[pedonbio]

Perhaps we should have a chat some time--I've had the same thing happen, to the point that I started feeling like I was a character in my character's novel. That's when I put it aside for a year or so.

[DruulEmpire]

Well, we could chat here -- or heck, we could e-mail.  Wouldn't mind using the chat room here, except that it will never let me back in (certainly not at this rate of non-maintenance), and I'm opposed on principle to having to create a whole new alias just to specifically qualify for that "privilege."  I've never been quite where you are, feeling too much like a character, although I've tended to avoid anything persuasively autobiographical and kept to science fiction, so that may help.  For that matter, it is my religious argument that no one published book can possibly encompass God, for the simple reason that the universe itself is the ultimate book, in which we are all characters.

While I'm replying, I may as well push on a few pages, because now I think I'm finally understanding the whole r4pe charge against this book.  I think I just glossed over it before -- "yeh-yeh, Dagny and Hank are getting it on" -- but now I'm feeling more of a WTF? reaction.  Especially wild that this should come up right after James parting with Cherryl -- perhaps Rand thought she was masterfully contrasting dysfunctional sex with hot sex, but eh, it's ALL looking dysfunctional.  Hank comes over to see Dagny, lavishes compliments on her work on the John Galt Line, but then "seized her arm, threw her down on her knees, twisting her body against his legs."  (I'm fairly tall myself, but how does one twist an entire body against just your legs?)  Next he keeps asking her who she **84** with before him (it was Francisco d'Anconia, dumbass), and then we get the following:

     The laughter in her eyes made it sound like a slap across his face, the laughter of her knowledge
that this was the answer he dreaded and wanted.
     He twisted her arms behind her, holding her helpless, her breasts pressed against him; she felt the pain ripping through her shoulders, she heard the anger in his words ... he saw that the shape of her mouth, distorted by pain, was the shape of a mocking smile.
     He felt it change to a shape of surrender ... He held her body as if the violence and despair of the way he took her could wipe his unknown rival out of existence ...  He knew, by the eagerness of her movement as her arms seized him, that this was the way she wanted to be taken.

Okay, so, given the rather dreary 268 pages up till this point, I suppose it IS relatively hot.  Still, you have to worry about impressionable virgins imagining this to be some kind of serious sex manual.  Like they keep saying throughout the movie "Sin City": "Yeeeeesh."    

[DruulEmpire]

Bizarrely enough, there are few things I think are more appropriate to King Day than hacking my way through "Shrugged," so here goes, as I conclude Chapter Nine.

What's wild is that this book has been claiming to be a mystery for over a quarter thousand pages now and the rather obvious key to that mystery drops directly and easily into Dagny's lap on a kind of whim.  First, though, we hear a Mr. Mowen bemoaning all the unfair shifting of business and public interest to Colorado because of Ellis Wyatt's oil field rejuvenation.  He is anti-success -- and like James Taggart before him, again I'm obliged to wonder: is he actually supposed to be anyone, anyone real, anyone human?  About the closest thing we have to a Randian hero these days is Steve Jobs, and the man continues to be showered with laurels.  Anyway, we have another out-of-the-blue straw man -- and notice that he is only called Mr. Mowen.  Later in this book we will meet a Mr. Thompson, who for all intents and purposes is the American President.  Did Rand opt for mere Mister because her imagination was failing her?  I find that doubtful -- in fact, I rather appreciate her vaguely Dickensian aptitude with names like Lee Hunsacker or Claude Slagenhop or even Balph -- yes, Balph, not Ralph -- Eubank.

Luckily, once we're introduced to an earnest young man with the OK name Owen Kellogg, we finally turn back to Hank and Dagny, bemoaning the emptiness of people complimenting them on how much people need them, and then they up and decide to spend a long and allegedly random driving vacation together.  Eventually, though, Dagny will ask to check up on the Twentieth Century Motor Company.  They find the whole area rundown, with only some aimless listless people still hanging around, and they are able to wander freely through the abandoned and unsecured factory.  There Dagny discovers and recognizes what can only be () a motor which can draw static electricty from out of the air.  She marvels at what a revolution it could have been, and wonders how it could have been deliberately junked, and of course she has to wonder about the inventor -- and if by now you can't shout out the name of this "mysterious" inventor, you need to read more mysteries.

Here I realize that what intrigues me about this novel is how backward it has become.  When it came out in 1957, conservatism was at peace with Heinlein-Gernsbackian technocracy, and it was taken as a given that critics of said technocracy could only be ignorant shaggy superstitious hordes.  But today, it seems to me that the so-called Left has taken up the details of science, while the Right can not plead technical ignorance fast enough.  It is as if a time of quantum mechanics and general relativity has somehow "betrayed" the iron determinism of the archconservative spirit.  To take Rand at her word, though, so many of her so-called disciples have the whole energy issue exactly wrong.  Here's page 289:

"Hank!  Don't you understand what this means?  It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine -- greater than that! ... Who'll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations? ... "

Yes, you read that correctly.  Rand could actually get excited about the usurpation of the internal-combustion engine and an end to oil and coal.  Notice also that she pointedly avoids mention of atomic energy -- the upcoming evil Project X will be allegedly ultrasonic in nature but reek of atomic imagery.  What's more, the motor draws energy from all around us, much like ... oh, I don't know ... sunlight?  Wind power?  Heat deep beneath the earth?  The tides?

