07.27.11
What Fabian was to rock ‘n’ roll
That’s the sophisticated insult, one among many, written into “Ayn Rand: The Right’s Weirdest Idol of All,” an essay by Hal Crowther at Populist.com here.
Crowther points out that Fabian, among other bad examples, did have an audience once. And it’s part of a personal reflection on Rand and GOP/Tea Party idolatry of her.
Crowther’s description of Rand’s arrival at his boarding school many years ago is spectacularly painful:
Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.
What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.
To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.
The description follows a preamble on the current Republican party, made even harder hitting by the current backdrop of of Dem politicians, including the President, scurrying to appease them just so the country won’t be forced into default. (The very latest, New Jersey’s Bob Menendez, cringing on MSNBC whilst making a plea for the GOP to say “yes.” Sniveling is not too strong a word for his behavior.)
Crowther writes:
Is it a death wish or a scheme to kill the rest of us, when “conservatives??? fight against clean air laws, or legislate to place a loaded pistol in every yahoo’s holster? I’ve reached the second half of my seventh decade, and I’ve never seen such an intimidating swarm of fanatics and fools marching under one banner. The election of a non-white president has brought out the worst in the worst of us. But who guessed that there were so many, or that their worst was so awful?
“Any political party that pretends to integrate [Christianity and belief in Rand’s ‘wolverine capitalism’ is] a party of liars, and doomed,” he concludes.
But before that happens they’re determined to take everyone else down with them.
Hat tip to Pine View Farm, who finds these things faster than I can.
Frank said,
July 27, 2011 at 7:13 pm
[chuckle] I got it so fast because I read my copy of Progressive Populist at breakfast, not having any cereal boxes.
I got a promo copy last month and decided that the subscription price (less than $40 a year) was a bargain for the level of content and also that it was worth supporting. As I said in my blog post, it’s a print aggregator, but what an aggregation!
Thanks for the linkage.