that she thought $6.95 was kind of steep for black coffee. I explained that the pods were imported from Italy, and that I had to pay for the espresso machine, the electricity to run it and the water, as well as the expense of my training and a living wage. I also needed to pay back my stockholders.
She made no response, so I guess it was acceptable. When she reached into her handbag and pulled out a package of cigarettes, I had to ask her to smoke outside on the patio since protecting my property was a priority for me. I assured her that it had nothing to do with the fact that she was an immigrant who spoke English as a second language. She said
I like cigarettes. I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours.
Atlas Shruggged, page 61
"Cancer?" I suggested.
At that we adjourned to my shaded, screened patio where the temperature was a toasty 101 degrees and began our chat. After I dug up an empty can for her to use as an ashtray.
Beginning with politics, I asked for her thoughts on the LA Times report that the Catholic Church was the basis of Paul Ryan's policy positions.
Ryan's religious beliefs have also been an important part of his politics. He often says his faith has guided his positions on social issues, putting him in line with church doctrine on abortion rights and gay marriage. But the former altar boy also cites church teaching in explaining his positions on government spending, deficit reduction and entitlements — the issues that have catapulted his rapid rise.
She said, tell Paul that
Whenever you committed the evil of refusing to think and to see, of exempting from the absolute of reality some one small wish of yours, whenever you chose to say: Let me withdraw from the judgement of reason the cookies I stole, or the existence of God, let me have my one irrational whim and I will be a man of reason about all else - that was the act of subverting your consciousness, the act of corrupting your mind. Your mind then became a fixed jury who takes orders from a secret underworld, whose verdict distorts the evidence to fit an absolute it dares not touch - and a censored reality is the result, a splintered reality where the bits you chose to see are floating among the chasms of those you didn't, held together by that embalming fluid of the mind which is an emotion exempted from thought.
The links you strive to drown are causal connections. The enemy you seek to defeat is the law of causality: it permits you no miracles.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1037
So then I asked her about the
LA Times article of the day before:
Back in 2005, an up-and-coming lawmaker named Paul Ryan credited the polemical novelist and libertarian Ayn Rand as a central inspiration for his entry into public life. Ryan toiled in those days in relative obscurity, a well-respected but low-profile member of the House of Representatives.
SNIP
Even three years ago, Tim Mak of Politico noted, Ryan channeled Rand. “What’s unique about what’s happening today in government, in the world, in America, is that it’s as if we’re living in an Ayn Rand novel right now,” Ryan said. “I think Ayn Rand did the best job of anybody to build a moral case of capitalism, and that morality of capitalism is under assault.”
Her response to his backtracking was swift, harsh and predictable:
Some of you might plead the excuse of your ignorance, of a limited mind and a limited range. But the damned and the guiltiest among you are the men who had the capacity to know, yet chose to blank out reality, the men who we're willing to sell their intelligence into cynical servitude to force...
They, the intellects who seek escape from moral values, they are the damned on this earth, theirs is the guilt beyond forgiveness.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1066
I then tried to steer the conversation to Mitt Romney, purposely avoiding his position as a Mormon Bishop and the tenets of his faith. But she was too smart for me, and declaimed
The name of this monstrous absudity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at moralty and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality...
Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a "tendency" to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1025
And his Presidential ambitions?
Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wished, his whims - as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs. He wants to deal with men by means of faith and force - he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason. Reason is the enemy he dreads and, simultaneously, considered precarious; reason, to him is a means of deception; he feels that men possess some power more potent than reason - and only their causeless belief or their forced obedience can give him a sense of security, a proof that he has gained control of the mystic endowment he lacked. His lust is to command, not to convince: conviction requires an act of independence and rests on the absolute of an objective reality. What he seeks is power over reality and over men's means of perceiving it, their mind, the power to interpose his will between existence and consciousness, as if, by agreeing to fake the reality he orders them to fake, men would in fact create it.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1045
It was clear to me that she had heard of his "I've paid a lot of taxes...Trust me" comments and his refusal to talk about reality, be it the reality of his looting companies of their wealth, driving them into bankruptcy for his private profit, or the reality of the fact that he paid no federal income taxes for ten years. "..he finds no satisfaction in their consent if he must earn it by means of facts and reason."
And what about his work at Bain? She proceeded to talk about the looters and moochers in her novel. Those that steal from others to enrich more than their bank accounts:
As they feed on stolen wealth in body, so they feed on stolen concepts in mind, and proclaim that honesty consists of refusing to know that one is stealing. As they use effects while denying causes, so they use our concepts while denying the roots and the existence of the concepts they are using. As they seek, not to build, but to take over industrial plants, so they seek, not to think, but to take over human thinking.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1039
and
You did not care to compete in terms of intelligence - you are now competing in terms of brutality. You did not care to allow rewards to be won by successful production - you are now running a race in which rewards are won by successful plunder.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1065
She has always had a disdain, a contempt for the acceptance of the unearned, whether it be emotional, intellectual, or financial.
That led me to ask about the appropriateness of donating to those in need, either directly or through a combined effort like unemployment insurance:
Do you ask if it's ever proper to help another man? No - if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes - if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man's fight against suffering is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his fight to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help.
Atlas Shrugged, page 1059
Somehow, our conversation then wandered onto the denial of Darwin's theory of evolution in the schools of some of our backward leaning states. She explained the rational of these intellectual looters:
There is no knowledge they teach, there's only faith: your belief that you exist is an act of faith, no more valid than another's faith in his right to kill you; the axioms of science are an act of faith, no more valid than a mystic's faith in revelations; the belief that electric light can be produced by a generator is an act of faith, no more valid than the belief that it can be produced by a rabbit's foot kissed under a stepladder on the first of the moon...
Atlas Shrugged, page 1042
I think the reason that she failed to include the theory of evolution in the argument was that it never occurred to her in 1957, when she wrote
Atlas Shrugged, that man would, or could, so rapidly descend into the abyss of ignorance.
The right has so often appropriated words like liberal or Obamacare and tried to turn them against us. While condemning us for using their own words like tea baggers. We are being rude when we deal with reality and use reason to refute the foundations of their bubbles.
I don't know that there is any irony greater than their claim on Ayn Rand. And while I know they would deny it because they would feel it untrue, I think, based on her writings, that she would condemn loudly a right wing political party that shrunk government until it was small enough to fit into our bedrooms. Or that attempted to legislate a morality based on the Christian writings that she so clearly despised.
She would be furious that they would attack a paid benefit like Social Security that made her retirement comfortable or Medicare that provided her with healthcare as she aged. And I can't begin to imagine her wrath at a government that dared to put itself between a woman and her doctor. But to understand Ayn Rand, one needs to rely on rational thought and an objective view of reality. That is hard to come by in a world defined by the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh.
Oh, by the way, before she left, Ayn Rand pulled her pocketbook out of her purse and handed me a five dollar bill and two singles, telling me to keep the change.
I did.
So, while I was posting this diary The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell did a brilliant segment on the Ayn Rand/Paul Ryan love affair.