Atlas Shrugged: Part One: Chapter Seven: The Exploiter and the Exploited

Someone read Anthem and loved it.

Eddie Valiant: So that’s why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don’t get it.
Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food. Tire salons, automobile dealerships and wonderful, wonderful billboards reaching as far as the eye can see. My God, it’ll be beautiful.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

Chapter VII: The Exploiter and the Exploited

Pages: 162 – 216

Summary: Back out West, Dagny has to deal with more business things.  Working with Rearden Metal gives Dagny no end to her troubles, since Summit Casting of Illinois has gone bankrupt.  It was the only company willing to work with the allegedly controversial metal.  Finding supervisors to work with the metal proves another stumbling block.  But she will find a way.  Oh, yes she will.  Nobody puts Dagny in a corner.

In Colorado, she meets Hank again and they have another business meeting.  Since Dagny has been having trouble building her bridge with Rearden Metal, Hank agrees to build the entire bridge out of the metal.  Not only would the bridge be stronger, it would also be less expensive.  Then he gives her a ride on his private plane to New York, since Dagny has to attend a business meeting with the perpetual screw-up James, her brother.

James Taggart

Dagny and James argue on their way to the New York Business Council meeting.  James tells her how public opinion is against the use of Rearden Metal because it might pose a threat to public safety.  Then he tells her how she’s going to debate Bertram Scudder, the topic: Is Rearden Metal a lethal product of greed?  Dagny, indignant, walks out on James.

She ends up in an automat and has a philosophical discussion with a bum.  Meanwhile Hank has a heated discussion with Dr. Potter from the State Science Institute.  He argues that the economy, since it is in a delicate state of equilibrium, would not be able to withstand the introduction of Rearden Metal.  Since Hank’s innovation would cause competing steel companies to lose business and by extension feel bad about themselves, it would be a bad thing.  (Ironically, in reality, businesses said the same thing when the State had the gall to mandate against the use of child labor.)

Dagny then heads to New Hampshire to meet Dr. Robert Sadler.  Dr. Sadler and Dagny argue, much like Hank and Potter, with Sadler unable to give a definite opinion on the goodness of Rearden Metal.  Dr. Sadler is a scientific genius who wrote a treatise on cosmic rays when he was twenty-seven.  He said to a student: “Free scientific inquiry?  The first adjective is redundant.”  He also said men are greedy, vicious dollar-chasers, but Dagny tells him she is a greedy dollar-chaser.

If you consider Atlas Shrugged a philosophical novel, I bet you believe in unicorns too.

During this conversation, Dr. Sadler tells Dagny he had three brilliant students when he was professor at Patrick Henry University: Fransisco d’Anconia, Ragnar Danneskjöld and a “third one” who achieved no distinction.  (Gee, I wonder who that could be?  Maybe the anonymous guy Eddie Willers keeps talking to in the Taggart corporate cafeteria?)

So much for foreshadowing.

Dagny Taggart, sick of the run-around with Taggart Transcontinental, decides to resign, leaving Eddie as Acting Vice-President, to start her own railroad line.  She decides to name it the John Galt Line.  Instead of despair, the line will symbolize hope.

Meanwhile Hank argued with his mother about giving his no-account screw-up brother a job.  Hank thinks it would be a fraud while his mother wants Philip to have a job so he can feel better about himself.  (Reminds me of the movie Tommy Boy.)

Philip Rearden: brother, looter, jackass.

Hank Rearden then has a conversation with Mr. Ward of Ward Harvester Company of Colorado.  During the conversation, his secretary, the calm Gwen Ives, tells them that the Equalization of Opportunity bill passed.  (What next?  Death panels to kill grandma?  The government providing up-armored Humvees for soldiers?  The gall of these assholes!)

Historical Note: Brown vs. Board of Education legalized integration in 1954.  Atlas Shrugged came out in 1957.  The Brown case wanted to equalize opportunity for students regardless of skin color.

Observations: In the previous post, Matt mentioned that Ayn Rand was like Thomas Pynchon in her ridiculous character names.  Pynchon’s fiction is concerned with entropy and randomness (among many other things), yet in Atlas Shrugged we get a world where economic entropy has become the norm.  Money has stopped moving, at least from consumer to producer, and this has spilled over into the consciousness of man, creating an apathetic creature unwilling to work.  It should be noted that the Great Depression was both an era of economic devastation and a psychological experience.  Many people had no jobs and no food along with a feeling of depression and despair.

Encouraging laziness among the looter class or saving capitalism from itself.

But Atlas Shrugged is not reality.  Far from it.  While Rand wrote about creating a novel that focuses on idealized versions of mankind (the industrial awesomeness of Hank Rearden, the railroad genius of Dagny Taggart, etc.), the novel is not so much about philosophical ideals as much as a modern fable.  The problem is: fables tend to be a little shorter than 1100 pages.  The characters in fables are also more subtly drawn.  Characters in fables tend to have at least two-dimensions.  Rand gives us straw men and caricatures and less-than-one dimensional heroes.  While Atlas Shrugged can be read as a takedown of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (another epic), it comes across as a poorly executed and highly overwrought screed.  The arguments lose their power due to the shrillness.  When the demands of an extended philosophical critique and a fable collide, it comes across as, ironically, a train wreck.

Math problem: Patch Adams minus jokes equals Atlas Shrugged.

Another telling feature is how the state-sponsored institutions and the legislature sound like a caricature of today’s Corporate America.  Rand waxes rhapsodic about how innovation, invention, and daring create better, cheaper products for consumers.  General Motors and other American car companies have created their own anti-dog-eat-dog mentality, crushing innovations as far back as Tucker’s safety features and the electric car.  With our crumbling infrastructure, inefficient motor vehicles, and government-corporate collusion, rail may be a means of liberation.  Unfortunately, in the real world, creating a decent rail system will take a creative partnership between private corporations, the government, and labor.

How big corporations kill innovation and then use those same innovations decades later.

Another solution to our oil addiction and poor foreign policy decisions is the adoption of the electric car as a regular mode of transport.  One of the more fascinating companies producing electric cars is Aptera.  Personally, I would love to see the roads filled with Apteras, Priuses, and Teslas.  Too bad Big Oil’s strangehold on Big Government – remember all those Ayn Rand-lovin’ pro-business conservatives defending British Petroleum? – will prevent electric cars from becoming a common reality.  At least for now.

Fuel cost: $1.  Car cost: $25 – 30K.  Ending our foreign oil addiction: Priceless.

