DO IT YOURSELF: Does your neighborhood have a Wemblish?

My neighbor Wemblish can do anything around the house.
     On Saturday mornings, having slept till ten, I go out to get my paper, and there is Wemblish, or the bottom half of Wemblish, sticking out from under the hood of his car, a spread of socket wrenches, bright as swords, arrayed on the driveway beside him as he resets the timing on his distributor or redistributes the setting on his timer. Whatever.
     That same afternoon, having risen from a two-hour nap following a brief check of my Facebook page, I look out the window, and there is Wemblish, or the top half of Wemblish, leaning over the peak of his roof next to his chimney as he adjusts his rotating ventilator fan or ventilates his fanning rotator adjustment. Whatever.
     Finally, well after dark, having gorged myself on a diet of red meat, Coors, and sitcoms, I open my back door to let the cat in for the night, and there is Wemblish, emerging from the wood shop he's added to his garage. There, never sleeping, he builds his wife new kitchen cabinets or builds his kitchen cabinets a new wife. Whatever.
     At that point I go to bed.
     Wemblish likes to be a good neighbor. Periodically, he will offer to clean out my gutters for me or prune my oak tree. Once, he insisted on attacking my driveway with his Weed-Whacker; when he was through, I discovered that my driveway was four feet wider than I'd thought. Another time, he dug something called a "dry well" for me in order to relieve a drainage problem; like magic, the pond that used to be my front yard disappeared. Wemblish is handy, generous, modest, innocent, fit, and pleasant. I hate him.
     Every woman on the block gushes over Wemblish. This includes his own wife, which is especially distasteful. The women of the neighborhood can often be found standing in front of Wemblish's house admiring his handiwork. "Ooooh, look at those wonderful gingerbread shutters!" they squeal. "Handmade, you say?" Or: "Well, I just wish my husband Weasley were here to see those marvelous bay windows! And you did them both in just one weekend with nothing but a hammer and a pair of pliers?" Or: "What beautiful stained glass! And you fired it yourself, did you?"
     One day I even discovered my own lady friend, Gilda, in a state of animated adulation in front of Wemblish's house, telling his wife how perfectly darling was the hand-carved Victorian trim around the Wemblishes' gables (Wemblish has gables, for god's sake), and how simply fetching was the little fountain in their front yard, with its spouting cupids. It was disgusting. Not the fountain--Gilda. I had to drag her off by the elbow.
     I learned long ago that it doesn't pay to compete with somebody like Wemblish. I would rather wield a putter than a power saw, and I will never learn the difference between a two-by-four and a four-on-the-floor. So I don't fight the Wemblishes of the world. Instead, I play along, pretend to share the admiration showered on them by silly women, and, most of all, I take advantage of them. People like Wemblish enjoy being taken advantage of, and I'm happy to do it.
     The other day, for example, I asked Wemblish if he would show me how to fix my toilet, which had developed the habit of yawning in the middle of the night. Barely able to contain his ecstasy at being asked, Wemblish hurried to his (hand-built) toolshed, hefted a gigantic steel toolbox, and began striding across the street toward my bathroom, which didn't stand a chance.
     Once there, he rolled up his sleeves, took the top off the commode, and dove in, figuratively speaking. As he went along, he explained everything he was doing, a big smile on his face. People like Wemblish love to share their knowledge.
     "This is the stipplepopper" he said, tapping a dripping mass of metal. "It granulates the burble ratcheter. See?"
     "Uh huh," I said, nodding enthusiastically. "That's fascinating!" I belong on the stage.
     "And this here is the flommalator," he continued, overjoyed to have such a willing pupil. "It exacerbates the munripple if the spillik isn't garbling. Got it?"
     "You bet," I said. "Boy, that's some nice engineering, isn't it?" I have no conscience.
     Twenty minutes later, my toilet was fixed, never to yawn again, and both Wemblish and I were happy as slugs in a dog dish.
     "Want to come watch me defibrillate my Toyota's crabulator?" he asked eagerly as he headed home, high on handiness.
     "Gosh," I said. "I'd love to. But I promised Gilda I'd bib her tipple and osculate her omphalos this afternoon."
     "Golly," he said, with new respect in his voice. "Can I give you a hand?"
     "No, thanks," I replied. "With something like that, you just have to do it yourself."

