| | Jason Lee Steorts has written an extraordinarly dishonest smear piece. A spiritual sister to the Whittaker Chamber's piece.
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He writes, "It’s not just the gas chamber. She piles offense upon offense, and they all come down to this: Instead of bringing forth the best within her, she brings forth the barely comprehensible hatred of her derangedly insecure ego."
He implies that the train scene where the tunnel blows up is Ayn Rand (via her heroes) marching men, women and children into a gas chamber. Repeating the nasty smears of Whittaker Chambers made in the same magazine over half a century ago.
First, he paints the picture of what led up to the explosion - from Atlas Shrugged, " 'It’s not my problem to figure out how you get the train through the tunnel, that’s for you to figure out!' Kip Chalmers screams at a station agent. 'But if you don’t get me an engine and don’t start that train, you can kiss good-bye to your jobs, your work permits and this whole goddamn railroad!' " ... "'The station agent had never heard of Kip Chalmers and did not know the nature of his position. But he knew that this was the day when unknown men in undefined positions held unlimited power — the power of life or death.' And so the station officials, knowing that the loss of their jobs means the loss of their lives, call in a coal engine, procure a drunken engineer, and condemn every passenger on the train to death by asphyxiation."
Then the author, Steorts, says that he stopped his reread of Atlas Shrugged at this point, "...because Rand thinks they [those who died in the tunnel] deserve it."
Rand is saying that actions have consequences, and in the story the people on the train symbolize different elements of the causes of the economic/political degeneration and that without those elements, the tradgedy would not have happened. She is contrasting the ordinary denials and evasions - the mental compartmentalization that allows evil to come into being.
He claims that the gas chamber anology is valid despite the following defense against it.
Here are his words: "Now there are two important defenses of Rand. The first is that it is the looters, not the prime movers, who make the gas chamber possible and send the train into it. The second is that Rand’s philosophy is incompatible with totalitarianism, and no one who believed it would ever send anyone to a gas chamber. Both are true. Neither has anything to do with what troubles me about this gas chamber, and about Ayn Rand."
Lets be clear. A gas chamber anaology was false to start with since it is an example of purposely murdering people by forcing them into a situation that takes their lives. There is no element of anyone being herded into a chamber at gun point and that point alone makes the anology despictable and unforgivable. But even more, neither Rand nor her heroes make the 'gas chamber' possible. Neither of them are the force behind putting people into that tunnel. Rand, her protaganists and her supporters oppose totalitarianism. Steorts agrees with those points, but then he continues to maintain that there is validity in the gas chamber analogy and he promises to explain why this is so. But he never does! How dishonest is that?!!?
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He meanders about, reviewing The Fountainhead and giving his personal reactions to elements of Rand's fiction:
Talking about the way the heroes look good and the bad guys don't, he says, "This projection of virtue and vice into physiognomy and physique disfigures The Fountainhead as well, but less. In Atlas Shrugged Rand seems to grow more spiteful with every page turn, so that the looter on page 7 has “a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead,” while the two on page 560 have a “pendulous face . . . with the small slits of pig’s eyes” and a “doughy face . . . that scurried away from any speaker and any fact.” Even their names are belittling: Buzzy Watts, Chick Morrison, Tinky Holloway."
What kind of psychology thinks that symbolizing virtue with attractive appearances, and symbolizing character flaws with negative visual cues "disfigures" a novel? In what universe is that "spiteful"? I would suggest that it is only so in the universe where someone believes in a secret elitism where PC regulations prohibit saying what one believes to protect those that are 'disfigured' morally and ethically, or in a universe of total moral and cultural relativism that is also laden with PC considerations. Or, perhaps in a universe where evil is not to be identified and absolutes don't exist and one has a duty to never condemn evil.
He goes on to say, "...which is why even the villains of The Fountainhead possess a measure of dignity and humanity. But in Atlas Shrugged Rand instead looked out and showed us the world of men as she sees them. And she sees them viciously."
Here I think it becomes clearer. He wants villans to have redeeming qualities, but he also wants them larger than life. He didn't like the way the villans of Atlas Shrugged were little. He missed the point. Evil, Rand was saying, can only exist by sanction of victim. She painted the villans small because they are in real life. Remember her description of the great brown bear of Russia as actually just being a large pile of brown cockroaches seen from a distance and mistaken as a great bear?
Her novel was intended to illustrate the sanction of the victim as a needed component of evil succeeding. The strike was the denial of their sanction. People whose psychology generates subconscious images of evil as great and powerful are often fearful of not continuing to grant a sanction. Don't upset the bear!
He says, "The book [The Fountainhead] finally starts to get interesting when we meet its Devil, an architecture critic and public intellectual named Ellsworth Toohey." He Describes Toohey as, "... witty, urbane, eloquent, ironically colloquial, physically repulsive, smashingly dressed, surgically subtle, and purely ruthless." Is it just me, or do you detect an attraction there? He like Toohey.
And this, THIS, is the heart of his objection to Atlas Shrugged. That is has no larger than life villans. He calls that "... her contempt for her creation." Saying, There is no Ellsworth Toohey, no villain we can respect and - as readers - enjoy." I see a man attracted to evil but perhaps unwilling to see that in himself.
So, out of a strange, but self-revealing jumble of dislikes for what are mostly stylistic artefacts, the author of this disgusting article stands by the gas chamber analogy making his baseless claim to have validated it.
National Review is now 2 for 2 - WFB must be having a wet dream in his coffin. Onward Christian Soldiers, march as to war...
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" ‘From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged,” Whittaker Chambers wrote here 53 years ago, “a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber — go!’” What he did not write is that Ayn Rand throws in a gas chamber. It’s about two-thirds through, in a chapter called “The Moratorium on Brains,” than which I reread no farther. (Our president seems to have inspired — which is not quite the word — half the country to read Miss Rand, and I wanted to remind myself what she was teaching them.)"
