The Bluff

This post is a primer for those who are going to see Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged but haven’t read the book. The movie is fast paced and jumps into the middle of the plot (as it must to avoid being 50 hours long) so a lot is skipped, and some helpful backstory is missing. So if you’re taking someone to see the movie who hasn’t read the book, or if you’re going to see it yourself …  here’s some helpful background without anything I would consider a “spoiler.” This isn’t everything, of course … but just a few key facts I think make the movie much more enjoyable

An Overview:

Ayn Rand doesn’t respect or celebrate people who gain money for the sake of gaining money; for her the joy is in the creation of something (a new and cool metal, an awesome railroad, etc.) and money is the proof that you’ve done well and produced something people need (i.e. most of the current computer moguls got into computers for love, but got rich because they did the right things and made all our lives better). And Rand only respects people who don’t ride the coattails of others, which is why she has no pity for people who lose money blindly trusting idiotic schemes.

But neither are Rand’s characters heartless. Yes, they think it is condescending and wrong to give welfare to people who don’t want to work, and they think it’s crazy that someone who aspires to be nothing greater than a janitor should have the same wealth as someone who has created a new product that is changing the world. But throughout the book the characters are constantly giving a helping hand to those deserving of it; to those willing to try.

Where the movie opens:

When the movie opens the U.S. is facing a financial crisis, and the government is responding by regulating trade (sound familiar?). But these regulations, intended to protect individuals and ignoring impacts to productivity (sound familiar?), are destroying the most successful businesses and making things worse. Which is when “The Destroyer” appears.

The “Destroyer”:

The movie opens with a shadowy man in a hat addressing a successful banker, Midas Mulligan (see video below) in the rain. And then we find out he immediately disappears. What you don’t know from the movie is that Midas Mulligan has become boxed in by government regulation and the moment we are seeing is the moment he has realized that he cannot succeed in the environment regulation has created. And that’s always when “the Destroyer” shows up (the Destroyer is what Dagny calls this shadowy character in the novel, because he is taking away the most powerful men when she feels they are needed most).

That powerful people are abandoning their businesses and disappearing when government interference becomes too much to continue is a central theme to the book, and the mystery is where the heck are they going.

The Backstory you don’t get in the movie:

Francisco and Dagney are self made successes. Yes, they were born into wealthy families already key to their industry … but they both set out anonymously on their own and made their own success. Dagney took a job at a rail yard doing menial work to learn the business from the ground up, and that’s how she gained the trust and love of her workers. Francisco disappeared to anonymously take a job at a competing copper mine — and ended up owning the mine — before he resurfaced to claim the life of wealth and privilege he was born to. The two became unabashed lovers at a young age as they had so much in common, but then Francisco went to college and mysteriously changed. He went from being an intense young man intent on growing his family business to a worthless playboy squandering his family’s wealth. One of the mysteries is … why?

James Taggart never understood his sister or Francisco. He thought they were mean and selfish because they wanted to work hard and make a lot of money. He went off to college and became enamored of the concept of social charity, but it quickly becomes apparent that he believes in social charity/social justice because he doesn’t think anyone else is capable of succeeding on their own (though his own ancestors did), and passing laws to help them out makes him feel superior. But of course those laws also limit business growth and thus the opportunities of those people to succeed on their own.

Trains:

When Ayn Rand wrote Atlas Shrugged trains were still a primary means of traveling long distances, as airline tickets were expensive. In order to make it logical that trains are still important in the modern day we are told that energy issues have made oil so expensive that trains have had to return as primary means of human and freight transportation. You either buy into that or not as you watch the movie … but I did think it is a delightful irony that a return to train travel (the high speed trains the government wants to spend billions on, because private industry knows they don’t make sense) is a primary goal of the current liberal elite in this nation, who are actively trying to make oil so expensive that we have to take a turn in this direction.

Now Go see the Movie:

Although reading a few paragraphs on the characters isn’t the same as seeing them developed in the book, if you keep the above in mind as you watch the movie you’ll understand it a whole lot better. So either read the book and then see the movie, or see the movie then read the book, or … well, the order is up to you.

But I recommend them both. Read the rest of my posts about Atlas Shrugged here.

Off Road

The best book ever written!

By me, anyway.

