Posted on 11/03/2009 12:13:51 AM PST by Tempest
Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"—her readers—were "lice" and "parasites" who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Why suddenly refer to Rand as Rosenbaum - is that your attempt at a Jewish slur? Do you think that will help you split her away from Christians? Are you really that puerile?
Anyone who fights to protect what the Founders created is one with the Founders. Don't believe me? Ask one of those "law-enforcement personnel" you're so fond of whether they belief they are risking their lives for anything less. Americans - all Americans - are Founders, because the country is based on individual rights. I n d i v i d u a l. That means each person has to live up to the Founders vision, individually, with their own lives.
Not collectively, through group agreement and group coercion and group control and - especially - group indemnification.
Can you give a citation for that, or are you just spreading B.S. to discredit a conservative writer?
Well gee, since I'm posting it in order to defend conservative writings and writers, up to and including Ayn Rand (you know, the subject of this thread?), I guess I'll have to pick Door Number 1: I am not "just spreading B.S."
But I won't do any research for you. You can either take me at my word, travel to Russia to research Dostoevsky's original papers, or... hmmm... use Google?
Up to you.
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I think the amphetamine smear is a bit weak ,, during the 1950's and 1960's speed was just about the most prescribed thing in existance... if you really want to slam Alisa Rosenbaum why don't you go after the 14 year affair she had with a man 25 years her junior (as covered in excruciating detail in the current issue of Inc. magazine) ,, of course you would have to acknowledge that her husband knew about it and allowed it to continue.
I don't worship Ayn Rand, she sounds like an absolute nightmare as a wife with her bloated ego , her speed usage, and her well documented contempt for her groupies but her novels Fountainhead and Atlas are fantastic and give the commies amongst us fits. To me it looks like God making lemonade from lemons ,, of course if my family was crushed by the Communist revolution and I had to flee to freedom I might be a bit screwed up too.
So, I'll plead questionable to my claim. But I still think I read it somewhere.
However - my stinking point was that writers are not perfect, and it is plain common sense that many have written ennobling works of art that they did not personally live up to (Common Sense is a good example, apparently Thomas Paine had hideous personal hygiene).
For other examples, William Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, Eugene O'Neill, Edgar Allen Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, John Cheever, Jack London and Sinclair Lewis were all alcoholics. Should we burn their books?
I will be the first to admit that Ayn Rand made some terrible personal choices, starting with the person she chose to "carry on her work." But the crucial issues she wrote about were, and are, timeless - and precious.
It is to her eternal credit that collectivist tyrants the world over still shake with rage when they hear her name.
Rush Limbaugh has been married three times and addicted to Oxycontin. Would you describe him as "vile and morally bankrupt" and a "corrupter of souls?"
Subjectivists won’t see their paradoxes. They are most often incapable of objective perceptions and tend to project their own weaknesses from their bandwagons. As for communism/fascism, the same effete repeatedly ushered it into their European homelands with their meretricious political putsches and genocidal fantasy threats.
We’ve allowed too much of Europe into America for about 150 years.
Reading Soviet propaganda isn’t research. If you take their word for that, you’ll take their word on everything.
Dostoevsky wasn’t perfect- he was at times a terrible gambler. I am sure he had quarrels with his wife. I have no doubt you read that he beat his wife. But do you have to spread Soviet lies around to others. Dostoevsky was their most hated writer of all- with good reason.
The reason Ann Rand is so quoted and revered in the conservative movement generally is that she hit the money with her observations of the evils of collectivism and statism. Unfortunately, she drew the wrong conclusions on how to respond to that with her damnation of all altruism and religion.
If you do that, and carry that idea through to its logical conclusion, then we make ourselves God. Does our life consist of nothing but more and more self-gain? If that is the case, we would never have children, or fall in love, or offer anyone else advice, or care, or comfort. Who wants to live in a world like that? I don’t mind helping the poor and the disadvantaged and those down on their luck. My problem is when the government does the helping, very badly, with my money, and for causes I don’t agree with!
The difficulty with Ann Rand is that though she had some good insights, you have to take the bad conclusions she came to as well. She certainly thought that anyway. Like most humanist philosophers, Ann was supremely arrogant and very self-centred. There were no half-measures with “objectivism”. You couldnt agree with some but reject other parts. As far as she was concerned that was worse than rejecting the whole proposal.
What I find most amusing about the liberal “hatred” of Ayn Rand is that if she was an admirer of socialism instead of capitalism, she would be a liberal icon. After all, she was an atheist, a supporter of abortion, brazenly committed adultery and was by most accounts an immoral mean-spirited woman who had no tolerance for anybody who had a different opinion. In other words, she was in many ways, the prototype liberal and aside from her political beliefs, would have mixed well with the likes of Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank.
“They seem to make her more selfish and self centered”
Jesus came to save the individual. He made each one of us “Priests before the Father”. So, in this perspective Rand’s me-ism is very Christian. Liberals (collectivists) treat each person not as a person but just another piece of the collective. This is decidedly NOT Christian.
Does this explain why Rand’s writings are appreciated by Conservatives whether Christian or atheist?
Next!
she was deranged but also came up with some good ideas
“What did she achieve, besides the corruption of souls.”
Read the book and you won’t have to ask.
You mean like Time, or Newsweek?
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