-Caveat Lector-
6/21/99
Poor Ayn Rand. If this is best defense she can get out of her
cultists,
she's better off dead. My complaint is that she died way too late.
& Ding dong the bitch is dead.
The wicked old bitch is dead, is dead.
Ding dong,
the wicked old bitch is dead...&
A musical,
Joshua2
----------------------
Kris Millegan wrote:
>
> -Caveat Lector-
>
> from;
> http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.25/pageone.html
> <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.25/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City
> Times
> </A>
> -----
> Laissez FaireCity Times
> June 21, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 25
> Editor & Chief: Emile Zola
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ayn Rand, Smeared Again
>
> The Ayn Rand Cult
>
> by Wolf DeVoon
>
> To win an argument, impeach the dead. That's the macabre strategy of
> Jeff Walker's 400-page history of Objectivism, entitled The Ayn Rand
> Cult. Walker presents himself as an honest scholar. In reality, he's an
> intellectual assassin whose mission is to exhume and burn Ayn Rand, body
> and soul, as a gesture of allegiance to "respectable" authors like Gore
> Vidal.
>
> I'm not a big fan of book reviews, so here's the bottom line. Buy a copy
> of Walker's encyclopedic assault on Objectivism. It's packed with
> anecdotes, confessions, hyperbole, and self-serving excuses supplied by
> Leonard Peikoff, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, John Hospers, David
> Kelley, the late Murray Rothbard, Erika Holzer, Tibor Machan, Albert
> Ellis, Joan and Allan Blumenthal, and virtually everyone else who knew
> Ayn Rand. Walker's tattletale informants denounce her (and ridicule
> Objectivism as a philosophy) with every conceivable slander. Ayn Rand
> was incompetent. Ayn Rand was a plagiarist. Ayn Rand was a drug addict.
> Ayn Rand was insane. The only people influenced by her novels were naive
> adolescents and uneducated fools. Ayn Rand was a hypocrite. Her
> scholarship was superficial and inaccurate. She was a fake and a
> failure, according to dozens of victims who regret their participation
> in a mad "cult" that worshipped a cowardly, whining, deceitful, paranoid
> autocrat who systematically abused her family and business associates.
> The only nitwit who still believes in Objectivism nowadays is Leonard
> Peikoff -- a third-rate student whose grasp of philosophical issues
> extends no farther than an undeserved sinecure, jealously milking her
> book royalties and film rights for personal gain.
>
> So much for the book review. Now let's talk sense.
>
> The world is a big place. Among the six billion living and five billion
> dead, it's easy to find examples of human dignity, sobriety, genius,
> creativity, passion, gentle goodness, and an equally broad spectrum of
> rottenness. I'm currently living in a Colorado town that happens to be
> prosperous and pleasant. I've also lived in South Central Los Angeles
> and a dozen other hellholes, including a two-year stint in Federal
> prison. Trust me.
>
> The world is a big place. I've seen it from a penthouse in Singapore and
> a windswept ditch in Wisconsin, a kampong in Java and the most elegant
> nightclubs of Mayfair and Monte Carlo. I've had more than my share of
> opportunity, especially as a young man who wanted everything the world
> could offer. My mentors were brilliant, flamboyant, courageous,
> charismatic, loyal and stern. The six dozen women I loved at various
> times were innocent, lascivious, dangerous, shockingly beautiful,
> playful, obstinate, and surprisingly tough.
>
> Like Ayn Rand, I disowned my parents and siblings. I worked as a
> screenwriter in Hollywood. I met Nathaniel Branden, John Hospers, Milton
> Friedman, and a couple hundred other "libertarians." I studied at
> prestigious universities that made me want to vomit with disgust,
> because they're full of philistines and bureaucrats. I campaigned
> against statism, for freedom. I wrote hundreds of thousands of words
> that were rejected (or ignored) by Liberty, Reason, The Freeman, The
> Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, and every book publisher and
> literary agent in the English-speaking world. My film projects were
> sabotaged, stolen, vetoed, and panned. It made me into a cold, hard
> renegade who despises every word in print, every game show, every film
> produced by Hollywood. I live in a world that has categorically shunned
> me. Now age 49, I'm struggling to survive as a day-laborer, climbing
> steel ladders and carrying heavy crates of equipment to rooftops, so
> that suburban restaurants and banks can play Elton John's brainless
> greatest hits.
