How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood
In keeping with the Ayn Rand ruins everything meme in honor of the release of Atlas Shrugged: The Movie, enjoy a blackly amusing recollection of what can happen when your Rand-obsessed parent attempts to raise you by the dictates of Objectivist philosophy. (Big mistake!) Alyssa Bereznak writes in Salon:
It was odd growing up in an objectivist house. My father reserved long weekends to attend Ayn Rand Institute conferences held in Orange County, California. He would return with a tan and a pile of new reading material for my brother and me. While other kids my age were going to Bible study, I took evening classes from the institute via phone. (I half-listened while clicking through lolcat photos.)
“We were wondering if you would petition to be emancipated,” he said in his lawyer voice. “What does that mean?” I asked, picking at the mauve paint on my hands. I later discovered that for…
How Ayn Rand Tanked The Economy
Ayn Rand was a godawful writer, and in ironic fashion her philosophy failed disastrously in her personal life. Yet decades after her death, her work’s destructive influence has never been stronger. The Awl rips apart the “Objectivist” doctrine championed by Rand and one of her most adoring disciples, former Fed chief Alan Greenspan:
That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both.
The two first met in the ’50s. Back then, a gang of acolytes, calling themselves the Collective, used to gather at Rand’s apartment on East 36th Street every Saturday night so they could tell each other how smart they all were. Along came Greenspan one evening, shy…
Ayn Rand In Congress
The National Journal has taken the time to analyze the number of times Ayn Rand has been mentioned in the last ten sessions of Congress. Only 23 times (here we go again – 23 enigma fans stand up) it turns out, mostly by Ron Paul and now his son Rand. The awful new Ayn Rand movie Atlas Shrugged that debuts this weekend will probably put a stop to it though!
Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul did what many saw as inevitable: he quoted at length from Ayn Rand, specifically from Anthem, during an Energy and Natural Sources committee meeting to make a point about individual will being squashed by a collective rules society. The speech got us wondering: before Paul the younger arrived to the Senate how often does Ayn Rand get mentioned in Congress?
A good measure, we thought, would be searching through the Congressional Record, which is the official record of the proceedings in the…
‘Atlas Shrugged’ Trailer Has a Bunch of People Yelling About the Railroad Industry (Video)
Yes, Ayn Rand’s book has been turned into a movie. As Cyriaque Lamar writes on io9.com:
Whatever your feelings happen to be about Objectivism, this isn’t a particularly effective trailer. Sure, it’s jam-packed with lines that ooze significance if you’ve soldiered through the book’s 90,000 pages, but for those audience members who don’t know Ayn Rand from Emo Phillips, it’s a movie about a bunch of randoms angry about Amtrak or yammering about metallurgy or something.
What’s your verdict? Can anything be salvaged here, or will this be an objective stinker?
Ayn Rand and Political Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
From Slate’s 2009 review of Jennifer Burns’ Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right and Anne Heller’s Ayn Rand and the World She Made:
Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child. In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote “a scathing denunciation of childhood,” headed with a quote from Pascal: “I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise.”
But the Rosenbaums’ domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs—but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father’s pharmacy was seized “in the name of the people.” For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde…
Will Goldman Sachs Prove Greed is God?
These A-holes are no longer happy with the “Greed is Good” mantra? Kicking it up to the Almighty now? Great job ducking those questions from Congress today. Matt Taibbi, who’s been excellent on speaking the truth behind the so-called financial “crisis,” writes in the Guardian:
The investment bank’s cult of self-interest is on trial against the whole idea of civilisation — the collective decision by all of us not to screw each other over even if we can.
So Goldman Sachs, the world’s greatest and smuggest investment bank, has been sued for fraud by the American Securities and Exchange Commission. Legally, the case hangs on a technicality.
Morally, however, the Goldman Sachs case may turn into a final referendum on the greed-is-good ethos that conquered America sometime in the 80s – and in the years since has aped other horrifying American trends such as boybands and reality shows in spreading across the western world like a venereal disease.
When Britain and other countries were engulfed in the flood of defaults and derivative losses that emerged from the collapse of the American housing bubble two years ago, few people understood that the crash had its roots in the lunatic greed-centered objectivist religion, fostered back in the 50s and 60s by ponderous emigre novelist Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand and Her Hollywood Days
Anne C. Heller, author of the biography Ayn Rand and the World She Made speaks with WSJ’s Steven Kurutz about the days when Ayn Rand was the “talk of the town.” She also discusses an upcoming blockbuster movie based on her novel.
