Somewhat related to the previous post, just when you think embittered right-wingers couldn’t get more ridiculous, petulant, and wholly irrelevant, along comes the crackpot notion of taking a page (or 40 of them to be precise) from Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” as the rallying cry for their rebellion against the imagined “socialism” of the new Obama administration:
“Just this weekend,” said Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) on Wednesday in an interview with TWI, “I had a guy come up to me in my district and tell me that he was losing his interest in the business he’d run for years because the president wanted to punish him for his success. I think people are reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ again because they’re trying to understand what happens to people of accomplishment, and people of talent and energy, when a government turns against them. That’s what appears to be happening right now.”
The plot of Rand’s novel is simple, despite its length — 1,088 pages in the current paperback edition. The United States is governed by bureaucrats, “looters” and “moochers,” who penalize and demonize creative people. The country is in decline because creative people are disappearing — they have followed the innovative John Galt to a mountain enclave, “Galt’s Gulch,” where they watch society crumble. Creativity has gone on strike (the working title of the novel was “The Strike”), and the engine of capitalism cannot run without it.
The following video is a visualization of Galt’s Speech using images and video from current events.
Heh. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ll just quote from one particularly funny comment (there are also many others worth reading in response to that Washington Independent article linked above):
Atlas Shrugged is as shallow as a Bible tract. The first 25 pages will tell you all you need to know about the book. Everything, and I mean Everything, is laid out in black and white. For example, all the people who do anything productive hate government. All the people who don’t hate government are useless, unproductive, spineless, lazy. All the heroes are productive masters of their universe who do not feel physical pain or fatigue simply because they will it to be so; who can do anything they want because they are super geniuses. It would take a few hours out of an afternoon for one of them to make a car out of dirt and some twigs, and run it with their amazing brain power. I picture them all wearing Superman capes.
I’m sure Rand fans swoon over these heroes, thinking, “boy, that’s me through and through!” but they are a cartoon. The bad guys are as two-dimensional as children’s unflattering stick figure drawings of people they’re mad at.
A simplistic book for simplistic people.
All you commenters with your phony threats of cutting back your work load and withholding from the world the benefits of YOUR amazing brain power seem to think that you’re all John Galts and Hank Reardens, that surely nobody else could step in and do what you do. Your threats are hollow because you aren’t Ayn Rand’s supermen — other people can take your place and they will jump at the chance.
Much like the “Tea Party” phenomenon, this latest grassroots “movement” seems in no small part fueled by the “class warfare” being hyped by right-wing pundits like Rush, Hannity, Beck and so on, all of whom appear to be either profoundly ignorant about the tax code and the way progressive taxation works, or (more likely) are simply flagrant liars pandering to their base of angry rubes.
Note: The complete video series “John Galt Speaks” can be viewed here.
Update: More on the efforts of “rightbloggers” to exhort their troops to “Go Galt” from the Village Voice. Quite typical of the mentality at work here was the suggestion made to Dr. Helen Smith (wife of Instapundit’s Glenn Reynolds) a while back that “productive people” stiff waiters and other parasites. While not endorsing the idea, she proposed leaving servers a snotty note instead. Doesn’t that perfectly sum up how deranged and cockeyed these folks are?
Update2: Digby has a great post about the pernicious nonsense of the Randians along with some insight into the value system and disgusting character of the “real” John Galts of this world.
Red Tory v.3.0.3 
It’s funny to read such crap – especially when it is the “liberal thinkers” who make up the “creative class”… The creative class which is situated in the Vancouver to San Francisco corridor, the East Coast, and around the Central Canada region… skipping all the “fly-over states”…
I don’t imagine society would be much impoverished by the absence of those who subscribe to Rand’s philosophy. We’d all certainly have been better off if Allan Greenspan, for example, had headed for the hills a long time ago.
I think people are reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’ again because they’re trying to understand what happens to people of accomplishment, and people of talent and energy, when a government turns against them.
I thought it had more to do with ad agency boss Bert Cooper raving about the book in multiple episodes of the first season of the uber popular series Mad Men.
Funny thing about Rand, for all her ravings about individualism, she seems to subscribe to the elitist “leader principle” wherein only some “men” are leaders and the rest should simply follow.
I’m with Red – let ’em go. All of them. Let them strike. Let them disappear. Then we’ll see what happens to the rest of the world.
I’m curious to see if who amongst the treasured elite will be the one cleaning the toilets and collecting the garbage in Galt’s Gulch….
