Ayn Rand Sucks

Crappy Musicians that All Europeans Seem to Like, for some reason

2010-01-01T11:17:00.006+01:00

Chet Baker, Keith Jarrett, and Pat Metheny.

(This remains a mystery, except perhaps when you think of the existence of the Europop Festival)

...and some great musicians that most of them don't know about:

Johnny Griffin
Art Pepper
Lennie Tristano
Lester Bowie
Roland Kirk
Gigi Gryce

They also tend to overrate Oscar Peterson a bit, but I guess there's no helping that. The guy sounds the way you imagine jazz ought to sound if you haven't listened to a lot of jazz. He's just a little too correct and straight-ahead to offer a visionary breakthrough. A virtuoso, but a template.

So spread the word and make some friends.

Oh and they love Bill Evans, which is fine -- but usually the wrong Bill Evans. Turn them on to the earlier stuff, like Sunday at the Village Vanguard, before Scottie LaFaro died.

Illusory Rationality: No one can "understand" the market

2009-10-04T17:12:00.011+02:00

DailyKos has a contribution to the mythology of rationalism today.

It is a misconception to think that someone who makes money in the stock market "understands" something that is missed by someone who loses money.

The simple fact is that we all have incomplete and unreliable information -- even the market players do (though they have the advantage of being able to move the markets with massive amounts of capital, and hence are in a position to "cheat" in the short term -- something they often do at the expense of their own clients).

If you made money sometime as an active investor, then more power to you.

But you were simply lucky. Lucky to have avoided a 1987.

Those who bet short on the 2007 market had a little more vision, but they were also lucky not to have been squeezed out of their shorts by a further year of index inflation, which might easily have happened.

There is little to "understand" about the market; Plato makes the distinction between knowledge and true belief; the latter is the best we can hope for.

There are too many factors influencing the dynamics of a market for it to be understood or predicted by any model. The so-called "professional" portfolio managers do no better than the average Joe in Peoria.

Where does this leave us, then? In terms of the investment component of the capitalist system, it must put us in a position of skepticism regarding one's self-determination, and raise doubts about the value of the application of the mind to this area of economic activity.

Never Miiind

2009-09-30T17:31:00.004+02:00

Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms…

Waxman: In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working.

Greenspan: Absolutely, precisely. You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.

___________________

Can't we just let Rand go out of print now?

Liz Cheney's College Paper

2009-09-28T18:41:00.004+02:00

Well, one of them, actually. I was a professor of Liz Cheney's at Colorado College in Colorado Springs in the late 1980s. As I cleaned out my closet lately, I encountered a box full of old papers, some of them unclaimed students' essays.

One of these was a 6-page examination of Jefferson and constitutionalism by one Elizabeth Cheney, who is positioning herself to run for higher office.

It's a perfectly good paper, free from any hint of the advocacy for the overthrow of checks on presidential power through which her father wrought such destruction on America and the world.

Know Thyself: on Mark Krikorian's name

2009-05-28T16:21:00.014+02:00

Again we ask: Who let the dogs out? A particularly weak and baffling Mark Krikorian piece over at the NRO is getting a lot of play lately. This fellow seems to object to the way Sotomayor pronounces her name, adding this to the pile of presumed outrages the judge has perpetrated against the American public.

Another gratuitous Rothko to ease the pain

The gentleman says she mispronounces her own name, and would impose this (doubtlessly authoritarian) practice on the suffering American public. To quote Randy Newman here: Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Could be, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt.

I'll leave most of this discussion to the big boys (Olbermann ranked Krikorian as the world's worst last night), but there's one aspect of the article that has been ignored. As a linguist, I just can't let slide a remark Krikorian makes about his own name:

For instance, in Armenian, the emphasis is on the second syllable in my surname, just as in English, but it has three syllables, not four (the "ian" is one syllable) — but that's not how you'd say it in English (the "ian" means the same thing as in English — think Washingtonian or Jeffersonian).

This is simply not true. The ending "-ian" is exceptionally common in Armenian names. It is a so-called patronymic, meaning "son of" ("-son"), and has counterparts in every language, like "-itch" and its variants in the Slavic language or the "-ez" in "Lopez" and "Fernandez" and so many other Spanish names, or the "Mac-/Mc-" form in Scots and Irish names. I could go on to list counterparts in virtually every language on the planet, but you get the idea.

