The Truth About Ayn Rand: UPDATED (Justice? No, They Meant, "Just Us")

<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

<Coda: Objectivists Take PPP Money>

UPDATE (7/08/20): What a difference a pandemic makes, right? Here at Ramen Noodle Nation, we couldn't let the news slip by without a tart observation or two. I'm talking about new revelations of the motley array of Trump donors, family members, friends, and supporters who hoovered up some $273 million of the so-called Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds.

Who are they, exactly? The Ayn Rand Institute: The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism, in Santa Ana, CA, received $1 million, which it will use to keep its 35-strong workforce employed. I'm not sure what's scarier, that such places are hiring, or you can put food on the table by promoting the Rand brand's mantra of arch selfishness.

A quick glance of the Institute's website shows no reference to their windfall, which seems (to paraphrase my late good friend, Lester Bangs) "slightly inconsistent." This, on top of a disapproving tut-tut from Rand herself, coming from a 1962 essay on seventeenth century businessmen, cited in media reports: "“They knew that government ‘help’ to business is just as disastrous as government persecution, and that the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off.”

Hands off? Seems more like the sort of handout that Rand's Objectivist cult rails against so loudly, right? But the Institute feels no shame, having already told the media, "We will take it unapologetically, because the principle here is: justice."

That statement would sound equally hypocritical, but no less smooth, had it rolled off the marbled lips of other Trump-connected recipients, including son-in-law Jared Kushner's businesses ($8 million), NewsMax, run by Trump donor Christopher Ruddy ($5 million), and Mitch McConnell The Mummy's wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, whose own business received $350,000 to $1 million, among many, many others (see links below).

Not to worry, though, because Trump's Christian right allies got plenty of money, too -- like Joyce Meyer Ministries, which received $5 million to $10 million alone, the largest sum that any organization could seek. 

This is the same entity whose finances survived a U.S. Senate investigation into its finances  unscratched. How long that did take in the current Trump enabling climate? Five minutes? Apparently, because Meyer has agreed to join something called the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability. 

You couldn't make up this stuff if you tried.

Presumably, those Council meetings should have plenty of table room for other strange bedfellows, like the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Bernadino, CA, which is implicated in a decades-old sexual abuse scandal, but also received $5 million to $10 million, or First Baptist Church (Dallas, TX), which hosted a rally with Vice President Mike Pence. They got a forgivable loan of $2 million to $5 million. Its pastor, Robert Jeffries, sits on Trump's evangelical advisory board, so draw your own conclusions, right?

Meanwhile, our town's only independent bookstore stood on the verge of closing a couple months ago, because its slowest season is spring -- which, unhappily, coincided with COVID-19's mid-March arrival. Fortunately, the store raised $30,000 through a GoFundMe campaign, fueled by ample word of mouth. The plan to leverage that success for additional funding to secure its future.

Such inconsistencies, of course, don't bother the bad actors I've enumerated above, because they're incapable of empathy for others, and shame is not something they ever allow themselves to feel. Nor does it stop them from wagging their fingers, as they prattle on about the evils of socialism, and intone, "If you don't work, you don't eat."

Judging by the size of their handouts, and the lack of strings attached, I suspect that the "don't work, don't eat" crowd -- like Rand's Objectivist cult -- should be dining out well on the low-hanging fruits of their own hypocrisies for some time to come.

It's the same hypocrisy that allows them to blather endlessly about self-reliance, even as they never stop funneling federal cash for themselves; the same hypocrisy that inspires endless social crusades against "special rights" (read: nonwhites, and/or gays), even as they demand carveout after carveout for their own class, or their business; the same hypocrisy that enables them to feel righteous about "justice," when they really mean..

"Just Us."

It all makes me feel well truly and sick, which is how anyone with an IQ above room temperature should react. If it doesn't, well, maybe you signed up with the wrong resistance. But it also recalls a saying that my dad evoked, in his own denunciations against our local Good Old Boys Club, and I think he had it just about right...

"One crow doesn't peck another."

See you in the funny papers, I guess. But it sure beats the emergency room right now, doesn't it?--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

Yahoo News:
Televangelists, Dallas Megachurch
That Hosted Pence
Approved For Millions In Pandemic Aid:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/televangelists-dallas-megachurch-hosted-pence-031832590.html

Trump Donors
Among Early Recipients of Coronavirus Loans:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-donors-among-early-recipients-041118435.html