Ping! The thread is up.
Prior threads:
FReeper Book Club: Introduction to Atlas Shrugged
Part I, Chapter I: The Theme
Part I, Chapter II: The Chain
Part I, Chapter III: The Top and the Bottom
Part I, Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers
Part I, Chapter V: The Climax of the d’Anconias
Part I, Chapter VI: The Non-Commercial
Part I, Chapter VII: The Exploiters and the Exploited
Part I, Chapter VIII: The John Galt Line
Part I, Chapter IX: The Sacred and the Profane
Part I, Chapter X: Wyatt’s Torch
Part II, Chapter I: The Man Who Belonged on Earth
Part II, Chapter II: The Aristocracy of Pull
Part II, Chapter III: White Blackmail
Part II, Chapter IV: The Sanction of the Victim
Part II, Chapter V: Account Overdrawn
Part II, Chapter VI: Miracle Metal
Part II, Chapter VII: The Moratorium on Brains
Part II, Chapter VIII: By Our Love
Part II, Chapter IX: The Face Without Pain or Fear or Guilt
Part II, Chapter X: The Sign of the Dollar
Part III, Chapter I: Atlantis
Part III, Chapter II: The Utopia of Greed
Part III, Chapter III: Anti-Greed
Part III, Chapter IV: Anti-Life
Part III, Chapter V: Their Brothers’ Keepers
Thanks for the ping. After watching Ayn Rand in an interview, my estimation of the book has moved up.
Down to brass tacks now for Hank Reardon in chapter 26, “The Concerto of Deliverance,” a reference to Richard Halley’s Fifth, the theme of which opened the novel, whistled by a young brakeman on one of Taggart Transcontinental’s trains. We know now where that young fellow ended up. Hank and Dagny, on the contrary, are still fighting a losing battle out in the real world and so is John Galt himself. Francisco has disappeared, presumably digging copper ore out of the side of a mountain in Colorado with a pick and shovel. He can do that; he can design an ultramodern smelter, he can run an enormous multinational firm, but the looters can do none of those things, and it’s starting to bite.
Hank has been given more than fair warning, no doubt about it. And now the mechanism of government takeover has begun to chew at his steel mills, the only productive ones left in the country and hence the ones most likely to be expropriated by a political class that still feels it is the material resources, and not the men, who create the wealth that will keep their game afloat.
It works through the goons who have infiltrated his plant, the ones the Wet Nurse stoutly refused to help import. An agitprop campaign against The Wealthy in the media has attempted to rally popular support for an end to the exploitation of labor at the Rearden facilities, such as it is. In truth the only labor that is actually producing anything there is firmly on Rearden’s side, but they have no microphone, no paid media shills, no voice.
Nor is it only his mills the looters are moving on. They attach his income, his savings, his assets on a pretext and then tell him they’ll release it…in time. Hank chuckles.
He had a few hundred dollars in cash, left in his wallet, nothing else. But the odd, glowing warmth in his mind, like the feel of a distant handshake, was the thought that in a secret safe of his bedroom there lay a bar of solid gold, given to him by a gold-haired pirate.
They’re moving on Hank himself, and it’s he, and not his assets, that they’re hoping to freeze. His family is hostage, helpless even to purchase groceries without his signature. Brother Philip’s motives for seeking work at the mill are finally revealed – he is trying to keep an eye on Hank for the government, as we suspected all along. His ex-wife Lillian has taken refuge with them in his own house, having nowhere else to go, her last value to the ruling class having disappeared in divorce. They speak in terms of starvation, of utter destitution. (One wonders what happened to the diamond bracelet Lillian got from Dagny for the chain of Rearden metal, but it is apparent that these people are not even capable of that sort of asset management).
We have questioned Rand’s understanding of her own heroes, which is a backhanded tribute to her power as a novelist. That wouldn’t be possible if her characters weren’t drawn finely enough to be able to measure their observed behavior against Rand’s theoretical explanation of it. We cannot question her supreme understanding of her villains. This, for instance, concerning Lillian:
The lust that drives others to enslave an empire, had become, in her limits, a passion for power over him. She had set out to break him, as if, unable to equal his value, she could surpass it by destroying it, as if the measure of his greatness would thus become the measure of hers, as if – he thought with a shudder – as if the vandal who smashed a statue were greater than the artist who had made it…
She set out to break Hank like a horse she intended to ride, just as the looters imagine all of society to be, a powerful but brute animal saddled for guidance by the clever. They’re in charge because they’re clever, and the measure of that cleverness is the fact that they’re in charge. It’s a nice, tidy, self-consistent world view untroubled by circularity, or, for that matter, by results. The media can spin results, after all, at least for a time, but they can’t spin facts as fundamental as an empty granary.
Hank is summoned to a meeting at which absolutely nothing of substance is said except for his frank denial to play the game. He wonders at the uselessness of the whole thing until he arrives back at his steel plant to find it under siege. Union goons and government agents are attempting a takeover and it is being resisted by force of arms. We have come to the shooting at last.
And the first shot was into the body of the Wet Nurse, who was unceremoniously dumped onto a slag heap by the invaders. He wasn’t quite finished, however, and Rearden finds him after he has dragged himself some one hundred vertical feet to the edge of a ravine near the roadway.
A scum of cotton was swimming against the moon, he could see the white of a hand and the shape of an arm lying stretched in the weeds, but the body was still…
It might actually have been better to remain that way, for over the course of the next four pages we are treated to the bathos of an operatic death scene. The young man is at last conferred the dignity of a name – it is Tony – and a kiss from the belatedly paternal Rearden as he breathes his last. We are spared an aria but that’s about all. Yes, of course the young man has achieved his moral epiphany but we knew that two chapters ago. He is, as Cherryl Taggart before him, an innocent playing a game far beyond his capacity, who pays for it with his life.