Quotes from Scripture™:

• “Down the track, she could see men working, their arms stiff with the tension of their muscles as they gripped the handles of electric tie tampers.”
• “Do you know that the stuff [Rearden Metal] won’t melt under less than four thousand degrees?”  (Steel melts at 2500°F.  Apparently, plasma cutters weren’t included in the operating budget, since they weren’t invented yet.)
• “She saw the disjointed notations he had made, a great many figures, a few rough sketches.”  (A good capsule review of this attempt at narrative.)

• “Damn these streets!”  James Taggart.
• “You are using ugly, unnecessary words, Mr. Rearden.”  State Science Institute man to hero Hank Rearden.  He’s also describing Ayn Rand’s writing “style.”
• This classic exchange:

“They are greedy, self-indulgent, predatory dollar-chasers who –”
“I am one of the dollar-chasers, Dr. Sadler.”

(When does Sauron show up?  Seriously, the last black-and-white, good-vs.-evil battle I read that was this earnest at least had some orcs thrown in.)

Ayn Rand’s capitalism is sort of like this.

• “To reduce you [Dagny] to a body, to teach you an animal’s pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need.”  Hank Rearden thinking to himself.  (Ewwww …)

Marty DiBergi: “This tasteless cover is a good indication of the lack of musical invention within.  The musical growth of this band cannot even be charted.  They are treading water in a sea of retarded sexuality and bad poetry.”
Nigel Tufnel: That’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?

Atlas Shrugged: Part One: Chapter Six: The Non-Commercial

Chapter VI: The Non-Commercial

Poor, henpecked Hank Rearden is being forced to attend his own wedding anniversary party by his awful wife, even though he’s got a bunch of metallic problems to deal with and a recently proposed “Equalization of Opportunity” bill, which would ban any person from owning more than one business, to worry about.  But Hank is so devoted to pretending to give a toss about his wife and her pathetic life that he slaps on a tuxedo and a grimace and goes out to glad hand with her friends.  And of course, these people are a singularly vile bunch of pompous, life-hating weasels, all of them dripping with scorn for Hank’s business prowess and the very notion of success, achievement or basic human decency.  These characters, like the “philosopher” Dr. Pritchett, the literary mountebank Balph (seriously?) Eubank, and the anti-corporate muckracker Bertram Scudder, are walking mouthpieces for every modern philosophical and literary idea that Rand hates.  Well, they’re mouthpieces for a comically distorted versions of said ideas, anyway.   After running this gauntlet of looters, Hank finally meets Francisco d’Aconia, whom he despises for his playboy fecklessness.  Francisco offers some cryptic evidence that his image may be hiding something deeper. He also seems to be assessing Hank’s character and worldview.  Dagny is also at the party, hoping to spend a little quality time bantering with her crush, but Hank is having none of it.  Mrs. Rearden makes a big show of denigrating the Rearden Metal chain Hank has made for her and claims that she would gladly sell it if anyone on earth would want to buy it.  This gets under Dagny’s skin and she trades her diamond bracelet for the Rearden Metal one.  Hank is not pleased.

After the party, Hank spends a few awkward moments in his wife’s bedroom (they sleep in separate rooms) and reflects on his horrible marriage.  He doesn’t know why she married him, given her clear hatred for him, but he does know why he married her: his base, animal need for sex.  Hank has some hang-ups in the bedroom, it seems, and feels like a slave to immoral pleasures of the flesh.  At the same time, “(h)is hatred of his own desire had made him accept the doctrine that women were pure and that a pure woman was one incapable of physical pleasure.”  Yikes.

Observations:

Chapter Six is basically just a bonfire of straw men.  There’s a bit of plot advancement, what with the introduction of this ominous “Equalization of Opportunity” bill as well as some information about the dread pirate Ragnar Danneskjold, who has been terrorizing the People’s States of Europe.

Ragnar the Pirate, Scourge of the Looters

The main purpose, though, is to give voice and body to all the evil, corrupt intellectual and literary ideologies that have paved the road to serfdom.  As usual, Rand stacks the deck by putting the words of her enemies in the mouth of a collection of lumpy, preening jerkwads, foremost among them the absurdly named Balph Eubank.  At the Rearden’s anniversary party, Eubank endorses the idea of a literary equivalent of the proposed “Equalization of Opportunity” bill, by which authors would be banned from selling more than ten thousand copies of a given book.  He also thinks that the only thing to live for is ‘brother-love.’  It’s difficult to take this chapter seriously as a critique of post-modernism since Rand’s contempt shapes her characterization of these views.  Rand’s Manichean worldview prevents her from even trying to credit her opponents with good faith.  These villains deny the reality of “morality,” but at the same time demand the expropriation of the rich for the good of the poor.  Using what rationale?  None is offered, because Rand doesn’t think such views deserve the kind of scrutiny that would put such views in a meaningful context.  But for the record, we should definitely NOT limit the number of books an author could sell.  Although John Grisham should probably give it a rest already.

From the Devil’s Own Mouth:

“The literature of the past was a shallow fraud.  It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served.  Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being–all that stuff is laughable to us.” –Balph Eubank.  Okay, SOME of that stuff was probably considered passe by the literary lights of the post-war era, but “morality” and a term as nebulous and loaded as “achievement?” Only if your name is Balph.

“Hunger won’t wait.  Ideas are just hot air.  An empty belly is a solid fact.  I’ve said in all my speeches that it’s not necessary to talk too much.  Society is suffering from lack of business opportunities at the moment, so we’ve got the right to seize such opportunities as exist.  Right is what’s good for society.”  –Claude Slagenhop, president of Friends for Global Progress.

Slagenhop? Balph?  This raises a question: who wins in the ridiculous-character-name-off, Rand or Thomas Pynchon?

“Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature.” –Balph Eubank

“Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy.” –Dr. Pritchett

“Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music.” — Mort Liddy

Lines like these don’t serve to establish an opposing ethos, they just tell the reader what constitutes a virtue in the Rand-iverse.  These moral and intellectual charlatans hate plot, logic and melody; you know what side Rand (and Objective reality) is on.

Atlas Summer: Ayn Rand, WTF?

Balph?  Are you kidding me?

“But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?” asked Mort Liddy.  “That’s a new one on me.”

“My name is Balph,” said Eubank.  “And it’s a new one on you because it’s my own idea.”

Atlas Shrugged, page 133.

Prof. Balph Eubank, looter idiot.

When I read that name, coupled with the cheeseball dialogue, I felt like Luke Skywalker in this Robot Chicken clip.  (Sorry, I couldn’t find the original animated clip, but here’s a clip with the dialogue.)