ALL I EVER REALLY NEEDED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN THE SEVENTH GRADE: ADVICE FOR THE NEW YEAR

A minister named Robert Fulghum wrote a big bestseller a couple of decades back titled All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. I guess I was a slow learner. All I really need to know I learned in the seventh grade. I share this knowledge now as useful information and advice for the new year:

      Don't worry about it when hair begins to sprout on strange parts of your body. It happens to everybody.
      Your closest friends from last year can suddenly turn into people you just wave at in the hall this year.
      You will always find new friends, unless you appear to really want to find new friends, in which case you will probably eat lunch alone.
     Never eat lunch alone.
     If you want to keep your new friends, learn to forgive them when they stuff live firecrackers in the mouths of toads.
     Always be on the lookout for new new friends.
     Use a public boys' room or girls' room only in the direst emergencies. Large people with hair on all parts of their bodies reside there, and they will take your lunch money.
     Don't make friends with the people you meet in restrooms.
     Bring your own lunch.

      Whenever you are hurt, frightened, or angry, curse.
      Whenever you are especially happy, curse.
      Whenever you are moved in any way, curse.

      Never enter a room that goes by the name "Shop."
      Never try to make anything. Especially never try to make anything that requires tools driven by electricity in a place called "Shop."
      Never touch solder, which is what holds life together. Solder requires the hand-eye coordination of a surgeon, the wisdom of God, and tools driven by electricity. Touch solder, and you will be burned in a place called "Shop."  

       There is always a wall between boys and girls, just like the one that runs through the middle of the gymnasium.
      Every wall has cracks.
      Girls are older than boys. This is true of any girl and any boy, whatever their ages. Girls possess knowledge in both their minds and their bodies that boys are always two years short of obtaining.
      When a girl smiles, it can mean almost anything.
      Never kiss a girl who's chewing gum and wearing braces. That sort of thing can lead to permanent attachments.
      Never carry your books like a girl. Unless you are a girl.
      Keep love to yourself.

      Cover your books.
      It's stupid, unnecessary, and impossible to keep your eyes on your own papers.
      Never put anything in writing that you don't want the teacher to read aloud to the class.
      Embarrassment happens.
      Learn to dance before it's too late.
      Never splash water on your lap before going out in public.
      Never examine the underside of a desk, chair, or anything else. There are things there you don't need to see.
      Never tell your parents what really happened.

      There are some people who care only about the grammar. These people will never be your friends.
      The books you read for school will never teach you as much as the books you find in your parents' nightstand.
      Simplify, simplify. All of life's necessities can fit in a locker eight inches wide.
      Every spring, clean out your locker. There you will find what your life amounts to, including several pairs of sweat socks.
      Remember your combination.
      Shower after gym, despite the hair sprouting in new places.
      Don't cheat on pushups.
      Daydream.
      Study.
      Pay attention.

And most of all, I learned this:
      After a certain age, life consists, not of one comfortable room where you spend the whole day, as in fourth grade, but of many inhospitable rooms that can be reached only by navigating labyrinthian hallways full of people going in the other direction.
      After a certain age, the people in charge of life's many rooms are no longer some version of your mother.
      And that's too bad.
     

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MRS. WEATHERS

In 2004, I wrote a longer version of the following column. It's about my mother, who died in 2009 at the age of 93. More specifically, it's about her politics. As we face a new year with the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives, it is worth remembering what the world was like before the New Deal. Many Republicans, as Nobel economist Paul Krugman, among others, has pointed out, wish to return us to the Gilded Age. My mother remembered that time.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO MRS. WEATHERS

 Don’t tell my mother that “liberal” is a dirty word

     I recently spent a week with my 89-year-old mother, Elsie Weathers. After a week with Mom, I worry for the future of the United States. What will happen to our politics when those who remember life before 1932 are dead?

