Existential Ennui

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Existential Ennui

Tag Archives: Atlas Shrugged

There Are No Rules of the Road

02 Friday Sep 2011

Posted by Sherry in Budget, Corporate America, Democrats, GOP, Humor, Individual Rights, Philosophy, Sarah Palin, Satire, teabaggers, What's Up?

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, death, Democrats, economy, life, life in the meadow, Republicans, Sarah Palin

If I had found myself abandoned in the wilds of the US, oh say, four hundred years ago, I would surely have perished. I was not “the fittest”. Nor even close.

To what do I refer? Well, please keep the secret, but I am one of those people genetically challenged when it comes to sight. I couldn’t hit the side of the proverbial barn as they say. Without technological assistance that is.

So with bow and arrow, I would have missed the target, and no doubt starved to death.

I started wearing glasses in the fourth grade. Year by year my eyes deteriorated until I was close to the “coke bottle” syndrome. I switched to contacts, but a badly shaped eyeball made them difficult at best.

Finally, I trucked off to Canada and got the Lasix treatment where they rearrange your focal point by some voodoo magic light, and voilá, I could see, sans glasses.

That has pretty much been it for nearly seventeen years. But alas age catches up with all of us.

Which is nothing more to say than that the Contrarian and I (as part of our departure stuff) went off to get our eyes tested and glasses ordered. We have gotten to the point that watching anything written on the TV screen, requires both of us to read it. We figured we might miss New Mexico all together and end up in the Grand Canyon by mistake. I do mean IN it.

So that was yesterday.

And I’m telling you all this, simple because there are no rules of the road here, and I can tell you whatever I choose, and you can read or not as the mood or time strikes you.

♦

As we were driving and I was trying hard to ignore the fact that one is never quite sure where one will end up when driving with the Contrarian at the wheel, we got to talking about Brandy. The sorrow is still there, but we can talk with laughter now.

Anyway, we were talking about how she went so easy and we were not forced to make that decision to “put her down”, a thoroughly strange way of avoiding “ordering her killed.”

It came to me, that we as humans are adjudged “humane” for putting down an animal that is in pain and with no real way to correct the condition. If we were to do the same thing for a human being, we would be adjudged more often than not, a murderer. A human is required to die in misery if that be the medical situation, no matter how long it takes. ‘Course, they often don’t. I understand doctors often “over dose” with pain killers, knowing that death will ensue.

Still, we wouldn’t judge it humane to put a human being out of their misery. Except if you were Doctor Kevorkian. He judged it merciful.

♦

I wonder how it will play?

Democrats: lets build roads, repair schools, fix bridges. (translate: hire construction companies which then hire more workers, and all the supply companies (concrete and so forth). Job creation: immediate. Results: workers make some money, start buying crap at Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart starts hiring more workers. Two tiered job creation.)

Republicans: cut taxes, eliminate regulations. (translate: corporations have more cash. HOPEFULLY they will expand worker pools. Hard to see why they would when nobody has any money to buy their shit.)

Does the American public at large have the brains to see this? I wonder.

♦

Did ya hear? Sarah Palin is heading off to Korea in a month or so to speak at a “World Knowledge conference.” I mean, oxymoron or what? What on earth could she possibly be speaking about? Is she gonna ask for help? A book list maybe? Or just pooh-pooh the notion that In_tEYE-lec-tuls are necessary in a world where everything can be decided using just good old common sense.

♦

Did anybody catch that Rudy Giuliani did it again? He said he will make a decision about running for the GOP nomination but not until after the 9/11 events. He does always get that 9/11 reference into everything he says doesn’t he?

♦

I’m just about done with Atlas Shrugged. She really is a pretty awful writer. She actually had some interesting characters but she’s buried them in so much political rhetoric that you have to wade through pages and pages of it, to get back to the story line.

I just finished “John Galt’s” radio broadcast. It went on for about forty pages of non-stop explanation of why enterpreneurs were good and everybody else was bad. This quote sums up her thinking about all of “us”.

“The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment, receiving no intellectual bonus from others to add to the value of his time. The man at the bottom, who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all of their brains.”

The rich man is the victim you see, and the worker is the exploiter of the rich man’s intellect. Why, Rand claims, all the things the worms at the bottom have, are the product of the genius of the top. The worms could never create a car if their life depended upon it.

This is ADMITTED mindset of the Cantors and Ryans, the DeMints and the Pauls. This is their concept of “survival of the fittest.”

Have a nice day!

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Know Thy Enemy

13 Saturday Aug 2011

Posted by Sherry in Corporate America, Economy, Editorials, GOP, Individual Rights, Literature, Philosophy, religion, teabaggers

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, capitalism, economics, free-market economy, GOP, government, Objectivism, Paul Ryan, philosophy, Rand Paul

I’ve been reading Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s epic novel that has become the spiritual guide for the likes of Rand Paul and Paul Ryan. They, so we understand, have made it required reading for their staffs.