>
> The point here is that I understand Ayn Rand.
>
> In Walker's poison-pen history, Barbara Branden is quoted as saying,
> "Ayn would have given anything in the world to find an equal, and
> anything in the world -- plus the next three worlds, if there are such
> -- to have found a superior intellect." On the next page, Ayn Rand's
> attorney Hank Holzer moans that his client "was such a prick... She was
> a terrible person to deal with."
>
> Trading Reason for Disneyland
>
> Big surprise. The loneliest person on earth was an asshole. One of
> Rand's private letters candidly admits: "I am becoming more anti-social
> than I was... I can't stand the sort of things people talk about." It
> was no fun being Alissa Rosenbaum in Russia, and less fun being Ayn Rand
> in New York City, because she saw the United States of America crumbling
> into a childishly vapid playgroup that traded reason for Disneyland and
> heroism for Toys R Us.
>
> As proof of Rand's incompetence, Walker mocks her struggle against
> despair and depression. "She was obsessed with not being affected by
> pain in any fundamental way," according to Nathaniel Branden. "All her
> energies were mobilized to deny her suffering."
>
> Edith Efron goes out of her way to help Walker belittle Rand: "There is
> no way to communicate how crazy she was... Ultimately everyone who knew
> her would ask themselves, 'Is she insane or am I?'... She was a
> profoundly manipulative woman. And the flaw it implied in her was not
> simply a neurosis but a profound disease." The copy editor for Atlas
> Shrugged adds that, working with Rand, "there was never a light
> moment... no capacity for simple enjoyment." Comedian Mark Breslin (who
> never met Ayn Rand) sniffs that Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are
> "utterly, utterly humorless."
>
> Mary Gaitskill says it's simply a case of bad storytelling, concluding
> that Rand contrived "an intellectual game that doesn't address the
> reader at a more emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically integrated
> level." The characters in The Fountainhead "have this kind of sticky,
> gooey, pulpy, drama happening for them," but "Atlas doesn't even have
> that, so I think [for readers] it's like a third or fourth removal of a
> mental response on a low level." Screenwriter John Hill agrees. Atlas
> depicts "a grim, humorless universe."
>
> The indictment is complete. Rand was an asshole. She wrote crap.
>
> Or did she?
>
> In a grown-up world, where thoughtful people understand the difference
> between the truth of a proposition and an ad hominem attack on the
> person who said it, it matters that "Evil requires the sanction of the
> victim" (Atlas Shrugged). Ayn Rand never gave her enemies, competitors,
> associates, or admirers that sanction -- not even when she was wrong and
> they were right. It is undoubtedly true that Rand made mistakes. She
> suffered. She was influenced by Nietzsche and Spillane. But none of that
> mattered. Her achievement was personal autonomy. It is so rare a human
> achievement that many of her contemporaries mistook it for madness.
>
> I was in Al Ruddy's office when he tried to resurrect the deal with Rand
> for the film rights to Atlas Shrugged. She was indeed paranoid, refusing
> to leave her apartment because "the KGB are trying to kill me!" Maybe
> they were. I asked Hospers to intervene. He laughed and said she was
> hooked on amphetamines, completely irrational.
>
> Yesterday, I got out of a beat-up truck, dead tired from a week of
> brutally hot physical labor, exactly twenty years after John Hospers
> laughed at an isolated, troubled old woman. When I slammed the door of
> the truck, my feet were in terrible pain and I had to waddle slowly to a
> cheap, two-room apartment. "I'm so sick of being rational!" I said
> aloud. "I hate being rational!" I shouted to the rest of the
> neighborhood, with their new cars and spacious homes. I have to be
> rational because my life is at stake on a rooftop, surrounded by power
> cables and puddles of stagnant water. Most of my neighbors are making a
> six-figure income, doing something they enjoy. They have assets. My wife
> and I have nothing, except the imperative to stay rational or lose our
> lives. It is unbearably horrid, constantly watching my step on a ladder,
> balancing a 50-lb crate of tools. I hate this work. It barely puts food
> on the table.