Set against the background of the American civil war of “progressives” vs. patriotic American traditionalists and a family caught in the middle, Off Road is a journey into the uniquely American world of God, guns, big trucks … and family.

More information here. Buy it at amazon.com in paperback or Kindle (only .99 for Kindle, which can also be read on a PC with a free reader). Or at Barnes and Noble in paperback or Nook (only .99 in Nook format). Or in any Ebook format, even .html or .pdf, for .99 from smashwords.com.

So I was hoping that after seeing the movie based on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged I’d be sitting here awestruck writing up a glowing report of the motion picture about to change America.  But while I really enjoyed it and it is extraordinarily well done for any movie — much less one with a relatively low budget and non-big name actors — I’m a little concerned that it might not be accessible to people who haven’t read the book (and check out this post for a primer on what you need to know if you fall into that category). So while people who have read the book number in the many millions and could make the movie successful, they’re not the people who need to see it; the people who need to see it probably never will.

Henry Rearden at his desk.

The crowd I watched it with (and it was very well attended) were clearly fans of the novel. Everyone laughed knowingly when characters or government programs were announced even though they weren’t yet developed, which left my wife — who hasn’t read the book — feeling a bit left out. And when I tried to stand back and view the movie as though I wasn’t well acquainted with the story I understood why; there’s a lot of extremely complex scenes being addressed in a very short amount of time, and if you don’t already know some of the characters and their motivations what’s happening isn’t always obvious.

For instance, we never see the history of Dagney and Francisco d’Anconia, so if you haven’t read the book you don’t realize that even though they were born into wealth and power they are people who insisted on going out on their own and anonymously developing their success to prove their worth. Unlike Jim Taggart, who accepted his wealth and position and then used it to prove himself superior to others by condescendingly pretending it was his duty to support them.

Kudos, though, to the producers for realizing they couldn’t tackle a tome like Atlas Shrugged by trying to follow the story line exactly. So they jumped in with the plot well underway to avoid a lot of tedious development and something had to be cut. I just hope they didn’t cut too much.

Dagney and Wyatt Ellis. Perfect casting, I'd say.

And the producers were also smart enough to dump the outdated commentary on sexuality that Ms. Rand included in the novel. Some might disagree, but while I understand why she included it — she was writing a story about brazen adultery and a woman who actually dared to *gasp* enjoy sex in the 1950′s with more than one partner — it falls flat to a modern audience. We already know that women are capable of enjoying sex and that adultery happens — and sometimes it’s even understandable when a marriage has failed in a painful way. So no need to talk about it, and they didn’t.

Here are some more good points:

1. Photography and editing did not reveal the low budget at all. Very nice.
2. Incredible panoramas of my home state of Colorado and the Rocky Mountain Region — a lot of places I recognized, and they did the photography at the most beautiful time of year, when the aspen are changing and in their full golden glory.
3. Casting was spot-on. With a couple of exceptions, everyone looked and acted roughly how I imagined them.
4. Music was excellent, though noticeably missing was Richard Halley’s 5th symphony (a victim of the shortened movie format).

So my conclusion is:

If you’ve read the book — Go see this movie ASAP. You’ll really appreciate it.

If you haven’t read the book — Read the book, then go see the movie asap.

If you don’t want to read a wordy 1950′s 1,000 page book — Go with someone who has read it and is a Rand believer, then buy then coffee afterward so they can explain it to you.

Or, at the very least, read my primer on what you need to know before you watch the movie.

More posts on Atlas Shrugged, both the book and the movie, here.

Off Road

The best book ever written!

By me, anyway.

Set against the background of the American civil war of “progressives” vs. patriotic American traditionalists and a family caught in the middle, Off Road is a journey into the uniquely American world of God, guns, big trucks … and family.

More information here. Buy it at amazon.com in paperback or Kindle (only .99 for Kindle, which can also be read on a PC with a free reader). Or at Barnes and Noble in paperback or Nook (only .99 in Nook format). Or in any Ebook format, even .html or .pdf, for .99 from smashwords.com.

The movie Atlas Shrugged is being released today, and it’s as polarizing a work as a state supreme court vote in Wisconsin — for proof, take a look at the discussion taking place on the movie’s website. And as you can see from the comments the progressive left is desperately trying to belittle the entire work and convince people not to see it — which proves that it’s worth seeing in the first place.