In other words, Mr. Krikorian offers a misinterpretation of his own name, while insisting on the mispronounciation of another's. For this fellow, the superficial -- pronounciation -- is more important than the substantial -- meaning -- and his ignorance about the meaning of his own name is a springboard for his clinging to the mispronounciation of another's.

It's also touching that the (incorrect) parallels he chooses are the names of two of the most illustrious figures in American history. (I think a powerful self-assimilationism is at work here, something we often see in conservatives that would in the 1950s have been quaintly called "ethnic.") Still, presumably they knew what "-ton" and "-son" meant.

You just can't make this stuff up.

On the Cusp

2009-04-26T16:41:00.025+02:00

There are moments in the history of a culture when we witness a particularly focused change, and can recognize it as such: we know that certain forces in public life us will become, in a matter of a few short years, mere remnants that have lost their force, except for a fringe few. The generational shift in attitudes toward gay marriage is one such shift; more generally the conservative mode of thinking -- in its present state -- is another remnant that is fading before our eyes. So heavily does it rely on a denial of obvious realities, and on manufacturing an alternate universe of "facts," that its framework, its infrastructure, is collapsing.

Collapsing, so far, to the 21% level, but there is no reason to count on an imminent rebound, since the movement is also undergoing paroxysms of self-immolation in these months.

Once you have science (and particularly modern science, focused far more than its ancient counterpart on method, on the inherent virtues of a testable system of investigation), you cannot go back to irrationality. The alternative to pure mystical irrationality, in a greater rational world, is crude denial of conditions as they exist, and insistence on something else.

Or more precisely, insistence on the falsehood of truth.

That's right: insistence is the method. Simple repetition, in ever-wilder voices. (I believe we were on redoing the American Revolution when I checked last month, costumes and all. I'm not sure what it is at the moment.)

One form of shouting, of course, when you haven't got anything else, is to claim the Direct Line to God. Remember, this is something not intended for public consumption, so the shouting would have done little good anyway:

God on our side: Comic book prepared by Rumsfeld for W's morning reading, and GQ breaks the story? Postmodernism in action.

(Go ahead and click on it -- just not while swallowing food.)

This image, and the others like it in a series of internal memos for the (apparently) indecisive Decider, have but one purpose: to clear the conscience of the President regarding the authorization of further attacks. Now Rand. She shares, with the current conservative short circuit, the insistence on abolishing the conscience in daily affairs: we should not be inhibited by an excess of sympathy for others, sympathy that will paralyze us in the fullest exercise of our personal freedoms.

Interesting here is the implicit acknowledgement that, if you did not deny conscience, it would bother you. The Randians and the conservatives know that conscience is human, in other words, and that all non-sociopathic vertebrates have one. It's just better to behave like a sociopath, even though we have never seen a functioning society where this is the norm. This is one aspect of Rand's antihumanistic tendencies we alluded to earlier. Here the antihumanist takes up ranks with the antisocial (what is the social structure of the Gulch, exactly?) to offer nothing on a silver platter.

Well, you can go back, but it won't be so cozy any more. And you won't have much time there.

To clear the palate, let me leave you with a Howard Nemerov masterpiece that is the consummate formulation of this entry's title. On the cusp -- the moment of change, recognized as it happens:

The Dependencies

This morning, between two branches of a tree
Beside the door, epeira once again
Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.
I test his early-warning system and
It works, he scrambles forth in sable with
The yellow hieroglyph that no one knows
The meaning of. And I remember now
How yesterday at dusk the nighthawks came
Back as they do about this time each year,
Grey squadrons with the slashes white on wings
Cruising for bugs beneath the bellied cloud.
Now soon the monarchs will be drifting south,
And then the geese will go, and then one day
The little garden birds will not be here.
See how many leaves already have
Withered and turned; a few have fallen, too.
Change is continuous on the seamless web,
Yet moments come like this one, when you feel
Upon your heart a signal to attend
The definite announcement of an end
Where one thing ceases and another starts;
When like the spider waiting on the web
You know the intricate dependencies
Spreading in secret through the fabric vast
Of heaven and earth, sending their messages
Ciphered in chemistry to all the kinds,
The whisper down the bloodstream: it is time.

Tea for Two Hundred or So

2009-04-15T22:17:00.032+02:00

Good to see the Right getting back to its good ol' Astroturf® roots. The Fox News tea parties managed to inspire a few people to set down the remote for an hour and a half to participate in a self-indulgent orgy of incoherence detached from any reality (which, as we know, has a liberal bias). Like the fact that 95% of them just got a tax cut, courtesy of Obama, if his budget passes.

