By the time Dagny got to Woodstock there was grass growing on an iceberg

Ayn Rand, as you probably could have guessed, hated hippies. I haven't found the essay online (yet) but apparently she wrote an essay about Woodstock:

It is also interesting to observe how Rand allies herself with the middle class in opposition to the intellectuals and the “counter culture.” In her essay “Apollo and Dionysus,” Rand discussed Apollo 11 and the Woodstock music festival, and placed herself on the side of the middle class. “[T]he people are reality-oriented, commonsense-oriented, technology-oriented ...” (Return of the Primitive (“ROP”), p. 102)  She denounced the “hippies” who attended Woodstock. In fact, “hippie” seems to have been a favorite term of derision for her, used for both Kant (“the first hippie in history”) and anarcho-capitalists (“hippies of the right”). 

I've always suspected that Rand's response to the government-run, taxpayer-funded space program would be approval - a.k.a. utter hypocrisy - along with her hatred of Woodstock, which in contrast to the space program was a for-profit private enterprise.

But she already hated Woodstock New York twelve years before the hippies showed up. When Dagny Taggart is hiding out in her hereditary cabin in Part 2 Chapter 8 of Atlas Shrugged, she finds plenty to hate about Woodstock:

The only store was a wooden hovel... The storekeeper was a fat, pallid woman who moved with effort, but seemed indifferent to her own discomfort.

Now mind you, this is the only human contact Dagny has during an entire month, and this is the sum total of her interaction with the storekeeper: "Why don't you move those vegetables out of the sun?" But Dagny doesn't only hate the fat slobs who run shitty grocery stores. She hates that Woodstock is pristine and fantasizes doing something about it:

...She looked at Fairfield gorge, where the county road, twisting through marshy soil below the level of a river, got trapped in a crack between two hills. It would be simple to bypass those hills, she thought, to build a road on the other side of the river - the people of Woodstock had nothing to do, she could teach them - cut a road straight to the southwest, save miles, connect to the state highway...

Apparently Dagny felt that looter/moocher Max Yasgur (a Jewish Russian immigrant like Rand) did not have enough to do on his dairy farm.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  In addition to the Taggart Death Tunnel incident in Chapters 6 and 7, other exciting things happened:

Eddie Willers has another stream-of-consciousness monologue with the mysterious worker in attendance.

The fog government creates Directive Number 10-289 which has a list of Points that are, naturally, completely stupid. This is nothing to sneer at though: in spite of the fact that the fog government is unable to prevent the theft of its foreign aid shipments by a Norwegian pirate and incapable of ensuring that its infrastructure-related regulations and  zoning laws are enforced and has never yet called out the military nor the secret police to oppose the Randian Supermen, the fog government is absolutely unstoppable whenever it issues an order, directive or bill of any kind. As soon as the ink is dry on any given bill's official signatures it immediately goes into effect and immediately thwarts the Supermen. The pen truly is mightier than the sword.

And speaking of the Norwegian pirate, Ragnar Danneskjöld finally reveals himself in the flesh to Hank Rearden in the middle of the night in the middle of the forest (Dagny could clear-cut that shit out of his way a jiffy) in order to give him a tax rebate in the form of a bar of gold.

As we know, in Atlas Shrugged beauty equals goodness, and by this standard Ragnar is very very good indeed:

The shock that came next was to see Danneskjöld smile: it was like seeing the first green of spring on the sculptured planes of an iceberg.

(passing by the moronic simile of a plant growing on an iceberg...)

Rearden realized suddenly, for the first time, that Danneskjöld's face was more than handsome, it had the startling beauty of physical perfection - the hard, proud features, the scornful mouth of a Viking's statue, yet he had not been aware of it, almost as if the dead sternness of the face had forbidden the impertinence of an appraisal. But the smile was brilliantly alive.

Rearden wasn't aware of Danneskjöld's physical perfection at first, but he sure is now. So much so that when the cops suddenly appear, conveniently right after Rearden has vowed to Danneskjöld that he will turn his pirate ass over to the cops if he ever gets a chance, finds that he can't do it:

He was looking at the policeman, but he felt as if the focus of his eyes had switched to his side vision, and what he saw most clearly was Danneskjöld's face watching him with no expression, with no line's, no muscle's-worth of feelings. He saw Danneskjöld's arms hanging idly by his sides, the hands relaxed, with no sign of intention to reach for a weapon, leaving the tall, straight body defenseless and open - open as to a firing squad. He saw, in the light, that the face looked younger than he had thought and that the eyes were sky-blue. He felt that his one danger would be to glance directly at Danneskjöld - and he kept his eyes on the policeman, on the brass buttons of a blue uniform, but the object filling his consciousness, more forcefully than his visual perception, was Danneskjöld's body, the naked body under the clothes...

Is it me or is it suddenly hot in here? Francisco d'Who?

Two more observations from this priceless encounter - I quoted Danneskjöld's motto in my ten-minute play Christmas Blessings, although I didn't know who His Hotness was at the time:

(Robin Hood) was the man who robbed the rich and gave to the poor. Well, I'm the man who robs the poor and gives to the rich - or, to be exact, the man who robs the thieving poor and gives back to the productive rich.

But of more significance, contrary to all evidence, the fog government does have a military presence on the high seas. We know this for certain because Danneskjöld reveals that:

...I have never robbed a private ship and never taken any private property. Nor have I ever robbed a military vessel - because the purpose of a military fleet is to protect from violence the citizens who paid for it...

Danneskjöld believes that a US military vessel would have been unable to avoid being robbed by him and his band of merry rogers (to say nothing of turning the tables and taking them into custody and ending their merry careers.) So it was very considerate of him not to rob one.

While Rearden's consciousness is being filled by the pirate king's naked body, d'Anconia shows up at Dagny's rustic Woodstock hide-away to try to get some woman-of-his-dreams action, after twelve years of celibacy. But Dagny cools his jets, so d'Anconia responds with something that the Randian Supermen love much more than sex. Because while all of them can go, in the prime of youth, at least a decade without sex, they can't go for more than a day without dispensing a lecture on The Usual - the uncrossable gorge between the worms and the Supermen.

...we kept mankind alive, yet we allowed men to despise us and to worship our destroyers. We allowed them to worship incompetence and brutality, the recipients and the dispensers of the unearned... 

- and blah blah blah. D'Anconia is two pages into The Usual - in other words, he's just getting warmed up - when suddenly Dagny hears on the radio about the Taggart Death Train and so must rush back to civilization to discover the full impact the tragedy has had on all those innocent machines.

* * *

( Throughout AS Rand breaks chapters into sections via three asterisks.)

OK this is a minor point, but it's really starting to irritate me. Rand believes she's invented a word, "pull" that expresses the effect of being popular through personal charisma or social connections. She uses it several times in the first 18 chapters of the book, starting with the title of Part 2, Chapter 2, "The Aristocracy of Pull."

This makes no sense - there was already a word in common usage that fulfills all necessary functions of the meaning and is less awkward sounding too: "influence." The Aristocracy of Influence - much better.

Ayn Rand's sycophants should check their premises

It seems to me that there is a contradiction in the way that Ayn Rand's friends Mary Ann and Charles Sures perceived Rand's attitude toward's being a celebrity. First they say:

She didn’t want or need an adoring, protective entourage around her, going with her everywhere she went, fawning over her, flattering her. She frowned on that practice. She had seen a lot of that in Hollywood and considered it phony.

And shortly after they say:

...she couldn’t get a cab. So she decided to take the bus. As she was sitting down, she noticed that the woman in front of her had a paperback copy of The Fountainhead, an edition that had her picture on the back cover. Now, here’s the charming, playful aspect of Ayn Rand. She tapped the woman on the shoulder, the woman turned around and said, “Yes?” and Ayn pointed to the paperback and told the woman to look on the back cover. When the woman realized that Ayn Rand was sitting behind her on the bus, she was very surprised and excited. She asked Ayn to autograph her book, which Ayn did. Then other people on the bus observed what was happening and inquired about the woman signing autographs, and this led to a few others requesting autographs. Ayn told this story with such delight, and said it was the best bus ride she had ever had.

So let me see now, Rand sees a woman minding her own business, reading The Fountainhead and so Rand feels the need to get right in her face and point out that she is the author, and as a result she had a crowd of bus passengers fawning over her. And Rand said it was the best bus ride she ever had.

Yah. OK, whatever you say, sycophants.

More from Ayn Rand's sycophants

I was not exaggerating when I said that the free online book Facets of Ayn Rand was written by sycophants. Here they are defending Rand's public behavior in the chapter Ayn Rand on Negatives.

