John Rogers on "going Galt":
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
I'm assuming that, when obscenely rich people yammer on about "going Galt," that would involve moving to their summer house and dismissing Carlos, the pool boy, since they're by gosh going to look after that pool by themselves now and won't that just teach that whole economy thing a harsh lesson?
Or something.
19 comments:
He should re-read Atlas Shrugged - if he can. In adulthood, it's revealed to be a schlockish romance with no sex and a lot of ridiculous posing - literally ridiculous posing, I mean, too.
I support those who say they're going to "go Galt". I just wish they'd hurry up and go.
I'm no Randian, but am a great fan of The Fountainhead personally. I second the comments made here about Atlas Shrugged, which degenerates all too quickly into tinny propaganda with one-dimensional characters. If Atlas Shrugged is literature, so is every leaflet and screed put out by Kim Il Sung.
Awesome takedown of AS and Ayn Rand here: http://heyjennyslater.blogspot.com/2009/03/atlas-sucked.html
I know it isn't this blog's thing to comment on Hollywood celebs, but anyone else think Angelina Jolie looks like a total bimbo in her admiration of this novel and its late, screeching author? I mean, how the hell could a UN Goodwill Ambassador who supposedly gives generous amounts of her income to charity admire the writings of a lunatic who equated altruism with suicide?
She's an idiot?
I remember a group of friends in high school getting all excited over The Fountainhead, which, along with Ayn Rand, I had never heard of before (despite coming from a really bookish family). First hint of uneasiness was the dialectical epiphanies they were all having, which was enough to turn me off, since I've always been suspicious of wild-eyed exuberance. It was only after undergrad that I found out that Ayn Rand had developed an entire philosophy...a "complete system" (again, alarms going off), which had a vaguely stale, 1960-ish, self-help/American babbitry quality to it. Then I found out her little cult had fallen apart due to a tawdry little sex scandal and that was pretty much the end of that.
Someone dig up Ayn Rand's corpse and scatter the remains to the winds. It's time to put an end to this already.
You had friends in high school?
From the comments at KFM:
http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
An essay on Rand's "real man."
I can only echo that commenter,"That's just creepy."
He is putting down Atlas shrugged. There are orcs in LOTR, or did I read it wrong?
I also point to the train scene, as I recall, where the woman(can't remember her name) is running around using hand signals, and other super-heroic methods, to keep the precious 'TT' corporate symbol on her trains viable and on time - and John sees her and is so overcome with intellectual lust and then they make love.
A good CEO never gets bothered enough by a devestating corporate crisis that they won't stop for sex.
Don't know if the trains were late, but she evidentally wasn't.
You had friends in high school?
Indeed I did. Why do you ask?
WV = expleney
Her name was Dagny and I thank Ayn Rand to this day for inspiring me to strive for great train sex in my lifetime.
(hint: the bottom berth way more comfortable than the roomettes)
Oh... no reason...
Hey - "expleney" is what Dick Cheney does every time he opens his big festering gob.
I can't remember a single goddamned thing about Atlas Shrugged except that it was the longest Harlequin Romance I ever read.
Liar. No one...NO ONE...has ever read Atlas Shrugged. Ayn Rand never even finished writing it. The last 471 pages are blank.
I've read it at least a half dozen times.
Well stop it. You'll end up retarded.
This is one my favourite articles on Atlas Shrugged.
"She runs through the politics of the train crash victims, implying they were accessories to the socialist government that is being justly punished: “The man in Bedroom A, Car No One, was a professor of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that everything is achieved collectively, that it’s the masses that count, not men… The woman in Roomette 10, Car No 3, was an elderly school teacher who who spent her life turning class after class of helpless schoolchildren into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that they must not assert their personalities, but do as others were doing.” And so endlessly on, through over a dozen deserving victims. “There was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas,” she notes – so let them burn."
It's fun to re-imagine that in the context of the 9/11 disaster.
Geez Louise, now I know where David Warren and Mark Steyn get all their column ideas.
I shall now post my standard comment that Ayn Rand was a sexual submissive who conflated her sexuality into a political philosophy.
She is also the Marxist equivalent of a Satanist. She accepted the philosophy of the Marxists but inverted it. What is bad in standard Marxism became good in her philosophy. And vice versa.
Which says a lot about her followers and worshippers.
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