Who Is John Galt?!

I got to read my pal Ayn Rand's work a couple of years ago.
I call her "pal" because I suspect we could have been
After all, most of my life I have been most fascinated by,
And closest to... eccentrics - including innovators mainly among them...(you know who you are)

I was so impressed with her beautifully developed, provocative work I wrote six, yes six stories about it. 
In rough order:

Atlas is Shrugging

Ine* Rand 678, Ine* 679

Lemon Rineand

Crow On Fifty (Ayn - the last installment)

Ayn Rand Redux

Atlas Shrugged

('dis be the seventh for those keeping count)

I think, in this day and age, Ayn would have mixed emotions at what she would see:

• A Congress in inertia 
• A President rendered impotent by checks and balances that are not working properly 
• A populace tired of economic abuses and the inability of its elected officials to correct the course 
• A national moral compass that fires our youth and our money erratically toward other nations

My favorite Rand work, "Atlas Shrugged" focuses on two key factors, an elected body that is so controlling that it destroys our economic base and entrepreneurs who leave the disaster behind to establish a utopian free-enterprise system.  Many people believe she correctly pointed to our current government as too large and too anti-business... this may be true in some respects.

Yet, I think the main thing in Ayn's novel that does not adequately mirror reality is the assumption that business can grow and prosper better if unregulated and that corporations will function ethically if left entirely to their own devices.  If this same logic were applied to the flip side of Ayn's thinking, the government would be fine if we just installed politicians and then left them alone to pass laws of their own choosing and find their own successors.

I think... even my pal Ayn Rand would agree these guys have screwed us up big time.  She knew the only way to "Fix it" was to drop all the ethical (emphasis on ethical) entrepreneurs into a remote valley no one else could find and let them peddle their wares among each other.  We don't have any hidden valleys, we have  our entire country and the whole world to contend with. Everyone world wide has their eye on our moral compass and that is as it should be because we have long taken pride in setting the standard.

The problem is now we have let standards slip and fall into moral crevices on many fronts such as; considering torture permissible, starting wars without factual justification, saddling our children with over $3 trillion in war debt without identifying the means to pay, giving corporations the benefit of the doubt ahead of the public voice, giving corporations and politicians a pass on investigating and prosecuting illegal activities.

Now, I wonder what Ayn would say to our leaders in business and politics today?  Maybe something like this; "Listen you idiots, I used my imagination and wrote novels. Fiction is what they were. Nothing more.  You, on the other hand, are writing history and you are doing a lousy job of it.  Snap out of it. You are both far too embedded in greed and egotism.  You are destroying your children's future." Okay, okay, maybe she would have taken 1,000 pages to relay that message but I think it would have summed up the same.

So what's to conclude?  There is much work to do of course, and our generation doesn't appear to have the cajones to do it.  Instead, we will have to wait on our sons and daughters to save us, and themselves. God, please be with them.

Lemon Rineand

"Houston.  We have a problem"

Okay, okay we have produced three blogs in high praise of "Atlas Shrugged", written by my very close friend and colleague (in my mind) Ayn Rand (pronounced "Ine").

Suddenly, on page 929, I have come across the reason "Ine" is renowned as a philosopher.  It is on that page, 929, where she begins a speech by her main protagonist. The speech lasts precisely 50 pages...no breaks.  To put this in perspective, I launched a cool little Internet stop watch and timed the reading of one of these pages...out loud and at the pace you would normally expect.  It took over three and a half minutes.  That equates to at least 175 minutes of...speech - no breaks. Just a hair short of three hours.  Pretty deep material too.   

After I got a half dozen pages into it I suddenly realized "Ine" was trapping me.  That is when I stopped to tally the depth of her trap.  Fifty big ones.  I am not even sure Mother Teresa could sit still for a speech like that.  This must be why they have the famous "Ayn Rand Institute",  http://www.aynrand.org.  It is because there are a bunch of folks who are spending their entire lives trying to figure out what she said on pages 929-979 of "Atlas Shrugged'.  No.  I am not joining.

So I am thinking; practically, there is no way I will ever in my lifetime read all those pages.  I won't even skim them.

I withstood Philosophy in college and know how painful it can be to try to understand some of those folks... I mean if it was easy everyone would be a philosopher right?!  Anyway, now I know why Ayn hit the big time in philosophy circles - she took the time to write a 50 page speech.  I have also found that she wrote it long hand and had a typist assisting her - a typist who could hunt and peck all day without nodding off and having her head hit the keyboard...er, I mean typewriter.

Now I have moved past the, "You guys are wrong and I am right" speech and am continuing to love the book. A little over a hundred pages left and I will file a final report on this, perhaps the greatest book I have ever read... except for the speeches.