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Howdy Pub’!

Chapter 20 now, “The Sign Of The Dollar,” a chapter that couldn’t contrast more strongly with the overstrained psychological drama and improbable dialogue of the previous one. It is Rand back in her stride chronicling the slow dissolution of a once-great land. Reading the two of them close together makes me wonder if perhaps they weren’t actually written together – this one a polished gem, the previous a clump of ore that could have stood a few of the rough edges to be chiseled off.

I suppose I should confess at this point that this chapter is one of my very favorites in the book. In it Rand has, finally, resumed her dramatic stride and the thing begins to crackle once the focus is out of the bedroom and into the world. Things are clicking, pieces coming together. And to Rand’s great credit as an author her protagonist is not omniscient, but just enough behind the reader to make her credible. That is actually a very difficult thing to pull off.

Dagny has boarded a train that is running through a middle America as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch, islands of normality punctuated by the inimitable signs of decay.

…she saw the ghosts between, the remnants of towns, the skeletons of factories with crumbling smokestacks, the corpses of shops with broken panes, the slanting poles with shreds of wire…she saw an ice-cream cone made of radiant tubing, hanging above the corner of a street, and a battered car being parked below, with a young boy at the wheel and a girl stepping out, her white dress blowing in the summer wind – she shuddered for the two of them, thinking: I can’t look at you, I who know what it has taken to give you your youth, to give you this evening, this car, and the ice-cream cone you’re going to buy for a quarter…

I saw something else in my mind reading that, the face at the curtain of the train window not Dagny’s, but of a horribly scarred World War II veteran, disfigured for life in the explosion that destroyed his tank in the hedgerows of Normandy. Rand might have known such a man. He would have known them. There was no WWII in Rand’s alternate history but Atlas Shrugged is pervaded with a sense of ingratitude toward the sacrifice that has brought a plenty taken for granted, and a sense of the fragility of that plenty in the face of that ingratitude. In that it is profoundly a post-war novel.

Enter the hobo. I use the word advisedly – a hobo is not a bum, nor is he a “tramp” as Rand incorrectly terms him, he is a traveling man who supports himself with odd jobs, and Rand has already placed words of import into the mouths of vagrants. This one has a mouthful himself, twelve pages of a single story that we already know. One might think that would qualify it for the cutting-room floor. Hardly; in my opinion it’s twelve of the best pages in the book.

Dagny gives him a ride and she buys him his dinner, and in reward he tells her a story, the story of the six thousand workers at the Twentieth Century Motor Company and how they degraded and wasted their patrimony. There is no work for him in the East anymore, everyone is watched, no one is allowed to succeed unless it be through connections with the Unification Board. And everywhere he does manage to find a few weeks’ work, closes.

“Anything you tried, anything you touched – it fell. Anywhere you looked, work was stopping – the factories were stopping – the machines were stopping – “ he added slowly, in a whisper, as if seeing some secret terror of his own, “the… motors… were… stopping.”

And the odd catchphrase of despair and futility “Who is John Galt?” that has danced through the novel?

“That’s it, ma’am. That’s what I’m afraid of. It might have been me who started it.”

Well, there are enough versions of this fable around already – a woman at a cocktail party’s, Francisco’s (at least two of them, Prometheus and Atlantis), Hugh Akston’s…and now this, in the mouth of a vagrant, hardly a place to inspire confidence, and yet it’s the one true story. It is the story of a great enterprise’s slide into pride, sin, and failure. In twelve pages we have a precise description of a Randian Fall From Grace. No external entity may be blamed, no force of tyranny imposed from afar. The company’s employees chose their fate, and it is not accidental that the hobo chooses to cast it in quasi-religious terms.

“You know, ma’am, we are marked men, in a way, those of us who lived through the four years of that plan… What is that hell is supposed to be? Evil – plain, naked, smirking evil, isn’t it? Well, that’s what we saw and helped to make – and I think we’re damned, every one of us, and maybe we’ll never be forgiven.”

“They let us vote on it, too, and everybody – almost everybody – voted for it. We didn’t know. We thought it was good. No, that’s not true, either. We thought that we were supposed to think it was good.”

A nice turn of phrase, that. I know personally a tragic number of American citizens who disposed of their vote in the past Presidential election based on that feckless premise.

“The plan was that everybody in the factory would work according to his ability, but would be paid according to his need.”

Marx’s shade is walking through Starnesville.

“The meeting was held on a spring night, twelve years ago…We had just voted for the new plan and we were in an edgy sort of mood, making too much noise, cheering the people’s victory, threatening some kind of unknown enemies and spoiling for a fight, like bullies with an uneasy conscience…Gerald Starnes yelled through the noise. ‘Remember that none of us may now leave this place, for each of us belongs to all the others by the moral law which we all accept!’ ‘I don’t,’ said one man and stood up…. ‘I will put an end to this once and for all,’ he said. ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ Then he walked out…”

“…When I hear them repeating that question, I feel afraid. I think of the man who said that he would stop the motor of the world. You see, his name was John Galt.”

Well, well. Twelve years. It is a length of time that has been noted frequently throughout the novel with respect to a number of seemingly unconnected events. Twelve years. Dagny gives her sleeper to the hobo and sits alone, knowing that what she has just heard is the truth. The train is now shunted off course along a recently-acquired line and she frets about the lost time.