Sadly, Rand is no scientist, which is evident straightaway in her choice of static electricity, which is useless prcisely because it is, after all, STATIC, that is, nearly immobile.  On this score she reminds us of sad tangents ranging from the "Dean drive" to Joseph Newman's charlatanry to "zero-point energy."  Like Dubya vaguely wondering at discovering something new (just not necessarily alien life) on Mars, she like too many others seems to want some modern equivalent of the medieval Philosopher's Stone, some handy gimmick by which to "cheat" the laws of nature.  It all makes for one fascinating mess.

Coming up: Chapter Ten will simply try to intensify the "mystery," and that will conclude Part One.  I'm looking forward to Part Two, which will feature what I call Francisco d'Anconia's Sermon on the Monetary.  However, I feel this is enough for a day off.

[DruulEmpire]

I would feel remiss if I let January slip by without even a little extra progress on this, so I'll move on to page 300.  This takes care of the first nine pages of Chapter X, which is called Wyatt's Torch.

Dagny and Hank find out that the mystery of the abandoned supermotor lies with a town called Rome, Wisconsin.  (Weirdly enough, the undervalued TV series "Picket Fences" was set in a Rome, Wisconsin.)  They track down a Mayor Bascom, a peculiar fool who buys the rundown adandoned factory and yet is too "practical" to reopen it, and yet expects it to be some sort of magical source of income.  In his own dopey way, Bascom oddly reminds me of Gordon Gekko, who would very deliberately seek to wreck a struggling company and immediately turn it into a garage sale.  The talk with Bascom goes sour when he makes a remark about Hank hanging out with a pretty lady who's not his wife -- ahh, once more, the rich must suffer, suffer the judgments of their lessers.  After that pointless bit of drama, Dagny calls Eddie Willers and learns that the bureaucrats are out to "kill Colorado."  She meets with the bureaucrats and learns that they're pretty much going to fudge and indecide their way towards just that -- and then we're past page 300.


At least something's happening, thought this could have come whole chapters ago.  I'm struck, incidentally, by the chapter's title, Wyatt's Torch.  Spoiler alert: by chapter's end Ellis Wyatt will set off an ultimate oil fire, a sky-high "torch" basically declaring "Fuck you, world."  I have to wonder if Rand thought she was topping the spectacle of "Fountainhead" in which the hero dynamites a building not constructed to his specifications.  Weirdly enough, I'm not sure this ever really caught on with readers.  Perhaps "Fountainhead" fans approved of the dynamiting of a building converted to low-income housing, while oil is too precious to part with; perhaps in that Rand overestimated.  Also notice that you hear murmurs of hero love for Howard Roark, or John Galt, or even Henry Rearden -- but in my experience the character of Ellis Wyatt seems to have slipped the minds of the Randists.  Kind of a shame, since she really seemed to be betting a lot on that Torch.      

[DruulEmpire]

I may as well at least finish off the first third of the book.

I held off a while because I was hard pressed to think of the right way to sum up that end, because there's still so much to come, such as the focus on the "traitorous" scientist Robert Stadler, or even what I call Francisco d'Anconia's Sermon on the Monetary, let alone the fate of Cherryl Brooks or the full mythology of the Twentieth Century Motor Company and how You Know Who left it.  Offhand the first two parts feel like one big part: everything grinding down, the crying need for utopia.

If Chapter X ends with any theme, I would call it a gallery of foils.  Dagny goes on trying to hunt down the young ingenious engineer of the static-electricity-capturing motor (which would be beyond genius and constitute outright magic -- notice that even the most ultraright scientific speculators never sigh "If only we could harvest static") and meets useless bureaucrats along the way.  Paul Larkin moans to her that his good intention is all that's important; Eugene Lawson declares that, yes, he ran a busines but theat he is devoted to love; Lee Hunsacker moans that he never got a break.

Now as before, when I asked who James Taggart is, I now have to ask who Eugene Lawson is.  Evidently his caring about his workers automatically spells all doom and abandonment of the business aspect.  Interesting tale to spin -- but who would he be based on?  When I think of a boss who made sure his workers were doing fine, I think of someone like Kelleher, the man who ran Southwest Airlines, and I notice Southwest is still going strong.  I suppose we're to bleieve that the TV show "Undercover Boss" spells the end of our civilization -- although in practice all that ever seems to happen is that the boss befirends a couple of impressive individuals and gives them a vacation or something, no systemic reforms need apply.

Anyhow, while this is going on, Rand sneaks in some new heroic types.  One we learn about by sudden injection of myth, a superbusinessman named Midas (originally Michael) Mulligan who disappeared years before, and philosopher Hugh Akston, the last advocate of reason (or the first of its return) working as a humble cook.  Charming as story, but it raises a serious suspicion as metaphor, which I'll touch on later after Frisco's Sermon.

We also get Lillian Rearden playing mindfuck with Hank, saying how only complimenting an ugly woman is worthwhile, or how he's somehow too dumb to engage in the mental telepathy necessary to anticipate herdesires, blah blah blah.  In real life, Trump would've "fired" her ages ago.  An anonymous elderly man explains to Rearden "You're the only one who's got something to be looted."  No doubt Rand believed that, but she might have bothered to at least acknowledge the reverse -- that it is the people who can be, and are, looted by their bosses.

