Among the Intellectualoids/Romancing the Self: Ayn Rand
Owen, Kent
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ROMANCING THE SELF: AYN RAND ive years after her death, Ayn Rand's shadow still falls across the landscape of American semi-popular culture—perhaps beyond the length...
...The arbitrary boundary lines drawn after World War II did place the Golan Heights in Syria...
...How delightful to have your meanest prejudices justified so lucidly...
...Its purpose is to combat media inaccuracies, through public education and publicity...
...If one extends the logic of objectivism to the nearest extreme, one is bound to conclude that statism, collectivism, and altruism are all attached to the same Hydra...
...While Rand herself, on the evidence of Mrs...
...Whatever its value as a study of a curious yet marginal cultural phenomenon, the biography deserves to be read as a cautionary tale about the grotesque excesses that the single-minded pursuit of Reason can cause...
...Missile and bombers would not be needed...
...Reason be hanged: what Ayn Rand uses to ensorcel is nothing less than Gothicism, that fictive architecture of haunted castles, ruined monasteries, and moonstruck manors...
...At least she thought she was...
...If one cares to probe the strangeness of Solzhenitsyn, Lenin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, or the current Kremlin roster, attention must be paid to her contrarieties...
...In 1948, after the declaration of Israel's independence, the British-led Transjordanians attacked the newly-founded Jewish state and were able to occupy Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") and the eastern part of Jerusalem...
...What are some of these myths, and what are the facts...
...In contrast, the land area of the Arab nations is twice that of the U.S...
...That narrow waist contains 75% of Israel's population and most of its industrial installations...
...Through the exploitation of the losers, the malevolent bring down the winners, redistributing whatever goods society has to offer...
...From 1948 until Israel captured the Heights in the 1967 Six-Day War, Syria subjected Israeli settlements in the plains below to constant bombardment...
...Putting aside the grosser exaggerations, one must respect the stoical nobility of her conception of man...
...Come to think of it, these are thesame makings that novelists have stuffed into their wares since the days of Ann Radcliffe and the Bronte sisters down to the Harlequinistes...
...Yes, her clear, bitter words lend themselves, like collaborators, to extreme constructions...
...Thus, Israel proved conclusively that peace and security—not extra land—are its top priorities...
...But when it comes to semi-popular thought, the chances of having things go haywire increase exponentially...
...So one learns from Barbara Branden's biography, The Passion of Ayn Rand, published last year by Doubleday...
...H owever else one may regard Ayn Rand, there's no denying that she was mad about Reason...
...Given the fact that the biographer was once married to Nathaniel Branden, Rand's chief acolyte and quondam lover, the book is remarkable for its generosity (more even than that, its magnanimity) toward a difficult, often impossible subject...
...Myth: Israel has been expansionist since its establishment...
...Spanning big-sellers, trendy movies, wellness regimens, moneymaking schemes, spirituose enthusiasms, and a range of self-propelled velleities, the semi-popular world is what self-improving, leisurely mental Americans go for...
...Or bothered to expend so many caressing words on the subject...
...These tribes founded a kingdom and called it Transjordan...
...In 1922, contrary to its mandate from the League of Nations, Britain gave the area east of the Jordan River (77% of Palestine) to the Hashemite tribes...
...All other countries concerned consider themselves in a state of war with Israel, deny its "existence...
...Petersburg, devoted herself to the construction of "objectivism," her own philosophy of rational self-interest...
...Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...
...What looks firm and sturdy is often porous and flimsy...
...all people—Moslems, Jews, and Christians—are entitled to live in the West Bank:' Myth: Israel annexed the Golan Heights illegally and has no right to hold onto them...
...As a result, the episodes of the carpentered plots are, in the main, more engaging than the salient qualities of the main characters...
...46 YES I want to help in the publication of these ads and in countering anti-Israel and anti-Zionist propaganda.-1 include my tax-deductible contribution in the amount of My name is I live at In State Zip Mail to: CAMERA, PO...
...Somehow she couldn't get it straight that one man's reality is never wholly and exactly congruent with any other's...
...The insistence on "adjustment" of borders is one step in the plan for its destruction...
