[USML Announce] Slate Article: How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon

Mon Nov 2 17:46:32 EST 2009

Brad Lee has sent you an article from Slate Magazine
<http://www.slate.com> .

Enough Packers trash talk. Let's chat up Ayn Rand one more time.

 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH020B9669EDE063B3630DEEC1A0> 

books
 <http://letters.slate.com/W0RH0208EC89FCFB9593E30D20DEA0> 

How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon
The perverse allure of a damaged woman.
By Johann Hari
Posted Monday, Nov. 2, 2009, at 7:01 AM ET

Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an
amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her
spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the
Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the
grounds that "the masses"?her readers?were "lice" and "parasites" who
scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular
writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from
beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans
say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her
writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a
prophetess. With her assertions that government is "evil" and
selfishness is "the only virtue," she is the patron saint of the
tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little
Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon? 

Two new biographies of Rand?Goddess of the Market
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195324870?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin
kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0195324870>  by
Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385513992?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin
kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0385513992>  by Anne
Heller?try to puzzle out this question, showing how her arguments found
an echo in the darkest corners of American political life.* But the
books work best, for me, on a level I didn't expect. They are thrilling
psychological portraits of a horribly damaged woman who deserves the one
thing she spent her life raging against: compassion.

Alisa Rosenbaum (her original name) was born in the icy winter of
czarism, not long after the failed 1905 revolution ripped through her
home city of St. Petersburg. Her father was a self-made Jewish
pharmacist, while her mother was an aristocratic dilettante who loathed
her three daughters. She would tell them she never wanted children, and
she kept them only out of duty. Alisa became a surly, friendless child.
In elementary school, her class was asked to write an essay about why
being a child was a joyous thing. She instead wrote "a scathing
denunciation of childhood," headed with a quote from Pascal: "I would
prefer an intelligent hell to a stupid paradise."

But the Rosenbaums' domestic tensions were dwarfed by the conflicts
raging outside. The worst anti-Jewish violence since the Middle Ages was
brewing, and the family was terrified of being killed by the mobs?but it
was the Bolsheviks who struck at them first. After the 1917 revolutions,
her father's pharmacy was seized "in the name of the people." For Alisa,
who had grown up surrounded by servants and nannies, the Communists
seemed at last to be the face of the masses, a terrifying robbing horde.
In a country where 5 million people died of starvation in just two
years, the Rosenbaums went hungry. Her father tried to set up another
business, but after it too was seized, he declared himself to be "on
strike."

The Rosenbaums knew their angry, outspoken daughter would not survive
under the Bolsheviks for long, so they arranged to smuggle her out to
their relatives in America. Just before her 21st birthday, she said
goodbye to her country and her family for the last time. She was
determined to live in the America she had seen in the silent movies?the
America of skyscrapers and riches and freedom. She renamed herself Ayn
Rand, a name she thought had the hardness and purity of a Hollywood
starlet.

She headed for Hollywood, where she set out to write stories that
expressed her philosophy?a body of thought she said was the polar
opposite of communism. She announced that the world was divided between
a small minority of Supermen who are productive and "the naked, twisted,
mindless figure of the human Incompetent" who, like the Leninists, try
to feed off them. He is "mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned."
It is evil to show kindness to these "lice": The "only virtue" is
"selfishness."

She meant it. Her diaries from that time, while she worked as a
receptionist and an extra, lay out the Nietzschean mentality that
underpins all her later writings. The newspapers were filled for months
with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a
12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped
her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in
pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he
represented "the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for
all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A
man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. ? Other people do
not exist for him, and he does not see why they should." She called him
"a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy," shimmering with "immense,
explicit egotism." Rand had only one regret: "A strong man can
eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not
strong enough."

It's not hard to see this as a kind of political post-traumatic stress
disorder. Rand believed the Bolshevik lie that they represented the
people, so she wanted to strike back at them?through theft and murder.
In a nasty irony, she was copying their tactics. She started to write
her first novel, We the Living
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0451226852?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin
kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0451226852>  (1936),
and in the early drafts her central character?a crude proxy for Rand
herself?says to a Bolshevik: "I loathe your ideals. I admire your
methods. If one believes one's right, one shouldn't wait to convince
millions of fools, one might just as well force them."

She poured these beliefs into a series of deeply odd novels. She takes
the flabby staples of romantic fiction and peppers them with political
ravings and rapes for the audience to cheer on. All have the same core
message: Anything that pleases the Superman's ego is good; anything that
blocks it is bad. In The Fountainhead
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452286751?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin
kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452286751> , published
in 1943, a heroic architect called Howard Roark designs a housing
project for the poor?not out of compassion but because he wants to build
something mighty. When his plans are slightly altered, he blows up the
housing project, saying the purity of his vision has been contaminated
by evil government bureaucrats. He orders the jury to acquit him,
saying: "The only good which men can do to one another and the only
statement of their proper relationship is?Hands off!" 

