Those Randy Republicans

Who knows how I stumbled on to this? Perhaps it was meeting a very engaging professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, and discovering—what did we do before Google?—that she had written an article about the convergences of Wisconsin under Walker and Puerto Rico under our former governor, who is so conservative that he was rumored to be a member of Opus Dei. (caps by tradition and nothing else….)

Right—read the article, which is excellent, and then remembered having seen something about Paul Ryan. But what was it? Well, it was three in the morning, so I tripped—almost literally—off to bed; this morning I remembered: Paul Ryan’s ideological mentor is or was Ayn Rand.

Look, let’s be fair. When you are 17, and when the beauty of purely abstract thought is freshly sprung upon you, you can be forgiven for loving Ayn Rand. Similarly, when at the same age you choose to bathe in the emotions, you are permitted to love Tchaikovsky. The point? You’re supposed to grow up.

Rand’s philosophy, which she called Objectivism, is deeply attractive to the adolescent mind; in fact, it almost feels that it was created for it. And there may be a reason for it—Rand could have stopped her cognitive development because of a traumatic incident. At age 12, she saw the Bolsheviks seize her father’s pharmacy in St. Petersburg.

She was told it was for “the people;” she saw it as rank injustice to her father, who had worked and struggled and dared and succeeded. And so she developed a philosophy, the philosophy of Objectivism. Its cornerstone was reason, and the first floor was selfishness, which she hailed as the greatest good. From that, the corollary was a hatred of altruism, or doing anything that was not in some way in your self-interest. And then came a hatred of religion—Rand was a staunch atheist, because who was more sickeningly altruistic than Jesus, curing all those lepers and washing whores’ feet? Screw that.

Now then, anything that prevents you from your capitalism, from making your fortune or pursing your goals, is bad—so that means government, unions, social groups pressuring on you or regulating you or even just taxing you. So—zero, or at least minimal, government.

Rand came to the United States and started writing—she cranked out The Fountainhead, which was pretty good, and then got to work on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. At 1200 pages—60 pages of which are a long speech that the main character presents outlining Rand’s objectivist principles—it makes an excellent doorstop. The hitch? It’s completely unreadable.

“What’s it about?” you may be asking.

Well, I got through, those days when I was reading Rand, but only because of the discipline practicing cello six hours a day had given me. And confession time—the book is so bad, it’s a soporific. In the same way that new mothers are said to forget the agony of labor an hour past, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged recedes into a fog of words. Or perhaps it’s just buried under them.

OK—here goes. A Great Man, John Galt (did I hear the sharp intake of breath, somewhere? You know, the one the denotes surprise and adoration?) is a great industrialist, but what happens? The fleas, the blood suckers, the leeches—read government, unions, church, social groups—drive him to abandon his enterprise and go off, with everybody like him, to form their own perfect, objectivist world. And so we’re fucked.

Dear Reader, calculate your hourly rate and the amount of time it would take to read a 1200 page blowup of the idea above. Then send your check to me….

Of course everybody hated it, but guess what? According to William F. Buckley—neither an intellectual lightweight nor a rabid liberal—it was the best-selling novel of all time. Is it still, after Twilight and the Fifty Shades of Gray? A better blogger would look that up….

Whether yes or no, it’s sold a lot of copies, and sales of the damn thing spiked two years ago when it was announced that Paul Ryan, the cute and chilling boy senator from Wisconsin whom Romney picked to give some pizazz to his ticket, had read it, been deeply influenced by it, and had given it to his aides as required reading. I presume, by the way, not on the taxpayer’s nickel, which would have driven Rand out of her grave and charging to Capitol Hill.

For the conservatives, you see, have taken the same approach to Rand as they have to the Bible: pick and choose. Rand’s atheism? OK—skip that. Her views on homosexuality, which were that she wasn’t into it, but the government had no business saying one thing or another about it? Err, move on. Her belief that sex…wait, let Wikipedia tell the story….

