ATLAS SHRIEKED: Ayn Rand's first love was a sadistic serial killer

[Raksha]

One of my Facebook friends posted this article to his profile today. It isn't a new one, but somehow I missed it the first time around. Like Adolf Hitler, Ayn Rand wasn't just a sociopath but a crusading sociopath--her goal was to make the world over in her own sociopathic image. It's absolutely terrifying how close that goal has come to its fulfillment, at least in the United States.

The description of the murder and dismemberment of the 12-year-old kidnapping victim is very brutal and graphic and I'm not going to quote from it. There's a photograph of the cops picking up the pieces (literally) along a highway also.

--Linda

ATLAS SHRIEKED: Ayn Rand’s First Love and Mentor Was A Sadistic Serial Killer Who Dismembered Little Girls

February 26, 2010
By Mark Ames

There’s something deeply unsettling about living in a country where millions of people froth at the mouth at the idea of giving health care to the tens of millions of Americans who don’t have it, or who take pleasure at the thought of privatizing and slashing bedrock social programs like Social Security or Medicare. It might not be as hard to stomach if other Western countries also had a large, vocal chunk of the population who thought like this, but the US is seemingly the only place where right-wing elites can openly share their distaste for the working poor. Where do they find their philosophical justification for this kind of attitude?

It turns out, you can trace much of this thinking back to Ayn Rand, a popular cult-philosopher who plays Charlie to the American right-wing’s Manson Family. Read on and you’ll see why.

One reason why most countries don’t find the time to embrace her thinking is that Ayn Rand is a textbook sociopath. Literally a sociopath: Ayn Rand, in her notebooks, worshiped a notorious serial murderer-dismemberer, and used this killer as an early model for the type of “ideal man” that Rand promoted in her more famous books — ideas which were later picked up on and put into play by major right-wing figures of the past half decade, including the key architects of America’s most recent economic catastrophe — former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and SEC Commissioner Chris Cox — along with other notable right-wing Republicans such as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Rush Limbaugh, and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.

<snip>

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 by 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’s favorite book — he even makes his clerks learn it.)

<snip>

http://exiledonline.com/atlas-shrieked-why-ayn-rands-right-wing-followers-are-scarier-than-the-manson-family-and-the-gruesome-story-of-the-serial-killer-who-stole-ayn-rands-heart/">Source

[bookman]

1. Wish I had a link. nt

[alittlelark]

2. You do.... click on 'source'

[hlthe2b]

5. the link is there... click on "source"

Very very very disturbing, though. This guy was so sick that it really ought to be fully revealed that THIS was the man Rand modeled her entire philosophy around.

Gawd. Though they are both long dead, the horrific legacy continues.

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. The thing that's so disturbing about Rand for me is that hers is

the dumbest, most sophomoric reading of Nietzsche imaginable. It really is as if you gave a few of Nietzsche's works (a very few) to a college sophomore with no background in philosophy, so sense of the philosophical conversations Nietzsche is engaging, not the slightest clue about the 19th century, much less 19th century German social thought, and asked, "So, watta ya think?"

As a great admirer of Nietzsche's thought (its complexity, its mode of engagement, its method), I just want to tear my eyes out to see it taken up by somebody like Rand - who has no sense of Nietzsche's various projects whatsoever, who can actually extract the opposite of Nietzsche's thought (or, indeed, the weaker force) from any given work - be taken seriously in her scribblings. It's nauseating. But you can almost hear Nietzsche laughing: "Naturlich...," and "I told you so."

[Raksha]

12. I know very little about Nietzche and I'm not likely to ever learn,

since I am emphatically NOT one of his admirers. I read a little of his writing when I was about seventeen, found it amoral, sociopathetic and repulsive and didn't bother with it after that. I rejected it instinctively, and for pretty much the same reason I reject Ayn Rand. I wasn't surprised when I learned that Hitler was also an admirer of Nietzche. So I'm not in a position to appreciate these fine distinctions and I'll just have to take your word for it that they exist.

I posted this same OP on another forum with a few Randroid libertarian types hanging around. One of them is obviously a great admirer of Ayn Rand (with this guy, I was NOT surprised) and he whipped out what he thought was a refutation of my OP about two minutes after I posted it.

