Posted on 03/16/2009 6:21:45 AM PDT by shove_it
Ayn Rand died more than a quarter of a century ago, yet her name appears regularly in discussions of our current economic turmoil. Pundits including Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santelli urge listeners to read her books, and her magnum opus, "Atlas Shrugged," is selling at a faster rate today than at any time during its 51-year history.
There's a reason. In "Atlas," Rand tells the story of the U.S. economy crumbling under the weight of crushing government interventions and regulations. Meanwhile, blaming greed and the free market, Washington responds with more controls that only deepen the crisis. Sound familiar?
The novel's eerily prophetic nature is no coincidence. "If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society," Rand wrote elsewhere in "Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal," "you can predict its course." Economic crises and runaway government power grabs don't just happen by themselves; they are the product of the philosophical ideas prevalent in a society -- particularly its dominant moral ideas.
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(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Rand's style is appealing enough for those with teen-aged sensibilities -- teens are, after all, attracted by Rand's kind of breathless outrage, which matches their own.
As Whittaker Chambers so aptly put it:
Since a great many of us dislike much that Miss Rand dislikes, quite as heartily as she does, many incline to take her at her word. It is the more persuasive, in some quarters, because the author deals wholly in the blackest blacks and the whitest whites. In this fiction everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly. This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storyknown as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures.
Rand is offensive to adult tastes, precisely because adults are not fooled by her strident emotional overtures. Adults have seen "those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly." And they properly reject those who would have us pretend that those intermediate shades do not exist.
This book was a fad when I was in High School. Even then, in the late 50’s the teachers didn’t like to see us carry it and didn’t want book reports on it.
They disliked my John O’Hara books even more.
"Required" reading is like the antithesis of Rand. lol. She would say "read it or dont. Just dont tell me what to read".
Dang... It was 59 last week....
It is screaming up the charts!!
Welcome to Free Republic.
Perhaps you would be happier at DU.
Wow - I forgot all about that story...
I read a lot of Vonnegut as a kid.
Playboy used to publish anthologies of SF stories from time to time back then; wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where he and I read it. (These were just SF books, not adult entertainment.)
IIRC, the magazine was a compilation of fiction and non-fiction stories, it had movie information (Star Wars), and other stuff in it, as well. So it had to be late 70s. I got it in grade school. There were articles on the Concord and Space Shuttle (well, the design of it, anyway, since it didn't launch first until '81).
I wish I still had the magazines, the short stories in them were great.
Go to Reply #60 and click the link.
LOL! Do you have any idea how stupid that insult makes you look?
Interestingly all of the ‘trust fund babies’ in her book, except for Dagny and Fransisco, sounded like the spoiled brats of today. James Taggart had obviously gone to the correct colleges, as were the heirs to 20th Century Motors.
You can do better than that! Tell us why you think he would be happier at DU.
FYI...the movie is set to star Angelina Jolie as Dagny.
sorry if this has been posted.
I am a sinner. Big time!
God loves me.
Why do you question?
“She’s relevant to the point of getting one thinking. However, her philosophy is both derivative and often irrational — and her writing style is just plain awful.”
I’m with you on that, although I think she contributes so much in her depiction of left wing thoughts/arguments and was so prophetic about the slow creep of socialism that I’m willing to overlook her faults.
Heck - writing is tough and no matter how good a book is there will always be “writing snobs” somewhere who bash it.
I appreciate her work and I’m glad she left all of us this book.
?
Ive been listening to it everyday while I work out.
It sure does seem to be that way.
I sometimes wish conservatives would stop writing books. They write them as a means of cautionary warnings. But I fear that the left are using them a script to destroy America. Orwell was spot on.
-—”I’m sorry for not being too specific, Rand used men like sex toys and was an atheist.”
What does her personal life have to do with her superb writing?
Do you realize you’re sounding like a bigot who judges one’s accomplishments by their sexual/religious/racial attributes that have nothing to do with her accomplishments?
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