Ayn, if you’re not going to take this novel writing thing seriously, I’m out.

Atlas Shrugged: Part One: Chapter Five: The Climax of the d’Anconias

Predictable liberal outrage.

Lisa: They can’t seriously expect us to swallow that tripe.
Skinner: Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe. (Class cheers and runs to table loaded with tripe)
Lisa: Stop it, Stop IT! Don’t you realize you’ve just been brainwashed by corporate propaganda?
Janie: Hmmph, apparently my crazy friend here hasn’t heard of the food chain.
Uter: Yeah, Lisa’s a grade A moron!
Ralph: When I grow up, I’m going to go to Bovine University.

“Lisa the Vegetarian,” The Simpsons

Chapter V: The Climax of the d’Anconias

Pages 89 – 126

Summary: The plot thickens!  The beautiful genius Dagny Taggart is reading the newspaper one night while listening to the genius composer Richard Halley.  (Like the comet.  Get it?)  She comes upon an article about Francisco d’Anconia and nearly has a brain aneurysm.

The majority of the chapter is a flashback about Dagny and Francisco growing up.  The pair of heirs even has cute nicknames they call each other.  It also humanizes the idealized achieving duo.  Francisco calls her “Slug” (“In case you don’t know it, ‘Slug’ means a great fire in a locomotive firebox.”) and Dagny calls him “Frisco.”

Francisco d’Anconia before he became a worthless playboy.

Francisco is a scion from a powerful Spanish family.  His ancestor, Sebastián d’Anconia, left Spain when it was “the most powerful country on earth and his was one of the proudest figures.”  (Let’s give Rand the benefit of the doubt and say sometime in the 17^th century during the reign of King Philip II or thereabouts.)  Sebastián fled Spain after disagreeing with a member of the Inquisition and throwing a wine goblet at his face.

Sebastian got away because they gave him three … no, four!  four!  Four last chances.

Since this is a Rand novel, Sebastián is a self-made man, bootstrapping his way to wealth with superhuman vigor.  He did have help from army deserters, “escaped convicts, and starving Indians.”

We also follow the growth of Francisco in a similarly meteoric fashion.  He is exceptionally talented, speaks five languages, and has an aptitude with technology reminiscent of Jarod from the Pretender.  When perpetual screw-up James Taggart receives a motorboat for his birthday, he can barely pilot the thing.  Then Frisco jumps in, no experience whatsoever, and pilots it like a pro.

Reading Atlas Shrugged is almost as fun as playing this game.

The chapter has Dagny falling for Francisco.  Their relationship includes pre-marital sex, because Objectivists cannot be bothered with such trifling conventions like marriage.  The sex itself is troubling.  I’ll explain in the Observations.

Dagny’s life is also profiled, from her awkward debut in high society.  She also works hard as an engineering student and a worker at Taggart Transcontinental.

“That winter she stripped her life down to a bright simplicity of a geometrical drawing: a few straight lines – to and from engineering college in the city by day, to and from her job at Rockdale Station each night – and the closed circle of her room, a room littered with diagrams of motors, blueprints of steel structures, and railroad timetables.”

Dagny is a little Stakhanov, industrious and ruthless in her desire to rise to the top.  Meanwhile, Francisco attends Patrick Henry University.  Randian subtlety strikes again.  “Give me liberty or give me –” Oh you know the rest.

Alexey Stakhanov (1905 – 1977): Soviet exemplar to inspire the workers to increase their productivity.

The chapter ends with Dagny meeting Francisco at the Wayne-Falkland Hotel.  It turns out he made a business deal that lost money and is living like a playboy.  The People’s State of Mexico seized his San Sebastián Mines, having detrimental economic repercussions for other businesses.

Observations: Rand’s ideological shortcutting continues in her biography of Sebastián d’Anconia.  He used deserters, convicts, and Indians, but not slaves, despite the monumental evidence to the contrary.  The slavery, brutality, and forced conversion cannot be easily dismissed, including the obvious fact that Spanish colonialism was a government-run operation.  Only the English and Dutch colonial systems created purely corporate structures (Dutch East India Company, Hudson Bay Company, etc.), albeit ones that slowly devolved into political entities.  The Spanish colonial agenda operated under the twin agendas of finding gold and creating converts.

To write Objectivist history, just whitewash out the unpleasant parts that contradict your economic dogma.  Stalin used it to make the Commissar disappear.

The Russian name for steel is “Stalin.”  Like Hank Rearden, he cared more about his work than his family.

Sebastián’s anti-Catholicism would not go far in the Spanish Empire.  He would probably end up burnt at the stake after some serious torture.  Rand’s anti-Catholic hero dovetails into her atheism.  It is a daring move for a book written in 1957, since the Eisenhower administration added “Under God” to the Pledge (1954) and “In God We Trust” on the currency (1956).  The pro-atheist message and the pre-marital sex makes this book very unconservative, at least since conservatism has degenerated into a theocratic capitalism.  However, in its essence, Objectivism is not conservatism, since conservatism values tradition and associates morality with organized religion.  Rand detests tradition and religion as much as any Stalinist cadre.  Instead of singing about tractors, she’s writing odes to railroads.

“Oh Lord, why won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? / My friends all drive Porsches I must make amends.”

The sex in this chapter is troubling.  It is not a rape, but comes close.  Dagny offers herself up to Francisco in an act of submission that seems radically out of character.  The scene is reminiscent of a rape fantasy scenario, but not worded as such, making the scene uncomfortable.  It is less a carnal union than a protracted power play (and one of the main vectors of rape is power).  The entire episode came across as highly un-erotic as opposed to a tennis scene that came close to rendering Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia in prose.

The physicality of the protagonists, mirroring the flabby immorality of the villains, represents the continuation of a trend allying body types with morality.  Any guesses who I’m talking about?

An example of German anti-communist art from the 1930s.

Bon Mots:

• “Francisco, what’s the most depraved type of human being?”  “The man without a purpose.”  (I wonder if Rick Warren is an Ayn Rand fan?)
• “She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth.”
• “He seized her, she felt her lips in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it.”  (I guess cuddling and foreplay is for looters.)

Who says Objectivists can’t rock?

Typical looter mindset.  Get a job, hippy!

• “She lay still – as the motionless, then the quivering object of an act which he did simply, unhesitatingly, as of right, the right of the unendurable pleasure it gave them.”  (Most awkward erotic line ever written.)
• “These were the times when she learned to feel a sense of beauty – by looking up at old wooden rafters or at the steel plate of an air-conditioning machine that whirred tensely, rhythmically above their heads.”  (“Beige.  I’ll paint the ceiling beige.”)

