| | Linz:
"Yeah, but as we also agreed, Lenny will protect me. He said so himself over our twentieth Martini, remember?" Aha. Proof of your lies and calumny!! You know you can't remember a thing after your twentieth Martini, you lush!
"Things sure are happening fast round here today." They always do on issues such as this. Sadly.
I have to say, aside from the news about Barbara, I see nothing in the noisy reproachments of Linz's article -- " I don't take hysterics seriously at all" says Alec hysterically -- that wasn't already answered in the article itself. I am surprised for example how many "last words on this subject" Alec and others have chosen to write, at all the pumped-up outrage, and also who is putting up those sanctions for it all. Is there a lurker or three whose vicarious participation in this debate we should know about? Who could it possibly be? And what's the point?
And didn't you notice the point early on that the book is written by a "prosecuting attorney by training' who is "out to convict." Since I don't see anyone disputing the actual evidence provided by the book, feel free then to judge the evidence in your own mind, and weigh it against what else you KNOW to be true, what the evidence clarifies about who has been economical with the truth when it suits, and what the evidence shows about motivation for that economy. Weigh it up in the courtroom of your mind, but please drop all the juvenile cries of "book-burning" and "whore!" and all that associated hyperbole.
While the news of Barbara's affair would normally be nobody's business except hers and those involved, and would normally not be worthy of discussion except by a small-town gossip, the news (it's news to me, since I haven't read NB's book) is germane to the discussion of Rand herself; it's germane because Barbara herself made it so in the way she wrote of The Affair: what precisely was agreed, who precisely was kept in the dark, and about what, and for how long. All factors are relevant in determining -- not BB's standing which is of secondary importance -- but Rand's, since it was Rand who was deceived by the two who eventually wrote about the situation (but not all about the deception), and deceived in a manner apparently calculated to require her to evade the evidence of her own thinking. That sort of deception is unconscionable to anyone, but particular so when one supposedly recognises the evil of evasion, and the consequences of faking reality. To do that to your teacher and your friend, to someone you love, now that's nasty.
You can't fake reality, and perhaps the consequences for those who tried to in this case are more far-reaching than they might have anticipated at the time.
That aside, and as far as Mr Valliant's book goes, if BB's account does show Rand in a lesser light than is truthful -- that is, in a lesser light than she deserves -- then I sure as hell want to know about that.
It would be satisfying to think that discussions such as this were unnecessary, but as long as Objectivism is a philosophy for living, those who are living it will be scrutinised. That's as it should be, and ~that~ is why the manner in which AR lived is important. Every great thinker has more than one biographer, and each will offer a different context; I welcome anyone who helps to honestly explicate the context of those who have gone before.
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