Here is Mary Ann Sures:

No one should forget that she defined a philosophy which has improved countless lives. She has inspired readers, by telling them that their minds are capable of understanding reality, and by giving them a morality of life. She has given them the incentive to achieve goals and move forward; she has created works of art in which man is an exalted being. Who else is doing that today in literature? Now, there were times when she did get angry in public, during question periods after a lecture. But to focus on those occasions is misleading. You have to ask: what is important about Ayn Rand? That she wrote Atlas Shrugged and defined a philosophy one can live by, or that, at times, she was capable of getting very angry? They are not equivalents.

And her husband Charles:

Ayn was perceptive. She could see what assumptions were behind certain questions; she could detect the hidden agendas, the unnamed ideas. She knew when someone was, for example, really questioning the validity of reason or advocating altruism—without saying it openly. And she knew what those ideas would lead to if put into effect; she knew the practical consequences of those ideas. She understood that man’s survival was at stake. Ayn was always the defender of man’s life and values, and when she saw them being attacked, in any form, she responded forcefully. She was not a “tolerant” person. If what you said was evil or seriously wrong, she let you know it and she let you know what she thought and felt about it. (There were other reasons for her anger, as well—see Leonard Peikoff’s memoir mentioned above.)

My thought on reading this is that Rand must have made quite a public spectacle of herself for these two to feel the need to say, yeah, she got angry but she was the genius who wrote Atlas Shrugged!

The entire book, with introduction from Ayn's designated heir  and spokesperson (who gets all the royalties from her books) Leonard Peikoff, strikes me as a defensive exercise, which was no doubt necessary after Nathaniel Branden and his wife each wrote their tell-all books. Here's Peikoff on the Sures book:

Their book offers plentiful examples of Ayn Rand’s mind, and intellectual generosity, in action, and also captures many lesser-known aspects of this unique woman. In these pages, we see Ayn Rand the celebrity, the loving wife, the legal client (of Charles), the employer (of Mary Ann). We are with her in her study (including the day she wrote the last page of Atlas Shrugged), at stamp shows, at the opera, on a New York City transit bus, in the White House. We discover new examples of her favorite and least favorite things in clothes, perfume, parties, music. We relish again her sense of humor, her capacity for indignant anger, her benevolence.

I've avoided demonstrating the veracity of Godwin's Law so far in writing about Ayn Rand, but when I read this book I can't help but be reminded of Franz Liebkind from The Producers:

Hitler - there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two coats! 

The book is pretty obviously a whitewashing - all other biographies of Rand make clear how important Nathaniel Branden was to Rand, not only for their personal, sexual relationship, but because Branden promoted Rand's work until their falling out. This book's timeline mentions Branden exactly twice:

• 1962: Nathaniel Branden Institute opens (January)
• 1968: Nathaniel Branden Institute closes (May)

 And now for a little from Rand herself. Here she is, declaring that a woman shouldn't be president of the United States. "Commander-in-chief of the army, a woman, I zink it's unspeakable."

Why I Like Stamp Collecting by Ayn Rand

36 E. 36th Street - Rand lived
in apartment 5A

Well now I can't find the reference that led me to believe that Ayn Rand lived at the Murray Park - she might have lived there, but only after she wrote Atlas Shrugged.

I thought that while she was writing Atlas Shrugged she was only nine blocks away from the library, and so had no excuse for the mess she made out of the Prometheus myth.

In fact when she was writing Atlas Shrugged she lived at 36 E. 36th Street - which is only seven blocks away from the main branch of the NY Public Library. And across the street from the Morgan Library.

Based on a realtor web site this building is also pretty affordable (for Manhattan), although no apartments have been available for rental in over a year.

There are all kinds of details about Rand's life in this apartment thanks to a book by two of her sycophants which appears to be online in its entirety, Facets of Ayn Rand which contains things like this:

A group of her friends met at the O’Connors’ apartment one evening to watch an interview show she had taped earlier. When it was over, she asked us for our reactions. I don’t remember the specific comments, but everyone was complimentary about her performance. When we finished with our remarks, she asked if that was all. We were, to a person, perplexed. What else was there to say? She then said that she was disappointed that no one had a comment about how good her legs looked! It’s not that none of us noticed them—I certainly did. I think we all thought her focus on the show was strictly intellectual. As it turned out, someone at the TV studio had commented on her good-looking legs, much to her pleasure.

***

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. 

What she was that night was the way she always was: she never doubted herself and her capacity to understand. It’s not that she had an encyclopedic mind that knew everything—although she knew more about things than most people did. The point is that she didn’t live in a state of chronic doubt. She didn’t constantly question the rightness of her ideas. She didn’t hesitate and flounder. She spoke with conviction. What she knew, she knew. This was a strong element in her personality.

***

One day, she was in the kitchen getting lunch, and I was at my typing table. She called to me, asking if I could come in and help her. I didn’t know what I could do to help the author of Atlas Shrugged, but I was pleased by the request. I went in and saw that she was holding a hot dog, and she asked me if I thought it was edible. When I asked why, she said that it had been in the refrigerator for a while and it was shriveled. So I examined it; it was wrinkled but I pointed out that the color was good and it didn’t have a bad odor. So, I told her that if it were immersed in boiling water, it would plump up. I asked her if she wanted me to do it, and she said, “Oh, no. You have work to do.” That amused me, because my work consisted of typing up her brilliant thoughts while she was going to cook a hot dog! 

Some minutes later, she came out of the kitchen, holding up a plump hot dog speared by a fork. “You were right,” she said, and thanked me for the suggestion. I said something to the effect of “from each according to his ability.” Her immediate response was, “Check your premises!”

But the best part in terms of my theory that Ayn Rand had Asperger's is the Stamp Collecting chapter.

By 1974 she had about 45,000 stamps, all of which she knew from memory. She was phenomenal in that regard. She knew exactly what she owned, and she never mistakenly bought a duplicate. She kept an exact count of her collection, and whenever I asked she had a figure at hand. The last count was something more than 52,000 stamps. It was a worldwide collection, but she would not, and did not, collect stamps from communist countries.

Stamp collecting is mentioned very often in connection with Asperger's Syndrome.

What are the Main Characteristics of Asperger's Syndrom in Adults?

Individuals with Aspergers often have intense interest in one or two narrow topics, bordering on obsession. Stamp collecting, song lyrics, and computer puzzles can become focal points in their need to collect and organize facts, which is comforting to people with Aspergers.

***

20 Facts about Asperger's Syndrome in Children

Older children may enjoy a club that is focused on their interest – for example, coin or stamp collecting.

***

Asperger's Syndrome

Kids with Asperger's also tend to be obsessed with one certain topic. They might talk about this topic a lot. They also might collect certain things -- such as stamps, shells or coins -- and organize their things very carefully.

***

Asperger's Syndrome Symptoms

These children tend to be fixated with some hobby or object like stamp collection, cars, etc.

***

Asperger's? What's That?

Another hallmark of Asperger’s syndrome is a preoccupation with a certain topic or interest. This can manifest as an interest in collecting stamps, dinosaurs, or memorizing phone numbers. Narrow interests are common in typically developing children as well, but tends to be somewhat exaggerated in people with Asperger’s: this may have given rise to the perception of some with AS as “little professors.” 

***

Chapter 1: The Little Professor

When I had run out of resources on geology, I moved onto flags for a while, then stamps (I built up a really good stamp collection, helped by "stamp club" at my first school, and the fact my Dad travelled a great deal, so was able to get me stamps, and got sent lots of foreign post too!). My favourite stamps were always those from various African countries - colourful and with pictures of animals on them! 

***

Social Skills

The social and emotional cues - the intonation of speech and facial expressions - that most people decode instinctively in their daily interactions remain a mystery to Asperger's sufferers. So while many may have high IQs and be technically and logically extremely proficient, they lack the ability to relate to other people. To the outside world they are geeks, nerds, self-centred or obsessives; stamp collectors, even.

***

FUN FACT: There was also an Ayn Rand commemorative stamp which I blogged about several years ago. As the New Yorker observed:

Of all Americans who have appeared on the nation's postage stamps, Ayn Rand is probably the only one to have thought that the United States government has no business delivering mail. In her central pronouncement of political belief - the character John Galt's radio address, which begins on page 1,000 of Rand's 1957 novel, "Atlas Shrugged" - allowance is made for the state to run an army, a police force, and courts, but that's it.

BONUS: I just discovered a reposting of Ayn Rand's essay for the Minkus Stamp Journal from 1971 called Why I Like Stamp Collecting. The article includes an image of the Rand stamp. Here's an excerpt:

Purposeful people cannot rest by doing nothing nor can they feel at home in the role of passive spectators. They seldom find pleasure in single occasions, such as a party or a show or even a vacation, a pleasure that ends right then and there, with no further consequences. 

