More literary criticism: Ayn Rand

As readers of this blog know, one of my literary pet peeves is the continued existence of Dan Brown. I don't object to Brown's ideas or stories. I object to him because he's such a terrible writer.

Another one of my literary pet peeves has to do with the continued existence of Ayn Rand. She is viewed as a great thinker of our time by a lot of people -- something that baffles me. Her notions -- which can be boiled down to the simple conclusion that selfishness is a virtue -- strike me as infantile and sociopathic. Her entire philosophy is a rationalization for behaving selfishly and having absolutely no regard for any other human being.

She is enjoying a resurgence in popularity now -- well, she would be enjoying if she weren't dead -- thanks to a lot of conservatives who share her belief that selfishness is a virtue. She is hot in publishing and is the subject of two new biographies.

A review of the two books on Slate magazine begins:

"Ayn Rand is one of America's great mysteries. She was an amphetamine-addicted author of sub-Dan Brown potboilers, who in her spare time wrote lavish torrents of praise for serial killers and the Bernie Madoff-style embezzlers of her day. She opposed democracy on the grounds that "the masses"--her readers--were 'lice' and 'parasites' who scarcely deserved to live. Yet she remains one of the most popular writers in the United States, still selling 800,000 books a year from beyond the grave. She regularly tops any list of books that Americans say have most influenced them. Since the great crash of 2008, her writing has had another Benzedrine rush, as Rush Limbaugh hails her as a prophetess. With her assertions that government is 'evil' and selfishness is 'the only virtue,' she is the patron saint of the tea-partiers and the death panel doomsters. So how did this little Russian bomb of pure immorality in a black wig become an American icon?"

Here is a passage that reflects just how nuts she was:

"The newspapers were filled for months with stories about serial killer called William Hickman, who kidnapped a 12-year-old girl called Marion Parker from her junior high school, raped her, and dismembered her body, which he sent mockingly to the police in pieces. Rand wrote great stretches of praise for him, saying he represented 'the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. ... Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.' She called him 'a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy,' shimmering with 'immense, explicit egotism.' Rand had only one regret: 'A strong man can eventually trample society under its feet. That boy [Hickman] was not strong enough.'"

She probably would have thought John Wayne Gacy was an exceptional clown.

The review concludes:

"The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties."

And if that weren't enough, in my opinion, anyway, as execrable as her ideas were, she was a terrible writer.