     My mother is not a swing voter. She is not undecided.  She is not an independent. Elsie Weathers is a Democrat. Let me amend that: Elsie Weathers is a DEMOCRAT! The first president my mother ever voted for was FDR. So was the second. And the third. She would like to vote for FDR this year.

     Politics for my mother is simple: The Republicans are the party of the greedy, the Democrats are the party of the needy, and the most important role of government is to protect the needy poor from the greedy rich. My mother has never voted for a Republican.

     My mother grew up on a hardscrabble farm in upstate New York. She was the daughter of Finnish immigrants who never learned to speak English. Her family was poor. She tells many stories of how poor. My favorite is this: My mother has always loved animals. When she was a little girl, she desperately wanted a lamb for Christmas. She begged and begged her parents for a lamb. On Christmas Day she ran downstairs expecting to find her lamb under the Christmas tree. What she got instead was woolen underwear.

      For my mother, all politics is personal. It is all about stories like the lamb and the underwear.

      Socialized medicine? My mother is all for it. After all, she spent four years in a state-subsidized tuberculosis sanitorium in the 1940s. Despite the fact that she nearly died of the disease, my mother remembers that period almost fondly. The doctors and nurses were, in her mind, angels. The government paid for it all. That, my mother believes, is what a government should do.

     Worker protection laws? OSHA? My mother is all for them. She tells of her brother-in-law, Eino, who contracted silicosis in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. He died of it—slowly, agonizingly. The coal mine company never considered protecting him when he worked or helping him after he got sick. They threw him aside and hired someone else they could exploit and sicken.

      Unions? My late sainted father was a union man. My mother still believes it was the reason the phone company never promoted him. She still remembers what the world was like before unions were strong. She repeats the story my father used to tell, of when he was a teenager working for a coal company in Kentucky. His job was to serve food to the workers, who were largely “paid” in food and company-owned housing. (Feeding and housing them was, Mom points out, a way for the coal company to keep the workers under its control. Actual wages the workers could have saved, so they could have improved themselves and maybe moved on to other jobs. The company didn’t like that possibility.) My father told of how the hungry workers would ask him, as he dished out their food, “Just one mo’ poke chop, young mister? Just one?” But he would have been fired if he gave them one.

      Laissez-faire capitalism? My mother tells the story of the January day my father (still a boy working for the coal company) saw one of the workers pick up a piece of coal by the railroad tracks leading out of the coal plant and put it in his pocket, to take home to warm his family. Another worker also witnessed the incident and reported the worker who pocketed the coal. My father was forced to testify against the coal-taker, who was fired. My father felt horrible about it to the day he died. In my mother’s mind, a capitalist is a person who, if not restrained by law, will kill his workers slowly and refuse a lump of coal to a sick and freezing man in order to make an extra buck.

       Abortion? A relation of my mother’s got his girlfriend pregnant in the 1930s. The girl decided to have an abortion, illegal at the time. The abortion was botched. The man watched his girlfriend slowly bleed to death on the backroom bed of an abortion house. My mother also tells of all the girls she knew who kept their babies and were forced by (presumably Republican) social pressure into marriages they hated for a lifetime. My mother believes in clean, safe, legal abortions.

      “Preventive” wars? My mother and my father would have drugged me, put me in the trunk of the car, and driven me across the border into Canada themselves to keep me out of the Vietnam War. The war was about me. She bleeds for every soldier and every child killed in Iraq, one at a time. She lingers over every newspaper story about the boy who enlists against his mother’s wishes and then dies in action. War, like politics, is personal for my mother.

