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An Interview With Ayn Rand

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Ideologue for the Irreligious Right

I am, to say the least, no supporter of Ayn Rand. Thirty years after her death, she has has occupied an incongruous position with her rightist and libertarian supporters. On one hand, she was an avowed enemy of religion. On the other, her tenets have been adopted by a political party which has close ties to American Evangelical Christians. It was Jesus Christ in the Gospel of St. Luke (12:33) is quoted as saying, “Sell your possessions and give to charity; make yourselves purses which do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near, nor moth destroys.”

Contrast that with Ms. Rand, who stated in a famous 1964 Playboy interview with Alvin Toffler:

My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.

How Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s Republican Vice-Presidential candidate, can square his religion (Roman Catholicism) with his adherence to the belief system of Ayn Rand’s so-called Objectivism is a mystery to me. I personally find much of her thinking to be abhorrent, such as her elevating productive work about family and friendship:

If they place such things as friendship and family ties above their own productive work, yes, then they are immoral. Friendship, family life, and human relationships are not primary in a man’s life. A man who places others first, above his own creative work, is an emotional parasite; whereas, if he places his work first, there is no conflict between his work and his enjoyment of human relationships.

So, which is it to be, Mr. Ryan? Shall we adhere to the teachings of Christ or of Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum, alias Ayn Rand?

The interview with Rand is worth reading in its entirety. Or one could just read one of her long and confused novels such as The Fountainhead (1943) or Atlas Shrugged (1957) to get to the same point after a several hundred turgid pages.

 

 

“I Did Not Want To Become Slight and Fantastic”

As I … meditated the direction of modern poetry, my discouragement blackened. It seemed to me that Mallarmé and his followers, renouncing intelligibility in order to concentrate on the music of poetry, had turned off the road into a narrowing lane…. Idea had gone, now meter had gone, imagery would have to go; perhaps at last words might have to go or give up their meaning, nothing be left but musical syllables…. I was standing there like a God-forsaken man-of-letters, making my final decision not to become a “modern.” I did not want to become slight and fantastic, abstract and unintelligible.—Robinson Jeffers, Preface to Roan Stallion

Going to the Mattresses

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Is There Any Escape?

We have reached that part of the election when all the millions of dollars spent by candidates and Political Action Committees (PACs) lead to a barrage of ads on television and over the telephone. During the last four weeks of a hard-fought political campaign (and they’re all that way now), I screen all my telephone calls.

Irrespective of the candidate or issue, I don’t want to talk to anyone on the phone about politics; and I most certainly don’t want to participate in opinion polls. I already avoid television—unless I am watching a movie without advertising or a DVD—so I am not susceptible to that particular attempt to poison my thought processes.

As I was coming to work today, I heard a news story on the radio about how the second presidential debate will be in a town hall format, with the participants all being uncommitted voters. Who in this superheated political arena is uncommitted any more? Doesn’t one have to be stupid or disingenuous at this point to be truly labeled uncommitted? I am as committed as hell, and I don’t want to talk to anyone about it.

In about a month, all this will be over and done with. We will have a president with whom we will be dissatisfied, to a greater or lesser degree; and the media blitz will have died down to nothing.

All those Citizens United dollars will have wreaked their damage on the American voter, who will be increasingly contemptuous of our political system. Sometimes I think the only people who like our system are those directly involved in manipulating public opinion.

In the middle of a hurricane, the only safe place to be is in out of the wind.

Picture Credit: The above cartoon is taken from the Fremd High School American Studies Ning (?!), which also addresses the same point I am trying to make.

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FDR’s Canadian “Cottage”

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FDR’s Summer Home on Campobello Island

During his youth, Franklin Delano Roosevelt spent many of his summers on Campobello Island in the Province of New Brunswick, just a few hundred feet from the Easternmost Point in the United States at Lubec, Maine. Since the 1960s, there is a bridge that connects Lubec with Campobello. But back when FDR stayed here, it was approachable with difficulty, by a combination of trains and ferries.

