Posted on 02/14/2009 11:27:03 AM PST by Publius
You know, it is pretty much impossible for anyone else to follow Publius and you!
Francisco allowed their own corrupt system to flourish.
He paid full price for construction of quality housing but allowed the looters to build it with the cheapest junk they could find and to pocket the rest.
He didn't as much condone the building of shanties and he knew it would take place because of the nature of the corrupt system.
His sin was one of omission rather than commission.
He failed to step in and make it right..but allowed greed and corruption to seek it's own level.
It because books like this aren’t allowed in liberal institutions.
They were too busy carrying Mao’s little red book and copies of Marx.
New Zealand is pretty liberal already.
LOL! I hope not. There’s always “Bill, yer fulla crap.” It’d be right more often than not... ;-)
OK, it is tough in this crowd, but I think I have an insight nobody has really remarked upon. This chapter very specifically shows us two children of privilege (and Eddie), and how they chose to grow up. They are juxtaposed with James. Dagny, Francisco, and Eddie spend their days constructing machines, exploring, and being producers. James is kind of a lump, and resents them for being doers.
The most important thing that we are being shown is that Francisco and Dagny both choose to work, and work at HARD jobs in their youth. Francisco even ran away from home one winter to work on one of his father’s ships. His father’s only question was, “Did you do a good job?”
We see a lot of self-made men in Atlas, but we are shown that being born to privilege is not enough. There is no such thing as just being “lucky”. James had all of the advantages that Dagny had, and he squandered them. The real people of value know that they have to work, no matter what their starting circumstances.
Case in point: the Vanderbilt family. Have you ever seen pictures, or been to, Biltmore in Asheville, NC? That place is a testimony to raw wealth. You would think that a fortune of that size should last forever, yet Gloria Vanderbilt was about the last one of any prominence....and the fortune basically does not exist. Wealth has to be re-earned generation after generation. “Luck” only gets you so far.
I saw a story in the Wall Street Journal several years ago about a Vietnamese community somewhere near Los Angeles. The story was about various benefactors to the community. The WSJ was very clever in that they named benefactor after benefactor, and told their stories. Inevitably, these people who were giving millions started out as penniless boat people, one guy making his first 20 bucks by selling the US Army jacket he had been given as a refugee. I thought it a wonderful illustration that your starting circumstance does not have to define your entire existence.
Repeatedly in Atlas, we hear various lame businessmen lament that “they never got a chance”, and Ayn Rand shows that you have to make your own chances.
Brilliant! Great catch. I should have picked up on that one.
I’ll tackle the sex issue, too.
“I’d never want to belong to a club that would have me as a member.”
Jim doesn’t think much of himself, and knows that the only women who could possibly consent to be with him must feel the same way about themselves.
Use your own experience here. When someone amazing is interested in you, you feel amazing. I remember in high school, if it turned out the person that had a crush on you was kind of a loser, you kind of wondered if that was the best you could do.....? And what did that say about you if that particular person thought that they had a chance with you? Yeesh. (ooops, been there, done that!)
Dagny and Francisco are internally calibrated to their own wonderfulness (to the point of obnoxiousness, really) so they would never consider being attracted to anyone that wasn’t perfectly wonderful, as well.
{glow}
Rest assured that you are doing a great job.
Unfortunately, we are three senators short...
I do have a question about the... "callousness to the welfare of those less-than-godlike inhabitants who do their best to live up to the arrangements dictated by the idealized capitalist relationships."
I am trying to see these people as a homogeneous group who are all victimized equally. In other places throughout the book many of the poor people are described similarly. In my view, this could only exist in AS, not in the real world. Consider Appalachia prior to and during the great depression. Did the people at that time suffer greatly due to economic turmoil? My understanding is that a large number of them listened to the news on the radio and went about their daily lives pretty much unaffected. True, they were dirt poor but most that I have spoken with look back on those days fondly.
To get to my point, the poor are treated as completely dependent upon the rest of society and when the rug is pulled out from under them, they are left absolutely helpless. This, in my opinion, is not like the real world. I have heard said many times that during the depression the country people didn't know that they were poor.
Daney and Francisco make love with their minds... Jim and Betty have sex with their bodies.
Boy, did you get that one right! Our first intimate time together, I saw stars.
I wonder if Madoff sees himself as a d'Anconia type of person.
... This is a very utopian frame of mind, this business of a phoenix arising from the ashes of the past. But in those ashes will be human bones.
The characters Eddie Willers, Cherryl Brooks and "The Wet Nurse" come to mind, though there are many others.
In my view you're absolutely right. Rand has to set up a contrast between her "immovable movers" and the rest of society - that would be us poor fumblers - in her dramatic narrative. To do this she must necessarily dispense with a whole lot of complexity that is the real world - it has been pointed out already that there are no children (yet) in AS, for example. And still the thing is 1100 pages long.
I think Rand might hold that a lot of the people you mentioned are, in fact, holding to her ideals in a sort of primitive but entirely virtuous barter-economy way. I hope I'm not giving a lot away in stating that it's the sort of straightforward economic relationships that exist in the fictional Galt's Gulch. This value for that. A jar of 'shine for a tire patch. That isn't in the least fictional. It will, in fact, survive Atlas shrugging very nicely both in fiction and in the real world.
Publius, what say ye?
Oh, nicely put.
My understanding is that a large number of them listened to the news on the radio and went about their daily lives pretty much unaffected.
A technical point. Radio began making an inroad into American homes during the Depression, but those radios were expensive. The poor couldn't afford radios. In this period, illiteracy was rampant. News was transmitted when the man in the family came home and told the family during the evening meal what he had heard during the day, filtered through his own prejudices. Radio did not become affordable until the beginning of the war.
True, they were dirt poor but most that I have spoken with look back on those days fondly.
It was a case of the rest of America coming down to the level these people had always known.
I have an example from my mother's side of the family. This side did poorly during the Twenties. My mother's older sister was pulled out of high school in 1926 by my grandmother, given subway fare and sent to the Curtis Publishing Co. to seek work. Her wages were needed for the rest of the family to survive. To her credit, my aunt ended up becoming managing editor of "Ladies' Home Journal" before her retirement in the Sixties. Being a high school dropout did not hold her back, and her religious faith prevented her from resenting what my grandmother had done to her. (I would have punched the old biddy's lights out for just suggesting that I drop out of school!) Needless to say, this branch of the family was staunchly supportive of FDR and remains Democratic today.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.