Directive 10-289 ping and Unification Board ping.
It’s supposed to be fiction not a how-to manual.
When will John Galt show himself???
I now live 16 minutes from Rome, WI, , home of the bank that helped finance the 20th Century Motor Co.
Somewhere in the area is the inspiration for Starnesville, located in Adams County, the 2nd poorest county in Wisconsin.
I often wonder what propelled Rand to choose this area? Back then, the flat terrain was heavily forested. The soil is sandy/acid and farming is limited. Irrigation is common for row crops. There are several wonderful lakes in the area, the largest of which, Petenwell, was the result of a dam on the Wisconsin River. It was created in 1948, during the time she was writing the novel.
Now it’s a tourist area featuring hunting, fishing, and boating, due to Petenwell and the other small, narrow slit lakes in the area, and the flat to gently rolling topography is perfect for golf courses. At the time of Rand’s writing, this portion of Central Wisconsin was dominated by the timber/lumber industry.
Perhaps she visited as a tourist and spent time writing here? It is peaceful & quiet still today, even during peak tourist season like this weekend. She did have a friendship with Frank Lloyd Wright during that period, (1937-1957) and there is correspondence indicating that she was also writing The Fountainhead at that time. Taliesin is about 75 miles SW of here. She couldn’t afford Wright to design the sets for Fountainhead, but she did explore having him design her a country ‘cottage’ (sic) that was never built.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/ayn-rands-frank-lloyd-wright-cottage.html
Unlike Rand’s description of near-mute denizens living in hovels amid squalid ruins, I believe people here are actually quite self-sufficient and will survive what we are experiencing.
I need to reread Atlas Shrugged. It’s been about 10 years since the last re-reading.