Wisconsin--Beleaguered but Great

It was a comment that nagged at me, though perhaps “statement” is a better word, since Susan had written it and not spoken it (though I’m absolutely sure she’d be willing to say it, as well). But she had written, “I think the man is a psychopath,” and she was referring, yes, to the current governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker.

It was interesting, I felt, on many levels, not the least of which was that when I was practicing as a psychiatric nurse—OK, three decades ago—the theory then was that true psychopaths are so rare that you might spend your professional career in psychiatry and never meet more than a handful of them. How rare was psychopathy? Well, am I wrong in thinking that we actually renamed the disorder as something like, “antisocial personality disorder?” I could look it up, if it mattered….

Oh, they were out there, and we were told: Beware of any friendship between a borderline personality disorder—of which the population was saturated—and that odd psychopath. Because the mix was supposed to be deadly. Here’s the way it might play out:

Borderline (to be known herein as “B”): Oh Jack, I know I can trust you, because you’re the ONLY person who understands me! (This was called splitting: setting one person up as the savior, versus the whole wide wicked uncaring world). And you’re so smart, and so kind (manipulation). And I feel so alone, and so helpless (play for empathy). I’m just so helpless, and I’ll never get better! That’s why I going to tell you: I’m going to KILL MYSELF (drama queen!) Yes, I’ve been cheeking my meds, and now I have enough! So between PM and night shifts, I’m GOING TO SWALLOW THEM ALL!

Psychopath (“P”): OK

Here, it’s not what happened but what didn’t happen, since the borderline was on a completely different train—and track—as the psychopath. Because the borderline assumed that the psychopath would run straight, although covertly, to the nursing / medical staff, to alert them. Then, the borderline would swallow the pills, arrange herself like Violetta in the last act of Traviata, and wait for the tenor—garbed in scrubs or whites—to come in at the last scene.

Wrong….

So I had been aware, in my forays through TED talks and YouTube, that we had all been seeing psychopathy wrong. Now… well, consider this quote:

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is a diagnostic tool used to rate a person's psychopathic or antisocial tendencies.  It was developed in the 1970’s by Dr. Robert Hare, a Canadian professor and researcher renowned in criminal psychology, who has spent three decades studying the concept known as the psychopath and based partly on Hare’s work with prison inmates in Vancouver.

For those interested, there’s a documentary below. And so I watched it, since a novel is looming on the horizon, the central question of which is whether there is higher than normal levels of psychopathy in conservatories, and if so, why? And how does it play out on both the faculty and the students?

And I knew that there were some professions that attracted, or maybe selected for, psychopathy. And that’s adaptive, in a sense: Confession—I give injections very well, to the point that I have had to show the empty syringe to the patient all to convince them that, yes, I gave the shot, though he or she didn’t feel it. I do this by caring not in the least about the patient, or whether he or she will feel it. Oh, and I absolutely do NOT say: “Now this is going to hurt, so take a deep breath, and I will tell you when I’m going to give the injection….” Duh, guys?

So am I a psychopath?

Wrong question, according to the documentary, since there are very few pure, 100% psychopaths: It was Ted Bundy, if I remember correctly, who got “only” 39 out of a possible score of 40. So maybe I would score a 1 or a 5 or even a 15: It doesn’t qualify me to play in the big leagues.

Well, one of the researchers interviewed in the documentary was actually from the University of Wisconsin, so that meant my problem was solved, right? Hey, just call the guy up—people in Wisconsin tend to pick up the phone, or at least answer message (might be that lingering duty towards the Wisconsin Idea…)—ask if Walker was a psychopath, and report in to all you Concerned Readers. Whew—my job done for the day! Beach time!

This tells you, perhaps, that my psychopathy is limited to piffling affairs like giving shots, because it took me several games of Sudoku (during which I mull things over) to realize: No amount of tenure would be enough to get a shrink to diagnose anyone he hasn’t met over the phone to a stranger. Oh, and if the patient is Governor Walker? Well, in his case, I fear that we’ll never know if nice guys finish last….

Right, so that wasn’t happening. And then I began to mull what I began to think of as the theory of historical inevitability. I give you the old question: How could Germany, the center of culture and scholarship, the homeland of Goethe and Schiller, have fallen prey to Adolph Hitler?