The minds of such people require continuity, integration, a sense of moving forward. They are accustomed to working long-range; to them, the present is part of and a means to the future; a short-range event or activity that leads nowhere is an unnatural strain on them, an irritating interruption or a source of painful boredom. 

Yet they need relaxation and rest from their constant, single-tracked drive. What they need is another track, but for the same train...that is, a change of subject, but using part of the same method of mental functioning.
Stamp collecting fulfills that need.

So David Ives is an asshole too

I missed this story from about a month ago - apparently Roman Polanski didn't feel despised and hated enough, so decided to open his ratty little face to say this:

“I think that now offering flowers to a lady becomes indecent, that’s how I feel about it,” the filmmaker explained. He added that striving for female equality was a “great pity.” 

“I think to level the genders — it’s purely idiotic. I think it’s a result … of progress in medicine. I think that the Pill has changed greatly the woman of our times, ‘masculinising’ her. I think that it chases away the romance from our lives and that’s a great pity,” he added.

Apparently Polanski has a problem with giving women birth control pills. Quaaludes on the other hand, are OK, especially to 13-year-olds you plan to rape.

But to be honest, I couldn't possibly despise Roman Polanski more than I already did, so this isn't that big a deal.

The real kick in the head was that thanks to this story, I discovered that:

Polanski's follow-up to his film adaptation of the award-winning play "Carnage" is another adaptation of an award-winning play (in this case an erotic two-hander by David Ives) set in a sole location...

Wow, so David Ives allows his play to be directed by a fugitive from justice, child rapist, misogynist asshole. That makes David Ives an asshole in my book.

I just realized that Buck Henry, my Facebook friend, signed the petition in support of Roman Polanski. Buh-bye Buck.

Woody Allan also signed it, but everybody already knows what a piece of shit he is.

Yasmina Reza, author of the play ART also signed it. What an asshole.

Here is the full list  of supporters of a child rapist's right to escape justice.

1. Fatih Akin
2. Stephane Allagnon
3. Woody Allen
4. Pedro Almodovar
5. Wes Anderson
6. Jean-Jacques Annaud
7. Alexandre Arcady
8. Fanny Ardant
9. Asia Argento
10. Darren Aronofsky
11. Olivier Assayas
12. Alexander Astruc
13. Gabriel Auer
14. Luc Barnier
15. Christophe Barratier
16. Xavier Beauvois
17. Liria Begeja
18. Gilles Behat
19. Jean-Jacques Beineix
20. Marco Bellochio
21. Monica Bellucci
22. Djamel Bennecib
23. Giuseppe Bertolucci
24. Patrick Bouchitey
25. Paul Boujenah
26. Jacques Bral
27. Patrick Braoudé
28. Andre Buytaers
29. Christian Carion
30. Henning Carlsen
31. Jean-Michel Carre
32. Patrice Chereau
33. Elie Chouraqui
34. Souleymane Cisse
35. Alain Corneau
36. Jerome Cornuau
37. Miguel Courtois
38. Dominique Crevecoeur
39. Alfonso Cuaron
40. Luc et Jean-Pierre Dardenne
41. Jonathan Demme
42. Alexandre Desplat
43. Rosalinde et Michel Deville
44. Georges Dybman
45. Jacques Fansten
46. Joël Farges
47. Gianluca Farinelli
48. Jacques Fansten
49. Etienne Faure
50. Michel Ferry
51. Scott Foundas
52. Stephen Frears
53. Thierry Fremaux
54. Sam Gabarski
55. René Gainville
56. Tony Gatlif
57. Costa Gavras
58. Jean-Marc Ghanassia
59. Terry Gilliam
60. Christian Gion
61. Marc Guidoni
62. Buck Henry
63. David Heyman
64. Laurent Heynemann
65. Robert Hossein
66. Jean-Loup Hubert
67. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu
68. Gilles Jacob
69. Just Jaeckin
70. Alain Jessua
71. Pierre Jolivet
72. Kent Jones
73. Roger Kahane,
74. Nelly Kaplan
75. Wong Kar Waï
76. Ladislas Kijno
77. Harmony Korine
78. Jan Kounen
79. Diane Kurys
80. Emir Kusturica
81. John Landis
82. Claude Lanzmann
83. André Larquié
84. Vinciane Lecocq
85. Patrice Leconte
86. Claude Lelouch
87. Gérard Lenne
88. David Lynch
89. Michael Mann
90. François Margolin
91. Jean-Pierre Marois
92. Tonie Marshall
93. Mario Martone
94. Nicolas Mauvernay
95. Radu Mihaileanu
96. Claude Miller
97. Mario Monicelli
98. Jeanne Moreau
99. Sandra Nicolier
100. Michel Ocelot
101. Alexander Payne
102. Richard Pena
103. Michele Placido
104. Philippe Radault
105. Jean-Paul Rappeneau
106. Raphael Rebibo
107. Yasmina Reza
108. Jacques Richard
109. Laurence Roulet
110. Walter Salles
111. Jean-Paul Salomé
112. Marc Sandberg
113. Jerry Schatzberg
114. Julian Schnabel
115. Barbet Schroeder
116. Ettore Scola
117. Martin Scorcese
118. Charlotte Silvera
119. Abderrahmane Sissako
120. Paolo Sorrentino
121. Guillaume Stirn
122. Tilda Swinton
123. Jean-Charles Tacchella
124. Radovan Tadic
125. Danis Tanovic
126. Bertrand Tavernier
127. Cécile Telerman
128. Alain Terzian
129. Pascal Thomas
130. Giuseppe Tornatore
131. Serge Toubiana
132. Nadine Trintignant
133. Tom Tykwer
134. Alexandre Tylski
135. Betrand Van Effenterre
136. Wim Wenders

The Taggart Death Train

Victory! I made it past the half-way point in Atlas Shrugged!

I also got to the gas train scene, or as Whittaker Chambers said in his review when the book came out:  "to the gas chambers - go!"

One again we see the strange capriciousness of the "government" in Rand's fantasia. Dagny and Rearden were allowed to test the Rearden Metal bridge by driving a train full of people over it, without a peep from the government. And yet, prior to the death tunnel, one of the moochers - a British fop named Gilbert Keith-Worthing - says: "are your railroads safe?"

"Hell yes!" said Kip Chalmers, "we got so many rules, regulations and controls that those bastards wouldn't dare not to be safe!"

Now Kip Chalmers is in a big hurry in order to get to a voter rally in time - because the moocher/looter fog is in fact a democracy. But there's a problem with the train motor so the only option is to send Kip and all the other passengers through the tunnel to their deaths.

Kip is never informed that if he goes into the tunnel he will die. Why nobody bothers to tell him is a great mystery because Kip doesn't say something along the lines of "I'm going to get to that rally in time even if I have to die trying."

Also a couple of the Taggart employees refuse to cooperate in sending the train into the tunnel of death and quit their jobs. But for some reason it doesn't occur to them since they are no longer employees, they have nothing to lose by warning everybody else about the fact that the passengers are being sent to their deaths.

However, although the resulting asphyxiation of all passengers is a disaster, it isn't a tragedy because Rand takes great pains to inform us that each and every passenger on the train deserves to die. In addition to Chalmers, Keith-Worthing and Chalmers' mistress, who obviously deserve to die, there are seventeen others, including two children, and Rand reels off their berth numbers and their crimes against Objectivism one by one. I won't re-type them all here, I'll just give a few samples:

The woman in Roomette 10, Car 3 was an elderly school teacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities but must do as others are doing.

And then there's the

"...woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives which she defended by saying: "I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children."

Rand doesn't say what the children's crimes are but maybe the elderly school teacher has already turned them into miserable cowards, so gas 'em.

And maybe the weirdest one of all...

The woman in Roomette 6, Car No. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not.

What could that possibly mean? Whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not? Does this have something to do with Rand's Supermen believing that in their version of capitalism, the producers of things like metal and trains have a right - nay, a duty - to police the uses and the users of their goods, after the sale is final?

I don't feel like addressing the rest of 6 and 7 now, so I'll let Liveblogger Dani Alexis fill you in on the other details of the two chapters - she's funnier than I can hope to be.

Oh, and it turns out that Whittaker Chambers also predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union.

...the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River

Before I began reading Atlas Shrugged I had seen this piece in The Awl entitled When Alan Met Ayn: "Atlas Shrugged" and Our Tanked Economy, which begins like this:

That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it's not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both.

