With Ayn Rand in the wilds of Texas

I am reading Ayn Rand while driving through the wilds of Texas. Both are big deals. My version of Atlas Shrugged stretches over 1000 pages. And the stretch from San Antonio to El Paso is a 2-day proposition.

Particularly if you are in a 14-foot U-haul truck with a car in tow -- my son is moving from Houston to LA -- and the check engine light on.

“What’s with the light?” we yelled into the cell phone sixty miles out of Houston. “And oiyl,” said the U-haul guy (we can’t make out his accent). So we did. “It’s still on,” we yelled into the cell phone sixty miles out of San Antonio. “Ahh, just drive with it; maybe it’s the gaaage.” So we are.

It’s about 90 humid degrees outside and the air conditioning is sluggish. The land is an endless stretch of flat green; the mile markers are in three digits (481, 480, 479, so on).

Recently Ayn Rand has been in demand. It’s been said that with the rise of Barack Obama, Rand’s “objectivist” philosophy has been a source of solace for conservatives banned to the wilderness.

To the extent that this is true, it is a window into the conservative heart: there is no love in it.

Rand’s heroes are goal-driven self-starters. The Dagny Taggerts, the Hank Reardons. Against all odds they achieve the construction of worlds: worlds of their making; worlds according to their dictates. For them, other people were meant to get with the program, or to get out of the way. In reading Atlas, the pictures conjured are in black and white – kind of like those Leni Riefenstahl films from the 1930s.

The films that documented the rise of Hitler.

There is a sense of ubermensch in reading Rand. A brave new world that would probably not smile kindly on the likes of me.

My son asks: “What if this U-haul breaks down in the desert?”

I respond: “Well, if it happens, God will provide a way.” I am thinking of kind folk driving by that would lend a hand.

And I am hoping they would not be like Hank Reardon.

Logos2Go

Isaiah 58.6-8 Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard.

“Atlas felt a sense of déjà vu” Economist, February 26, 2009 http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13185404 Accessed May 12, 2009