...For despite her intention to make novels of ideas, Ayn Rand reworked the literary tradition of the Romantic Hero, the modern Prometheus confronting his destiny...
...Numerous international legal authorities, among them Eugene Rostow, have shown conclusively that Israel's rights in Judea-Samaria (the "West Bank") are based on international law and are further affirmed by U.N...
...Our overhead is minimal...
...No doubt Ayn Rand would have been appalled by such goings on...
...Almost all of our revenue pays for these messages...
...The fate-stricken heroes of Byron and Hugo give way to Rand's engineers, entrepreneurs, and technocrats...
...Anyone with the temerity to attack the prevailing hypocrisies must be ready to catch hell from all and sundry...
...Ayn Rand herself would have called that a fair bargain...
...Fact: Israel, including Judea and Samaria (the "West Bank") has an area about half the size of San Bernardino County in California...
...write the script for the television series, "Amerika...
...Branden, was often attentive to the needs of others, she refused to countenance altruism as a legitimate principle of human conduct...
...Israel has been ready for such talks for 20 years...
...of the misbegotten and misfitted...
...So far, only Egypt has finally agreed to sit down and talk to Israel...
...If Israel were to give up Judea and Samaria, it would only be nine miles (!) wide between the Arab military machine and the Mediterranean Sea...
...Almost every matter had to be raised to the level of moral abstraction and taken with the utmost seriousness...
...It was then up to her, often to her alone, to instruct mankind about what it had to know...
...In the spoils, Britain got Iraq and Palestine...
...and will not consider any talks or negotiations...
...Ayn Rand essay contests for high school pupils who aspire to explain the cosmic significance of objectivism to those without the law...
...Beyond the fact by Kent Owen of sheer numbers she has attracted legions of loyal readers who cherish the books as the authoritative and definitive source of economic, social, political, moral, and psychological wisdom...
...Israel is the only victorious country in recorded history that, in quest for peace and acceptance, has surrendered vast territories to the vanquished...
...To this day, there are Ayn Rand study groups who gloss the sacred texts to discern innermost meanings...
...Bitterly candid as she was, Ayn Rand had no reluctance about strip= ping away the wrappings from cant and sham though that put her at odds with those who believe in the ultimate truth of the Judeo-Christian ethic or even with the devotees of secular humanism, whose main premises hers seem to resemble, if one makes allowances for economic heresies...
...In the marketplace of ideas, like that of goods and services, the customary advice is caveat emptor...
...Nowadays it works much the same, whether in the incessant productions of Joyce Carol Oates or the ejaculations of Stephen, Sidney, Jackie, Harold, and Barbara What're-Their-Names...
...Fact: Contrary to what Arab propaganda suggests, Jordan was never sovereign in JudeaSamaria (the "West Bank...
...In effect, the novels are not novels at all but "romances" that center on conflicting ideas or themes, ideologies, and personality types...
...There is a palpable pattern here to a grand design that can mean only one thing: The goblins will get you if you don't watch out...
...Over the last forty years, one could count on flushing a covey of Randians from any high school or college debating team, sci-fi club, junior overachievement society, or claque of the self-consciously bright such as MENSA or The Baker Street Irregulars...
...each is an allegorical figure used to represent, more or less, a trait, type, or general tendency...
...Israel has been prepared to negotiate all issues with Syria, including the status of the Golan Heights...
...Nothing in her several dogmas so rankles would-be allies and outright opponents as the adamant rejection of one person's selfless concern for another...
...A.S...
...Doesn't it feel terrific to confess that Ayn Rand gives a lift to anyone who is sick and tired of coerced compassion and compulsory charity...
...In case of attack, Israel could not mobilize and its principal population centers would be reduced to rubble within a matter of minutes...
...In a way it's a pity she didn't live to Myth: The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 changed border arrangements that had existed for centuries...
...All in the name of justice and humanity, of course...
...Even during her lifetime, she was hardly able to monitor the purposes her ideas were made to serve, whether by ideologues, free-market speculators, political operators, or sub-literary sycophants...
...All through the overthrow of man's greatest faculty, Reason...
...Accordingly, those who choose to stock their minds with Randian notions will have to accept the consequences, if and when anything goes wrong...
