Racism Isn't Just Acting Like John Derbyshire

This Thursday past, longtime National Review contributor John "Derb" Derbyshire published a column about how black people are stupid and dangerous and should be avoided except for, maybe, the smart ones. This wasn't on the National Review's website, but elsewhere, Taki's Magazine, which bills itself as "Cocktails, Countesses, and Mental Caviar." Here are some of those intellectual fish eggs on which to feast. Note that this is a sub-list of item ten of how to interact with black people:

(10a) Avoid concentrations of blacks not all known to you personally.

(10b) Stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.

(10c) If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date (neglect of that one got me the closest I have ever gotten to death by gunshot).

(10d) Do not attend events likely to draw a lot of blacks.

(10e) If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.

(10f) Do not settle in a district or municipality run by black politicians.

(10g) Before voting for a black politician, scrutinize his/her character much more carefully than you would a white.

(10h) Do not act the Good Samaritan to blacks in apparent distress, e.g., on the highway.

(10i) If accosted by a strange black in the street, smile and say something polite but keep moving.

After at first only tut-tutting the article, National Review editor Rich Lowry gave Derbyshire the boot. The reasons for doing so should by now be obvious, but it's worth reprinting the official explanation of their ways-parting:

Anyone who has read Derb in our pages knows he’s a deeply literate, funny, and incisive writer. I direct anyone who doubts his talents to his delightful first novel, “Seeing Calvin Coolidge in a Dream,” or any one of his “Straggler” columns in the books section of NR. Derb is also maddening, outrageous, cranky, and provocative. His latest provocation, in a webzine, lurches from the politically incorrect to the nasty and indefensible. We never would have published it, but the main reason that people noticed it is that it is by a National Review writer. Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise. So there has to be a parting of the ways. Derb has long danced around the line on these issues, but this column is so outlandish it constitutes a kind of letter of resignation. It’s a free country, and Derb can write whatever he wants, wherever he wants. Just not in the pages of NR or NRO, or as someone associated with NR any longer.

The first thing that should be noted is that the nature of the column in question is not new. The Atlantic Wire has a good roundup of Derbyshire's long history of proud racism, but suffice it to say it's hard to imagine anyone else having a career as a opinion writer in a mainstream magazine after telling the University of Pennsylvania's Black Law Student Association, in person, that as African descendants they should collectively resign themselves to being dumber than whites. John Derbyshire often comes off as a terrible human being, but he is compellingly terrible, and both refreshingly and alarmingly upfront about his white supremacy.

So really, this whole fracas is just "Derb being Derb." And that's part of the problem, for "Derb" has some qualities, if not redeeming (there's no redeeming the unrepentant), then that at least help explain why he lasted as long as he did. His cranky pessimism (his most recent book was titled We Are Doomed) led him to butt heads with his erstwhile National Review colleagues ever so often, on issues like George W. Bush, creationism, and Terri Schiavo. This was amusing, if nothing else, but it also made him idiosyncratic and not at all a mere conservative apparatchik. He also has a way with words and on occasion put them to good use, such as his account of how he ended up playing an uncredited thug in a Bruce Lee movie.

Derbyshire's mixture of qualities both compelling and repelling, then, tends to trip up even (especially!) folks who we would like to think would know better about this sort of thing, but hate to see someone with otherwise admirable qualities as so morally deficient. I myself will admit to not saying anything when certain acquaintances have made ugly, racist remarks, for risk of jeopardizing the relationship. If we are to grant President Obama's understanding for his white grandmother, who feared black men passing her on the street, we can on some level feel that Lowry and company being slow to action regarding Derbyshire (whose bigotry is much, much worse) is understandable, if not acceptable.

The sad fact is most people don't grapple with these issues enough to have an informed opinion. To the casual observer, racism is a skinheaded, swastika-tattooed Edward Norton curb-stomping a black guy--not some crusty old Englishman who writes for a magazine the average American has never heard of. Thus the depressing number of people--if the comments on some of these pages are any indication--who echo Derbyshire's sentiments and claim they aren't being racist (though, notably, Derbyshire has before admitted his racism straight up). I don't wish to defend such ideas, but I do think it important see where the people who espouse them are coming from, that they may just possibly be corrected.

Regarding National Review, it's perhaps uncharitable to say Derbyshire got fired for being too obviously racist, but Lowry's statement that "Derb is effectively using our name to get more oxygen for views with which we’d never associate ourselves otherwise," even though Derbyshire said plenty of other nasty things under the National Review banner, suggests he was fired because of the shitstorm he brought to their doorstep rather than their understanding of why the shit was storming. It's not only Derbyshire's ridiculously offensive prescriptions that are the problem. They are the symptoms of the disease: a rotten dehumanization and objectification that is palpable in the very words he employs.

Consider the "intelligent and well-socialized blacks," which Derbyshire finds so remarkable as to require a category unto themselves. He encourages his hypothetical children to befriend these "IWSBs," because these ostensible friends are an "amulet" to guard against charges of racism, like a crucifix to ward away the devil. ISWBs are furthermore, "something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous." Black people were once literally white people's property, and today John Derbyshire argues they are at best a commodity good.

That black people aren't really even people to him, just "blacks," just objects and things that are without agency or feelings or lives outside of a general incompetence and hostility to whites, is inherent in the very premise of the article. The piece is a tongue-in-cheek response to "The Talk" that black parents give their (male) children about interacting with trigger-happy and negligent law enforcement and the culture at large. This is a horrific and persistent issue, with the Sanford Police Department's botched handling of the death of Trayvon Martin (and Geraldo Rivera's subsequent declaration that Martin brought it on himself for wearing a hoodie) being only its latest and most visible iteration. Derbyshire's response is to treat the death of innocent youth as a joke and write a "Nonblack Version" of The Talk that proves its point by getting the issue precisely backward; in response to a talk about how to maneuver in a world of prejudice, we have a "talk" on how to perpetuate prejudice.

This mindset, viewing vast swaths of people as cultural grindstones and other mere tools, goes beyond this single episode. Recently leaked documents from the National Organization for Marriage revealed a strategy to court conservative blacks and Latinos--the latter of which must have their assimilation into the culture interrupted for fear of losing their conservatism--purely as a means of attacking gays. Nor is this at all restricted to conservatives. Bill Maher's recent declaration that he can't be a racist because he gave a million dollars to Barack Obama (as a follow-up to an Alexandra Pelosi video that 'documented' dumb, poor, liberal New York City blacks in response to criticisms of her footage of dumb, poor, conservative Mississippi whites), displays a similar reductiveness.

The whole episode, and the Martin case more broadly, is a depressing reminder of our discourse's gross immaturity. Racism is not demonology. It is, at heart, like a great many problems, a failure of empathy. To miss this crucial point and focus on the obviously outrageous is, pardon the term, so much thinking in black-and-white.

When in Rome

Modern-dress Shakespeare is a chancy affair. As often as it is successful, like Julie Taymor's ancient-modern mashup Titus, it can be just as often gimmicky (certain aspects of the Baz Luhrmann Romeo+Juliet) or a bloody mess (the Australian gangland Macbeth is one of the worst filmed Shakespeare adaptations I've ever seen and most definitely my worst-ever blind buy). As with every other directorial decision, displacing time needs to be justified: why should this text of 400 years of age be re-set in modern times? What does it have to say to us today? Titus worked so well because it took an obscure and sort of crappy play and turned it into a meditation on humanity's timeless penchant for violence. Ralph Fiennes' take on Coriolanus, another lesser-known Roman piece, albeit one much higher in quality, is quite happily a success: more than an exercise in cleverness, it makes the Renaissance writing and the classical conflicts viscerally immediate.

Our story takes place in "a place calling itself Rome," besieged from without by the Volsces, led by Tullus Aufidius (Gerard Butler), and within, by grain shortages that have the people rioting. Caius Marcius (Fiennes), one of Rome's most decorated soldiers, spurns the rioters and their objections, and then proceeds to drive the Volsces from their city of Corioli, for which he is rechristened Coriolanus. His mother Volumnia (Vanessa Redgrave) convinces him to run for consul in spite of his contempt for popular rule, but two scheming tribunes, Sicinius (James Nesbitt) and Brutus (Paul Jesson), goad him into denouncing the masses, leading to his exile to Volsces territory, where he offers himself to Aufidius to lead a revenge campaign against Rome.

