Ayn Rand

About an apparently important lady of whom I had never previously heard, one Ayn Rand. The patron saint of many important figures of the right in the US, including people like Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan, Mike Pompeo and Donald Trump. Plus a whole raft of big cheese IT entrepreneurs - including, I am sorry to say, the man behind Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales. I had thought better of him.

I started with the review at reference 1, continued with the short, easy read book at reference 2 and am now waiting on Amazon for the TV film of the lady's love life at reference 3.

I learn that Rand was born of comfortably middle class Russian Jewish stock, exempted from the harsh Tsarist laws for same on account of their making uniforms for the Imperial Guards. Her life was turned upside down by the Revolution of 1917, which seem to have resulted in a lifelong hatred of commies and the empowered mob. Left what was then the Soviet Union in 1926 and headed for Hollywood, alternating between California and New York for the rest of her life. Started out writing film scripts, gets involved in politics, writes a lot, including the two best sellers at references 5 and 6. Both including, by the standards of the time, lashings of sex. Also never heard of by me, but apparently the guiding light for millions of white, professional males. Founds a strange faith called Objectivism, complete with inner circle of acolytes, but which collapsed in the wake of the collapse of her bizarre love life in 1968 or so. But devotees of her books continue to swarm in the corridors of US power.

The hero of her first try at a novel - unpublished - is based on a particularly nasty murderer called William Edward Hickman.

The general drift of her subsequent writing seems to be that larger than life, attractive and powerful heroes should grab what they can from the world and to hell with the rest of us. And as for mental defectives, the disabled and so on and so forth. These heroes are in themselves and in what they create what is important and government has no business trying to reign them in. Never mind tax them. A nostalgic wave at the sturdy homesteaders and frontiersmen of old. Plenty of people in the US who rise to that sort of bait.

I don't think she was an alcoholic but she smoked a great deal and she liked Benzedrine, which as a rich person she could no doubt get prescribed by her doctor, rather than have to resort to some pusher in the street. And anyway, as a hero anything was allowed: rules were for little people, losers and other deviants.

Serious reviewers - by which I mean the sort of people who might appear in the NYRB, LRB or TLS - have pretty much all been very rude about both her and her writing. But that was not enough to stop her and we should worry about what able and determined - but unprincipled and greedy - people can get away with.

All in all a rather unpleasant business and depressing that she should have been so successful.

Lisa Duggan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University and a past president of the American Studies Association. According to Bing, she has taught or is teaching an introductory undergraduate course in LGBT history and politics, apparently encountering anew the alternating confusion, resistance and delight of students as they start to take in the full implications of the simple claim that gender and sexuality are historically constructed. The present book carries some of that sort of baggage, but I am glad to have read it nonetheless. A bit of US history - and life today - that had passed me by.

PS: there is a particularly unpleasant bit at the opening of chapter four about hedge fund billionaires reflecting (at a more or less private meeting) on how they would keep the mob out of their compounds and islands when ordinary life broke down for some reason or other. Reflections which apparently included disciplinary collars for their armed guards - presumably after the fashion of 'Battle Royale'. Perhaps some of these billionaires had done the US equivalent of PPE at Oxford and had learned all about 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes'.

Reference 1: The Siren of Selfishness - Cass R. Sunstein - 2020. NYRB, April 9, 2020.

Reference 2: Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the culture of greed - Lisa Duggan - 2019.

Reference 3: The Passion of Ayn Rand - Helen Mirren and others - 1999. A made for TV film.

Reference 4: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand.

Reference 5: The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand - 1943. A best-selling story about an architect. Plus sex and scandal. Later: was this book an echo or a cause of the odd fascination of film makers in the US with architects?

Reference 6: Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand - 1957. A best-selling fantasy about a dystopian US. Very long, padded out with long stretches of philosophical-political codswallop.

Reference 7: https://www.theobjectivestandard.com/what-is-objectivism/. A sample of Objectivism turned up by Bing which is visible today.

Reference 8: https://lisaduggan.org/. Lisa Duggan land.

Reference 9: https://theasa.net/. The American Studies Association.