       Liberals? My mother plays bridge with a group of women who rarely discuss politics, but occasionally one of them, usually a generation younger, will begin to rail against liberals. My mother is a shy little stooped-over woman. She never initiates talk about politics. But she will not countenance criticism of liberals, especially in her liberated old age. “I’m a liberal,” she’ll declare, her voice trembling with anger. “And I’m proud of it. In fact, if you want to call me a bleeding-heart liberal, you go right ahead. Because that’s what I am.” Then, if you put her to the test, she will tell you how it was the “liberals” who came up with social security, worker-protection laws, consumer-protection laws, environmental-protection laws, and Medicare, and how it was the Republicans who, consistently and repeatedly, opposed them.

      Protect the needy from the greedy.

      My mother does not trust the rich. In his capacity as president of the New York State School Boards Association (a voluntary job), my father had some school-aid dealings with Nelson Rockefeller when Rockefeller, a Republican, was governor of New York. My father respected Rockefeller, who, by current standards, was something of a liberal himself. (The current Rockefeller in the Senate is a Democrat.) But my mother never trusted Rockefeller, because he was rich. She felt vindicated when he reportedly died in a fancy Park Avenue penthouse while in the arms of a woman who was not his wife.

      When my mother thinks of politicians, she rarely thinks in terms of their policies. (Why consider policies? Democratic policies are good. Republican policies are bad. Q.E.D.) Mrs. Weathers thinks instead in terms of personality. She began despising Richard Nixon in the 1940s, when he first used Red Scare tactics to win a seat in the Senate. His demise in the 1970s was almost an anti-climax for her, she had hated him for so long. She felt disdain, but not disgust, for Ronald Reagan, whom she dismissed as little more than a script-reader. She is even capable (though rarely) of disliking a Democrat; she abhorred Lyndon Johnson. My mother has a fine eye, almost a sixth sense, for spotting the morally corrupt.

       The important question today is this: What will America be like after my mother’s generation dies off–the generation that knew first-hand the world as it was before government put the reins on capitalist greed? After my mother dies, who will replace her? Let’s hope that the world replaces her with others who study a bit of history so they can understand her point of view. But I worry that that won’t happen. I worry about that a lot.

END

        

     

THE BOY WHO SAID, “SO WHAT?”: A parable on existential themes

     Once upon a time there was a boy who said, “So what?”

     His mother said to him, “Son, eat your vegetables or you won’t grow up to be big and strong.”

     And the boy, who was about five years old, said, “So what?”

     And his mother said, “If you don’t grow up to be big and strong, you won’t be able to get a job.”

     And the boy said, “So what?”

     And his mother, who was a very patient mother, said, “If you don’t get a job, you won’t earn any money, and if you don’t earn any money you won’t have food to eat or a place to live or a wife to love you.”

     And the boy said, “So what?”

     And his mother, who was a very patient mother, said, “If you don’t have food to eat or a place to live or someone to love you, your life will be hard.”

     And the boy, who had big innocent eyes, said, “So what?”

     And his mother, who was not that patient, said, “Eat your vegetables. Or else.”

     And the boy ate his vegetables, but he didn’t seem convinced.

     Later, the mother explained to the boy why he had to go to bed and why he had to go to school and why he had to clean his room. “If you don’t get your sleep, you’ll come down sick,” she said. “If you don’t go to school, the world will confuse you. If you don’t clean your room, someone else will have to do it.”

     And the boy blinked and said, “So what?”

     After a while his mother, who was not a stupid mother, stopped explaining. “Go to bed,” she said. “Go to school. Clean your room. Or else.”

     The boy went to bed, went to school, and cleaned his room, but he didn’t seem convinced.

     A few years later, when the boy’s voice had grown deep, other people explained things to him.

     “If you don’t go to college, you won’t be able to get a good job and make a lot of money,” said a nice woman in an office at his school.

     “So what?” said the boy, plucking a loose thread from his shirt.

     The woman took the boy to a man in a sweater, who sat behind a desk. “What does this make you think of?” said the man, showing the boy a symmetrical blob of dried ink. “What do you think of when I say, ‘Pistachio’? Can you draw a woman?”

