[DruulEmpire]

I've got some time to kill, so I may as well take on the next twenty pages, as they are awfully lovey-dovey.  After Dagny hangs out awhile with Kellogg and Galt, the next day Francisco shows up.  Naturally they melt into each other's embrace and kiss. As some latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel or Christopher Bale Bruce Wayne, playing the cad while secretly saving civilization, he actually gets to tell Dagny "The women I chased -- you didn't believe that, did you?  I've never touched one of them -- but I think you knew it."  Cisco, listen to me, Dagny can't be that hot and she's a freakin' loon -- okay, you're a loon too, but at least you get to be so Ricardo Montalban In "Space Seed" about it.  Honestly, you should have banged some of those women, I'm just sayin'.  He goes on: "That's the joker in their system, they're out to fight any man of honor and ambition, but let them see a worthless rotter and they think he's a friend, they think he's safe -- safe!-- that's their view of life, but are they learning!--are they learning whether evil is safe and incompetence practical!"  Okay, we get it already, jeez.  Anyhow, he goes on at great length at how he had to betray his copper company and how his love of her is all mixed up in that, blah blah blah.  Then it's some back-and-forth.  She: "Francisco, I've hurt you in so many different ways -- "  A little later, she adds "Francisco, I did love you -- "  and he answers, calmly, smiling, "But you do ... You still love me ... "  And there's some philosophizing about how happiness is like smelting copper -- you know what, I'm not even going to try to sort that out.  Some time later, he breaks out silver goblets which once belonged to his illustrious ancestor Sebastian d'Anconia and his wife.  Then he talks about how the d'Anconia fortune had to be reborn on American (as in USA, not just North American, let alone South American) soil.

Days pass, and she speaks with Galt, and it turns out that for years he had been near to her, watching her.  Hey, give the novel credit for at least indulging the female ego, with men gazing longingly upon the heroine for ages and ages.  We eventually learn that Galt considers his great personal enemy to be Dr. Robert Stadler -- on how much basis, I still really haven't determined.  Anyhow, Galt leaves, and already we're sensing her falling for him, perhaps inevitably, as Galt is the most like Rand, except with a penis.

In all of this, there's one passage which seems rather neat in its own right, and so it seems a shame that it's stuck in this book.  D'Anconia says of America "This country was the only country in history born, not of chance and blind tribal warfare, but as a rational product of man's mind.  This country was built on the supremacy of reason -- and, for one magnificent century, it redeemed the world.  It will have to do so again."  This rather Michele-Bachmannishly glosses over one hell of a lot, but at heart this sentiment speaks to my own patriotism.  We're supposed to be built around an ideal, and we could stand to be in the ideals business once more, if only because the world goes on being in dire need of ideals.  Sadly, the would-be heirs to Rand are pretty much the last people I would ever look to for them.   

[DruulEmpire]

A little woolgathering helps me to get through this.  Case in point:

So far as art criticism seems to go, I don't "get" the painting "Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh.  I've heard it described as a "raft," for gentle dreamy wandering.  Well, I don't see it that way at all.  Granted, I live in a city, so I'm lucky to see any stars at all, but for me a starry sky is a fairly bland affair, pinpricks of light peeping through the darkness, and because of that the contrast to the painting could not be greater.  For van Gogh the night is positively stormy.  Each star is the center of its own spectacular ripple effect, and there is even an intimation of what might be a vast roaring galaxy.  The moon is practically a sun (even if its crescent makes no sense, suggesting a smaller Earth).  What is striking to me is that the sky is where all the action is, while the Earth is calm and sedate and stately.  This to me is a window on the universe as revealed to us through science fiction, for all the real action is out there, amidst alien civilizations, not to mention the great cataclysms of newly forming planets and moons, let alone some supernova giving birth to a nebula.  For one moment, in one image, the assumption "Sky passive, Earth dynamic" is turned almost literally upside-down.  It shows me in a single colorful snapshot a truth of the universe usually consigned to boring books and lectures.

I blather like this, if only to try to give some idea of what art, or at least the right art, can do for me.  I don't much care what a battalion of critics might tell me.  I have a reaction and the message, however unintended, has been sent.  I also blather like this because Ayn Rand now presumes to speak on art.

A fellow named Richard Halley is playing the piano for Dagny.  We've been reminded all bloody novel long that he is THE Richard Halley, who wrote That Mysterious Fifth Concerto Which He Never Officially Wrote Yet Everyone Seems to Have Overheard Somehow.  (Tempting to call it TM5CWHNOWYES2HOS.)  But now he stops and they start to talk:

          "Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as much as it does to you?"
          "Not many ... "
          "That is the payment I demand.  Not many can afford it.  I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion -- emotions be damned! -- I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it -- I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wish to be admired ... "

Did you get all that?  (Because if you didn't, fear not, he goes on like this at even greater length.)  "Hamlet" is notable for the line "I believe the lady doth protest too much" and, wow, is Halley ever protesting, over how rational and unemotional (!) his art is.  Why do I get the feeling that this is not any kind of artistic insight at all, that this is essentially Rand reprimanding a world that does not "get" her?

At this point Rand can't seem to help but expose to us a tantalizing glimpse of her subconscious.  Remember the great train wreck?  So many people had the bad karma of the wreck coming to them, and yet, out of all those people, Rand significantly saved up the most venom for some poor minor playwright.  Now, listen to Halley characterize some artists clearly lesser than himself:

          " ... This, Miss Taggart, this sort of spirit, courage, and love for truth -- as against a sloppy bum who who goes around proudly assuring you that he has almost reached the perfection of a lunatic, because he's an artist who hasn't the faintest idea what his art work is or means, he's not restrained by such crude concepts as 'being' or 'meaning,' he's the vehicle of higher mysteries, he doesn't know how he created his work or why, it just came out of him spontaneously, like **113** out of a drunkard, he did not think, he wouldn't stoop to thinking, he just felt it, all he has to do is feel -- he feels, the flabby, loose-mouthed, shifty-eyed, drooling, shivering, uncongealed bastard! ... "

To which I might add: so there!  But what's important is that he's not emotional about any of this.

I feel for Rand, a little.  I've never "gotten" a lot of Picasso.  Salvador Dali is amusing, and Jackson Pollock has some color and vitality, but they're simply not van Gogh.  That much I grant her.  What is more, I suspect she might actually go easy on da Vinci or Michelangelo or El Greco if she could convince herself that they were inspired more by money that by the spiritual aims of their clients, and she might even persuade herself that Handel felt nothing for his Messiah.

But just when you think you have Halley sorted out (and I have to say, adjectives like "loose-mouthed" and "uncongealed" aren't much help), he says:

" ... Feelings?  Oh yes, we do feel, he, you, and I -- we are, in fact, the only people capable of feeling -- and we know where our feelings come from.  But what we did not know and have delayed learning for too long is the nature of those who claim that they cannot account for their feelings.  We did not know what it is that they feel.  We are learning it now.  It was a costly error.  And those most guilty of it, will pay the hardest price -- as, in justice, they must.  Those most guilty of it were the real artists, who will now see that they are first to be exterminated and that they had prepared the triumph of their own exterminators by helping to destroy their only protectors.  For if there is more tragic a fool than the businessman who doesn't know he's an exponent of man's highest creative spirit -- it's the artist who thinks that the businessman is his enemy."

At the beginning of this section, Halley identifies himself as a businessman.  This is another sore point with me, for I live in Pittsburgh, and we're all supposed to think it's so cool that Andy Warhol came from here.  No doubt Rand would dismiss him as simply another modern slob -- but so far as I can tell, if ever there was an artist devoted to commerce, it was Warhol.  You hit a nerve of the Zeitgeist and start providing "comfort food" art by silk screening soup cans, then go for it, keep silk screening anything, Marilyn Monroe perhaps, and claim it's an oh so ironic commentary on mass media.  Whether she likes it or not, I call Warhol an heir to Rand's ideal of the commercial artist -- and he is definitely no van Gogh.