And wow, I have to admit, the more I read Atlas Shrugged, the more I agree she was a nincompoop.

There are some who claim that we shouldn't judge Atlas Shrugged for its literary value because as this otherwise hilarious cataloging of the nincompoopery of the novel says:

...If Atlas Shrugged is taken as just a fictional representation of several philosophic themes that Ayn Rand is trying to get across, it generally works. At least in the sense that as boring as it might be at times for a novel, it's by far the most interesting philosophy text book you'll ever read! In that sense, it is a fantastic achievement for teaching people philosophical ideas without them needing to pour over often times dry and complex text books.  

Why Galt and the others seem so silly, illogical and oft times mean is for them being taken as real by readers who should know better. You see, there is an enormous difference between made up characters acting in odd fashions so as to move the story or the point along, versus real people.  

It makes sense for Galt not to sleep with anyone till he meets the "ideal woman", as he is portrayed here as an "archetype". In life, such celibacy would typically mean some deep psychological problems. Thus if this book is taken as a blueprint for life, it fails quite miserably. 

You probably know this. If you are not a "college bred pansie", that is. Randites - or those who take Rand not as an author but as some kind of secular Messiah - do not. They have "Biblified" her books, most notably "Atlas Shrugged", and seek to claim that what is described is "what would really happen if the geniuses went on strike". They believe that all that the heroes in the book do is moral. I would suggest they... lol..."check their premises".

But according to the testimony of Rand's friend Mary Ann Sures:

She reminded me that her goal was to write fiction, to create the kind of characters she admired and wanted to see in real life, and that all her work as a philosopher was for that purpose. She stressed the importance of pursuing values in the way one finds most interesting and gives one the most pleasure—as she had done. She said that over the years she had been criticized for not writing her ideas in nonfiction form; some people said it was her duty to do so. She said she would never have given up fiction to write philosophical treatises, that doing so would have been self-sacrificial. In that conversation she stressed the importance of pursuing personal values, and not undertaking any battle as a duty.

As far as Rand was concerned Atlas Shrugged operated equally as a novel and as philosophy. Both together reveal the essence of Ayn Rand's thinking: rigid and binary.

But it is a great mystery why she's so popular, as this review of two Rand recent biographies (written by non-sycophants) says:

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?

Although I haven't seen any evidence that Rand wore a wig.

In any case, I am hoping that eventually I will figure out the mystery, in part by reading the two biographies, which I've ordered.

I should have moved on to the next chapter of Atlas Shrugged by now, and only commented on Rand's bizarre re-telling of the Prometheus myth. I'm still not even half-way through the book. But I am too amazed by the other gaping logic holes in this chapter to let them pass without comment.

At the beginning of the Part 2 Chapter 5 we see that the country is going to hell in a handbasket - snowstorms leave behind piles of corpses and the train system - which seems to be the only long-distance delivery system in operation has broken down...

(I suddenly realized the reason that Rand has the country suddenly switch over from oil to coal - so cars and trucks are not issues she has to address and can stick to trains because trains can run on coal but cars and trucks don't - they could technically but coal liquifaction is expensive compared to gasoline - especially when this book was written, when it was about 30 cents a gallon.)

...including the system of getting supplies into Manhattan:

When the train reached New York, the lettuce and oranges had to be dumped into the East River: they had waited their turns too long in the freight houses of California...  Nobody but their friends and trade associates noticed that three orange growers had gone out of business in California, as well as two lettuce farmers... When people were starving, said the newspapers, one did not have to feel concern over the failures of business enterprises that were private ventures for private profit.

So in the middle of all this death and privation, in the middle of February, Lillian Rearden and James Taggart...

"...met in a distinguished, high-priced restaurant, much too distinguished ever to be mentioned in the gossip columns."

OK so from where is the distinguished high-priced restaurant getting its food? Are there supposed to be massive greenhouses around New York City? The restaurants are replacing fillet mignon with alley cat? Subway rat?

It seems we are to ignore the big song-and-dance she's been making for the entire chapter about how all of America is crippled by the failure of the rail system and just accept that restaurants in New York are not impacted in any way.

And why would oranges be dumped in the East River? Oranges from California would be coming from the west so they'd be dumped into the Hudson River. Especially since the tracks ended either on the west side of Manhattan or in New Jersey.

When she wrote this, Ayn Rand was living on the east side of New York, blocks away from the East River and so had to know that it was the wrong direction for trains to be coming from to deliver oranges from California.

Anyway, so Lillian decides to have two dozen roses sent to Hank Rearden at the Chicago depot of the Taggart Transcontinental (the Comet line if you really want to know). So my eyes are popping out - in spite of everything else we've been told, the floral delivery system is completely intact.

But then I got to this and I thought finally, finally, Rand is going to repair the disconnect between the railroad failure-induced shortages and the intact urban infrastructure...

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 the starving people of Chicago looted the local greenhouses and ate them?
• Because the roses from California bound for Chicago had to be dumped into the East River?

Of course not.

...he said, because Mr. Rearden is not aboard the Comet.

It is in this way that Lillian figures out that Hank is having an affair with Dagny.

And that nincompoop Ayn Rand couldn't think of any better scenario than one in which the FTD and its delivery system is the only private business for private profit that still stands, in spite of the raging squalor everywhere.

Well I'll end this post with yet another hysterical piece about Atlas Shrugged. Rand's work does serve as the source of inspired humor, so it isn't completely useless.

Obviously, it's a polemic, so you're going to have to grit your teeth and take it, but, then, is this not our great question? Shall we write polemical novels? Is it acceptable to write polemical novels? Are they ever any good? Rand, of course, insists that Atlas Shrugged is a love story. Which, okay. I was happy that Hank Rearden cheated on his horrible wife with Dagny. I was kind of happy for Hank and Dagny. Dagny clearly has a lot of shit to put up with at work, and Hank is surrounded by losers, so it's nice they found each other, prior to John Galt weirding everything up. PLUS, Hank doesn't rape Dagny, which immediately makes this the Free to Be… You and Me of Rand's oeuvre.

...I had long since decided to engage in efforts to advance free-market capitalism as an insider...

Gerald Ford, Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand.
And Greenspan's biological mother.

There are six entries on Ayn Rand in Alan Greenspan's 2007 autobiography The Age of Turbulence: a couple crediting her for predicting the fall of the Soviet Union (he also gives credit to Reagan); one in which a member of the Putin government asks if Greenspan wants to discuss Ayn Rand with him (we never get to find out if they did); but the most significant entry is:

Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds - mostly my mind meeting hers - and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent - we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor.  

But she had gone far beyond that, thinking more broadly than I had ever dared. She was a devoted Aristotelian, the central idea being that there exists an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known. Thus she called her philosophy Objectivism. And she applied key tenets of Aristotelian ethics - namely that individuals have innate nobility and that the highest duty of every individual is to flourish by realizing that potential. Exploring ideas with her was a remarkable course in logic and epistemology. I was able to keep up with her most of the time.  

Rand's Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas. Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn't there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that  the fervor receded. 

One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to Objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including the protection of individual rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused? 

I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day*, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. By the time I joined Richard Nixon's campaign for the presidency in 1968, I had long since decided to engage in efforts to advance free-market capitalism as an insider, rather than a critical pamphleteer. When I agreed to accept the nomination as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, I knew I would have to pledge to uphold not only the Constitution but also the laws of the land, many of which I thought were wrong. The existence of a democratic society governed by the rule of law implies a lack of unanimity on almost every aspect of the public agenda. Compromise on public issues is the price of civilization, not an abrogation of principle.  

It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted history and literature - if you asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said "don't bother." Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge - different cultures grow and create material wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off.

I find it amazing that he credits Rand with persuading him to look at human beings, their values, how they think, etc. If Atlas Shrugged is any indication, Rand had absolutely no idea how most human beings think, or how the world works, which is why she created her ideal man's world as one in which there were absolutely only two ways of thinking - the Superman way and the moocher/looter way. The government that Rand portrays in Atlas Shrugged is amorphous - its only purpose seems to be to thwart the Randian Supermen, but only sporadically - when it's narratively convenient. The rest of the time it barely exists: the government in Atlas Shrugged appears to have no navy - or one that is so ineffective it is not capable of stopping the hijacking of government aid supplies by one Norwegian pirate.

That Alan Greenspan thinks that Rand had valuable insights into humanity is maybe one of the scariest aspects of Alan Greenspan.

And this is how Alan Greenspan behaved when he was wooing Andrea Mitchell:

It might not be everybody's idea of first-date conversation, but at the restaurant we ended up discussing monopolies. I told her I'd written an essay on the subject and invited her back to my apartment to read it. She teases me about that now saying "What, didn't you have any etchings?" 

