Posted on 05/16/2009 7:40:33 AM PDT by Publius
Synopsis
Dagny spends her time at the cabin in the Berkshires depressurizing, but also building a footpath because she can’t relax. On occasion she drives into Woodstock, an isolated and depressing hamlet. Finding that kerosene is not available because of a road washout, she asks why the road is never fixed. “It’s always been that way,” is the response. She can’t take her mind off what may be happening back in the world, and she yearns for Hank.
Then Francisco shows up unannounced, and Dagny could swear he’s whistling the theme from Halley’s Fifth Concerto. Francisco takes Dagny in his arms and kisses her, but Dagny backs off. Francisco tells her that he can now explain everything. He should have intercepted her when she quit and spared her the past month in seclusion.
Dagny wishes that The Destroyer had come for her, and she was surprised that he didn’t; now she thinks he doesn’t exist. Francisco reminds her of that night, twelve years ago, when he warned her in agony about what was going to happen that he couldn’t talk about; that was the night he gave up d’Anconia Copper. Now he is destroying it to keep it from the looters, but in such a way that they cannot detect it and seize it to stop him. He was the first of the industrialists to quit, but he stayed in place. The worst part was what he knew it did to Dagny.
He and Dagny charged too little for their accomplishments, and their error went all the way back to Sebasian d’Anconia and Nat Taggart, who created the wealth of the world, but let their enemies write the moral code. He and Dagny lived by their own standards but paid ransom to the looters to survive. Dagny perceives, and just as the recruitment of Dagny Taggart by Francisco d’Anconia approaches a successful consummation, the radio broadcast of a symphony is interrupted by a news bulletin about a train wreck in the tunnel in Colorado. All of Francisco’s hard work retreats into insignificance as the horror hits Dagny with full force.
As we left the Comet in the last chapter, it had entered the tunnel pulled by a coal burning steam locomotive. Three miles into the eight mile bore, the crew felt the effect of the fumes, and the engineer, that alcoholic friend of Fred Kinnan, threw the throttle wide open to gain enough speed to surmount the heavy grade. As the passengers felt the effect of the fumes, one panicked and pulled the emergency stop cord, breaking the locomotive’s air hose and stopping the train almost midway through the tunnel. The fireman fled through the tube, reaching the western portal when he was flattened by the blast of a explosion behind him. Apparently, the Army munitions train had been cleared to proceed because the tunnel’s signaling system was defective, and it plowed into the Comet, setting off an explosion that demolished the tunnel and most of the mountain with it.
Dagny screams and flees, and Francisco begs her not to go back, but to no avail.
Jim Taggart stares at the letter of resignation he hopes to avoid signing. Clifton Locey is hiding behind his doctor’s statement that he has a heart condition, and most company officers are playing hooky. Jim decides to hide in his office; even Wesley Mouch knows better than to call him.
But finally galvanized into action, Jim accosts Eddie Willers and demands to know where Dagny is; Eddie won’t answer. Jim tries to intimidate Eddie, accusing him of treason, but Eddie won’t budge. Then Dagny walks in. Jim screams that the disaster is all her fault, but Dagny ignores him and gives orders to Eddie. She quickly discovers that key personnel on the railroad have quit and disappeared. While Jim slinks off to shred his letter of resignation, Dagny asks what has been done since the disaster. Nothing, says Eddie, because the first person to act would have set himself up for the Unification Board. The entire Taggart system is in chaos.
Dagny opens up a rail map and tells Eddie to route trains over the tracks of other railroads, even to buy abandoned railroads and put them back into service. To fill gaps in the map, she tells Eddie to hire local crews to build new rail lines; bribe the Unification Board goons if necessary. Then she tells him to get the pre-tunnel system map out of the archives to see how they can reclaim the old route through the Rockies.
Eddie updates Dagny: Hank has signed the Gift Certificate, Quentin Daniels hasn’t been heard from, and trains have been abandoned on the system with the crews disappearing into the night.
Wesley Mouch calls Dagny, making the official excuse that her health was the reason for her absence. She sloughs Mouch off and demands to talk to Clem Weatherby. She tells the rail czar that Mouch is never to call her again; she will deal exclusively with him. Weatherby balks until he realizes that Dagny is handing him preferment, the right to use her as an item of “pull”. She tells him that she is going to start breaking laws immediately, and Weatherby tells her the laws are certainly flexible in such a situation. Finishing the call, she looks at Clifton Locey’s collection of liberal magazines and sweeps them off the coffee table in one stroke.
After giving the orders that will put the railroad back in working order, Dagny calls Hank. He tells her to start handing out bribes so that he can pour the steel – any kind of steel – to make her railroad whole again. He agrees to come over that night.