That's an awful lot of story to recap, but really I'm just scratching the surface. The Roman plays are Shakespeare's most politically-minded, and Coriolanus is thematically one of his richest, with its rival strains of democratic and elitist thought. Alas, this is chiefly why the play remains relatively unknown. Marcius has the distinction of being one Shakespeare's most opaque tragic heroes; he has only one soliloquy, here expunged, and so the audience's opinion of him is based entirely around his heated and often contemptuous interactions with other characters. His disgust with the plebians is a hard sell in a modern democracy, and is counter-balanced by the populace itself--fickle, ungrateful to its military protector, and easily manipulated by unscrupulous politicians.

It's not an easy piece, but Fiennes has confidence in it and takes it in fascinating directions. Whereas the original historical context of the story is the very early days of the Roman republic, shortly after the expulsion of the Tarquin kings, the Rome of the film is an apocalyptic, bombed-out urban shell that everywhere seems to be coming apart at the seams; had they referred to it as 'Athens,' the opening scenes could barely be considered fiction. DP Barry Ackroyd of the Bourne trilogy and The Hurt Locker, films the proceedings in his now trademark rough-hewn handheld camerawork, giving the movie an even grittier edge. All this is grounded further with the occasional BBC-style news report that serves the additional functions of condensing the text and easily communicating story developments. Occasionally the modern approach falters, like with a political-debate scene on a Sunday morning talk-show style set whose audience consists of the same couple dozen protesters we saw earlier. But by and large world is very well-realized.

At the center of it it stands Fiennes' Marcius, battle-scarred and bald-shaven. He lives to fight, if not with enemy soldiers then with his own people, and is patently unsuited for the political life that is expected of him. He is the end product of a society that has been at war so long that the violence has taken on a life of its own. The character is not likable per se, but neither is he trying to be. He is proud, but not boastful, and part of his antipathy towards the rabble is a refusal to pander to and flatter them. As a protagonist Marcius has his limitations, but Fiennes gives him as much seething life as can be imagined.

The performers that surround Fiennes, which also include Brian Cox as the sympathetic senator Menenius and Jessica Chastain as Marcius' wife Virgilia, are uniformly strong. The Jacobean English never sounds forced or out of place, which really is tremendous praise. Ultimately, however, the movie belongs to Fiennes, Butler, and Redgrave. Butler is capable, but Aufidius isn't Shakespeare's most nuanced villain by a long shot; he is basically a mirror image of Marcius. What makes their dynamic so interesting is its barely-veiled homosexual subtext. Their close-quarters dueling at the beginning and end of the movie is an erotic death dance, given ample support by the text itself:

O Marcius, Marcius!
Each word thou hast spoke hath weeded from my heart
A root of ancient envy. If Jupiter
Should from yond cloud speak divine things,
And say 'Tis true,' I'ld not believe them more
Than thee, all noble Marcius. Let me twine
Mine arms about that body, where against
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke
And scarr'd the moon with splinters: here I clip
The anvil of my sword, and do contest
As hotly and as nobly with thy love
As ever in ambitious strength I did
Contend against thy valour. Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sigh'd truer breath; but that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing! more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

This in turn is mirrored in the Oedipal shadings of Redgrave's performance. Her Volumnia worships her son but is also virtually the only character that can successfully challenge his headstrong stubbornness. She does so while occasionally donning a decidedly unfeminine military officer uniform. All of this working in tandem conveys a brutalizing masculinity that is driving the world over the edge. As Volumnia sniffs,

"Anger's my meat; I sup upon myself,
And so shall starve with feeding."

SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF A 400 YEAR-OLD STORY FOLLOW

That is basically what happens in the end. Marcius is a born fighter, and in true tragic fashion what dooms him is his betrayal of this nature, by relenting to his mother's pleas to halt the invasion of Rome. This isn't communicated as clearly as it could be, and in fact the ending is slightly altered. In the original play Aufidius whips the Volscian people into a frenzy against Marcius, who "kill'd my son.' 'My daughter.' '...my cousin Marcus.' '...my father,'" and who in turn refuses to abide an insult to his pride. In the movie it is merely the Volscian army that gangs up on him, and the ending speeches are jettisoned in favor of a final bloody embrace with Aufidius and the discarding of Marcius' corpse.

Aside from that admitted nitpick, however, and a few cut speeches that I missed (there's a exchange in the beginning of the play talking about the revolt against Marcius as the body's revolt against the belly; it's great writing, but probably would have slowed the action down too much), this is probably the best adaption of Coriolanus that could be hoped for, and one of the better filmed Shakespeares, period. It makes the original material extraordinarily relevant to the current zeitgeist, but without ever condescending to to work or the audience. Time, is on its side.

Bleed the Poor

I enjoyed The Hunger Games more than I expected. America's last big movie sensation, Avatar, was pretty, but also pretty dull, being as it was so many white savior and environmental and sci-fi themes warmed-over. Hunger Games promises more with its title alone, an ear-catching juxtaposition of poverty and play. In practice, the movie (I haven't read the book series on which it's based, but given there are three of them I would suspect the film's biggest flaw originates therein) does a great many good and interesting things, but does not have the courage of its conception, and ends up shying away from the logical conclusions of its grim setup.

That setup is a very good one. At an unspecified time in the future, there is a nation, Panem, divided into thirteen districts. The thirteen revolted against the Capitol, which crushed the rebellion, destroying District 13 (this detail passed me by in the theater) and re-asserted its authority by decreeing that every year the remaining districts would select by lottery two children, a boy and a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen referred to as Tributes, to go to the Capitol and battle to the death in what are known as The Hunger Games, until there is only one left standing.

The Hunger Games, the movie, takes place on the eve of the 74th such competition. District 12, a coal-mining region, selects as its Tributes Primrose Everdeen (Willow Shields) and baker's son Peeta Mellark (Josh Hutcherson). Prim is but a girl of twelve and for her sake her older sister Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence), who has provided for her family by illegal trapping and hunting game beyond the District boundaries, volunteers to take her place. Katniss and Peeta are taken by a very silly escort from the Capitol (Elizabeth Banks) onto a train, where they meet their mentor, a previous Hunger Games winner and now seemingly hopeless drunk, Haymitch Abertnathy (Woody Harrelson), and head to the Capitol to prepare for the Games. Katniss and Peeta have something of a history, which will play a decisive role in how the Games eventually unfold.

While the geography of the world the movie builds occasionally feels small or ill-defined (the movie doesn't make clear that this is a far in the future America, which makes it seem all the more remarkable that of twelve presumably huge districts the two Tributes should know each other so well already), its character is quite fully realized. Far be it for me to say how The Hunger Games managed to conquer our consciousness in less than three months, but I would posit the fact that it crystallizes so much of the national mood--on reckless endangerment and death in sports and reality television; on the regression of values by endless war; even, and especially, the awareness of teen bullying--and pushes it to, in Peter Brook's phrasing, arresting extremes.

The teenager angle is especially stark, taking high school life, which feels like a life-and-death, end of the world struggle, and making it so. At one point in the Tribunes' training Katness tells Peter to demonstrate his strength, because his clumsiness is making him a target in the others' eyes. This scenario is already familiar to an audience--it may as well be happening in gym class--but here it acquires a vicious edge: they're playing for keeps, as the kids say. Accordingly the opening of the Games, in which nearly half the contenders get slaughtered making a mad dash for a cornucopia of weaponry, plays like the most lethal game of dodgeball ever conceived. The violence is not as brutal as a story like this should be, but it does about everything it can within the confines of commercial necessity. With an assortment of deaths by bludgeons, wasp stings, neck-snappings, and impalements, it's definitely on the outer limits of a hard PG-13 rating, which had already been pushed pretty far by The Dark Knight.

