OK people, next Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the first publishing of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Most self-appointed intellectualls around today dismiss it as farcical and melodramatic. I say to them, blow it out your ear! Never has it been more applicable than today as the cancerous scourge of political correctness, socialism, and multiculturalism engulf our national leadership. If you have not read it, I urge you to pick up a copy at your local library. If you want a tease first, go here and read this short synopsis and brief analysis over at RealClearPolitics.com.
Friday, October 05, 2007
If you read nothing else this year...
OK people, next Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of the first publishing of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Most self-appointed intellectualls around today dismiss it as farcical and melodramatic. I say to them, blow it out your ear! Never has it been more applicable than today as the cancerous scourge of political correctness, socialism, and multiculturalism engulf our national leadership. If you have not read it, I urge you to pick up a copy at your local library. If you want a tease first, go here and read this short synopsis and brief analysis over at RealClearPolitics.com.
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4 comments:
My Bible. That is all.
Such gestures pretty much defined her style to the end, and her extremely black and white view of life in general. "In this universe everything, everybody, is either all good or all bad, without any of those intermediate shades which, in life, complicate reality and perplex the eye that seeks to probe it truly," the critic Whittaker Chambers once noted in a brilliantly corrosive review published many years ago in the conservative American magazine National Review magazine.
"This kind of simplifying pattern, of course, gives charm to most primitive storytelling. And, in fact, the somewhat ferro-concrete fairytale the author pours here is, basically, the old one known as: The War between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. In modern dress, it is a class war. Both sides to it are caricatures."
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...objectivism's greatest intellectual appeal remains with keen minded yet sadly impressionable youths or else platitudinous dullards with a taste for the cult life.
Or perhaps, her story tells the tale of what could possibly, and most likely will happen when governments figure out what regulating businesses can do to an economy and a country. Maybe you should actually read the book for yourself before you read what other people have to say about it. If you read the book, you will see that the press is just as much involved in bringing down capitalism as the government, so it would make sense that anyone in the press would hate the book.
@anon7:07,
May I assume you to be one of the "intellectual" enlightened class which Rand castigates in Alas?
Your last paragraph would suggest as much. Her story may point to contrasts between blacks and whites, but the hued minutae of real life would blur the larger picture, which is that men, working in their own self-interests, unencumbered by onerous government regulations and silly political correctness, end up raising the life standards of their fellow men by leaps and bounds more than if government mandated that they work on behalf of their fellow man. The concept of a man's labor and ideas belonging to only himself and no one else, as the ultimate example of morality, frames the modern contrast between liberalism/socialism and true conservatism.
If you cannot understand that, perhaps you should re-read Atlas.
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