Would Rand's world ever recognize van Gogh?  For there he is, leading a marginal, dissolute, tortured life, dependent on his brother Theo for his very survival, and I don't pretend for a millisecond that he ever dreamed that I would have my reaction to his "Starry Night."  Yet it is van Gogh who strikes a chord in me, whereas the more Rand keeps "intellectually" haranguing me, the more she misses.  

[number3fac]

Just came across this funny webcomic and thought I'd share it with this thread.  Enjoy!

[DruulEmpire]

6 (shall I go with 6?), I like the comic myself, especially when one considers just how many would-be world-runners consider themselves Randian -- and it's more clever than it knows, because the Mr. A invented by the Rand-inspired Steve Ditko, formerly working for the Amazing Spider-Man, pointedly wore a metal mask with an expression devoid of emotion.  Sadly, though, in the commentary you'll notice some people moaning "Oh, isn't it a shame that no one really read Atlas Shrugged and really understands," on and on like that.

I think I may finally be understanding this book -- and the shame is that for all its redundancy and sheer inflation of words, I'm finding it at heart to be a very simple thing.  This happens from time to time.  Early in my life I held out some respect for the Communist Manifesto, mainly because I had never actually read it.  Then I read it, and the bubble of mystique burst for me, and I thought "This is it?  This thing?  This is what billions of people have gotten themselves so excited about?  Really?"  The Koran is even more that way, if you're not living in Arabia in the 7th century AD you're just not going to "get" a lot of it.

There's an irony, but a mild and transparent one, in people bemoaning sheer bulk of words while throwing Shrugged around.  "Oh, the health care legislation or the tax reform proposal is too long, oh woe is us, we who are lawyers and corporate bureaucrats, however can we survive hundreds of pages?" Instilling a dread of heavy reading in their audience, they then abuse precisely that dread by dumping this doorstop of a book and saying "Here is our ultimate declaration!"  Their egos presume that it's impossible for, say, me to actually get through it.

The older I get, the more obvious it is to me that there are no perfect documents anywhere in our history.  I love, each in their own way, the Bible and the Constitution, but not at the expense of my critical mind being able to appreciate that they were what they could be in and for their particular time.  The pageant of civilization is one of simply grabbing whatever is handy along the way, and books that changed history were not necessarily literary classics but simply what was handy.  (The sole exception I can offer is Orwell's 1984, an enduring definitive social nightmare.)  Shrugged is passionate, declamatory, exhaustively thorough, and occasionally shows off a gift for delicious melodrama -- but beyond that it is at heart a very simple thing, and with any luck I may get to that by Christmas.

In my adolescence I even briefly admired, of all things, B. F. Skinner's Walden Two, and page 785 brings back some of that nostalgia -- but not before Kay Ludlow makes an interesting slam:

          " ... They let me play nothing but symbols of depravity, nothing but harlots, dissipation-chasers and home-wreckers, always to be beaten at the end by the little girl next door, personifying the virtue of mediocrity.  They used my talent -- for the defamation of itself.  That was why I quit."

Off course, Miss Ludlow, you may have proven yourself to be too rigid in your choice of roles, not that great a thing for an actor's resume, but oh well.  Yet again, I have to wonder if Rand was idealizing Joan Crawford or Bette Davis.  Hey, during the whole She Stole Brad! shockeroo, I myself was more Team Jolie than Team Aniston -- does that count?

Rand surprises me a little by honoring motherhood after all, though in a strangely cramped and rushed (Rand, cramped and rushed!?!?!?) page 785.  She simply describes two boys as having a good look to them.  They have an "open, joyous, friendly confidence."  On this single snapshot impression the book then claims to rest an entire revolution of ch1ld rearing.  The mother speaks:

          " ... I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a ch1ld's brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he's unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror ... "

Oh, gawdz, the irony is so thick you could chainsaw it.  You can recognize it, can't you, the plea of parents not wanting their ch1ldren to learn evolution -- and these are the closest things to parents demanding clear-eyed intellectual realism that Rand has actually inherited.  Congratulations, Ayn.

In a little bit we will consider another take on youth, when Galt, d'Anconia, Danneskjold and Akston all used to hang out together -- along with Robert Stadler.  There's a special day coming up in early August, and I'd like to try to hit page 831 by then.  With any luck you will see why.    

[DruulEmpire]

Eh, hang it all -- I have eighty or so minutes left to kill today, so I may as well move on to Dr. Hugh Akston's take on all this.  I have to wonder if the peculiar name was chosen as a play on "axiom."

At something called the Patrick Henry University -- which to my ear rings as a typical slapped-together cheapjack name for a diploma mill -- outside no less than Cleveland, Ohio, philosopher Hugh Akston meets three precocious teenagers, no less than a young Francisco, a young Danneskjold, and a young Galt.  All three majored in both physics and philosophy.  (In this quantum age, would Rand still offer that advice, I wonder?)  Akston the philosopher combined forces with Robert Stadler the physicist to give these three a very fast and very hard education, which they happily slaved away at.  Ah yes, Akston would bring them out to his place and serve them cocoa, and at one point found himself gazing admiringly at Galt's **83** face in the starlight -- and the hell of all this is that I suspect it never crossed Rand's mind to feel creeped out by any of this.  But the important thing is that Akston almost automatically volunteers that he would have killed for them, except that it was unclear to him who to kill:

          " ... It was everyone and no one, there was no single enemy, no center and no villain, it was not the simpering social worker not capable of earning a penny or the thieving bureaucrat scared of his own shadow, it was the whole of the earth rolling into an obscenity of horror, pushed by the hand of every would-be decent man who believed that need is holier than ability, and pity is holier than justice ... "

Luckily, Akston is dissuaded from his Anders-Breivik-like fretting over who to kill by a great confidence in the abilities of these young men to fend for themselves even in such "an obscenity of horror."  His great rival turns out to be Stadler.  Evidently everything changes when Stadler endorses a State Science Institute.  Stadler whirls upon Akston and cries "I'm so sick of all you impractical idealists!"  That's the unforgivable break right there, the deep and enduring schism.  (Rand does this, the Could-Have-Been-a-True-Titan character -- back in the Fountainhead it was Gail Wynand, a guy by the way.)  Akston goes on:

          "Every man builds his world in his own image ... If he abdicates his power, he abdicates the status of man, and the grinding chaos of the irrational is what he achieves as his sphere of existence -- by his own choice."

On one level, this is supremely basic: make choices, take responsibility.  Yet everybody does -- but presumably not to Akston's glossed-over specific standards.  Does Rand praise Thoreau for going off to Walden Pond?  Or Father Damien for going off to Molokai?  I have to wonder.  And who among us honestly gets away with making zero choices?  I also worry a little at the near-solipsism of the phrasing "Every man builds his world in his own image."  Certainly, one must account for one's creations, but for lack of a God in Rand's antitheistic universe, we do not then automatically become God ourselves, shaping the laws and fabric of reality by sheer will.  Rand treads rather close to New Ageyness in this choice of words, and I nearly expect her to next start sounding like Rhonda "The Secret" Byrne.

After that, the next 24 pages are a lot of back-and-forth deliberation over whether or not Dagny should leave.  I know that sounds flip, but honestly, that's what it all seems to boil down to.  She finally does get to leave, and is dropped off by Galt near (appropriately enough) a train station before Galt flies off on his own mysterious mission.  For three lingering paragraphs Dagny watches him fly away.

And now we are ready for the 23rd chapter, where at last we are permitted the joy of relentlessly craven leechlike villains.  Honestly, after all this "We're all so smugly happy, ahahaha, just take our word for it," it's a great relief.

[number3fac]

6 (shall I go with 6?) 