Ultimately, however, the movie shrinks from the horrific implications of its concept. The Tributes, the handful of the 24 that do receive some characterization, are largely written as 'good' or 'evil' types, such that it when one of them dies, it's clear whether we should be happy or sad. These scenes are generally fine in themselves--the way one death triggers a District riot is in fact one of the best moments in the movie--but there's no ambiguity. Inherent in the concept of kids fighting to the death is the possibility that Katniss and Peeta will have to kill someone they don't want to die, including the other. I can't articulate what's wrong with the second half of the movie without going into major detail, so for those who wish to remain blissfully ignorant, suffice it to say that this crushing moral dilemma is deliberately neutered.

HERE BE SPOILERS.

Midway through the Games the rules are very explicitly changed so that two victors can be allowed if they're from the same district. The gamemaster who makes this change does so to keep Katniss and Peeta from being killed on orders from the President, and to encourage a 'Romeo and Juliet' angle that will play well with audiences. This completely eliminates the Hunger Games' basic tension, the zero-sum scenario that could force good people to kill each other to survive, and reduces the conflict even more to good kids vs. bad kids.

The rules are borked with even further, however, so that the final showdown with Cato, the District 2 Aryan psychopath antagonist, has to be literally conjured out of thin air, with a pack of hyena-like beasts forcing them all into one confined area. Then the two victors rule is rescinded, forcing the zero-sum conflict back into the story where it should have stayed from the beginning. And then, just when it seems like the movie might actually pull off a great ending in spite of all this narrative chicanery--that Katniss and Peeta will, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, commit suicide rather than abide by the pitiless one-victor rule, and so defy the false notion of hope the Games are built on--the rules change once more so they can both live and the audience can have a happy ending.

Making an actual character, the Gamemaster, responsible for changing the rules is a clever attempt to shift the blame for narrative inconsistency away from the story's author and screenwriter, Suzanne Collins, but it's still a cop-out. Yet as meta-textual commentary it's a smashing success. The Panem audience loves Katniss and Peeta, and The Hunger Games opens with juggernaut $211 million blitz.

I'm making this sound worse than it is. Director Gary Ross's decision to film all this with a nervous, handheld shaky-cam and rapid-fire editing is a terrible decision that sometimes results in near total geographic incoherence, but the first two-thirds of the movie manages to be very good anyway, thanks to a strong cast (Lawrence is the obvious standout, playing a girl caught between mature resolve and youthful vulnerability, but the supporting cast, including Harrelson, Wes Bentley, Stanley Tucci, and Donald Sutherland as the President, are vital to realizing the world of the story), and some solid visuals, balanced between the squalid Districts and the shiny, shallow, Capitol.

In the end, the movie's done its job. In spite of the cheap ending I'm invested enough in the characters to find out what happens, and may well check out the books, which I'm told describe the world in considerably greater detail. The movie's second half, though, hurts badly, in all the wrong ways. It betrays the promise of the premise, making what could be a truly great story merely good for the sake of a follow-up. Perhaps the the sequels justify it, but for now, I'm still hungry.

He Needs to Talk About Kevin

Fiction is an inadequate medium to address ideas of fate. A story is crafted, hopefully with care, by a writer with an intent in his plotting, a method to his sadness. Drama is ultimately about creating expectations in a story and then meeting, subverting, or at least addressing them in some way. Chekhov's third act firing gun and all that. Real life, as was elsewhere noted regarding the fictions of Mike Daisey, is decidedly not intentional. We all have expectations, but the universe is at best haphazard in dealing with them in any meaningful way. Life is less a tightly-wound plot than a freewheeling improvisation. Thus is it all the more impressive that Jeff, Who Lives at Home is as entertaining and successful as it is, being as it also is a warmed-over meditation on the 'everything happens for a reason' philosophy of the movie Signs.

That's not a joke, except that it is. The very first thing we see, after some intentionally "deep" text as said by the titular Jeff, is Jeff himself (Jason Segel) elaborating on the profundities of Signs, into a tape recorder, while he's on the toilet. It's an amusing introduction to the character, a 30-year-old man-child that Seth Rogan might have played a few years ago, who lives in his mother's basement and smokes pot all day, and who takes a random caller asking about a "Kevin" to be a sign that he should follow every Kevin he can, to find his path in life. He sets out to buy some wood glue to fix a wooden slat in the closet door for his widowed mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon)--who amid her own mid-life malaise tries with the help of her friend Carol (Rae Dawn Chong) to learn the identity of a secret admirer at work--and ends up running into brother Pat (Ed Helms), who seems to regard his wife Linda (Judy Greer) as a whiny medium through which to project his own ridiculously vain urges and desires, including a new, ill-advisedly purchased Porsche. Not at all surprisingly, the two brothers find out, Linda might be cheating on him.

It's a good setup that goes as far as it can until thematic necessities of destiny intervene with a climax and ending that, to this atheist anyway, too conveniently tie everything together and wrap it up. But it's a lot of fun while it lasts, thanks to the actors, who find great humor and warmth in characters that could easily be grating stereotypes--the lazy schlub, the asshole husband, the frazzled mother--as well as a perhaps a somewhat surprisingly sharp script. The creative team, brothers Mark and Jay Duplass, hail from the Mumblecore indie film scene, noted for its barbarically lo-fi and improvisational filmmaking approach. The only other film of theirs I have seen, the comedy-horror Baghead, was as good a representative of the genre as could be hoped for, in that it succeeded in spite of its inherent indulgences.

Since going quasi-mainstream, the brothers have upped their technical ante, though not entirely. The script, on the one hand, is marvelously crafted, with the goofy and quirky indie humor balanced by the quiet desperation of the characters. The contrast between Jeff and Pat, total opposites in life motivation yet still finding themselves adrift without their father, is nicely handled. The laughs are frequently inventive too, with the stakes constantly escalating and great mileage being made of devices as varied as a parking ticket and a cell phone.

Less deftly handled is the camera, which if not actually handheld at least feels like it is. It moves with coffee-addled jitter, and most annoyingly zooms in and out constantly, as in at least twice a minute throughout the entire film. The first time it happens it's a lovely bit of comic exaggeration, but it wears out its welcome a minute later after the fourth or fifth use. It's adaptable eventually, in the way a person with Tourette's syndrome adapts to his body and facial tics, but its no less annoying for being so. It makes the movie rather an eyesore to watch, like Cloverfield without having the expectation beforehand of motion sickness, and mars what is otherwise a very entertaining comedy.

There's also, as mentioned, the goofy 'interconnectedness of the universe' cosmology that dictates its precedings, but in the end one either buys it or one doesn't. The film is enough of a hoot that it doesn't matter that its ideas are a conscious retread of M. Night Shyamalan's second best movie. It at least knows when it's being funny and ridiculous.

A Daisey Train of Thoughts

Before The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, there was this, the original Daisey deception:



I am kidding, but not only kidding. The exaggerations of Mike Daisey and the Johnson campaign, while different in their specifics, are in fact much alike, for they were both done for a Noble Cause. The former is exposing Apple's shady manufacturing processes in order to effect their change, the other was beating Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Both causes contain clear villains whose (potential) offenses are so great as to justify whatever distortions may be used in service of the goal of defeating them.

That the things Mike Daisey described--child workers, workers poisoned by N-Hexane, workers whose hands are destroyed by repetitive motion--that these happened is not in dispute. That they happened to the people he talked to, is.

This matters. It's not enough to fall back on Apple's established bad record when attacking them. 'They've done bad before, why wouldn't they do it again?' is a righteous comfort, but not right; it's the hallmark of conspiracy theorist thinking. Indictments of individuals and organizations must rest on their actual offenses against the actual people in the actual factories.

That Daisey felt the need to make the victims he didn't meet seem as if if they were the ones he did, is also vaguely egotistical in a white savior kind of way, as if they wouldn't matter if they weren't a part of his China experience. It's irritating for the same reason that Tom MacMaster's posing as a Syrian lesbian is irritating: it re-channels the suffering of a group through a voyeur of the privileged class such that only by the contact of the one with the other is the story granted legitimacy. Granted, acknowledging that characters and events had been fictionalized might not fully inoculate Daisey from such a charge--white saviorism is the most crippling problem with The Help--but by declaring a work fiction it would justify concentrating Apple's accumulate transgressions into one narrative.

The issue of narrative is what galls the most about Daisey's defense on This American Life's retraction of their January excerpt from his show. I'm a man of the theater as Daisey is, and I am with Ira Glass a hundred percent on this:

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater.

