What's black and white and read all over?

In spite of the binary world that Ayn Rand created in Atlas Shrugged - or very likely because of it - the book continues to sell hundreds of thousands of copies every year.

To many people, especially intellectuals, describing a novel or a philosophy or a personal view of the world as black and white is not a compliment. It's meant to indicate an egregious over-simplification, but Heller's biography notes:

Rand loved the fact that (Mickey) Spillane's potboiling plots and gun-toting heroes were dedicated to separating good from evil in a black-and-white world. ("Grays don't interest me." she said apropos of his work.)

And black and white thinking, we are told from no less an authority than Temple Grandin, is extremely common in those with autism-spectrum disorders:

People with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome tend towards black and white thinking.  They see themselves and the world around them in polar opposites, and this tendency feeds their need to be perfect. Even the tiniest mistakes and mishaps can feel like monumental failures to them, creating high levels of anxiety when their efforts or the events around them do not measure up to this all-or-nothing scale.

And a contributor to the discussion board for people with autism/Asperger's, in a discussion specifically about black and white thinking, wrote:

In my youth I embraced Ayn Rand's writings; she clarified morality and inspired me. (Many philosophies do that; some are bad, like cults, propaganda and Republicans.) But I realized that life is seldom clear...

But many people who haven't been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder won't, or maybe even cannot, think in shades of gray. That's why religion is so popular - the God/Devil dichotomy is so easy to understand. You're either blessed or you're cursed. And Rand's philosophy is an exact copy of this structure - you're either one of the Supermen, blessed with beauty, brains and a superior morality, or you are the exact opposite - in every way.

One thing I found disturbing about the Heller biography was her defense of Rand's work. Heller writes:

The reviews (of Atlas Shrugged)... were hateful and dishonest... (The New York Times) branded the novel as "a demonstrative act rather than a literary novel"... "as loudly as Miss Rand proclaims her love of life, it seems clear the book is written out of hate." (Hicks) suggested that it was nothing more than clumsy mixture of melodrama and didacticism."

I happen to find Hicks' opinion right on the money, but then, I realize it's opinion. And the only way it could be characterized as "dishonest" is if it isn't Hicks' true opinion. And nowhere else in any of the reviews that she quotes does Heller demonstrate that a reviewer was being dishonest. Heller appears to equate dishonesty with strong opinions that Heller disagrees with.

And if the reviews were "hateful" - and they were strongly negative from all points on the political spectrum - maybe it's because Rand's black and white worldview required her to deal harshly with those characters on the bad side of the equation, sending them to their deaths while detailing their thought-crimes. She continually dehumanizes all who oppose her "philosophy" and rants against the altruistic and the poor.

How could any sane person not perceive that as hateful?

Maybe it's the false equivalency that so many journalists love, that prompts Heller to try to find something positive to say about Rand, because Rand's personal life provides very little that is praise-worthy. But I have to wonder how carefully Heller read "Atlas Shrugged" because she says:

But Rand's certainty that she alone understood the truth and that people who lived by other convictions, especially liberals, religious adherents, and public intellectuals, were mystics of spirit, savages, looting thugs, beggars, parasites, gibberers, carrion eaters, cavemen, and headhunters did have the ring of Big Sister, even if the ideological content of the novel did not.

How could Heller not be aware of the fact that calling people who lived by other convictions nasty names is the very essence of the ideological content of "Atlas Shrugged?" If you took a drink every time someone is called a parasite or a moocher or a looter, you'd be drunk at the end of a single chapter.

And of course the bad guys have to be non-human in order to highlight her heroes' Super-humanness. Because that's how binary thinking works.

I realize it's impossible to prove Rand was on the autism spectrum, and in fact apparently it's all the rage now to claim somebody is "on the spectrum":

 Schnarch recalls a man who phoned him the day before a scheduled initial couples session and announced that he’d just been diagnosed with Asperger’s. “As soon as this happened,” Schnarch says, “I knew I had difficulty.” He contacted the referring therapist, who said he’d suspected the man had Asperger’s because he said things to his girlfriend that were so cruel he couldn’t possibly understand their impact. As far as Schnarch was concerned, it was an all-too-familiar instance of ­sadism masquerading as disability. “If you’re going to perp, the best place to perp from is the victim position.”