And the game is afoot. Gunfire in the background reminds us that we are at war, and as he drops the cooling corpse off at the dispensary Hank spies the lynchpin of the factory’s defense.
On the roof of a structure above the gate, he saw, as he came closer, the slim silhouette of a man who held a gun in each hand and, from behind the protection of a chimney, kept firing at intervals down into the mob, firing swiftly and, it seemed, in two directions at once, like a sentinel protecting the approaches to the gate. The confident skill of his movements, his manner of firing, with no time wasted to take aim, but with the kind of casual abruptness that never misses a target, made him look like a hero of Western legend…
We wince. Rand, who has taken the trouble to inform herself of the minutiae of railroad and steel plant, is on considerably less firm ground with regard to firearms, unfortunately, and this won’t be the only time. While it is conceivable that two-gun heroes of the silver screen might attempt to hipshoot from an elevated position into an oncoming mob in two separate directions at once it is not recommended combat procedure. Even an infallible paragon of accuracy must encounter the inconvenient necessity to reload, a two-handed process which in real life tends to happen at the most awkward moments.
But this fellow, whoever he is, is also good enough to intercept a direct attempt on Rearden’s life some moments later and carry him from the fray.
“Who was it that saved my life? Somebody grabbed me as I fell and fired at the thugs.”
“Did he! Straight at their faces. Blew their heads off. That was that new furnace foreman of ours. Been here two months. Best man I’ve ever had. He’s the one who got wise to what the gravy boys were planning…Told me to arm our men…Frank Adams is his name – who organized our defense, ran the whole battle, and stood on a roof, picking off the scum who came too close to the gate. Boy, what a marksman!”
Frank Adams. Francisco d’Anconia, of course, and we learn here that in fact he did not spend the intervening time making the unoffending Colorado mountainside pay for his sexual frustrations at the point of a pick and shovel, but instead sought out the man he described as his “greatest conquest.” And so Hank is, as at last they sit down for the conversation that is the final one that all of the other industrial magnates had before they disappeared into the protective rustic arms of Galt’s Gulch.
All but one, that is. Dagny is still out there.
Have a great week, Publius!
Recent history has the “protesters” showing up at the homes of AIG execs. If memory serves, while the so-called protesters weren’t necessarily coordinated out of the White House, they might as well have been, because Acorn was the hand behind the people brought in.
While there was no violence at these protests, there very well could have been, due to the rhetoric coming from the President.
“He suggests they simply expropriate his mills, and they recoil in horror. He asks how he can produce if he produces at a loss; Ferris says he will produce because he can’t help himself. Jim says that Hank will do something to fix the problem – and the last piece fits. Francisco was right – he is the guiltiest man in the room because he had accepted the reality that these men had created.”
My co-workers (colleagues and management) are fully aware of my world view as I make no effort to hide it (monogamous heterosexual evangelical Christian). I don’t smack them in the face with sanctimonious ravings, but they have no doubt where I stand. As for my work product, they are counting on the fact that I simply cannot coast; I have be engaged and productive even if they do not value my contributions I will continue to produce as they withdraw their support.
But more interesting is their behavior regarding things outside my work product. They think of me (and have told me to my face) that my orthodox Christianity is “creepy” and “intolerant,” and that anyone who does not abide by an existentialist, hedonistic lifestyle or is a Darwin skeptic is “retarded.” Yet I have encountered numerous instances when one of them softly knocks on my office door, asking to come in and receive my counsel when they need someone honest and genuinely caring to listen and help them solve a problem in their lives.
Further, my coworkers know that I am a 2nd Amendment absolutist, I own and shoot guns, and even worse, I’m a “preparedness end of the world nut!”
Here comes the truly fascinating part: they expect my own faith and honor to be their ace in the hole! Of course my preparations for coming hard times is nutty and proof of my paranoia. But, they have also made it known (quietly) that when the Schumer Hits the Fan, they will come to my house and expect me to take them in and care for them because in their demented minds how could I “do anything else as a Christian ?” Implicit is their idea that “You have to do the right thing. Your beliefs command you to take care of me.”
Wow, are they in for a surprise. As I told one of them, “So you ridicule my beliefs even as you expect them to cause me to bail your behind out?”
I remember being at a Winter Party (pagans do not celebrate Christmas and have no difficulty insulting or offending those who do) in December 1999. One of the higher-ups breezed into the room and invaded my conversational group, kvetching about Y2K. She asked me if I was ready. Since as a matter of practice we have a freezer and larder full of food, my generator is in working order with a good supply of fuel, and my security devices are nearby and ready to employ, sure I was ready for a couple months if necessary.
“Oh, if things get really bad, can I come to your house?” she asked breathlessly.
Sweetly I replied that if she was unprepared for disruption, she would be on her own out in the street with everyone else.
I suspect the look on her face was similar to that on the looters in the Wayne Falkland Hotel that evening with Hank.
Thanks for all the work on these threads.
Thanks for all your work on these threads!
I was driving south on I-95 this afternoon between Savannah and Brunswick, GA (didn’t note the mile marker, unfortunately), and saw a very visible billboard asking this question:
“WHO IS JOHN GALT?”
There were no other words visible on the billboard.
Offhand, I’d say that the word is getting out.
Relatively speaking, it won’t be long now before the Obama administration and the Democrat Congress pi$$ off enough people to force a “shift,” shall we say, in the direction of the US government.
Obozo is at -8 on the approval/disapproval scale now. I wonder what the tipping point will be?
I cannardly wait! For the tipping point, that is.
It will be interesting!