I’m only about half way through (it’s over 1,000 pages), and I can already tell that anyone who thinks this is some kind of model of how to run a country is, well, not exactly playing with a full deck.

Ayn Rand was an immigrant from Russia, and pretty much that’s all you need to know. Her thinking is utterly shaped by her hatred of Communism and those who brought it upon the earth–the intellectual elites in the form of “progressives.”

Her heroes in the book are all brilliant industrialists, those who work because they  see the only virtue as being the quest to create. It is the purpose of existence.

Juxtaposed against them are the progressives, those who teach and those who are not capable of creating. They pursue as their virtue love of humanity and the need to help one’s brother.

Where it all goes horribly wrong is in the extrapolations. The good guys are perfectly good and the bad guys are perfectly bad. It gets down to even sex. For the good guys sex is a million fireworks going off at once as to perfect people unite in creative glory. For the bad guys, sex is that dirty little animal drive reserved for faceless men and women in back alleys.

In a nutshell, Rand creates draws out the pitfalls of the nanny society to such absurd extensions and the glories of unbridled capitalism to inhuman heights, that they ultimately are laughable. That anyone could take this as a serious likelihood worldwide, is indeed quite juvenile in their thinking. Indeed, they are incapable of anything resembling critical thought.

The fact that most philosophers have rejected her theories of “objectivism” relying on utter reason as the basis for all knowledge, and her belief that only a pure laissez-faire capitalism can protect individual rights, hasn’t stopped those who champion her cause. Of course it is a rather convenient excuse for corporate greed. And surely she would have nodded at Gecko’s shout: “Greed is good.” She promoted selfishness a proper and “good” thing after all.

Ironically, she was very much against religion of any kind, finding it failed the “reason” test. I say ironic because today her most ardent supporters are the know-nothing TeaNutz®. A healthy percentage of them are also ultra right-wing Christianists who wish in the end to form a theocratic state modeled after their strange interpretation of the bible. Ayn would have shuddered and be repulsed by such notions. Given that the average TeaNutz® imbiber has neither read Rand nor has a clue of anything she wrote, this is pretty understandable. You can imagine that the GOP elite is not rushing to inform them either.

She would have whole-heartedly endorsed the idea of calling industrialists as “job creators” since she found workers as parasites, necessary ones to be sure. Among her friends and presumably fellow travelers is one Alan Greenspan. Other admirers are Mark Cuban, owner of the Mavericks and John P. Mackey, owner of Whole Foods.

It is not hard to extrapolate from her portrayal of the wealthy as the true “victims” of society to the idea that it is a near-religious sin to think of taxing these superior folk. That is essentially the Republican mantra. After all, they are the fountainhead (pun intended) of the successful state.

I have to admit that I am enjoying the read. I love tomes (I read Aztec for god’s sake!), and this one is about par for the course, wildly boring in spots, full of soapbox rhetoric that passes as “conversation” and a plot that is fairly obvious. I am about half way through and long ago “guessed” the outcome. Still, the characters are interesting and like I said, I like these kinds things. (I’ve also read War and Peace TWICE.)

Still, reading the book or even reading a Wikipedia bio on Rand explains a good deal of what would otherwise be inexplicable regarding the GOP. What is amusing most of all is that the silly TeaNutz® continue to have no clue. It is quite clear that the GOP elite neither cares nor is interested in pursuing the social aspects of the trailer-livin’ right. They are prepared to give lip service and that only. Rand was in favor of abortion rights, she had an open marriage, and she as I said, had no use for religion whatsoever.

 Much of the “shadow” GOP feels the same. This is simply about money, and making sure that money goes to the right place and thus power is retained where it should be. The little folks are just to be patted on the head, thrown a crumb or two once in a while, and assured that “efforts are being made” to effect a moral government based on the bible. To the degree that a number of them feel that this is “ordained” by their unique interpretation of the bible, that is well, gravy.

I don’t say read the book. You may not have the fortitude to sign up for that long a haul, but do at least familiarize yourself with its basic outline and the life of its writer. And do pay a bit closer attention to those who promote this science fiction as “where we are headed” if a certain black man continues to guide the ship of state.

Related articles
  • Articles of Faith: Did Ayn Rand and Austerity Politics Kill Compassionate Conservatism? (swampland.time.com)
  • The Ayn Rand-Satan Connection Revealed! (reason.com)
  • Rand Paul Agrees With Mitt Romney: “All Of Us Are Corporations” (alan.com)
  • Ayn Rand and the GOP vs. Jesus (tinyfrog.wordpress.com)
  • Atlas Shrugged (gabriellapinto.wordpress.com)
  • The Dark Side Of Ayn Rand (lukeford.net)

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