un-china_digression: GQ gut check

Whenever I come back to Shenzhen from Hong Kong I stop by a magazine stand to pick up some English reading to while away the time spent changing subway/train lines and standing in line in customs. My preferences: GQ and Wired. But it has to be an American – not British – edition of GQ. I don’t really care for thirty pages of articles about the parliamentary intrigues of a government that has minimal relevance today, or for another twenty pages of sartorial writing that aims to recapture the fashion style of “the glory days of Empire.” That and I don’t really identify with all those British words like “bollocks.” An odd little way of finding my American comfort level.

But what I enjoyed the most out of this month’s American GQ was most definitely Andrew Corsello’s excoriating article on Ayn Rand, who is GQ’s Writer of the Year for her “influence.”

To briefly explain my stance on the polemical Objectivist: I don’t buy her arguments and I was never very impressed. One of my father’s libertarian colleagues gave me my copies of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged with a note about cultivating the young mind that my father boasted of so often. They were decent reads to while away the summer hours of high school, but even then I thought it was more like pulp fiction than either Dickens or Rushdie, especially with the many cheap tricks it pulled (evidently if you want your son to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, give him the initials HR – and if you want your daughter to grow up strong, resolute and masculine, the initials DT will be fine too.) So many of my friends whom I had previously thought of as sensible people remarked how “unique” the Randian world view was though. My own political views disagreed and my aesthetics vomited, but until college there wasn’t much confrontation on the matter.

Fast forward to 2007 when Ann Coulter and the neoconservative punditry was working at a fever tilt spewing hatred and bigotry. The USC Objectivist Club, always hosting crockpot panels on how the West should nuke terrorists into cinders or how everything blue and green was bad all while trying to pass it off as academic discussion and debate (there is no such thing as debate with an Objectivist; there is only his or her linear thinking), was reaching out to the USC Young Republicans to co-sponsor a week they wanted to call “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” which would culminate with the hosting of Ms. Coulter herself. I was mordantly annoyed by this and tried to rouse my own tepid Academic Culture Assembly board members to stand up and fight for the “academic integrity” that the Randian lunatics were hijacking and calling their own, but in the end we let it slip by. I still wish that I had sent a letter in to the school paper’s editor or something.

But I don’t have to worry about voicing my opinions about Objectivism, Ayn Rand or her two puerile fiction pieces anymore, as Corsello did it all for me. I can hardly put it better myself, so here’s a sampler:

A weirdly specific thing happens with the books of Ayn Rand. It’s not just the what of the books, but when a reader discovers them—almost always during the first or second year of college. Rand grabs a reader at a time of maximum vulnerability and malleability, when he’s getting his first accurate sense of how he measures up in the world in terms of intellect and talent. The longing to regard oneself as misunderstood and underrated can be powerful; the temptation to project oneself as such, irresistible. But how? How to stand above and apart?

Enter Howard Roark, the heroic and misunderstood architect, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who at the end of The Fountainhead blows up his own masterpiece after a bunch of sniveling “parasites” and “second-handers” tinker with the blueprints.

GODDAMN!

Then enter Atlas Shrugged’s John Galt, the heroic and misunderstood engineer, square of jaw and Asperger-ish of mien, who, after persuading “men of talent” to retreat to his Colorado aerie while the country goes to seed (in order to show the “mediocrities” left behind what life is like without their betters), delivers a 35,000-word speech decrying bureaucrats and regulators.

SIXTY PAGES, BITCHES!

Finally, enter Objectivism, the name Rand gave to her moral defense of “reason,” individualism, and unfettered capitalism.

SCOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORE!

The days during which that 19-year-old has Rand’s worldview vectored into his cerebral cortex are feverish and sleepless. Days of beautiful affliction during which the intransigence of others—roommates, a coed the patient has been hitting on, professors, parents, everyone—are shown to be the product of their shortcomings, their idiocy and sublimated envy of the patient’s intelligence and talent. Days during which the infected comes to see himself and Roark/Galt as avatars of one another: superheroically mirthless protagonists in a drama of historical import. It’s the damnedest thing. One day you’ve got a bright young kid dutifully connecting the dots of his liberal-arts education; the next, he’s got Roark and Galt in the marrow and has become…an insufferable asshole.

And a fairly good example of such an asshole:

does that moniker “Ayn Rand Asshole” strike you as a contrivance? Do you disbelieve the proposition that a person could read Atlas Shrugged almost purely at the level of injunction—taking the things John Galt says and does as straight as a biblical literalist takes the eye of the needle?

Then meet Michael Malice. No, really. That’s his name. He’s a New York City author and blogger who calls himself both a genius and an “elitist anarchist.” What’s that mean? It means that if a panhandler asks him for a little money or food, Malice says, “I could, but then you might live longer, so you see my dilemma.”
…

Malice also owns the domain name…eh, forget it. You’ll just think I’m making this stuff up. Here’s the interview transcript:

mm: It’s funny you should call me an Ayn Rand Asshole, because I happen to own the domain name assholism.com.
gq: Ah, now you’re fucking with me.
mm: Really. I own it.2
gq: Really?
mm: I really do.
gq: If that’s true, you are not a Randian Asshole. You are the Ayn Rand Asshole.
mm: Well, an asshole is just an assertive person you don’t approve of, right?

Oh, wait, I DO have something to say:
This kind of dead certainty is something you should be rewarded with after you have assessed all factors and been able to reach the best conclusion. This is almost never possible, but I’ll concede that some people are good enough to do it. But most Randians aren’t. Too many of them mistake a blind and lazy kind of self-confidence for this kind of enlightenment. This sort of cockiness lazily passes over analysis and argument and skips to the part where one professes the righteous correctness that helps to fuel his or her own compensatory narcissism.

A Randian would then get on my case about hypocrisy and using an elitist attitude to attack Rand’s support for elitist attitudes. But they’d forget one important difference: I don’t eat babies.

I’ll leave the rest for my own notes. But I do encourage you to read Corsello’s wonderful, vindictive, and visciously delicious article from top to bottom. By the way, I may agree with the bare bones of Corsello’s economic-tie-in, but I’m going to reserve judgment on more conspiratorial matters until I read some of the rest of what those libertarians are touting for myself.