonder how far the production stormtroopers were prepared to go. Do they look out for everybody within eyesight who might be taking a photo of the production? And how do they know the offender isn't actually taking a selfie?

You can see in the photo below just how vast the space (at least for one 20-minute segment) was where they were performing.

Oberon and Puck on the tax-payer-funded green

The problem is that the rules against video and photography set down by Actors Equity are from the distant past when taking a photo or video footage was a major undertaking. From a time before everybody had high-quality imaging equipment in their pocket at all times. I mean, so what if somebody takes a picture? It's a freaking FREE production anyway, so they aren't losing anything by someone publicizing their production by (ahem) posting pictures on their blog. It just does not make sense anymore to have such prohibitions and especially for a free outdoor performance in a tax-payer funded park. That's right - I paid for their venue through my taxes, it's appalling that they would begrudge me a few photos.

In any case, I love the top photo on this blog post, taken just as the fairy folk were coming off the "stage."

MIDSUMMER is so popular it's on the verge of over-exposure. I have an idea to write a play about two theater companies who happen to get permission to produce MIDSUMMER in a local park in adjoining locations at the same exact days and times. I think it could be very popular - as a change of pace from yet another production of MIDSUMMER and also, because many people don't understand what is being said much of the time, even for this play. I overheard a woman say she only understood about 70% of what was being said, and this was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where people pride themselves on their cultural sophistication.

I don't know if I'll call it DUELING MIDSUMMERS or A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S RIOT or what. Not that I should really be planning yet another play which who-knows-when I'll get around to writing. I finally finished a first draft of the latest incarnation of my Marilyn Monroe play, which will probably have a production in the Venus and Adonis festival this winter, but I still have to re-write my Ayn Rand-haunted play DARK MARKET, plus rewrite a play listed in my Doollee entry as THE BENEFICENT POWER OF REVENGE but which I will probably change to FLOWERS FOR MOM. I have to re-write it partly because I can't find a single copy of the script on my computer and may have lost it completely in a hard drive crash; and partly because I have new ideas and it will ultimately be a better play.

And then there's the play inspired by my mom's senior residence plus transvestite (CHESTNUT STATION); PALMYRA NJ based on my adventures with early motherhood and the radical chic; and 12 ANGRY JURORS FROM QUEENS. So five plays I'm trying to finish simultaneously. Do I really need to put one more in the queue? Sigh. I guess I have to.

4 Short Christmas Plays

Looks like I am doing four of my 10-minute plays as part of a night together with a play called "Swordfight Christmas." We run December 16 - 20 at the Producer's Club (ugh).

My plays:

YULE COUNTY- a two-person play about a college freshman who is considering suicide on Christmas morning. I did this as a reading in my 10 min playfest in 2008. This will be the first time it will be on its feet.

MISTRESS ILSA'S CHRISTMAS - a completely new sequel to MISTRESS ILSA - Mistress Ilsa is whipping willing subjects for an audience at Christmas time.

THE VERY DARK ROOM - a completely new play I've been wanting to do for several years -  a woman in despair at Christmas argues with her brain as Death eagerly awaits the woman's suicide.

CHRISTMAS BLESSINGS - I did produce this in 2009 but I am looking forward to doing this again - it's my first play to mention Ayn Rand.

I've been trying to think of a name for the collection - so far I've only thought of "Christmas Fun."

More details to come.

Happy Blogger-versary!

Wow, here it is, 10 years since my first blog post on November 2, 2005. 

Since that date:

My former partner and I won against Edward Einhorn and his copyright scheme ~ I wrote an article for the Dramatists Guild here. I got to know playwright David Ives a little since he was editing the Guild magazine at time. And I got an anecdote about David Ives and the bullwhip out of that one.

I did lots of self-productions which can be seen at my Mergatroyd site. One of them, Jane Eyre, nearly drove me into bankruptcy. And I became an award-winning playwright.

I turned NYCPlaywrights into a money-making venture instead of a money-losing venture. Of course it is not a lot of money. But it's still better than losing money.

I wrote sonnets because I was in unrequited love with a complete mediocrity. You're never too old to be a fool for love. But I did enjoy writing the sonnets. And some of them are not bad.

I got my first booty call, and from the son of a movie star yet. I did not take him up on it.

Obama became president Oh, yeah, that. Kind of a big deal. I was very excited when it happened, although I had been rooting for Hillary during the primaries. But I liked Obama too, and I think he's proven to be an unusually effective president, in spite of the hideousness of the Republican party.

I often expressed my love for Jon Stewart. And Paul Krugman. And my contempt for Ayn Rand, New Atheists and Social Justice Warriors.

I lived through unemployment and cancer, as well as being personally lied about and smeared by identitarian bully Mikki Kendall and famously bad movie director/producer Andrew Bellware.

I have received responses to this blog from the dread Daphne Merkin and from the cool yet somewhat out-there Cindy Gallop, as well as Santa Claus.

My proudest moment for this blog was when I contributed to preventing the greater mainstreaming of professional bio-racist Razib Khan.


Some blog statistics from blogger - unfortunately they only go back to 2010 so they're not entirely accurate over the last 10 years.

My 10 most popular posts of all time. #4, about Schopenhauer, is pretty surprising.

Damn my accursed principles!!!! Jun 3, 2008	3395
Stupid shit that Social Justice Warriors say, Flav... Mar 4, 2014, 2 comments	2080
Intact Gallery Aug 28, 2010	1994
Six Questions for Arthur Schopenhauer Nov 13, 2011	1773
Razib Khan and his continuing successful quest for... Jan 9, 2013, 6 comments	1476
Social Justice Warrior smear campaign: Sarah Kendz... Jun 12, 2014, 8 comments	1376
Don't Let Me Down Oct 18, 2011	1175
On being smeared by the Mad Gastronomer and Karny... Jun 30, 2012, 4 comments	957
miffed at the New Yorker, Steven Pinker calls for ... Nov 30, 2011, 15 comments	858
more confirmation that Richard Dawkins is a gigant... Jul 6, 2011, 2 comments	818

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