Ayn Rand was one sick puppy

[Kelvin Mace]

The dialogue between two of her "protagonists".

She thought of the evening last winter when he came in, took a small package from his pocket and held it out to her, saying, “I want you to have it.” She opened it and stared in incredulous bewilderment at a pendant made of a single pear-shaped ruby that spurted a violent fire on the white satin of the jeweler’s box….

He led her to the bedroom, he took off her clothes, without a word, in the manner of an owner undressing a person whose consent is not required. He clasped the pendant on her shoulders. She stood naked, the stone between her breasts, like a sparkling drop of blood.

…”Do you think a man should give jewelry to his mistress for any purpose but his own pleasure?” he asked. “This is the way I want you to wear it. Only for me. I like to look at it. It’s beautiful.”


“I like giving things to you,” he said, “because you don’t need them.”

“No?”

“And it’s not that I want you to have them. I want you to have them from me.”

“That is the way I do need them, Hank. From you.”

“Do you understand that it’s nothing but vicious self-indulgence on my part? I’m not doing it for your pleasure, but for mine.”

“Hank!” The cry was involuntary; it held amusement, despair, indignation and pity. “If you’d given me those things just for my pleasure, not yours, I would have thrown them in your face.”

“Yes… Yes, then you would – and should.”

I guess I can understand why the Cons love her, aside from her abject worship of money and the wealthy, she really has ZERO respect for women.

This reads like satire.

[BrainMann1]

1. I read the piece and you are right she was one sick puppy

[LeftyMom]

2. She got her ideas about the ideal man from a notorious murderer. What else would one expect?

http://www.alternet.org/story/145819/ayn_rand,_hugely_popular_author_and_inspiration_to_right-wing_leaders,_was_a_big_admirer_of_serial_killer

The best way to get to the bottom of Ayn Rand's beliefs is to take a look at how she developed the superhero of her novel, Atlas Shrugged , John Galt. Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market , Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation -- Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street -- on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: "Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should," she wrote, gushing that Hickman had "no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel 'other people.'"

This echoes almost word for word Rand's later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead : "He was born without the ability to consider others." (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' favorite book -- he even requires his clerks to read it.)

[closeupready]

3. Hollywood kicked her out, and that's when she penned the dreadful

books we've all come to know as literary equivalents of Emperors Without Clothing - highly touted by the Establishment and monied elites, but actually really bad, and boring, shit.

[Kelvin Mace]

11. I watched "The Foutainhead"

And it was just as bad a "Atlas Shrugged".

[treestar]

4. It's part of her selfishness theory

You should not want a man to do something for you unless he wants to do it, likewise, a man should not want a woman to do anything for him unless she wants to do it. There, she wouldn't be sexist. She wants it to be selfish. You do something for the other because it makes you happy, not out of any thought or consideration for them.

She hated sacrifice too. That word made her see red.

[FSogol]

5. Exactly. Her writing is a sophomoric (and long-winded) attempt to justify selfishness.

[Kelvin Mace]

12. She is one of those writers

that makes it very hard not to consider the occasional book burning.

[awoke_in_2003]

6. I bet she especially hated the idea...

of sacrificing that Social Security check she collected every month.

[awoke_in_2003]

7. This should not be taken lightly...

it should be flung with much force

[MineralMan]

8. Crappy writer, too.

Hated reading her.

[socialist_n_TN]

9. Ah, yes, Third Way prose......

[baldguy]

10. One of Ed Snowden's favorites.