     The boy didn’t answer.

     “If you don’t cooperate, we can’t help you,” said the man.

     “So what?” said the boy, looking out a window.

     Later, the boy went to college because his mother told him to, or else, but he didn’t seem convinced.

     In college, more people explained things to the boy.

     “Study business, or you’ll be poor,” said some.

     “Study the arts, or you won’t know what’s beautiful,” said others.

     The boy yawned. “So what?” he said.

     One of the people at the college took an interest in the boy. “I am a professor of philosophy,” he said. “I will show you the reasons for things, or at least the reasons smart people have come up with for things.” And the teacher talked, for a long time.

     When he was done, the boy nodded his head, smiled, and said, “So what?”

     This made the man very angry, and he stomped out of the room, saying, “I can’t teach you anything!”

     “So what?” said the boy, to himself.

     After college, various people—his mother, his grandfather, a girl he knew—told the boy he had to get a job, buy food, find a house, and get married. Or else. The boy got a job, bought food, found a house, and got married, but he didn’t seem convinced.

     One day a man at his job said to the boy, who had a bald spot, “You must work harder. I’m your friend. I’m telling you. You might get fired.”

     The boy said, “So what?” and doodled on an interoffice memo.

     Later, another man at his job, who seemed serious and important, said to the boy, “If you don’t work harder, you’ll be fired.”

     The boy looked at the important man. “So what?” he said.

     The boy was fired, and then he didn’t have a wife, and he stopped buying food, and he stopped having a place to live. People who saw him on the street said to him, “You look terrible! You’re a disgrace! You’re throwing your life away!”

     The boy looked far away and said, “So what?”

     When the boy said, “So what?” people looked at him and blinked their eyes. Then they walked away fast. Even children walked away fast, looking over their shoulders at him.

     One day the boy, who now had gray hair and wrinkled skin, was lying in a bed. People standing around the bed told him, “If you don’t take these pills, you won’t feel better. If we don’t put these tubes in, you won’t get better. If we don’t cut you open, you won’t live long.”

     And the boy shrugged and whispered, “So what?”

     And all the people stomped out except one. She looked like the boy’s mother, only she wore stiff white clothes. She said to the boy, “Look. Close your eyes and rest. Or else.”

     So the boy closed his eyes. And he kept them closed a very long time.

     But he didn’t seem convinced.

The End

NO FOOTNOTES NEEDED: My literary esthetic

 

     I’m about a third of the way through Jonathan Franzen’s new novel Freedom. It’s an admirable book: witty, even eloquent at times; well observed; psychologically acute; nicely plotted; full of vivid, fully realized, interesting characters.  I’m enjoying this book. It deserves the rather exuberant praise it’s received. Anyone who’s written a book has my respect, and Franzen has given us a much-better-than-usual book, so he has my respect, doubled.

     Nevertheless (you saw that “nevertheless” coming, didn’t you, or at least a “but”)—nevertheless,  I am reading Freedom with just a bit of preemptive regret, because I know that, for all its virtues, it is a novel that will not withstand the Test of Time.* Fifty years from now, no one will be reading it except 1) minor anthropologists, sociologists, and historians who want to learn about the U.S. middle-class mindset in the year 2010, and 2) the occasional grad student who is struggling to find a PhD topic. The novel will, as the years progress, have an ever-dwindling audience. A hundred years from now, it will be forgotten altogether. Why? Because it is a novel too much of the here and now and not enough of the everywhere and always.  A Chinese reader who knows English even today would find its cultural allusions culturally elusive. It lacks, as they say, universality.