And I do have to wonder about this last paragraph of the Heller biography, where Heller reveals Rand saying something so incredibly contrary to Objectivist principles I could hardly believe it. Heller herself doesn't seem to be aware of it, and instead wants to move on to give Rand credit for individual rights and freedom, etc. But the last paragraph begins:

"It is not I who will die, it is the world that will end," she liked to say. Of course the world went on. But her extraordinary achievement...

OK, stop right there.

Putting aside the debatable nature of her achievement, this quote is the most succinct refutation of one of the tenets of Objectivism I've ever read. As the Ayn Rand institute explains, the metaphysics of Objectivism is:

"Reality, the external world, exists independent of man's consciousness, independent of any observer's knowledge, beliefs, feelings, desires or fears. This means that A is A, that facts are facts, that things are what they are...

But Rand's saying the world will end when she dies demonstrates the subjective nature of reality. The world does go on - but not as far as the one who is dying. In their reality the world is ending.

I haven't yet found out what Ayn Rand thought of Schopenhauer, although she can't have thought very highly of him since he did not believe in free will. I also find it strange that she hated both Kant and Hegel, when Schopenhauer revered Kant (not without critique) and despised Hegel. And Schopenhauer tended to favor Plato over Aristotle which would have been completely unacceptable to Rand.

In any case, Schopenhauer felt that subjective vs. objective was a false dichotomy, as he discusses in a brief dialog in The World as Will and Representation which I turned into an Xtranormal animation a couple of years ago:

A Dialog from "The World as Will and Representation" by Arthur Schopenhauer

Sympathy for the Devil

I received the first of the two Rand biographies I ordered, Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller and now I understand why one of the book's reviewers said it made her feel compassion for Ayn Rand. I felt the same way.

That is not to say that it turns out that Ayn Rand was empathetic and perceptive about people's feelings, and was open to new ideas, and had a nuanced view of life and philosophy. Even though Heller strains to be fair to Rand, including defending her work against what I think is valid criticism (more about that later), her book makes it clear that Rand was exactly the opposite.

But you can't help but feel that it is because of Rand's traits that she was so utterly clueless her much-younger boyfriend was cheating on her (and on his wife, who knew about the affair with Rand but not about the 20-something actress), and even when he came out and said he was rejecting her because she was too old (she was in her 60s by this time) she wouldn't believe him.  (Although if the Internet is to be believed, plenty of men do have erotic feelings for old women.)

Heller writes:

...she was making more than one hundred pages of shrewd, if painfully myopic, journal entries about what had gone wrong between them. She did not accept for a minute that her age was the real source of the problem... 

Still under the impression that he was sexually 'frozen', she added: "Thus he can claim there is nothing seriously wrong with him." At times her notes expressed an austere affection for the bright young man she had met and mentored; at other times, she struggled with overwhelming revulsion against his "filthy soul." Most often, she displayed remarkable control as she analyzed him from every point of view consistent with her characters and philosophical convictions. At times, she wept in grief. Not once, however did she ask herself what responsibility she might bear for the harrowing end of one of the two most important allegiances of her life. Nor did she attempt to inhabit Branden's point of view - that, say of a young man entranced and half-consciously seduced by a charismatic, authoritarian mother figure from whom he lacked the courage to break free. Such empathy for the other was outside her range.

The inability to see things from another's point of view is one of the hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders. But I don't know if Asperger's is enough to explain how incredibly delusional Rand was:

Basically, what she found wrong with him was something she had struggled not to believe: that he had an advanced case of social metaphysics, the wound that disfigured the souls of Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey, and that chaser after shopgirls, Dagny's weak and incompetent brother James... 

...she was sure of one thing, however "with the full power, logic, clarity and context of my mind." She was too much for Nathaniel Branden... at one time, she wrote, he did have the potential of becoming a hero and a genius, and if he had chosen to pursue Roark's values of independence and integrity she would not be too much for him, she reflected from inside her world of fantasy.

