Ayn Rand Was a Terrible Person: A Short Essay

Shared cultural experiences are one of the strongest ties people can have. A Star Wars fan is going to be fundamentally the same regardless of location or age, because you and he saw the same movies. Kuurion and I, living at either ends of a large-ish continent, have a few such shared cultural experiences. For instance, we both thought Atlas Shrugged was a terrible book. The key difference is that I called bullshit after 82 pages and he read the whole thing.

Atlas Shrugged was written by a very angry woman named Ayn Rand. Rand hated the idea that anyone in this world should have any more or any less than exactly what they worked for. Atlas Shrugged was her dense, heavy-handed, wrathful sermon on how most people in society are parasites sucking off of the creative power of a very few.

But that's not the worst of it. Rand's idea of the cultural hangers-on wasn't simply that they mooched off those who were better than they. She viewed them as anti-progress, and depicted them as such in a way that was the single most offensive thing in the part of the book I made myself read.

One of the major characters is an industrialist named Henry Rearden, a man who has created a metal alloy that does the work of steel, but better. Protagonist Dagney Taggart, sister to a buffoon who controls a railroad, wants to use it to make rails. Nobody else in the industry will touch the stuff, and her brother fights her on it. The gist of the argument against "Rearden metal" is that the railroad people dare not touch anything new.

That's really it. I know that's really it because that single point is harped upon in a way that goes beyond beneath subtlety. Industry leaders fear change.

That would be a really potent message if it were even remotely true. In practice, industry people cannot wait to get new ideas out the door. Look at thalidomide, for God's sake. The people who made that stuff pressured for its availability in the United States in the and didn't apologize for the things it did to people until three weeks ago. Thalidomide came out the same year as Atlas Shrugged, just for comparison.

Rand's book is populated by straw men who are shown to be retardant to progress. Her arrogant opinions, when transposed onto the real world (where they are indeed embraced by certain people), are the most unapologetic kinds of dangerous. Her ideal of growth and independence is the tumor.

Where the Infrastructure Ends

I live in a small New England town at the end of a street nobody uses. There is a sign at the intersection saying that "This is Not Route 12," thus strongly implying that anybody going this way is probably doing so by accident. For those of us who live here, it's like a delightful look into the future when a combination of decaying hardware and rationed resources have lead to spotty service all around. This is Where the Infrastructure Ends.

After Hurricane Irene came through parts of the road caved in, and because this isn't a high-traffic area, those holes were covered with huge pieces of sheet steel that were sort of welded in place with asphalt and left that way for the winter. I suppose that they'll be taken away this summer and the hole filled, but if they aren't there isn't a thing I can do about it.

Utility service is, to be fair, usually good, but that's gauged against 100% service, as opposed to those rolling blackouts they have in North Korea. Measured up against any other service I've had in the United States, we lose power a LOT more than is normal. I've had the wires yanked off the side of the house by a falling tree, and it didn't even fall there. It feel farther up the line, yanking the cables so tight that the whole connection point, including some of the wood, came off the side of the building.

Another time, the power went off with the sound of a gunshot. It turns out that's the noise the breakers they put on the poles (yes, apparantly they put breakers on poles) trip. Gunfire. Because that sound coinciding with total darkness isn't alarming in any way.

The phones work alright.

Right now, a water main in front of the house is bleeding water into the street. This is Monday and it started leaking on Friday. They put a cone on it and left it. Apparantly losing thousands of gallons of water isn't a big deal, but okay, everybody needs some time off. As Monday turns into Tuesday, however, I'm wondering if anybody is ever actually going to come deal with this leak. However, like the steel places five hundred yards up, I must admit that it's interesting to see what happens when people just take a problem... and leave it.

Always on the Eve of Destruction

According to Wikipedia, the Iraq War lasted from March 20, 2003 until December 18, 2011. On March 20, 2003, I was a student in middle school. On December 18, 2011, I was a college graduate employed in my field and engaged to be married.

I have not known an America without war since my childhood. Even if America is done in Iraq, there is always the question of Afghanistan, a conflict that continues to rumble in the background. But that's for me, as an American; things are far more wretched from the other end of the telescope. Afghanistan has been at war since 1978, against the Soviet Union (1979-1989), the US (2001 - present), and itself throughout. You can read the details here, but basically what we think of as the War in Afghanistan is actually the third act in a very long and bloody play. It somehow gets worse when you find out that the average life expectancy there is about 44 years and you suddenly realize that there aren't going to be that many people who can clearly remember a time before there was war.