You might find it entertaining, and for all I know even agree with it.

http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2010/03/smearing-ayn-rand-nietzsche-and.html

[saras]

21. You seem to know enough

You pretty much encapsulate my own reaction after serious college-level study of Nietzche. There's no doubt he's a more intelligent writer than Rand, but then that isn't saying much. He thinks clearly about some of the most hideously stupid and wrongheaded premises... but to what effect?

[Myshadow]

63. 'Thoughts"

That's what being philosophical through the haze of tertiary syphilis.

[bhikkhu]

64. I was fond of him at one time

...then moved on and didn't even think of his philosophies for a long time. The other day I went back and read "The Gay Science", which I found to be transportingly well written and transcendent once. On re-reading it fell flat - like many modern day pundits, he stops just short of public masturbation.

I really don't see much of value in the old stuff anymore, in spite of occasional nostalgia. It was all egocentric, ethnocentric, anthropocentric, and narrow, as was the culture of those days. Its easy and sometimes comforting to fall into that, but sooner or later the hateful side of it takes hold.

[readmoreoften]

67. Nietzsche wrote many letters of absolute horror at the fascists use of his work.

He was not an anti-semite and wrote many scathing letters about how they were monsters who perverted every aspect of his work to mean the opposite. Hitler was also a vegetarian and practiced Eastern religion because it was Aryan. It doesn't mean that Hinduism has shades of Nazism in it because Hitler found it there. Tom Paine is quoted by idiots all the time.

[Mason Dixon]

29. what do you do for a living?

generically speaking?

[alcibiades_mystery]

44. Why?

You writin' a book?

[Mason Dixon]

56. just curious

what you're credentials might be

[alcibiades_mystery]

68. Ah

That's nice.

[Mason Dixon]

73. Tis

which tells me your credentials are the same as mine

1 computer
1 router
1 credit card

That is nice!

[alcibiades_mystery]

74. Will I be baited?

No.

:hi:

[RaleighNCDUer]

47. that is a GREAt title "Nietzsche, Laughing" nt

[applegrove]

4. The GOP and the neocons use the toolbox of the sociopath all the time:

sophie's choices, stereotyping, giving their followers a paranoid stance against their enemies, etc etc..

[onager]

69. Yep. I saw a great documentary on that last night...

The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom. Just one in a string of brilliant BBC documentaries by Adam Curtis.

Curtis tends to the leftish himself, but he pulls no punches when it comes to the political classes, either US or UK. One of his recurring themes is the way models of human behavior developed and accepted during the Cold War are still being used today...even though they have been repeatedly proven wrong. Along with the crap economic theories that drove both Reaganism and Thatcherism.

A funny thing I remember: some high-level economists commissioned a study, laying out their model of the Ideal Rational Human and asking what sort of human would have these attributes. They were expecting an answer of "Well, nearly everybody." The answer they got: only 2 classes of human beings would behave this way - professional economists and psychopaths.

:rofl:

The titles of the three episodes give a hint of their contents:

1. "Fuck You Buddy" (a look at the game theories of John "Beautiful Mind" Nash. Including an interview with an older and wiser Nash, who points out that he was suffering from severe clinical paranoia when he developed some of those theories.

2. "The Lonely Robot"

3. "We Will Force You To Be Free" - yes, whether you live in post-Soviet Russia or Iraq, the neocons want to serve you a great big steaming pile of one-size-fits-all economic and political "freedom..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trap_(television_documentary_series)

[Old and In the Way]

6. Rand was an anti-socialist at heart.

Can society exist when everyone is anti-socialist? How do Rand's characters do their great works if there is no society organized to allow them to happen?

And lets not forget that, when it really counted, Ayn Rand took advantage of the benefits of both Social Security and Medicare - so she was an anti-coialist hypocrite to boot. Why anyone would worship her ideas is beyond my ken.

[rpannier]

7. Dangerous woman and her dangerous philosophy nt

[highplainsdem]

8. Great advice at the end: "smoke the Rand followers out, make them answer for following the crazed

ideology of a serial-killer-groupie, and run them the hell out of town and out of our hemisphere."