But then, the new progressive/far left mode of operation seems to be to attack the personal or unrelated aspects of whomever you want to shut up. Because it’s much easier to scream Hitler! Fox lies! Teabaggers! Tan Man! and mock the figureheads of the other side for being too pretty or too rural than dealing directly with the issues. And since the facts and the outlook of the American people generally work against them (because however good they felt after the 2008 election, what they had was a reaction to an unpopular president and NOT a mandate for socialized hope and change) insults and mockery are about all they have left.

I got plenty of commentary on my last Atlas Shrugged post as well, so just let me make this clear going forward … this was an incredibly powerful book for me, but not because it taught me a new way to live every aspect of my life (which it has for some) but because it reveals in a startlingly powerful way the role of government in people’s lives. And how the progressive push to force government to constantly do more “good” and take care of everybody and control society will have the effect of making a worse future for our children, not a better one, unless we’re extraordinarily careful. And this is not idle conjecture, it’s something we’ve seen in real life repeatedly throughout the last hundred years.

The bottom line is — I don’t think anyone would argue that communism, which incorporates socialism and a Utopian political view, has been proven as unworkable and actually evil in its end result; millions have died and continue to die or are held in poverty because of that political experiment. But strip away the class struggle aspects and the dictatorship of the proletariat and many people are still quite comfortable with the socialism aspect. But is that good? Or in the long run does it create a society where the energies and output of the best and hardest working people are stolen by the government for purposes they may or may not agree with, leaving the best and brightest with a motivation to actually STOP being the drivers of society and business?

Is it right to take tax money from people who, for ANY reason, find some particular medical procedure morally objectionable, and then use it to pay for others to to have that procedure?

Is it right to take tax money from workers/share holders of Ford and use it to shore up their competition? Thus reducing the profits of the Ford shareholders and reducing the career options of the Ford workers? With their OWN hard earned money?

Would it be right to take tax money from the believers of the anti-gun Brady Campaign and give it to me to buy more guns?

Things to think about as you buy your advance tickets online and head out. And let’s hope that while it’s a low budget movie without any really big “A list” stars … that it captures the essence of the book and leads to complete the series.

Off Road

The best book ever written!

By me, anyway.

Set against the background of the American civil war of “progressives” vs. patriotic American traditionalists and a family caught in the middle, Off Road is a journey into the uniquely American world of God, guns, big trucks … and family.

More information here. Buy it at amazon.com in paperback or Kindle (only .99 for Kindle, which can also be read on a PC with a free reader). Or at Barnes and Noble in paperback or Nook (only .99 in Nook format). Or in any Ebook format, even .html or .pdf, for .99 from smashwords.com.

Last month I completed a journey through Ayn Rand’s epic novel Atlas Shrugged, (now a movie to be released 4/15/2011) and it many ways it was a more life changing experience than any other fictional book I’ve read — so much so that I’ve decided to devote a series of posts to it. And Atlas Shrugged is a journey every American should take, even if they end up rejecting the human liberty and free market values it espouses, so they can at least understand what they risk when they promote a government that supplies and controls everything (or anything, for that matter). Because Rand shows us, in a graphic portrayal, that sometimes what feels “safer” and more “compassionate” is actually less so in the long run. And the bottom line is … when you live in the most successful nation the world has ever seen, do you “fundamentally” change it on a whim to pattern it after less successful nations?

That such an eye opening journey is necessary is apparent by the crushing government debt and subsequent riots in Greece and elsewhere, and the fact that we in the U.S. are headed down the same path. And even though we are facing what is inarguably an unsustainable debt load that WILL overwhelm our economy if not turned around,  many politicians continue to argue about “what’s fair” in spending without even a nod to what we can afford … and that’s a big, big problem. I don’t think it’s fair that I work really hard and don’t have the brand new Mustang I want … I think I deserve a brand new Mustang because I work way more hours than a lot of people who do have one … but wanting and deserving and saying “not fair!” isn’t going to put a new Mustang in my garage. Any more than wanting and deserving and saying “not fair” will give every American platinum health insurance without somebody sacrificing something somewhere (and in the case of Universal healthcare it’s everybody sacrificing a lot everywhere).