I'm guessing the "context of the theater" refers to the work's own subjective, internal context. Seen on its own, as a story, it is powerful and moving. But so was Johnson's Daisy ad. It was great political theater, and it committed people to the (arguably) good cause of denying Goldwater the White House. But stories don't exist in a vacuum. And these particular stories, were not true.

Mike Daisey and Shakespeare and Greater Truths

The theater has ever been an ailing medium, wanting relevance in an increasingly technology-based world. It's with considerable discomfort, then, that I've read about Mike Daisey's fabrications in his monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, whose popularity and success in effecting some actual change to Apple's business practices were astonishing and admirable.

Daisey's defense is that he's "not a journalist" and that he shouldn't have consented to have his show excerpted on This American Life, which is a journalistic enterprise. True enough. Daisey is an actor and performer. But what has he been performing? He describes it as "a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license," but is this clear to the audience? When Daisey sat at his table onstage and described what he claimed to have seen in China, audiences were inclined to take him at his word. This wasn't a The Things They Carried exercise in meta-fiction; the assumption was we were hearing about the experiences of Mike Daisey, not "Mike Daisey."

But still: Daisey is a storyteller. Ought not he be allowed to use every storyteller's tool at his disposal to do his job? Well, yes and no. Many people would probably scoff at the idea that there's such thing as a "greater truth," that one doesn't need facts for, but in almost any kind of dramatic narrative, it's generally true. Any costume drama is going to elide certain facts simply for narrative convenience. There are too many details that are either irrelevant or would take too long to include in the two hours' traffic of the stage. Shakespeare was notoriously promiscuous with the facts in his "True Historie"s of England's monarchs, but to dwell on that would be to miss entirely the point of a powerful piece of theatre as Richard III.

The problem is Daisey isn't merely out to entertain the groundlings. His truth is greater than the Tudor Myth that Shakespeare appealed to; it is the very real and very bad conditions of Chinese factories manufacturing Apple products. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs deals with Daisey's own ambivalence with Apple, yes, but it functions also as an expose and chronicling of Daisey's discoveries. At that point, when the integrity of the work is dependent on the unearthing of facts, creative license is no longer a benefit but in fact a considerable detriment. This was the critical failure of a very different work involving Shakespeare, last year's historical disaster film by Roland Emmerich, Anonymous. The goal of that grand misadventure was to tell the "truth" that "Shakespeare" wasn't actually Shakespeare, but it couldn't be bothered to get basic facts about the time period straight.

There is plenty of room in the world for both fiction and journalism. Goodness knows the internet's made it easier than ever for the propagation of falsehoods, nonsense, and pablum (see: Kony 2012), but it can also illuminate the darkest of places, such as the way Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have helped document and sustain the Arab Spring. But one can't have it both ways. The fact of Daisey's fictions hurts the credibility of Apple's critics; mingling invention with reportage only reduces the story's potency to so much sound and fury. Thus does the illuminating power of art, that brief candle, go out, out.

Don't Douthat

Ross Douthat, conservative New York Times columnist, devoted his column Saturday to the shortcomings of the liberal and conservative views on abortion prevention, with an emphasis on liberal failures. His thesis? The last part of "Safe, legal, and rare" is not true, as proven by state-by-state statistics. States with liberal laws on abortion, contraception, and sex ed., he says, have lower birth count numbers only because their unwanted pregnancies--which are similar across the board--are terminated by abortion at higher rates.

But the liberal narrative has glaring problems as well. To begin with, a lack of contraceptive access simply doesn’t seem to be a significant factor in unplanned pregnancy in the United States. When the Alan Guttmacher Institute surveyed more than 10,000 women who had procured abortions in 2000 and 2001, it found that only 12 percent cited problems obtaining birth control as a reason for their pregnancies. A recent Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study of teenage mothers found similar results: Only 13 percent of the teens reported having had trouble getting contraception.

This is not true. Or, at least, it is not the whole truth.

Yes, the two studies Ross cites both show only a small percentage, 12 or 13 percent, of women who had procured abortions and teenage mothers, had trouble accessing contraception. This is true as far as it goes, which isn't very. Ross's criticism is of the liberal theory of abortion prevention as a whole, which downplays abstinence education and similar moralizing in favor of, yes, increased access to contraceptives, but also education on how to use them and prevent pregnancy.

The results bear this out, and in fact directly contradict what Ross is saying (emphases mine):

Forty-six percent of women had not used a contraceptive method in the month they conceived, mainly because of perceived low risk of pregnancy and concerns about contraception (cited by 33% and 32% of nonusers, respectively). The male condom was the most commonly reported method among all women (28%), followed by the pill (14%). Inconsistent method use was the main cause of pregnancy for 49% of condom users and 76% of pill users; 42% of condom users cited condom breakage or slippage as a reason for pregnancy.

Again:

Approximately one half (50.1%) of these teens were not using any method of birth control when they got pregnant, and of these, nearly one third (31.4%) believed they could not get pregnant at the time; 21.0% used a highly effective contraceptive method (although less than 1% used one of the most effective methods, such as an intrauterine device [IUD]); 24.2% used the moderately effective method of condoms; and 5.1% used the least effective methods, such as rhythm and withdrawal. To decrease teen birth rates, efforts are needed to reduce or delay the onset of sexual activity, provide factual information about the conditions under which pregnancy can occur, increase teens' motivation and negotiation skills for pregnancy prevention, improve access to contraceptives, and encourage use of more effective contraceptive methods.

A third of women not using birth control did so because they simply believed they wouldn't get pregnant, and  an enormous percentage of those who used it and got pregnant anyway did so because they were using it incorrectly or inconsistently. This is damns liberal policy only in the sense that it isn't being implemented well enough.

When Ross moves into the pregnancy rates of red vs. blue states, he gets into even shakier territory:

What’s more, another Guttmacher Institute study suggests that liberal states don’t necessarily do better than conservative ones at preventing teenagers from getting pregnant in the first place. Instead, the lower teenage birth rates in many blue states are mostly just a consequence of (again) their higher abortion rates. Liberal California, for instance, has a higher teen pregnancy rate than socially conservative Alabama; the Californian teenage birth rate is only lower because the Californian abortion rate is more than twice as high.

He doesn't say which Guttmacher Institute study says this, so I took a look. The very first result for "rate of unintended pregnancies by state" on Google is a Guttmacher study, from 2011, that reaches the exact opposite conclusion as Ross:

In 2006, the median state unintended pregnancy rate was 51 per 1,000 women aged 15–44. Most rates fell within a range of 40–65 unintended pregnancies per 1,000 women. The highest rate was in Mississippi (69); the lowest rate was in New Hampshire (36). Rates were generally highest in the South and Southwest, and in states with large urban populations. In 29 states and the District of Columbia, more than half of pregnancies were unintended; in nine, a consistent upward trend in unintended pregnancy rates between 2002 and 2006 was apparent; no state had a consistent decline.

This isn't to say he's wrong about Alabama and California, which indeed do have similar rates. But note the mention of "states with large urban populations." I looked at a comparison of both unintended pregnancy rates and demographic data for Alabama and New Hampshire, red and blue states which don't have especially large urban centers, as well as New York, a blue state which does (California is missing a lot of the variables I was looking for) and has a similar unintended pregnancy rate as Alabama.

The results are telling: when looking at children living in poverty, Alabama and New York are at 25% and 20% respectively, while New Hampshire is only 10%. When the rate of unintended pregnancies per 1,000 is broken down along ethnic lines, the differences are startling.

Teen Pregnancy Rate by Race/Ethnicity
Statistic	Alabama	New Hampshire	New York
Non-Hispanic Whites, 2005	56	N/A	44
African Americans, 2005	95	N/A	149
Hispanics, 2005	228	N/A	126

African-Americans are disproportionately poor, as are Hispanics, who often face additional language barriers. Poverty goes hand-in-hand with a lack of educational opportunities. And as these results have shown, the poverty rate in these states runs parallel with the unintended pregnancy rate. Since so many of these pregnancies happen because of lack of correct information, it is not at all a stretch to conclude that the poorest Americans are not as educated as they could be about pregnancy prevention.