But we did go to my apartment and I showed her this essay I'd written on antitrust for Ayn Rand. She read it and we discussed it. To this day Andrea claims I was giving her a test. But it wasn't that; I was doing everything I could to keep her around.

Perhaps it's Greenspan's Rand-derived wrong-headedness about human behavior that  led him to his present state - which Forbes magazine, no enemy of the free market described a month ago as "Alan Greenspan's Epic Incompetence: Another Shoe Drops."

...an article by Bill Black, a former financial regulator, that provides stunning new insights into former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s incompetence. 

Posted at the website Naked Capitalism, the article makes dozens of  devastating points which have hitherto received little or no attention in the mainstream press. This may reflect the fact that the press groveled at Greenspan’s feet for so long in the pre-crash era (Bob Woodward WWD +0.35%, the doyen of Washington scribes, even entitled his notoriously naive Greenspan biography “Maestro”).

One of the examples of Greenspan's incompetence listed is:

Greenspan opposed  attempts by Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, to crack down on fraud.  Greenspan allegedly told Born that there was no need for a law against fraud. Greenspan was such a true believer in the efficient markets hypothesis that he apparently genuinely believed that market action alone would quickly prove an effective prophylactic against fraud. Black comments: “Greenspan, with the rabid support of the Rubin wing of the Clinton administration, along with Republican Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm, crushed Born’s effort to regulate credit default swaps (CDS). The plutocrats and their political allies deliberately created what’s known as a regulatory black hole – a place where elite criminals could commit their crimes under the cover of perpetual night.”

Greenspan does not have a single reference to Brooksley Born nor the CFTC in his book.

*written before his infamous "mea culpa" a year later:

Here’s a fascinating exchange between Alan Greenspan and Representative Henry A. Waxman from today’s hearing on Capitol Hill (as reported by Michael Grynbaum):
Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”
Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.
“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

Voting Rights

Excellent article by Louis Menand in the New Yorker about voting rights and the possible repercussions of the recent Supreme Court decision:

King believed that defending the voting rights of minorities was the responsibility of the executive branch. For years, while civil-rights workers were being beaten, jailed, and murdered across the South, King begged the White House to send federal authorities to protect voter-registration drives. Presidents and attorneys general always found reasons to refuse. Finally, with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress gave the executive branch the tools and the authority to enforce the law. 

With the decision in Shelby v. Holder, the Supreme Court has taken much of that authority away. Claims of Fifteenth Amendment violations must again be pursued through the courts, a lengthy and expensive process that shifts the burden of proof to the plaintiffs. As Richard Pildes, a voting-rights expert at the N.Y.U. School of Law, and others have argued, some of the blame for the decision should go to Congress. In 2009, the Court sent Congress a signal, in a case called Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District v. Holder, that it needed to revisit the act’s definition of which areas were covered by the requirement that they clear changes in voting regulations with the Justice Department. That provision had not been revised since the mid-nineteen-seventies. But it has been politically expedient for Congress to renew the act, rather than add places where discrimination is a problem today. 

“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., said, a sentiment echoed by Justice Thomas. They could not mean that race is no longer an issue. The Times reported that one place eagerly awaiting the Court’s ruling was Beaumont, Texas, where the Justice Department has blocked several attempts by a group of white citizens to change voting regulations for the explicit purpose of unseating a black-majority school board. What’s so changed about that? 

This August 28, 1963 marks 50 years since the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and King's "I Have A Dream" speech. I expect one or more organizations will sponsor some kind of commemoration and I hope to participate.

The article mentioned the important documentary series Eyes on the Prize which I haven't seen for a long time - and now it's available on Youtube. I will definitely be watching the series on the 4th of July.

Part 1:

But also the article clued me into this little-seen documentary.

Prometheus Shrugged, or, Ayn Rand re-writes ancient Greek myths

Ayn Rand's apartment building
The Murray Park - much more
affordable than I would have guessed.
One of these days I'm going to see
if I can get a peek inside - maybe
pretend I'm looking to move there.

I realize that Ayn Rand did not have the advantage of the Internet at her fingertips. The concept for the Intergalactic Computer Network wasn't even dreamed up until 1963 and Atlas Shrugged was published in 1957. But Rand lived nine blocks away from the main branch of the New York Public Library (a 13 minute walk according to Google maps) so is it really too much to ask her to do a little research? If she had she wouldn't have gotten the Prometheus myth so incredibly wrong.

This is from part 2 chapter 5 of Atlas Shrugged, where d'Anconia is comparing John Galt to Prometheus:

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains - and he withdrew his fire - until the day when men withdraw their vultures.

Except for the part about Prometheus being chained for bringing men fire, every single aspect of this description of Prometheus' predicament is wrong. Since I do have the Internets at my fingertips, I'll let Wikipedia explain it:

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan, culture hero, and trickster figure who is credited with the creation of man from clay, and who defies the gods and gifts humanity with fire (theft of fire), an act that enabled progress and civilization. He is known for his intelligence and as a champion of humanity. 

The punishment of Prometheus as a consequence of the theft is a major theme of his mythology, and is a popular subject of both ancient and modern art. Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, sentenced the Titan to eternal torment for his transgression. The immortal Prometheus was bound to a rock, where each day an eagle, the emblem of Zeus, was sent to feed on his liver, which would then grow back to be eaten again the next day. In some stories, Prometheus is freed at last by the hero Heracles (Hercules).

But is it really carelessness? Rand was aware of the Prometheus myth since at least 1937 because her novel Anthem includes a character who calls himself Prometheus.

Clearly "men" don't have the option of withdrawing "their" "vultures" no matter what Prometheus does - the eagle belongs to Zeus, and the only way Prometheus was freed (in some stories) is by Heracles - who was the son of Zeus.

For the record, Rand also got the Atlas myth wrong too. Atlas is described as "the giant who holds the world on his shoulders" in Atlas Shrugged when in fact, as Wiki says:

A common misconception today is that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth on his shoulders, but Classical art shows Atlas holding the celestial spheres, not a globe; the solidity of the marble globe born by the renowned Farnese Atlas may have aided the conflation, reinforced in the 16th century by the developing usage of atlas to describe a corpus of terrestrial maps.

Since the fire belongs to the gods, which makes it their property, and Prometheus stole it from them, doesn't that make Prometheus a looter who deserves to be punished, according to Rand's philosophy?

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Rand's retelling of this myth isn't even that she gets it wrong. It's that her version of the myth is completely illogical. Because the way Rand re-tells it, Prometheus gives the fire to men, and then men punish Prometheus - the god who created them - for giving them fire!

The incoherence of Rand's Prometheus story is a microcosm of the incoherence that is rampant throughout Atlas Shrugged. The incoherence results from Rand having no comprehension of how governments work, how economies work, or the cause and effect of human behaviors.

Our Town on Long Island

I got a tip to see the Hofstra University-hosted production of OUR TOWN which closes today (Sunday), and on the spur of the moment decided to go Saturday. It was a big deal getting there and back from Astoria without a car - I had to take two subways, a train and a taxi each way. But I had never seen much of Long Island (not counting the NYC parts) except for a couple of quick drives through on big highways, and a couple of brief visits to Oyster Bay on theater business over five years ago, and so on the way to Hofstra I enjoyed seeing the towns go by, mellow in the setting June sun through the Long Island Railroad train window.

This is the first time I've seen OUR TOWN in person. My daughter gave me tickets for Christmas 2009 to see the acclaimed production directed by David Cromer, but I was sick the night of the show and so my daughter took a friend of hers instead.

Ironically the first time I saw OUR TOWN, I was home sick from work and caught the public television recording of the Lincoln Center Theater production directed by Gregory Mosher with Spalding Gray as the Stage Manager. Maybe because that was the first production I've seen, and maybe because I'm a playwright, but I think the Mosher/Gray version is right way to do the play.

Frank Rich gave the production a fairly critical review, but then he doesn't seem to actually like the play itself very much:

As prettied up by Wilder, the sleepy Republican town of Grover's Corners, N.H., from 1901 to 1913, seems to say less about the country we live in now than does the earlier New England of 18th- and 19th-century literature. As an example of American playwriting of the 1930's, ''Our Town'' is closer in weight to Kaufman and Hart than to O'Neill.

But you can't win with Rich because although he thinks the town of the play is "prettied up" he complains the production's aesthetic isn't pretty enough:

With such stylization, Mr. Mosher seems to be attempting to justify his unadventurous saunter into ''Our Town'' by linking it to such other Lincoln Center productions of the year as ''Waiting for Godot'' and ''Speed-the-Plow.'' This esthetic statement is made at a price, because it has led to one major casting miscalculation, Spalding Gray's flip Stage Manager, that constantly disrupts the fragile text, the firm staging and the otherwise well-chosen cast.