Works for me!

Looking forward to more analysis!

[DruulEmpire]

6, thanks for the encouragement.  I've been deliberately postponing this section for this weekend, for reasons which I hope will become clear, but first I get to examine the lengths to which Rand is willing to make Dr. Stadler look clownish long before any actual information is divulged in this 23rd chapter.  The chapter is called "Anti-Greed," which one can guess by now is supposed to be the essence of evil, or something like that.  Much like a cartoon character wondering aloud what he's doing in the pages of some strange new comic book, Stadler complains:

          "What am I doing here? ... Why was I asked to come here?  I demand an explanation.  I'm not accustomed to being dragged halfway across a continent without rhyme, reason or notice ... Do you realize that I was much too busy and that this meant an interruption of my work? ... Why was I given no explanation?  Why didn't you come for me in person, instead of sending those incredible young hooligans with their mysterious gibberish that sounded half-science, half-pulp-magazine? ... Then would you mind telling what you're doing in the middle of a plain in Iowa -- and what I'm doing, for that matter?"

I've condensed the above from nearly a full page of complaining, with Floyd Ferris providing the smug terse answers of a man who knows full well he can make Stadler do anything at anytime, murmuring terms like "historical event" and "milestone."  Focusing on a strange building the shape of which reminds Stadler of a mushroom, Stadler reflects on how tired he is of being bullied and pushed around in the name of "Top Confidential" affairs.  He soon meets "the Head of the State," Mr. Thompson, and then Ferris finally starts addressing an audience concerning Project X, explaining "certain frequencies of sound vibration which no structure, organic or inorganic, can withstand ... The sound ray is invisible, inaudible and fully controllable in respect to target, direction and range."

Yes, you read that correctly: sound ray.  I first came across such a concept as a kid in the Tintin adventure "The Calculus Affair," and even then the great Herge had the sense to give his long-range ultrasonic weapon a power to spread its signal rather than to concentrate it -- but then, this too seems sadly typical of Rand's personal slippery grasp of science.  The weapon is declared to be the Thompson Harmonizer, Mr. Thompson says "Contact!" and then a Dr. Blodgett starts pulling levers.

In a moment, the result, as I'm more tired now than I thought I was ...

All right I'm back.  Stadler raises his field glasses and looks at the farmhouse:

          "In the instant he focused his lens, a goat was pulling at its chain, reaching placidly for a tall, dry thistle.  In the next instant, the goat rose into the air, upturned, its legs stretched upward and jerking, then fell into a gray pile made of seven goats in convulsions.  By the time Dr. Stadler believed it, the pile was motionless, except for one beast's leg sticking out of the mass, stiff as a rod and shaking as in a strong wind.  The farmhouse tore into strips of clapboard and went down, followed by a geyser of the bricks of its chimney.  The tractor vanished into a pancake ... It was so swift, so uncontested, so simple, that Dr. Stadler felt no horror, he felt nothing, it was not the reality he had known, it was the realm of a **09**'s nightmare where material objects could be dissolved by means of a single malevolent wish."

If there is anything positive to be said for Ayn Rand's vast personal reservoir of fear and hate, it's that it undoubtedly inspired her to describe well this one scene of horror.  Still, in a novel that is presumably, metaphorical, it is fair to ask: what the hell has just happened, as something which we are supposed to draw some lesson from back in the real world?

So much of it feels at odds with what we might assume to be Rand's outlook.  Clearly it's a horrible weapon, yet elsewhere Rand will concede that maybe, maybe, if government is to exist at all, it should protect the populace, presumably with weapons of war.  Dare we speculate that Rand may feel conflicted about all of the weapons available to modern war?  The specification of a sound weapon is so quaint that we might as well have witnessed a test of poison gas to be used in World War One.  Also consider that Rand asks her reader to feel empathy for an animal.  Why do I somehow doubt that Rand would do that in virtually any other instance?  Would Rand agree with **02** that it is wrong to torture animals in the name of perfume?  Would she care at all about chickens being bred as pathetic immobile blobs stashed away in vast secret coops in the name of fast food?

And am I really supposed to take this at face value, as specific dread of ultrasonic weaponry?  I think we glimpse the weapon's true nature in this exchange:

          ... "Who invented this ghastly thing?"
          "You did."
          Dr. Stadler looked at him, not moving.
          "It is merely a practical appliance," said Dr. Ferris pleasantly, 'based upon your theoretical discoveries.  It was derived from your invaluable research into the nature of cosmic rays and the spatial transmission of energy."

I have to give a   here.  A sound weapon based on cosmic ray research?  As a kid I came across a book put out by the UFO hack-prophet Adamski claiming that sound and light were all different magnitudes of the same cosmic vibrations -- and even as a kid I smelled a rat, as I understood full well the fundamental difference between pressure waves (sound) and radiant energy (light).  The would-be revolutionary physicist Joseph Newman sounded much the same when he snagged the attention of Johnny Carson.  Anytime someone claims that sound and light are the same thing, they don't know what they're talking about, and neither does Rand -- which is really not so surprising, but it does tend to undercut her "I'm so realistic and practical" claim.

Still, let's pursue this further.  A wide open area, people looking on with field glasses, a weapon dependent on cosmic ray research,  and somewhere out there is a building resembling "a puffed, venomous mushroom."  Why a mushroom?

Is a mushroom building meant to suggest a mushroom cloud?  In fact, does Rand not love the Bomb?

But wait, it gets even wilder:

          "What war?  What aggression?  With the whole world starving and all those People's States barely subsisting on handouts from this country -- where do you see any danger of war?  Do you expect those ragged savages to attack you?"
          Dr. Ferris looked straight into his eyes.  "Internal enemies can be as great a danger to the people as external ones," he answered ...

Some huge issues get glossed over in this quick glib little exchange.  Is Rand here suggesting that the Cold War is based on sheer hype of the Soviet threat?  Because that certainly wasn't what she said when she testified to Congress.  But Ferris's answer tilts this strange alternate world all the way into the realm of "FEMA is building concentration camps!"  We're honestly going to nuke -- sorry, Thompson Harmonize -- our own people?  And can I really accept this as Rand's sentiment, not so long after that long bit of karmic justice doled out by a train wreck?  Would she honestly cry foul at Philadelphia mayor Wilson Goode firebombing his own people to try to control radicals?

"No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X," Dr. Ferris claims -- based on what, I've no idea, it's just a flat assertion.  The Manhattan Project was indeed a government project, but private defense contractors have been more than happy to build nukes ever since.  Also notice how Rand neatly wiggles out of any discussion of nuclear power per se.  She does not object to burning, from her precious cigarettes to Wyatt's Torch, but she objects to a sound weapon, or at least her wacky version of it, because it DISASSEMBLES.  Yup, weapons never come from the private sector, only from politicians.  I have to wonder if Rand ever heard of a certain European family named Krupp.

The rest of this scene is some momentarily shocked onlookers stepping up to give grand speeches about how wonderful this thing is, and Stadler being aghast at being any part of this, or of these horrible people.  Next it's his turn to speak, when a young newsman (!!!!!) impulsively implores him:

          " ... Tell them the truth!  Tell them that you had nothing to do with it!  Tell them what sort of infernal machine it is and for what purpose it's intended to be used!  Tell the country what sort of people are trying to rule it!  Nobody can doubt your word!  Tell them the truth!  Save us!  You're the only one who can!"

Whereupon Stadler pauses one uncertain moment, then says loudly "I do not expect to be insulted by disloyal young punks with treasonable motives" and goes on to give a supportive speech.  Rand remains antitheistic, and yet the Faustian moral HE SOLD HIS SOUL could not be clearer.

Rand, anti-nukes?  Rand, standing up to the military-industrial complex?  Rand, enjoying a screening of "Dr. Strangelove"?  Why does that all seem impossibly incongruous to me, and not to be believed?