But I guess if you're going to hold your little thingy on tax day, then you just have to moan about taxes, even if you did just have your rates cut. Did I say 95%? I was lowballing: how many of these types are making $200k?

OK, how many of the ones dressed up in blue-and-yellow satin George Washington suits with spittle running down their faces, ranting about fascism and communism and socialism? (Have I left anything out?)

Are these people even Americans? How many of them could tell you what a safety squeeze is? Or Marbury v. Madison? Fageddaboudit. They're Amurkins, doing what their TV has told them to do.

But don't blame this on the low end of the bell curve. Blame it on an ideology that takes no prisoners but the truth. The reporters -- people who in theory should know better -- who have played a shameful role as organizers and open advocates for this frat party (while denying all along that they are behind it), cannot see the simplest ironies of what they are doing. In California, they gather at the Sacramento State house in a muddle of anger, but against whom, they are a little confused. California is charging them more -- but their federal government, in the vast majority of cases, is asking less. No matter; it's all the same to them.

Speaking of California, but really à propos of nothing, here's a fabulous Diebenkorn, on the cusp of his move to abstract expressionism. Just something to help you stomach this unpleasant subject.

Salon's Mike Madden called it "Woodstock for Ayn Randers," which is so catchy that it's hard to resist. But of course, these people have no music at all, or love, or joy. This sad state probably springs from the desperation of their personal lives. And it's a desperation that's not so quiet, no matter what Thoreau says, but this isn't "most men" we're talking about. This is the left-hand end of the bell curve, where things get scrunched up and the only energy they have access to is the bawly and (at least verbally) brawly type. We should have some sympathy for these folks. They have nothing else.

Reason, indeed.

We didn't see much direct Randian talk going on, but the Who is John Galt? meme that's been floating around lately is really not these folks' cup of Salada. These are not the rugged individualist self-proclaimed hero types, but the safety-in-numbers crowd.

The heck with productivity. These types want revolution. Televised. In funny costumes. With their takeout burgers in little bags.

Redefining Productivity Down

2009-04-14T11:04:00.006+02:00

You can be a hero too. All Randians think this, particularly about themselves. It's an easy message to like -- and a very American one. The Randian individual hero becomes so by standing in the face of the system.

It's American as Hollywood, really. A healthy impulse, too -- when backed up by at least a spoonful of substance. Lately though, the other American art -- chutzpah -- is widely practiced in the dying circles of the right. Sheer invention of things.

It's Orwell meets the me generation: let's all make the world up in a free-for-all -- using newspeak like "enhanced interrogation techniques" and "extraordinary rendition."

This of course springs from another part of the mythology:

You can do anything you want in this world, be anything you want.

Now isn't that just a big load of horseshit. Why do we keep propagating this?

Success is a function of personality type more than anything else. As such, it is a form of luck: you are that way or you are not. You don't absolutely have to be born with it: you might be fortunate enough to have lived through a crisis like, say, alcoholism, and have emerged from it with a nice, solid compulsive personality that will not yield. That is also a formula for a kind of success. The kind that rewards persistence and inflexibility.

Until it breaks completely.

Delirium tremens

2009-03-27T14:51:00.023+01:00

The story about surges in purchases of Rand books (Atlas in particular) in response first to the popularity, then the victory, then the inauguration of Barack Obama has been kicking around the press for a few months now. I can't help thinking of the similar swell in Fox News' viewership (please don't make me link a reference), or the sudden conspicuous frenzy of the batshit crazy branch of the party -- which turned out this week to include the Newtmeister, now warning us of an impending dictatorship.

Who let the dogs out?

Most of these people in the political sphere are not pure Randians; they believe in God, and would insert the Almighty as a projected proxy for themselves into the process of governance wherever they might. (More on this ostensibly unresolvable conflict with the American Right in a later post.)

Yet the Randites share much with the delusional conservatives. Primarily, both groups are proud of not making apologies for their selfishness, proud of refusing anyone out of luck the benefit of the doubt, and positively proud of the fruits of their own supposed initiative in an age where prosperity has become so institutionalized that "initiative" is something we can now only write in lower case: salaried jobs, employer-provided health care, and an all-pervasive corporate presence that clearly defines what it expects of the individual -- all these have taken a toll on the primacy of individual talent and its prospects in America. For outside of a mere relative handful of celebrities, it is the corporate players who have been best rewarded by this setup, speaking solely in monetary terms of course.