      I’m always a bit saddened when a novel I like anchors itself to a particular time and place—and therefore prevents itself from sailing off into the distant future and visiting many distant lands. Many elements can anchor a novel in this sad way. In Franzen’s case, one of them is his reliance on brand names and current cultural references. He has a long passage about iPods and MP3 players, for example, and mentions the brand name of a particular kind of outdoor decking (Trex) an unholy number of times (well, three or four times). He refers to celebrities like Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop continually.  If you want a book that takes the brand-name references to even more of an extreme, see Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which seems to rest on a foundation of New York Times advertisements. What this means is that fifty years from now, no one will be able to read either of those books without footnotes.

      Other elements that can ground a book on the reef of one time and one place are short-lived slang phrases (“23-skiddoo,” anyone? “Whatever.”), heavy emphasis on short-lived contemporary technology (please, no cassette players or Priuses in the Great American Novel),  long descriptions of current fashion (fedoras, capri pants) and references to other contemporary writers (J.K. Rowling, just maybe, but not Tom Clancy).

      The greatest writers require almost no cultural footnotes. Their books’ worlds are pretty much self-contained. All you may need to know is some basic history (for Faulkner, that there had been a U.S. Civil War, for example) or some basic vocabulary (for Melville, perhaps what a harpoon is). The only contemporary celebrities in the Iliad are the characters themselves, who exist fully on the page. (Bob Dylan does not exist fully on Franzen’s pages. E.L. Doctorow has tried occasionally to resurrect real historical figures on the page; it rarely works.) Melville’s otherwise perfect short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” has only one failing for me: its reference to John Jacob Astor in its early pages. Who the hell was John Jacob Astor? (I actually know the answer because I was a bloody American Lit specialist once upon a time, and I had to look him up; now the story usually comes with, yes, footnotes.) John Updike’s Rabbit novels will likewise fail the Test of Time, I fear, if only because the word “Toyota” plays such a big role in them.

      A hundred years from now, what reader will know Toyota, any more than we would know the brand name of a hansom cab in a Dickens novel?

      Dickens never bothered telling us the brand names of his hansom cabs (did he?), and if he did, it wasn’t because those names would have been as important to his novels as Toyota is to Updike or Apple is to Franzen.

      In sum: To the extent that you need footnotes to appreciate  a book, it fails The Test of Time.

      I would go even further: To the extent that a book requires footnotes, it is also an esthetic failure.

      A book should be, to the extent any book can be, self-contained. Of course, the writer will be limited by the vocabulary, and the science, and the other discoveries open to him in his time—but the great writers overcome these limitations. The world of a great book should exist within the book itself. Otherwise, that book is nothing but, as my Columbia professors used to call each book (to my horror), “a cultural artifact.” That is, it is something for historians and anthropologists to exhume, dust off, and examine. Sorry, gentlemen, but I think Huckleberry Finn is more than a shard of pottery.

      I take this argument against footnotes quite far. It is really an argument against outside-the-text literary allusions of any kind. In graduate school, I once made the claim in an American Lit seminar that Moby Dick would be the same book if Ahab were called “Harry” instead of “Ahab.” Our professor, a wonderful then-new teacher named Sacvan Bercovitch, did not bounce me bleeding from the room. Instead, for two hours he let the class chew over the questions of 1) whether the allusion to the Ahab who was a king in the Old Testamtent was important to one’s understanding of the novel, 2) what role external cultural context plays in any work of literature,  and 3) what the role of the literary critic should be—as a delver only inside the text or as an examiner of the influence culture and history exert on a text from the outside, and vice versa. 

       I was too ignorant to know it at the time, but in that seminar that day we were playing out the whole “New Criticism” vs. “Historicist Criticism” argument. Mr. Bercovitch later went on to a spectacular career as a teacher at Columbia and Harvard; he has been called perhaps the world’s greatest “historicist” American lit scholar (look him up on Wikipedia). Columbia’s English Department was a historicist school back then,  but I was more a New Critic, I suppose. (I actually think I was something else altogether.) The professors at Columbia treated me good-naturedly, though. In my PhD orals, one of my examiners said to me, after another discussion about the proper role of criticism, “You’re going to burn in hell with Northrup Frye.” That cracked the room up. I had no idea what he was talking about.

