I first fell in love with Ayn Rand in 1963, when I read Fountainhead. That was a story of an idealistic architect who was willing to sacrifice everything in order to construct a building that was “correct,” and he would not permit the architectural profession nor the development community to dissuade him. It was a story of a man standing up for what he believed, and it resonated with me during the sixties.
Soon afterwards, I read her classic Atlas Shrugged. That was a story of an idealistic railroad owner who wanted to build a lighter, faster, more efficient train but was continually foiled by a gray, faceless bureaucracy that wanted only to crush innovation. Over the years, I continued to read everything I could find, which was substantial.
In a college sociology class, I learned about social homogenization. Just as government requires that milk from coast-to-coast be homogenized, so that it is safe and tastes the same, an unholy alliance between government, media, and culture is homogenizing Americans, creating coast-to-coast sameness. I thought of Ayn Rand.
My parents strongly encouraged me to work for the government, but I thought of Ayn Rand. My first wife strongly encouraged me to stay in the military, but I thought of Ayn Rand. As the survivalist movement began in the late 1970s, I thought of Ayn Rand.
Arguably, the greatest TV commercial of all time was the Apple commercial that appeared only once, i.e., during the 1984 SuperBowl game. It showed a female athlete being chased by some military goon squad into a large theater where the gray, ashen, robotic people watched propaganda films. The women threw a large hammer thru the screen, liberating the poor souls. It was pure Ayn Rand imagery.
Over the years, I learned I had little in common with other fans of Ayn Rand and drifted away. Then, in 2009, I learned that certain politicians, including Paul Ryan, required their staffers to read her books, which echoed the mind control she would have hated.
Recently, I was lucky to have obtained a rare, over-priced DVD of her 1942 film classic We The Living. This is a story of a young, anti-Communist girl who is an engineering student in 1923 Russia and finds herself caught between two men. One is a persecuted former aristocrat, and the other is an officer in the hated KGB. Those who use Ayn Rand to further their purist political agenda will not find her film helpful. The heroine falls in love with the tragic aristocrat who rails against the Communists but succumbs to profiteers. She saves him by prostituting herself with the KGB official she loathes. However, in the end, she realizes too late that she was really loved by the KGB official, not the idealistic fighter. The KGB official stands up to the gray, faceless bureaucracy, announces he is prepared to die for his belief that Communism betrayed Russia, and he does.
I have written before that the tragedy of Ayn Rand is that her philosophy has been used to intellectually justify various purist political agendas. Today, the Tea Party reflects her disdain for an oppressive government but inconveniently ignores the rest of her philosophy, such as rejection of what we now call “social values” and “safety nets.”
R.I.P. Ayn Rand . . . if you can.