[kohodog]

61. "Rand Paul"

Just made the connection!

[Forkboy]

9. As opposed to those humane serial killers.

:)

[dkf]

10. I must be the only one who watches criminal minds.

[emilyg]

20. You're not the only one.

[snot]

11. Very interesting. Sources for the author's statements re- Rand's feelings toward Hickman

would have been helpful.

[Raksha]

13. I believe the main source for the quotes was Ayn Rand's journals.

Here's a link I just posted in reply to another post on this thread. It's to a self-proclaimed Objectivist blog that attempts to refute the article in my OP. The blogger gets more deeply into primary sources since he is obviously very familiar with them.

http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2010/03/smearing-ayn-rand-nietzsche-and.html

[snot]

18. Gracias;

very interesting.

Bottom line: while Rand's writings are certainly of interest, whether she was a sociopath must be judged from her behavior in her own life.

(But I do think the effects of her writings are unhealthy.)

[bongo_x]

71. weak argument...

That counter argument from the Sociopathic Students of America was amazingly unconvincing, and said so little with such a large amount of words.

[Kablooie]

14. Ayn Rand is the Karl Marx of the Tea Party.

[white_wolf]

15. Please don't compare Marx to that ignorant, hateful woman.

[Kablooie]

16. What about Gummo? Can I compare him to her?

And by the way, I'm not comparing the quality of their thought.

Just a movement that follows their beliefs after they are dead.

The quality of the Tea Party reflects the quality of Rand's writings.

[white_wolf]

17. Fair enough.

Oh, on that topic am I the only one who loves seeing T-baggers hold up signs saying "I am John Galt." I'm just thinking, no your not. Your one of Rand's parasites. Sorry to disappoint you,but Rand and her fellow aristocrats despise you people. Wake up!

[Kablooie]

19. She hated democracies and Christianity too.

So of course the Christians an lovers of democracy worship her.

Imbeciles all.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

22. *snort*

:spray:

GREAT point!! I LOVED it!

[BobbyBoring]

35. That's what I really don't get

She hated religion and the concept of family. Shows how warped wingnuts are~

[ejpoeta]

53. just shows that they will pick the parts they like and ignore the rest to suit their needs.

they need to justify their selfish greediness and apparently they must get some of that from this person. i have never read her work but from the sounds of it, it makes sense they would fawn all over this alternative reality they like to invent.

[loudsue]

70. That's what they do to the Bible, the constitution, the law.

They're sociopaths, to boot.

[Enthusiast]

38. Imbeciles all.

:thumbsup:

[hifiguy]

25. More like the Charlie Manson. Much more.

Rand was a pure psychopath and sociopath. The only book published in the 20th Century that was more evil than Atlas Shrugged was Mein Kampf. Both are filled with paranoia and simple platitudes for simple minds.

[white_wolf]

27. I'm honestly not sure if in the long run, Altas Shrugged and

the Fountain Head won't prove more dangerous and cause more harm than Mein Kampf

[Raksha]

32. I never looked at it that way before, but you could very well be right.

[Paradoxical]

52. Please take that trash somewhere else.

Thanks.

[highplainsdem]

23. kick

[felix_numinous]

24. K&R

What a completely heartless idealism.

[Ganja Ninja]

26. It's a pity she never got to know Hickman on a close personal level.

[2banon]

33. LOL!

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

28. Thanks for posting this. Another DUer already posted the link below but it's worth posting it again:

How Ayn Rand ruined my childhood

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/04/04/my_father_the_objectivist

[RaleighNCDUer]

49. That is a sad and disturbing story.

Makes me, with all my fuck-ups, sound like father of the year.

[Kurovski]

51. Condolences to the author for having a father who is a dick, a deadbeat, and an unfit parent.

Burn in hell ayn rand you fucking crackpot.

[chillspike]

58. Makes one wonder what Rush Limbaugh & Beck are doing to families right now (nt)

[bongbong]

30. Little known quotes of Ayn Rand

"I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I would've s*cked Hitler's coc* if I had met him."

#AllegedToBeATrueFact

[Raksha]

34. Wow...do you happen to have a source for that?

[bongbong]

40. asdf

The amazing thing is that my fake "quote" is actually believable, which merely reinforces the fact that Rand was an amoral psychopath.