Poverty isn't a slam dunk explanation by any means, but it's certainly a factor, and one that Ross doesn't even begin to consider. Far from disproving the liberal idea of birth control, the data, properly examined, largely vindicate it.

Rand Down

The Ayn Rand business of the past few months was starting to take over the blog, which is more general interest and eclecticism, so I started another blog, Objectionism, to house all the old postings, as well as the new. I just posted my final entry on The Fountainhead, considering its popular appeal.

I also happened upon a fellow traveler who is blogging every chapter of Atlas Shrugged in a lead-up to the presidential election. Taylor Bettinson hangs his hat at Atlas Clubbed and I encourage you all, all three of you, to check him out.

How the Culture Wars Are Like Like Star Wars

Besides the blatant sperm-egg imagery, the kinkiness of Darth Vader's helmet, and the glowing condom/vibrator Luke Skywalker is wielding, I mean.

Andrew Sullivan, in looking at an ethics-based attack on Obama's revised contraception plan (which I hope to dig into later on), gets at the heart of the theocratic mindset:

Hence his view that no society should allow heterosexuals their rights and homosexuals theirs' and live and let live. Because such neutrality would encourage the idea that gays are equal to straights - which is material if not formal acquiescence to evil. That's how gay marriages hurt straight ones, in his view.

The notion that gay marriage hurts straight marriage has always been laughable to anyone who doesn't buy into it, but I think I actually get where the theocrats are coming from. Think of the Star Wars trilogy. Awesome. Classic. Immaculate. (I know, I know, Jedi's not so hot, and the original is less a great movie like Empire than a special effects showcase, but just go with it. It's not like the history of marriage is so sterling either.) Now think of the prequel trilogy. Middling when not awful, a complete misfire that squanders the legacy of the original.

This last part is key. Many bad, or even potentially bad (think of the recently-announced Watchmen prequel books) spinoff projects have been rationalized by the standby that "even if it's bad, it doesn't harm the original work." But do we actually believe this? We certainly believe in brand reputation. We understand that a cultural entity is the sum of its constituent elements which can't be easily separated or compartmentalized away. Calvin & Hobbes is rightly remembered as a classic because Bill Watterson brought it to a close at its height. As a result our memories of it are still fond, and revisiting it is always worthwhile.

Contrast this (as I did off-handedly quite some time ago) with The Simpsons, which ought have cashed out at the end of the 90s after several brilliant seasons but instead continued on and is still with us today in a significantly diminished capacity. The diamond:shit ratio has suffered badly; Calvin & Hobbes was and is great, while no one can think of Star Wars or The Simpsons or The Matrix without wincing as if they just imagined two dudes on their honeymoon.

Looked at this way, it makes total sense that gay marriage/contraception/masturbation(?) opponents are so vehement that these behaviors not be given legal sanction, even in the form of neutral allowance. If you believe gay marriage is objectively wrong the way The Phantom Menace is objectively bad, you can't be live and let live about it. You "care" about the institution enough that you don't want its weird sequel damaging its good name, and so you'll fight like hell to see that Marriage 2: Electric Bugaloo doesn't come to pass.

Ayn Rand: Ayn Kampf

As I was just about to start The Fountainhead a month-and-a-half ago, I referred to it as an act of self-prophecy. What I meant is that, whatever its literary concerns and conceits, it functions as a veiled account of Ayn Rand’s struggles as a writer and predictor of her eventual fame, as well as the vehicle of same. (For a contemporary analogue, consider Lady Gaga and how The Fame Monster is predicated entirely on its creator’s own sudden superstardom.) It tells a (highly romanticized) story of struggling to success, and was the catalyst for its author’s own stratospheric sales and public profile after years of obscurity and toil. There’s a worn-out maxim that says talent is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and never was that more true than with Rand, whose literary skills were average at best (and, perversely, worsened the further she went into her career, and her own recursive mind), but who was hell bent on becoming a successful author nonetheless and refused to let anything stop her.

In her early Hollywood days Rand worked a number of odd jobs, including a waitressing gig from which she was fired on her first day, and a sales job in which she made only one actual sale. In keeping with her austere standards of self-presentation and in stark contrast to Roark’s easy-going asceticism, she made sure her jobs were out in the suburbs, where her future husband and professional contacts would not see her menial laboring. It was in these days, starting in 1935, that she began planning her second novel.

The genesis of the book was, as mentioned before, a disgusted response to a casual acquaintance whose only goal in life was to one-up everybody else, living life “second-handedly,” by being defined by others and not oneself. Thus was born Second-Hand Lives. For the story proper Rand drew heavily from the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as a popular hack, Thomas Hastings. (The irony that “practically the entire story” of a novel which exalted originality and scorned borrowed fortune should be drawn so heavily from two figures, seems to escaped her.)

In a way, however, the book is autobiography: details from Rand’s life—such as an episode in which a school assignment to write an essay on the wonders of childhood prompted Rand to turn in a denunciation of childhood as a gross and irrational phase of one’s intellectual development—show up, often with little disguising. More interesting is the way certain obstacles of her career are inverted: at one point Howard Roark pointedly turns down offers from a client to heavily advertise one of his creations. This is presented by Rand as heroic individualism. Yet it was precisely a lack of promotion and support that sunk Rand’s first novel We the Living; the publisher destroyed the type after the book’s initial run of 3,000, to the author’s great chagrin.

The gestation of The Fountainhead was long and troubled. Outlining, which had begun as early as 1935, stalled out in the search for a climax. It was eventually solved by the architect Jacques Kahn, for whom Rand had gone to work as part of her research: he it was who told her that affordable public housing was the most bedeviling problem of architecture. But after writing the first of the book’s four sections, writer’s block—“the squirms,” as she called it—struck. Money troubles returned. Royalties from Night of January 16^th and an advance on the new book eventually dried up, Knopf’s contract for the book was not renewed after she missed an extended deadline, and Rand parted acrimoniously with her agent, who had been unable to sell the book to other publishers (as story Rand tells it is that the book was rejected by twelve houses all told, but this includes Knopf, with whom she parted by mutual agreement). At one point she borrowed money from some friends, which she later paid back but never ackowledged for the hated altruistic act it was. To provide income—her husband’s acting career had sputtered out at this point, and so she was the household’s breadmaker—Rand had to work long hours evaluating potential script stories for Paramount Pictures.

She also busied herself with other projects, including campaigning against Franklin Roosevelt on behalf of Wendell Willkie, writing and publishing (in England) the novella Anthem, and adapting We the Living to the stage, in a production entitled The Unconquered which closed after only five days and ended up costing her more money than she made. At one point she was so discouraged by “things as they are” that she considered giving up working towards “things as they should be” altogether. She would have, had her husband Frank O’Connor not spent hours convincing her not to be beaten by those she despised.

She persevered, and got a contract and an advance from Bobbs-Merrill on December 10, 1941, a fortuitous date; had it been signed but a week later, the contract would have been cancelled due to paper rationing for America’s incipient war effort against Japan and Germany. Her contract gave her a year to complete the manuscript. This deadline she made, by engaging in writing binges of days at a stretch, which allowed her to produce sometimes an entire chapter a week. This she accomplished by way of amphetamines that she had begun to take to concentrate her energies, and would continue to take in the following years and decades, which no doubt contributed to her increasingly stormy behavior later on.

When the book was at last finished, edited (she hacked out a whole character and subplot), and renamed, the critical response was bewilderment if not outright hostility to its cheerful immorality, its “gargoyles” of characters, and its overcooked speeches. One of the rare exceptions was The New York Times(!), which called Rand “a writer of great power.”

The popular response was far more enthusiastic. After a slow start the book sold out its initial run of 10,000, and went into several reprinting. Rand had told one of her few close friends at the time, the conservative columnist and novelist Isabel Paterson, that she would not be satisfied with anything less than a hundred thousand copies sold, an enormous number for any author, much less a relative unknown as herself. The Fountainhead sold 100,000 in 1945 alone, by which time Rand was back in Hollywood, working on the film adaptation directed by King Vidor and directed by Gary Cooper, whose script she wrote, and for whose rights she was paid $50,000.

