In the past week I've started reading a new fiction book, new for me at least. Most people would recognize the title---Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I've never read it before, although I have read some of Rand's nonfiction work years ago.
"Aha, I knew it! He's become one of them!' I can hear certain of my leftist friends saying, if they read this, as if I am not already a lost cause to them.
On the left, it is an article of faith that Rand is an inferior writer of bad philosophy and with a nasty, contemptible worldview. Appreciating her work is a sign of poor taste.
I used to have this attitude when I was a leftie. I read Rand's philosophical tracts in college, but it was with the attempt to refute her, because I knew in advance she was wrong about everything. I specifically wanted to be able to argue with the big-ell Libertarians I knew who promoted her as a prophet, so I could respond to their well-prepared arguments.
Over the years my attitude towards Rand and her work softened a bit, partly because of the predictable robotic leftist reactions against her, even though most leftists wouldn't dream of reading her books. They have plenty of experience, however, with people who have read Rand, and they know what happens to you if you get into her work.
I've since learned that among the left, reading her to refute her, as I originally did, is not at all an approved activity. One simply does not contaminate one's mind with anything like that. One already knows how to think and feel about it. What can be gained by actual exposure, once one has achieved that awareness?
So why am I reading Atlas Shrugged now? Simply it is because a friend asked me, in a roundabout way.
The idea came up during a recent phone conversation with my friend Greg, whom I knew in high school as an acquaintance, but who has been one of my best friends since I visited him in Memphis in 2009, where he lived at the time, divorced with his two young sons. He has since gotten remarried and moved to Omaha to live with his second wife and her family. His children, and hers, are now grown to adulthood.
Greg's politics are somewhat of a mystery to me at any given point, although I'm certain he voted for Hillary. He still hates Reagan from our high school days, the way we all did back then. Nevertheless he's a self-described fiscal conservative who has voted Republican in the past.
As a small businessman---he operated his own furniture import business for decades---he learned first-hand how taxation and regulation can cripple the ability of the little guy to compete against the corporate giants. As an undergraduate, he had gone to the University of Georgia, and like other people I know from that state, he has affection for the hometown news organization CNN, which he watches for much of his news, at least as of my lsat visit to Omaha three years ago. But he's not at all enthusiastic about Biden.
In our phone call, he described a recent phone conversation with his oldest son, Nate, who is an undergraduate at a liberal arts college in Memphis. I know his son well from many visits over the years. It's been a privilege to see his boys grow up.
In that conversation with his son, they had gotten into a heated argument sparked by the visit of a conservative speaker to Nate's campus in Memphis. Greg didn't mention who the particular speaker was, or what their views were. I inferred that it was someone with a controversial reputation.
On the phone they argued over the topic of free speech.. It was a stereotypical generation gap confrontation between Gen X and the younger crowd. That is, Greg believed that one should tolerate the airing of all views, even ideas that one finds detestable.
"You gotta let the assholes speak," he told Nate, "at least so you can know what they're up to."
Nate, however, was having none of this line of reasoning. Like many of his generation he believed that the speaker had no right to air his type of hateful views and should be prohibited from speaking on campus.
Listening to this, I couldn't help recall a conversation I'd had with both of them during a visit I had made to Memphis in May 2014, during Nate's graduation from junior high school. It was a lovely ceremony held in a historic Episcopal church in central Memphis that made me feel comfortable to be in. There was nothing political about the ceremony. It feels like a different era.
At the time six years ago, I had recently discovered the phenomenon of Tumblr blogs, which for a season were a trend among preteens and teenagers to express their identity and views, before Instagram and Twitter took off.
I told them that the subculture of Tumblr was "Extreme Wokeness." The youngsters were far left in their identity, embracing what seemed like the most radical positions on the Rainbow Flag and Critical Race Theory spectrum.
It was all new to Greg, and only marginally familiar to his young sons. At least that's what they said. Greg listened in disbelief as I told them how on Tumblr, everyone had to announce what their personal pronouns were, a revelation that Greg found absurd when he first heard it.
Among the Tumblristas, as the youthful bloggers were known, there was a defined spectrum of gender identities beyond anything someone from our generation could possibly imagine at the time, even in parody. They were also utterly intolerant of any dissent, venting their hatred openly for anyone out in the world who dared to challenge the legitimacy of their worldview (few dared to do so on Tumblr itself). They had special insults reserved for various classes of their enemies.
The kids on Tumblr seemed utterly miserable to me, but of course they had a reason for that misery, namely all the rest of us who didn't go along with their worldview. Needless to stay I never interacted with anyone there, or ever started a Tumblr blog myself.
Greg put up a confused resistance to this at the time I told him. Was I making this up? I informed him that he was, in the parlance of Tumblr, a shitlord. The word, I told him, meant a person who was caught in reactionary ideas who did not embrace the vanguard of race-gender-cultural fluidity.
