Ayn Rand: The Beast 666

I keep running into Ayn Rand, for she seems to have regained her place as the darling of the American Right. Very creepy experience.

My life with Rand began in junior high. My mother the English teacher receives an annual maildrop of information about the Ayn Rand Ayn Rand Institute Essay Contest. Every year the Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit in Irvine, California, splits $85,000 into 569 prizes and hands each to a Junior High or High School student brave enough to read one of Rand's godawful novels. Many a money-conscious parent has force many a young reader into undergo that traumatizing experience. It's probably destroyed more budding socio-political novelists than anything since television.

A Jewish pharmacist's daughter, born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum in St. Petersberg, 1905 (the year of Bloody Sunday and revolution), Rand was twelve in 1917, when revolution again seized Russia, this time for good.

Escaping to America in 1926, young Alisa Rosenbaum committed the kind of auto-genesis her characters are always going on about and renamed herself. Alisa Rosenbaum may have got on the boat, but it was Ayn Rand to when to Hollywood.

During this period, she ran into Cecil B. DeMille, designed costumes for RKO and married an actor. She also, according to the eXiled's Mark Ames, began idolizing the serial killer William Edward Hickman, "The Fox."

Hickman was a check forger, convict, and armed robber who kidnapped his former employer's twelve-year-old daughter, strangled her, cut her into bits, and tossed the bits out of a moving car all over Los Angeles. His capture in the town of Echo, Oregon, trial, and subsequent execution were the celebrity trial of 1928. And, as Ames notes,

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand — guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing — admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Other people don’t exist for Ayn, either. Part of her ideas are nothing more than a ditzy dilettante’s bastardized Nietzsche — but even this was plagiarized from the same pulp newspaper accounts of the time. According to an LA Times article in late December 1927, headlined “Behavioralism Gets The Blame,” a pastor and others close to the Hickman case denounce the cheap trendy Nietzschean ideas that Hickman and others latch onto as a defense:

“Behavioristic philosophic teachings of eminent philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer have built the foundation for William Edward Hickman’s original rebellion against society…” the article begins.

The fear that some felt at the time was that these philosophers’ dangerous, yet nuanced ideas would fall into the hands of lesser minds, who would bastardize Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and poison the rest of us. Which aptly fits the description of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy developed out of her admiration for “Supermen” like Hickman. Rand’s philosophy can be summed up by the title of one of her best-known books:The Virtue of Selfishness. She argues that all selfishness is a moral good, and all altruism is a moral evil, even “moral cannibalism” to use her words. To her, those who aren’t like-minded sociopaths are “parasites” and “lice” and “looters.”

"Thriller" novelist Michael Prescott (who's Next Victim my Aunt Judith happened to be reading over Christmas, so props to you, Michael) adds more depth to the picture on his page of Rand:

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.

The more I read up on her life, the creepier she becomes. A picture emerges of writer, speed freak, and sociopath. A cult-leading Anne Coulter. A dress-wearing Glenn Beck. A roadshow barker, tossing red meat to the masses she despised, labeling them “parasites” to be ground under food.

Over at Slate, Johann Hari concludes his little book review/psychoanalytic biography of Rand with this eminently reasonable assessment:

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism's opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

I don't find it hard to understand why this happened to Rand: I feel sympathy for her, even as I know she would have spat it back into my face. What I do find incomprehensible is that there are people—large numbers of people—who see her writing not as psychopathy but as philosophy, and urge us to follow her. Why? What in American culture did she drill into? Unfortunately, neither of these equally thorough, readable books can offer much of an answer to this, the only great question about her.

Now, Rand's followers, on the other hand, diverse nothing but scorn. And, as Ames points out, some very highly placed people--Alan Greenspan, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rep. Michelle Bachman (R-Batshit Crazyville), Glen Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and God only knows how many ordinary Americans who have nothing like her fucked up childhood to use as an excuse.

Whenever you hear politicians or Tea Baggers dividing up the world between “producers” and “collectivism,” just know that those ideas and words more likely than not are derived from the deranged mind of a serial-killer groupie.

One who died the year before I was born, alone and unloved, from lung cancer. So it goes.

You'd think, in a nation so obsessed with protecting our children, we might do something to protect them from the cackling-mad doctrines of this evil old woman. To say nothing of the fact that her books are downright boring. Even her early novels, like Anthem (which I read in eight grade) show signs of terminal Victor Hugo's disease, a kind of sprawling, preachy romanticism that went out when Dostoyevsky died.

Yet Rand's crap remains popular, and tough economic times are forcing pundits from all corners to blame populism. Yet the essence of her "objective" truth is elitism--the belief that you are superior to everyone and everything around you. And what could be more American than that?