Coming up: Dr. Stadler, the Sermon, the full myth of John Galt's beginning, an antithesis of Robin Hood, a big honking train wreck.  It's pretty cool, just torturously slow to get to.    

[DruulEmpire]

It will be a little while yet before I tackle the second of the novel's three parts, but I feel compelled to make a comment on how this business in Wisconsin -- all the more amusing because Rand set the epicenter for the beginning of the fall of civilization, as well as the beginning of the underground legend of John Galt, in a town called Rome, Wisconsin -- confirms how downright anti-real Rand's "vision" is.

There could be little doubt that Rand would be siding with the Koch brothers and their all too clear power over Scott Kevin Walker against the "looters" (Rand's term) marching, and sitting down, to retain their collective bargaining rights.  Note, however, how inside-out and upside down the action is.  "Atlas" was originally titled "The Strike," because the aristocracy of industry would go on strike and leave society to suffer their absence until society capitulated.  Isn't exactly what's happening in Wisconsin, is it?  The Kochs aren't withdrawing like pained browbeaten martyrs, they're not flinching from the oppression of society -- because they ARE the oppression of society.  It's not legislation for "looters" (specifically, the working class) which is getting rammed through in a single instant, it's legislation permitting the Kochs to buy up power plants without even having to make a bid.

The events in Wisconisn could never have been predicted by Rand, or at least by "Atlas."  Towards the end of "Atlas," Rand's craven looters plead with John Galt to save them, to lead them, to be their dictator.  The Kochs are the exact oppostie of being so shy and retiring, they are SEIZING power outright.

The would-be inheritors of "Atlas Shrugged" are staging, not a strike, but a coup.  

[DruulEmpire]

Here's a funny idea: could the "hip" David Mamet be better at writing an Ayn Randian thesis than Rand herself?  Over time I've gotten to wondering if for all his gritty talk and his "Glengarry Glen Ross" if he is at heart far more conservative than he might let on.  I've enjoyed and wondered over "Oleanna," and I suspect it worked for him because as much as he was outraged by the political correctness of the complaining student, he also no doubt saw the professor as getting his due karmic comeuppance.  I have always thought of it as "a male ass getting screwed by a female prick," and he may be rooting for neither.

Such thoughts come to me after having caught all over again the Mamet-scripted movie "The Edge" starring Anthony Hopkins, Alec Baldwin and an ever-decorative Elle Macpherson.  Hopkins is billionaire Charles Morse, an oddly reserved man and a voracious fact collector.  His wife, Macpherson, gives every indication of loving him and yet it is clear that she and Baldwin are an almost-secret item.  Watching this means a little more to me after reading an article about social problems of the rich, which seem to come down very simply to this: that, as Freud argued, love and work are crucial to attacking and enjoying life, and great wealth tends to undermine both.  In "The Edge" I saw a far more moving and persuasive case to sympathize with a billionaire than in all of Rand's trotting out of the forever petty and tedious Lillian Rearden.  That, and the great Alaska scenery and a sweeping Jerry Goldsmith score helped.

Anyhow, I got in a little more reading today.  The first half of the eleventh chapter is Dr. Robert Stadler contending against a handsome but pretty much useless Dr. Floyd Ferris, who's pushing a "scientific" book basically instilling uncertainty and doubt for the sheer hell of it.  I have to wonder if this was Rand's objection -- and an objection by many of her modern "heirs" -- to the rise of the theory of relativity, as well as the discovery of non-fundamental particles such as mesons.  Science is only supposed to provide clear strong tools, but no, now we have to hear about the position of an electron as a function of probability.  I consider it a wonderful cosmic "betrayal" of Rand that scientific revelation has itself rebuked her.

Dagny is obliged to see Stadler to try to track down The Mysterious Inventor, but Stadler is of no help.  He is, however, delighted to be able to recognize the potential in the abandoned motor, and for one strange moment he considers himself a comrade to Dagny when he asks "Have you been tortured by it, too, Miss Taggart?  By the impossibility of finding any intelligence anywhere?"  Here at last Rand is trying something truly ambitious, to show a might-have-been egoist -- consider Gail Wynand from "The Fountainhead."  But how far will she succeed?

I'll knock off the remainder of this chapter later.  Only eight hundred more pages to go ...

[SamV]

Based on what you're saying about the "science" in the book I should stay away from it then. If I ever attempted to read it I'd probably spend all my time picking apart the inaccuracies in it; which is much like I do what I watch old si-fi shows.

Just this past weekend I happen to be suffering a bout of insomnia and caught part of an old episode of the 60's version of Outer Limits with Adam West. He was playing the commander of a rocket crew that landed on some alien world. I keep looking at the port hole window over his shoulder and noticing how the stars in the sky outside never shifted despite supposed hours and hours of time passing. And the fact the planet had a sufficient enough atmosphere to allow excursions outside the ship without a spacesuit helmet the sky was as inky black as one would expect in very deep space. 

But I digressed OT enough, so carry on. 

