The Weekly Screed (#536)

Atlas cried
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Recently, I’ve had occasion to re-read several books I hadn’t cracked since high school. The result has been an uneven mixture of nostalgia, disappointment, rediscovery and surprise.

Re-reading Brave New World, for instance, was excruciating. I had no idea, back in ninth grade, what an awful writer Aldous Huxley was. On the other hand, returning to Dandelion Wine, I felt greater pleasure than ever before in Ray Bradbury’s lyricism. Going back to The Centaur, I found I’d lost my connection to its young protagonist. Instead, my sympathies had shifted to author John Updike, who’d written beautiful passages but failed to fully develop his central motif. Imagining myself in Updike’s shoes, I would have loved to go back into the ms. for a metaphorical do-over.

Surprisingly, with one author, Ayn Rand, it was as though no time had elapsed. I had slogged through one of her epics, Atlas Shrugged, during a teenage summer. Forty years later, I tackled The Fountainhead. In each book, I struggled to find what Rand is allegedly famous for — a “philosophy.” Easier to discern was a mirthless melodrama of arrogant and often repellent characters who tend toward bombastic self-pity.

Both books, and a little research, led me to suspect that Ayn Rand, were she alive today, would be deemed not so much a philosopher as a dogmatic right-wing pundit with a lot of marketable “attitude,” like Charles Krauthammer or Grover Norquist.

Lately, there’s a Rand revival — partly because of new biographies by Jennifer Burns and Anne Heller, but also because of Barack Obama. Whenever a liberal becomes Commander in Chief, the cult of Ayn Rand sees the full moon and erupts to life. Rand lived in mortal fear of do-gooders with guns. She also maintained a searing contempt for those whom liberals might use the power of government to comfort, folks whom Emma Lazarus called “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

There is irony in Rand’s disdain because, a refugee from the Soviet Union, she was once herself a huddled mass. But then, Rand’s life was a carnival of ironies.

One thing that Rand got exactly right was the naming of her cult She called it “objectivism.” With this word, Ayn Rand captured the soul of contemporary U.S. conservatism, whose ideological certitude depends on its capacity to objectify the many sorts of people they’d rather not pretend to care about.

As I was pondering Ayn Rand’s lexical gift to conservatism, I thought of examples of the importance of objectification — or objectivism — in current-day politics.

My “negative,” (subjective) example was Bill Clinton, in Oklahoma City, in April 1995, just after the bombing. Clinton faced a heartsick throng, spoke of “love and caring and courage,” then lingered among the families of victims. He wept openly and conveyed an empathy that moved the nation. No one snickered at Clinton’s tears, or mocked his feelings. Almost everyone trusted that Bill Clinton sincerely “felt the pain” of those bereft families. They trusted because he’s a liberal. Liberals, whom Rand called “second-handers” and “second-raters,” have a record of lending succor and giving actual money to Emma Lazarus’ huddled masses, whom Rand called “parasites.”

On the other hand, consider the tears of John Boehner. Recently, Boehner wept over the future of America’s schoolchildren. He confessed that when he used to visit schools, his hopes for the pupils to achieve “the American dream” so overwhelmed him that he would burst into tears. This is why, said Boehner tearfully, he no longer visits schools.

Speaker of the House Boehner avoids such near occasions of compassion because his Randian duty is to be “objective.” Were he to yield to the empathy that wells up in his tear ducts whenever he visits a school, he might hesitate, for example, to wipe out an urban Head Start center, or to shortchange a school lunch program and impose on hungry kids an even deeper hunger. He might find it shameful to fire teachers by the thousands, expand class sizes to the point where schools become mere warehouses for the ignorant. He might even think twice before reducing the once-preeminent U.S. education system to a lockstep tedium of standardized tests so dumbed-down and generic that the typical American six-year-old would be better off emigrating — before it’s too late — to a higher-performing nation still proud of its public schools, like Poland, Estonia or Macao.

People giggle when John Boehner weeps, because they see the crocodile behind the tan. They mock him, as they never did Bill Clinton, because Boehner’s a conservative. It is the essence of conservatism to be objective (or objectivist), to make choices about the distribution of resources based on a written-down theory of individual autonomy. Ayn Rand wrote it out this way: “The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man’s first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes.”

John Boehner wishes not to weep over milk denied other people’s kids. Devoted ideologically to self-interest, Boehner has no choice but to shun the huddled masses of hungry children for whom “the American dream” is, in his philosophy, a pipe dream. He knows that actual contact with real people weakens his resolve to treat all of them — equally — as objects. “Integrity,” counsels Rand, “is the ability to stand by an idea.”

One helps those who can most help oneself, not those who need the most help. In an ideal world, the “self” transcends all values, even at the cost of millions of “outsourced” jobs, moribund schools, a crumbling infrastructure, Third World health care, and national surrender to a financial system that exalts the greedy and preys on the impoverished.

“Money,” said Ayn Rand, “is the barometer of a society’s virtue.”

Whatever that means.

Maybe this: Rich people, who once built castles to fortify themselves against serfs, ghetto-dwellers and other victims of their greed, now build gated communities. Distance — and a good security staff — is the best defense against empathy. From a safe distance, the rich remain blissfully objective. They encounter no one who might object to the heroine of their ideals — Ayn Rand, who rationalized selfishness into man’s highest virtue. And then she died, with a million followers and hardly a friend in the world.