...Myth: Israel's insistence on defensible borders is unrealistic in this age of missiles and long-range bombers...
...Myth: Judea and Samaria (also called "the West Bank") are part of Jordan...
...Scarcely the affirmation of the free market one would expect of so eminent a proponent...
...Her ideal of an autonomous person true to his own integrity does possess a grandeur...
...W hile Ayn Rand proclaimed her- self "a radical for capitalism," she declined to invest in the stock market, preferring to squirrel away her money in a savings account...
...But there is something other than deep-rooted selfishness that holds her readers—something like the self's struggle to summon its powers against the evils that challenge its advance...
...To do less would have insulted her dignity as a thinker who had to be respected as very, very serious...
...But in place of invincible will and passion, The Fountainhead's Howard Roark and Atlas Shrugged's Hank Reardon draw their masterful force from Reason, that Randian philosopher's stone supercharged beyond the sanest dreams of Bertrand Russell...
...From first to last, her intention was to state the reality of the human condition as clearly and courageously as she could...
...Like semi-classical music, it is rarely fatal, but does tend to stunt one's growth...
...By no means was this the only contradiction in Ayn Rand's privatelife...
...Sit down at the negotiating table and work out an agreement on borders, just as Israel did with Egypt...
...through it all his stainless integrity gives off an undimming gleam, by which lesser men may someday find their own way...
...But it's more than passing strange that the one writer who styled herself high priestess to the Cult of Reason should have trafficked so wantonly with the enemy...
...She may have embodied more of Mother Russia than anyone wants to admit...
...Rand's books, particularly The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, startle readers bolt-upright: See here, they declare, the gifted and the talented, the brightest and the best are held hostage by cunning mediocrities, woolly-witted sentimentalists, and bogus humanitarians...
...Today's bumper crop of gifted and talented must regard her as a tutelary goddess, as do the self-absorbed careerists whose ambitions and desires propel them upward, if not onward...
...Few philosophers were so smitten by the mechanics of ratiocination...
...For the real meaning of prophesy is not to foretell the future, but to tell the truth about the present...
...Still, Israel is not prepared to commit suicide by yielding to propaganda and myth and by adjusting its boundaries to suit the purposes of its implacable enemies...
...Since 1943 when The Fountainhead was published by Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis, twenty million copies of her books have been sold throughout the world, making her one of the century's better vended thinkers...
...Thank heavens, she's got the gumption to say loud and clear what needs to be said...
...By the way, Sherlock Holmes with his deductive faculties grinding away could be the prototypical Randian hero, except for the spells of moodiness and a cocaine habit...
...It is, after all, beyond the power of the originator to do much about what happens to his ideas at the hands of others...
...tion" is pointless...
...42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 Rightly so...
...and for all one knows, Ayn Rand investment clubs, chain-letters, real estate seminars, singles bars, and self-realization retreats...
...Infra dig as this bag of tricks may be, that old Gothic magic is hard to ward off...
...Presto chango: they are rebuilt as skyscrapers, corporate cantonments, public housing projects, urban sprawlings ridden by terror...
...Hence, a considerable irony in the flat characters is that although they talk constantly about freedom in one form or another, they are not themselves "free" to grow inner lives in a spontaneous, resonant way...
...Should they be changed...
...Compromise was always beneath her even when the point at issue was incidental...
...The solution...
...By dint of constant repetition, some of these myths have come to be accepted as reality...
...Few, maybe none, of her characters can be described as richly imagined, thickly textured, complexly realized...
...It put Israel at an impossible military disadvantage...
...In particular, those glib antinomians who follow the libertarian gleam are usually sent off in that direction by the Sphinx's riddle, "Who is John Galt...
...Box 590381 San Francisco, CA 94159 CAMERA is a tax-deductible, non-profit educational 501(c)(3) organization...
...Moreover, allegorical conventions convert them into the monumental figures that bedeck the public works murals in American courthouses and post offices—and, more ironically, in Soviet representations of brawny men and buxom women strenuously at work in factories, farm fields, construction sites, all under the aesthetic aegis of Socialist Realism...