[DruulEmpire]

"The Invisible Enemy" -- yeah, that was on one of those retro TV channels.  I grew up on the original "Outer Limits" but I think I "get the joke" of it a little better than some.  It had two producers with oddly similar surnames: Leslie Stevens, a rather New Agey type, and Joseph Stefano, the screenwriter for Hitchcock's "Psycho" (with of course all due kudos to Robert Bloch).  They were out for horror and melodrama, and pretty much EVERY episode had shitty science -- but it was perfect for me as a kid who wanted a sense of wonder, without being pandered to in a "Lost in Space" sort of way.  I find it slightly unfair to single out ol' "OL" because pretty much all cinematic and TV SF is cheesy -- heck, I stil puzzle over the boring little meeting which Heywood Floyd speaks at in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- and has been all my life and I have no idea how that's going to shift, save for RL itself becoming more like SF, resulting in more movies like "Apollo 13."

As for "Beware the science" -- eh, too late.  I've already read this a couple of times; I'm just obliging myself to one long hard Rumsfeldian slog through it to try to provide a kind of definitive open notebook here on it.  But don't worry, some of my best friends are good at physics, and even without their help I can recognize bullshit.  By the way, I neglected just now to mention that Dr. Stadler quizzes Dr. Ferris on something called Project X -- short for Project Xylophone -- which is supposed to be ominous and threatening, and that will be crap too.  Rand is basically a kid with a big crazy Christmas gift wish list, hoping that some latter-day Ford or Carnegie or Rockefeller will obligingly play Santa Claus for her, like Disney's absent-minded professor.  Science does not work that way.  

[DruulEmpire]

In "honor" of the first of three chapters of a movie version of this coming out, I'd better get back to work on this -- and none too soon, because we are now at the brink of a nugget of genuinely interesting writing within all this puffery.

"Everyone had a right to the Metal, except himself."  Rand does indeed possess powers of summation after all -- so why does she drag everything out so bloody long and THEN give us the summation anyway?  This describes pretty much the fix that Hank Rearden is supposed to be in.  There's a fascinating subplot here, by the way: Rearden is being commanded to supply Rearden Metal to a government project known simply as X, but Rearden will have none of this, he doesn't go blindly contributing to secret projects -- especially one (spoiler alert) with weapons capabilities.  All I have to wonder is: golly, where is THIS behavior when we need it?  Why aren't guys at Lockheed Martin or some such super-contractor telling the government "Sorry, we can't possibly be involved in anything the details of which can not be shared with the American people"?  Imagine how all black budget shenanigans would instantly shut down, if megafinance did indeed meet this priestly standard of Rearden's.  And yet, it doesn't.  Hmmmmm.

Anyhow, in a protracted wrangling with an employee known as the Wet Nurse, Rearden will begin to see what will get called "the sanction of the victim."  You know that business in vampire movies, where the vampire taps at the window but it's up to you to open the window and let him in?  Rearden figures out that his enemy can't bring itself to use force outright, but that it tries to convince him that there is simply no other sensible course of action.  Later he discusses this principle with Dagny.

The twelfth chapter opens with Rearden talking with fellow magnate Ken Danagger.  Danagger has always intrigued me a little, because he's described as a Pittsburgher and I've always wondered if he's supposed to be some sort of latter-day Carnegie.  But the centerpiece of this chapter is Cherryl Brooks, who gets marries to James Taggart, and the writing plays heavily on the awkwardness of this whole "Cinderella" story.  We enter the party as leading businessman, and newlywed groom, James Taggart declares "Money is the root of all evil."  Cherryl meets Dagny for the first time, and after having heard James complain so much against her she goes up to her and informs her that she, Cherryl, is now the woman of the family.  "That's quite all right," Dagny replies.  "I'm the man."

It takes forever to orchestrate, but at least Rand can deliver a bitchy melodramatic zinger.  I have to wonder if she ever wished that Bette Davis or Joan Crawford could have been cast as Dagny.

Later, there's some heartburn over Dagny openly wearing A BRACELET OF REARDEN METAL (gasp!) RIGHT IN FRONT OF MRS. REARDEN (palpitation!).  Lillian insinuates all over the place with Dagny, yet will not accuse her outright of an affair, at which point Hank steps in and demands that Lillian apologize to Dagny.

Luckily, just when you thought this was in danger of become the most leaden of soap operas, who should enter but -- Francisco D'Anconia.  How did the idea for this character ever come to Rand, and why is he the only protagonist who actually seems sane enough to enjoy himself?  I knew he was coming, but I felt relief all over again as Frisco arrived -- and just in time for that "The Vulture is Molting" novelist Bertram Scudder to repeat "Money is the root of all evil," thereby setting Frisco up for a reply.

But before I go on: what is up with the name Scudder?  Heinlein used it as the name of an American religious tyrant, one Nehemiah Scudder, and here it's for a kind of latter-day Upton Sinclair.  More recently, Scudder has been the name of a recovering alcoholic detective by one Lawrence Block.

I have stopped just in time, because right now, on Signet page 410, Frisco is about to launch into what I have always called the Sermon on the Monetary.  We will see time and again that as antitheistic as Rand was, there could be an eerie Christology to how her protagonists held forth.  When I pick this up again, it will be with an analysis of the Sermon.  Oh, and two hundred pages from now there will be a major train crash and a lengthy description of how everyone on that train karmically had it coming to them because none of them shared Rand's philosophy.  We're finally getting into the meat of this.  