There’s one answer—and no, by the way, I’m not comparing Walker and Hitler—and that is that if it hadn’t been Hitler, it would have been somebody else, just as bad, just as totalitarian. The period—with its humiliation over the defeat in World War I, its massive inflation, it anti-Semitism—selected the dictator. And his name happened to be Hitler.

I’m on the fence on this, but it did stir me to wonder: Why did Minnesota, a state so similar to Wisconsin, go one way, while Wisconsin went the other? OK—let me rephrase the question: How many people know the name of the governor of Minnesota, versus the governor of Wisconsin? I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t, until Mary Jane, a very nice woman from Minnesota told me: The name is Layton, he’s very unassuming, completely inept at giving glib answers, and totally committed to the state. OK—maybe we now do know about nice guys finishing last….

But was it just coincidence? I had figured out that the rise of Walker coincided with the subsequent boom in fracking sand mines in Wisconsin, and who had put Walker in office? Right—The Koch brothers, and so I had written a post last year, entitled something like “Oil Barons Buy the State of Wisconsin.” But the question still nagged: Why Wisconsin, not Minnesota? Just bad luck?

Then it dawned on me: What are the characteristics of the victims of psychopaths, and could a state be a victim, as much as an individual? Here, I have no answer. But the documentary made very clear: Psychopaths are predators, who study their victims as a lion studies a herd, looking for the weakest victim. And here I checked on the website psychopathsandlove.com—and could I make this up?—and discovered what I had suspected: Victims tend to be trusting, loyal, caring, sentimental, and committed to helping others meet their goals.

Sound familiar?

And so I resolved another problem I had been having, since I’ve been feeling massively guilty about having elected Walker in the first place—true, a bit irrational, since I’ve been living out of state for 25 years, now—and especially guilty about possibly inflicting him on the rest of the country. Because guess what? Victims of psychopaths feel guilty, much like abuse victims. Gee, wonder why that could be?

Right—so I’m working on it. All of the things that made Wisconsin go for a good guy like Fighting Bob La Follette also made us perfect victims for Joe McCarthy and Walker. What makes us great makes us weak.

Oh, and the theory of Historical Inevitability?

…think I know which way I’m leaning now! 

A Monday Morning Walk Through Facebook

Well, well, it’s a Monday morning, and isn’t it time to walk through Facebook?

Bloggers get to do this, you see, or maybe we have to, since there are days when the news is so unremittingly bad that The New York Times and El Nuevo Día are merely siren songs for suicide (sorry for that alliteration—all this poetry stuff I’m doing must be rubbing off). So what can I tell you, or rather, in what new ways can I derich your—perhaps/ probably—difficult Monday morning.

Well, start off briskly with this:

Do I have to? Because—talk about a graphic being worth a thousand words—who needs to make that click? I know perfectly well what’s happening, I know perfectly well how I feel about fracking (essentially, frack that), and so why make myself crazy?

Does it get better? Of course not, because then we have to come to this:

Wonderful! Investigated that just enough to know that vegetarianism is out, too, since the storage tanks holding all that highly radioactive water? Do I have to tell you?

Move on to this:

Why isn’t Congress acting? Do you think I haven’t asked myself that question? Of course, and here’s the answer, if you really didn’t know: Congress is not acting because, for the last six years, a bunch of elderly white bigots ostensibly called Republicans have been in a frenzy of obstructionism. You see, the world changed—you see, they don’t. Oh, and guess what? Because here’s what’s next….

Devoted as I am to you, Dear Readers, who wake every day thirsting to read this blog, whose one reason is to wake…oh, skip it. I checked it out and yes, Thomas reasons that Congress can’t establish religions, but that doesn’t mean that a state can’t. So you Mormons out there in Utah? Feel free!

Well, the Supreme Court is taking a well-deserved rest, having busily fucked everything else up for the rest of us, who are going to have to get busy and do stuff like this:

 

Go to it guys!

At last, I have uncovered the reason for the deeply addictifying nature of Facebook, since the site puts you into such a state of catatonic rage—don’t know how they do that, but they got it figured out—that you then have to turn to stuff like this:

Well of course, of course, I had to spend seven minutes of Monday morning looking at the movie references to Wisconsin—you, Dear Reader, deserve nothing less—but having done that, please don’t waste your time. Somebody, after all, has to keep this world together.