Railroads, Eminent Domain and Reciprocal Use
During the 19th Century, many states granted railroads the right of eminent domain. Railroads used that provision to claim the land for rail lines just as states used eminent domain to build highways. The provision was last used wholesale during the Twenties when America saw its last great period of railroad building.
Railroads often purchase trackage rights from other railroads to gain access to certain areas. In the event of an emergency, railroads are also quick to grant competitors the rights to their track because one day the shoe may be on the other foot. These emergency rights will be paid for, as will diesel fuel consumed at the host railroad’s depots.
The railroad world has changed since the book was published. Back then it was rare to see the locomotive of one railroad running on a different railroad unless there was an agreement or an emergency. In the 21st Century, however, high priority freight trains changing domain at Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis and New Orleans change crews but not locomotives. For high priority freights time lost at a rail yard is money; that is why it is now common to see locomotives in Union Pacific livery popping up in New York and vice versa.
Discussion Topics
Growing tomatoes is impossible for an apartment dweller in the rainy Pacific Northwest. But I have a gourmet market nearby that is having Heirloom Tomato Week starting Monday. I’ll be fixing up those tomatoes, adding some sweet Vidalia onion and some smoked salmon to go with the crusty French bread. Mm-mm-mm!
I'm sorry to say this Pub, because this will hurt you....being a part of the Jersey Diaspora........and knowing what a nasty reputation New Jersey has in the nation.....but here in South Jersey you can still go to a local farmers market and get sweet, juicy, tasty tomatoes and fresh basil and sweet white corn. In fact, I will pit the taste of Jersey Corn and Jersey Tomatoes against any fancy gourmet corn and tomatoes in the world. We may be a scum bag liberal hell hole but we have magic soil for growing these two items. In fact, I dabble a bit myself in the back yard garden.
And south philly Italian bread is still baked fresh daily on this side of the river also.
Remember ??
It's a bit different here, but we have farmers' markets, too.
Billthedrill...
And yet the straight line is not really an artifact of man, but his imitation of the horizon. The horizon isn’t perfectly straight, of course, either in terms of curvature or of granularity, but then neither are the lines made by men. In this man is one with his world whether he likes it or not.
and...
The truly straight line is, as Dagny just said, an abstraction, an artifact not even of man’s mind if Immanuel Kant is to be believed, but an a priori concept that is one of the laws of the universe that form the foundation of Ayn Rand’s epistemology.
You've made me consider the significance of this concept and I am not sure I understand the implications. Is not a plumb line straight? Used from the very beginning of mans efforts to build, it describes a perfectly straight line and man has always striven to copy its perfection.
The pull of gravity is a summation of all the the relevant forces but it resolves into a natural axis that is able to be harnessed by mans mind. In fact all other axis are derived from it.
I read the chapter and attributed Dagny's take on this as a flaw in her reasoning, but as you pointed out a straight lines non-natural existence is part of the basis of Rands epistemology. Had Dagny stood on the tracks holding a plumb bob in front of her, would she have seen the natural source of the straightness of the rails?
Perhaps it's one of those times when I'm looking for something that isn't there but so far the logic used by Rand appears valid to me.
Or the surface of a body of water, except that’s actually ever so slightly spherical I would think.
In any communal setting, if it's everybody's responsibility it's no one's responsibility.
Had the looters been left to their own devices (and consequences), I'd feel better about the whole thing. But to have otherwise productive people actively sabotaging the works kinda smacks of peeing in someone's pool and then declaring, "See? I told you swimming pools were filled with bacteria and filth."
I do agree that the looter's will eventually collapse the economy and society, but due to at least these two people that collapse won't be entirely the looter's fault.
Outrage and backlash provoked by the looters confiscatory policies can’t be attributed to the looters?
Sounded pretty good till you got to the smoked salmon part. I personally only smoke menthol salmons with the filter tip. Seriesly though, I don’t salmon or trout. Give me a snapper, roughy, or a hellofit, thanks.
Or crab. Crab’s acceptable.
Philosophically this stuff is like dog-paddling in a mile-deep ocean. Enter Immanuel Kant. This idea of straightness, defined as a one-dimensional line describing the shortest distance between two points (themselves abstractions) - is it an invention of man, or was it always there and man merely its discoverer? A posteriori or a priori? Inventor or discoverer? (Bishop Berkeley versus John Locke in one famous example. I got a tenner on Locke by a TKO in six rounds...) It makes a fundamental difference in one's view of the universe.
The reason that Rand is so closely aligned with Aristotle on the topic but parts company when it comes to teleology is that for her the laws of the universe simply are, and for him they are caused. His is, in essence, one form of the teleological argument for the existence of God.
