A Spork in the Drawer

Reading Is Fundamentalist

Randroids:

The charitable arm of BB&T Corp., a banking company, pledged $1 million to the University of North Carolina Charlotte in 2005 and obtained an agreement that [Ayn] Rand's novel ``Atlas Shrugged'' would become required reading for students. Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, and Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, say they also took grants and agreed to teach Rand.

While it's hard to complain about exposing students to a range of ideas it helps if those ideas are, y'know, somewhat grounded in reality. One would hope that students are also exposed to Karl Marx's critiques of capitalism but I suspect that's given short shrift.

Says one critic:

Scholars scoff at the Rand bounty, saying her ideas are too shallow to build courses around her.

``Rand could not write her way out of a paper bag,'' said Harold Bloom, a professor of the humanities and English at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Bloom, 77, is the author of ``The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages'' (Harcourt, 1994), an examination of the most important works in Western literature. Rand isn't on the list.

It should be noted that Bloom is no liberal. And it should be further noted that one of Rand's great disciples is former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan.

How's that working out?

Disclaimer: I last read Rand maybe 25 years ago and have since (mostly) successfully blotted the pain of it from my memory.

[Via The Shrill One.]

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Attack Of The Randroids

On the 50th anniversary of its publication Morbo looks at Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged:

If you’ve never read it, “Atlas Shrugged” is a work of fiction that explores Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, a kind of personal fascism based on the premise that selfishness is a virtue, government regulation is always bad and taxation and social welfare programs are a great moral evil. In “Atlas Shrugged,” characters frequently offer up extended rants outlining the virtues of finding new ways to shaft your fellow human being. One of them goes on for something like 50 pages. This is considered the centerpiece of the novel.

[...]

The idea is that once these rugged individualist super-geniuses have withdrawn from the pathetic, socialist welfare state that America has become, society will quickly collapse and beg for them to come back — only this time it will be on their terms. The books ends with society in chaos as the square-jawed, ravishingly beautiful hyper-capitalists scheme to put the boot on our necks for good and smoke even more cigarettes and have even better sex while liberals squirm in their wretchedness, pining for the days of food stamps.

It's a hilariously on-target review. Check it out.

That anyone takes the "novel" seriously - let alone build a whole world-view around it (I'm looking at you, Alan Greenspan) - reveals a horribly purile aspect of our society.

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