Rich couldn't be more wrong. This isn't "unadventurous" at all. In fact I would say it is adventurous to do what Mosher did - stick to the text for once. American directors seem to think that it is their duty to make each and every play their bitch, tarting them up with pointless intrusions, just to put their personal stamp on it. It's this way of thinking that led the loathsome Edward Einhorn (with the full support of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society) to make a legal claim that since he directed the second production of my play TAM LIN all subsequent productions owed him a royalty.

But back to OUR TOWN. Spalding Gray had just exactly the right demeanor as the stage manager - dry and matter-of-fact. He was very upset by Rich's claim that he was too post-modernist and mentioned that in one of his monologues.

One of my complaints about the show I saw last night was the way the Stage Manager was played - too emotional, even maudlin at times, and too much a part of the town, rather than the  meta-observer he should be. Although at least the actor could do a New England dialect when he wanted to and a standard American dialect the rest of the time. (Not an issue for Spalding Gray in any case since he is a native of New England.) But the rest of the cast was all over the place, dialect-wise: some used their native Lon Guyland dialect and some sounded like they thought Grover's Corners was in Alabama. I would rather they stuck with their own native dialects, even if it was Long Island.

The Best Rearden Family Thanksgiving Ever

So many offenses against coherence and literature in the third and fourth chapters of part 2 of Atlas Shrugged! I really need to stick to one chapter at a time when I blog about AS  because there is so much material in any one chapter that if I do two, I end up glossing over too much in the blog post.

On the other hand, I am trying to finish this damn thing so I can start my play which features the spectre of Ayn Rand appearing to Alan Greenspan. And I'm almost at the half-way point, so I pushed on, but after those two chapters had to take a rest. I'm not made of stone.

The highlight, if you can call it that, of these two chapters is the Rearden family Thanksgiving with the standard Superman~moocher dynamic.

At the Thanksgiving dinner Rearden's family berates him for not caring about their feelings when he got arrested (for selling his Rearden Metal to Kenneth Dannager, I'm still not sure why this became a law). And they point out that his arrest is an embarrassment to them all. But even though they are all financially dependent on Rearden, (as Rearden explicitly acknowledges in his confrontation with his brother, whom he tells "whatever affection I might have had for you once is gone") none of them seem in the least worried that his possible prison term might impact their luxurious lifestyle. Moochers are so inscrutable.

Since Rand can't be bothered to give us any flashbacks to what they were like once, when Rearden did have affection for his brother, this statement has no emotional resonance. Rearden has despised his three moocher family members throughout the novel so far, and we've never seen anything that would lead us to believe he ever had any affection for any of them, ever.

Except, ever so briefly, for Lillian, whom he didn't hate for an entire month after they were married, but has pretty much hated her for the next eight years, which even the normally slow-witted Lillian realized:

"Do you wish to divorce me?"
"Oh, wouldn't you like that! Wouldn't that be a smart trade to pull! Don't you suppose I know that you've wanted to divorce me since the first month of our marriage?"

I'm not entirely sure, but I think this might be the first time the word "divorce" has appeared in the novel. Since the world of Atlas Shrugged is so different from the real one, I wasn't sure if divorce had been outlawed by the government, which would be the only plausible reason why Rearden hasn't divorced his much-loathed wife.

I will say that when Lillian caught Rearden (not in flagrante delicto unfortunately) cheating on her and proceeded to hurl insults at him, it was the one moment in the entire novel so far where a Rand character sounds like an actual human being.

But it only lasts for a couple of pages. And then, lest we forget that we are in an Ayn Rand novel, we see Rearden's peculiar response to Lillian expressing displeasure with his infidelity:

There was neither thought nor feeling left in him, nothing but a sense that merged the remnants of both, the sense of congratulations upon the greatest victory he had ever demanded of himself: that Lillian had walked out of the hotel suite alive.

It's striking that not only are Rearden's family life and marriage hideous, his is almost the only family life and marriage depicted at all in Atlas Shrugged up to this point. Marriages/families are barely mentioned: Nat Taggart offering to gamble his wife into sexual slavery; the lightly sketched flashback family comprised of Mrs. No-name Taggart and her children; and the moochers that Cherryl Brooks has come to New York City to escape from. The only other family depicted are the hicks that Dagny and Rearden meet on their road trip. The hick children throw rocks at Rearden's spiffy roadster and their mother looks like an old hag.

Maybe the absence of family life is why Eddie Willers keeps cornering an unfortunate anonymous worker in order to deliver expositional monologues. Oh yes, he did it again! If the worker was getting paid by the hour, and was on the clock, it wouldn't be so bad, but Rand sets up the second monologue by noting they are in the Taggart Transcontinental cafeteria. Willers can't even let this guy have his lunch in peace!

But lucky for Rearden, he has his love for Francisco d'Anconia to keep him warm. And fortunately I don't even have to write about it, another blogger has already cataloged the manly love in Atlas Shrugged.

As I noted in a previous blog post, d'Anconia told Dagny nothing about his life at college and she didn't ask. People in love in Atlas Shrugged don't make pillow talk about their hopes and dreams and past history. It is the same thing between Dagny and Rearden, which explains why Rearden has no idea that d'Anconia knows about metal smelting. He discovers it when they are spending some quality time together (d'Anconia is lecturing Rearden on the evils of the looters and the moochers and the virtues of selfishness, etc. - the usual) and there is an accident at the factory. Caused by, what else, a moocher:

A young man with a look of chronic hurt and impertinence, together, rushed up to him crying: "I couldn't help it, Mr. Rearden!" and launched into a speech of explanation. Rearden turned his back on him without a word. It was the assistant in charge of the pressure gauge in the furnace, a young man out of college.

d'Anconia saves the day by demonstrating his unmatchable (of course) skill at lobbing clay into a furnace hole, and Rearden, stars in his eyes and little hearts flying around his head, pledges his troth to d'Anconia.

I was going to say d'Anconia's skill was acquired while working in the copper biz, but let's face it, based on everything else we know about him, he no doubt did it perfectly the very first time he tried it.

Now I can understand why Dagny doesn't tell Rearden that d'Anconia is her former boyfriend, because Rearden has twice been on the verge of a jealous meltdown, demanding Dagny tell him who her other boyfriends were. d'Anconia was the only other boyfriend (or friend of any kind except for poor lonely Eddie Willers) that Dagny has ever had, and they didn't see each other for ten years which means that Dagny was celibate for ten years until she got together with Rearden. But if Dagny and Rearden had exchanged any information about their childhoods of course Dagny would have mentioned that she and d'Anconia knew each other since childhood and that d'Anconia had been working in the copper mines since he was a teenager.

But since Rand's heroes spend most of their waking hours talking about the usual, there is no time for that personal stuff.

So anyway, Rearden goes on trial for selling his Metal to Kenneth Dannager - who buggered off, or as Dannager described it "retired. " There doesn't seem to be a manhunt underway to track him down.

The trial provides a chance for Rand to give us some sense of how the government works, how it got to be that way, etc. etc. but as always Rand declines this opportunity and instead presents the government as a mysterious fog. The trial, run by three judges and completely open to the public, is apparently created to give Rearden a soapbox from which to expound on the usual, to much public acclaim, except of course from the most extreme moochers:

The crowd burst into applause.
Rearden whirled around, more startled than his judges. He saw faces that laughed in violent excitement, and faces that pleaded for help; he saw their silent despair breaking out into the open; he saw the same anger and indignation as his own, finding release in the wild defiance of their cheering; he saw the looks of admiration and the look of hope. There were also the faces of loose-mouthed young men and maliciously unkempt females, the kind who led the booing in newsreel theaters at any appearance of businessmen on the screen; they did not attempt a counter-demonstration; they were silent.

Meanwhile d'Anconia was listening on the radio:

"Do you mean my trial?"
"I mean, your trial."
"How do you know, you weren't there."
Francisco smiled, because the tone of the voice confessed an added sentence: I was looking for you. "Don't you suppose I heard every word of it on the radio?"

Now I have to wonder - is Rearden a complete idiot, or is his playing dumb deliberate in order to get Francisco to admit he heard every word on the radio - as part of their mutual flirtation? Because Rearden had already been told two pages earlier that his speech was on the radio. So why would he ask an idiotic question like "how do you know, you weren't there."?

Or did Rand just not have any editors?

