Random Thoughts 3/2/06

A fondness for Rush at an early age lead me to delve into the writings of Ayn Rand. Why Rush had to do with Ayn Rand in those days was due to the fact that primary lyric writer and drummer extraordinaire, Neil Peart, had dedicated the 2112 suite "to the genius of Ayn Rand". In retrospect, I think even Peart would back away from that observation, but at the time, Rand had a pretty powerful impact on me. A brief background on this woman: Ayn Rand was a Russian author who grew up in the early years of the Soviet Union. She later grew virulently dissaffected with the system, adapted a fierce libertarian streak (quite unfashionable for the times amongst the intellectual set in the 1950's, who were still in thrall of the collectivist USSR), defected to the US, then wrote the best-selling novels "Atlas Shrugged" and "Fountainhead". I read the latter at the age of 15, and its message of uncompromising independence in the face of staggering odds resonated deeply with me. (In many ways, it still does.) I have to pat myself on the back for having the mental tenacity to blow through a book like "The Fountainhead", as it was, to my recollection, about 800 pages long. (But hey, if Neil Peart liked it, that was more than enough sustenance for me to complete it!) When I graduated from college, I decided that I'd read the other major work of Rand, "Atlas Shrugged". Far from being enamored with it like I was by "The Fountainhead" seven years before, I found it to be boring and pedantic, with flat character development and no drama. In short, it sucked. I later had a conversation with a friend who has significant grounding in philosophy, who consequently described Rand as "low-grade Neitzche" (or something to that effect). I'd never read Neitzche (still haven't), but I usually take his word on matters such as this. All I can say is that Rand, in the end, was a crappy fiction writer. Her essays stand up a bit better, and I agree with more than 50% of her views. I'll always be mostly anti-socialist, anti-collectivist, anti-big government, pro-business, pro-free market, all of which dovetails easily into Rand's philosophy. But in the end, I'd rather read...anything but Rand again. The following quote sums it all up quite nicely:

"It's okay to think Atlas Shrugged is the greatest book you've ever read until you're 18. Then you should stop."

--John Podhoretz

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"He went about complaining how bad the times were, and particularly that there had been no public disasters...the prosperity of his own reign, he said, would lead to its being wholly forgotten, and he often prayed for a great military catastrophe, or for some famine, plague, fire, or earthquake."

--Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, commenting on Emperor Gaius, aka Caligula

Sound like some we all know? A certain former president, by chance? One who openly wished it would've been HE who was president in 9/11?

Think about it.

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Apologies to those of you who live in New Jersey. (And you know who you are...)

"Not familiar with the Jersey Smell? Start your car, then lie under it with your half-eaten goat."

--Steven Colbert

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Story of the Day:

ROME (Reuters) - Leaders of the former Soviet Union were behind the assassination attempt against Pope John Paul II in 1981, an Italian parliamentary investigative commission said in a report.

A final draft of the report, which is due to be presented to parliament later this month, was made available to Reuters on Thursday by the commission president, Senator Paolo Guzzanti.

"This commission believes, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the leadership of the Soviet Union took the initiative to eliminate Pope John Paul," the report said.

[Shocker. But hey, they were going to collapse on their own anyway, right?]

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A friend ofJohn Derbyshire at NRO, this fellow did some low-level grunt work for Nixon in '72:

"A Republican president and a Republican Congress--both houses! We could only dream of it back then. And yet, after all, what has it got us? Spending out of control, open borders, Wilsonism all over the bloody world, congressmen's pockets stuffed with lobbyist dollars, huge dysfunctional govt bureacracies springing up all over the place, sucking in public money to finance their stupid turf fights..."

Kind of hard to dispute that, sadly.

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And in the "some things never change" department:

"Augustus Caesar married his wife Scribonia, but divorced her, 'because', as he wrote, 'I could not bear the way she nagged at me'"

--Suetonius, Twelve Caesars

[Sidenote: Augustus Caesar ruled Rome at the time of the birth of Christ, some two thousand years ago.]