Posted on 06/20/2009 7:51:34 AM PDT by Publius
Homosexuals?
Rand plays with the idea of a state that is willing to slaughter its people to maintain power, but she drops it almost immediately. There are two kinds of people who run such states. One kind understands that if he starves the masses, he'll get food riots, so he makes sure they can at least eat. The other is willing to kill the rioters. Joseph Zdugashvili and Mao Tse Tung were two of the latter group.
Rand avoided the obvious implications of the state she imagined. She wrote extensively about the deaths of the passengers on the Comet when it crashed with the arms train in the Taggart Tunnel. The incident filled twenty pages and introduced several characters, all of whom were portrayed as worthy of their fate. There are also hints of violence prior to this point. Dagny Taggart mentions raiders on the frozen train, but nothing about their actual methods.
Rand portrayed the ideological battle between self love and self hate, not a contest of arms between factions of different stripes. Her method argues that the reader should appreciate himself and not view himself as worthless when compared to society. Another interesting view of a society gone mad “for the common good” is offered in Harlan Ellison's A boy and His Dog.
In the film adaptation of that story, the Topeka Council is the absolute authority in a post apocalypse city. Anyone who defies the council is immediately killed and the death attributed to a farm accident or some other benign circumstance, with the council blithely adding, “Oh, and may the Lord have mercy on his soul,” after they order the murder. In Soviet Russia, the order might be a profane tirade from Papa Joe, followed by the disappearance of the victim, and the state's effort to remove that person from the historical record. Why bother to lie about his death when refusing to admit that he ever lived eliminates the need to answer difficult questions?
Rand's collectivist state sabotaged a wheat harvest so that politically connected traders could ship grapefruits. Such a state has to use force. People find out why they're starving, why their friends and relatives are starving, and they're not nice when they find out who did it. But Rand never mentions the state taking action against the violators of Directive 10-289. The penalty for violation is death, but no one gets executed. This is perhaps a reflection of The Fountainhead, which portrayed the conflict between socialism and liberty as an ideological battle. Perhaps enough people did not understand what The Fountainhead was truly about and Rand changed her theme to make it more clear.
But Project X is clearly designed to keep internal order by killing a lot of people at once, and so I think your observation about regimes willing to do that is precisely accurate. One of the nomenklatura - Mouch? - blandly recommended murder in that conversation about Directive 10-289 and Kinnan put his foot down. The union thugs won't stand for it at the moment but later they will. Maybe it's just that they won't stand for people other than themselves doing it.
Rand's written violence has a fairyland-like quality to it that may have been a product both of her times (although Raymond Chandler was putting out some pretty graphic stuff) and her antecedents - as we'll see later, she writes about a gunfight like a philosopher, not a gunfighter.
I'd love to know how much she really knew about the starvation campaign in the Ukraine - at the time the novel was published Krushchev had only just made his secret speech, so a lot of Stalin's abuses were still pretty much papered over, but Rand did have relatives in the old country at the time who occasionally wrote to her. I have to wonder, though, if she had stuck that stuff into AS - would anyone have believed it?
Not Mouch. Ferris is the one who always pushes for death.
I don’t think it was Ferris and I’m not sure if it was Mouch. Rand’s style puzzles me. She dances around two dark truths, which are the use of force in a totalitarian state and the effects of incempetence in an industrial society.
Project X is demonstrated but never used. Rand’s leaders, though obviously despicable, are afraid to use physical force. Imagine a world that issues death threats then kowtows to a union leader who says they can’t threaten to kill the union men. Or else what? They’re evil enough to starve the world through stupidity and political favors, but not evil enough to actually pull the trigger.
Rand mentions a couple of plane crashes and industrial accidents as if they were headlines flashed on the New York Times headline scroll in Manhattan. The train wreck is the only detailed description. It’s reminscent of a scene in The Fountainhead. Dominique Francon meets with a bunch of wealthy do gooders in New York to discuss the plight of the poor. We would refer to this audience as limousine liberals and/or morons. Dominique tells them about the poor people she studied, how they had brand new radios (written in the 1930s) but didn’t pay the rent, spent their days drinking and ignoring their children, etc. Both scenes are described with clinical detachment. They’re not meant to make the reader sad or angry.
Those incidents have consequences, though, which are shockingly real and accurately foretold. We’re familiar with the welfare moochers of the 1980s and fools with heavy machinery were a staple of the Soviet Union. I assume she wanted to appeal to the readers’ sense of logic, rather than emotion. But anger and sorrow are natural when confronted by deadly acts of stupidity. If we didn’t get angry about them, they would happen more often.
Sheesh. Good thing the unity board won't let them fire me.
Actually, it does in fact get used, but I don't want to post a spoiler.
Late to the party, I’ve been out of town.
Consider, though, that Rand found it necessary to have the State create a weapon that is designed, primarily, to keep internal order.
Again, remarkably prescient. Ruby Ridge and the botched military style raid against Randy Weaver. Elian Gonzalez and the government sanctioned thugs that seized him, unnecessarily, at the point of a gun.