Perhaps the Randians sense that this is the case: that it is the corporation, and not the individual, that is pulling the strings today, and maybe this is the background ostinato that is the real reason behind the resurgence; Obama is no more than a catalyst.

Let me leave you with the antidote, the purest refutation of objectivism: beauty for its own sake, brought to you by another refugee from Eastern Europe, born just two years apart from Rand (just to show that this was not entirely a lost generation):

A Right to Play the Blues

2009-03-22T13:25:00.026+01:00

Our old friend Warren is a well-known musician in Seattle. He tells of a Randian orgy (the kind that produces no children of course), the sort of thing that really shines a light on the absurdity of the whole phenomenon, and hints at its dangers:

"I was a trumpet player on a cruise doing the Vancouver-to-Alaska run. Our "job" consisted of playing to "click" tracks, tapes that played our parts through the loudspeakers and we were to play along (yeah, that's why I've devoted my life to playing music). Anyway our piano player got the whole band to read Ayn Rand backstage (we must have been pretty bored and gullible too). Well, this was one of life's moments: the head of the cruise staff came backstage, saw us reading Ayn Rand and remarked that we were supposed to be in the bar getting drunk like all the other bands he worked with.

It was indeed a great moment. The piano player who instigated this turned out to be a soulless materialistic dweeb."

...some great Philadelphians: Lee Morgan and Benny Golson and the Blakeyites

What were they reading?

A bunch of jazz musicians sitting around reading Rand in their spare moments: I'm not sure what this says about the state of jazz today, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt and look at what it tells us about le phénomène Rand. There is a cult-like flavor to all of this, though given Randians' absolute insistence on individualism, this is an aspect of the phenomenon that they would clearly not emphasize.

Still, to call it a cult is no hyperbole. Consider these chilling words:

“Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived. Atlas Shrugged is the greatest human achievement in the history of the world. Ayn Rand, by virtue of her philosophical genius, is the supreme arbiter of any issue pertaining to what is rational, moral, or appropriate to man's life on earth.”

[Correction from our original version: I had passed these words along as Alan Greenspan's, though indeed this attribution had never fully sat right with me: it was hard to believe that a person of Greenspan's intelligence would willfully dribble such cultoid, sycophantic claptrap -- though I was too clumsy to formulate this doubt. Our friends over at aynrandcontrahumannature, more rigorous than I, point out that this little outburst comes from another follower, Nathaniel Branden, a psychoanalyst who espouses a version of objectivism (as his enthusiastically adopted name suggests). More on Branden in another post dealing with the altruism inherent in certain professions, like psychoanalysis (though presumably not Branden's), where the ego of the analyst must be nullified in order to provide the patient a blank palette on which to project. The upshot of our point, though, is unchanged.]

Clearly this is someone susceptible to all kinds of hero-worship and the damage that can wreak in the public sphere. It really raises the question whether certain personality types are more susceptible to Randspeak than others. Our jazz musicians just had a little taste, but how many of them would have continued reading -- and how many would ultimately have taken the Randian worldview to heart?

One psychological interpretation is that people who insist on the cult of the individual to the exclusion of all communal considerations -- a radical view in any case that is destructive to the fabric of society -- are actually just compensating for a lack of direction in their own lives.

Don't those conservative US senators that inveigh against homosexuality all get discovered, sooner or later, foot-tapping in a gray airport bathroom, or stroking the rippling back of their languorous male escort distended on the crimson carpet of some seedy hotel outside Denver?

Denial is the First Symptom

2009-03-18T14:12:00.029+01:00

The landscape of desolation in Atlas is difficult to locate in place or time (which heightens its allegorical feel), but at any rate clearly for Rand the world is a physical place: "productive" people build edifices, or mine for gold, or run train companies across the rocks and hills of a solid continent.

In other words the Randians are materialists in the literal, even (cough) Marxist sense of the word, despite their protests to the contrary. Even reason, so exalted by Rand, requires the justification of material benefit as tangible evidence of its existence. This is no world of services (there is no "productivity" if there is nothing to point to) or art for art's sake. It is a concrete world.