As I said, this stuff gets real deep really fast. For Rand the greatest conception of the human mind is, in fact, an abstraction, and elsewhere she will be more explicit about it. Fundamental to her position between Nietszche and Aristotle is in whose mind that abstraction belongs, man's or God's. I'll leave it there for now.
“Where are Third World standards encroaching on our current infrastructure?”
The Main Stream Media!!!!!!
In the case of Francisco, however, he is not the originator of his mining enterprise although he is his worthy heir. Does he actually have sole rights of possession? The looters would claim that he has no rights of possession whatever, those residing in the People, whatever that might mean. A radical individualist such as Rand would claim that he is its sole owner and hence has full rights of disposal. The difficulty with that is that such an enterprise does have a collective nature, in which the contributions of other men have a part. Presumably (but not provably) he is the proper owner of those as well, having paid for them at some point. But that is, as Rand has illustrated, not always the case.
In a clean, theoretical world it won't happen - anything of the sort would have been properly paid for and in that payer resides the rights of disposal. But in fact even the d'Anconias can't run a perfectly ethical enterprise in an ethically compromised world (and Francisco didn't in Mexico - he simply allowed the ethical compromise to run its own natural course).
So I guess the long, convoluted answer is that even with every attempt to keep it tight and ethical, it's an iffy proposition as to Francisco's real right to do what he's doing. One is left with the very satisfactory consolation that it's a war between the looters and the producers, and that there are inevitably ethical compromises in war.
Milovan Djilas called it a "New Class" in his critique of Marxism by that name. These are looters in every literal sense of the word. Inevitably it is they, and not the people who are the ostensible beneficiaries of their theft, who become the true beneficiaries, as long as there is stuff left to steal and deal. When that fails, they fall. If by some combination of bullying and B.S. they can keep from running out, or simply steal more from somewhere, they'll live like kings. In fiction Galt is hastening it. In reality that's a lot harder to do, but they managed it in Zimbabwe.
Back east, I wasn’t a partisan of smoked salmon. But here in the Pacific Northwest, there are 4 or 5 different ways of smoking salmon, and some of them go extremely well with ripe tomatoes, sweet onions, crusty French bread and a good local microbrewed beer or ale.
Well, I love all that other stuff, so I'll take your word on the salmon and try some if I'm ever up your way.
Your statement-
...the string is, even without a lens, coarse, its boundaries pocked and porous, its internal fibers twisted and lumpy. Nothing about the thing is straight upon close examination. It is only straight when you back up enough to consider it as a one-dimensional object, which it is only in the mind.
is accurate.
The rails of a railroad also have the same qualities as the string though on a different scale. I assumed that Dagny was viewing the physical world as it appears. What you seem to be saying is that she is actually seeing it in her minds eye, as an abstract geometric concept. The seemingly straight line that occurs in nature is therefore irrelevant as would be any other natural geometric shape. The use of abstractions can be a seamless process for Dagny, the same way a skilled mechanic knows how to use every tool in his toolbox.
Berkely vs. Locke....Awwww, now I got homework to do before next weekend :-(
whose mind that abstraction belongs, man's or God's. I'll leave it there for now
As will I. Thanks for the reply.
Wyatt Ellis was right. The only other option is for producers to be de facto slaves.
If you look at history it is pretty frightening. The government looter class plays the nonproductive against the productive to get elected and to advance their hold on power. They often use the community organizer technique of rubbing raw the perceived wrongs that caused the nonproductive to be in their undesirable situation in life. But once the government looters get enough power to become tyrants, the nonproductive class becomes an unwanted burden and they are often eliminated.
Brother Publius
Thanks again for your ministry to us out in Freeperland.
Mrs. Crusher and I are becoming increasingly convinced that the Obamunist Reich is intent on nothing so much as the utter destruction of the private sector and the imposition of a fascist collective (is that redundant?) It is all about reducing personhood and expanding dependent sameness (and I say this as a Federal employee, albeit in the research world. Still, my continued career success yields nothing but grief and jealousy from the rungs of the ladder above me)
For a decade we have been constructing our retreat so far out in the boonies that you can’t find us if you do not get directions first.
For Christmas we bought ourselves a bushel of heirloom seeds. And just this morning I finished the penstock for my hydroelectric plant. When the Schumer Hits The Fan, we’ll be gone, enjoying tomatoes that do not taste like turnips, and berries that are so tasty it makes your tongue go into shock.
My own view of the unfolding of history is that 24-36 months we see the birth of Argentinian hyperinflation, followed shortly by wage-and-price c0ntrols, which leads to shortages (it must!), riots by those unbounded by civilization and unskilled in living, and finally Martial Law by The One.
Good luck with that, Barry. Not only has Ayn Rand seen the future, but anyone even mildly historically literate has seen the events before, and the results are always the same.
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