It’s significant that Randroids usually can never tell shit from shinola. We’re supposed to understand that statist oppression stifles creativity and drive from a group of people who are, almost to a person, abysmally mediocre?
They are also famously humourless, which, as anyone knows, I believe is an indication of a significant personality disorder. Robert Fulford tells the story of how he once went to lunch with Barbara and Nathaniel Branden and that their humourlessness was the only impression they made.
Anyway, I highly recommend the movie The Passion of Ayn Rand. Watching Rand (Helen Mirren) get plowed from behind by Branden (Eric Stoltz) right across the floor really does put that whole philosophy into perspective.
Just a thought.. discussed in my own blog today.. but 48% of Canadians are employed by small business.. small business accounts for 30% of our GDP..
While I am a lawyer, I consider myself to be running a small business, with 20 or so employees.. all of us paying taxes, without government or autoworker pension plans to fall back on..
My point? The credo of my blog more or less articulates my attitude – a quote from Hunter S. Thompson –
.
In other words, small business, the backbone of our country gets caught up in that great lost middle – not one of the darling “causes” that consume so many on the left, nor big enough to warrant special government attention when they are in trouble a la GMC, Air Canada. et al.. yet, at the end, they truly keep the country going…
My concern is simply that as we may discount the rantings of the dogmatic right in the U.S., we not lose sight that many “corporations” are one or two person businesses struggling against the current economy as much, or more, than many employed persons in society.. and that we not forget the costs of societal “improvements” on those small businesses.. whether it is an enhanced carbon tax, increased corporate taxes, expanded parental leave entitlements, etc., etc..
..as the people often cleaning your toilets are often either self-employed, or employees of a small business.
Someone should let these folks know that “Going Galt” and “Getting Fired” are two entirely different things.
and that we not forget the costs of societal “improvements” on those small businesses..
Ah, the costs of societal improvements canard. It’s funny that those preaching it never seem to mind the costs of societal improvements that benefit those small businesses such as the cost of schooling that provide them an educated workforce or roads that provide access to their small businesses.
Rob: It’s the loss of solidarity or common purpose among all the people who contribute to a healthy economy that is the problem. And small business owners are as often part of the problem as they are the solution (usually as a result of some conceit leads them to believe, by dint of their entrepreneurship alone, that they are more virtuous than other people.
In any case, I’ve never found small business owners much of an ally in the critique of corporate capitalism and corporatism (which are not leftist issues) until their own bottom line is affected.
And that’s too bad.
A better to choice to dust off for a re-read might be F.A. Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.”
..touche RM.. and those complaining of corporate advantage never mind the massive donations that business pours into charity, nor the tax dollars from business that are used to fund those societal improvements.
My point is that we need to expand our vision – as conservatives and liberals (progressives?).. the right needs to more fully understand the benefit of a healthy educated work-force in a clean environment.. and those on the other side of the spectrum need to more fully understand that, in a real way, “them” is “us”.. that as businesses begin to fail, the people who will be hurt worst, in fact, will be those at the bottom of the economic chain – not the top.
..and as for being more “virtuous”.. I wouldn’t say that, but I think the notion of having some respect for those in business or otherwise, who show initiative and effort is hardly a bad idea..
Oh.. and here’s irony, as I’m being challenged for my thoughts here.. which is fair enough, on SDA, I’m being referred to as “comrad Rob” because I dared to suggest Limbaugh is a “side-show circus freak”..
When I’m getting criticized by both sides.. I’m feeling I’m probably doing something right 🙂
When I read Rand as a young rodent I thought her philosophy unworkable and her villains over the top. No one would ever hold opinions as patently stupid and nihilistic as her bad guys!
Well now I’m a bit older, and I still find her philosophy unworkable. But I find her bad guys coming alive on the television and internet with increasing regularity. Here’s a quote from an recent article by Donald Downs:
Several years ago an administrator at Penn chastised an unwary student for having the temerity to use the word “individual” in a memo to the university planning committee. “This is a RED FLAG phrase today, which is considered by many to RACIST,” the administrator wrote back. “Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privileges [sic] the ‘individuals’ belonging to Penn’s largest or dominant group.”
Re “(usually as a result of some conceit leads them to believe, by dint of their entrepreneurship alone, that they are more virtuous than other people.)”
Just out of curiosity, have you ever risked everything, survived at less than minimum wages without whining about it, in order to bring an idea into the world, in order to create value out of thin air?
Re “When I’m getting criticized by both sides.. I’m feeling I’m probably doing something right :)”
Atta boy!!!