Atlas Summer: Atlas Shrugged: Part One: Chapters 3 & 4

Chapter III: The Top and the Bottom

Summary:

Having introduced her readers to her bold and brilliant protagonists, Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden, Rand opens Chapter Three with an intimate look at some of the many, many spineless weasels who make up her menagerie of mediocrity.  In an ominously darkened rooftop barroom somewhere in Manhattan, Jim Taggart, Dagny’s idiot brother and the President of Taggart Transcontinental, Orren Boyle, idiot owner of Associated Steel, and assorted sniveling minions sit around a table and attempt to undermine their more successful but less politically connected competitors.  Jim wants to derail the Phoenix-Durango through collusion with his fellow railroad magnates. Orren wants to put the kibosh on Rearden Metal before it renders steel obsolete.  And all of this Machiavellian maneuvering is couched in the language of “progressive policies” and “social responsibilities.”   This scene raises the question of whether Rand is setting out to critique the very idea of altruism or if she’s suggesting that altruism doesn’t exist except as a justification for selfishness and tyranny.  I’m guessing both…

From here, Rand pulls back to offer a capsule history of the life of Dagny Taggart, engineering genius, and her dullard brother, put in control of the railroad thanks to mindless adherence to tradition and sexism.  One sign of Jim’s incompetent management of Taggart Transcontinental is his insistence on building a money-losing line into Mexico, where copper mining supremo/playboy Francisco d”Aconia has built the San Sebastian mine.  Dagny is convinced that the (communist?) government of the “People’s State of Mexico” will end up nationalizing the mine and the railroad that services it.  During his meeting with Boyle, Jim learned that Dagny had been using ancient wood-burning engines and decrepit rolling stock on the San Sebastian and he confronts Dagny about it.  The conversation is pretty much identical to the first conversation between the two: Jim sputters and whines, Dagny coolly insists on her demands, and in the end, Jim gives up and whines some more.  I suspect that this will be a recurring motif.

After dealing with Jim’s spastic colon, Dagny walks across the Taggart Transcontinental terminal floor, pausing to genuflect before a statue of her grandfather, Nathaniel Taggart, founder of the railroad.  It seems Taggart was the original self-made man, a “penniless adventurer” who built a continent-spanning railroad with his own two hands, having “never sought any loans, bonds, subsidies, land grants or legislative favors from the government.” He also, according to family legend, killed a corrupt legislator.  I’m thinking if Rand had lived long enough to see There Will Be Blood, she would have swooned over Daniel Plainview.

Daniel Plainview: couldn’t hold Nathaniel Taggart’s jock strap.

The chapter ends back with sad, love-lorn Eddie Willers, eating in the Taggart Transcontinental cafeteria with an unnamed and silent co-worker. The subjects: the importance of renovating the Rio Norte line…and how amazingly awesome Dagny Taggart is.  Poor, poor Eddie. He might as well be writing her name on his Trapper Keeper.

Observations:

Atlas Shrugged has barely begun and we’re already beginning to see Rand begin the process of dividing humanity into two discreet blocs: the extraordinary, brilliant, diamond-hard genius creators and the fleshy mass of jealous, mush brained sluggards.  It’s not hard to figure out which is which.  Greatness seems to be genetic in Rand’s characters.  Nat Taggart’s will and tenacity are reflected in Dagny, as are his physical attributes.  All the “good” people in this book are sketched in sharp lines.  The villains are more squishy, hunched and small.

Rand’s description of the rise of Nat Taggart is an early indicator that Atlas Shrugged is content to make it’s ideological case with as many dramatic shortcuts as possible.  Yes, Nat Taggart built his railroad without any federal land grants or subsidies.  Meanwhile, in the actual United States, the 19th Century railroad companies were the first large-scale recipients of corporate welfare: pretty much all the land west of the Mississippi was either Indian or Federal land, and this nation’s rail worthies made their fortunes thanks to massive land give-aways by the government.  I don’t care how bad-ass Nat Taggart was, he wasn’t going to defeat competing railroad companies that were grabbing free Federal land as far as the eye could see.

Quotes:

“Orren Boyle made a noise, swallowing his liquor.  He was a large man with big, virile gestures; everything about his person was loudly full of life, except the small black slits of his eyes.”

“Dagny’s rise among the men who operated Taggart Transcontinental was swift and uncontested.  She took positions of responsibility because there was no one else to take them.  There were a few rare men of talent around her, but they were becoming rarer every year.”  (Foreshadowing!)

“Dagny regretted at times that Nat Taggart was her ancestor.  What she felt for him did not belong in the category of unchosen family affections.  She did not want her feeling to be the thing one was supposed to owe an uncle or grandfather.  She was incapable of love for any object not of her own choice and she resented anyone’s demand for it.  But had it been possible to choose an ancestor, she would have chosen Nat Taggart, in voluntary homage and with all of her gratitude.”  There are like, fifty more sentences in that paragraph than necessary.  No wonder this thing’s 1300 pages long.

Chapter IV: The Immovable Movers

Chapter Four begins with another thick slab of meatloaf-rich metaphor, with Dagny surveying the shop floor of the United Locomotive Works.  “On her way through the plant, she had seen an enormous piece of machinery left abandoned in a corner of the yard.  It had been a precision machine tool once, long ago, of a kind that could not be bought anywhere now.  It had not been worn out; it had been rotted by neglect, eaten by rust and the black drippings of a dirty oil.”  JUST LIKE AMERICA!

Anyway, Eddie wets his pants while telling Dagny that her chief contractor for rebuilding the Rio Norte line has suddenly closed up shop.  This leads to a long, thoughtful walk through the darkened streets of New York, as Dagny makes her way to her apartment, where she listens to some Richard Halley concertos, while thinking about the musician’s life.  He struggled through years of failure and scorn from the musical powers-that-be before unveiling a massively successful opera.  He retreated from public life and stopped publishing music the day after it opened.

Jim Taggart is having an awkward, dumb conversation with his mistress when he gets a call that, just as Dagny predicted, the Mexican commies have nationalized the San Sebastian mines AND the San Sebastian railroad.  Thanks to Dagny’s foresight, the loses are minimal, leading Jim to take credit for his sister’s actions in front of the Taggart Transcontinental board of directors.  What a jerk!

They’re coming for your railroad…and your carne asada.