[DruulEmpire]

Can anybody out there help a brother out with a working link to the middle section of May 4's Colbert Report, where he reviews the "Atlas Shrugged" movie that's out now?  Evidently legal wrangling within Viacom had it taken off youtube, and elsewhere my new Firefox arrangement is somehow denying me the crucial Flash player.  No doubt this can only be the result of government meddling and corporate pettiness has zero to do with it.   In any event, he did a great job of remarking on how most Americans don't seem eager to go see a movie that says that most Americans are parasites, and he even remarks on the radical new insight it gives him into old favorites.  Evidently Mr. Potter was the hero of "It's a Wonderful Life," and the "Star Wars" climax blowing up the Death Star actually detailed a tragic siege on a gated community.

Just in time for a first of three such movies (though the other two are in peril -- a failure of financial ingenuity, oh the irony) and Colbert's review of it, I now get to take on the Sermon on the Monetary.  It beats the hell out of Galt's final harangue as it is less than five pages long and delivered far more engagingly.

D'Anconia begins "Have you ever asked what is the root of money?"  He talks about dealing by trade, and giving value for value.  I find this fair as far as this goes, because I've often reflected on how much business gets conducted easily and politely in the course of a single day.  Of course, Rand could have bothered to attack the Biblical quote more accurately, focusing on the LOVE of money, but I'll leave that go.

D'Anconia goes on to praise "these pieces of paper, which should have been gold."  Much later he will assert "Destroyers seize gold and leave its owners a counterfeit pile of paper."  Deeper into this book we will find Rand basically saying that the discovery of gold imbued us with morality.  But any ideologue can have an irrelevant pet peeve, so I'll leave that go as well.

Monetary value coming out of "man's mind" inspired a reverie in me.  How is it that a Robert A. Heinlein or a John W. Campbell seemed quite serious about pursuing so-called psychic powers?  I have to wonder if they so believed in a natural aristocracy of mind that labor could be sidestepped.  But I digress.

I even like Rand's sentiment that it is good to "make money" by providing a good or service, that to "make money" by simply any means of arithmetic is not the same.  But how many capitalists care about that?  Complain about the arcane fees charged by anyone from banks to cable providers and you can bet your bottom dollar that John Stossel will be out there defending such "money making."

"It is the best product that wins."  I'm not even going to comment -- instead, I invite any readers out there to share counterexamples from their own experience.

Very striking is the backhanded defense of heirs.  "Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it.  Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune."  Wow, so Paris Hilton is in fact selflessly denying so many of us the curse of being parasites, by shouldering that role all by herself.  Guess she DOES provide a service to society!

Much of the rest is the idea that you depend on money on survival, so don't yipe about it.  Trouble is, it's my right to yipe.  I depend on food for my survival, but that doesn't mean I have to be in love with any slop that gets troweled out.  When Rand imagines "looters," you can't help but imagine the working class -- yet our money was recently brought low by "looting," all right, but by precisely those ritzy people who consider Rand to be their cheerleader.

The whole thing goes on with neo-religious absolutism until D'Anconia wraps up with --

     Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.  When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men.  Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars.  Take your choice -- there is not other -- and your time is running out.

It's one thing to say that money is handy -- but who among us seriously want money to run EVERYTHING?  Every friendly loan, every gutsy risk, every hobby, every artistic urge -- do you want to choose those only according to some balance sheet?  When you come to this Archive, are you always trying to gauge the value you're getting for your dues?

But I would be remiss if I left out the follow-up.  A critic of D'Anconia falters with "Oh, I can't answer you.  I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."  I will admit that when I react to this book that it begins with a feeling -- but that's only because I'm human.  More importantly, though, I know that my feeling is anchored in a simple question: "Does this in any way corroborate with reality?"  What is more, I am even willing to imagine a reality in which government does not exist -- and even then, I find this wanting.  This Sermon is simply divorced from too much of corporate behavior in the real world.  Destroying this planet's chance to have a future is the biggest sin possible -- and that will have a corporate rationale.  Even now corporations are echoing D'Anconia when he says "Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them."  Fine, forget my heart -- what about genuine innovation and competition?  And why, by the way, should I place all my faith in someone so eager to sound so heartless?

In fact, Rand's jab at the "feel, don't think" principle ought to be directed at least as much to her own readership.  The average Rand enthusiast, in my experience, does not really hold Rand to this scrutiny.  They wanted something that proclaimed "Fuck welfare," and Rand provided, and that's about that.

There are a few pages left -- and then, at last, the chapter that finally explains why the heck this thing has this would-be-classical title.     

[DruulEmpire]

With the Sermon on the Monetary finally behind me, and more openly declarative scenes directly ahead of me, I hope I can begin to accelerate my way through this.  Of course, it always helps when I get a boost of inspiration from reality.

In the last post we were treated to some tragic nameless woman who could only lament that she could not think, that she could only feel.  This, so far as I can see, is pretty much the straw man (or woman) which a rightist assumes to be the sum of all liberalism.  Our eyes would surely bleed and our brains would ooze out our ears like guacamole if we ever considered one heterodox thought -- like that, blah blah blah.  But just last week it was on that conspicuously left-of-center "Daily Show" that the guest was one Philip K. Howard.  Of course, the conservative style of absolute quarantine (thereby denying exposure to heterodox thought -- hmmm!) would probably grouse, "Eh, he worked with Gore, fuck him."  However, Howard's thesis is one I've heard from some Libertarians -- namely, that there is too much law.  What's more, Howard marks the first time I've ever heard a persuasive take on this.  A Libertarian usually says something like "Do you realize there are laws against candy lying around on a front lawn?  Silly!  So clearly corporations should not be hindered in any way!"  Howard, however, makes the case that all this legislation induces a kind of arthritis which gets in the way of the adroitness we could truly use to address issues.  Wherever you are on the Left or the Right, both sides are constrained by this heavy build-up of sheer law.