Do you get more satisfying, intense, multiple dialectal epiphanies from the Road to Serfdom, SR?
Rob (and I thank you for presenting the other side here), it seems to me like there are a good many extremely successful businesswo/men who go about contributing to their communities, giving to the arts and providing gainful and rewarding employment without rubbing our faces in it. We can certainly respect successful entrepreneurs (successful lawyers I’m not so sure), but those entrepreneurs should recognize the education and infrastructure that allow them to run a business they love, be their own boss and, in many cases, make a good deal of money. 99.9% of business owners didn’t get into it so that they could provide jobs for people, they did it to make money.
“…I’m curious to see if who amongst the treasured elite will be the one cleaning the toilets and collecting the garbage in Galt’s Gulch….”
and
“…..as the people often cleaning your toilets are often either self-employed, or employees of a small business.”
Apropos, the fourth most common cause of backed-up toilets, after used tampons, toothbrushes and cellphones is, curiously, copies of Atlas Shrugged.
Re “Do you get more satisfying, intense, multiple dialectal epiphanies from the Road to Serfdom, SR?”
“More satisfying” doesn’t apply because I never got past the first 100 pages or so of “Shrugged.” That’s why I qualified with “might be.” It just strikes me as a book and premise that points at more as it “ages.” The problem is bigness, mass. Loss of “freedom” via bureaucratic structure is directly proportional to growth. And yeah, there is a dialectic in there somewhere. 😉
Just out of curiosity, have you ever risked everything, survived at less than minimum wages without whining about it, in order to bring an idea into the world, in order to create value out of thin air?
Don’t be passive-aggressive, Ronin. It’s very effeminate. You’re not asking this out of curiosity; you’re suggesting I’ve never done any of these things.
Well, I have. I’ve been financially independent since I was 18 years old, I paid for my own education and have worked my share of minimum wage jobs. As for creating value out of thin air: well, operationalise “value” for me and I’ll see if I can answer that.
Several years ago an administrator at Penn chastised an unwary student for having the temerity to use the word “individual” in a memo to the university planning committee. “This is a RED FLAG phrase today, which is considered by many to RACIST,” the administrator wrote back. “Arguments that champion the individual over the group ultimately privileges [sic] the ‘individuals’ belonging to Penn’s largest or dominant group.”
Sounds like one of these incidents wingnuts either misinterpret or outright fabricate all the time. I’d like to see this “memo.”
Re “Don’t be passive-aggressive, Ronin. It’s very effeminate.”
LOLOL 😉 Hang on, why dontcha, you’re about three comments ahead of me! I figured that’s where I’d massage in an “effeminate/bureaucratic” segway.
Re “I’ve been financially independent since I was 18 years old,” etc.
Okay, question answered.
Value as in worth as determined by someone other than the creator, i.e. market/demand, over and above the cost of production. The curse of most first-time entrepreneurs is, “What a great doodah I have created. I’ll be rich.” Well, the great doodah may be a great doodah, but there’s absolutely no demand for it. (For the same reason I have always wondered why Inventory gets the asset priority it does as a book value. At that point, it is still value as determined by the producer, not the consumer.)
Value as in worth as determined by someone other than the creator, i.e. market/demand, over and above the cost of production.
While I’m ready to accept that as the operationalised definition of value for the purposes of the economy, I do happen to believe that some things have an intrinsic value and some do not and no amount of discussion has ever managed to change my mind about that.
…*ahem*…segway?
are they going to stick with the name “galt’s gulch”? “sugar mountain” has a nice ring to it. so does “hooverville”….
KEvron
“I’d like to see this ‘memo’.”
No need to. Just tune in to CBC Radio on any given day.
“No need to. Just tune in to CBC Radio on any given day.”
got it; the “memo” likely doesn’t exist, not that anecdotal evidence is really illustrative of anything.
KEvron
No need to. Just tune in to CBC Radio on any given day.
*yawn*
Re “Much like the ‘Tea Party’ phenomenon, this latest grassroots “movement” seems in no small part fueled by the “class warfare” being hyped by right-wing pundits like Rush, Hannity, Beck and so on.”
Have you caught “The Bubba Effect” as spun by Beck? I find it to be very, very interesting. Not for what’s on the surface, but for what is beneath the surface.
I’m preparing a post entitled, “A Wild Gay Marriage: Glenn Beck Proposes to Alex Jones.”
Digby’s got a nice post up about this very issue.
Heh. I hadn’t actually seen the original, just Colbert’s send up of it called “The Doom Bunker” which was extremely funny.