And once more with these major characters: who is Robert Stadler supposed to be?  If I push, really push, I wonder if he's a heavily disguised Einstein, a Ro-BERT standing in for an Al-BERT.  Yet I seriously doubt it.  Once again, this allegedly oh-so-metaphorical tale appears to dream someone up out of nowhere.  Heck, if Rand wrote this today, Stadler would probably be warning us about global warming.

Anyhow, I thought it was important to do this in time for the weekend, seeing as tomorrow is Hiroshima Day, and three days later comes Nagasaki Day.  Would Rand have preferred that we proceed with a massive incursion of troops against the Japanese instead of nuking them?  As ingenious as Rand is supposed to be, the more I read this, the more so much of the world is simply beyond her depth.  

    

[DruulEmpire]

I can't say too much right now, but I have just found these last two weeks of my personal life to be profoundly transformational.  This is owed to various factors and sources -- but most certainly NOT any inspiration from Dagny's month-long stay in that smug antiseptic hall of vanity mirrors that is Galt's Gulch.  I'll take the last two weeks of my life over her overhyped odyssey of discovery (or whatever) anytime.

Right after the presumably Faustian Dr. Stadler proclaims "a new instrument with an incalculable potential for a civilizing and liberating influence upon the mind of man" -- the aforementioned ultrasonic cosmic ray atom bomb dingus -- Dagny finds herself back in civilization: "The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust."  A furnace with stagnant breath?  Melted dust?  I guess Rand is trying to be poetic, but I've no idea what this is supposed to be describing.  She recalls walking through a small town, how she wanted to cheerfully proclaim "Snap out of it!" to people all presumably under some great cloud of despair:

          "There was no reason for people to be as unhappy as that, she thought, no reason whatsoever ... and then she remembered that reason was the one power they had banished from their existence."

In and of itself, possibly true -- but in the context of this book, yeesh.  People should be happy that the ultrarich are going to demand even more power?  Riiiiight.  Anyhow, I recall this as another section where Dagny always gets to outclass and outshine all the gratuitously stupid craven jerks around her.  Let's see.

Dagny gets back to her office and calls Hank.  "The look on the faces of her staff, as she entered the anteroom, was the look of drowning persons at the sight of a lifeline."  Eddie Willers brings her up to speed and James begs her to no avail that to publicly announce that business is fine when in fact it's awful.  Dagny eventually dismisses James and then says to Willers "Well, Eddie, let's see what two impractical persons, like you and me, can do about preventing the train wrecks."

This brings us from page 831 to page 846 -- just in time to meet Lillian Rearden again.  Ye gawdz, I'm so bloody tired of that character.  I'll have to get back to this after I take a break right now.    

[DruulEmpire]

I have remarkably little to say today about the conclusion of the 23rd chapter.  Part of that stems from the fact that it is the upcoming 24th chapter that has tantalized me for some years now.  I've been waiting and waiting for a chance to finally sit down patiently and seriously to read 24 page by page, to at long last nail down the mystery which has been bugging me, namely: Why does Cherryl Brooks (I can never think of her as a Taggart) kill herself?  If this novel has anything even remotely resembling a satisfying answer, I will gladly award that point -- otherwise, I'm bound to become even more cranky.

So now let's finally wrap up 23.  Dagny is working when Lillian Rearden strides in and informs her that she'll be speaking on Bertram Scudder's broadcast that night.  In some twisted way I really don't care about, Lillian telling the government about the affair between Dagny and Hank has somehow given the government leverage first against Hank and now against Dagny.  (Truly, this is all so dated.)  Dagny appears for the broadcast (by the way, everything always seems to be radio, had Rand no opinion of television?) and turns the tables (big surprise, right?) by confessing to the affair and then protesting the System, or whatever.  Scudder knocks the microphone over and his announcer speaks of "technical difficulties" while Dagny goes out and grabs a cab.  Then Hank shows up and they kiss and then they declare their courageous defiant love for each other for a few pages -- and then comes the one bright spot in all this sudsy soap opera, when Hank tells Dagny that he knows full well that she has fallen in love with a whole new man in just the past month:

          "Yes!"  Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness.  "Hank! -- how did you know it?"
          He smiled and pointed at the radio.  "My darling, you used nothing but the past tense."
          "Oh ... !"  Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.
          "You never pronounced the one word you would have rightfully thrown at them, were it otherwise.  You said 'I wanted him,' not 'I love him.' ... "

NOW ... NOW ... perhaps I see, a little, why readers dig Hank Rearden.  He's essentially telling her "I've just OWNED you, you narcissistic beyotch, climbing and **83** your way through one ever more perfect male clone of the author herself right after another."  I even think he should slap her -- he slapped D'Anconia, after all -- but you know what, this is best this way, he's too classy for that.  He gets to be so "I'm the grownup between the two of us," so aloof and yet in command, so ... so -- Dare I say it?  Hell yes, I'll say it -- so DON DRAPER, and in moments like these that can be quite a cool thing indeed.

They talk a little about her having been away, and about how John Galt did indeed build that motor they once found, and then she falls asleep -- and now, prepare for The Cherryl Brooks Suicide Mystery.

[DruulEmpire]

I consider Cherryl Brooks to be one of the most obvious mysteries of this book, because if I didn't even mention her I would barely ever hear about her, out there amidst the Rand fandom, and yet it seems clear to me that Rand meant her to be important.  For here we are, at chapter 24, and Cherryl is going to get this chapter almost entirely to herself, and Rand has been taking special patient pains to set this up.  Rand titles this chapter "Anti-Life," which to my mind is very much like naming it "Death," and if you devote the bulk of an entire long chapter named "Death" to one character, that character must be meant to be important.  (This much, Rand seems to have had the sense to rip off from Shakespeare.)

But I will want to proceed slowly and carefully -- so for today why don't we at least get through the opening four pages, which aren't really about Cherryl at all, but that schlump of a husband of hers, James Taggart.  As 24 kicks off, James is shaken when he give a beggar a hundred dollar bill and the beggar is contemptuous, as if resigned to dying that night no matter how much gets contributed.  James has just finished off a day consisting of a luncheon, two cocktail gatherings, and a dinner reception, all having something to do with a People's State of Argentina and a People's State of Chile, culminating in talk of the People's States of the Southern Hemisphere.  (She does so love this running gag.)  He has thrown himself into these empty worrisome rituals and come out unhappy.  He's anxious to do, really do something tonight, but his thinking is not at all clear -- and so, as he walks into Cherryl's room, we can already guess that some conflict is on the horizon, and that for now will wait.

What this does mean, however, is that we are now just 300 pages shy of the end of all this.  Oh happy day.

************

You know what, I have to break and make a confession.  I am getting NO illumination, NONE.  The closer I get to the end of this alleged towering giant of an accomplishment, the tinier and pettier it looks.  Seeing as this is about as close to an Arch-conservative Manifesto as there is, I must confess I was hoping to find some key to that whole outlook, that whole psyche, and I've immersed myself in it and drenched myself in it, and I'm still not getting it.

Take James Taggart.  In the beginning I wondered, why does James Taggart even exist?  Who is James Taggart supposed to be?  Now that we're nearly done with the fool, I begin to wonder if James Taggart was never really meant to exist or to provide any clear parallel or metaphor, if he was simply Rand having her vicious fun trying to imagine a person with all the "wrong" virtues.  Rand works, really works, to try to make this Frankenstein patchwork of twitches and phobias into a consistent and fully realized person -- and at day's proverbial end it all still fails, because I still don't know one person who actually talks and acts like James Taggart.  James Taggart is an elaborately woven-together straw man, but still straw.

It's a little as if someone were to give Q_BE the assignment "Here, you go try to be TheZookie007 for a week."  It doesn't work, it doesn't hang together, it's transparently unreal from the outset.