The National Alliance of Railroads (whatever that is) pass something called the “Anti-dog-eat-dog Rule” which bans newer railroads from competing in districts already serviced by long-time providers. This means that Dan Conway’s Phoenix-Durango line has to go out of business in six months, leaving the newly-discovered oil fields of Colorado all to Taggart Transcontinental.  Dagny, outraged, goes to see Dan Conway and tells him to fight the rule. Conway, dazed and disenchanted, declines to act.

With the efficient Phoenix-Durango soon to go out of business, Colorado oil genius Ellis Wyatt goes to see Dagny.  The success of Wyatt Oil now depends on the rapid renovation of the Rio Norte line, and Wyatt wants assurances that it will succeed. Dagny, all steely determination, tells him not to worry about it. She’s got this shit.

Observations:

I am having a difficult time understanding how this book became such a touchstone for so many people.  Not because of the ideology, and not necessary because of the quality of the prose (although it’s occasionally laughable and never better than workmanlike).  It’s because the first hundred pages of this book consist almost entirely of the minute engineering challenges of a railroad company.  How did anyone even GET to the juicy and/or incendiary stuff without falling asleep first?

The “Anti-dog-eat-dog” rule?  Another way you can pick out the bad guys in this book: their horribly awkward way with words.

Quotes:

‘”The music of Richard Halley has a quality of the heroic. Our age has outgrown that stuff,” said one critic. “The music of Richard Halley is out of key with our times.  It has a tone of ecstasy.  Who cares for ecstasy nowadays?” said another.’  Atlas Shrugged: come for the thrilling tales of locomotive engineering, stay for the incineration of straw men!

“Dagny, whatever we are, it’s we who move the world and it’s we who’ll pull it through.” (Ellis Wyatt)

Atlas Summer: Atlas Shrugged: Part One: Chapters 1 & 2

The Book: Atlas Shrugged, 35^th Anniversary Edition, by Ayn Rand, “with a new introduction by Leonard Peikoff” (New York: Dutton, 1992)

Pagination will be based on the Dutton edition.

The Notoriety:

“This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

—Dorothy Parker on either Benito Mussolini’s The Cardinal’s Mistress or Atlas Shrugged.

“Yes, at first I was happy to be learning how to read. It seemed exciting and magical, but then I read this: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I read every last word of this garbage, and because of this piece of shit, I am never reading again.”

– Officer Barbrady from South Park

Here we go!

Welcome to Atlas Summer, our team reading of Atlas Shrugged in the Great Recession.  Matt and I will give our impressions to the book.  Let us know what you think.

At present, I am restricting myself to chapter summaries and initial reactions.  Further into the book, the chapter posts may involve a more detailed presentation.  The project will also involve posting on specific topics, since this is an Issue Novel.  The issues will be confronted, pored over, and discussed.

Part I: Non-Contradiction

Chapter I: The Theme

Pages: 3 – 26

Summary:

“Who is John Galt?”  The question plays like a refrain throughout the chapter as the reader meets a few of the important characters.  A bum meets Eddie Willers, an employee at Taggart Transcontinental, a powerful railroad concern.  He remembers a large oak tree he saw when he was a child on the Taggart estate.  When lightning struck the tree, he discovered it was hollow and rotten.  (Hmm, metaphor?)

Willers discusses business matters with James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.  The reader is thrown into the cutthroat world of the railroads.  There are lots of accidents happening, the Rio Norte Line is in competition with Phoenix-Durango, and Taggart Transcontinental has lost the Wyatt oil fields.  The necessary steel shipments have not arrived.  James Taggart refuses to take action.

Meanwhile, the beautiful Dagny Taggart, Vice-President in Charge of Operation for Taggart Transcontinental, gets delayed on a Taggart Comet.  She uses her position and iron will to get the train moving again, despite the reluctance of the employees.  The employees, who stopped the train at a red light, refused to move the train unless they received direct orders.

In a brief scene, she allegedly hears a new piece of music from Richard Halley, even though he has not composed anything in years.

She enters the office of her brother, James, takes command, and orders a new alloy called Rearden Metal.  The metal will be used to upgrade construction of railroad track.  She does this without permission from the Board, her brother, or anyone else.  What a dame!

The chapter ends as it began, with the ominous question, “Who is John Galt?”

Observations:

The novel wears its self-importance on its sleeve, but that is par for the course with an Issues Novel.  The success or failure is based on the subtlety of its execution.  While not subtle, the novel begins by introducing many of the main characters and several conflicts (personal, business-related, and others).

Rand’s authorial voice is insistent and forward-driving, much like the trains that are pivotal to the narrative.  The narrative contains a hardness I have rarely encountered.  Laudatory passages about machines and achievement coexist with a strong female character.  Intriguing.  Since it has been decades since I have read The Fountainhead, I am not sure what to expect.

I wonder how the reading public treated Atlas Shrugged?  The eccentric Senior Partner Bert Cooper has mentioned it a couple times in Mad Men.  What other books were published in 1957?

(During this reading project, I am also reading A Confession by Leo Tolstoy; Capital: a Critique of Political Economy by Karl Marx; and the memoirs of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.  These other works will create a fascinating set of associations and friction when reading Rand’s controversial work.)

Bon Mots:

• “Who is John Galt?”  (Obviously.)
• “Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean – the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible.”
• Talking about Rearden Metal: “Because it’s tougher than steel, cheaper than steel and will outlast any hunk of metal in existence.”
• “I’m not interested in helping anybody.  I want to make money.”  (Dagny Taggart)
• “Other people are human.  They’re sensitive.  They can’t devote their whole life to metals and engines.  You’re lucky – you’ve never had any feelings.  You’ve never felt anything at all.”  (James to Dagny)

Another tunnel and another ruthless individual Rand might admire, Tony Soprano:

Chapter II: The Chain

Pages: 27 – 43

Summary:

Henry “Hank” Rearden observes the first firing of Rearden Metal, the revolutionary alloy mentioned in Chapter 1.  During his walk home, he fingers a bracelet made of this new metal.  He plans to give it to his wife as a gift.

At home, he is beset on all sides by his castrating wife, chiding mother, and chiseling brother.  Following the triumph of casting the Rearden Metal, his wife, Lillian, complains that he is never home.  She also has to prompt him to remember when their wedding anniversary is.  His mother acts in a passive-aggressive manner, possibly in accordance to his Minnesota upbringing.  His brother, Philip, asks for a donation to the Friends of Global Progress.  (Subtle!)  To add insult to injury, Philip asks him to donate the money in cash, since the Friends would not want to be associated with a nefarious tycoon like Henry Rearden.  The chapter ends with Lillian dismissing Hank’s gift, “Appropriate, isn’t it?  It’s the chain by which he holds us all in bondage.”