Now Ayn Rand is no goddess to me, and her book is NOT The Bible by any means. While I think she absolutely nails the basis of the majority of human interactions with her social theories, I think she makes a mistake in trying to define humans entirely by that single standard. Yes, throughout the day the vast majority of my interactions with people, from co-workers to shop keepers to fellow drivers, is perfectly explained by her objectivistic philosophy. But to define my whole life in that manner is to ignore the primal nature of humanity — and I don’t mean primal as a negative, but rather as a nod to our basic human nature, which is just as worthy of admiration and celebration as our intellectual capacity. Because while we are all intellectual beings capable of great thought, either through our God created nature or the instincts forged into us by evolution (whichever you believe in the results are the same) there is much more to us than that.

Touch one of my children, and I’m no longer an intellectual human, I’m a silverback gorilla protecting his off spring. How many people do you know who have stayed loyal to their marriage even after their spouse is crippled or disabled, and has become a daily burden? In that situation, do you respect the person who stands by their spouse to the end, or the one that says “I only live once, and you aren’t the life partner I chose and you provide nothing to me, so adios.” And as to the sexual nature of humanity … well, while I found fascinating Ms. Rand’s take on male sexuality … I’ve been a male for many decades now,  and all I can say is that her perception is more the way a 1950′s feminist would like to believe than reality.

In the days of my liberal youth and liberal associates I was assured that Atlas Shrugged was  a hateful book written by an insane egotist and not one I should touch. In recent years I’ve heard it described as the cornerstone of conservatism/libertarianism, and one I should read if I ever want to understand what made America the world power it is …  and what forces can drag it back down. While it’s much more the latter than the former, it doesn’t fit either definition perfectly. I do wish I had read it when younger, though, as at my current age it reinforced and enhanced my knowledge of humanity rather than forged it.

One obstacle to getting people to read Atlas Shrugged is that it’s one heck of a long tome (I can’t imagine how many finger flicks I did on the iPhone Kindle app to get through it all). And if I’m honest … as powerful as the story is, Ms. Rand’s writing style is painfully wordy at times and she feels a need to repeat herself, as though teaching us a lesson with one anecdote isn’t enough and she needs to have multiple anecdotes with the same outcome. And each with a character that goes over the lesson in detail. And to really drive it all home she has the main character give a speech that runs somewhere around 70 pages (too much to handle in one sitting) to detail her entire outlook — which has already been detailed by her story telling. Hopefully the movie producers for Atlas Shrugged have figured out how to handle the content of the book without getting bogged down by the incessant detail — we’ll know in a couple of weeks.

There’s a lot of things I think are worth covering in the book, and this post is just an introduction. I’ll be dissecting different pieces and talking about them in posts to come.  As an overview …

Ms. Rand is harshly honest in her view of mankind and what motivates us. Because the bottom line is … we do very few things that don’t have some value to ourselves, and trying to pretend otherwise is not only dishonest but self destructive. She further points out that doing things for ourselves, in the long run, adds value to the public overall and is not something to be ashamed of. And a culture that embraces that principle (as the U.S. historically has) not only allows us all to shine our brightest, but the net effect is that the sum of the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts.

So buy Atlas Shrugged, read it, and then think responsibly about the future. And don’t believe it when some politician says he can provide healthcare (or any government service) to everyone with no new taxes and nothing but savings for all. Because while whatever he’s promising may be worth paying/sacrificing for … it sure ain’t free, and that means somebody’s paying for it somewhere, and why isn’t that part of the debate? And whatever the government spends OUR money on … they’re using money we could have spent on something else, possibly buying the product that your company makes and helping support your job.

Off Road

The best book ever written!

By me, anyway.

Set against the background of the American civil war of “progressives” vs. patriotic American traditionalists and a family caught in the middle, Off Road is a journey into the uniquely American world of God, guns, big trucks … and family.

More information here. Buy it at amazon.com in paperback or Kindle (only .99 for Kindle, which can also be read on a PC with a free reader). Or at Barnes and Noble in paperback or Nook (only .99 in Nook format). Or in any Ebook format, even .html or .pdf, for .99 from smashwords.com.