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Are you happy? Shame on you if you are. People have long excoriated Ayn Rand and all who pay attention to her. However, as I traveled to Los Angeles yesterday on business, I saw the evidence of her vision coming to life. The rail lines from Orange County to Union Station are deteriorating. The once iconic station is now worth of a third world nation. The streets of the city are crowded with the flotsam of humanity. The homeless sleep in every nook and cranny. Depression overwhelms even their desire to panhandle. As I escaped back to my enclave in South Orange County, I realized that happiness is a rare commodity in America these days and we are now asked to select from two of our unhappiest members to lead us further into the depths of depression. Ayn Rand had it correct.
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Happiness
Happiness
Posted 8 y ago
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I've always liked this quote from John Rogers:
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
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I read Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead as a teenager, and I found them both to be somewhat interesting.
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CPT Jack Durish
Funny, I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time as a teenager. I didn't find it interesting. I found it disturbing. I refused to believe that it could be true. I've read it twice since, once more in middle age and again when I got older. It's fascinating how the prescience of it exposed itself in those subsequent readings.
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I wonder if it was really prescience, or was it Rand's observations of the Soviet Union (her home country before coming to the U.S., I believe) and the direction of trends there?
Either way, I found the books mildly interesting.
Either way, I found the books mildly interesting.
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My real problem with books like hers is that the story is just a frame, and a rather flimsy one at that, so the characters can voice her political views. Lengthy expositions of her superman philosophy, and of the inferiority, almost non-entity, of those flabby, malleable types that make up the human trash (by far the majority of our kind, apparently). Their speeches could have been accompanied by "Also Sprach Zarathustra" if it were 5,000 times longer than it is.
I have the same problem with Robert Heinlein's books, because all of his main characters are political philosophers and have their minds stuffed with voluminous, ready-made speeches so they can tell the reader how the world really works, whether he's interested or not. At least Heinlein was creative though, which helps.
I have the same problem with Robert Heinlein's books, because all of his main characters are political philosophers and have their minds stuffed with voluminous, ready-made speeches so they can tell the reader how the world really works, whether he's interested or not. At least Heinlein was creative though, which helps.
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I view Atlas Shrugged as a prophesy at this point. Everything going on has a direct coloration with in that book. That and the movie idiocracy.
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CPT Jack Durish
I don't know if "prophesy" is the word I'd use. More like a warning like a fight manager who warns a boxer not to lean into a left jab. We did...
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