I’ll get there in time, she thought. I’ll get there first. I’ll save the motor. There’s one motor he’s not going to stop, she thought…

Oh, no? Dagny has all the information the reader has but she hasn’t made the connection yet. It is not her motor after all. It is literally John Galt’s.

Dagny wakes up. The train is “frozen,” meaning it has been abandoned by its working crew in the middle of nowhere with a full complement of passengers onboard. It is all very proper, the fires of the ancient steam locomotive banked, the brakes set, a warning lantern placed at the rear of the train to warn the next one along. That might, in these times of decadence, be days. And in the logbook of the locomotive Dagny finds a familiar name: Pat Logan, her engineer when she risked her life at a breakneck speed to prove the worth of Reardon Metal, logging out of his last Taggart ride.

She’ll walk for help, then – she has to get to Utah. But there are outlaws, raiders, “deserters” in these days when the only legitimate employment is for the looters, and the road is no longer safe. Who turns up but her old employee, the mystery man Owen Kellogg! He does seem to turn up at the oddest moments, doesn’t he? But this one is legitimate, and Kellogg a perfectly legitimate passenger. He’s off for a month’s vacation at an undisclosed location and it’s the most important thing in his world. A month’s vacation. Now, isn’t that interesting?

He’s the only one willing to accompany Dagny…except for one other. Yes, it’s the hobo, whose name is Jeff Allen. She hires him on the spot to take charge of the abandoned train and its passengers until help arrives. Good help is so hard to find these days.

So what, exactly, is Kellogg doing these days?

“Oh, many things.”

“Where are you working now?” “On special assignments, more or less.”

“Of what kind?”

“Of every kind.”

“You’re not working for a railroad?”

“No.”

That isn’t going to work. Kellogg isn’t talking, but Dagny is thinking. And she wants him back, desperately because good help…

“What I need is your – “

“-mind, Miss Taggart? My mind is not on the market any longer.”

She stood looking at him, her face growing harder. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she said at last.

Yes, he is. And he’s laughing at her. Infuriating male. They walk, and they find a working phone, and she summons help for the gaggle of fools left on the abandoned train. That was her charge. Next is her mission. But along the way Kellogg absentmindedly offers her a cigarette.

She was about to take a cigarette – then, suddenly, she seized his wrist and tore the package out of his hand. It was a plain white package that bore, as a single imprint, the sign of the dollar… She caught a glimpse of his face: he looked a little astonished and very amused.

“Where did you get this?” she asked.

He was smiling. “If you know enough to ask that, Miss Taggart, you should know that I won’t answer.”

“I know that this stands for something.”

“The dollar sign? For a great deal. It stands on the vest of every fat, piglike figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel – as the one sure-fire brand of evil. It stands – as the money of a free country – for achievement, for success, for ability, for man’s creative power – and precisely for these reasons, it is used as a brand of infamy…Incidentally, do you know where that sign comes from? It stands for the initials of the United States.”

Yes, actually, it does. Those who take that sort of thing for granted and place their beliefs in something their political enthusiasms tell them is a “higher truth,” do so at the risk of the sort of ingratitude that will bring the entire system crashing to the ground. That is Rand’s warning. That is the point of Atlas Shrugged.

“…Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it.”

Well, the country didn’t. Certain of its self-appointed intellectual leaders have, just as they have in the novel, under the fatuous assumption that it is the currency that is being venerated and not the ability to earn it. It is, properly, a measure of merit, not merit itself. A lot of people possessing large quantities of it tend to forget that fact just as easily as an editorial cartoonist.

Dagny purchases an airplane at an airfield in the middle of nowhere, a Dwight Sanders airplane that has unaccountably been abandoned. Kellogg has remained, cheerfully taking responsibility for putting proper closure to the train full of demanding customers. And so Dagny continues her mission. Here Rand’s descriptions are obviously by an individual who has sampled the exquisite moments of general aviation but not, I suspect, as a pilot. They are evocative nevertheless. And Dagny finds herself using one checkpoint that is the brave flickering of Wyatt’s Torch.

She arrives at Afton, Utah, minutes too late.

“There’s Mr. Daniels going now.”

“WHAT?”

“He went with the man who flew in for him two-three hours ago. Never saw him before, but boy! – he’s got a beauty of a ship!”

It is impossible. They know. How could they know? No one outside her select circle knew about Daniels, and absolutely no one knew about his letter…except for Eddie Willers. And a certain anonymous track-worker.

She gives chase, of course. The mountains of Colorado (or anywhere else that size) can be very dangerous flying country as this author can personally attest. Off-course, low on fuel, this is the stuff of disaster. Downdrafts can easily exceed the climb capabilities of a light aircraft, and when that happens, you go down, and where the ground is as much vertical as horizontal, that can be a very unhappy circumstance. The valley that she happens upon is the only thing that kept her alive.

It is a secret valley, a Shangri-La in the Colorado high country, and she’s about to land there, because a sudden flash of light has disabled her engine and one thing you really don’t want to see is the prop that’s supposed to be pulling you along, stationary, grinning at you. The student pilot encountering these circumstances must first resist the temptation to shoot his instructor, although no true jury of his peers would ever convict.

Dagny fights it to the ground, because that’s what you do. You trade airspeed for altitude, altitude for distance, and along the way you’re hoping for that nice, green, smooth spot that Dagny spies. Before she strikes she knows she’s got it, and the last thing to go through her head is a derisive, “Oh, hell! Who is John Galt?”

There is a truism that one shouldn’t ask questions whose answers one isn’t ready to know.

Have a great week, Publius!