These ideas were enforced like a rigid code among the youth on Tumblr, even as they curated their blog pages to reflect the particular unique combination of pop cultural iconography that fit their own personal identities.
Greg protested that he didn't want to be a shitlord. I told him that it wasn't up to him.
"There's no escape," I told him. "Just the fact that you're an old straight white male makes you a shitlord. Trying to appease them only makes them hate you more."
I warned him that this was the wave of the future. "When these kids get into college, they are going to demand that everyone obey these rules," I said. "I'm telling you this now so you can prepare in advance."
At the time I remember Nate listening along in the back seat. He said he knew what I was referring to---kids are the first to know all these things---but it was clear he was not among the people of his cohort who read Tumblr blogs as a matter of daily habit. I didn't think he would necessarily become one of those people, but events have progressed rapidly. The pull of gravity of one's peers is very hard to escape. Now I'm surprised if a young person doesn't want to announce their preferred pronouns in public.
I've barely seen Nate since that day, but I've followed his college career through Greg, so I was aware that Nate had gradually adopted the universal creed of wokeness that had become as mandatory as chapel attendance once had been on campuses in the Nineteenth Century.
As Greg spoke to me over the phone in our recent call, I pondered whether to remind him of this conversation from six years ago, in which I had warned him of the inevitable future, but I thought nothing would be gained from bringing it up.
Greg then told me that he had attempted to bribe Nate to read Atlas Shrugged, which was one of his own favorite novels from long ago. He told Nate he would give him five hundred dollars if he would read the book.
"Did you know there's a John Galt Boulevard in Omaha?" he asked me, referencing the name of the well-known fictional hero of that story. A local developer had named the street decades ago, based on his appreciation of the novel.
Whenever it was appropriate, Greg said, he liked bringing this curious fact up to strangers in Omaha, in order to talk about Atlas Shrugged. He's a friendly, garrulous guy so I easily pictured him doing that, as he was doing to me over the phone. But I knew about the book already, of course, and recognized the John Galt name, as it's a famous detail about the story.
It wasn't clear whether his son had taken him up on his offer. The book is over a thousand pages long in small print. "About fifty cents a page," I told Greg, doing a quick calculation in my head.
Given what I know about Nate's cohort, I am assuming there is little hope that reading any book would alter the trajectory of his ideological development in the short term. But there is an incumbency on Greg as a parent to at least try to provide such influence.
Then spontaneously I told Greg over the phone: "Heck, you know what? I'll read Atlas Shrugged, And you don't have to pay me five hundred bucks."
After he realized I wasn't joking, he offered to send me a free version of the audio book, which he owned and could relay to me through a membership in a service he belonged to. He's a big consumer of audio fiction, as I've learned from the times I've spent riding along with him in the long trips between Omaha and Memphis that he used to make, while he still had his old apartment there.
"It's sixty-eight hours long," he warned me.
I accepted his offer of the audio book, although I realized there was little chance I'd go through that many hours of listening, given all the other things I already listen to. So I went online immediately and purchased a paperback copy, and when I finished other books I was reading, I started in on it. I'm about a hundred pages in. I just got through the first racy love scene.
Overall I quite enjoy the book, more so than I thought. I hope to finish by the end of this month, before I go up to spend some time in the Colorado mountains, which play an important role in the story, although I haven't gotten to that part yet.
The most surprising thing to me so far is how much of the book concerns the railroad industry in America, the history of which I know a lot about. Rand's description of various railroad builders who defied common wisdom and public skepticism to achieve greatness evoked comparison in my mind to the real life versions that had lived half a century or more before Rand published her book in 1957.
In this way the book feels anachronistic to me, as if already out of date when she wrote it. It has an air that Derrida might call hauntological, referring to the eerie psychological displacement of being inside an alternate historical timeline that isn't necessarily defined as such, but which one knows cannot be the "real" reality, of either the past or the present.
Likewise Rand's description of wealthy railroad heirs growing up on a large estate reminded me of similar scenes I had imagined for a story I have been researching and writing for many years based on real historical figures---a story that my friend Thor and I came up with---but for which the corresponding scenes would be set at the turn of the 20th century.
Already I am very glad I chose to read the book, as it fills a hole in my knowledge of contemporary fiction, especially about New York City and Colorado.
Now whenever anyone asks me "Have you read Atlas Shrugged?" I will be able to reply "Why, yes I have."
As for the audio version, I haven't downloaded it yet, but I will probably do so, in order to tell Greg that I listened to at least part of it.
It will be good when I see him again in Omaha (a very important city in railroad history), whenever that will be. We will talk about the book. He will drive me out to see John Galt Boulevard.
We will go to his favorite taco restaurant and perhaps he will ask the person behind the counter in a friendly way if they know who John Galt is, and he will then explain what that means, and mention the street nearby, in a way that the other person will find entertaining and useful. Greg has that effect on people. Maybe the other person will even read Ayn Rand.
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