But now, I’m saved by Montalvo, who arrives with the news that his poetry is driving him crazy, since he spent five years making the same mistake, namely writing lines of two words each. I’ve told him, the feeling of reading poem like this is just like bumping down the stairs on your rear-end. So it’s time for a challenge: write a poem of four four-line stanzas, with each line being at least eight syllables each. The first line is “Your memory is a silent ghost,” and you have half an hour to do it. Get to work.

Well, can I do that? I decide to try:

Your memory is a silent ghost

That still cries at night, when the wind,

Cold and unwanted, forces itself through the

Cracks of my empty heart, which even now

Has a ventricle for the eyes that saw no one but me,

Before they misted, clouded, became watery, then pus-filled

And at last, all desire lost, refused to see.

A ventricle to, for the voice, which once was only

Laughter, then turned to song, and then

Hardened slightly, turned as somber as mute swans

In a chill Autumn pond, until your voice, as they, fell silent.

I fled, then, to the other chambers of my heart, places

You were little likely to go, places I might have shown

You, but did not.  I slammed the valves shut, cemented them

With hurt, grief, the usual glues of a deadened love.

I waited, alone, in a dusty corner, and listened—

Thump-thump, thump-thump; you knocking insistently

For a while, but each day more silently, weaker, until at last,

Tired of a call never answered, you left, and it was silence

At last.

A Blogger Proposes Marriage

As proof of our suitability to marry, I bring you the following dialogue, ten days ago:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

I admit it, as a child I used to wonder at my parents, who could telescope an entire conversation into about six words. Now I totally get it, because who needs to do the whole thing, which would be:

Raf: Did you hear about Wisconsin?

Marc: Yeah, isn’t that great? You think there’s a federal judge out there who’s willing to support a same-sex ban?

Raf: Nah…

Marc: Hey, wanna get married in the Period Garden Park?

Raf: Absolutely!

OK—it’s happening so fast that you may have missed it, since the accurate headline would run, “Ho-hum, Another Federal Judge Strikes Down Same-Sex Marriage Ban.” But a Friday or two ago, Judge Barbara Crabb joined the parade, and issued her ruling. And she slung a few, rather crabby—sorry, had to—remarks to all those who believe in “traditional” marriage. She pointed out that, for most of humankind, marriage ha been between one man and multiple women, and was that where we wanted to revisit?

Undoubtedly, the judge had been reading this blog—I think that’s totally neat, and sorry, Judge, for poking fun at your name. (I know what that’s like, since I’ve spent a lifetime being called Marc Outhouse…)

At any rate, the judge ruled on a Friday afternoon, and then some neat stuff happened. There were the two guys who told the waitress in the pizzeria that they had just gotten married. So she told the boss, who promptly said that the food was on the house. That, of course, went viral—definitely good business move. Note—get ready for the Westboro Baptist Church, guys!

Then there was the county clerk of Milwaukee, who decided to open the clerk’s office on Saturday, a day it would normally be closed. So—this being Wisconsin—he paid for the whole thing out of his own pocket. And what’s happened to him now? He got slapped with a lawsuit, which is causing him, he says, no loss of sleep.

The predictable happened, meaning that 555 or some such number same-sex marriages took place, and then another federal judge put a stay on the ruling. So now the Wisconsin couples are in legal limbo, as are couples in various other states, including Utah and Michigan.

So, Dear Reader, you’re all invited to the Period Garden Park, on the second Saturday of June, 2015 to witness the consummation of what we started thirty-two years ago. That is…

Mr. Fernández, will you marry me?

(Here's what's NOT gonna happen!!!)

Come to Think of it, the Eiffel is Kinda Sexy….

Well, if Cousin Ruthie said it, it had to be real, but all the same, it seemed incredible. And indeed, The Huffington Post confirmed it:

The "marriage evasion" law criminalizes leaving the state to “contract a marriage that is prohibited or void” in Wisconsin. Couples violating the marriage evasion statute can be fined up to “$10,000 or imprisoned for not more than 9 months or both.”

So that means that a gay or lesbian couple who drive across the bridge to the Twin Cities, get married, and then drive back over the bridge to Wisconsin have committed a criminal act in Wisconsin.

There’s good and bad news. First, the law has been on the books since 1915, when “marriage evasion” laws were popular: the laws were intended to prevent inter-racial marriages, in general, but also marriages to minors or recently divorced people. (Wisconsin, apparently, has a six-month waiting period for remarriage….)

The other good news?  

The law hasn’t been enforced since 2001, when a man left the state to get remarried 30 days after his divorce was finalized.