       But this remains a central principle of my literary esthetic: a great work of literature requires no looking outside the text itself. This, of course, means I have serious reservations about some “great” works like, well, just about all of T.S. Eliot’s and Ezra Pound’s poetry, the novels of John Dos Passos, and most contemporary American novels like Franzen’s. But I still have wide shelves of books that do satisfy my esthetic demands, even contemporary books, such as Bel Canto (by Ann Patchett) and The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) and Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis de Bernieres) and Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry). At their best, all my favorite writers—Faulkner, Melville,  Borges, Garcia Marquez—create  worlds that seem to exist, whole, within their pages.

       No footnotes required.

     

      

*So here’s a footnote, anyway! For an interesting discussion of the Test of Time and its implications for literary works, see Law and Literature, by Richard Posner, Chapter One.

     

A CROSSWORD PUZZLE FOR MY (VERY FEW) READERS

In my retirement, I'm trying my hand at creating New York Times-level crossword puzzles. It's great fun for a word person.  Here's a crossword puzzle I created last spring. I sent it to the Times, but they turned it down; they said it wasn't bad but didn't quite fit their requirements. Although I tried following their published specifications for Sunday puzzles, I think I understand now, after further research, why they turned it down. I'll let you decide for yourself if it lives up to the Times' standards. Some friends and family have done this one and liked it. If you enjoy Times-style crossword puzzles, you might want to give this one a go. Please let me know what you think. I'm looking for feedback.

R.I.P.: AYN RAND--PLEASE

Update: I wrote the following piece in 2010. It is relevant once again in 2012 because Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for vice-president, has been an avowed disciple of Ayn Rand's economic theories.