I blogged last week about the inability of Ayn Rand's characters in "Atlas Shrugged" - moochers and Supermen both, to figure out when other characters have an affair going on. Lillian Rearden takes a year to figure out Hank is cheating on her, and then, in spite of the fact that Dagny is the only woman he has any interactions with; and Dagny refuses to return Lillian's Rearden Metal bracelet even though Lillian suggests it would be a scandal; it takes Lillian another year to figure out that Dagny is the other woman.

Hank Rearden, who has had every opportunity to find out from Dagny or James or Eddie Willers that Dagny and d'Anconia knew each other since childhood, and that they'd had a sexual relationship (James throws this in Dagny's face early on in the book) it comes as a huge shock to him that d'Anconia was in love with Dagny. Such a shock that he punches d'Anconia in the face - and even then doesn't realize that d'Anconia was the only other man Dagny's had sex with - she has to come right out and tell him.

And Eddie Willers, even though he's seen Dagny and Rearden alone together at odd hours several times, doesn't figure it out until he sees Rearden's dressing gown in Dagny's closet. And only this shock of jealously makes him realize that he was in love with Dagny.

Turns out Rand was exactly that obtuse herself. Even though she knew that Branden and the actress had been friends for a while, and Branden was attempting to end the sexual connection between himself and Rand:

Inexplicably, she didn't question his claim that he felt only friendship for Patreicia, whose "notary public" soul she imagined offered him relief from the burden of Roark's stern example. Yet she also angrily described him as a man who had forsaken his highest values because of "a sexual urge for the bodies of chorus girls!" 

"Inexplicably" - if you don't consider the possibility of Asperger's Syndrome, combined with years of being worshipped by her very own cult.

It's easy to feel pity for the meglomaniacal old woman, so self-serving, so deficient of insight.

The word "philosophical" has two meanings in English. The second one is:

Characterized by the attitude of a philosopher; specifically: calm or unflinching in the face of trouble, defeat, or loss

But the type of resignation implied here is antithetical to Rand's rigid, binary, winner-take-all "philosophy." And Rand's philosophy is nothing more than her own personality traits turned into a system - by Nathaniel Branden. It's a pretty safe bet that without Branden, there would only be Rand's novels, there would be no Objectivism.

And since her personality traits were indistinguishable from Objectivism, when Rand suffered a romantic disappointment it was natural for her to view it in terms of Objectivism and through the characters in her novels.

And when Branden's wife Barbara finally tells Rand the truth about the affair, her response is the opposite of philosophical - she has a complete melt-down.

It's easy to feel compassion for this clueless, delusional creature, but it's hard to understand how anybody can consider her, through either her life or her novels, to be a source of wisdom.

Another thing Ayn Rand gets wrong in Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand adored the dollar sign. She wore broaches in the shape of the dollar sign and at her memorial service had a floral arrangement in the shape of a dollar sign. And the dollar sign is all over Atlas Shrugged, including the final gesture of the book. The dollar sign is to objectivists what the cross is to Christians.

But unlike Christians, Rand didn't actually know where the symbol came from. In the painfully long tenth chapter of Part 2 of Atlas Shrugged, "The Sign of the Dollar" she has Owen Kellogg (some guy who's long since gone Galt and just happens to show up when the crew of her train gets raptured go Galt) explains, as they are sharing a smoke of John Galt's personal cigarette blend - the brand with the gold dollar sign stamped on each cigarette:

"Incidentally, do you know where the sign comes from? It comes from the initials of the United States."

Now since I've seen Rand's bone-headed mistakes concerning Prometheus, the East River and iceberg similes, I was suspicious of this explanation - it has too much of the Randian wish-fulfillment that infuses Atlas Shrugged. So I checked out both Wikipedia and The Straight Dope and they both agree that this is not the most likely explanation. The Straight Dope debunks:

The dollar sign was originally the letters U and S superimposed. The idea here is that the original dollar sign had two vertical lines, not one. Popular though this idea is, there is zero documentary evidence for it. Furthermore, Robert Morris, the Revolutionary War financier and the first U.S. official to use the dollar sign, made it with a single vertical stroke.

And then proceeds:

Professor Florian Cajori contends that the dollar sign is an abbreviation for "pesos." Bear in mind that the Spanish dollar, also known as the peso de 8 reales, was the principal coin in circulation in the U.S. up until 1794, when we began minting our own dollars. In handwriting, "pesos" was usually abbreviated lowercase "ps," with S above and to the right of the P and with the hook on the latter written with one or two deep strokes. As time went on, the P and the S tended to get mashed together and the result was $. 