[aggiesal]

31. What they don't tell you is that ...

when Ayn Rand died, she was on Medicare and Social Security!

[SpiralHawk]

36. RepubliBagger Family Values - You cannot go any lower

Ptoooey.

[Judi Lynn]

37. He also tried to blame his crime on another man. Why take responsibility? Not in his best interests!

http://image2.findagrave.com.nyud.net:8090/photos250/photos/2006/110/9123488_114567128165.jpg

Executed by the State of California on October 19, 1928 for the kidnapping and murder of Marion Parker, a 12-year-old girl. Hickman kidnapped Parker on December 15, 1927 by appearing at her junior high school, claiming that her father, Perry Parker, was ill, and that he wanted to see his daughter. The next day Hickman sent the first of three ransom notes to the Parker home, demanding $1,500 in $20 gold certificates. On December 19, Parker delivered the ransom in Los Angeles but in return Hickman delivered the dismembered body of Marian. Her arms and legs had been severed and her internal organs removed. A towel stuffed into her body to absorb blood led police to Hickman's apartment building but he managed to escape. A $100,000 reward was offered for his capture, and for nearly a week Hickman eluded capture. He was finally caught after spending some of the ransom in Washington and Oregon. He subsequently confessed to kidnapping Marian, but blamed her murder on a man who was actually in jail during the time of the crime. Hickman was one of the earliest defendants to use California's new law that allowed pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity. However, in February 1928 a jury rejected his claim and he was sentenced to hang. He appealed the conviction and both the law and the verdict were upheld by the California Supreme Court.

http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=9123488

http://2.bp.blogspot.com.nyud.net:8090/_LxB5bkk8QeU/TBjfiMavq2I/AAAAAAAAGqM/5CSnl2Rjkz8/s320/hicka.jpg

His crime was considered "The Most Horrible Crime of the 1920's"

Several photos of this failed human being.
http://dulltooldimbulb.blogspot.com/2010/06/true-crime-william-edward-hickman-most.html

Thank you, Raksha, for sharing this information with D.U.'ers. It IS as loathesome as we would have expected. It's very good to know about it.

[Raksha]

46. Thank you for the additional information.

I didn't know about any of it until my friend posted the article in the OP on Facebook last night--either the Hickman/Rand connection or the kidnapping and murder of Marion Parker. I have a feeling it was old news to the liberterrorists on the other forum, though. Not only are they all major Ayn Rand freaks, but one of them was all ready with a defense two minutes after I posted the OP.

This is the first time I've ever had a post on the Greatest page after more than 6 years on DU. I was kind of surprised to see that. I guess Ayn Rand has been getting more attention than she deserves lately because of the movie, which I understand is falling as flat as my OP's usually do!

[geardaddy]

39. They're movie tanked the first weekend

Ranked 14th.

Peter Travers gave it a 0.

[Cherchez la Femme]

41. Poor Marion Parker

alongside her parents, she left behind a twin sister who barely escaped being taken out of school by the kidnapper, who instead got Marion

-- can you imagine how that little girl felt?

I do not wish to focus on that literal trash Ayn "Selfish-Asshole" Rand. She deserves to be if not reviled, then at least forgotten by future generations.
The murder, however, was horrendous. As the OP says, & I agree, I won't go posting the horrifics here,
but they are easily researched on teh Google.


Also, the Marion Parker/Parker family's house is reported to be very haunted. Still.

[provis99]

42. Randbots seem alot like Jared Lee Loughner.

Like him, they bizarrely think they are applying logic to their twisted moral viewpoint, all the time missing the fact that their worldview is a complete fantasy to begin with, and their "philosophy" is based on insanity.

[localroger]

43. Rand is much like the Marquis de Sade

It is not Nietzsche but Sade I'm always reminded of when Rand comes up; the parallels are much closer, including her not too well hidden sexual obsessions and hypergraphia. However, I think Sade had a better understanding of his role in society (as Colin Wilson pointed out, "his stories are littered with the bodies of his libertines") and that egoism would not make you triumphant but only allow you to be true to yourself until you inevitable ultimate destruction. Sade's attitude seemed to be that you should have as much fun with it while you can, knowing the party will come to an end; Rand is much more naive about how it will all work out in the end.

