What drew me to Ayn Rand in the first place was a friend recommending The Fountainhead. That caught me at a time in my life when there were people who kept trying to tell me what I should be doing with my life careerwise—and how I should do it. The message I got from The Fountainhead was to follow my own muse, and that I did not owe it to others to do it their way rather than my own. I needed that at the time. The basic message I took from the book was to have confidence in my own ideas and, as someone once put it, "Instead of letting other people tell you how to run your life, have the courage to be the star of your own movie."

Then some years later, she came out with Atlas Shrugged. The writing style was the same (very muscular), but it was a whole different thing. There are people around with the same kind of artistic and personal integrity as Howard Rourk, protagonist of The Fountainhead. But you're going to be damned hard pressed to come up with a real-life counterpart for characters like Hank Reardon, Dagny Taggart, Francisco d'Anconia—or John Galt. Or, for that matter, Rand's modern day pirate (attacking, looting, and sinking relief ships whose cargos have been bought with his rich friends' tax money, which he returns to them in gold bars), Ragnar Danneskjöld, who is sufficiently clever and elusive to evade all the world's navies. And he's one of Ayn Rand's good guys.

The whole thousand-plus page novel is a build-up to John Galt's fifty-two page speech, in which he (Ayn Rand, actually) outlines the basic principles of the philosophy and ethics of "Objectivism."

I soaked all of this up and even went so far as to take a twenty lecture course in "The Basic Principles of Objectivism" along with a bunch of other people, all sitting around of a Saturday night listening to lectures by Nathaniel Brandon on LP records. A lot of this sounded pretty good, but a lot of it bothered the hell out of me.

Any misgivings I dared to voice were quickly shamed out of me by the others—although I was not the only one there bothered by the idea that anyone who, through no fault of their own (illness, any kind of reverse or mishap) couldn't cope and needed a bit of a hand should simply be left to manage as best they could. The elderly? If they didn't have the foresight, or, for that matter, enough money left over at the end of the month, to save up for their retirement, they should be left to cope for themselves. They should have got a better job.

A very "survival of the fittest—and ONLY the fittest" view.

Like I said. What cured me of Ayn Rand was taking a look at the real world. And what REALLY cured me was that, having also read books like Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring and others who were issuing early warnings about the way we were using the atmosphere and the oceans to dump our trash in with the apparent assumption that their capacity was infinite and what this could eventually lead to, Ayn Rand came out with an essay on the burgeoning environmental movement, and concluded it by saying that these environmental "alarmists" ought to seek out the dirtiest, filthiest, belchingest smoke stack they could find and get down on their knees and give thanks for all the goods, services, and benefits it was endowing them with!

THAT CORKED IT!!

This and many other things she wrote in books like Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, The Virtue of Selfishness, and her monthly magazine, "The Objectivist" managed to convince me that the woman was either completely out of touch with reality or a real monster.

During the last few decades of her life, she managed to "repudiate" and alienate all her friends and her "inner circle" of people like Nathaniel Branden and Alan Greenspan. She wound up living in her thirtieth floor New York condominium and never went out into the real world.

And despite her vitriolic loathing of "government handouts," when her monthly Social Security check was deposited to her bank account, she bloody well spent it. And Medicare payments when she, a chain smoker all her life, contracted lung cancer.

(Tell me again that bit about personal integrity?)

I have quite a library of books by and on Ayn Rand. All of the books she wrote, and many books written about her by former members of her "inner circle" such as Nathaniel Brandon and Barbara Brandon (separately). And I have read them all.

There's not a helluva lot about Ayn Rand anyone can tell me that I don't already know.

ATLAS SHRUGGED:    The basic plot MacGuffin is that all the creative people of the world (or at least the ones John Galt can round up) who feel that they are not being properly credited or paid for the largess their creativity has lavished on an unappreciative and thankless world go On Strike, disappear, and hide out in a hidden valley in the Colorado Mountains (which they call "Atlantis," but it sounds a bit more like "Shangri-La" from the book and movie "Lost Horizon"). With all the world's entrepreneurs on strike, civilization collapses. In the climax, the protagonists decide it is now time to come forth from their refuge and rebuild the world in their own image.

Pure    Unregulated    Capitalism

Now you know what the Tea Party is all about.

Don Firth