I'm struck by this, and I think there's a place for Howard's thesis.  The mistake the rightists keep making is that they assume "Just side with us, as we inveigh against legislation and yet intrude in people's personal lives and turn everything over to corporations" is a pitch that no one would stop to scrutinize.  Seems to me there's got to be some bipartisan movement to chip away a lot of regulation -- that is, if such a movement could STAY bipartisan if it ever started achieving actual success.

I raise all this because there's not to much to be said for the remainder of the twelfth chapter.  Frisco has mysteriously sabotaged his own copper company, the kind of ultrasafe investment even the most vocal anti-Randist would tend to be heavily invested in.  Discussion of this continues in the thirteenth chapter, and then we have to put up with some more of Lillian Rearden, who could basically walk around with NEUROTIC NAG stenciled across her forehead and so much tedious dialogue could be jettisoned right out of this novel.  But now Dr. Floyd Ferris chides Rearden for his not-so-secret deal with Pittsburgh coal magnate Ken Danagger, and then this happens --

     "Did you really think that we want those laws to be followed?" said Dr. Ferris.  "We want them broken ... We're after power and we mean it.  You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it.  There's no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.  Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens?"

Of course, this falls apart when one considers that someone like Rearden would already be armed to the teeth with lawyers, and would probably be buying and pocketing all the legislators he could.  Somewhere in here is a character called "his Washington man" but his role seems awfully negligible.  Still, it's an intriguing perspective in its own right, especially in a country with such a spectacularly high prison population.

Eddie Willers talks at length to a mysterious (ha!) guy who then gets hold of Ken Danagger just before Dagny does.  She's too late, Danagger's been converted to The Strike.  Next, D'Anconia meets Rearden once more and tells him Rearden that he is shouldering an undeserved guilt, a guilt over his virtues rather than any actual sins.  Of course, in Rand's hands, D'Anconia gets extreme once more: "A viler evil than to murder a man, is to sell him suicide as a virtue."  Then he says --

     " ... if you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders -- what would you tell him to do?"
     "I ... don't know.  What ... could he do?  What would you tell him?"
     "To shrug."

D'Anconia: first the Sermon, now the book's title.  Why does Rand, having created him, then need to shunt him slightly aside?  Because he's not white enough?  Or is he simply a side legend, like Ragnar Danneskjold becoming a kind of pirate king?  Frisco and Hank bond briefly as they throw themselves into a sudden factory crisis ... but that's going to be about it for them right now, at least until disaster finally strikes in the next chapter.  That fourteenth chapter is going to be pretty solidly Rearden, but at least it has one comic diversion that a lot of people can relate to: the good-for-nothing relative.          

[DruulEmpire]

Screw it -- I'm going to plow straight through the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters, because there's really not enough diversion in them, in my opinion, to sell you on.

Thanksgiving is the kind of holiday ripe for parody, so for one queasy moment you may side with Rand's poking at Thanksgiving cliches.  But it soon all becomes about the love-hate -- or need-hate -- relationship between Rearden's family and Rearden, complete with a brother, Philip Rearden, trying to simultaneously plead for charity and independence.  This feels a bit weird so soon after D'Anconia's defense of heirs.  Is the problem that Philip is only an brother, and not a son -- and where are Rearden's children anyway?  Rand's universe is starkly childless; they turn up as occasional flourishes of decoration but to my memory no personalities whatsoever.  Anyhow, why can't Rearden handle Philip Don Draper style, palming off a trust fund on him and then saying "Now stay away forever or I'll kill you"?  Rand's piling on of family misery that any actual zillionaire would jettison in a heartbeat is just tedious.

But fear not, for soon Rearden is in a courtroom defending his "black market" deal with Danagger -- and of course the crowd bursts into applause.  Is this some sub rosa way of trying to serve up a second helping of "The Fountainhead"?  Which never made sense the first time -- try to imagine if you will the headline ARCHITECT DYNAMITES OWN BUILDING, GETS OFF FREE AFTER MAKING SPEECH.

Earlier I asked "Who is James Taggart?" and now I'm tempted to ask "Who are these working class fans of Rearden on page 481?"  But weirdly enough, I think there's an answer.  I think they're the Tea Party.  Get a load of this bizarre conversation --

     "Listen, Mr. Rearden," said a man who looked like a factory worker, "it's the rich who're selling us down the river.  Tell those wealthy bastards, who're so anxious to give everything away, that when they give away their palaces, they're giving away the skin off our backs."
     "I know it," said Rearden.

Where, except in her own brain, would Rand have ever heard a conversation like that?  Yet this working-class "don't touch the rich" phenomenon seems to be with us to some degree.  My own suspicion is that it comes from a poor understanding of capitalism, the idea that it's nothing but a lottery -- you work hard, and then, bingo, one day you wake up and you've won the jackpot -- and if you want to hang on to that jackpot, you'd better protect the other jackpots, right?  Yet many of us don't buy into the lottery model, not out of any pessimism or self-loathing, but because we have some inkling of what the jackpot would truly demand, and we dare to have other priorities.