And the hell of all this is that meanwhile, in the real world, we're being obliged to take these Randists and kinda-sorta-Randists -- up to and including an actual Rand Paul ("I'll take religious irony for $200, Alex") -- seriously, AND IT'S ALL A BIG NOTHING.  It's a tempest in a tea-party-cup.

What's the key?  Tax hate?  All right, how much?  Want zero taxes?  You're not getting that.  So is this all about relative percentages of tax rates?  So what else is there?  Fear of big government?  All right, I can begin to see that, but let's specify the Why and How first.  As with taxes, is there any magic number of proportionality which will honestly soothe you back down?  And if you're going to fear big government, why can't you at least be Libertarian about it and stay out of people's bedrooms and uteruses?  A capital-L Libertarian, I can begin to understand -- except on one point.  You say you love freedom and hate coercion.  Bravo, magnificent -- so you're concerned about corporations, right?  No?  No corporation can ever do anything wrong, you say -- except when thriller writer Brad Thor (yeesh ... !) accuses Burger King of recapitulating to the encroachment of Sharia law in America, which of course realistically leads us right back to "No corporation can ever do wrong."  So, then, is this the clarion call to freedom -- the freedom to be blind and deaf?

I've looked to other authors, I think more successfully, for the key to the psyche.  You read around in enough of the old Allen Drury books, and he claims that conservatives just want to be left alone and all the lefties are overwound control freaks.  Probably the most coherent of his on this score is the curiosity "Anna Hastings."  Another old-school Tory -- who is actually entertaining -- is James Clavell, who once put out a little curiosity (funny how this works) called "The Children's Story," which did a fair job of explaining how it is at our peril that we simply do away with "mere" symbols like our flag.

But if the ultimate anti-left complaint is "All the leftists want to change everything too fast too soon" -- which begs the burning question: is Steve Jobs a leftist? -- then this whole "It's not science, it's only leftist politics warning of global climate change" excuse is the surest way we're going to shoot ourselves in the foot and for zero reason.  America needs to LEAD on that, yesterday if not sooner.

It all smacks of brattiness.  "We want to be a world superpower AND a smug little island quarantined from the rest of the world." Sorry, we're all grownups now, you only get to choose one.  You want to stay in the superpower game, actually earn it for once.  You don't, then get out and don't whine about how you miss it so.

As I say, the more this book gasses on, the tinier it feels.  Another 300 pages, and I'll clue you in on just how tiny.  If anyone out there actually loves this thing, now's the time to explain what I'm presumably missing.    

[DruulEmpire]

Feeling good today, so I'll try to grind through the next four pages.

James is somehow disappointed to notice how gracefully Cherryl has grown into becoming lady of the house.  "He would have preferred the jingling bracelets and rhinestone buckles of her past."  Hoping for the eager puppyish enthusiastic curiosity of the shopgirl he first met, he declares "I closed a big deal today," and Cherryl can only wonder "What deal, Jim?"  There's a tense back-and-forth as James keeps wanting her to draw the information out of him but she doesn't care, so he expounds anyway, on how he will help to manage the nationalized assets of the People's States of South America -- and breaks to slip in the odd accusation that Cherryl is now hiding that she came from the slums and ought to be more interested in such selfless work as his, concluding:

          " ... It's always the poor who lack humanitarian instincts.  One has to be born to wealth in order to know the finer feelings of altruism."

I suspect that Rand may be making a specific slap at how our society tends to rely on what my father calls "aristo-populists," men from great wealth such as John F. Kennedy or Jay Rockefeller -- or Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for that matter -- who champion liberalism.  Certainly the current conservative batch likes to make these noises, even as they blink in wonder asking "What Koch brothers?" or "Rupert who?"  To my ear "noblesse oblige" is pretty sensible, but the conservatives consider it hateful.

Cherryl replies " ... I haven't any sympathy for that welfare philosophy.  I've seen enough of them to know the kind of poor who want something for nothing."  As I say, one Rand apologist went so far as to suggest that Rand was toying with Cherryl being black, in which case we may be seeing an attempted portrait of a black arch-conservative such as Clarence Thomas or Allen West or Herman Cain.  Cherryl may be a minority within a minority, but Rand is sufficiently fascinated by her to try to give her voice.

James offers her a yacht, even the crown jewels of the People's State of England.  Cherryl says she doesn't want anything.  He asks her if she still considers Hank Rearden a great man, and when she says she does he boasts that he will beat Rearden and become far greater -- and then she interrupts him and asks him about the nationalization of d'Anconia Copper.

Then she says "What your sister said in her radio broadcast was great."  This then is the crux, that Cherryl is finding James to be more kingpin than titan.  On Bertram Scudder's program being taken off the air, James says "It closes the issue and there's nothing more to be said about it."  "About a government that works by blackmail and extortion?" she replies.

Rand is trying to create a tragedy here -- and I say it is a tragedy, but not the one she intended. The tragedy, for me, is that Rand is finally expending some real work and care and talent in patiently setting up Cherryl Brooks against that endlessly complex clown James Taggart -- and it's all wasted, because it all hinges on a really dumb gimmick.  Once more, I wonder, what is the parallel, what is the analogy supposed to be, to the whole Hank and Dagny affair?  Rand seems to seriously be saying "THIS is what's wrong with society -- titans find true love and the government blackmails them for it, why, it happens all the time!"  The sad truth is that I find Cherryl Brooks to be far more interesting than the motivation this overblown novel saddles her with.  Rand might have had Cherryl ask James "Why are you driving away all the people of quality?" or some such thing, but no, it's always back to this archaic and silly scandal.

James goes a bit wild, complaining that his world is all personalities and power blocs and petty jealousies and maneuvering and betraying, declaring all this to be ingenuity and industry and prosperity.  Then he bursts out "I'm not to blame!  I have to take things as I find them!  It's not I who've made the world!"  Cherryl smiles bitterly and answers "That's what my father used to say when he got **92** at the corner saloon instead of looking for work."

She takes James for a hoodlum, all right.  Maybe even a gangster.

At this point we finally take leave of James and take a long reverie through Cherryl's mind -- and on that suspenseful note (well, I think it is), I will leave it there for tonight.     

[DruulEmpire]

It now occurs to me that I blurted ideas out a little too soon last time.  The more deeply I read, the better I appreciate that Cherryl is not necessarily any kind of stand-in or symbol.  I think this character affects me because Rand has gone to such trouble to build as James Taggart such an awful person, and Cherryl in spite of herself becomes the anti-James, the key to his lock, the one person who can get up close to him and figure him out and expose him, though he won't recognize that.

Right now, though, I think I'll take one minute to address another mystery, one so obvious it would be easy to never actually state it, namely: how were James and Dagny ever brother and sister in the same family!?  This contrast was used to far more comic, and occasionally even emotional, effect back in the TV show "Family Ties" when the conservative Alex was dumped into the liberal Keaton family.  Certainly there are splits between siblings all the time -- after a bout with Libertarianism, my oldest friend came back to liberalism, while his brother has become severely conservative -- but there's usually still SOME overlap between them.  To put it another way: what exactly is gained from insisting that Dagny is James' sister?  Offhand I can only think of one reason: that Rand wanted to show a Taggart not going the way of a jaded heir like James, and so she pointedly made that Taggart a woman who is always simultaneously admired and yet set apart because she is after all a woman in a "man's world."  Perhaps Rand is saying that Dagny embraced hard work precisely because she's a woman, and wised up to a degree that James never did.  Perhaps -- but if so, I wish Rand could spell it out more.