[davidwparker]

45. (Bad, I know, but ...) Burn, baby. Burn.

[Prophet 451]

48. Rand was a sociopath

I put up a post here a while ago (it's in my journal if you're interested) where I used Rand's own life and works to evaluate her using Hare's Psychopathy Checklist (Psychopathy and sociopathy are the same thing, both are covered by the modern Anti-Social Personality Disorder) and with one exception, she ticks every box. Naturally, I got the usual accusations of "not understanding" her work (it never occurs to these people that it's possible to both understand something and reject it).

The woman was a sociopath. And since every writer's first few novels tend to be wish-fulfillment, she wrote of a world where sociopaths are proven right. They're proven right, of course, because she constructs her world specifically to prove them right. In reality, her "philosophy" wrecks countries and destroys lives. Based purely on the impact of her "philosophy", she may be the most evil woman to ever live.

[undeterred]

62. Whenever I hear her name I see a visual of Ann Coulter.

[Meldread]

50. Ayn Rand was merely the mirror reflection of Karl Marx.

...and like in any mirror the reflection is always reversed.

Too few people forget that Rand was twelve years old when she experienced the Russian Revolution of 1917. She experienced communism first hand, and its impossible to separate these (very bad) experiences in her early life from what she ultimately came to idealize. Like so many people who fight monsters, they become the very thing they despise.

I'd say that Ayn Rand was largely motivated by terror - not fear - terror. The climate in the United States during her heyday merely fed into that terror. The terror was that communism would spread, and that she'd experience the same things she experienced as a child all over again. That no matter where she ran she'd never be safe. That any freedom she held would be temporary at best... and so she became an extremist crusader.

Ayn Rand made communism and Marx her enemy, so she decided to idealize, elevate, and hold in reverence everything they despised. In the process she became just as bad as what she struggled against. It just goes to show that extremism in anything is bad, especially when it is in reaction to something or someone else.

[MedleyMisty]

55. That's how I feel now

Thanks to her.

Terrified of fascism and of losing my freedom.

Luckily for me, if I idealize and elevate and hold in reverence everything her followers despise, I shouldn't be so bad off. I'm cool with being an extremist crusader for empathy and justice and freedom and everyone having shelter and food and water and health care and education.

[Meldread]

57. That's not extremism.

That's having a point of view.

I think it's proper and justified to be afraid of anything that would cost us our freedom. We should always be on alert and defensive against such encroachments.

It becomes extremism if it's taken to such a level in which you cannot even hope to engage your enemies without viewing them as less than human, rather than misguided. That's how many evils in the world are introduced: by viewing enemies as less than human, it then becomes easy to justify horrific acts against them.

For example, it's one thing to believe that everyone should be free. It's quite another thing to espouse that idea, and then proceed to strip those who disagree with you of freedom simply based on the fact that they themselves would deny it to others. Which, naturally, would be done under the guise of 'they're dangerous people' or 'attempting to protect others from their dangerous influence'.

Ayn Rand was very much like this - she spoke a great deal about individualism and freedom, and yet many in her inner circle were cast out for not agreeing with her 100% of the time. She did not tolerate differing points of view well, even when they closely aligned with her own. In the end, it came down to the fact that she was afraid and felt threatened. So she acted in the same way those she fought against did: she used whatever power and authority she had to shut down dissenting points of view.

[RoccoR5955]

54. Did you expect anything less? n/t

[scarletwoman]

59. Raksha, I'm pretty sure you'll find this essay from 2005 extremely interesting.

Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman

Part One: Ayn Rand's "real man"

<snip>

In her journal circa 1928 Rand quoted the statement, "What is good for me is right," a credo attributed to a prominent figure of the day, William Edward Hickman. Her response was enthusiastic. "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard," she exulted. (Quoted in Ryan, citing Journals of Ayn Rand, pp. 21-22.)

At the time, she was planning a novel that was to be titled The Little Street, the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan. According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan - intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man - after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should." (Journals, pp. 27, 21-22; emphasis hers.)

