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How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon - The Perverse Allure of a Damaged
Woman


She announced that the world was divided between
a small minority of Supermen who are productive
and "the naked, twisted, mindless figure of the
human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists,
try to feed off them.

He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned."
It is evil to show kindness to these "lice":
The "only virtue" is "selfishness."


-- 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?

Two new biographies of Rand—Goddess of the Market by Jennifer Burns
and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne Heller — try to puzzle
out this question, showing how her arguments found an echo in
the darkest corners of American political life.*

But the books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They
are thrilling psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman
who deserves the one thing she spent her life raging
against: compassion.

Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter
of czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped
through her home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a
self-made Jewish pharmacist, while her mother was an
aristocratic dilettante who loathed her three daughters.

She would tell them she never wanted children, and she kept them
only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child.

In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about
why being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a
scathing denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from
Pascal: "I would prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."

But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the
conflicts raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since
the Middle Ages was brewing, and the family was terrified of
being killed by the mobs — but it was the Bolsheviks who struck at
them first. After the 1917 revolutions, her father's pharmacy
was seized "in the name of the people."

For Alisa, who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies,
the Communists seemed at last to be the face of the masses,
a terrifying robbing horde. In a country where 5 million people died
of starvation in just two years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her
father tried to set up another business, but after it too was
seized, he declared himself to be "on strike."

The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not
survive under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle
her out to their relatives in America.

Just before her 21st birthday, she said goodbye to her country and
her family for the last time. She was determined to live in the
America she had seen in the silent movies — the America of
skyscrapers and riches and freedom.

She renamed herself Ayn Rand, a name she thought had the hardness
and purity of a Hollywood starlet.

She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories
that expressed her philosophy — a body of thought she said was
the polar opposite of communism.

She announced that the world was divided between a small minority
of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted, mindless
figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try to
feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be
burned." It is evil to show kindness to these "lice":
The "only virtue" is "selfishness."

She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as
a receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality
that underpins all her later writings.

The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial
killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl
called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her,
and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police
in pieces.

Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he
represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever
for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all
his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul.
… Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why
they should." She called him "a brilliant, unusual, exceptional
boy," shimmering with "immense, explicit egotism."

Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can eventually trample
society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough."

It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic
stress disorder.

Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the people,
so she wanted to strike back at them — through theft and murder. In
a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics.

She started to write her first novel, We the Living (1936), and in
the early drafts her central character — a crude proxy for
Rand herself — says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I
admire your methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait
to convince millions of fools, one might just as well force them."

She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She
takes the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them
with political ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All
have the same core message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego
is good; anything that blocks it is bad.

In The Fountainhead, published in 1943, a heroic architect
called Howard Roark designs a housing project for the poor — not out
of compassion but because he wants to build something mighty.

When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the housing
project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated by
evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him,
saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the
only statement of their proper relationship is — Hands off!"

For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged (1957), Rand returned to a
moment from her childhood. Just as her father once went on strike
to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the super-rich in
America going on strike against progressive taxation — and said
the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole
if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil.

The abandoned masses are described variously as "savages,"
"refuse," "inanimate objects," and "imitations of living
beings," picking through rubbish.

One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand
makes it clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing
in horror how they all supported the higher taxes that made the
attack necessary.

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme
self-pity: They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their
time fuming that the masses don't bow down before their
manifest superiority.

As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with
a tightly policed cult of young people who believed she had found
the One Objective Truth about the world.

They were required to memorize her novels and slapped down
as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they asked questions.

One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a right kind
of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of dancing.
There were wrong books which we should not buy."

Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing
The Fountainhead, and her natural paranoia and aggression were
becoming more extreme as they pumped though her veins.

Anybody in her circle who disagreed with her was subjected to a
show trial in front of the whole group in which they would be
required to repent or face expulsion.

Her secretary, Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a
killer of people." The workings of her cult exposed the hollowness
of Rand's claims to venerate free thinking and individualism.
Her message was, think freely, as long as it leads you into
total agreement with me.

In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas.

She fell in love with a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and
had a decades-long affair with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and
she named him as her "intellectual heir" — until he admitted he
had fallen in love with a 23-year-old woman.

As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex was
never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition
of shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest
human achievement."

So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was rejecting her
ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed: "You
have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest
value?"

She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in
our lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up
despising herself.

In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after
insisting that her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's
victory over fire" and the studies showing it caused lung cancer
were Communist propaganda.

By then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone
in her apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her
philosophy is right — if the only human relationships worth having
are based on the exchange of dollars — this was a happy and
victorious death. Did even she believe it in the end?

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left
their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was
Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin.

Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite
in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose
its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass.

The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be
stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand:
I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it
back into my face.

What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people —
large numbers of people — who see her writing not as psychopathy but
as philosophy, and urge us to follow her.

Why?

What in American culture did she drill into?

Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books
can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct
that courses through us all sometimes:

I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to care about any of
you any more!

She then absolutizes it in an amphetamine Benzedrine-charged
reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is the only feeling
worth entertaining, ever.

This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the
American right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a
bad, bizarre joke?

In a country where almost everyone believes — wrongly, on the whole — that
they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt
for people who didn't make much of themselves.

And Rand taps into something deeper still. The founding myth of
America is that the nation was built out of nothing, using only
reason and willpower.

Rand applies this myth to the individual American: You made
yourself. You need nobody and nothing except your reason to rise
and dominate. You can be America, in one body, in one mind.

She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors
only," with superiority defined by being rich.

Well, we got it. As the health care crisis has shown, today, the
rich have the real power: The vote that matters is expressed with
a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to vote only for the candidates
they have pre-funded and receive the legislation they have pre-approved.

It's useful — if daunting — to know that there is a substantial
slice of the American public who believe this is not a problem to
be put right, but morally admirable.

We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche
of the mini-malls.

Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers and even
invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when
he joined the Ford administration.

You can see how he carried this philosophy into the 1990s: Why
should the Supermen of Wall Street be regulated to protected the
lice of Main Street?

The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is
L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used
trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult
isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No,
its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest
human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties.

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

SEE ALSO: Tea Party - Libertarian Heroine Ayn Rand was on Social Security
and Medicare

-- Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero
Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer
funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after
she got lung cancer.

An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to
Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified
that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and
Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor
(husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and
she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two
government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn
"despised government interference and felt that people should and
could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual
should take help."

But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/28...Boing+Boing%29

Just like Gunner.....

On Wed, 4 Jan 2012 17:43:55 -0500, "ATP"
wrote:

-- Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero
Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer
funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after
she got lung cancer.

Odd..that sounds like just about every Leftwing Hollywood actor doesnt
it?

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that,
in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers
and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are
not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.
Gunner Asch