[beckett]

Brilliant, flawed, interesting Ayn. Long ago I went through a period when I studied her life and work pretty closely.

My favorite anecdotes about her are illustrative, but not flattering. In the first, when she learned her much younger protege and lover Nathaniel Branden (an anagram of Ben Rand, i.e., Son of Rand) was cheating on her, the goddess of reason slapped him hard across the face and flew into a rage with witnesses present, violating her own golden rule that emotions should always be held in check and subordinated to reason.

In the second, at the end of her life when it became clear lung cancer would kill her, her physician urged her to publicly denounce smoking to her legions of fans and followers, many of whom smoked because of her example. She declined. Their health was their problem, she averred. And besides, the champion of nicotine found it much too difficult to admit she was wrong about the habit.

Ayn Rand was correct about private property, capitalism and the meaning of money. She was very wrong about much else.

[libstripper]

The sad thing about Rand was that, in her private life, she ended up violating most of her moat important teachings. Indeed, after reading and thoroughly enjoying Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, and We the Living, I made the huge mistake of reading This is Ayn Rand. TIAY was a total sycophantic suck-up that was almost a bad as some of the similar efforts by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to canonize the Kennedys. Indeed, after properly criticizing Stalin, she went on to ape him by creating her own cult of the personality.