The Truth About Ayn Rand

<Blow up, to read more closely: 

that's the size, which I can't do anything about>

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This cartoon sums it up nicely, for me, anyway. For all the far right's rhapsodies about Ayn Rand, you rarely hear about what actually happened to her in later life, when her health began to fail, and she'd been abandoned by many of her so-called allies. She'd reached her peak with Atlas Shrugged (1957), which became an international best-seller, despite many negative reviews -- making neither the first, nor last, author to claim that feat.

My personal favorite is one by Whittaker Chambers, the former Communist defector who fingered Alger Hiss as a Soviet spy: "From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: 'To a gas chamber—go!'" You can practically see his contempt thundering off the page.

For all the debate about the impracticality and immortality of her Objectivist beliefs (see links, Rand did achieve -- unlike many of her critics -- a measure of pop culture success in her lifetime. It's one of the more fascinating (if overlooked) aspects of her career. Those distinctions included a courtroom drama, Night Of January 16th, that became a Broadway hit in 1935-36, undoubtedly aided by its gimmick (every night, a "jury" of the audience voted on one of two endings to perform).

The results prompted a movie adaptation, Ideal (1941), in which Rand didn't participate, and didn't like. Still, that's hardly a shabby outcome for someone who wasn't a household name, and worked for a time at RKO Pictures' costume department. Other achievements included the reprinting of a novella, Anthem, in Famous Fantastic Mysteries' June 1953 issue.

Fittingly, at the time of her death, in 1982, she was working on a TV adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. Barton Fink, she wasn't.

Ayn Rand's first published work, a 2,500-word 

monograph on actress Pola Negri (1925).Pola who?

We'll have to explore that issue another time.

<Public Domain>

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Alas, real life rudely interrupted Rand's unfettered laissez-faire visions. After Atlas Shrugged, Rand turned to nonfiction, publishing several collections of essays that received the same degree of hostility -- such as Gore Vidal, who slammed her efforts in this arena as "nearly perfect in its immorality" -- and far less attention. In 1974, she underwent surgery for lung cancer, following decades of heavy smoking. Two years later, she retired from editing her newsletter, and went on the social programs that she so abhorred: Social Security, and Medicare.

Ironically, the person who convinced Rand to make such a giant leap of faith was someone she already knew: Evva Pryor, an employee of her attorney. As Pryor recalled (see below), whether Rand agreed or not wasn't the issue: "She saw the necessity for both her and (her husband) Frank." Her husband, now struggling with dementia, needed specialized care that would exceed whatever resources she could contribute. She had own health issues to consider, too.

"She had to see that there was such a thing as greed in this world," Pryor stated, in Gary Weiss's book, Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle For America's Soul. "Doctors could cost a lot more money than books earn, and she could be totally wiped out by medical bills if she didn't watch it."

The irony of Objectivism's founder allowing herself a philosophical carve-out needs no more elaboration. For Weiss, Rand's decision is less driven by total hypocrisy, than the response of someone with their back against the wall: "Contradictions, and ideology, fade away when one's own personal interests are at stake. Only the very wealthy, a category that did not include Rand in her golden years, can afford Objectivist ideological purity."

The far right, of course, will claim that Rand got the last laugh. They'll cite her influence on  Reaganomics, for instance, and the growing posthumous interest in her writings, which have sold an estimated 29 million copies worldwide, as of 2013, and impact on pop culture figures like Rush's drummer, Neil Peart. It's not hard to imagine the Trumpist acolytes who are out gleefully celebrating the shoehorning of Brett Kavanaugh -- who, beyond the accusations of sexual predation, has justly earned his stripes as a hard right ideological warrior -- onto the Supreme Court.

True enough, on the surface, and yet...and yet, I doubt any of those notions mattered when Rand swallowed hard, signed those forms, and became a recipient of the government help she so despised. Her colleagues could only look on from afar, it seems, and shrug, having watched their dog-eat-dog beliefs spin out to their final, logical, if unsatisfactory conclusion, as Weiss writes: "Reality had intruded upon her ideological pipedreams." As an epitaph, that works well enough for me. --The Reckoner

Links To Go (Hurry, Hurry,
Before They Tip You Out Of The Lifeboat)
(Cut and paste into your browser, if needed, or just type in the title)

Google Books
Ayn Rand Nation: 
The Hidden Struggle For America's Soul:
https://books.google.com/books?id=oJVLHvEPdrQC&lpg=PP1&dq=Ayn%20Rand%20Nation%3A%20The%20Hidden%20struggle%20for%20America%27s%20Soul.&pg=PT60#v=onepage&q=social%20security&f=false


Open Culture: When Ayn Rand 
Collected Social Security & Medicare,
After Years Of Opposing Government Programs:
http://www.openculture.com/2016/12/when-ayn-rand-collected-social-security-medicare.html