The dollar sign and the PS abbreviation were used interchangeably from around 1775 until the end of the century, after which the latter faded from view. Professor Cajori backs up his argument with examples from manuscript, and I'm prepared to declare the matter settled.

I don't know if Rand was aware of the alternative theories but even if she was I'm sure she would prefer not to use the peso version - in Atlas Shrugged she takes great care to tell us that Francisco d'Anconia looks Latin only in the sense of ancient Rome, not in the sense of a Latino.

And Mexico is a bad guy in Atlas Shrugged full of looters who nationalized everything in sight.

More ragesex

The work of Ayn Rand has such powers of hilarity that it can inspire wit in any writer.

I don't care much for the work of Richard Brody of the New Yorker, especially his recent "The Demise of Physical Comedy" which I thought was completely inane. But there are two notable items in his review of Atlas Shrugged, Part 1. I had to LOL at this:

The preening resentment of the smart social misfit finds its fantasy fulfillment, as Rand’s flamboyant potboiler intensity (and her fascination with the authority of the great loner) gives rise to a tittering knowingness: the words “union” and “guild” are the pretexts for sneers and smears, and an unintentional howler of a business plan may give rise to a new, Tarzan-style pickup line: “My metal, your railway.” 

The second item - looks like I'm not the only one to figure out why Rand made the switch from oil to coal in her story:

The story is set in 2016 in a dystopian America beset by economic depression and a new oil crisis, which is the pretext for rendering rail travel—the core of the novel’s plot—newly central.

But Brody is no match for Dani the Atlas Shrugged Liveblogger in the humor department:

Dagny then “turn[s] with indifferent astonishment” to open the door, whatever that means, and the ringer of her doorbell turns out to be Frisco, who’s come for a sexy, sexy two three-page conversation that is probably meant to sound deeply philosophical but that only sounds obtuse.  So, basically, it’s Atlas Shrugged.

The philsobtuseversation pretty much boils down to this:

Frisco: I can’t believe you went back to work!  You’re such a stupidhead!
Dagny:  Well, I can’t believe you quit work!  You’re the real stupidhead!
Frisco:  Nuh-uh, you are!
Dagny:  Nuh-uh, you are! 

This masterpiece of dramatic dialogue is interrupted by the sudden entry of Hank Rearden, who apparently has a key to Dagny’s apartment.

Have you ever seen a soap opera? This is a soap opera. There’s a highly predictable love-triangle quarrel complete with obligatory slappings of faces, then somebody storms out. It’s so cliche I can’t even be bothered to remember who does the slapping and who the storming. At least when Gone With the Wind did it, we got some shattered porcelain and hoopskirts.

One of the best things about reading the work of other people who have live-blogged Atlas Shrugged is their confirmation that something that you read in Atlas Shrugged really was in there, and that they too experienced the incredulity and frustration that you did. When I was reading the quarrel between d'Anconia and Dagny in the book I remember having the same response - that this was an incredibly inane and repetitive argument.

And I was glad that the other blogger had this response too:

Then Rand pulls the biggest bait-and-switch in literature since Harry Potter discovered Snape wasn’t really trying to steal the Sorcerer’s Stone after all: 

        He stood looking at her, disarmed and smiling.  ”Not yet.  You have a      great deal to forgive me, first.  But I can tell you everything now.” 

BUT HE DOESN’T.  OF COURSE HE DOESN’T.  WE HAVE 550 PAGES OF THIS CRAP TO GO.

I also love the word the blogger gave to Dagny and Rearden's couplings: ragesex. And she's not kidding when she describes the confrontation between Rearden and d'Anconia over Dagny as a soap opera.

(Rearden) made a step towards Francisco; he asked, pointing at Dagny, his voice low and strangely unlike his own voice, as if it neither came from, nor was addressed to, a living person.  

"Is this the woman you love?" 

Francisco closed his eyes. 

"Don't ask him that!" The cry was Dagny's. 

"Is this the woman you love?" 

Francisco answered, looking at her, "Yes." 

