The Weekly Screed (#595)

Paul Ryan: Smarter 
than the average cheerleader
by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Ever since Rep. Paul Ryan emerged from the weeds along the Potomac — to be instantly anointed by an adoring Washington press corps as one of the most intellectually gifted vote-getters in history — my competitive juices have been boiling. Part of this is because Ryan grew up in Janesville, a town whose high schools play football in the same conference as my alma mater in Madison.

I mean, I’m talking Madison here, home of the Nobel Prize-intensive University of Wisconsin, while Janesville is famous for, well… not being Beloit (which has a college). But that’s not the half of it. Ryan’s triumphant march through Craig High School in the mid-1980’s marked a post-Sputnik era of dumbing-down and grade inflation — which affected Madison, too. But this was Janesville, Second City of Rock County. If I’d had Ryan’s course load, I might’ve cracked the Honor Roll before my senior year.

Janesville and the Eighties are hardly the only reasons for America to doubt Ryan’s alleged abstrusity. There’s also the matter of fame. Whenever the gullible media decide that some blowhard is smarter than the average bear, they tend to rely more on style than evidence. When this happens, the first sound you’ll hear is a lot of know-it-alls yelling, “OK, wait a minute!” Those of us who flatter ourselves with the term “intellectual” — or even more obnoxiously, “the intelligentsia” — are among nature’s most viciously competitive mammals, high on the tooth-and claw scale with Olympic sprinters and rutting bighorn rams. CNN might insist it has exposed an unlikely vein of intellect among the denizens of an otherwise Cro Magnon Congress, but we among the thinking classes demand empirical proof — typed, multi-sourced and peer-reviewed. 

OK, wait a minute. Before further deconstructing Paul Ryan’s one-track mind, let’s go back to high school in the Sixties, where I was a teenage smarty-pants — proudly “intellectual” and clueless to the magnitude of my own ignorance. I even wrote free verse. Luckily, I fell into a posse of fellow smartasses who challenged my every nugget of knowledge and slashed with bloodthirsty derision my every cerebral flourish.

For example, at age 15, I “discovered” an author named Drought whose now-forgotten novel, The Secret, was a relentless tone-deaf scream against every perceived injustice that every system had ever inflicted on him. It was a fun read, but something in me sensed that if I shared my fondness for The Secret with Schuster, Keener, Dick, Scott, Gaylord and my other friends, they would pick it — and me — to shreds. My hesitance extended to the godmother of our snotty gang of precocious polymaths, an English teacher named Alice. Her definition of “smart” included terms like “curious,” “reflective,” “skeptical,” “eclectic” and “humble.” Had any of us sworn devotion to a single author or thinker, or to any ideology that claimed a patent on all the answers, the fool would’ve been laughed into Distributive Education, never to be heard from again.

So I kept The Secret secret. In the next year, I read — among others — Orwell, Marcus Aurelius and Catch-22, Thomas Pynchon, Death of a Salesman and Ray Bradbury, I and drifted naturally away from Drought’s raw fury. That was also the year I got around to tackling Ayn Rand’s 900-page oratorio, Atlas Shrugged.

Now, let’s fast-forward two decades, still in high school, but in little Janesville. Paul Ryan, age 16, stumbles upon Atlas Shrugged (possibly being used as a doorstop at the school library). Once he’s begun, he can’t put it down. It confirms everything he has seen of the world from the bay window of his family mansion. Rand becomes wide-eyed Paul’s single-source, all-purpose personal yogi. Twenty years pass, but Rand remains Ryan’s guiding star. Now in Congress, he hands out copies of Atlas to his staff and declares that Ayn Rand is the avatar of capitalist “morality.” He says, “I grew up on Ayn Rand.”

Back to 1965: I slogged through Atlas Shrugged and muttered, “OK, what’s the big deal?” As a mere adolescent, I should’ve been a sucker for Rand’s ”philosophy” of melodrama and epic self-pity. But I was a Secret veteran, which means I’d already envisioned an America even bleaker than Ayn Rand’s dog-eat-dog dystopia. Having grown up on DC Comics, I’d met cartoon heroes and cardboard villains even bigger and bolder than those in Atlas Shrugged. For me, the lady was just too easy. I mean, by then, true to Alice and my jugular peers, I’d been reading hard guys— although not necessarily understanding more than two sentences in a row — like Epictetus, Voltaire, Emerson, C. Wright Mills, Bertrand Russell. So, what’s the big deal? 

An obvious shortage of smartasses at Craig High in ‘87, alas, thrust our hero into Ayn Rand’s smothering embrace. Certainly, Ryan’s sheltered youth encouraged a cool, objective outlook on the rest of us. Born rich in a working-class backwater, the diligent, well-behaved Ryan earned the sort of grades that set him apart from the sleepy mediocrity of Janesville in general. No wonder Ryan identified with Rand’s brilliant iconoclast, John Galt. Ryan came to see himself as a Second Coming of pulp fiction’s uber-est ubermensch — and who was there in all of Rock County to say him nay? And if you’ve been lucky enough by age 16 to find — in one book! — all the answers, why keep asking, reading, cluttering your head with any scripture beyond the gospel of Self?

But, just for fun, let’s imagine Ryan yanked back in time (and 50 miles north) to Madison, where he tries to crack my circle of wits, critics and ego-deflaters at LaFollette High. Suddenly, no ones cares if his family is rich. To get an iota of respect from snobs like me, he has to read up, think fast, suffer a hail of abuse, and defend his faith. In return, he gets not the praise he’s accustomed to, but the worst sort of sarcasm — teenage, know-it-all, cutthroat sarcasm from the bookworm version of Hell’s Angels. Little Ryan, the one-book wonder, finds himself in a Hieronymus Bosch nightmare where he can’t convince a soul above the rank of cheerleader that he’s even “smart.” And then, worst of all, pricked by doubt, he ponders heresy: Maybe Ayn Rand has fewer answers to the mystery of life than — to name a few deeper thinkers — Mike Royko, Spike Jones and Pogo. And poof! In a flash, a mind that once seemed so pure and clear, black and white, becomes a labyrinth.

OK, that was just-pretend. All his life, Paul Ryan has steered wisely clear of Madison; stayed in Janesville, where’s he’s still (after Russ Feingold) the second smartest boy in town. Today, Paul Ryan is America’s valedictorian, with little to fear from the sour-grapes popinjays — like me — whom he long ago left in the dust. We can’t touch him now. Our sole consolation lies ironically in Ayn Rand’s prose, where Howard Roark and John Galt prove too glorious to be loved by an ingrate mob even more narcissist than they are. The hero retreats finally into a bitter exile, seething with self-pity and shaking a fist at the scum of the earth who, even for their own sake, will not bow to his transcendence.

Paul Ryan would call the fate of Rand’s hero a tragic injustice. Marcus Aurelius would see the tragedy, too. But he would smile and call it hubris.