>
> Galt�s Creed
>
> Yet, I often recite Galt's creed: I swear by my life and my love of it,
> that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man
> to live for mine. It doesn't matter whether Ayn Rand said it as an
> original thought, or stole it from Stirner, or found it in a box of
> Cracker Jacks. It doesn't matter whether Neil Schulmann publishes my
> novel or goes out of business next month. I don't even care if he screws
> me out of the film rights, and Queenie and I end up toothless old
> beggars in some nightmare of poverty. I'm in debt beyond any hope of
> repayment, much of it to personal friends. Anything I earn in the future
> belongs to the IRS for back taxes. But for now and forever, there is
> something that cannot be taken from me. I own one life -- mine -- in
> prison or out, in sickness or destitution or whatever else happens next.
> I understand Ayn Rand's personal hell, because she owned her life in
> just this same way. The only difference between us is that Rand became a
> wealthy celebrity. If it happens to me, I will be just as shy and stern
> in public, just as awkward on television and angry about surprise
> birthday parties.
>
> What have I "invented" as an author? -- not much. Two make a fire. It
> means nothing out of context. The hero says "I like being wrong." At a
> crucial moment in the third act, I wrote three words: Time ribbon stop.
> Not even a complete sentence.
>
> Queenie and I amuse each other by quoting lines of dialogue from a movie
> that was never released: "With or without the fish"... "I licked the
> checks and mailed the stamps"... "Rubber noses and dinner at 10." My
> website advocates nuking West 57th Street and the Vatican. I angrily
> proclaimed that government is impotent and illusory. In G21 World
> Magazine, I said that love mocks right and wrong. What sort of
> intellectual achievement is that?
>
> Plenty. It's mine. I understand Hank Rearden perfectly. It's mine.
>
> Jeff Walker inadvertently performed a public service by ridiculing Ayn
> Rand's ideas. Analyzing her philosophy, he rightly says that "... for an
> Objectivist, 'survival' automatically means survival at a fully human,
> rational level -- nothing less." Fully me. Fully a creature of my own
> making, for better or worse, with the knowledge that I'm probably going
> to fail because the deck is stacked in favor of Bill Clinton and George
> Lucas.
>
> Of all the snide revelations hurled by Mr. Walker, one was the most
> hurtful and most accurate. The Chicago Tribune recently nominated Atlas
> Shrugged as the second worst novel of the millennium. "Here is a book
> despised by the literati and beloved by the masses," Walker concludes.
> True enough. I love Atlas Shrugged. It freed me and kept me free through
> 30 years of painful exile. Ayn Rand said that reality is real, and that
> the unreal bullshit around us is an historical product of evil bastards
> like Oliver Wendall Holmes and Gore Vidal.
>
> Rand�s Triumph
>
> I admit it, that Objectivism is a no-frills philosophy that appeals to
> marginalized, bad-tempered, socially awkward children. I admit also that
> Ayn Rand dimmed my interest in other authors. She made more sense than
> the Bible and Richard Nixon. It was as simple as that.
>
> Despite everything I've said or implied in this article, I want to
> emphasize that Ayn Rand triumphed in her crusade to short-circuit the
> course of human history. See http://www.anarchista.com and read Kari
> Freckleton's analysis of Rand's legacy.
>
> Rand used to say "It's earlier than we think" -- but that was 30 years
> ago. Don't be surprised by what happens next, when Branden and Peikoff
> and others are eclipsed by real-world events.
>
> In the meantime, those of us who revere Ayn Rand as the patron saint of
> healthy children sleep peacefully every night. Our lives are governed,
> not by Mr. Walker's learned colleagues at the Canadian Broadcasting
> Company and The New York Times, but by a simple axiom of no interest to
> academic philosophers: that A is A.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Jeff Walker, The Ayn Rand Cult, Open Court, 1999, xvii + 396 pages.
>
> -30-
>
> from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 25, June 21, 1999
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Published by
> Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc.
> Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar
> All Rights Reserved
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