Observations:

• This chapter was unbelievably manipulative.  Objectivist philosophy notwithstanding, the chapter had less subtlety than an Animaniacs short.
• The description of the factories reminded me of Hard Times, J.R.R. Tolkien’s description of Mordor, and the anti-industrialization tirades in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  The irony is Rand describes these factories in gushing praise, prose-poems to mass production.  Machines and engines have not had this much positive adulation since the Futurists.
• There isn’t a single likeable character.  Hank comes across as a workaholic sociopath, not to mention uncharitable.  His brother, Philip, comes across as an ungrateful dick.  His wife, Lillian, seems to take pleasure in giving him shit.  And his mother harasses him to no end.  Ugh, I hate all these people.
• Hank Rearden is described like a tall, blonde superman.  The first image that came to mind was the glamorous Nazi henchman Reynard Heydrich.

Bon Mots

• “Of what importance is an individual in the titanic collective achievements of our industrial age?”
• “It was his mother’s voice; he turned: she was looking at him with that injured look which proclaims the long-bearing patience of the defenseless.”
• “It was so childishly blatant, thought Rearden, so hopelessly crude: the hint and the insult, offered together.”
• “And then Rearden thought suddenly that he could break through Philip’s chronic wretchedness for once, give him a shock of pleasure, the unexpected gratification of a hopeless desire.”
• “You don’t really care about helping the underprivileged, do you?”  (Philip to Hank)

I wonder how Rearden Metal stacks up against Adamantium?

Atlas Summer…it begins!

I go into “Atlas Summer” knowing Ayn Rand only by reputation.  I know the titles of Rand’s books and their basic plots (there’s a lot of rape, right? and trains?) as well as the overall thrust of her weltenschauung.  I also know more than I wish I did about Ayn Rand’s personal life: idolizing serial killers, starting a cult of personality/stud farm, popping uppers like they were Pez…Most of all, I know her by her influence on three generations of self-regarding white guys, from Alan Greenspan to Ron Paul, and the philosophical fuel she provided for neoliberalism’s deregulatory steamroller that paved the way for housing bubbles and derivatives clusterfuckery.

The Randian garden gnome who helped destroy the economy.

Ron Paul: Randian and creation of the Children’s Television Workshop.

Amazingly, interest in Rand, particularly her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, skyrocketed just after an economy powered by Randian precepts collapsed, discrediting both her and her followers.  The Apostle of Deregulation himself, Alan Greenspan, essentially admitted to a congressional committee that his entire worldview was defective!  Yet, when centrist Democrats attemped mild Keynesian stimulus (while cutting taxes), it prompted up every Rand follower in and outside of government to take to the ramparts, dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged in hand, rather than doing what basic human decency demanded: begging the world’s forgiveness, then committing ritual suicide with a sharpened copy of Galbraith’s Affluent Society.

The penalty for supporting the Gramm-Leach Act: ten Hail Marys and twenty pages of Krugman.

What mystical force must be contained in such a volume?  This is a book that not only has the power to convert an army of computer science majors to its author’s cause, but to hold acolytes in its thrall no matter how much evidence piles up revealing it as utter twaddle!  The only comparable work I can think of is the Bible, and at least that book offers up the enticing promise of eternal life and Heaven everlasting.

Offer of Eternal Life not valid for Jews, Muslims, Randians or Richard Dawkins.

Perhaps Rand offers a secular equivalent: the prospect of life lived without the chains of oppressive conscience, a terrestrial utopia more indulgent, more personalized, and, most importantly, more realizable than the dreary “worker’s paradise” promised by Marx.

Roadmap to Utopia: No Looters Allowed!

Or maybe (gulp), Atlas Shrugged is just really, really well written.  There’s truly only one way to find out…

Atlas Summer: Introduction

Close Encounters of the Rand Kind

My first encounter with Ayn Rand came in high school.  In my senior philosophy class, my teacher introduced me to The Fountainhead.  The book appealed to my philosophical bent and I enjoyed Howard Roark’s passionate, downright reckless individualism.

Let me reiterate: I was in high school.

The teacher who recommended the book to me did not look like Mr. Russo from Freaks and Geeks.

I have not read another Ayn Rand book since.  This was not because of Rand-hatred.  (I will address that later.)  I went to college.  Had a job at a TV station.  Then I went to grad school and worked in a museum.  During those years I read other books.  Books by Ayn Rand just did not figure on my list of books to read.

I am currently working as a temporary employee.   This status should provide an interesting X-Factor in reading Rand’s 1300 page magnum opus.  A job provides many things, including money.  A steady income stream will help and I would really like a fat wallet.  Is this greed or simply the desire for self-preservation?

As a critic of popular culture and politics, Atlas Shrugged presents itself as a fascinating test case.  I have read many reviews of the book.  The surprising trend is that either the reviewer loves the book, saying it is the best book ever written by a human, or it is the worst thing ever written, worse than Battlefield Earth, the Silmarillion, and Eragon combined.  I am curious about how one book could generate such hyperbole from both ends.

“If you’re good at something never do it for free.”  A = A.

Why So Serious?

The hyperbolic reactions caused by Atlas Shrugged have turned the book into a volatile commodity.  Proponents speak in religious terms, equating his or her reading experience with St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.  Ayn Rand is the greatest writer ever.  Within the book lay the key to unlocking wealth, power, and prestige.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the book generates a ferocious and equally fanatical hatred.  One parallel is the Two-Minute Hate in Orwell’s 1984.  The hatred can get borderline irrational, mere disagreement with the text turning into violent screeds.

Seriously, it’s just a book.  It’s fiction!  One sees reverence and piety directed at sacred texts, not at lengthy potboilers written in the 1950s.

What’s the point of all this, anyway?

Since 2009 the United States and most of the world has endured an economic cataclysm the likes of which has not been seen since Herbert Hoover sat in the Oval Office.  Calling this global catastrophe the Great Recession will remain one of the monumental understatements of American history.  It is akin to saying Hurricane Katrina gave Louisiana a little more moisture for a few days.

The multiple causes of the Great Recession have been debated endlessly.  The cascading crises within the subprime mortgage, housing, credit, and currency areas all have a singular culprit.  The culprit is less a person than an amorphous vituperative philosophy commonly called “deregulation.”  Whenever the banking and the financial sectors are deregulated, economic cataclysm is soon to follow.  It resulted in the Great Depression, the Crash of 1987, and 2009.  Three major systematic collapses within a century, how is that a stable economic system?  Capitalism seems about as stable as Corey Haim.  But, hey, after a period of legislative rehab, we can deregulate the industry again.  The Dow will never go down, we’ll all be rich, our 401Ks will be huge!  One more time.  One more hit.  (The Corey Haim metaphor was not a mere pop culture reference.  Corey Haim is dead because he thought he could have just one more hit and his body would take it.)