One might even call it a Soviet Socialist-Realist world, without the socialism of course, and clearly without the fertility. It is no accident that publishers slap covers on her books that are inspired by socialist realism, like Nick Gaetano's covers, for example: didactic, idealized, static, and ultimately chilling works in the tradition of public art established by Socialist Realism in eastern Europe, a movement that brought us architecture like this never-constructed Zaryadye Administration Building that would have dotted the sky in Moscow:

Now tell me that couldn't be a Gaetano cover - just toss in a hyperproportioned, grotesquely-muscled android figure with gold leaf for skin, suck the life out of the sky, and clutter up the composition a little.

An allied, though at its best much more refined, human, and effective aesthetic strain is to be found in many WPA buildings in the United States in the 1930s and early 40s like the Alameda County Courthouse, which doesn't let the proportions get out of hand and has a warmth. It still looks great, exuding a sense of the importance of its function while avoiding undemocratic pomposity:

The opening scene of Atlas that we looked at in the last post is also hauntingly Russian, in its own way, even if this is not immediately obvious: Instead of a cardboard facade of perfection for the visiting Catherine II, or an inspecting Party Secretary and world press to marvel at, Rand gives us an equally cardboard dystopia of simplified character types, without children, indeed devoid of any sense of humanity. We can only conclude that there is no back story here either.

In other words, an inverted Potemkin village. And the Reader is Catherine the Great. (Insert horse joke here.) (No pun intended with "insert.") You can take Ayn out of Russia, but you can't take the Russia out of Ayn.

She wanted so hard to leave her family and native land -- but in a real sense, she brought it with her; she just added a few radical twists to the landscape. Ultimately though, denial remains her theme: denial of the humanistic tradition, denial of the intellectual (as opposed to the "rational"), and denial, paradoxically, of a certain freedom of thought.

Atlas Shrugged: a Closer Look

2009-03-17T14:46:00.031+01:00

Some things, when you magnify them, just get smaller.

"Who is John Galt?"

A fine question, and beautifully worded too; our research reveals that the first draft named him "John Cult," but this was ixnayed as excessive by AR's advisory committee, consisting of the young (and breathtakingly virile) Alan Greenspan, a promising tenor saxophonist who gave up a career in music to shatter an otherwise healthy economy with simplistic and inflexible notions that will be served up on the pages to follow.

The light was ebbing

Got it: fall of civilization - but let's give it a chance; maybe the whole dimestore symbolism thing won't go too far

and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face.

Well of course not: he's a bum, just like all the others. ("Make out" would have been so much more powerful than "distinguish," now wouldn't it?)

The bum had said it simply, without expression.

Simply, of course. This bum is humanity, degree zero.

But from the sunset

oy vey here we go

far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes

The setting sun is red actually, but we get it: the color of decay and rot. Still, far better would be "his eyes glinted yellow" (and besides, "caught his eyes"? Fuzzy English; What she means is "reflected/gleamed/glinted in his eyes"),

and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still-as if the question had been addressed to the causeless

oh surely not "causeless" - try "the mysterious" or "unexplained"

uneasiness within him.

The bum ugh-again viss ze bum? leaned against the side of awkward! - delete "the side of" the doorway; a wedge of broken glass okay, we get the symbolism behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.

Yellow, yellow, brown, brown. The chromatic gamut from A to B. Anyone else need an aspirin yet?

"Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense. Well you'd be tense too if you had to live in prose like this all day.

"Why does it bother you?" he asked.
"It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.

Now this is some scintillating dialogue!

Open Outcry: A Call for Submissions

2009-03-13T02:19:00.013+01:00

Just when you thought it was safe to consider reentering responsible public life, the Rynders are out in a paroxysm of auto-afflatus. In sync, perhaps, with the grinding self-annulment of a certain Party, a few people who actually think Rynd is readable are suddenly inhabiting the everysphere, and they're cockier than ever. Call it a swan song, or a paroxysm of refuge into the fantasy self - but it's there.

Battered by the unremitting implosion of their dearest-held myths (the unfailing power of "self-improvement" -- which I think means making money -- the rejection of the poor, and the general embrace for horridly leaden prose), one might have expected a little humility from this crowd.

Alas, this was not to be.

At any rate, we'd like to hear your Rynd stories. Not the roll-in-the-hay, tell-me-the-Russian-for-nipple-again kind of Greenspan personal stories, but accounts of your experiences reading Rynd, and realizing that you'd rather read the Des Moines phonebook.

So send us your stories at:

aynrandsux
at
gmail.com

We'll be culling all submissions for the really good stuff.

And please don't hold back. Your effort shall not be wasted. We have excellent taste, so if you send us the premium scribbles, we'll put them on a plate for all to view.