In spite of Dagny's inability and/or disinterest in the personal history of her lovers (and vice-versa) Rearden and d'Anconia get very chatty with each other - and d'Anconia confesses to Rearden that the Latin playboy persona was all an act and launches into a longish lecture on how true manly man only have sex with the most exalted female (i.e. Dagny) and although he doesn't directly say it, it is implied that Francisco d'Anconia has also been celibate for ten years - or actually 11, I think. That means that during the peak of his youth and sexual desirability - and as we know he's charismatic and perfect at everything he does - Francisco d'Anconia has not had sex at all.

So Rand's Supermen are almost as weird as her moochers/looters - Dagny and d'Anconia, despite having no qualms about sex in general each spend a sexless young adulthood and Hank Rearden has been having sex for eight years with a woman he despises and who screws him only out of a wifely duty.

Rand herself had much more sex than her heroes when she was twice their age:

Rand convened a meeting with Nathaniel, his wife Barbara (also a Collective member), and Rand’s own husband Frank. To Branden's astonishment, Rand convinced both spouses that a time-structured affair—she and Branden were to have one afternoon and one evening a week together—was “reasonable.” Within the Collective, Rand is purported to have never lost an argument. On his trysts at Rand’s New York City apartment, Branden would sometimes shake hands with Frank before he exited. Later, all discovered that Rand’s sweet but passive husband would leave for a bar, where he began his self-destructive affair with alcohol. 

By 1964, the 34-year-old Nathaniel Branden had grown tired of the now 59-year-old Ayn Rand. Still sexually dissatisfied in his marriage to Barbara and afraid to end his affair with Rand, Branden began sleeping with a married 24-year-old model, Patrecia Scott. Rand, now “the woman scorned,” called Branden to appear before the Collective, whose nickname had by now lost its irony for both Barbara and Branden. Rand’s justice was swift. She humiliated Branden and then put a curse on him: “If you have one ounce of morality left in you, an ounce of psychological health—you'll be impotent for the next twenty years! And if you achieve potency sooner, you'll know it’s a sign of still worse moral degradation!” 

Rand completed the evening with two welt-producing slaps across Branden’s face. Finally, in a move that Stalin and Hitler would have admired, Rand also expelled poor Barbara from the Collective, declaring her treasonous because Barbara, preoccupied by her own extramarital affair, had neglected to fill Rand in soon enough on Branden's extra-extra-marital betrayal. (If anyone doubts Alan Greenspan’s political savvy, keep in mind that he somehow stayed in Rand’s good graces even though he, fixed up by Branden with Patrecia’s twin sister, had double-dated with the outlaws.)

Well it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!

Oh dear God not another Atlas Shrugged party! I thought that the Rearden wedding anniversary was bad, but James Taggart's wedding party, in Part 2 Chapter II is even worse. 

One of the reasons why Rand's party scenes are so excruciating is because they invariably contain lots of moochers and looters - those ugly, stupid haters of anything good, who speak as no humans at a party - or anywhere else - have ever spoken.

The funniest aspect of the whole thing is when Hank Rearden tries to get away from stupid women doing stupid women things but:

He could not find a single straight statement in the conversation of the men; whatever subject they seemed to be talking about never seemed to be the subject they were actually discussing.

Rearden must be making a serious effort to find these seeming tautologies because everywhere else at the party people are saying exactly what they seem to be talking about, right out loud. Which leads to a series of confrontations: Lillian Rearden corners James Taggart to point out that he owes her for bringing Hank Rearden to the party; Lillian Rearden tells Dagny that if she doesn't return her Rearden Metal bracelet it will look like she's having a "scandalous" affair with Hank; and James Taggart and Francisco d'Anconia share with each other most of the contents of their brains concerning the state of d'Anconia Copper.

But mostly Francisco talks for four pages, in his role as the mouthpiece of Ayn Rand's monetary "philosophy" and instead of walking away from this stunning bore, the partygoers all stand around staring at him with their moocher/looter mouths hanging open, causing one woman (I think it's the "flabby-faced" one) to say, once he finally shuts the hell up, "Well it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!"

Mais non, Madame Flabbyface, it is the only way to talk at an Ayn Rand party!

But at least d'Anconia finally clears up the difference between a moocher and a looter - I had been using the terms interchangeably, but that was wrong:

Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or the looters, who take it from you by force.

So there you go. So far we've only really seen moochers in action although we've heard of the Pirate King who steals government aid supplies - but surely he can't be a looter if he's one of the Randian Supermen.

But that d'Anconia - he's so suave. Is it any wonder that Hank Rearden has a gigantic man crush on him?

It was the muscles of his own face that made Rearden realize the nature of his reaction to Francisco's arrival: he noticed that suddenly he was smiling and that his face had been relaxed into the dim well-being of a smile for some minutes past, as he watched Francisco d'Anconia in the crowd. 

He acknowledged to himself for the first time, all the half-grasped half-rejected moments when he had thought of Francisco d'Anconia and thrust the thought aside before it became the knowledge of how much he wanted to see him again. In moments of sudden exhaustion - at his desk, with the fires of the furnaces going down in the twilight - in the darkness of the lonely walk through the empty countryside to his house - in the silence of the sleepless nights - he had found himself thinking of the only man who had once seemed to be his spokesman. He had pushed the memory aside, telling himself: that one is worse than all the others! - while feeling certain that this was not true, yet being unable to name the reason for his certainty. He had caught himself glancing through the newspapers to see whether Francisco d'Anconia had returned to New York - and he had thrown the newspapers aside, telling himself angrily; What if he did return? - would you go chasing him through night clubs and cocktail parties? - what is it that you want from him?

Pretty surprising coming from a huge homophobe like Rand. For a moment there I thought that Ayn Rand was going to go all slash fiction on her own novel.

And I discovered yet another humorous blog analysis of this awful novel, Atlas 'Clubbed - he concludes his discussion of Part 2 Chapter II perfectly:

The trigger pulled on his latest financial suicide-bomb, Francisco scans the room. Only he, Dagny, and Rearden are left, all exchanging looks. Frank himself is grimly satisfied. Dagny is nonplussed. Rearden is conflicted.
“So, look, I’m just throwing this out there,” he says. ”What are your guys’ thoughts on menage a trois?” 

It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and vast

OK! I made it through the first chapter of Part 2 of Atlas Shrugged.

While reading I was reminded of the case made in the article Defending Capitalism against Ayn Rand that in fact Rand's heroes are anti-capitalists.

It isn't clear because the world of Atlas Shrugged is incoherent, and she gives lots of lip-service to capitalism - or rather the glory of selfish commerce.

Dr. Stadler is one of the few characters in the novel who isn't completely part of the great dichotomy that runs throughout the book - you're either a moocher or a Superman. Dr. Stadler was in with the Supermen, but he won't stand up to the State Science Institute in its presumably anti-science crusade.

Strangely enough, although the SSI is presented as a sham science organization with metallurgists who can't do anything right, Stadler is thinking in the first page of Part 2 (subtitled "Either-Or" - how's that for a blatant dichotomy?):

Five days of stillness, he thought, with the great laboratory motors stopped and irretrievable hours wiped out, when his staff had been working on problems that involved the heart of the universe.

Now if this was any other novelist I might think Rand was being humorously ironic. So is Stadler so delusional that he thinks that his staff really is working on problems that involve the heart of the universe? And we're suppose to think he's a fool? But even Dagny Taggart thinks he's smart, she calls him in to have a look at the magic motor she found.

Stadler meets with Dagny's approval because he loves machines and scientific achievement as much as she does (and his three favorite students were d'Anconia, the Norwegian terror of the seas, and John Galt) - but then he reveals his fatal character flaw:

...By the time he raised his head - and before he saw the look of admiration in her eyes, the open look he had begged for, the look of forgiveness - he destroyed his single moment's atonement by adding in a voice of drawing-room sarcasm: "Apparently the young man had no desire to work for the good of society or the welfare of science. He told me he would not take a government job. I presume he wanted the bigger salary he could hope to obtain from a private employer." 

He turned away, not to see the look that was fading from her face, not to let himself know the meaning.

So Stadler knew the effect it would have on Dagny, for him to criticize someone for not caring about society or the welfare of science, because immediately after he says it, he avoids looking at her response.

So if he wants her admiration so much, why didn't he just stop himself from blurting out something that he knows will repulse Dagny and just let her admire him for their common love of applied technology?