Rearden hangs with D'Anconia awhile, and D'Anconia warns him that he was wrong to rely on D'Anconia's copper company.  Sure enough, the fifteenth chapter begins with a first failure in history for Rearden Steel, and a chain reaction of such failure shakes America.

Someone described simply as "Danagger's cousin" crops up, and as with James Taggart, again I wonder: who is he?  Confronted with crisis, his main act is to singlehandedly reduce his employees' working day to just six hours.  Who does this?  Who COULD do it even if it was an option?  How many straw men does Rand have to invent, anyway?

Oh, and guess what -- the tally continues.  Ragnar Danneskjold emerges as some kind of mysterious pirate to intercept a shipment of coal to the People's State of England, which we've seen before -- but now we're about to get the People's State of Germany.  Not even East Germany, just Germany.  Where do you begin to break that down?  Rand would no doubt harp on the "National Socialist" label -- so, would she say we up and let Germany renazify?  Or does Nazism even exist for her?  (Or Fascism, since the irony of "The trains run on time" is surely lost on her.)  Basically, there's a lot of people blubbering about redistribution with zero consideration for production or competence, and Dagny's not into that.

Along with the People's States tally, Rand likes to insinuate that her protagonists are gutsy and frank and that only the bad people put on airs and insist upon fulfilling certain forms.  This is underscored by Dagny and D'Anconia calling each other Slug and Frisco ("Slug" is supposed to be industrial slang).  Once more: what universe is this supposed to be representing?  So Slug and Frisco chat and recall their glorious forebears -- Sebastian D'Anconia, Nathaniel Taggart -- and then at last "Frisco" offers this about Galt --

     "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 withdrew their vultures."

Two questions: One, why does Rand go to such lengths to create a character actually capable of some charisma, only to allow him to become a mere footnote, and two, why couldn't she take D'Anconia's own advice?  To my mind "Prometheus Unchained" would be much more compelling than "Atlas Shrugged" -- certainly more accurate, since Atlas holds the SKY on his shoulders.  Okay, so that would leave the initials PU -- but still, it would be so much clearer.  Why does Rand keep burying her one halfway successful character?

The rest is a lot of Hank-Dagny-Lillian wrangling, and I'll spare you that.

Were these chapters evenly apportioned, we'd be at the halfway point of all this -- but no, the later chapters are a bit thicker(!), so that's still another two chapters away.  But this is a good point to break anyway, because on the very next page we about to meet what I consider two key characters.  One is called "the Head of the State" but is probably the American President, and he is always called merely Mr. Thompson.  The other is a union official named Fred Kinnan, the only character in this entire book I halfway like.  Should you ever have to survive this book on your own, Fred Kinnan may be your salvation.

And in closing: a big thanks to tommyboydd for his TRAAAINS! link up in the Youtube Randomicity thread, I greatly appreciate it.

PS: it's Thursday the 12th now and I can't help but notice that Congress grilling (sadly, in an effort to disguise the fact they haven't the courage to come up with a national energy policy) the executives of the big five oil companies today is about as close to a would-be-Randian moment as you get in real life.  Trouble being, as the newscast poses the question "Should oil companies continue to get tax breaks?" the feedback is 88% No to 12% Yes.  Not exactly the working class bursting out in applause for Hank Rearden, is it?  But of course, surely Rand herself would be totally against oil companies getting handed dirty grubby government money in the first place -- you think?

[DruulEmpire]

I won't be attacking the sixteenth chapter just yet, but it does seem rather inevitable that in a book with such starkly drawn characters on the one hand and such persistent abstract manifestos on the other that a piece of legislation would emerge as a character in its own right.  This is Directive No. 10-289, a law which basically says "Let's freeze everything, create nothing new, and settle into a squabbling internecine Dark Age."  Once more: who's honestly for that?  The closest I can think of to this is wage-price freezing, and that was tried under that infamous Commie President Richard Nixon.  However, there is a high irony to her choosing this number, because if you look back at my January 17 post on this thread it is page 289 of this Plume edition where Dagny exclaims --

     "Hank!  Do you understand what this means?  It's the greatest revolution in power motors since the internal-combustion engine -- greater than that!  It wipes everything out and makes everything possible.  To hell with Dwight Sanders and all of them!  Who'll want to look at a Diesel?  Who'll want to worry about oil, coal or refueling stations?  Do you see what I see?  A brand-new locomotive half the size of a single Diesel unit, and with ten times the power.  A self-generator, working on a few drops of fuel, with no limits to its energy.  The cleanest, swiftest, cheapest means of motion ever devised.  Do you see what this will do to our transportation systems and to the country -- in about one year?"

Not even Rand herself could fight the appeal of such an idea.  It's right there, just look at what she's complimenting, and how she's complimenting it.  She's enraptured by the idea of a NEW motive force that is CLEAN and EFFICIENT.  She embraces NOT WORRYING ABOUT OIL AND COAL -- and I dare suspect that she never reflected for one moment on how entrenched oil and coal interests might react to that.  It's typical to exclusively blame labor for entrenched technology -- for all its sexual politics and virtual reality, Michael Crichton's "Disclosure" is ultimately about kowtowing to labor-intensive foreign manufacturing -- but labor will always go where the productivity is, while zillionaires like the Koch brothers enjoy imagining they're eternally above such considerations.

