Ayn Rand Redux

Ayn Rand is the natural spokesperson for Libertarian ideals.  Her novel, Atlas Shrugged, portrays a dystopian society in which the government suppresses individualism, creativity and initiative. The turning point comes when protagonist John Galt leads the people to stop productive activities, thereby starving the government of its revenue and bringing down the oppressive system. The idea being that human achievement should not be suppressed, and that oppressive structures only exist with the tacit approval of those being oppressed. When the structure collapses, then people will be free. Thus Ayn Rand presents her ideal of a world in which those who work hard get what they deserve, and those who are lacking in worldly goods are poor because they are lazy or morally defective. 

"Objectivism" was Rand's philosophy; individual rights along with the pursuit of one's own happiness was the essential morality that she espoused. She saw laissez-faire capitalism as the most logical milieu for nurturing the values of her philosophy.  Little wonder that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan was enamored with Ayn Rand and loved her book so much that he gave it out to people. Rand was voicing what the right wing Tea Partyers are extolling: no more government handouts, no more taxing away our money that belongs to us because we earned it.  Government bureaucracy is inefficient and bad, private enterprise is good.  All of these ideals are to be found in Ayn Rand’s philosophy.

Paul Ryan is now backtracking because he found out that Ayn Rand was an atheist, or maybe it’s because she favored a woman’s right to an abortion.  The whole Ryan/Rand incident exemplifies something that I see that is wrong with politics and the media sound bites of our day. For one thing, Paul Ryan should be able to articulate which aspects of Ayn Rand’s philosophy he agrees with and why, and which ones he disagrees with. The problem is that such articulation would require a sophisticated understanding of the world that is not made up of simple black-and-white issues.  Such an explanation would also require more than a 20-second sound bite and unfortunately Ryan’s followers may not attend long enough to hear an explanation.

Ryan has made his political capital on Tea Party issues of private enterprise, no taxes, no government handouts, and family values. He is free to hold his economic and political views, though they are not views that I hold to. As much as I would love to make an issue of the “Godless Free-Market Capitalism” of Ayn Rand and pin that on Paul Ryan due to his past exuberant embrace of her philosophy, and as much as I would love to point out to Tea Partyers that their family values have been sold down-river by the money-mad right-wing politicians, I shall refrain.  It is important, however, for anyone to take stock of what they say they believe and to consider what the consequences of political actions would be.  The ethic that I hold to affirms that we are to take care of one another. The morality of a society is seen in how the weakest and most vulnerable are treated.

Blogger Bob Gifford has very succinctly written about his own conversion from Ayn Rand libertarianism in “My Politico-Religious Journey.” Darrell Grizzle, who has read extensively from the works of Ayn Rand, posted a timely piece on his Blog of the Grateful Bear just last week. I have talked about my views of what makes a society work for the good of all its citizens in “Politics and the Common Good.” Check out each of these short essays and ask yourself what it is that you envision for our society, and how can we get there?



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Wednesdays With Dorothy: Outings, Hysteria, and Prayer Meetings

                                            (This is part of a series. For Table of Contents go here)

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Dorothy Faye Burdette was born February 18, 1930, at the beginning of the Great Depression. She tells a story of growing up in utter poverty. Her father was a mechanic who could not hold a job; her mother did odd jobs to bring in some money. By her own telling, Dorothy was a slow learner and was prone to behavioral outbursts that sounded like fits of fear and rage.

“My Daddy and Mother used to take me to the carnival on the fair grounds.  There was something about that carnival music that really scared me. I would try to get out of my daddy’s arms. I would get scared and nearly wring my daddy’s arm off.  If I got loose I’d break and run. My mother took me on the Ferris wheel. We would get way up to the top and I would rock that seat back and forth – my mother had to make me stop. I guess I was born with some kind of hysteria.”

“I was real hysterical back then. I would break and run and my mother couldn’t hardly catch me.  Sometimes I would look at the boards on the porch, with some of them bucking up – for some reason that would scare me. I would run up under the porch – that’s really how hysterical I was.  I remember I went running out onto the porch and I wasn’t paying no mind, I just ran off the end of the porch and knocked the breath out of myself.”

“Sometimes I would grab my mother by the legs and she couldn’t get me off of her, She would have to pry me off her legs and get me up to where the light was. I don’t know what it was, and I would get scared of the dark and everything, and I’d wake her up crying, 'Light the lamp! Light the lamp!’   And I’d try to climb the headboard of the bed – it was an old iron bed.”

Her behavior must have been a source of distress for her parents. There were few parenting resources available at that time in the rural South. Spanking and extended family were about the only resources, especially among the poor. Dorothy told me about a time when her parents appealed to a Higher Power in their desperation for help:

“There was a colored preacher and he told my mother – and I can just barely remember him tellin’ her – that he could pray for me and whatever that was would go off of me and it would never come back over me. Well, it did, but I was still pretty scared sometimes. Now that I’m older I’ve got where I’m not so seized or scared.”

Dorothy also shared some other experiences she had with religion when she was a child:

“Going to church, sometimes we went to them old tent meetings they used to have. One time we went to this church and they didn’t have no piano or nothin’ and they used to beat on buckets and sing. Then at our house there was a man and his wife – he worked in a shoe store in Sylacauga – and they were Holiness. They lived on one side of the duplex and we lived in the other.”

On future visits with Dorothy, she would tell me about her experiences in public school and the difficulties that arose both from her lack of ability to learn at the same pace as the others and from her difficulty fitting in socially. Living with developmental disabilities can present multi-layered difficulties. All too often those with the least coping skills are asked to navigate themselves through a complicated and often cruel world.

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Monday Music: Oh Happy Day

I thoroughly enjoyed watching the movie, Secretariat. That was such a feel-good movie. It brought back memories of watching that race on television at the time and hearing my father say, "Look at that horse go!" The movie soundtrack also reminded of what an inspiring song "Oh Happy Day" was when it hit the airwaves. The Edwin Hawkins Singers showed us all how to sing that old hymn on a whole new level when it first topped the charts in 1969! Here is the original version that we heard on the radio: