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Old 11-14-2008, 07:41 AM   #8 (permalink)
bobstad
Art is the means whereby.
 
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I don't think of Rand as being worthy, though when I was twelve years old and more naive' I think I read everything she wrote.

If you enjoy reading autobiography you might like singer Mel Torme's IT WASN'T ALL VELVET, who mentions being an Ayn Rand fan himself. He also wrote a biography of his close musician pal drummer Buddy Rich, who I was surprised to find had been a compulsive marijuana user.(though once knowing this, I'd not been surprised at all)

If you read Torme' you can see how I might find his take on Rand instructive; since his life is so incredibly ordered in the sense of promoting his gifts to greatest advantage who was a great child prodigy. Such a person could find the plutocracy virtuous; and you get this feeling from such a virtuoso musician where their art is enough of a talent to shield them from the more prurient sides of society and commerce.

I think evidently Rand must've also had reason to see that or similar sides of the tiny hierarchy which runs society, though if I ever did know much about her life I've forgotten that now.

But, contrast her fictional hero Reardan, to the sociopathic *****s like those who ran Enron for instance. As captains of commerce to one of industry, which to me seem inter-related.

Or, a more personal experience is of my grand father, who'd owned in his life five different logging companies, but had an inferiority complex. This was not out of any doubts of his talent or intelligence, but from a habitual honesty which always put him at a disadvantage dealing with the robber barons who ran the industry as a whole.

He'd been a natural humanist, who when during the second world war the government was paying cost plus ten per cent to the owners of businesses important to the war effort, yet had frozen the worker's wages; my grandfather aware of this obvious injustice and efficient enough he'd of made a profit without the huge advantage of only having to total the cost of doing business and then add ten cents on top of every dollar spent to the total the government paid anyone they did business with; had put every family member of any of his workers on the payroll as if they too were working full time, in order to give a small portion of what he was making to those who worked so hard for him at one of the most difficult and dangerous, exhausting livelihoods known to man.

I think someone like Rand, who tends to idolize corporate autocracy, must find easier to publish her books and ideas, than another writer very critical of the strata of society most involved in whether someone is allowed to widely distribute their thoughts.

You might really enjoy three books written by someone my grand father hunted and fished with in the '60s in British Columbia, Richmond Pearson Hobson, Jr. He'd been a New York real estate agent when the depression hit who'd never given up a childhood dream of becoming a cowboy.(his father had been a rear admiral during the Spainish-American war)

He'd drifted from New York to Wyoming where he'd spent six years shoveling manure in a barn without ever once riding a horse; when he'd met a veteran cowboy his age named Panhandle Phillips.

His three books are the stories of their many adventures in the '30s, '40s & '50s opening up the last unmapped open range area in North America; and all true stories rather than the idealized fiction Rand pedals and proselytizes with. GRASS BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS, NOTHING TOO GOOD FOR A COWBOY and RANCHER TAKES A WIFE; about their incredible experiences ranching the wilderness interior of B. C.
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