Rearden's hand rose, swept down, and slapped Francisco's face. The scream came from Dagny. When she could see again - after an instant that felt as if the blow had struck her own cheek - Francisco's hands were the first thing she saw...

Now mind you, this isn't after Rearden has discovered that d'Anconia and Dagny had sex. He slapped d'Anconia for merely admitting she's the woman he loves. After all this, he still cannot figure it out until...

The sound she made was half-chuckle, half-moan - it was not a desire for vengeance but a desperate sense of justice that drove the cutting bitterness of her voice, as she cried, consciously throwing the words in his face, "You wanted to know the name of that other man? The man I slept with? The man who had me first? It was Francisco d'Anconia!" 

She saw the force of the blow by seeing his face swept blank. She knew that if justice was her purpose then she had achieved it, because this slap was worse than the one she had dealt.

Putting aside the unavoidable, perplexed speculation on the chuckle/moan, you really have to wonder what is wrong with Hank Rearden that he hits d'Anconia without technically knowing that he'd boinked Dagny - but that reminded me of something I'd read about people with Asperger's... but first the ragesex.

That Ayn Rand was a kinkster. It takes Rearden another half-page to process the soul crushing information that Dagny has had sex with one whole other man besides himself in her entire life, and then...

He seized her shoulders, and she felt prepared to accept that he would now kill her or beat her into unconsciousness - 

(and considering that Rearden congratulated himself for not killing his wife when she discovered that he was cheating on her, she might be right)

- and in the moment when she felt certain he had thought of it, she felt her body thrown against him and his mouth falling on hers, more brutally than the act of a beating would have permitted.

(That must be one mofo heavy mouth.)

She found herself, in terror, twisting her body to resist, and in exultation, twisting her arms around him, holding him, letting her lips bring blood to his, knowing that she never wanted him as she did at that moment.

But this is the best part - the Dagster is basically fantasizing about having both of them simultaneously - the two men of her entire thirty-something years:

...his conquest of that man by means of her body - she felt Francisco's presence through Rearden's mind, she felt as if she were surrendering to both men, to that which she had worshipped in both of them...

These people so need to have a three-way.

So a little later, Dagny's loyal thankless flunky Eddie Willers shows up to take dictation from Dagny, in her bedroom, while she's packing her suitcase to go on a roadtrip to find the Superman she assigned to figuring out the magic machine, when poor Eddie has a revelation:

He knew what was wrong with him, he thought; he did not want her to leave, he did not want to lose her again, after so brief a moment of reunion. But to indulge any personal loneliness, at a time when he knew how desperately the railroad needed her in Colorado, was an act of disloyalty he had never committed before - and he felt a vague, desolate sense of guilt.  

"Send out orders that the Comet is to stop at every division point," she said "and that all division superintendents are to prepare for me a report on -" 

He glanced up - then saw his glance stopped and did not hear the rest of the words. He saw a man's dressing gown hanging on the back of the open closet door, a dark blue gown with the white initials HR on its breast pocket.
He remembered where he had seen that gown before, he remembered the man facing him across the breakfast table at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel, he remembered that man coming,  unannounced, to her office late on a Thanksgiving night - and the realization that he should have known it, came as two subterranean jolts of a single earthquake: it came with a feeling that said "No!" so savagely that the scream, not the sight, brought down every girder within him. It was not the shock of the discovery, but the more terrible shock of what it made him discover about himself.

If you think Hank Rearden was slow on the uptake in figuring out who was schtupping whom, Eddie makes him look psychic in contrast.

But even more amazing is his lack of insight into his own feelings for Dagny. He's known her since they were children, and he has never ever had a single thought in the book that was not directly related to Dagny or her railroad. Not a single one. And he doesn't know he is in love with her until he sees Hank Rearden's dressing gown?

I'm not forgetting of course that the only reason for Willers' existence is to worship Dagny and the railroad, which is why Rand can't be bothered to give him a family or a social life or any other interests, but the idea that somebody is not aware of his own feelings comes straight out of standard diagnostics for people with Asperger's:

Although Theory of Mind is typically seen as referring to the ability to assess other people’s mental states, there is strong evidence that the processes of assessing one’s own and other’s mental states are closely related (Frith, 1989; Frith & Frith, 2003). This suggests that Theory of Mind deficits might also lead to difficulties assessing one’s own mental states (e.g., Moriguchi et al., 2006). It is important to note that this may not only hold for cognitive states, but also for emotional states. If this is correct, Theory of Minddeficits should be related to difficulties reading and labeling one’s own emotions, as well as those of other people.