...From the fall of Czarist Russia to her own end, she believed she had learned the whole truth about reason, freedom, the nature of man, and hisultimate destiny...
...It's hard to gauge her influence because that terrain is uneven and spooked by mirages...
...Thrilling stuff, this recounting of the solitary, accursed hero's exploits...
...Branden's book is that it manifests the spirit of altruism Ayn Rand despised...
...Then again, she probably would have insisted that it be titled "Gone With the Mind...
...She's right, you know: here are cryptocollectivists with their bowels in an uproar at the mere mention of bankrupt farmers, laid-off factory workers, "out-placed" employees, hooligans, welfare mothers, and whole shelters full Kent Owen is Indiana editor of The American Spectator...
...Could it be that Schadenfreude is the source of her persisting appeal...
...Who, indeed, is John Galt...
...Many in the Arab world insist that the State of Israel is "illegitimate" and that, in order to be considered for "recognition", it must, at the very least, "adjust" its borders...
...They renamed themselves "Jordan" and stayed in that occupation for 19 years, until they were defeated and driven out by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War...
...Box 590381, San Francisco, CA 94159-0381 You deserve a factual look at...
...In sum, Ayn Rand has become in death larger than life through the American gift for commercial aggrandizement...
...Whether she would have called it "Dr...
...The last irony of Mrs...
...Thus are vital juices sapped and sucked away through the leechery of entitlements...
...Bully for Ayn Rand, you say...
...President Reagan concluded that Jewish settlements are not illegal and that...
...When the rationalism of the Enlightenment became stuffy and acrid, bored readers sought the shuddersome pleasures roused by spectral romances...
...Thus, the constantly-repeated accusation of "Israeli occupaThis ad has been published and paid for by Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America P.O...
...The static quality of her prose also calls up images of municipal statuary, pompous and weighty, but too apt a target for pigeons...
...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages...
...Nabokov said that the word, reality, should always be italicized, but because absolutes were the need of her nature, that wouldn't have done her much good...
...All because the manipulating self-haters cannot stand to live in a world uplifted by proud, independent, useful creators and producers who revel in the glory of rational self-interest...
...Once again, the genre that she called "Romantic Realism" is a throwback to the massively proportioned nineteenth-century novel, but with a difference...
...It should sate the cravings of detractors and idolators alike for a thorough narrative of the life and career as well as a closely observed-account of the personality and character...
...In order to justify that insistent demand, Arab propaganda has created many myths...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ROMANCING THE SELF: AYN RAND ive years after her death, Ayn Rand's shadow still falls across the landscape of American semi-popular culture—perhaps beyond the length her height commands...
...Better yet, people would have watched and people would have listened...
...Zhivago in America" or "Beyond the Yankee Gulag," Ayn Rand might have created a Neo-Gothic ideodrama replete with orations and noble struggles...
...Fact: The British allocated the area east of the Jordan river to the Hashemite tribes...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1987 43...
...No matter what one thinks of national characteristics, Ayn Rand could only have been Russian...
...Though life be unfair, it's rendered even unfairer by envious utopianeers who contrive to handicap every able-minded creator and producer for the sake of the poor, luckless, and afflicted...
...Israel's Borders Are they "legitimate...
...Fact: The Golan Heights is a desolate area the size of Queens, NY...
...Fact: In 1974, Israel returned to Syria territories captured in the 1967 and 1973 defensive wars...
...The former Alice Rosenbaum, late of St...
...Fact: The borders in the Middle East were drawn arbitrarily after World War I, by Britain and France...
...And instead of the stock company of demonic monks, mad alchemists, tormented princes, and damsels at risk, she substitutes megalomaniacal tycoons, epicene intellectuals, blase playboys, and uppity heiresses...
...In exchange for a peace treaty, Israel returned the vast Sinai area to Egypt, with all of its settlements, strategic installations, and economic assets...
...Myth: Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria ("West Bank") are illegal, an obstacle to peace...
...Resolutions 242 and 338...
...One suspects that among the ranks of the LaRouchies are cadres of onetime Randians, who view American society as a gigantic conspiracy run by irrationalists, plutocratic fops, and mystagogues...
Vol. 20 • October 1987 • No. 10