In 1921, FDR discovered during a visit to the island that he had a paralytic illness, which was later diagnosed as polio. That was a watershed in the ambitious young man’s life: From being an active outdoorsman who loved sailing the waters of Passamaquoddy Bay and the Bay of Fundy, he found himself increasingly a cripple. From that point on, he didn’t have it in him to spend much time time at Campobello.

That was not the case for his wife, Eleanor, who continued to visit the island—especially after her husband died in 1945. One of the highlights of a trip to the massive “cottage” at Campobello is a daily event known as “Tea with Eleanor.” For twenty lucky guests, tea and cookies are served in an adjoining cottage; and the knowledgeable waitstaff tell stories about Eleanor, who is much loved by the local people.

Campobello Island is a strange little island. To buy gasoline or perform many other services, the residents must cross the border into Lubec. There are two restaurants on the island and, I believe, only a couple of places where tourists can spend the night. The cottage is surrounded by a large park and criss-crossing hiking trails, where once there were other resorts for wealthy tourists around the turn of the century.

Lubec and Campobello are about two hours east of Acadia National Park and the resort at Bar Harbor.

 

 

Oh No! Not Big Bird!

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Help save Big Bird!

Mitt Romney has gone too far. It was a mistake to attack Big Bird. The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is a tiny, but culturally significant part of the nation’s budget. Contrast that to the untold trillions we throw away in the Middle East building fortified zones from which our young men and women venture out only to be bombed to smithereens.

Sesame Street would rather not be in this predicament. It’s not as if the nonpartisan, nonprofit wants to be in the middle of a political firestorm: It clearly is uncomfortable in that role. Even Republicans have children, after a fashion, and those children are likely to find themselves identifying with the characters who dwell in Sesame Street. By so doing, they will not necessarily volunteer to serve on Obamacare Death Panels or join the Socialist Workers’ Party, They may even grow up to be distressingly normal, unlike their parents.

There are certainly a few hundred things I would think to cut before attacking tiny PBS, whose 15% contribution from the Federal Government constitutes far, far less than 1% of the budget. (Closer to 0.015% actually.)

In politics, sometimes little things have large consequences. I think that, in attacking Big Bird, the Mittster may have taken on more than he can handle.

Photo Credit: The above image was copied from an About.Com website on political humor.

 

Thinking Like a Rat

Richard Feynman

All experiments in psychology are not of this [cargo cult] type, however. For example there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on—with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it’s using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn’t discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.—Richard Feynman, 1974 Commencement Address

 

Spider Webs and Mucus

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Feels icky when they’re in your lungs

Doesn’t sound terribly appetizing, does it? But that’s only half the problem: Since we’ve returned from vacation, my lung feels as if it were filled with spider webs interspersed with globs of mucus. The choking that drove me crazy during the trip has gone down. What remains are juicy coughs which, instead of bringing up the gunk in the chest, seems to redistribute it among the spider webs.

In addition to another, shorter, course of antibiotics, I have been on Advair and Albuterol to fight the asthma that accompanied the choking spasms of coughing. I just wonder how long it will take before the coughing stops. After all, it has been going on for a little over three weeks now.

It is amazing what life can throw at one when one isn’t prepared. And how is one ever prepared to fend off an infection or a virus? They just seem to come higgledy-piggledy and have their way with you.

I have seen several of my best friends afflicted similarly in this last year—all with different things. One had MRSA; another, incipient Alzheimer’s; and yet another, a broken hip and wrist from a fall. When one is young, one could just don jogging shorts and go through all the approved little exercise routines, patting oneself on the back for doing the right thing and preventing any illnesses. One eats one’s prepackaged salad greens with the desired sugary/fatty dressing, the right breakfast cereal. I guess it helps, but there are no guarantees in this life.

One has to be eternally vigilant, but one is still mortal.

Photo Credit: The photo above comes from the National Geographic for Kids website.