"A wonderful, free, light consciousness" born of the utter absence of any understanding of "the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people." Obviously, Ayn Rand was most favorably impressed with Mr. Hickman. He was, at least at that stage of Rand's life, her kind of man.

So the question is, who exactly was he?

William Edward Hickman was one of the most famous men in America in 1928. But he came by his fame in a way that perhaps should have given pause to Ayn Rand before she decided that he was a "real man" worthy of enshrinement in her pantheon of fictional heroes.

You see, Hickman was a forger, an armed robber, a child kidnapper, and a multiple murderer.

(much, much more at link -- it's an amazing read!)

sw

[Raksha]

72. Thanks for the link, SW. If anything, that article is better than the one in my OP.

I read the entire thing, and I'm going to save it to read again. It's most interesting for the questions it raises that don't seem to have any easy answer. I don't just mean questions about Ayn Rand per se but about the RW libertarian mindset in general. I don't have time to get into all of them tonight, so the most obvious one will have to do for now.

A quote from your link:

Of The Fountainhead's hero, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world." (Journals, p. 93.)

In the original version of her first novel We the Living: "What are your masses but mud to be ground underfoot, fuel to be burned for those who deserve it?" (This declaration is made by the heroine Kira, Rand's stand-in; it is quoted in The Ideas of Ayn Rand by Ronald Merrill, pp. 38 - 39; the passage was altered when the book was reissued years after its original publication.)

Something that never fails to amaze me about sociopaths and narcissists in general is that they seem incapable of putting themselves in the place of their despised "other," not even to the point of realizing what kind of hell it would be for them if some OTHER self-proclaimed Ubermensch took the same attitude towards THEM, and unilaterally proclaimed them part of the despicable mass of humanity, "mud to be ground under foot."

This seems to be a consistent blind spot; they invariably identify with the ruling elite or the "sovereign individual, to the point where it's literally impossible for them to imagine that someone else--some other psychopath!--might consider them "vermin." They can't seem to understand that a big component of compassion and empathy is simply enlightened self-interest, not weakness as they invariably assume. At the base of it is the instinct for self-preservation. I hope it isn't a mistake to mention this, but it's even more incomprehensible in light of the fact that Ayn Rand was ethnically Jewish. I'm allowed to bring this up because I am too. And if there's one fact that positively screams at me from practically every page of Jewish history, it's what can happen when the ruling class unilaterally declares you to be "vermin" and "parasites."

That's one lesson I never forgot, from my first readings about the Holocaust in junior high school.

[scarletwoman]

76. You're very welcome. I'm glad you found it worthwhile.

I came across it a day or two before you posted your OP, so I found it gratifying that someone else was shining a light on the same issue.

As for the point you bring up at the end of your reply, I guess I don't find it amazing at all. The egoistic assumption of superiority simply does not countenance the possibility of any sort of situation arising in which one would NOT be superior.

sw

[MrMickeysMom]

60. SO... It's a "Pile of little arms", is it?

I've seen the horror. Horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that, but you have no right to judge me . It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and mortal terror are your friends. If they are not, then they are enemies t o be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces--it seems a thousand centuries ago--we went into a camp to inoculate it. The children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile--a pile of little arms. And I remember...I...I...I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out, I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it, I never want to forget. And then I realized--like I was shot...like I was shot with a diamond...a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, "My God, the genius of that, the genius, the will to do that." Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they could stand that--these were not monsters, these were men, trained cadres, these men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled wi th love--that they had this strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time were able to utilize their primordial i nstincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment--without judgment. Because it's judgment that defeats us.
I worry that my son might not understand what I've tried to be, and if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything. Everything I did, everything you saw, because there's nothing that I detest more than t he stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you...you will do this for me.


Col. Kurtz... Apocalypse Now

Now we know

[RagAss]

65. Well....There were two things I liked about her....

She was an atheist and Pro-Choice.

[MrMickeysMom]

75. Gee.. I hope that didn't do it for your acceptance of this nut...

I know a boat load of people with both qualities I wouldn't count on in life.

[Dawson Leery]

66. Ayn Rand: a horrible whore