In rejecting the traditional altruistic moral code, Rand also rejects the sexual code that, in her view, is the logical implication of altruism. In Atlas Shrugged Rand introduces a theory of sex that is based in her broader ethical and psychological theories. Rather than considering sexual desire a debasing animal instinct, Rand portrays it as the highest celebration of human values, a physical response to intellectual and spiritual values that gives concrete expression to what could otherwise be experienced only in the abstract.

Right, maybe a mistake there, though the writing above does give you a fair taste of the 1200 page work itself. I can put it simpler—fuck whom you want. As Rand did, by having an affair for umpteen years with the husband of her close friend. Oh, and there are three adulterous affairs in the book—all very much glorified as the supreme and crowning physical expression of noble, selfish beings.

The conservatives have also forgotten that Rand scorned Ronald Reagan, whom she thought (rightly) was a nitwit. Nor did she think he was a true capitalist, but rather a “mixed-government” type. Here she is:

In conclusion, let me touch briefly on another question often asked me: What do I think of President Reagan? The best answer to give would be: But I don’t think of him—and the more I see, the less I think. I did not vote for him (or for anyone else) and events seem to justify me. The appalling disgrace of his administration is his connection with the so-called “Moral Majority” and sundry other TV religionists, who are struggling—apparently with his approval—to take us back to the Middle Ages, via the unconstitutional union of religion and politics.

The threat to the future of capitalism is the fact that Reagan might fail so badly that he will become another ghost, like Herbert Hoover, to be invoked as an example of capitalism’s failure for another fifty years.

Observe Reagan’s futile attempts to arouse the country by some sort of inspirational appeal. He is right in thinking that the country needs an inspirational element. But he will not find it in the God-Family-Tradition swamp.

Well, we have the John Galt Society and the Ayn Rand Institute and a whole host of organizations that espouse the carefully pruned views of Ayn Rand. In fact, Rand had a whole coterie of followers, some quite influential, like Alan Greenspan. And so Paul Ryan went off to speak to the Atlas Society in 2005; here’s what he said:

The 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.”

Or consider this, from 2009:

“what’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now. I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”

Well, well—the election came along and it had to be admitted: there were some serious issues that Rand espoused that the right wing didn’t want to get into. So when someone trotted over to ask Ryan about all this, here’s what he had to say:

He admitted that he had “enjoyed her novels,” but, as Mak notes, he stressed that, “I reject her philosophy. It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas.”

Wow—that’s class! Epistemology? Thomas Aquinas? Well, I looked it up: what was the epistemological view of Aquinas? And here it is:

Thomas believed "that for the knowledge of any truth whatsoever man needs divine help, that the intellect may be moved by God to its act."

Reading further, I came upon this, from the wicked and atheist pen of Bertrand Russell:

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

Oh, I thought—isn’t that another word for apologetics? So I trotted over to look that up, and yes, it’s suspiciously close—apologetics is the defense of (usually) a religion by making formal arguments (when possible). Oh, and as an example, I found a wonderful graphic used to explain the trinity, a concept that has mystified everyone for a millennium or two. Here goes:

 See? What could be clearer? Well, got that cleared up!

All this, and before lunch!

And Thus Spoke Susan

Readers of this blog—which, I’m happy to report, include folk from Spain (17), Russia (11), UK (6), Trinidad and Tobago (3) and one each from France and Ireland—know that I’m busying myself by listening to Haydn’s The Creation. Well, why not? For seven years I sat in a room and threw pencils at the students. Don’t I get a break?

And speaking of breaks, why do I have to write every day? Can’t somebody else shoulder the burden? And since this blog is now international, shouldn’t it start getting serious?

Well, it was puzzling me, yesterday, as I sat in the Internet café absorbing the air conditioning. What to say about my paisano, my countryman, my almost neighbor?

Paul Ryan. Resident—or so I thought—of Janesville, Wisconsin. The very city my father, Jack, was born in! And a man who has cheese flowing in his veins (as he disturbingly said yesterday). 

But what to say?

Well, those years of being a teacher paid off. A student asks a question you can’t answer? Send him to the library to do some research! Get somebody else to do the work.

