Looking at my server logs I see the recent release of the trailer to the coming Atlas Shrugged movie (part 1…and I’m not the only one guessing that the John Galt speech will probably amount to nearly the total running time of part 3…) has brought more then a few readers to my little corner of the net.   More specifically this post.   Cool.

I think the movie has at least a fighting chance of not being completely horrible that The Fountainhead never did, largely because the Atlas Shrugged movie has an advantage The Fountainhead didn’t; that Ayn Rand is dead and so she can’t fuck with the producers. But it still has the deadly problem of bringing Ayn Rand characters to life and seldom outside of the pornography industry have characters been drawn that are so deathly one-dimensional.   Rand’s characters are little more then slapped together hand puppets she waves around in her morality plays.   They’re not there to tell you anything about life and existence and what it is to be human, they’re there to let Rand create a world of her own where she could take revenge on everyone and everything in the real world she hated.   But this is something people who have never actually read Atlas Shrugged need to see for themselves.

I am all about giving Atlas Shrugged its moment on the silver screen.   Especially the part that takes place in Galt’s Gulch.   If nothing else, that scene alone will convince a lot of people who might be otherwise bamboozled by it, that Rand’s claim to intellectual fame is pure hokum.   I walked a reference back to one blog’s link to my post and found a link to this which is an even more priceless take-down of Galt’s Gulch then I could have ever done.   But you would expect a farm boy to see the fundamental stupidity of it even more clearly then a kid from the suburbs like me…

The most egregious example of this comes in that pile of pap that Glenn Beck shucks like the Bible’s smarter, prettier sister: Atlas Shrugged. I have desire to go into a list of why that book is a pile of shit, at least not right now. But there is a moment in it that so completely sums up everything that is wrong with the Tea Party/Randite/Libertarian worldview that it is breathtaking in its elegant stupidity. It is when Dagny Taggart finally gets to Galt’s Gulch, and it is a breathtaking panorama of loveliness with fertile fields and little houses, and people fishing and etc. It’s para-fucking-dise. And John Galt himself leads Dagny around showing her all the wonderful things they’ve done. And there are oil pipes in the mountains, and fields full of…stuff (She’s not much for details, our Ayn.) And it’s the most hilarious moment in the book, because you realize, at that moment, that Ayn Rand has no clue how the world works.

See, I grew up on a farm. And I’m familiar with the sheer, bloody amount of work it takes to run a farm. Notice, I am not saying build a farm. Building a farm from scratch is an almost impossible undertaking. (Which is why *gasp* the pioneers did it all together in groups. No payment expected, just help out when its their turn. Buncha commies.)

Certainly, a few years after this project got started, they would still be on the frontier edge of starvation, desperately going hungry in the winter so they wouldn’t have to touch their seed corn for the next year, anxiously scanning the skies for clouds. Living in one room cabins. Of course, Rand handwaves this by essentially giving them cold fusion, but even so, it Doesn’t. Work. Like. That.

It is at that moment that you realize Rand probably never did a day of real work in her life.

And when you hear the Tea Partiers, or Glenn Beck naively parroting her back as if her words were found in the desert, cut into the living rock by the invisible hand of Adam Smith himself, it is worth remembering that a lot of them haven’t done an honest day’s work in their life either.

You need to read this whole thing.   I had this image of this blogger, who grew up on a farm, reading this…

“…Since the time I saw you last, I have designed and manufactured just one new tractor.   I mean one – I tooled it by hand – no mass production was necessary.   But that tractor has cut an eight hour workday down to four hours on” – the straight line of his arm, extended to point across the valley, moved like a royal scepter; her eyes followed it and she saw the terraced green of hanging gardens on a distant mountainside – “the chicken and dairy farm of Judge Narragansett” – his arm moved slowly to a long, flat stretch of greenish gold at the foot of the canyon, then to a band of violent green – “in the wheat fields and tobacco patch of Midas Mulligan” – his arm rose to a granite flank striped by glistening tiers of leaves – “in the orchards of Richard Halley.”

…and breaking into fits of hysterical laughter.   An Eight Hour Workday?   An Eight Hour Workday???

Right there is Rand, and her cheerleaders on the lunatic right in a nutshell.   Many of those right wing billionaires massively funding faux grassroots political movements like the Tea Party and poisoning the national dialogue with a variety of pseudo think tanks inherited their wealth.   Below them are rank after rank of winger nutcases who have never had to work a day in their lives and never bothered to explore the world outside of their gated communities.   They have not clue one how to earn a living.   Theirs was essentially given to them and I suppose one of the reason the rest of the human world frightens them so much is they know we can survive just fine without them while they wouldn’t last a season without their trusts and hedge fund portfolios.   They love Rand for her righteous assurance that only selfishness and greed are truly moral, that the true evil is to care for your neighbor and that somewhere in the Colorado Rockies is a beautiful fairy tale land wherein we who work for our living are the ones who cannot live without the likes of them.

There’s a lot of comment and some righteous snark going around the net over the Atlas Shrugged trailer.   Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution writes, “Hank Rearden’s line about only wanting to earn money comes across as either a parody  of Gordon Gecko  or as something worthy of Gecko’s parody.”   Since Gordon Gecko is a fictional character I can’t really make the comeback that Gecko got his greed is good lines from Rand and that he is the embodiment of her ideas, but it’s a fair guess that the writer who put those words in his mouth either had Rand in mind or some Wall Street asshole disciple of hers.   Some of the thread comments are delightful like “Dagny drives a Camry?”   But I particularly liked, “Anyway, since the passing of Leni Riefenstahl I can’t imagine anyone being able to give Atlas Shrugged the cinematic treatment Rand no-doubt believed it deserved.”

Yeah…   If I could wave a magic wand and travel back in time to when both women were still alive, I’d get them both to agree to make the movie of Atlas Shrugged somehow without Rand being aware of who the director really was and Riefenstahl not being aware of whose book she was making a movie of.   Then with the finished product absolutely delighting them both I’d then pull back the curtain and introduce them to each other, hand them each a knife, close the door and take bets on which one gets out alive.   Bet I could make back both the production costs and the time-travel costs selling DVDs of the fight.