Now for the bad news: the law is still on the books. And guess what? Well, here’s the Wisconsin Gazette on the subject:

ACLU of Wisconsin executive director Chris Ahmuty said it’s not difficult to imagine a rogue district attorney apprehending a same-sex couple married out of state in order to make a statement or score political points, just as renegade county clerks in New Mexico and Pennsylvania are handing out marriage licenses to test the law in those states.

And, in fact, the Gazette goes on to say that in 2009, the CEO of the Wisconsin Family Council (note—any title with “freedom, “family,” or “heritage” in it should give you the shivers) said this:

“You purposely left the state or another state and you get married and you know it’s not going to be legal where you reside and you have every intention of returning. That’s defrauding the government,” Appling said in the interview.

And who is Appling? Well, the Gazette wonderfully supplies the answer:

Appling, a never-married woman who has lived for decades with another never-married woman in a home they own jointly in Watertown, continues to work fiercely against equality.

Well, any conscientious blogger would check out the Wisconsin Family Council, so I took a deep breath, and clicked on the link. Fortunately, though, I got a message saying that the website certificate was invalid. This I took to be a sign: the universe was letting me off the hook. But who was Julaine Appling?

Well, The Huffington Post, via the Cap Times had the answer: "the most important social conservative in the state." Oh, and she was also reported to be the driving force behind the (gag) defense of marriage amendment to Wisconsin’s constitution in 2006.

And here’s what she said when asked about whether she was, err, you know…that way:

"I would submit there’s not a person alive who hasn’t said, 'Well, I wonder,' because of the culture we live in, the time we live in," Appling, 60, told the Times. "It's a natural part of the maturation process. It's not a life sentence."

Oh, but not to worry, because “people have left gay lifestyles by the droves successfully.”

Whew, so there’s hope!

Which is lucky, because it seems I’m on the slippery slope. Fortunately, Mr. Fernández hates the French, so I’m unlikely to be tempted, but an Iowan, living in that cesspool of sin that permits gay marriage, has news for me. You can see it in the clip below, or—so says the Iowan—you can simply google “red herring,” and what you’ll see will shock you.

Well, the red herring was a red cape to my inner bull, so I did that, and discovered nothing more noxious than the standard definitions. But add “gay marriage” into the mix? Your eyes will sear in horror!

“Kids, I’m sorry to tell you that my gay marriage deeply threatens your straight—and putative—marriages. Just felt you should know.”

Felt like I should warn the guys at the coffee shop.

“Hey, you’re gay? Always thought you were straight…” said Mendoza-who-is-not Montalvo (don’t ask…).

I tell them about Wisconsin, that it’s a criminal offense to go get married—if you’re gay—in another state.

Lucía, busy sweeping the floor, is totally uninterested in my sexual orientation—WHAT!—but remarks over her shoulder that “don’t worry, my generation will take care of that.”

Which it will, of course.  Julaine Appling is in her young 60’s—will any girl of Lucía’s age lead the closeted life that Appling has? Not likely.

There was a time when, “I’m” and “gay,” were the two hardest words in the language to put together. But practice has made it easy: I’ve told bosses, parents, strangers that I’m gay. And now, I’m gonna tell the public about it. In twenty states—including Wisconsin—gay couples have gone to court to challenge the state amendments that invalidates their marriages.

I bought an apartment next to Raf’s parents, so that someone could live there and look after them. And I asked the notary, who described me in the deed, if it was really true that I was soltero, or single. Legally, yes, he said, according to the laws of Puerto Rico. He then went home, tossed and turned all night, and called the bar association the next day. They had been waiting for the call….

“Hey, I’m a footnote in the legal history of Puerto Rico,” I ran around telling everybody. I and Raf had become the first reference legally to a same-sex marriage in a legal document in Puerto Rico. Being a footnote feels great—try it sometime…

So why not be a paragraph?

Newhouse versus the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico!

Like it?

Wisconsin is Open for Abuse

It’s the time of the year when my mood turns cynical, or rather, more cynical, since I’m never entirely free of the outlook.

But in this case, it seems absolutely justified, since the great—well, at one time—state of Wisconsin passed a law that forbids…OK, here’s the headline:

New state law conceals records of abuse, neglect in nursing homes

I came upon it via Ralph Nader, whom you can see and hear below, on his talk on the defining question / issue of our time: the corporation. And, in passing, he mentioned that tort lawyers are finding it difficult to sue nursing home chains. Why? Because the homes are owned by a corporation with few assets that are owned overseas (probably a tax shelter) by another corporation, which in turn may be owned by another corporation. So even if you sue successfully and get a judgment, can you collect? Nope!

