Life is good! It’s Sunday and only a scant 9 days away from the 2008 presidential election. Like Larry Craig, I cannot wait to get normalcy back in my life. However, my usually anxious mind is comforted today some by the polls that suggest overwhelmingly, by all conceivable measures that Barack Obama is ahead. That is unless you count those conjured up in the geriatric mind of John McCain, of course.
With this I found myself digging through my library to find what new and old discoveries lie hidden in the pages of the many unread books I have. Out of the masses staring at me is an old, tired paperback by Ayn Rand, "For the New Intellectual" (1961). The title seemed apropos for the times, and boy was it! Not two pages in, I had to put it down to pound out the dairy you are now reading. I hope that you enjoy the unbelievable or not so unbelievable repetitious patterns of history that are plotted below from Ayn Rand’s pen to my keyboard.
When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediency-not daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehow- or they can identify the situation, check their premise, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.
John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the first course. Barack Obama and Joe Bidden represent the second, obviously. Ayn continues to lay out what the first course looks like:
The grayness, the stale cynicism, the noncommittal cautiousness, the guilty evasiveness of [their] voices suggest the attitude of the courtiers in the story "The Emperors New Clothes" who professed admiration for the Emperor’s non-existent garments, having accepted the assertion that anyone who failed to perceive them was morally depraved at heart.
Of course, one could add a plethora of examples that illuminate the erratic, out-of-touch campaign that is currently being waged by the McCain-Palin ticket. However, I found the new clothes versus non-existent garments logic most ironic, and depressingly true.
*examples of self-righteous anti-intellectual condemnation are plenty, and thus not needed here.
America meets Sarah Palin.
One of America’s tragic errors is that too many of her best minds believe-as they did in the past-that the solution is to turn to anti-intellectual and rely on some cracker-barrel sort of folksy wisdom. The exact opposite is true.
America meets Barack Obama
Yes, those are her words-word for word. You may disagree with her notion that suggests Republicans have some of the best minds in America, but you can not deny the 2008 Palin-Republican nail was smashed in that cogent 1961 sentence.
What we need most urgently is to recognize the enormous power and the crucial importance of the intellectual professions. A culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them. A country without intellectuals is like a body without a head.
Ayn, America is awake and listening! On November 4th the American body will finally have a head. An intelligent one that can identify the situation, check their premise, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.
Now, I'll get back to my reading to discover why everyone will be ripping Rand to pieces here- laissez-faire capitalism?