Both Eddie and Hank seem to be created to illustrate the inability to assess one's own emotional states.

I should point out here that I'm not attacking people with Asperger's by suggesting that Ayn Rand had Asperger's Syndrome - I'm sure there are plenty of people with Asperger's who don't consider their condition to be a sign of superiority and neurotypicals to be the parasites that need to be exterminated. Like neurotypicals, people with Asperger's are individuals and vary greatly. But like neurotypicals they are not all saints either. And Ayn Rand isn't the only (probable) Asperger who hated non-Asperger traits: 

Yes, yes I hate them all without reservation.  

This includes people I love - their NT traits make me sorry for them and I cannot ever fully trust them because of those NT traits. But I make do.
I really do think NT's are 'less evolved', and for all their struggles and occasional briliance, they nonetheless present a difficult and philosophical choice: Is it possible to ever truly, fully trust an animal, or a stupid person? 

No, I don't think it is.  

So while its not necessarily necessary to like, dislike, hate, or even 'love' them, its very necessary to keep one eye on them, and be prepared to squash when necessary.  

Yes, I hate NT's, and I wish there were less of them in the world and more A's.

Another person with autism fantasizes about something that sounds very much like going Galt:

As an advocate of autism rights, I sometimes dream of autism-only spaces. I’m sure other advocates have had that exhaustive moment of “Oh fuck it, I want to buy a private island and invite all my autistic allies to come live with me alone.” It’s pretty easy to feel that way, when the mainstream conversations about autism conveniently forget the disability rights credo of “Nothing about us without us” and prioritize the experiences and “knowledge” of parents and doctors over that of autistic people, effectively silencing them. 

It’s also easy to fantasize about that when you are in a group where autistic people outnumber the neurotypicals, and the conversations are rich, interesting, and feel safer somehow, more free, because you are not constantly wondering whether what you say will be used to prove you are too smart or too high functioning to comment on this or that. I’ve participated in autistic-majority conversations when discussing projects, and the amount of smiles, laughter, and mutual understanding involved made me feel a cheesy kodak moment of, “So this is what it feels like to be accepted.”

And a commenter named Spacemonkey on an Atlas Shrugged forum on Amazon.com makes some excellent points in favor of the proposition that Rand had Asperger's - my favorite point is number 6, especially because I missed calling out the first train wreck in my own analysis - and it's funny:

6) Human life and the emotional/existential experience of others seems bizarrely undervalued. In two of the most unwittingly hilarious sections of the book, trains crash, giving intriguing insights into Ms Rand's psyche as they do so. 

In the first TERRIBLE TRAGEDY of the book, a train carrying copper collides head-on with a passenger train on a hillside, spilling PRECIOUS COPPER everywhere. Hank Reardon surveys the terrible tragic waste of PRECIOUS COPPER spilled over the tracks, before gritting his teeth at the hellish awfulness of it all, and heroically organising alternate transport so his PRECIOUS COPPER can get there on time, without so much letting an emotion slip out because of all the tragedy of the PRECIOUS COPPER. Because that's the kind of heroic guy he is. 

**IT HIT A FREAKING PASSENGER TRAIN HEAD-ON. THE HILLSIDE WOULD BE LITTERED WITH DEAD PEOPLE. RAND DOESN'T EVEN MENTION THIS ONCE.** 

The time people DO get killed in the train, of course, in the collapse of the tunnel, they have pretty much asked for it, by dint of being teachers, social workers, journalists, humanitarians, mothers etc. They knew the risks of living in a society that wasn't based on fascistic capitalism, so screw them, right? They're only useful to make a point. Screw them.

The rest of Spacemonkey's commentary on the novel is equally incisive. And then somebody else on the board named A Capitalist jumps in to basically embody every point that Spacemonkey has made about Rand. 

This Onion parody Autistic Reporter: Train Thankfully Unharmed In Crash That Killed One Man seems to be about Ayn Rand as much as anything else.

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.