If that previous sentence didn't bum you out, you're welcome to look at Wikipedia's list of modern conflicts in the Middle East, which runs from 1918 to the present. War is more common than the lack of war.

And so, at last, we arrive at the present and find that the United States and Israel are engaged in an increasingly tense standoff with Iran over the latter's nuclear ambitions. If you ask the Iranians what they're doing in underground laboratories with uranium, they'll tell you that they're working on a nuclear reactor for the generation of electricity. The other two openly suspect that the Iranians might be building an atom bomb. The politics of it all get so much more complicated after that that nobody really knows what will happen next. And that's bad.

I hope this doesn't sound too detached, but how much more war can this part of the world take? And how much more can the United States take? The 1990s were tremendously dull for me when they happened, but now I can't help but think how nice it would be to live in a country that's not at war somewhere. We have too many problems here at home to afford another war, and yet there is a point beyond which not fighting is worse than fighting. The problem with that is that no two people can ever agree on where that point is - and, in this case, the stakes are exceptionally high.

EDIT: I've just learned that Anonymous is reporting (but not taking credit for) the disabling of the CIA's website, which explains why I couldn't use it to check Afghanistan's life expectancy rate a few minutes ago (I ended up using Wikipedia). In the spirit of looking at what a fantastic and frightening place the world is, take a few minutes to read this article about the rise of the Guy Fawkes mask as a symbol of rebellion. It may be coming soon to a street near you.

Unto Disorder, 2012

Fuck it, let's review 2011.

Today, Time Magazine chose its person of the year, and for the fifth time in a decade they chose a group rather than an individual. In 2002, they chose "The Whistleblowers", followed in 2003 by "the American soldier," "the Good Samaritans" in 2005 and "You" in 2006. In many ways, "the Protester," the 2011 choice, feels like a distillation of all four and the consummation of the one thing relating all of them: the need to step forward.

I went to an Occupy rally. The organizers kicked things off by having us sing, except they made nowhere near enough copies of the song and it was nothing I was familiar. The halting, miserable progression of the tune suggested that nobody else was either. Then we marched and shouted that we were the 99 percent. I don't even know what we were protesting, except that I was mad that this was what America looked like and this felt like a good venue for complaint. I think everyone else there felt the same way.

Osama bin Laden was killed a few months before the tenth anniversary of 9/11 and when the day came I reflected on the last decade and stuck with my feeling, formed in 2006, that that was the day America went wrong. In our efforts to fight terror we destroyed what it meant to be American. I might still have been an Occupy participant in the fall if 9/11 hadn't happened, but at least I wouldn't have to feel like the government was looking at all air travelers through their clothes because they didn't know what else to do. It's a long, sad road from missing your intel about upcoming threats to full-body image scanners.

The world that unfolded from September 11, 2001 onward in this country was defined by the US and not by the agents of terror who set the ball rolling. It wasn't 9/11 that brought our country to its knees - and we are on our knees - but our reaction. People die from bee stings not because of the venom but because of the immune system's response. It's called anaphylaxis.

Doomsaying is always going to be trendy, because you get to be the guy who knows something nobody else does. That said, I want to clarify a distinction between that and this, because I can point to definitive indices of trouble and malaise. Food and energy costs are up. Income is down. Everything old people hate about young people is becoming a little more pronounced. It's hard to point to specifics because the general trend, macro and microscopically, is that of entropy - order to disorder.

Oh, but Zack Parsons at Something Awful did a pretty good job of summing things up, probably by limiting his focus to car commercials.

Referring back to the Protester: where do I stand in that? Is the Occupy movement simply another kind of anaphylaxis? It's different than 9/11 because the catalyst is harder to define, but on the other hand it's equally hard to read definite meaning into a protest held by people who had the chance to have us sing "This Land Is Your Land" and blew it. They didn't know me a lot better than an investment banker would, honestly.

Does a societal convulsion represent the progress of order or disorder? In itself, it is both - united rebellion manifest as disruption - but in resolution it can be either, depending on how things work out. Tunisia, where things all started a year ago, has since had free elections remarkable for their order. Egypt, which also shed a regime, has since undergone a second intrarevolutionary revolution against the military, which took placeholder power after the ouster of Mubarak.

What you put in is related to what you get out, but only by alchemy. Everything is in flux. This trend is only growing stronger. Shit.