Rand’s fight to the top was both easier and more difficult than she made it out to be. Her fury with trying circumstances is reflected in how she exaggerated certain aspects and papered over others. And she certainly did not pull it off by herself, though she certainly thought she had; she would later say she neither asked for nor received help before she became famous. The Fountainhead, above everything else, is a curious look into how she saw herself and her years in the trenches. Its closing passages, with Dominique Francon riding a construction elevator to the top of the new Wynand Building, past all other heights and structures until “there was only the ocean and the sky and the figure of Howard Roark,” makes a neat parallel with Rand’s own ascendency.

As far as sheer grit is concerned, Ayn Rand earned her success. Yet there were certainly other writers looking for their big break, and of them many far more deserving, on artistic and literary grounds. The real question is why The Fountainhead became the smash hit that it did, a question worth pursuing, even (especially!) by Rand’s detractors.

Contraception Contradictions

The ongoing spat between the Obama administration and Republicans over whether (the insurance companies providing) Catholic Church-run organizations' health insurance plans should pay for contraception is largely partisan--it's really only because Obama is pushing it that Republicans are going to the mat to fight access birth control (I also can't help but wonder if Democrats would have let it slide if Obama had quietly taken the Church's side). But outside of the Washington snake pit there are people who sincerely believe the Republican argument--perhaps it's more correct to say the Republicans take their side insincerely--so it's worth unpacking what's really being argued here. At heart this is another proxy battle in the conflict between liberal and conservative views of liberty.

In an absolute sense, having the requiring Catholic organizations to provide services the Church finds morally abhorrent is an infingement on their right. As a private religious organization they should, in theory, be free to provide or withhold services to whomever they want without interference. No citizen or group wants "the government" to dictate what they should be doing.

But this kind of situation does not occur in a vacuum. For one thing, and this must needs be stressed, contraception is a settled issue for the majority of Americans, and Catholics. The only people really bothered by it are evangelical Christians and Catholic clergy, comprised 100% of "celibate" men. As has been pointed out already, if the religious organization in question were enforcing Sharia law or excluding black people from coverage, many would be singing a different tune.

Yet this is not merely a popularity contest; there is actually a principled reason for overriding this "absolute" liberty that is just as much concerned with freedom. The libertarian perspective is generally, 'keep the (federal) government out, and let whatever happens happen, because private actors should be free to do what they want.' But the federal government is not the only powerful actor at work here. State and local governments, corporations, and organizations like the Catholic Church, wield huge influence over our lives. The example of "excluding black people" isn't a hypothetical; it was the reality in huge swaths of this country up until the 1960s, and it took federal legislation to end it, legislation which Congress's most visible libertarians, the Pauls Ron and Rand, have infamously criticized for its federal intrusion in the private sphere. When it comes to the contraception issue, the Catholic Church owns around 12% of hospitals in the United States, and is acquiring more all the time. If we are going to allow giants, they need to be mindful of who their out-sized feet are stepping on.

It all comes down to first principles. If you start with the premise that an active government is a bad thing by definition, then even if you believe in a woman's access to contraception, or the equality of black people, the fact that those rights are denied in huge parts of the country by private or local actors is regrettable but ultimately acceptable. If your "highest value" (to use and subvert a little Randian terminology) is actual liberty for as many people as possible, then you care about the size of government only insofar as it protects the rights of others, from others.

I think the conservative/libertarian critique of over-sized government has its place, especially in regards our current deficit situation. And using the government to restrict the rights of one group to ensure the rights of another is in its way messy and contradictory. But such is life. If you care about personal liberty, then you need to care if your system of ethics and the policies it implies are actually making people more free. From a personal liberty standpoint, it doesn't make any sense for a handful of people who will never have to worry about birth control yet can still find reason to be incensed with Griswold, to dictate to 50% of their employees what to do with their bodies. A ≠ B.

Ayn Rand: Capitalist Realism

Strangely enough, for all of her fiction’s endless speechifying, Ayn Rand considered herself a novelist before a philosopher (she considered herself a great many other things, mostly narcissistic superlatives, but work with me here). It’s a fairly important distinction. Her fiction is much more than mere agitprop, which uses the confines of normal storytelling as a vehicle to preach a given message. For Rand’s whole approach to storytelling is marinated in her ideas on everything else, and so its bent approach makes reading it a decidedly different experience.

The Fountainhead shares the structural elements of a normal story: beginning, middle (more like two, really, the first punctuated, like the second, with a trial), climax, dénouement. A protagonist with a goal, and obstacles thrown in his path, an antagonist with goals athwart his own. So far so good. But it is the characters, colored by Rand’s singularly odd views on individuality, which drive the action, and give the book its hypnotically strange effect.

All of the book’s principle figures were conceived as symbols, with Howard Roark as “a man who is what he should be,” Peter Keating “a man who never could be [man as he should be] and doesn’t know it,” Gail Wynand “a man who could have been,” and Ellsworth Toohey, “worst of all possible rats. A man who never could be—and knows it.” This schematic view of plotting has the dual effect of making the characters both larger-than-life and two-dimensional, as if they were fixtures on a billboard. They serve the same basic purpose, channeling Rand’s radical individualism. The peculiar effect of her ideas about rationality and will, however, makes the proceedings feel, paradoxically, pre-ordained.

Consider what was perhaps the biggest surprise I encountered, dealing with a secondary character, Catherine, Toohey’s niece and Keating’s sometime fiancé. Such a pitiful, clingy creature is she that I was fairly sure she would kill herself out of sheer helplessness, especially after Keating ditches their wedding to shotgun marry the ice queen Dominique Francon. She instead resurfaces near the end of the book years later, reborn as a Washington bureaucrat with a lack of personality remarkable even for an Ayn Rand character:

”It wouldn’t have worked, Peter. I’m temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It’s too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It’s only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me.” He winced. “You see how stupid those things sound. It’s natural for you to be a little contrite—a normal reflex—but we must look at it objectively, we’re grown-up, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can’t really help what we do, we’re conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there.”

I ended up being more right about her fate than I had guessed: rather than merely kill herself, she killed her self.

Catharine’s lack of identity is as much a constant as Roark’s unflappable confidence, Keating’s venality, and Toohey’s super-socialism. Their essential nature is fixed, and there is never any real chance that they will ever change, for better or worse. Their defining traits merely become more pronounced, and grotesque, as the stakes raise ever higher, but the there is no real tension, no possibility of redemption or betrayal or surprise that hasn’t been telegraphed from the start. As busy as The Fountainhead's scenario is, it’s all mellow, no drama.

Yet cardboard characters aren’t derived (only) from general hackishness, rather they proceed directly from Rand’s own ideals of what constitutes a proper human being. As said by Steven Mallory, Roark’s sculptor disciple:

I often think that [Roark]’s the only one of us who’s achieved immortality. I don’t mean in the sense of fame and I don’t mean that he won’t die some day. But he’s living it. I think he is what the conception really means. You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict—and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass. How do they expect a permanence which they have never held for a single moment? But Howard—one can imagine him existing forever.

Rand, who claimed her beliefs had remained essentially the same since she was a teenager, is here essentially making a virtue of stubbornness and refusal to grow as a person, under the same usual banner of willpower: the real individual knows he’s right, so why should he change? Her characters are demonstrations of this idea, as are the very many things they do and say.

Along with melodramatic plotting, Rand’s fiction is infamous for its didactic speeches and dialogues that go on for pages and pages at a stretch. My favorite, if it can be called that, involves newspaper magnate Gail Wynand and Roark going on a month-long yacht cruise—without Dominique Francon, who they’re both in love with and to whom Wynand is married. Wynand can’t stop looking at Roark’s half-naked body, “at the threads of water running down the angular planes,” that makes him think “of the yacht’s engine, of skyscrapers, of transatlantic cables, of everything man had made.” The scene’s tone veers between unintentional 300-style homo-erotica and an After School Special with amazing gracelessness:

”What’s left then? Where does decency start? What begins where altruism ends? Do you see what I’m in love with?”

“Yes, Gail.” Wynand had noticed that Roark’s voice had a reluctance that sounded almost like sadness.

“What’s the matter with you? Why do you sound like that?”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me. It’s just something I thought. I’ve been thinking of this for a long time. And particularly all these days when you’ve made me lie on deck and loaf.”

