Daily Blog 04/17/2011
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Two biographies of Ayn Rand. – By Johann Hari – Slate Magazine
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?
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Atlas Shrugged – and The Tea Party poured in to watch – Americas, World – The Independent
Three hundred cinemas across America yesterday bore witness a curious social spectacle.
In place of overweight men queuing for the latest Star Wars re-hash or spotty youths awaiting another Twilight installment was line after line of middle-age white people wearing tricorn hats, stars-and-stripes T-shirts and pin badges suggesting that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This is the Tea Party, on a big night out.
The occasion was the launch of Atlas Shrugged, a film version of a novel written in 1957 by Ayn Rand.
