the creeping ulcer of indifference objectivism

Music: Neil Young: Harvest (1972)

I watched with interest the John Williams' inspired revelation of vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan of Wisconsin this morning on CNN. With the backdrop of a Norfolk warship, dramatic music swelled as Romney, then Ryan, descended from the battleship to the podium. Posed on Facebook and Twitter like my fellow pop politics junkies, our tweets and status barbs started to fly. One of my favorite conservative friends (and a brilliant graduate student) said: " Ugh, whoever stagecrafted this event needs to lose their job. A gray ship? Nope. Choose the ocean as a background - limitless possibilities, horizons, the whole nine yards." I responded, "Sound reinforcement would have been bad. It's all about the John Williams-like presidential soundtrack as Mittens and Rand Paul--oops, I mean Paul Ryan--descend from the festooned Super Star Destroyer."

My deliberate slip from Paul Ryan to Rand Paul references Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré and novelist who relocated to the United States as a consequence of the Russian revolution. Ron Paul named his politician son after Rand (she changed her name to "Ayn" because it rhymed with "mine") and her so-called "objectivist" philosophy, which celebrates the figure of the wealthy capitalist as a "hero" and lambasts the poor as "parasites." In her widely read novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand extolls the "virtues of selfishness" by painting a black-and-white world in which Christ's social gospel (love your neighbor, indeed, help them) is responsible for destroying the civilized world.

My own aversion to Rand---like most aversions---is born of a previous fascination if not adoration. I read The Fountainhead in high school, obsessed. I then turned to reading her other works, devouring them like comic books (because they paint the sort of world that is reflected in comic books, of course). With my debate partner John, I devised "briefs" that critiqued the "blood sucking altruism" of debate resolutions for years. Rand appealed to me because of its staunch atheism and righteous defense of white privilege. I was a smart white kid growing up in Snellville, Georgia, of course. And while I always identified as "left" in political orientation, there was something about Rand's libertarian views that seemed sensible to me. As a 15 year old.

College changed all that, of course, exposing me to a diversity of views. I grew to see the Randian view of the world as somewhat limited---even perverse (I never quite understood her joyful celebration of violent sex in her novels). In part, my reading of Nietzsche eclipsed her views---as did close readings of Plato and Aristotle (her read of the ancients is woefully wrong). While I've never quite outgrown my love of comic books (I still get giddy with each new issue of Creepy), I have outgrown the bloated, faux-philosophizing of Randian novels---if only for the beauty of Joyce, or Faulkner, or even Hemmingway. But of course, mostly for my exposure to deeper thought (even if I don't understand it, such thought complicates my easy solutions/thinking). It's hard to take Rand seriously after reading Derrida on mortality, for example. Or after attending a funeral service (as I did today). I guess what appealed to me about Rand was an identification with whiteness and privilege (even though, by the standards of my peers in college, I was from the working class). She paints a chiaroscuro world of clearly discernable good guys and bad guys, when the world is actually peopled by anything but "guys." The success of Randian ethics is the ability to "other," and to other with resolution: thou art but shit. No compassion. No compromise. No quarter.

So it is with amusement and fear that I greeted the announcement of Ryan as the vice presidential candidate. Ryan has been on record, many times, for espousing the virtues of selfishness. In 2005 at a speech to a objectivist think tank, Ryan said: "[T]he reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. And the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.” He gifted workers in his office copies of Atlas Shrugged at Christmas. In recent years he has distanced himself from Rand because of her strident atheism (principally leveled at Christian altruism and the teachings of Christ), but his previously expressed fealty to the female Palpatine is a matter of public record.

I've said it before and no doubt my saying it again makes it true: blogs are dead. Which makes, again, this endeavor a gothic enjoyment. Even so, friends, you should read Ayn Rand if you have not, if only to become familiar with the strategic affective appeal hailing Ryan to the RePube ticket makes. Recently an Objectivist group endowed a Chair of Philosophy (to the tune of a million bucks) here at UT. Two years ago at a graduate student conference in North Dakota I heard not one, not two, but three graduate student papers about Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged has been made into two films (thankfully, pretty bad). But Rand is back in public discourse and the popular imaginary, even if her name is a "dirty word."

For reasons I am not yet conscious of, I have been on a Star Wars kick lately: reading, almost obsessively, graphic novels devoted to the "expanded universe" and re-watching the films with adolescent glee. The same "good/evil" simplicity animates Lucas' vision as does Rand's novels, only on the side of the Left. Even so, it's hard not to see both fantasy worlds as the same piece of the cloth. I suspect my regression to adolescent fantasy is not mere happenstance, but overdetermined by the (mediated) culture within which I am immersed.

One interesting thing I'm discovering reading the Star Wars expanded universe literature is the over-the-top attempt to humanize Darth Vader and the "Dark Empire." Stories have proliferated about the Empire (well known to be a riff on the Nazis) to complicate the black/white cast of the original films. Vader is alternately cast as a conflicted man goaded by quest for power (eventually, a desire to have a stronger relationship to his son, Luke---a familial bond) or a strong leader who desires order and fairness. I had no idea the Star Wars had become such a complex fantasyland. Still, it's that desire to humanize evil (or rationalize a fascination with evil) that I see at work in the ironically-named Republican guard. There's no question that those on the right believe they are doing good, and I have no doubt that Romney and my self-identified "conservative" friends mean very well---or are, at root, good people. But what Star Wars is still about is a characteristically Christian compassion versus those who are "all for themselves."

The question is not whether or not human beings are selfish. We are. If you are not a narcissist at some level, that is depression (and sadly, one resolution is violence). Rather, the question is whether we will elevate our better natures to the status of structure, against our worse and more selfish impulses. It's easier to politic against the "parasites" than it is to "love your neighbor." It's both amusing and depressing to watch mainstream politics, for playing out Lucas' fantasies so accurately.

I miss Paul Wellstone.