A metaphor.

Karl Marx, the bête noire of Ayn Rand, once said that capitalism plants the seeds of its own destruction.  With Goldman Sachs selling junk stocks to widows and retirees, British Petroleum turning the Gulf Coast into a black oily hellscape, and a two-party democracy unable to pass necessary legislation to prevent socioeconomic collapse, one has yet to here a coherent counter-argument from free-market advocates.

“Atlas Summer” will take an in-depth look at Ayn Rand’s very long and very controversial work.  The analysis will be in the same spirit at Red Letter Media’s eviscerations of Avatar, the Phantom Menace, and Attack of the Clones. Everything from historical context, economic philosophy, and literary craft will be subjected to our gaze.

As a fan of box office bombs, camp, and pop culture notoriety, I am willing to give Atlas Shrugged a chance.  Despite my serious issues with deregulation and the free market, I want to hear the arguments from the other side.  It is not my task as a book reviewer and cultural commentator to read and watch things I completely agree with.  That’s boring and narrow.  One’s view of the world should be leavened with different opinions, different viewpoints, and different backgrounds.  As people are wont to say, “Some of my best friends are …”

Too many voices agreeing on the same things cause epistemic closure.  During this project, we want to hear from you.  The Rand-hater.  The Rand-lover.  If I got something wrong in my summary and analysis, point it out to me.  Even though I am a pretty good reviewer, I am also fallible.

It would be great if some enlightening discussion can be generated with this project.

A Few Questions

• Why has this book remained popular?

• Some people say this is the best book ever written.  Compared to what?  Examples.

• How is Rand’s philosophy different from Marx, de Sade, Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, John Maynard Keynes, and others?

• Is “going Galt” a bad thing?  (Considering the actions of Enron, WorldCom, Goldman Sachs, and British Petroleum.)

NB: Coffee is for Closers is also looking for a conservative voice during this project.  If you think Atlas Shrugged is a great book, please contact either Matt or I.  A variety of voices will heighten the quality of discussion.

We’re as mad as hell and we’ll take it for as long as you feel like giving it.

The current political climate in the United States could best be described as “hatey.”  Teabagging rightists hate Comrade Hussein Obama and his army of zombified liberals.  Folks on the left hate the frothing, spittle-flecked teabaggers and their braying, ignorant leaders (you betcha!).  The ideological and cultural rift between these two groups seems impossibly vast, but political malcontents of all stripe share the same driving resentment, even as they go to absurd lengths to deny it: the bone-deep but unacknowledged awareness of their essential political impotence.

America’s civic religion holds that a person’s vote is their single most important expression of democratic virtue, and that of all the votes a person casts, their vote for president is the most important of all.  America’s civic reality is that the American president has far less power over the institutions of government and a much smaller range of viable decisions when exercising what power he does have than is commonly believed.  In short, we live in the world foreseen by Ned Beatty’s corporate titan in Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 satire Network.

Every American president, even in the post-WWII era of the National Security State, must operate within a global economic system of multi-national corporations and a forever-churning sea of money flowing across the planet, filling every nook and cranny through fiduciary osmosis.  All American economic policy must serve this system, as we saw during the economic crisis, when a Republican president passed a baton of bank bailouts and corporate enabling to a Democratic president without a hitch in the step.  Similarly, American foreign policy is dictated by a structure of global imperial power projection by this same economic system, featuring prominently as it does defense contractors and petroleum producers.  Yes, a particularly unhinged president could, pretty much on his own fevered initiative, invade a random Middle Eastern nation, but only because such a move reinforces that imperial paradigm.  No American president could possibly move to reduce the overall size and mission of the American military by, say, closing a bunch of our foreign bases.

In such a system, the president is less Leader of the Free World and more hen-pecked middle manager.  Nobody likes the idea that their sacred vote is really just a national referendum on an Arby’s Employee of the Month, and the chasm between the mythical Office of the President and the grubby reality is too vast to spend much time gazing into without getting seriously bummed.  Thankfully, there are three natural resources America will never run out of: type two diabetes, self-delusion, and narcissism.  The self-delusion and narcissism make for presidential elections were voters make a personal investment in candidates that is both intimate and skin deep.  Instead of voting for presidential candidates due to any specific policy platform (a platform that they’ll end up discarding in favor of the requirements of the economic imperative), we vote for the candidate who we feel “represents” us.  Not our specific ideology, but our self-image.  Since we can’t really expect a president to accomplish anything, we demand a president who will satisfy our desire to see our individual values and aesthetic preferences in Oval Office.  The president, as head of state and head of government, is a living embodiment of the United States of America, and more than anything, we want to recognize ourselves when we look at him.

One of the side effects of this highly personalized, image-centered politics is a refusal to accept the legitimacy of presidents who refuse to satisfy our selfish need to identify with the chief executive.   Let’s take a look at the public images of our past two presidents.

Exhibit One: the born-again son of a former president

What conservatives see: a pious, humble Christian, driven by faith in God and in the greatness of America, a plain-spoken straight-shooter who isn’t afraid to say what needs to be said and do what needs to be done for the good of the country.

What liberals see: a spoiled, fraudulent, rich kid, a casually cruel dry-drunk sub-moron, a swaggering dunderpate floating on a sea of unearned privilege and entitlement, devoted above all to maintaining the untrammeled power of the overclass.

Exhibit Two: the biracial community organizer and constitutional law professor

What liberals see: an empathetic, intelligent visionary whose experiences in Indonesia and the south side of Chicago, not to mention at Harvard Law School, that gives him a deep understanding of the need for social justice in America and the world beyond.  Not to mention: wow! a black president!

What conservatives see: a disciple of Marxism, radical Islam and Chicago-style political criminality.   A glib, elitist, vapid demagogue with a secret but abiding contempt for an America that he has no sense of connection to.  The ultimate example of out-of-control affirmative action.

These beliefs have little to do with either president’s policies, but rather with the way that their biographies and public personae react with the personal cultural and aesthetic preferences of a given voter.  When someone offensive to our view of ourselves becomes president, we feel disenfranchised and alienated. There’s an iron-clad but obtuse bit of logic at work: A legitimate president represents America.  I am part of America.  The president’s values and appearance do not represent me. Therefore, the president is not legitimate.