Ayn Rand was a third-rate novelist pretending to be a first-rate philosopher. She wrote Harlequin Romances for intellectually pretentious adolescent boys. I know. I was one of those boys.
      By the time I was 17, I had read all of Rand's major works: The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, and Anthem. I was put on to them by Eleanor Amidon, a bright, rebellious high school classmate on whom I had a powerful crush. (To this day, Eleanor is one of only two females I know who have liked the works of Ayn Rand. The other is an English-professor friend. I'm sure there are others; I just haven't met them.) As a teenager, I enjoyed Rand's books. They were simple and a little sexy, with just enough harebrained economics and philosophy thrown in to make me think I wasn't wasting my time. The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are also very long (the latter over 1,000 pages), which made them seem both literally and intellectually weighty.
      But even at the age of 17, I knew that Rand was a philosophical charlatan. More on that in a minute.
      Rand was born in 1905 and died in 1982. So why am I bothering to write about a mediocre writer who died 28 years ago? Because Rand still wields influence in high places. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve and arguably the man whose Rand-inspired belief in so-called "free markets" was most responsible for the failures of the American economic system that led to the recent Great Recession, was once a member of Rand's inner circle. The neocon-influencing Cato Institute was founded largely on Ayn Rand's principles, and Glenn Beck devotes whole segments on Fox to singing her praises. Tea Party favorites Ron Paul, and his son Rand, recently elected to Congress, are huge admirers of Ayn Rand; indeed, Tea Party meetings have been known to begin with readings from Atlas Shrugged. (Rand Paul has even gone on YouTube to dispel hope-based rumors that he was named for Ayn Rand, insisting, however, that he does love her work.) The entire neoconservative movement owes a debt to Rand.
     Given all that, it is appropriate to put Ayn Rand in her place. That is, back in the grave.
     Let us consider Ayn Rand's view of the world, as reflected in her novels. She believed that money was the measure of a man (and a woman, though she clearly preferred male heroes). In Ayn Rand's world, all handsome, strong, brilliant people are rich, and all rich people are handsome, strong, and brilliant. In her world, Bill Gates would look like Gregory Peck, and Warren Buffet would have Paul Newman's blue eyes. In her world, Paris Hilton would have the snap and strength of Katharine Hepburn.
     In Rand's world, if you are poor, then you must be lazy, stupid, or weak, and if you are lazy, stupid, or weak, you will be poor, and who cares? In her world, laissez faire capitalism is the only True Way and always results in the talented being rewarded. In her world, the strong and the beautiful meet and make love, but the worthiest woman, though gorgeous, is never soft, and the worthiest man, though intelligent, is never effete. To win a woman in her world, a man has to "take" her and "seize" her. Love-making in her world closely resembles rape. The prose describing these moments is hilariously bad: "They stopped and looked at each other. She knew, only when he did it, that she had known he would. He seized her, she felt her lips [sic] in his mouth, felt her arms grasping him in violent answer, and she knew for the first time how much she had wanted him to do it." (Atlas Shrugged, p. 106.)
     In Rand's world, the hero-capitalists are geniuses not just at making money, but at everything. They are mathematical geniuses and philosophical geniuses, appearing as precocious teenagers in college classrooms and stumping the professors at their own game. The capitalist heroes are even geniuses at sports. When South American billionaire heart throb Francisco D'Anconia (tall, dark, sculpted, of the copper D'Anconias) comes to the U.S., he spends fifteen minutes watching his first baseball game, then steps up to the plate and hits a home run "over a line of oak trees" in his first at-bat (Atlas Shrugged, p. 92). I love the oak trees. That's typical over-the-top Rand. (To be fair, I must say that my English-professor friend who likes Rand defends such passages as acceptable literary hyperbole. I say it's the purplest kind of phony prose.)
      Let me repeat: I liked Ayn Rand's books when I was an adolescent, back in the Sixties. Her comic-book superheroes appealed to me, and of course there was the sex (almost always outside of marriage--ooh la la). But even at the time, I knew she was a fool when it came to the way laissez-faire capitalism worked and the way people behaved in it. The telling issue for me was workers' unions. Rand hated them. Her logic about unions went like this: 1) Unions harbor some workers who are lazy and shiftless. 2) Therefore all unions are evil. 3) Therefore anyone who joins a union is lazy, shiftless, and evil. In her books, all union members are weak, stupid, and good for nothing, or else they are the ignorant dupes of union leaders who are simply exploiting them for their own purposes. To refute this view of the world in 1962, all I had to do was look across the kitchen table each night at my own father, who was a union activist for the Communication Workers of America and was the hardest-working man I knew, and one of the smartest and nicest. In the McCarthyite 1950s, he received anonymous notes at work from people calling him a "red" and a "commie" for his union work. No doubt some of these notes came from Ayn Rand disciples; Rand was a notorious commie-hater. (She had been born, Alisa Rosenbaum, in pre-revolutionary Russia.) In Rand's utopian capitalist world, no such thing as a company store or scrip or a sweat shop had ever existed. The Rockefellers and Vanderbilts and Carnegies were, in her world, saints.
       It was from Rand's depiction of union members that I learned what a "straw man" argument is--a lesson that has served me well ever since. In a "straw man" argument, rather than trying to deal with your opponent's strongest positions, you deal only with his weakest ones, which you usually put in the form of an extreme weak example. Thus, Rand created union members who were smarmy, scrawny, hypocritical, and indolent; they were easier to knock down than someone like my father. The most famous example of the straw man was the "welfare mother driving a Cadillac" imagined by Ronald Reagan's Rand-influenced speechwriters. That woman never existed, as it turns out, but she was easier to argue against than the real poor. Ayn Rand was a past-master of the straw man argument. As I said, the neoconservative movement owes much to her.
      Having said all this, I must also say that I am glad I read the works of Ayn Rand when I did, and I would still recommend them to young people today. In fact, I found much in her philosophy to agree with: her emphasis on the importance of personal pride, on objective reason as opposed to religious faith, on the need to live your life according to your own principles, not simply to please others.
      But please, let us not use the cheap economic pronouncements of a third-rate novelist as the basis for national policy.