But I did not stop by here just to go over page 289 because Directive No. 10-289 reminded me of it.  I give Rand this much credit: she tried to theorize about morality and technology.  But now I do too.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of the Pittsburgh science fiction club.  The presentation was about a flurry of airship sightings in 1896 and 1897, which strongly suggest that there may have been manned lighter-than-air travel a few years before the Graf von Zeppelin laid exclusive claim to that.  It got me to wondering how a little extra innovation in the right times and places might have accelerated the 18th and 19th Centuries even more.  Then that got me to reconsidering my personal thesis that it was not necessarily sheer morality that inspired the North to abandon slavery but the North's embrace of what could be called post-slavery technology.  If you sit around priding yourself on being unhurried and unmechanized, you run the risk of trying to excuse the existence of your pool of slave labor indefinitely, even forever.  The right technology opened up a newer, better morality.

After all this, I phrased a simple question:

Does morality drive technology?

Of course, I need to define some terms, as it is a certainty that the question does not resonate in your own mind exactly as it does in mine.  Loosely throwing around "morality" is potentially explosive, but about all I can say is that by "morality" I don't mean "What would a Pope, even one who's a Borgia, like?"  I mean morality in the most basic sense you can imagine it.  How do you delegate labor?  How do you avert famine and plague and disaster?  And as for technology, I don't mean just any technology, I'm not trying to tally up the spiritual merits of a Frisbee (though I dare say there are some).

To rephrase it a little more exactly: Does our best morality drive our highest technology?  The more I think on this, the more I'm inclined to say Yes.

Go out into a battlefield seeking only to kill more of the enemy, and you will make more weapons; go out into a battlefield seeking primarily to heal the wounded, and you will make more medicines.  Seek to destroy Russia and you fill the world with plutonium; seek to shame Russia and you not only walk on the moon but in so doing, in meeting the challenge of that, you will unleash a computer revolution.  Bulldoze the earth and you can find a few centuries' worth of dirty power; explore the depths of the earth and you can find clean energy which can last virtually forever.  For too long we have accepted the tyranny of "An okay plan now beats a perfect plan tomorrow," and the excuse "But we didn't know any other way to make money!" has been the misstep of everything from slavery to cigarettes.  The technologies we choose with a simple and genuine morality benefit us endlessly; the technologies we seize out of desperation are the ones that poison and shortchange us.

The usual narrative has confused this principle for too long.  For Rand it is impossible that Copernicus and Newton could be the tender souls they were, or that Jonas Salk could be anything but a villain.  She doesn't know shit about science, and therefore she doesn't know shit about scientists.  The average scientist is not a tinkerer dreaming of royalties, and the best scientist, far from embracing the ego, can't get away from it far or fast enough.    

[DruulEmpire]

What the hey, I can at least attack the next four pages, which will bring me up to the "character" that is Directive No. 10-289, and I do happen to consider it a major character, worth discussing in its own right.  Sadly, Rand will marry this character to a long discussion of some dude named Wesley Mouch, who I simply never get into.  The name seems like a clear play on "mooch" and reminds me way too much of "moustache."  Anyhow, in these four pages we will meet Fred Kinnan and Mr. Thompson.  Unfortunately, Kinnan doesn't get to shine just yet, but is relegated to a little cascade of squabblers all turning around blaming each other.  So this mainly leaves us with the thrilling details of a man smiling, another man folding his hands, yet another man crossing his arms, another man tapping an ashtray -- and then Mr. Thompson:

     Mr. Thompson, the Head of the State, was a man who possessed the quality of never being noticed ... He had the cunning of the unintelligent and the frantic energy of the lazy.  The sole secret of his rise in life was the fact that he was a product of chance and knew it and aspired to nothing else.

Is it just me, or does this description cry out GEORGE W. BUSH?  A man who just happens to be the son of the Vice-President under Reagan, who was never good in anything, particularly business, who blew off whole crucial months clearing brush, who can indeed be "misunderestimated" but still seems to have whole lobes of his brain conveniently missing -- I'd say Bush is Thompson, all the more prophetically because at one point the GOP pushed both a Tommy Thompson and Fred Dalton Thompson as successors to Dubya.  Of course, I somehow suspect that Rand might not have gone that far, and might have been reflecting disappointment in Eisenhower.  Yet by all internal logic this "Head of the State" is indeed the President we're talking about -- which is another point on which Rand missteps, because, all kidding aside, we usually tend not to elect ciphers.  If Rand wanted to skewer a Democratic President, she would have been far more prophetic calling him "folksy," as indeed Carter and Clinton played the "folksy" card.  Robert A. Heinlein was never that great a characterizer, but I continue to remember his eerily Reagan-like Secretary-General Joe Douglas (complete with a wife who believes in astrology).

Anyhow, Mouch says he needs wider powers, Kinnan gamely suggest adding one-third to all work forces, Taggart protests and asks to double freight rates, Orren Boyle objects and asks for a subsidy, at which point some guy named Weatherby says No way, and Mouch reiterates that he needs wider powers.  It's all spiraling inexorably down towards their all signing off on the dreaded Directive.

Rand will take her own cues too well, because in the wrangling discussion of the Directive we will never hear from Mr. Thompson again.  It would have been a nice bit of humor if he could have made some tiny yet crucial comment, but he is denied even that.  Ah well.