For her longest novel, Atlas Shrugged
<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452011876?ie=UTF8&tag=slatmaga-20&lin
kCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0452011876>  (1957),
Rand returned to a moment from her childhood. Just as her father once
went on strike to protest against Bolshevism, she imagined the
super-rich in America going on strike against progressive taxation?and
said the United States would swiftly regress to an apocalyptic hellhole
if the Donald Trumps and Ted Turners ceased their toil. The abandoned
masses are described variously as "savages," "refuse," "inanimate
objects," and "imitations of living beings," picking through rubbish.
One of the strikers deliberately causes a train crash, and Rand makes it
clear she thinks the murder victims deserved it, describing in horror
how they all supported the higher taxes that made the attack necessary. 

Her heroes are a cocktail of extreme self-love and extreme self-pity:
They insist they need no one, yet they spend all their time fuming that
the masses don't bow down before their manifest superiority. 

As her books became mega-sellers, Rand surrounded herself with a tightly
policed cult of young people who believed she had found the One
Objective Truth about the world. They were required to memorize her
novels and slapped down as "imbecilic" and "anti-life" by Rand if they
asked questions. One student said: "There was a right kind of music, a
right kind of art, a right kind of interior design, a right kind of
dancing. There were wrong books which we should not buy."

Rand had become addicted to amphetamines while writing The Fountainhead,
and her natural paranoia and aggression were becoming more extreme as
they pumped though her veins. Anybody in her circle who disagreed with
her was subjected to a show trial in front of the whole group in which
they would be required to repent or face expulsion. Her secretary,
Barbara Weiss, said: "I came to look on her as a killer of people." The
workings of her cult exposed the hollowness of Rand's claims to venerate
free thinking and individualism. Her message was, think freely, as long
as it leads you into total agreement with me.

In the end, Rand was destroyed by her own dogmas. She fell in love with
a young follower called Nathaniel Branden and had a decades-long affair
with him. He became the cult's No. 2, and she named him as her
"intellectual heir"?until he admitted he had fallen in love with a
23-year-old woman. As Burns explains, Rand's philosophy "taught that sex
was never physical; it was always inspired by a deeper recognition of
shared values, a sense that the other embodied the highest human
achievement." So to be sexually rejected by Branden meant he was
rejecting her ideas, her philosophy, her entire person. She screamed:
"You have rejected me? You have dared to reject me? Me, your highest
value?"

She never really recovered. We all become weak at some point in our
lives, so a thinker who despises weakness will end up despising herself.
In her 70s Rand found herself dying of lung cancer, after insisting that
her followers smoke because it symbolized "man's victory over fire" and
the studies showing it caused lung cancer were Communist propaganda. By
then she had driven almost everyone away. In 1982, she died alone in her
apartment with only a hired nurse at her side. If her philosophy is
right?if the only human relationships worth having are based on the
exchange of dollars?this was a happy and victorious death. Did even she
believe it in the end?

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their
bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite,
when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a
small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must
seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The
only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on
were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel
sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my
face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people?large
numbers of people?who see her writing not as psychopathy but as
philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did
she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough,
readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great
question about her. 

Rand expresses, with a certain pithy crudeness, an instinct that courses
through us all sometimes: I'm the only one who matters! I'm not going to
care about any of you any more! She then absolutizes it in an
amphetamine Benzedrine-charged reductio ad absurdum by insisting it is
the only feeling worth entertaining, ever. 

This urge exists everywhere, but why is it supercharged on the American
right, where Rand is regarded as something more than a bad, bizarre
joke? In a country where almost everyone believes?wrongly, on the
whole?that they are self-made, perhaps it is easier to have contempt for
people who didn't make much of themselves. And Rand taps into something
deeper still. The founding myth of America is that the nation was built
out of nothing, using only reason and willpower. Rand applies this myth
to the individual American: You made yourself. You need nobody and
nothing except your reason to rise and dominate. You can be America, in
one body, in one mind.

She said the United States should be a "democracy of superiors only,"
with superiority defined by being rich. Well, we got it. As the health
care crisis has shown, today, the rich have the real power: The vote
that matters is expressed with a checkbook and a lobbyist. We get to
vote only for the candidates they have pre-funded and receive the
legislation they have preapproved. It's useful?if daunting?to know that
there is a substantial slice of the American public who believe this is
not a problem to be put right, but morally admirable. 

We all live every day with the victory of this fifth-rate Nietzsche of
the mini-malls. Alan Greenspan was one of her strongest cult followers
and even invited her to the Oval Office to witness his swearing-in when
he joined the Ford administration. You can see how he carried this
philosophy into the 1990s: Why should the Supermen of Wall Street be
regulated to protected the lice of Main Street? 

The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard,
another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up
a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a
rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by
drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's
major political parties.

Correction, Nov. 2, 2009: This article misidentified the author of
Goddess of the Market as Gordon Burns. (Return to the corrected
paragraph.)

Johann Hari is a Slate contributing writer and a columnist
<http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/>  for
the Independent in London. He was recently named newspaper journalist of
the year by Amnesty International.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2233966/

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