The flip side of this phenomenon is a fierce and nearly tribal attachment to a president who does strike us as a kindred spirit.  Our attachment, like our hatred, has nothing to do with policy.  In both cases, our superficial reaction to the person occupying the white house helps us ignore the nagging and dispiriting knowledge that our electoral power is laughably limited.  When George W. Bush passed No Child Left Behind and authorized the first bank bailouts, conservatives fumed, but their anger was diffused by their tribal identification with the president.  Luckily, a new, foreign-looking, elitist commie-type took office to soak up all that impotent rage.  Now, as Obama continues an economic policy designed to perpetuate the untrammeled power of the financial sector, sends tens of thousands of troops to Afghanistan, and continues Bush’s policies on military tribunals and indefinite detention, liberals are feeling that same, vague sense of powerlessness that conservatives felt while watching Bush go “big government” all over the place.  Liberal dissatisfaction with Obama could, theoretically, lead to a grassroots agitation to push the administration to the left, but any such movement is crippled by the same tribalism that afflicts conservatives.  Rather than confront the feelings of impotence and betrayal that Obama’s status quo-humping evokes, liberals dump all of their anger and resentment on Sarah Palin and a bunch of rubes with misspelled signs.

Superficial identification with the president is both a symptom of and contributor to our post-democratic political system.  We watch as the men we come to love ignore our supposedly shared beliefs in order to conform to the dictates of global capital, then vent all of our frustration on the political leaders who fail to provide us with a sense of cultural solidarity. This cycle ensures that, at any given moment, no matter what sort of economic catastrophe or senseless war is going on during a given administration, only half of the electorate will raise their voices to object.  The other half will be too busy hating the objectors and ignoring every betrayal by their chosen political messiah.  The amazing thing is that such a beautifully rendered mechanism for dispersing dissent and maintaining a fiction of democratic engagement didn’t require any sort of planning by the media or political or economic elite.  We created it ourselves in order to cope; it’s a natural byproduct of social evolution.  Opposable thumbs for the body politic.

The Turner Diaries (1978) by Andrew Macdonald

Henry Gibson played a Neo-Nazi in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers.  Standing in front of his brownshirted buffoons, he uttered the following speech:

“White men! White women! The flag is calling you. The sacred and ancient symbol of your race, since the beginning of time. The Jew is using The Black as muscle against you. And you are left there helpless. Well, what are you going to do about it, Whitey? Just sit there? Of course not! You are going to join with us. The members of the American, National Socialist, White Peoples’ Party. An organization of decent, law-abiding white folk. Just like you!”

Unfortunately, the Turner Diaries has much the same content.  Make no mistake; the book is not a comedy, at least not intentionally.  The rigid seriousness of the narrator, one Earl Turner, and the pedestrian writing style left this reader rolling his eyes and saying to himself, “Oh come on!  Seriously?”  Before ridiculing the author, one has to realize that this scary little book is a product of its times.  What was he thinking?  Why did he think that?  Why is he constantly blaming the Jews and the Blacks for all his troubles?

In the Seventies, the United States faced a combination of crises in the economy, in foreign policy, and in politics.  The US support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War resulted in the OPEC-sponsored economic warfare commonly known as the oil embargo.  Decades of fighting a foreign war in Vietnam resulted in a crumbling infrastructure, a divisive chasm unleashed by domestic protests, the Civil Rights movement, and the heavy-handed tactics used to quash domestic dissent.  The Watergate scandal led to President Nixon to resign in disgrace and a foreign policy that shrank away from the challenges of foreign engagements.  Runaway inflation, gas rationing, and losing a decade-long war fueled paranoia and resentment.  In these dark times, Andrew Macdonald (the nom de plume of William Luther Pierce) wrote The Turner Diaries.

Pierce founded the white supremacist organization the National Alliance in 1970 with a Neo-Nazi ideology that is “explicitly genocidal” (according to the group profile on the Southern Poverty Law Center website).  Writing under another name, Pierce wrote a fictional account of a revolution that violently overthrew the government of the United States.  In the novel, we follow the clandestine exploits of one Earl Turner: gun owner, racist Christian, and Anti-Semite.

Pierce relishes in the violence and mass murder with a sociopathic glee.  The ruthlessness of the main characters pales the misdeeds and atrocities of the Marquis de Sade’s characters.  The Turner Diaries is also, in its own perverse way, family-friendly.  The novel has very little sex and not that much vulgarity (Cf. Sade’s novels).

What makes this book far worse than the usual saber-rattling thriller or ideological screed masquerading as fiction?  The “good guys” do some pretty disgusting things.  Murder, assassination, bombing government buildings, and hanging “race-defilers” are only a few things Earl Turner does in the name of White empowerment.  In the novel, Turner belongs to the Organization and wages a campaign of domestic terrorism against The System.  The System is Big Government personified to the brink of self-parody.  The novel opens with Turner and pals hiding their weapons due to the passage of the Cohen Act.  The repressive government has sent machete-wielding Negroes to seize their weapons.  (Come on!  Seriously?)

Make no mistake, Pierce casts aspersions at the usual suspects (liberals, Jews, Blacks, Communists, Israel, homosexuals, feminists, etc.), but this is also a novel that espouses Neo-Nazi revolutionary rhetoric.  Turner unleashes bile against conservatives, since they do not want to overthrow the System.

Unlike other works by fascist authors, Pierce is not a good writer.  Lyle Stuart writes in the Introduction that the book was a favorite on the gun show circuit.  One could facetiously classify the Turner Diaries as “gun nut fanfiction.”  Gun shows appeal to a certain fandom and Pierce writes for them.  One does not look for the technical precision of someone like Vladimir Nabokov or Samuel Beckett.  For gun owners with a serious beef against the Federal Government, this book was probably a gripping read.  To this reviewer, the novel offered an implausible plot slathered in sub-standard prose.  Louis-Ferdinand Céline for all his vile Anti-Semitism and misanthropy could at least craft a decent sentence.  Ezra Pound, even while recording radio broadcasts as Benito Mussolini’s cheerleader, had the capacity to write some of the finest poetry in the English language.  Ironically, it is the vilest sections, the parts dedicated to the most heinous racist ideology that the prose reveals a talented writer.  The novel itself has cardboard cutouts (the “heroes”) fighting racist caricatures.  It is like Blazing Saddles minus the jokes.

“I have great respect for human life. My decision to take human life at the Murrah Building – I did not do it for personal gain. I ease my mind in that…I did it for the larger good.” — Timothy McVeigh