"The thing to do is to not get scared, but to learn."  This idea begins Cherryl's reverie, and I frankly find it admirable, certainly more so than all this I WILL NEVER FOR ANOTHER MAN NOR HE FOR I declamation.  If we all pointedly decided that it is better to learn than to fear, what a world this could be.  Cherryl clings to this idea during her first year married to James.  She toughs it out and soon finds herself enjoying a party because she has "arrived" as Mrs. Taggart and not some Cinderella curiosity.  Yet James can only bemoan the party -- and how well she fit in with it.  Later her good old horse sense urges her to point out to James that Dr. Simon Pritchett is nothing but a phony, and for an instant she dares wonder if he knows perfectly well the man's a phony, and is in league with him.

When she asks him about his work, he accuses her of being interested in a railroad executive rather than a husband -- even though it was his stature that first impressed her -- and then he claims "I don't trust anyone around me, I have nothing but enemies, I am very lonely.  Don't you see I need you?"  (So James is not a complete fool after all -- give him points for being adept at emotional blackmail.)  Later he comes home declaring "Happy times are here again!"  (Ah, at last, Rand echoes the real world.)  He's crowing over a big Washington plan.  (The Directive?  Or the Railroad Whatsit?  Doesn't seem to matter -- it's from Washington, so it's evil.)  James seesaws wildly back and forth between claiming victory and inveighing bitterly against the likes of Hank Rearden, an occasional sadism seeping out.  Cherryl is afraid -- heck, anyone would be, this James Taggart characterization is BIZARRE -- but she forlornly keeps faith in him.  So she decided to follow up on James on her own, and quickly learns that no one has any genuine respect for him -- Dagny, sure, but not James.  Then she goes to Eddie Willers.  Remember him?  The very first name we were introduced to, nearly 900 pages ago.  Eddie gives her the inside story of everything, of how James kept making stupid deals and Dagny kept on trying to save the railroad.

So at a time which I assume to be a little later in the original evening, reverie now over, Cherryl asks "Why didn't you tell me the truth?"  James keeps on being slippery, making this all about her ignorance and faithlessness.  Then that Dun-dun-dun! of all possible questions: "Jim, why did you marry me?"  At this James is all Ah gee, nobody gets too much love anymore (all right, so he doesn't exactly prophesy the Bee Gees, but he's about that lame), maybe human understanding is impossible, and he punctuates all that with --

          " ... I'll always seek and hope.  You're my last hope.  You're all I have ... I need you," he wailed softly.  "I'm all alone.  You're not like the others.  I believe in you.  I trust you.  What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me?  You're all I have ... "

Ah, James, James -- you shouldn't have snapped "Shut up, you rotten little bitch!" mere moments ago, that kinda scotched the deal.  Now she asks "What do you want of me?"  Eventually he accuses "You don't love me."  She answers "I did love you once ... but it wasn't what you wanted.  I loved you for your courage, your ambition, your ability.  But it wasn't real, any of it."  He counters "I want to be loved for myself -- not anything I do or have or say or think.  For myself -- not my body or mind or words or works or actions."  He goes on insisting this is some great romantic ideal, proclaiming "Love is its own cause!", but then --

          ... "You want it to be unearned," she said, not in the tone of a question, but of a verdict.
          "Oh, you don't understand!"
          "Yes, Jim.  I do ... You want unearned love.  You want unearned admiration.  You want unearned greatness.  You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is ... "

James screams "Shut up!" but hey, she's got him.  He makes a vicious mocking toast to Francisco d'Anconia which she refuses to participate in, and then she decides to get out of the house, if only for the next hour.

And NOW I understand why this section and this character has always nagged at me, because somehow or another Rand finally managed to nail something.  Is it melodrama?  Absolutely, positively -- but as the stuff goes, it's primo.  In my book Cherryl Brooks beats the hell out of Susan Alexander Kane, who can only complain to Charles Foster Kane that it's always about him and never anyone else, but Cherryl's complaint is far more biting and interesting.  Hell, this cuts even deeper than Betty Draper confronting Don Draper with his really being Dick Whitman.  And what's truly stunning is that for once Rand has done this EFFICIENTLY -- all right, I've been paring back, but in relatively few pages we get an entire year's worth of a "Cinderella" marriage all cracking apart in a single long night.

It's a double tragedy -- the story itself, and the fact that it's stuck amidst the morass of Atlas Shrugged.

Coming up -- Dagny and Cherryl meet once more.     

[DruulEmpire]

Appropriate that I am now a "Why?" Cup, for now I get to ask: Why, why, why did Rand go to all this care and trouble to create Cherryl Brooks, only to destroy and waste her?  We don't get enough cynical comic relief from Fred Kinnan, and now we won't be getting enough refreshing clarity from Cherryl.  Her end is coming, and let me tell you, it ain't gonna be pretty.

Rand is obsessed with sex and death.  Yeah, you can level the charge that this is one awfully dry book -- but think about the PLOT.  What does so much of Hank and Dagny's fortunes hinge upon?  Their affair.  What are we up for in another few pages?  Another affair, but between evil people.  And seen one way, this whole saga is Dagny simply working her way up a checklist of men.  And there's death aplenty: a train wreck, a couple of suicides before this -- and (spoiler alert!) Dagny is even going to get to shoot someone, I knew you were just dying for that to happen.

And now I get to savor the uneasy -- or perhaps just queasy -- sensation of Dagny, of all people, giving an "Aw, buck up, kiddo" pep talk to Cherryl.  Talk about being between a rock and a hard place: Dagny is Rand's rock, the St. Peter of her antitheist church of Galt Almighty,  and James is simply a hard place -- and Dagny is indeed better that James, if only because he's just so loony-tunes bizarre, but really, Cherryl's soul is clearly crying out for good old simple basic tenderness.  I rather wish that Dagny was a lesbian (there's no doubt a ton of snide speculation about that anyway), so she could give up lusting after one mortal male god right after another and simply give this fine woman some lovin'.

In fact, a thought strikes me.  What if Eddie Willers could be on hand, instead of just Dagny?  So far as I can tell, Rand insists upon Eddie being a kind of perpetual virgin doomed to pine after Dagny forever.  Why not give Eddie a REAL break?  He already met Cherryl when she came to him seeking information.  Eddie is a decent guy, and really needs to finally learn "She's just not that into you" when it comes to Dagny.  I read Cherryl as someone who right about now could go for some good old drown-your-sorrows whookita-whookita-whookita from a guy with a heart, and that would be Eddie.

That tears it.  I've just decided that someday I'll write a story with a character named Cherryl Willers.

But ... we are still left with the story as it is.  Dagny's burnin' that midnight oil, she's a hard-workin' gal, and she pauses to have a faintly creepy reverie that maybe John Galt is spying on her at that very moment, a little like Matt Damon advising Joan Allen to get some rest because she looks tired at the end of "The Bourne Supremacy."  The doorbell rings.  It's Cherryl, who has come to apologize for having gotten everything so backwards the last time they met.  Dagny thinks, What a distance to travel in less than a year ... !, and for once I can agree with her on something.  Anyhow, Cherryl pays her debt, as she thinks of it, and is taking her leave of "Miss Taggart," and Dagny replies --

          ... "Cherryl, my name is Dagny."
          ... "I ... I don't know whether I should -- "
          "We're sisters, aren't we?"
          "No!  Not through Jim!"  It was an involuntary cry.
          "No, though our own choice.  Sit down, Cherryl."

Hell yeah!  Preach it!  Sisterhood!  Like Annie Lennox sings, sisters are doing it for themselves!  Ehh, but no such luck, not really, because Rand can't help but screw this up, this is really all just an excuse to try to indoctrinate a Daughter She Never Had:

          " ... They, Jim and his friends, they said you were hard and cold and unfeeling."
          "But it's true, Cherryl.  I am, in the sense they mean -- only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it?"
          "No.  They never do.  They only sneer at me when I ask them what they mean by anything ... What did they mean about you?"
          "Whenever anyone accuses some person of being 'unfeeling,' he means that that person is just.  He means that 'to feel' is to go against reason, against moral values, against reality ... observe that you will never hear that accusation in defense of innocence, but always in defense of guilt.  You never hear it said by a good person about those who fail to do him justice.  But you always hear it said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, who's who don't feel any sympathy for the evil he's committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence.  Well, it's true -- that is what I do not feel.  But those who feel it, feel nothing for any quality of human greatness, for any person or action that deserves admiration, approval, esteem.  Those are the things I feel.  You'll find that it's one or the other.  Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.  Ask yourself which, of the two, are the unfeeling persons.  And then you'll see what motive is the opposite of charity."
          "What?" she whispered.
          "Justice, Cherryl."