At Kuruvungna Springs

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The Oasis at Kuruvungna Springs

Today was the “Life Before Columbus” Festival of the Gabrielino-Tongva Indian Tribe. (Appropriate, as tomorrow is Columbus Day, one of America’s more uncelebrated holidays—except by banks and the Civil Service).

About half a mile from our apartment is a site sacred to the Gabrielinos, who once occupied Southern California between Catalina Island and Cajon Pass, between Santa Barbara and Orange County. I am speaking of what is variously called Kuruvungna Springs, Tongva Sacred Springs, and Serra Springs. It is tucked into the Southeast corner of the University High School campus in West Los Angeles.

The Gabrielinos are not one of the better-known Indian tribes, but as Professor Paul Apodaca of Chapman University remarked at the festival, there are two hundred separate Indian tribes in the State of California, and something like a hundred Indian reservations. The tribes belong to some eight language families. My guess is that the Gabrielinos, like other smallish tribes, have not been able to gather the political support to have their own reservation or casino. And, in fact, many political entities do not recognize them. I can understand their budgetary collywobbles to some extent, but I recognize them, as does the City of Los Angeles. (The little Tongva cultural center at Kuruvungna Springs has a series of official scrolls attesting to their status by various governmental entities.)

That does not hide the fact that, when Richard Henry Dana in Two Years Before the Mast landed in L.A. in the mid-1830s, it was the Gabrielinos he encountered. They were named by their affiliation with Mission San Gabriel, which they helped to build. They were one of the few maritime bands in California, rowing in their plank canoes to Santa Catalina and the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara.

The little oasis around the springs (which form part of the water supply of the City of Santa Monica) is a serene and peaceful place in the great wen that is Los Angeles—which, by the way, is called Yangna in the Gabrielino tongue.

Bougainville on the Indians of the East

Louis Antoine de Bougainville

I see no difference in the dress, ornaments, dances, and songs of the various western nations. They go naked, excepting a strip of cloth passed through a belt, and paint themselves black, red, blue, and other colors. Their heads are shaved and adorned with bunches of feathers, and they wear rings of brass wire in their ears. They wear beaver-skin blankets, and carry lances, bows and arrows, and quivers made of the skins of beasts. For the rest they are straight, well made, and generally very tall. Their religion is brute paganism. I will say it once for all, one must be the slave of these savages, listen to them day and night, in council and in private, whenever the fancy takes them, or whenever a dream, a fit of the vapors, or their perpetual craving for brandy, gets possession of them; besides which they are always wanting something for their equipment, arms or toilet, and the general of the army must give written orders for the smallest trifle,—an eternal, wearisome detail, of which one has no idea in Europe.—Louis Antoine de Bougainville as quoted in Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe

 

The Life of the Party

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No, I was not the life of the party

Last night, Martine and I attended the wedding of my best friend’s second son, Eric. The ceremony and reception were held at the Heritage Museum of Orange County in Santa Ana, about 45 miles south of where we live.

Since Eric is more than a generation removed from us, it was interesting to see the differences between a social event for the young compared to old poops such as myself. To begin with, once the DJ cranked up the music, my communication skills were all but shut down. Although we were seated at a table full of people we knew and liked, I was unable to hear anything.

And insofar as dancing went, I have never had the skill the move in time with music—ever since I was banned from the folk dancing class at the First Hungarian Reformed Church in Cleveland back in 1950 for accidentally stomping on the feet of my dance partners. And, dear readers, I have not improved since then.

So, far from being the life of the party, I felt as if I were immured in a carbon prison like Han Solo in Star Wars III: Return of the Jedi. What made it worthwhile was being with old friends, not to mention honoring the wedding of someone I have liked since he was an infant. I find, after the wedding, that he is even more of an upstanding person than I had thought.

I wish him well as he treads the dangerous paths of this life.Fortunately, he has a killer sense of humor that I think will carry him and his young wife through in style.

Photo Credit: No, this was not taken at the wedding. It is an ad from a website called People Skills Decoded which offers to teach you how to be the life of the party. I suppose they could do that if they replaced my hearing and subtracted a few decades from my age.