“Thinking about me?”

“About you—among many other things.”

“What have you decided?”

“I’m not an altruist, Gail. I can’t decide for others.”

This weird fusion of belief and behavior follows through to the book’s very end, which involves, lest we forget, a manically idealistic dynamiter being found “Innocent” by a jury. Most polemicists would stop with putting speeches in their characters’ mouths, but Rand’s conception of humans being driven by reason and ideals permeates the story’s very blood and marrow.

By traditional—objective?—literary standards, The Fountainhead is a failure: its characters are bold but ultimately dull, its plot bizarre, and its message delivered with all the subtlety of a boot stamping on a human face forever. Yet, my snarky post title notwithstanding, it’s unfair to consider it mere propaganda--that it bears some resemblances to the blandest Soviet pablum is a function of a circular political spectrum in which at a certain point the far left and far right begin to look alike. Nor is it pop fiction, which never aspires to be more than merely mediocre entertainment.

Instead it is a frantically ambitious product of its creator’s very idiosyncratic sensibility, the kind that thinks turning thought experiments into hundreds-of-pages-long plots on which to hang philosophical dialogues is the pinnacle of storytelling. As a result the book is, like a Tyler Perry movie, freakishly compelling and almost always interesting. The normal standards cease to apply. It’s beyond good and awful.

Ayn Rand: The Beautiful and the Damned

If it hasn’t been made clear yet, Rand was an idealist of sorts, albeit an extreme one. She almost certainly had a personality disorder—clinical narcissism, and likely a strain of Asperger’s—that wired her brain such that she insisted her logic, and everyone else’s, be consistent and constant, to a pathological degree that leaves room for neither emotion nor accident. Thus what she considered an ideal is different from most; rather than a guideline or example to be striven for, if never fully achievable, she saw ideals as standards that must be adhered to without deviation.

Consider Christ, the most common model of moral guidance. Even if humanity could collectively agree on exactly what he stood for, we could never live in a world where every single person followed his example of ascetic, chaste, material poverty, (nor is it even certain we would want to). In any case, there is an implicit understanding when speaking of human behavior that one will always short of perfection, whatever that is (and Christ is above all a symbol of forgiveness).

 Rand likely would have called bullshit and said that any such caveat essentially betrays an ideal in advance and makes a mockery of ethics, which one could concede is true in an academic and totalitarian sense. This absolutist view of ethics and life is the keystone of her extremely idiosyncratic Objectivism, which is spelled out in explicit detail in the The Fountainhead’s infamous courtroom speech.

 Some context: the pathetic and now hopelessly declining Peter Keating comes to Howard Roark with the problem of designing affordable low-income housing. Roark comes up with a workable design and agrees to let Keating submit it as his own, with the stipulation that nothing is changed. When other architects eventually meddle with it and build it with numerous useless additions, Roark dynamites the structure and lets himself be caught at the scene. With echoes of Rand’s play Night of January 16th, Roark is put on trial not for the property destruction laws he’s broken, but for his society-defying individualism, which he spends seven-and-a-half pages justifying.

The thrust of Roark's speech, which has been touched on previously, is essentially a redefinition of egoism. Essentially, it says, the creative individual has always been responsible for advances in mankind, and has every step of the way been resisted:

Prometheus was chained to a rock and torn by vultures—because he had stolen the fire of the gods. Adam was condemned to suffer—because he had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Whatever the legend, somewhere in the shadows of its memory mankind knew that its glory began with one and that one paid for his courage.

Creative man is entirely self-sufficient and, whatever benefits to mankind his discoveries and inventions bestow, it is always for his own satisfaction that he works. Anyone who deviates from this standard and looks for satisfaction in others, whether by helping or exploiting them, is a “second-hander.” Invariably, unable to create anything for themselves, they drag the creative class down to their mediocrity, by way of, naturally, making stupid additions to architectural designs and the like. Thus the traditional understanding of egotism is, to coin a phrase, false consciousness:

The choice is not self-sacrifice or domination. The choice is independence or dependence. The code of the creator or the code of the second-hander. This is the basic issue. It rests upon the alternative of life or death. The code of the creator is built on the needs of the reasoning mind which allows man to survive. The code of the second-hander is built on the needs of a mind incapable of survival. All that which proceeds from man’s independent ego is good. All that which proceeds from man’s dependence upon men is evil. 

The egotist in the absolute sense is not the man who sacrifices others. He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner...

There’s a chimp’s feast of nits one could pick from a screed of such length. To take but one example, its mangling of Greek mythology: Prometheus was chained up and tormented by the gods for stealing their fire in order to help mankind. He was, in fact, the prototypical second-hander. There’s also the absurdity of any philosophy that considers “the beggar, the social worker, and the bandit” as well as dictators to be moral equals. But in fact the whole logical edifice can be demolished like a bad housing project by referring back to Rand’s fundamental absolutist misunderstanding of traditional, altruistic morality:

Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above himself…. 

Men have been taught that their first concern is to relieve the suffering of others. But suffering is a disease. Should one come upon it, one tries to give relief and assistance. To make that the highest test of virtue is to make suffering the most important part of life. Then one must wish to see others suffer--in order that he may be virtuous.

Rand critically mistakes altruism, the consideration of others’ welfare over one’s own, as an imperative, an ironclad and all-consuming law, rather than a gentle corrective to man’s tendency toward self-enrichment which often comes at the expense of others. It’s the confusion, once again, of ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Part of the altruistic ideal is the understanding that in the world as it is, there will always be suffering, vice, and folly, and so it is necessary to ameliorate it as best as possible. To accuse altruists of thinking there ought to be suffering, because it gives them a purpose, is like accusing doctors of enjoying the sickness of their patients. Roark's logic that “but for me the destitute could not have had this particular home,” suggests that a doctor would be justified in withdrawing a treatment at his own discretion, prior oaths and agreements be damned. 

Rand’s misunderstanding comes into the sharpest relief when one examines an earlier and similarly long-winded speech by villain Ellsworth Toohey, delivered after Peter Keating has surrendered to him the written agreement he had made with Roark about the housing development, as well as what little remained of his dignity. In what amounts to a philosophical version of the scene in Men in Black when Vincent d’Onofrio rips off his skin to reveal a giant cockroach underneath, Toohey is shown to be not merely a gross liberal intellectual caricature, but a veritable secular Satan:

“...I said I intended to rule. Like all my spiritual predecessors. But I’m luckier than they were. I inherited the fruit of their efforts and I shall be the one who’ll see the great dream made real. I see it all around me today. I recognize it. I don’t like it. I didn’t expect to like it. Enjoyment is not my destiny. I shall find such satisfaction as my capacity permits. I shall rule. ”  

 “Whom...?” 

“You. The world. It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind....” 

It’s hard to describe the effect of five pages of this. The scene, such as it is, plays a similar narrative function as O’Brien’s breaking of Winston Smith in 1984. But Toohey is constructed as less a human being than a symbol, the exact, demonic opposite of Roark in every way, so his anti-creed recalls the inverted morality of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape, without the wit:

Here’s another [way to break a man’s soul]. Kill man’s sense of values. Kill his capacity to recognize greatness or to achieve it. Great men can’t be ruled. We don’t want any great men. Don’t deny the conception of greatness. Destroy it from within. The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional. Set up standards of achievement open to all, to the least, to the most inept—and you stop the impetus to effort in all men, great or small. You stop all incentive to improvement, to excellence, to perfection. Laugh at Roark and hold Peter Keating as a great architect. You’ve destroyed architecture. Build up Lois Cook and you’ve destroyed literature. Hail Ike and you’ve destroyed the theater. Glorify Lancelot Clokey and you’ve destroyed the press. Don’t set out to raze all shrines—you’ll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed.

Toohey is constructed such that, with a little adjustment of pronouns, most of what he says could just as easily be uttered by one of Rand’s heroic individualists. The only difference is he thinks these things are good rather than evil:

Yet the test should be so simple: just listen to any prophet and if you hear him speak of sacrifice—run. Run faster than from a plague. It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. The man intends to be the master....

