Posted on 03/07/2009 7:48:34 AM PST by Publius
Think about the ubiquitous Environmental Impact Statement. Every time anything is to be built, you need to file that statement. Today, if Dagny were to re-engineer the Rio Norte Line, there would have been at least one environmental study comducted by a politically connected consulting firm before a spade of earth could be turned. That study would have cost a bundle and taken at least a year to perform.
When we get to the last chapter, I’ll have an essay exploring that issue.
DING DING DING! We have a winner!
In Rand's day, deconstructivism was just a gleam in the eye of a nihilistic academic somewhere. Rand had had her experience with nihilism in Bolshevik Russia, but here she was creating the academic basis for denying reality itself, which will come soon in the book.
Damn, you're good!
Most of us at FR are great thinkers. (Maybe that should be my next tag line.)
By the way, "Casablanca" was set in that city during a specific period of World War II. But rent the 1984 film "Streets of Fire", and you'll see what you're talking about.
Wait until we get to the "trial" of Hank Rearden. A lot will be explained then.
In my #7, your question got me going on another facet of the "disinterested third party" phenomenon. In AS, when people describe themselves as "disinterested" the media assumes (1) They ARE disinterested, and (2) That this renders their opinions worthy of consideration and of respect. This is similar to today's assumption that anyone spouting the liberal line is altruistic, while anyone taking the other side is assumed to have sinister motives.
Here we are in Chapter 8, entitled “The John Galt Line,” subtitled Dagny’s Ride To Glory. In it she ramrods her way through technical difficulties, public pressure, and political skullduggery to run her train over Rearden’s metal and their mutual bridge, after which she and Hank finally satisfy our expectation and tumble into one another’s arms. An elegy to prurience and propinquity. One of my favorite words, the latter – it means kinship or likeness, similarity in nature, which describes Dagny and Hank’s relationship. Love between the two as commonly understood is still nowhere in sight.
Within the chapter we see the upshot of the Equality Of Opportunity Bill, which is simply the division of Rearden’s empire up among sundry political operators who engineered the act’s passage. Each of these wants his own little bite of an enterprise he considers a static reservoir of wealth. He cannot create it, he cannot run it, but he can despoil it. That is life under socialism.
Quite often on FR we have one of those “when did the rot set in?” threads, the usual consensus being somewhere in the late 60’s when the (highly debatable) conventional morality of the Greatest Generation was swamped over by the licentiousness of us Boomers. Those threads generally deteriorate pretty rapidly to useless flamefests and rational folk wander off to debate more important matters such as the merits of Obama’s torso or the high drama within the New York Yankees’ infield.
But I think Atlas Shrugged gives us more than ample evidence that the rot had already set in after its current familiar form well before the days of nascent hippiedom. By 1957 Rand was already giving us polished gems of corruption with far too much verisimilitude for her to be accused merely of making them up out of whole cloth. Here are a few:
The general policy of the press had been stated by a famous editor five years ago. “There are no objective facts,” he had said. “Every report on facts is only somebody’s opinion. It is, therefore, useless to write about facts.”
One need look no further than MSNBC or the pages of the NY Times to note that this doctrine has been taken to heart. What counts is journalism’s social effect (that word again) and not whether its facts are correct; what counts is whether the reporter and editor have “made a difference” and not whether they have made an accurate description of events. Journalism no longer intends to reflect, it attempts to shape.
It certainly tries to in AS. Journalism is a knowing conduit of the smear campaign directed against the John Galt line -
“I don’t say that the bridge will collapse,” said the chief metallurgist of Associated Steel, on a television program, “I’ll just say that if I had any children, I wouldn’t let them ride on the first train that’s going to cross that bridge. But it’s only a personal preference, nothing more, just because I’m overly fond of children.”
Cute. And from social critic Bertram Scudder:
”I don’t claim that the Rearden-Taggart contraption will collapse…the important issue is: what protection does society have against the arrogance, selfishness, and greed of two unbridled individualists…? These two, apparently, are willing to stake the lives of their fellow men on their own conceited notions about their powers of judgment, against the overwhelming majority opinion of recognized experts. …Should society permit it? …It has always been the belief of this column that certain kinds of horses should be kept bridled and locked, on general social principles.”
That word “social” again, not to mention claims of a phony “scientific” consensus that might have issued from the capacious yaps of Al Gore and James Hansen. We have with further poignant familiarity a petition from an “expert” committee, and of course the mandatory public opinion poll -
A few businessmen… did not hire metallurgists to examine samples, nor engineers to visit the site of construction. They took a public poll. Ten thousand people, guaranteed to represent every existing kind of brain, were asked the question: “Would you ride on the John Galt Line?” The answer, overwhelmingly, was: “No, sir-ree!”
It’s a public relations campaign undertaken by political thugs and abetted by journalist sympathizers who want nothing more than to share the power. The railroad unions do their part by threatening to prohibit their members from running the train. Dagny puts paid to that little ploy in the space of a single paragraph:
“You want a stranglehold on your men by means of the jobs which I give them – and on me, by means of your men. You want me to provide the jobs and you want to make it impossible for me to have any jobs to provide.”