Got all that?  Personally, I find it's NOT one or the other, that people tend to want justice AND kind consideration, and that often a person can be accused very accurately and objectively of being unfeeling, of being literally a bully and a sociopath.  Ah, but Rand will brook no heterodoxy, not even for her very own Cherryl Brooks.

          ... "Dagny, I'm afraid of them ... of Jim and all the others ... it's as if the whole world were suddenly destroyed ... by some horrible kind of softening ... and that would be the end of the world, not fire and brimstone, but goo."
          "Cherry ... Cherryl, you poor kid, there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that ... Cherryl, what you are struggling with is the greatest problem in history, the one that has caused all of human suffering ... "

Jeez louise, lady, this woman is having enough trouble with her MARRIAGE, could you lighten up on the whole self-glorifying "The whole world is against you" pitch?  Anyhow, good to know that the real problem with tyrants and conquerors and slave traders is that they were all big softies.  And finally, after this book has steadfastly refused to manifest the courage to attach a name to its enemy ideal, like "communism" or "collectivism" or "e pluribus unum," we now have a term: gooism, because Rand's evil status quo wants everything soft and gooey.  Here I've had to put up with a GOOEY grasp of basic science and a GOOEY grasp of human behavior and most definitely a GOOEY restaging of corporate behavior, and now this author presumes to warn me off anything so GOOEY as, say, people demanding a just wage.

          Dagny saw ... the slump of her shoulders ... the slender figure that seemed to sway then marshal all of its strength to remain erect.  She looked like a plant with a broken stem ... which one more gust of wind would finish.

Mind you, this is how Dagny sees Cherryl leave.  The whole world's been against you for centuries, you've got that?  Bye now.

The next sixteen pages are not going to be fun.

ADDENDUM: Oh, hang it all, let's at least get past this one dirty deed.  Abandoned by Cherryl, James Taggart gets visited by Lillian Rearden, who for some reason thinks she can wrangle with James to get Henry not to divorce her -- not, because she still wants the Rearden fortune if not Rearden the man.  (Huh, evidently this may have been before you could rake in huge divorce fortunes -- in modern times it would seem to me that she might be able to keep the money and drop the man, especially as she could prove Henry's infidelity with Dagny.)  Agreeing that James can't help her after all, they have that toast that James so wanted to d'Anconia.  Lillian spills her glass on herself, James moves to wipe it -- and it's spontaneous combustion, instant affair.  They, of course, only have cold passionless sex.

Later, Cherryl unlocks the door ... 

[DruulEmpire]

Here's the thing: I've come all this way, through a train wreck conveniently killing people who kinda-sorta had it coming to them, through assertions so perverse it's a wonder this novel isn't simply some obscure curiosity, through a lot of ideals which are the photographic negative of my own -- and for all that, I've never actually hated this book till now, and I must tell you, that's a tough place for a reviewer to be.  But the end draws near, and I'll not be bested by this overblown Goliath, so let me just refill my slingshot and carry on.

Cherryl comes back.  Now back in her old world, she's losing whatever strength she gained from Dagny (not surprising to me at all -- whatever you do, never put Dagny on a suicide hotline) and she catches on that Jim has been with another woman.  When confronted, Jim erupts into another unending irrational scream, bragging that it was Lillian Rearden and wrapping up by insisting that he chose Cherryl because she was worthless.  Ah, but --

          "You're lying, Jim."
          His answer was only a startled glance of astonishment.
          "Those girls that you used to buy for the price of a meal, they would have been glad to let their real selves become a gutter, they would have taken your alms and never tried to rise, but you would not marry one of them.  You married me, because you knew that I did not accept the gutter, inside or out, that I was struggling to rise and would go on struggling -- didn't you?"
          "Yes!" he cried.
          Then the headlight she had felt rushing upon her, hit its goal -- and she screamed in the bright explosion of the impact -- she screamed in physical terror, backing away from him.
          "What's the matter with you?" he cried, shaking, not daring to see in her eyes the thing she had seen.
          She moved her hands in groping gestures, half-waving it away, half-trying to grasp it; when she answered, her words did not quite name it, but they were the only words she could find: "You ... you're a killer ... for the sake of killing ... "
          It was too close to the unnamed; shaking with terror, he swung out blindly and struck her in the face.

So she runs out -- but she starts figuring that there is no really running from James Taggart who, like Satan, is prince of this world.  She wants a job, but worries that any place would start hating and abusing her for being a hard and honest worker.  She had once been inspired by skyscrapers but now sees them as "tombstones, slender obelisks soaring in memory of the men who had been destroyed for having created them ... "  (Ahh, always back to that Fountainhead.)  She sees a lighted sign "Young Women's Rest Club" but imagines the pointless conversation:

          ... "Drink?  Dope?  Pregnancy?  Shoplifting?"  She would answer, "I have no guilt, I'm innocent, but -- "  "Sorry.  We have no concern for the pain of the innocent."

Then eventually a social worker (ah well, a social worker, that's ALWAYS a pick-me-up) seizes her arm:

          ... "It's a disgrace to come to such a state ... if you society girls had something to do besides indulging your desires and chasing pleasures, you wouldn't be wandering, **92** as a tramp, at this hour of the night ... if you stopped living for your own enjoyment, stopped thinking of yourself and found some higher -- "

To which Cherryl screams back "No!  No!  Not your kind of world!" and then runs down to the river, towards "the parapet that barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space"

Rand wants her tragedy, and she wants it so badly that she commits her own sin: by denying Cherryl a mind of her own.  Cherryl was supposed to be a kind of definitive Everyperson despairing against the state of the world, and Rand is so insistent on her misery that her brain can't be permitted to function.

It's obvious she can try to go to Dagny, if not that night then the next day, and it sure seems obvious to me that she might even make an impression upon Eddie Willers.  Yet not even the novel's own internal logic can be applied to spare her this death.  What is more, we've been asked to consider at arduous, tedious length how Hank and Dagny have had to put up with injustices and deal-making -- can't Cherryl, even for one night, just do whatever it takes to put up with a little bullshit and get through the night and then try to think more clearly in the morning?  Rand makes her point only by suddenly making Cherryl well nigh psycho and death inevitable.  Rand claims to be for the individual struggling for happiness, but is so near-orgasmic over this hackneyed tragedy that Cherryl can't be permitted her own struggle.

I've seen this before, in entirely different stories, this railroading (you should forgive the aptness of the verb) of a character's personality to an author's intended homily, but from now on I shall always think of these wasted characters as Cherryl Brooks.  If Rand had any remote chance of making any sense through any halfway sympathetic character, that chance was with Cherryl -- but that would have been too complex, too human, the story taking on a breath of life outside Rand's iron synopsis.

No, James Taggart is not the only killer for the sake of killing.

Really, that was dreadfully unpleasant.  Ah, and to think, if Cherryl could only have survived another (mere!) hundred pages, she could have made it to the 59-page harangue that solves everything and saves the world -- but that is yet to come.  

[DruulEmpire]

I am now sufficiently past the distaste of Cherryl Brooks' (particularly) needless suicide to take on chapter 25, which starts out being about three copper wires breaking -- not all at once, either, but as a kind of steady progression.  You know the old "For want of a nail ... " saying, it's just that here the nail has become a wire.  Could this mean that Rand would have been all for Obama's call to rebuild our infrastructure!?  Ehh, somehow I wouldn't hold my breath for that.