Well, that was sufficiently interesting to turn off Nader—sad the things you can do cybernetically but not in real life—and google “tort law nursing homes.” And that’s where I came across the state law, which was meant to promote a more business-friendly environment in the state.

And what’s the essence of the law? Here’s the State Journal:

The law, which went into effect in February 2011, bars families from using state health investigation records in state civil suits filed against long-term providers, including nursing homes and hospices. It also makes such records inadmissible in criminal cases against health care providers accused of neglecting or abusing patients.

What does that mean? It means that if you—as did Joshua Wahl, in the article cited above—leave Mother in a home and she is lying in her feces for hours at a time, she will very likely develop a bedsore. And if, as happened to Wahl, the bedsore is never adequately treated, Mother may develop an infection that may turn into septicemia. And that’s life threatening.

Now, let’s imagine you are the incredibly slacking type who doesn’t turn Mother over every two hours and perform a thorough inspection along with good skin care. You shockingly assume that that’s their job, after all. What resource do you have, to make sure that old Mother is getting the proper care? The friendly smile of the home’s administrator?

You know, of course, that the state inspects the facility, and there’s that official-looking certificate on the front door (or next to it). And so you decide to go online and check if the Wisconsin Department of Health Services has any info on Mother’s nursing home (now euphemistically called a “skilled nursing facility”). Well, I did—and came upon a page which, in miniscule type said this:

Wisconsin Nursing Homes: State Citations Issued from 10/01/2012 to 09/30/2013 Information is current as of 10/28/2013

OK—I’ll save you a trip to search for the magnifying glass—it’s Wisconsin’s citation of nursing homes for an entire year, from October 2012 to October 2013. And guess what? I was looking up my own mother’s old nursing home, Ingleside in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin. So I was on the “I” page, and how many citations were there for an entire year for nursing homes beginning with “I” in Wisconsin?

One.

OK, it’s diluted but it’s there. Jack, my old journalist father, sometimes spurs me to action. And so I went page by page counting nursing citations in Wisconsin. I can hear the bated breath out there….

There were 28.

Here’s the link: try it yourself.

Yeah? Well, let’s do a posthumous—in my mother’s case—search for records on Ingleside. So I did a search in the “providers” page, entered the name, the county, and the city. And guess what? The search turned up this:

No records were found for your search criteria

(At least that’s what happened to me. It has to be said, however, that the talented Ms. Taí came up—somehow—with a helpful six-page report. Here’s the link, and good luck!)

https://www.forwardhealth.wi.gov/WIPortal/DQA%20Provider%20Search/tabid/318/Default.aspx

OK—Ingleside doesn’t exist, what about the Attic Angels, where I worked many a night shift?

Also not found….

Four Winds in Verona?

Curiously, the site found it! Wow, and there was a map!

What wasn’t there?

Anything else….

All right—time to trot over to Google, to check out how many nursing homes—including the phantom one that had sheltered my mother three times in three years—there are in Wisconsin. And I chose what must be an industry (word used quite intentionally) site. Here’s the dough:

Wisconsin contains 390 certified Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes. These nursing homes have a total of 34,876 available beds for skilled nursing residents and at the time when we updated this data 82% of those beds were full. The overall average Medicare 5 Star Quality rating for Wisconsin skilled nursing homes is 3.5 which ranks 13 nationally.

What! We’re only 13 nationally when in an entire year we only had 28 citations for 390 certified homes! Wow, those twelve other states must be immaculate!

Walker, with his “Wisconsin is open for business” slogan, seems to have gutted any effective regulation of at least nursing homes. And you know, I spent a portion of today inventing new, Walkeresque regulations. Things like:

Inspectors are encouraged to choose between on versus off site inspections.

Or how about…

Inspectors are under no circumstances permitted within 50 yards of the facility. Inspections should be limited to general questions—e.g. “everything going OK in there”—to passing staff members. Non-responses will be considered a “overwhelmingly positive.”

You know, I worked for years in those places. I know perfectly well that in even the best homes I could have found a dozen citations, had I been armed with the regulations. Considering a little time to rest up in a nursing home?

Enter at your own risk!

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!