Politicians, academia, the literati, the media, and now the labor union. It is 1957 in the real world and yes, the rot has set in. Here in this chapter we have the précis of the novel: that the main impediment to achievement is the political power of those who cannot achieve themselves but intend to control it and everything else, and the only way to break that control is to remove from the system the means of conferring that political power onto the unproductive.
The union backs off – it has little choice. Every single operational individual on the Taggart Lines volunteers to ride Dagny’s chariot of fire. And they provide an armed escort, one per mile of track. It isn’t ceremonial. Dagny’s opponents would not stick at sabotage and everyone knows it.
I might point out that these individuals, here celebrated for their independence and courage, are the same ones cursed earlier in the novel for enervation, incompetence, and ennui. Rand is attempting to have it both ways and that, I’m afraid, won’t do. It brings to the fore a question that I don’t believe Rand completely addresses in AS – is the relationship between employer and employee strictly on the basis of largesse – “jobs which I give to them” – or is there an element of reciprocity, a responsibility on the part of the employer toward an effective and ethical employee? And if there is the latter, at what point is Atlas shrugging an action that is impermissible by the very morals that mandate it? I’ll leave that an open question for now but I think it’s a central ethical question in the novel and I’m not sure I’m entirely satisfied with the way Rand addresses it.
We have, though, already seen Francisco d’Anconia’s view of that issue. It is that he provided the jobs for people who couldn’t do that for themselves – point taken – and that he allowed them to be defrauded by the system in which they were participating. Were there no ethical employees in that arrangement, no one who did what he paid them to do honestly and effectively? And if there were, did he not betray them, judged by his own standards? Or does he deny the reciprocity? My sense is that he does feel that he betrayed them and that it haunts him, a deplorable but inevitable cost of his own shrugging. In that sense Francisco is not only pretending to fall but really has. We have already seen within Rand’s atheistic world the artifact of soul, and now we encounter the inherent concept of sin. I find this exceedingly curious.
To the fun part – we have for the next dozen or so pages Rand’s best effort at descriptive writing nearly uninterrupted by dialogue. It is the exhilaration of speed, the expression of high achievement in a train doing no less than a hundred miles an hour over untested rail. It is a metaphor for the sort of life the immovable movers lead, the reward due them for their own personal excellence and that of their followers for their faith.
It’s quite a performance, actually, although those of us who live in the west might look askance at the notion of a freight train hurtling through a small town at a hundred miles an hour, traffic being protected by nothing more than an occasional cross-buck sign and the native caution of someone who suspects that although no train has heretofore done so, some lunatic might decide to run one at breakneck speed through the community. Stranger things happen all the time out here.
At last there is a triumphant arrival, a climax to this crypto-sexual Ride of the Valkyrie that is reflected later in Dagny and Hank’s physical congress in Ellis Wyatt’s house. Earlier in the chapter Hank’s wife has scoffed at the notion that Dagny is his mistress – how well she knows her husband, nearly well enough – and yet here they are in one another’s arms. It shouldn’t be a surprise. They are two people very much alone. Propinquity. They thirst, they ache for peers. Either Hank and Dagny will find them, or they will find Hank and Dagny.
One of them, at least, knows the score:
“Ellis Wyatt picked up his glass, looked at their faces and said, “To the world as it seems to be right now!”
He emptied the glass with a single movement…She heard the crash of the glass against the wall in the same instant…It was not the conventional gesture meant as a celebration, it was the gesture of a rebellious anger,…movement substituted for a scream of pain.
“Ellis,” she whispered, “what’s the matter?”
…“I’m sorry,” he said. “Never mind. We’ll try to think that it will last.”
Have a great week, Publius!
An elegy to prurience and propinquity.
Eschew obfuscation.
In the book, the disinterested citizens turned out to be liberal idealogues.
But check the prose that preceded it. All these great names among leftist intellectuals were playing every public relations card they could while insisting that they had nothing to do with public opinion.
Ooh! We could publish them and call them "Pub's notes"! Don't forget BillTheDrill's always excellent comments as well.
Same as my handle, Ramius, from The Hunt for Red October. There's no special meaning for selecting that... really, other than it was on the TV while I was signing up for an account on FR. Several other tries were already taken, and when I glanced at the movie... I tried it, it was available. :-) And the tagline seems to work in almost any context, I've found.
Me too, with the black and white thing. It’s weird. Don’t know what it is about her style, but it seems to have that effect on a lot of people.
Magnificent! Thanks.
Oooooh, I knew it sounded familiar.
My favorite line from that movie is, “You A@@, you have torpedoed US!”
Seems apropos, somehow.
Good idea. I thought having Publius’ summaries all in one place would be beneficial. First, to refer back to at some later time. And for those coming to these threads later on.
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