Plasma Pool

Reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in the summer between high school and college was one of the formative events in my sharp drift from latent conservatism to a more liberal (and sometimes leftist) ideology. I remember that upon finishing the novel, I immediately reached over from my bed, turned on my boombox to Bob Dylan’s John Westley Harding, and started to read the Bhagavad Gita (as per required summer reading).

Ayn Rand

I’m still not quite sure why I forced myself through it. I read the first three hundred pages on a flight and found them partially sympathetic. I had occasionally heard these same ideas off-handedly cited by some of my Rand-loving classmates in my high school English and polisci Classes (whom I still intellectually respect and don’t mean to denigrate), and found myself slightly more receptive over time, especially in the context of otherwise apolitical classes. These were the kids who seemed to care enough to have developed an opinion that wasn’t necessarily inherited from their parents or the social-justice-conscious school administration (which in the long run ended up most deeply informing my current ideology), while offering something that was both youthful and subversive without falling into Hot Topic angst. Most kids didn’t like George Bush Junior, and I didn’t either, but it was pretty easy to simply assume that there were vital conservative politics outside of the leadership of the Republican party. It even seemed still okay to be a little nationalistic and right wing even as photographs from Abu Ghraib emerged and Al Quaida turned out not to have anything to do with Iraq. After all, my conservatism concerned the deeply personal and intellectual nature of private property, not a war over freedom/WMDs/regime change/9/11/oil/imperialism.

With this kind of spectrum of political thought guiding me, it wasn’t so much Ayn’s over-simplified political logic as her aesthetic that drove me away by the end of the book. I was already a pretentious literary snot at the time, and fairly misguided too, and everything written automatically drew comparisons with Joyce’s Ulysses for me. My AIM screenname referred to the last lines of Portrait of the Artist. After crawling my way through the labyrinth the previous summer (with the help of Sparknotes) and following it up with Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and Portrait to fill in some of gaps, 70+ pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seemed not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also the product of a small mind.

Joyce portrayed a world of fragmented consciousnesses that struggled to negotiate a modern spiritual landscape in the pursuit of unification and rest. Rand’s aesthetic represented personhood in its noblest form when articulated through money, which somehow also subtley relied on conditions of whiteness (Francisco d’Anconia is a slightly exoticized token character) and masculinity (the sex of the protagonist doesn’t really compensate for some of Rand’s other infamous comments on gender). Joyce offered the dopey and neurotic Leo Bloom as a hero, while Rand gave me the macho-industrialist action figure Hank Rearden. In deciding which offered the more convincing portrait of consciousness (and the ideological package of what rights and needs these representations assert), it wasn’t quite a fair comparison. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.

So I’m actually glad I read through that brick, if only because it brought to light what some of my political beliefs turned into once probed beyond the comfortable stock aphorisms I usually fell back on. I’m not quite socialist now and I am still pro-life (with qualifications), but my time reading Ayn Rand was able to shake a conservativism that even Bush’s first five years couldn’t upset.