Susan!

I dashed off an email, asking if she might say a few words about the man, and then began to feel a little bad. Was it an imposition? Was it fair?

Would Jack approve?

Would Susan feel a bit used? She’s a busy lady, after all.

Answer came back in 45 minutes!

And here she is:

The New York Times (part of the liberal media) this morning (August 13) published a story on Paul Ryan (“Conservative Star’s Small Town Roots”). It leads with “the death of his father when Mr. Ryan was only 16 punctured his life of math tests and bike riding . . . ‘Paul went to work at McDonald’s and began to pull his own weight . . . ‘ says his brother. ‘It is remarkable that he chose a path of individual responsibility and maturity rather than letting grief take a different course.’”

The article continues: “His self-reliance followed him to summer camp, where as a counselor he canoed and hiked, and into young adulthood, where he took up deer hunting, a fact noted in his engagement notice in 2000 in The Milwaukee Journal- Sentinel. “Ryan is an avid hunter and fisherman,” the paper reported, “who does his own skinning and butchering and makes his own Polish sausage and bratwurst.”

What you won’t read in this lengthy hagiography is that Ryan’s mother inherited a bundle from her family’s fortune*, his father was a successful lawyer, the camp Ryan went to was Camp Manito-wish (a pricey camp in Northern Wisconsin -- the price today runs from $2000 for two weeks of basic camp to $12,300 for three weeks on an expedition), the Ryans lived on Courthouse Hill in Janesville (and still do --at least for voting purposes, although he’s rarely left Washington since graduating from college). But the NYT article makes him sound like a typical small town kid, bike and paper route, and appealing to Palin fans’ love of hunting and butchering.

As a student (Miami University in Ohio), Ryan was described as “a freshman with a Ph.D. attitude” but Ryan only completed a bachelor’s degree in -- well, they don’t tell us what his major was. He was in too big a hurry to get to Washington. In summers he was an intern there for GOP politicians. Upon graduation did he get a job and some real-world work experience? He did work briefly in the family construction business founded by his great-grandfather. (In the mail room, no doubt.) But not for long. He ran for Congress and scurried back to Washington.

Besides being entitled, Ryan is a hard-core Catholic -- he is adamantly opposed to not only abortion (even in cases of rape or incest), but also birth control. He hates gays and loves guns. Not only for hunting, evidently, as he supports concealed carry of handguns and the kind of weapons used to kill people in the Colorado theater and the Wisconsin Sikh temple.

The article winds up with “Ask one of the 87 Republican freshmen who came rolling into Washington in 2010 — many of them with no political experience — whom they most idolize in Congress, and chances are Paul Ryan’s name will come up.”

Interesting, as the Tea Party loathes Washington insiders, and Ryan is as insider as it gets.

So the GOP has given us two men from privileged backgrounds and money, neither of whom appears to have done a day of sweaty work in his life, both of whom are deeply embedded in authoritarian, patriarchal, anti-woman religions. 

 *See Esquire Magazine: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-family-wealth-11644997

Wow! Guess I got the answer there!

Well, I did ask. And I pondered it all today, on the daily trot. The Creation, I had decided, was what was called for, after such a gloomy report from home. And I had decided that The Creation would be done in German, since the English version, apparently, resembles a bad computer-translation. Here’s WikiPedia on the subject:

Van Swieten was evidently not a fully fluent speaker of English, and the metrically-matched English version of the libretto has given rise to criticism and various attempts at improvement. Indeed, the English version is sufficiently awkward that the work is sometimes performed in German even in English-speaking countries. One passage describing the freshly minted Adam’s forehead ended up, “The large and arched front sublime/of wisdom deep declares the seat”. The discussion below quotes the German text as representing van Swieten's best efforts, with fairly literal renderings of the German into English; for the full versions of both texts see the links at the end of this article.

Right—German it is! So all I understand are three words: Und Godd sprach. And God spoke. Until I came to this, the slyest and most respectful homage to Handel possible.