We learn that copper wire is a vanishing commodity, "more precious than gold or honor."  No one dares to actually do anything because they "did not know what was safe or dangerous these days, when the guilty were not punished, but the accusers were ... "  Dagny sees everything winding down and gets to chuckle scornfully that the Railroad Unification Plan isn't working.  She also sees that James has been even more off balance (!!!) since Cherryl's suicide, screaming "It wasn't my fault!" and tending to hang out with Dagny more often, needing some sort of support, any support.  She knows what James has not yet sorted out: that proper business and transit are dying, and yet people with "pull" are constantly calling for special favors regularly screwing up the whole system.  To Dagny, half the decay is due to "charity-lust" and the other half due to simple gluttony, and as they yield the same result, she does not care to make any distinction between them.  One paragraph paints a slippery slope argument, which begins with a call for only a little of the wealth of the rich, then steadily demanding more and more of it -- ahh, so the Republicans are saving us from that slippery slope, isn't it a good thing that a novel agrees with them?  My town of Pittsburgh comes up again for a non-Danagger reason, as the place where rail is getting stolen by one Cuffy Meigs.

Finally the pointless banter breaks down -- and at least this much may be owed to Cherryl, the idea of two women in a row quietly and authoritatively laying down the truth for James:

          "You are asking for my reassurance, Jim.  You're not going to get it."
          "I beg your pardon?'
          "I'm not going to help you pretend -- by arguing with you -- that the reality you're talking about is not what it is, that there's still a way to make it work and to save your neck.  There isn't."
          "Well ... "  There was no explosion, no anger -- only the feebly uncertain voice of a man on the verge of abdication.  "Well ... what would you want me to do?"
          "Give up."  He looked at her blankly.  "Give up -- all of you, you and your Washington friends and your looting planners and the whole of your **72** philosophy.  Give up and get out of the way and let those of us who can, start from scratch from out of the ruins."

You know, I'd like to say that last sentence myself -- but TO certain industrialists.  But that's another issue.  But now I'm struck by James (eventually) retorting "You could save us now, you could find a way to make things work -- if you wanted to!" and Dagny bursting out in laughter.  I can't blame her, under these circumstances -- and yet, isn't what's happening now the reverse of this and yet serving the same superstition?  For today it seems we're now saying "Here, take more and more money, you titans of finance, certainly that will incentivize you to ... to ... to save our economy somehow!"  And if I do say so, we've learned the wrong lesson from Apollo, for even Obama probably figures "There must surely be some way to live off 'clean coal' if only engineers wanted to."  Rand did foresee a breakdown of our civilization, she just got the details amazingly wrong, if not inverted outright.

James launches into another pointless rehash of the whole "My being weak and needy constitutes a superior and inescapable moral claim upon your intelligence and resourcefulness" "philosophy," when thankfully (if only from the standpoint of shutting James up) there comes word that the d'Anconia mines have been simultaneously blown up all around the world.  (Ayn's gone pyro.  Dynamiting the Cortlandt back in "The Fountainhead" wasn't enough for her, and now not even Wyatt's Torch was enough for her.)  The legendary d'Anconia fortune is gone -- and Francisco has, of course, vanished.

Dagny has dinner with Hank, who describes life in this way:

          "Rearden Steel is now working at capacity," he was saying indifferently.  "They've lifted the production quotas off my mills -- for the next five minutes, I guess.  I don't know how many of their own regulations they've suspended.  I don't think they know it, either, they don't bother keeping track of legality any longer.  I'm sure I'm a law-breaker on five or six counts, which nobody could prove or disprove -- all I know is that the gangster of the moment told me to go full steam ahead."  He shrugged.  "When another gangster kicks him out tomorrow, I'll probably be shut down, as penalty for illegal operation.  But according to the plan of the present split-second, they've begged me to keep pouring my Metal, in any amount and by any means I choose."

Two pages later:

          " ... Dagny, they had to have tools for their harvest.  I've been selling all the Metal I could steal out of my own mills to the manufacturers of farm equipment.  On credit.  They've been sending the equipment to Minnesota as fast as they could put it out.  Selling it in the same way -- illegally and on credit.  But they will be paid, this fall, and so will I.  Charity, hell!  We're helping producers -- and what tenacious producers! -- not lousy, mooching 'consumers.'  We're giving loans, not alms.  We're supporting ability, not need.  I'll be damned if I'll stand by and let those men be destroyed while the pull-peddlers grow rich!"

Now here's the thing: I personally like what Hank is doing -- and yet I can just imagine some ideologue moaning "Oh dear, Rand has fallen for the siren call of the pampered and overcompensated American farmer," or even "Hank, Hank, you have fallen prey to the lure of CENTRALIZED PLANNING and REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH -- oh, Hank, it's such a shame that you're a Socialist!"  (By the way, I rather dig the term "pull-peddler," it sounds so much like "pud-puller.")

Soon the second wire breaks, just in time to provide a handy symbol for Rearden reaching his own breaking point with his useless brother Philip.  He is, however, much nicer when the Wet Nurse comes back to him for a job.  Meanwhile, Dagny is hearing out cries for copper wire and nails and waterproof paint, for rail spikes and screwdrivers and light bulbs, but the system is being frittered away on the People's Opera Company or something called Project Soybean.  Later, she gets an anonymous call warning her that there won't be enough cars to haul the harvest from Minnesota.  Minnesota soon goes crazy, farmers setting fire to their farms.

Sounds like Rand may recall a bit of the Great Depression -- yet draws the exact opposite lesson.

And now a third copper wire breaks -- and there I'll leave it.  66 pages now to the Big Harangue.  

************

ADDENDUM: Eh, what the hey, I still have strength in me today to see this almost -- almost -- to chapter's end, so here goes.  The wire causes a short circuit in a central control system for the railroads.  First, though, Dagny must suffer the company of clueless fools (her brother included, of course) in a private dining room.  These men of no inner initiative are prepared to let Minnesota get sealed off, and in so deciding are letting the rest of the country die off too.  Wesley Mouch quite accidentally sounds like he has a glimmer of a principle when he keeps insisting he wants "the production of a nation," but at that point Dagny puts him on the spot and argues that all of them must concentrate on saving the Eastern seaboard.  No one agrees or disagrees, they all just look and act as if her strategy is completely irrelevant.  (Yes, we've all been in meetings like that, haven't we?  And no, I'm not being ironic.)  Mouch sullenly notes that there's been talk of California seceding from the Union.  Cuffy Meigs asks everyone to perk up and consider that, yes, they may be losing Minnesota, but maybe now they should shoot for Mexico and Canada.

Somehow this triggers in Dagny the idea that, for all their technology, these men are motivated not by any industrial skyline, but by the blind grubby grabbing habits of some decadent self-indulging maharajah.  She considers herself a proud daughter of the industrial revolution, while these men have astrology and alchemy in their souls.  "She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation -- and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow."

In this context, her learning of the crisis set in motion by the third breaking wire is a kind of relief, a chance to grapple again with reality, even a tragic reality.  Dagny takes charge.  "Send them out on the Hudson Line, with orders to tear down every foot of copper wire, any copper wire, lights, signals, telephone, everything that's company property.  Have it here by morning."  Then she makes her way to a tower and tells them that they're back to men standing around as human lampposts with lanterns to lead the way, and working the switches and signals by hand, and sending written orders.  She then leaves the tower and proceeds to give orders to a throng of workers -- and then, right in the middle of that, she stops, and the next several paragraphs proceed as if she is in some out-of-body experience.  What happens now is so crazy, so hallucinatory -- no, no.  I can't write it now.  I'll resume this in a few days, and at long last draw a close to chapter 25.