And, the most grotesque violation by the government against citizens, in recent memory, Waco.
Rand implies the US has become a country willing to use deadly force against its own citizens.
I suggest recent history shows our government has no problem with the idea of violence against its own citizens.
And, the people who are involved in these raids always use the “I was just doing my job” excuse to justify their actions.
She omitted much of the obvious consequences of violence that would not be shocking to her intended audience. But her discussions of Dagny Taggart and her lovers are borderline explicit for 1957. Her novels repeatedly trashed collectivism, but also offered discussions of sexuality a bit more frankly than the prudish nature of the era. The two characters in Anthem run off to live together outside of the mainstream without the benefit of marriage. Howard Roarke rapes Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead. Dagny Taggart’s sexual adventures are discussed in more detail than any aspect of Atlas Shrugged except for objectivism. I wonder how much of Rand's ideal was against the sexual mores of the era.
Kay Ludlow is another insight into this. She tells Dagny that she quit movies because all the roles it offered were home-wreckers and such (sluts) instead of independent women who could do whatever they wanted, such as marry a philosopher turned pirate. Some comedian cracked wise about women and pirates when he asked, "How many women fantasize about being ravaged by an English professor wearing a turtleneck?"
No, I think it was Ferris. Ferris is always wanting to kill people. He mentions it in the first person there, and his attitude is referred to by others elsewhere as well.
The wuss. ;-)
It's too bad actually. If Mouch DID try to kill somebody, he's such a moron he'd probably end up shooting himself, and everybody'd be better off.
Ann Coulter once commented that the only way for an actress to win an Oscar was to portray a whore at some point in her career.
Ann then proceeded to list Oscar winners that won for their portrayal of a prostitute or had “played a prostitute” on their screen resume.
The list is pretty impressive:
Jane Fonda
Julia Roberts
Kim Basinger
Nicole Kidman (she won after Ann made her comment)
There are others, however, their names escape me at the moment.
Rand does mention what happens to the violators of the Directive: they go rogue, become villains, form gangs that roam the wilderness. That is the only course I could see. Screw starving to death, take what you need, and if you have to kill a few “authorities” to get it, so what? Even if they eventually kill you (I think that is why the military is moving around so much in the novel, hunting gangs/raiders), it’s better that going out like a wimp.
The plan executed by Galt, D’Anconia, and Danneskjold is to bring the world to its knees by being as stupid as society claims to desire. When John Galt says he plans to return to New York, they try to talk him out of it by describing some of what they expect to happen. The story mentions gangs of raiders only a few times. None of the characters ever encounter such types. Hank Rearden will encounter something like them later (I'll avoid the spoiler details) but the antagonists are not a raider gang. They had other motives.
Part of this is Rand playing black and white. Individuals are good, collectivist government busybodies are bad. It's difficult to portray the rugged individualist as the good archetype when some of the rugged individualists resort to armed crime for survival. But Danneskjold does the same thing and Rand uses him as irony; the brilliant philosopher turned pirate because society would accept nothing else from him. Mr. Spock was hardly the first person to realize that, “In an insane society, a sane man must appear insane.”
Rand could have explored this and added some interesting characters and subplots to the story. In all honesty, I wanted to murder James Taggart around page 100. I didn't need to read about the fiftieth time he used influence peddling to stick it to somebody he didn't like, which was anybody. The reality of the world coming down on people's heads is gripping drama. Think of the description of the wreck in the Taggart Tunnel. It's one of the most captivating parts of the book. The collectivist mindset kills people. Imagine if Rand knew about Soviet adventures with nuclear submarines and power plants.
And not all of the black market in such a world is evil. In a world where boot-licking is the most marketable skill, some will be better at it than others. In any economy, some people will hoard the benefits they receive and some people will share them. Cheryl could have been such a character. It would have been interesting to see how bureaucratic inertia frustrated her efforts. This theme was played out in The Fountainhead. Catherine, Ellsworth Toohey’s niece and abandoned bride of Peter Keating, becomes a miserable social worker, of the type that enjoys knowing that others suffer, and feeds on making them suffer some more. But she didn't start out that way.
The more I think about it, the more I believe that are there other, and equal, themes to Atlas Shrugged besides the stupidity of Karl Marx. Rand lived that lifestyle herself. IMO, the best part of AS is quoted in my profile.
The plan executed by Galt, D’Anconia, and Danneskjold is to bring the world to its knees by being as stupid as society claims to desire.
It's the very core of Atlas Shrugged. The only thing I'd change is ...by being appearing as stupid as society claims to desire...
It's difficult to get an intelligent adult to 'dumb down' (think Orwell's 1984). The lefties know this, and are aggressive in getting to your children while they are young.
Also the gulchers all need and have an outlet for their creativity.
An observation that I think is relevant - There have been documented instances in colonial America where, captured Europeans had feigned feeble mindedness in order to escape their captors wrath. Of course, this doesn't make them stupid, it is just another form of self defense.
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