....I want nothing for myself. I use people only for the sake of what I can do to them. It’s my only function and satisfaction. I have no private purpose. I want power. I want my world of the future. Let all live for all. Let all sacrifice and none profit. Let all suffer and none enjoy. Let progress stop. Let all stagnate. There’s equality in stagnation. All subjugated to the will of all. Universal slavery—without even the dignity of a master. Slavery to salvery. A great circle—and a total equality. The world of the future.”

In her introduction to The Fountainhead Rand wrote that her “man-worship” should not be confused for the secular religions, like Communism and Fascism, that substituted God with “the people” or “the master race” or some other nebulous collective. Yet she has in fact done just that. The heroes and villains of her cosmology are just two ends of an hourglass that share the selfsame sand.

In actual philosophical differences in the world, the opposing sides can’t even agree on the terms of debate. This is the case with the hostility between Rand-inspired conservatives and liberals. The one side sees the other as celebrating misery, while the liberal perspective has the exact opposite issue. It’s not that Rand wants the suffering that results, if unintendedly, from her idealized selfishness, it’s that such accidents are categorically excluded from her worldview. One side considers circumstances in how people are shaped, and attempts to mitigate its effect. The other considers one’s fortunes to be entirely self-determined and accordingly views any attempts to make things easier as, if anything, part of the problem.

They’re fundamentally irreconcilable views, which is why the past three years in Congress have been such an arduous slog. As we’ll see next they're also, because this difference was so fundamental to Rand’s character, the reason The Fountainhead and Rand’s ouvre as a whole is so utterly alien to most other fiction.

Ayn Rand: Love Means 'No' Means 'Yes'

A female fan once asked Ayn Rand if the "wonderful" love scenes between Howard Roark and Dominique Francon were based on life experience. Rand's response would seem a rare instance of humor on her part: "Wishful thinking." It's a useful summary of her fiction more generally, "the world not as it is, but as it ought to be," but a look at just what these love scenes entail, however, reveals an ideal appalling, amusing, and at least a little pitiable.

Dominique Francon, columnist for the New York Banner and daughter of Peter Keating's boss, Guy Francon, is The Fountainhead's love interest and also its most baffling creation. Rand wrote the character as “myself on a bad day,” which is to say cold, spiteful, possessive, catty; when Dominique's editor tells her that he didn't think she was "just an irresponsible bitch," she replies, "You were wrong." Given that nearly everything she says to almost everyone is contemptuously insincere, this is, one supposes, supposed to be ironic, which--ironically?--is even bitchier.

She's supposed to be something of a cynic, a romantic so despondent of the world's underserving of the great and the beautiful, that she will destroy beauty--for its own sake.

“You know, I love statues of naked men. Don’t look so silly. I said statues. I had one in particular. It was supposed to be Helios. I got it out of a museum in Europe. I had a terrible time getting it—it wasn’t for sale, of course. I think I was in love with it, Alvah. I brought it home with me.”

“Where is it? I’d like to see something you like, for a change.”

“It’s broken.”

“Broken? A museum piece? How did that happen?”

“I broke it.”

“How?”

“I threw it down the air shaft. There’s a concrete floor below.”

“Are you totally crazy? Why?”

“So that no one else would ever see it.”

This approach, obnoxiously contrarian and attention-hoarding, continues through her relationship with Roark, her highest ideal made manifest, so that their nearly every reaction is marked by hostility and violence.

It's love at first slight:

She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face.

...She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life--a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.

The extension of contempt and hatred beyond one's inferiors to encompass one's mate is consummated in the infamous “rape scene,” in which Roark lets himself into Dominique's bedroom, and has his way with her. There's rough material to follow in the rest of the pose, so sensitive readers should consider this a TRIGGER WARNING:

She tried to tear herself away from him. The effort broke against his arms that had not felt it. Her fists beat against his shoulders, against his face. He moved one hand, took her two wrists, pinned them behind her, under his arm, wrenching her shoulder blades. She twisted her head back. She felt his lips on her breast. She tore herself free...

...It was an act that could be performed in tenderness, as a seal of love, or in contempt, as a symbol of humiliation and conquest. It could be the act of a lover or the act of a soldier violating an enemy woman. He did it as an act of scorn. Not as love, but as defilement. And this made her lie still and submit. One gesture of tenderness from him—and she would have remained cold, untouched by the thing done to her body. But the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted....

There was some outcry about this scene when The Fountainhead was first published, that the novel's hero is basically raping a woman. Rand disputed this, saying that “if it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.” Dominique wanted it.

This is true so far as it goes. Dominique and Roark are generally oblivious and aloof to other people, while their attraction to each other is studded with words like “contempt” and “cruelty.” The rape is preceded by a scene in which Dominique, on horseback, whips Roark across the face with a tree branch in response to an insolent remark. Their subsequent relationship is a succession of sexual encounters between which Dominique does everything in her professional powers to destroy Roark, which she does for the same reason she destroys Greek statues and marries human waste like Peter Keating: because the only right response to a world that corrupts and squanders greatness is deliberate, sado-masochistic destruction.

Thus aggression is not incidental to Rand's view of sex, but rather necessary and intrinsic:

When they lay in bed together it was--as it had to be, as the nature of the act demanded--an act of violence. It was surrender, made the more complete by the force of their resistance. It was an act of tension, as the great things on earth are things of tension....It was an act of clenched teeth and hatred, it was the unendurable, the agony, an act of passion--the word born to mean suffering--it was the moment made of hatred, tension, pain--the moment that broke its own elements, inverted them, triumphed, swept into a denial of all suffering, into its antithesis, into ecstasy.

The most charitable reading of this possible--and since I am not a Randian, I will be charitable--is that love, like any other act of will, can be glorious and triumphant only by conquering the most ferocious struggle and resistance ("passion--that word born to mean suffering"). As put towards the end of the novel, when Dominique finally and fully submits herself to Roark, "she could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known." In the meantime, the hatefuck is a consummation of Roark and Dominique's negging each other on.

So it’s a rape, Dominique even calls it that, but it's still not rape rape, which makes it a lot worse, because this is supposed to be an idealized love, where "man was the life force and woman could respond to nothing else."

This notion of sex as conquest, the inferiority of women--Rand thought the idea of a woman president was an absurdity--it all would be incredibly off-putting, offensive, and so forth, and it is, but Rand's commitment to the juxtaposition of affection and affliction, much like her ideas more generally, is so complete and over-the-top that after a time it stops being offensive and starts provoking giggles:

She came in and found a copy of the Banner spread out on his table, open at the page bearing “Your House” by Dominique Francon. Her column contained the line: “Howard Roark is the Marquis de Sade of architecture. He’s in love with his buildings--and look at them.” She knew that he disliked the Banner, that he put it there only for her sake, that he watched her noticing it, with the half-smile she dreaded on his face. She was angry; she wanted him to read everything she wrote, yet she would have preferred to think it hurt him enough to make him avoid it. Later, lying across the bed, with his mouth on her breast, she looked past the orange tangle of his head, at that sheet of newspaper on the table, and he felt her trembling with pleasure.

A reader would be hard-pressed to imagine a woman looking at a bloody newspaper and getting a rush by how much it pisses off the man currently suckling her dug without, pardon the phrase, getting all atitter.

More than anything, however, Rand's ideas on love become rather sad, when seen in the light of her own love life. Short, somewhat frumpy, and with "a stare that could wilt a cactus," she was not a sculpted beauty, unlike the characters of her fiction. Her first girlhood crushes were on, typically, impossible heroic figures: a French adventure serial hero, Cyrus, and--I'm not making this up--Enjolras, the leader of the Paris student rebellion in Les Miserables. Her first real love was a fellow St. Petersburg student, Lev Bekkerman, who pointedly ignored and avoided her after a few dates.

Her husband Frank O'Connor looked the part of hero, but he was overwhelmed by Rand's domineering personality and his acting career had, by the time of The Fountainhead's creation, petered out completely. Though she depended on him as an emotional outlet, the tension in their pairing created a friction that doubtless contributed to her eventual seduction of an acolyte twenty-five years her junior. Her ideal of love as vicious struggle, like much else in her worldview, may well have been a conflation of 'is' and 'ought' born of a lifetime of disappointment. "Wishful thinking," indeed.