Because everybody blurts out exactly what they think in Atlas Shrugged, all the time. Even the neurotypicals (i.e. moochers) - and we know that Stadler is a neurotypical and not an Asperger's Syndrome Superman because towards the end of the chapter Dagny and Rearden are trying to puzzle out Stadler's behavior:

"Dagny, they're doing something we've never understood. They know something we don't, but should discover. I can't see it fully yet, but I'm beginning to see parts of it. That looter from the State Science Institute (not Stadler somebody else) was scared when I refused to help him pretend that he was just an honest buyer of my Metal. He was scared way deep. Of what? Public opinion was just his name for it, but it's not the full name. Why should he have been scared? He has the guns, the jails, the laws - he could have seized the whole of my mills, if he wished, and nobody would have risen to defend me, and he knew it - so why should he have cared what I thought? But he did. It was I who had to tell him he wasn't a looter but a customer and friend. That's what he needed from me. And that's what Dr. Stadler needed from you - it was you who had to act as if he were a great man who had never tried to destroy your rail or my Metal. I don't know what it is that they think they accomplish - but they want us to pretend we see the world as they pretend they see it. They need some sort of sanction from us. I don't know the nature of that sanction, but, Dagny - I know that if we value our lives, we must not give it to them. If they put you on a torture rack, don't give it to them. Let them destroy your railroad and my mills, but don't give it to them. Because I know this much: that's our only chance...

...Yes," she said. "yes, I know what you've seen in them... I've felt it too - but it's only like something brushing past that's gone before I know I've seen it, like a touch of cold air, and what's left is always the feeling that I should have stopped it... I know that you're right. I can't understand their game but this much is right: We must not see the world as they want us to see it. It's some sort of fraud, very ancient and vast - and the key to break it is: to check every premise they teach us, to question every precept, to - "

Dagny is cut off because this speech has made Rearden horny and they go at it until the end of the chapter.

I don't know how Ayn Rand could make it any clearer that she has some kind of autism-spectrum syndrome and can't understand the way most people perceive the world - or as Dagny and Rearden prefer to say: "the world as they pretend to see it."

Lacking the ability to see things from another's perspective, Rand thinks that the sympathetic fellow-feeling that the moochers want from other people is a pretense - of course the moochers don't really feel that way if Rand doesn't feel that way. Or as a writer with Asperger's put it:

When I think of Theory of Mind, I think of an amusing, but of course very inaccurate, belief I harbored as a young child.  While playing games like hide and seek, I used to think, "If I can't see them, they can't see me."  Of course, I learned very quickly that that was not the case.  However, the mindblindness of individuals with autism or Asperger's can be similar - "If I can't/don't feel it or perceive it, then they can't/don't feel it or perceive it" (or vice versa).

And this is definitely Rand declaring her beliefs - she was always using the phrase "check your premises" which Dagny proposes as a method that she and Rearden can use to keep out of the clutches of the neurotypicals.

The give-away this isn't some political view, but more elemental, is this passage: "it's some sort of fraud, very ancient and vast."

Yes, ancient and vast as the neurotypical culture that Rand lives in and cannot comprehend, like an alien. And "alien" isn't my concept as a neurotypical - the most prominent Autism community blog is called "Wrong Planet."

And Stadler didn't actively work against Dagny and Rearden. He simply didn't take steps to stop the activities of the SSI or the government. Because, obviously, he loves his job as the head of the SSI. Stadler thinks it's doing work involving "the heart of the universe." But for Dagny and Rearden to see Stadler's actions as sincere self preservation rather than pretense covering malice would mean they'd be forced to acknowledge the complexity of human interactions - which, if they could do that, would destroy their Superpowers and render them mere neurotypicals.

But back to Rand's strange attitude towards capitalism. Rearden can't just sell his Metal and let it go:

"I created that Metal. It is my moral responsibility to know for what purpose I permit it to be used"

As the author of Defending Capitalism says:

In Part II, Chapter 10, Dagny says that Nathaniel Taggart, supposedly the archetypical capitalist, “couldn’t have worked with people like these passengers. He couldn’t have run trains for them.” But no one running a train line, even in a socialist economy, could possibly consider the moral worth of its passengers, or any consideration besides their paying for the ride.

One of Jon Stewart's best shows ever

Ron Lindsay's real apology

Here it is.

I predicted it, in my post (which was referenced by several other bloggers) Ron Lindsay's non-apology apology for his non-welcome welcome.

I'm guessing the CFI board is going to make him issue a proper apology, and he'll do it rather than lose the prestige of being CEO.

I was able to predict this outcome because that's what happened after Larry Summers suggested the evolved female brain was primarily to blame for women having less distinguished careers in math and science. Although give Ron Lindsay credit - it only took him two tries to come up with a true apology. It took Larry Summers three tries.

The people who lionized Summers and Lindsay for their brave stand against the politically correct somehow forgot that Summers and Lindsay held/hold positions that are in fact political. And so of course their insulting remarks about women - especially at events meant to encourage women's participation in the organizations sponsoring those events, would result in a huge blowback.

Evolutionary psychology promoters are at the root of both controversies. Summers was only echoing Steven Pinker (who came to his defense during the controversy), and Lindsay's hostility, especially towards Rebecca Watson, was the result of the "elevatorgate" controversy sparked by Richard Dawkins' insulting response (and second response which made it worse) to a 3-minute video clip in which Watson recounted an incident that made her uncomfortable.

The evolutionary psychology-infused message is that women need to dial back their charges of discrimination because:

a. it's the fault of their own brains and
 b. men's feelings have been hurt by the charges of male privilege.

Pinker and Dawkins are not politicians - they are celebrity intellectuals who can get away with saying insulting things about women.

Lindsay and Summers perhaps felt they were also celebrity intellectuals rather than of heads of organizations that included women they were insulting. Which makes them not only deluded but very bad politicians.

Perhaps it's a generational thing - Lindsay, Summers, Pinker and Dawkins are all old enough to remember the good old days when you could shit on women and totally get away with it because they're just women. So it must be quite a shock to all of them when women occasionally give them shit back.

After my prediction on the previous blog post I wondered:

Now will all his fanboys who considered him a hero start calling him a "mangina?" We shall see.

I really hope Rebecca Watson or the other skeptic feminist bloggers check in with the various Men's Rights types and report back to the rest of us if that happens - I sure don't want to visit the slymepit.

The awesome somegreybloke appears to be the creator of the excellent parody of MRA/PUA atheists: Dan Cardamon. Although it's only two years after elevatorgate, I don't know if the error is part of the parody or what.

When he’s not listlessly condemning humanity like a mid-nineties goth girl, he’s fondling hors d’oeuvres and launching them down his gullet

Jesus, another Atlas Shrugged blogger. Here I thought I was some kind of pioneer and instead I'm at least two years late. At least.

I do think mine does cover some bases not covered by the other two I've seen - my critique is more detailed and serious than the others, but what they lack in analysis they more than make up for in entertainment value. I got a good belly laugh out of this passage, especially the part that I bolded - now that is a fine piece of humorous writing:

The most contrived centipede in Ayn’s philosophical vagina is Dr. Simon Pritchett. I guess he’s a postmodernist. I’ll cop to hating them as much as the next guy (assuming that guy gives a shit). I’ll even grant – based on a presentation I watched tried to watch about PoMo jerkoff, Jean-François Lyotard — Pritchett’s arguments could’ve been taken verbatim from a sincere PoMo dipshit. I can’t explain why it’s worth debating a marginal and little understood philosophy aside from it being an easy target. 

Anyway, the effete Pritchett’s all, Who’s to say what’s real? We’re just meaningless chemicals and what not! Nothing matters… and so forth. 

Rearden insists that things do indeed matter. 

Rand, you fucking rebel! Underscoring the hypocrisy and degeneracy of Pritchett’s remarks is that he’s eating. Possibly the only one mentioned eating at all – certainly the only one emphasized doing so. It’s a minor point, but odd. When he’s not listlessly condemning humanity like a mid-nineties goth girl, he’s fondling hors d’oeuvres and launching them down his gullet. I can almost hear him chewing, Lahff ith menninglthss. Weh’r thutht thumb ahnhimals. 

In the Randverse, the repugnance of his eating snacks and talking at a party is apparently self-evident. If not for her belaboring some point about the seemingly appropriate behavior, I wouldn’t even know it was a problem for her. It’s like she’s saying, Hey, look at this guy. Eating food set out for guests at a party. What an asshole.

So excellent. And no, I didn't notice the blatant symbolic eating by Pritchett. That was a good catch. But really, there is so much egregiously wrong about Atlas Shrugged that it would take a team of bloggers to catch all the bullshit.

Bonus artifact: the scene from ANGELS IN AMERICA where Louis confronts Joe about his relationship with Roy Cohn - they get into a knock-down fight and then after Louis says: "it was like a sex scene in an Ayn Rand novel, huh?"