So, what do you think is beneath the surface of this “Bubba Effect” (which sounds more than a tad hysterical).
C-C: Thanks. I’ll go check it out.
Beck’s agenda is as transparent as a sheet of glass. The insinuation of a statement always carries more weight than the statement itself. He howls for this scenario to not play itself out, while in the same breath conditioning the public psyche (well, the public psyche of his middle-class demographic, anyway) for its eventuality. I would imagine that this type of “journalism” will more and more pop to the surface via the gatekeepers. They, and their interests, know full well that the jig is up. If bloggers speak in terms of “civilizational collapse” (maybe not so much in here) you can rest assured that like language is being whispered in back rooms.
It’s a “heads up” signal. I like that he brought in Celente who laid it on the line fairly starkly. Also voicing the fact that war games are being conducted on American streets by American troops exposes that way beyond the conspiracy fringe. I mean, shit, we’re talking prime time!
Ti-Guy:
I can not verify the Penn quote. David Downs, however, is a well-respected professor at the University of Wisconsin, and definitely does not write like a wing nut.
The Seattle Public Schools board, however, famously had this quote:
Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as “other”, different, less than, or render them invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation, emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology, defining one form of English as standard, ….
(http://www.fourmilab.ch/fourmilog/archives/seattle_schools_racism_2006-05-29/searace.htm)
Now you’re digging through statements put out by the Seattle Public School Board to find evidence of Ayn Rand’s bad guys?
You really need to go Galt.
By the way, rabbits aren’t rodents. They’re lagomorphs.
My point about who cleans the bathrooms was not meant to demean those who actually do it, but rather to tweak the nose of those elitists who don’t.
Rob, I like what you say and I too usually get it from both sides of the fence as I am one of those curious creatures usually reserved for mythology – a free market anarchist fiscally and hard-core liberal socially. I agree about small businesses and corporations, since I too have a corporation of 2.
But realistically, Rush and the other Gulcher’s aren’t talking about the owner-operator of Manny’s Janitorial or Lilly’s Electrical. They mean the Randesque people like Greenspan, Buffet or Gates, and seem to have the idea that without those glorious leaders, we’d all be grovelling in filth with sticks and eating bugs.
A over the top and idiotic as Rand’s villains are, her heroes are even more so – the are dashing handsome, perfect and either envied or misunderstood in society at large. Again, no one ever fits that mold. Certainly not the group of two-faced hypocrites who are the current “Gulchers” – they didn’t seem to mind when it was George Bush spending the money or Greenspan inflating the money supply, but now seem to think they can bring society to its knees by leaving.
They are elitist pricks.
Furthermore re “Bubba:”
Don’t forget that it was Zbigniew Brzezinski who floated the notion of “class warfare” several weeks ago on MSNBC. Setting the pace via nuance is the better part of any political dialogue:
“And if we don’t get some sort of voluntary National Solidarity Fund, at some point there’ll be such political pressure that Congress will start getting in the act, there’s going to be growing conflict between the classes and if people are unemployed and really hurting, hell, there could be even riots.”
SR — I’m not sure about the notion of “conditioning the public psyche (well, the public psyche of his middle-class demographic, anyway) for its eventuality” considering the “reach” of cable blowhards is relatively limited in the scheme of things. Based on past performance, I’d guess that Beck’s viewership is only a few hundred thousand people. It’s probably more just a case of trying to be sensational and outrageous to boost those ratings. As for a nefarious plot to soften up the public… much less likely.
Here’s another take on “Going Galt” by Roy Edroso:
The triumph of capitalism to be found in the Galt schtick is of a more traditional kind: It excites the troops and drives them to increase rightbloggers’ web traffic. (Not to mention their t-shirt sales.) In modern America, revolution is something you sell to suckers to get them to buy your products. Go Galt, like Go Gulf and Go Greyhound, is not a battle cry — it’s a marketing slogan.
That was linked to in my first Update, but thanks anyway. 😉
Ewps.
I came across an interesting post that suggests that Atlas Shrugged was really the first novel in a trilogy (with Anthem as the 3rd). And that the 2nd novel was so depressing that she never published it.
Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to “stop the motor of the world,” to kill 90% or so of Earth’s population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert “strike of the mind,” as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did — because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don’t consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.
And that’s where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I’m whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity’s saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt’s manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that’s not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.
Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We’re looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor’s village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers’ twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.
http://bradhicks.livejournal.com/393124.html