Thanks to a reader’s email note, I learn that my recent post on bin Laden’s possible porn stash has been quoted in The Independent and The Week.
From a Google search, I learn that the quote has since propagated far and wide.
I also learn, to my surprise, that I am a “mainstream blogger.”
I don’t think I’ve told this story from my Roatán trip yet. So:
Delta offers direct flights between Atlanta and Roatán on weekends, but during the week one must connect through San Pedro Sula on the Honduras mainland. (That may change if the current attempts to touristicise Roatán succeed.) So while I’d flown directly on my way in, I had to go through SPS on my return. Delta had booked me a fairly tight connection; but the SPS airport is quite small, so as long as my incoming flight was on time – which it was – there should have been no problem making my connection.
Well, the connection was indeed physically quite possible to make; but it turned out to be legally impossible. Apparently u.s. law requires incoming flights from Honduras to close an hour before takeoff. So although my plane to Atlanta was sitting right there with my reserved seat empty and waiting, I wasn’t allowed to board it. The gate agent told me: “I don’t know why Delta keeps booking people on these connections when they know we can’t let them through.” And of course there was no other flight until the next day.
So I and three other attendees ended up spending 24 hours in SPS instead of the expected 40 minutes. Delta, acknowledging their screwup, paid us for a hotel and transportation thereto, as well as (partially) for meals. So I got to see a side of Honduras I otherwise wouldn’t have.
Roatán is a tropical paradise. San Pedro Sula, not so much. It has a reputation of high levels of violent crime – including gangs attacking buses traveling from the airport to hotels, as I cheerfully recalled while traveling from the airport to my hotel. (I gather that the situation has improved a bit in recent years, however.)
From what I could see, the city is mostly a vast slum stretching for miles. Streets were lined with piles of garbage, and every once in a while a uniformed man with a rifle just standing there. Signs of desperate poverty were everywhere. (I’ve looked up photos of SPS online, but they all look much nicer than what I saw.) Nearly every car was dented – no mystery when one sees how they’re driven, at top speed with literally no more than a couple of inches’ space between one bumper and the next. Despite this, beggars – one with part of her face missing – were wandering in and out of traffic as the cars flowed like water around them. I saw a wagon bearing an enormous tower of junk and scrap, pulled by a sad-looking horse; traffic flowed expertly around this also. Above and around all this misery towered beautiful rolling green mountains, their tops lost in mist – and marred only by an enormous Coca-Cola sign looming above the city.
In related news, I finally saw the Atlas Shrugged movie – twice (once in San Diego during the APA, and once here in Auburn where it surprisingly showed up after all). I disliked it less on the second viewing than on the first, but it still left me mostly cold.
This is actually one of the most successfully Randian-looking images from the film
Admittedly any film of Atlas was going to have a hard time satisfying me; after all, Atlas was the book that introduced me to philosophy in general and to Aristoteleanism and libertarianism in particular, so it’s a pretty important book in my life.
All the same, Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Chronicles of Narnia were pretty important books in my life too, but despite various gripes I enjoyed the film versions of those a lot more than I enjoyed Atlas. (Re LOTR and Dune I’m referring to the Peter Jackson and John Harrison versions respectively; I didn’t much enjoy the Ralph Bakshi and David Lynch versions.)
I could give a long list of particular things that bugged me about the Atlas movie, but in a way that would be beside the point. After all, I could probably produce an equally long list of things that bugged me about Jackson’s LOTR, but those complaints don’t add up to anything like the same sense of overall dissatisfaction. And after all, the Atlas film was relatively faithful to the plot, and the casting was mostly sensible.
The difference is that, despite my many many gripes about Jackson’s LOTR, I nevertheless felt transported into Tolkien’s universe. And in watching Atlas I never felt transported into Rand’s universe. I’m not talking about the decision to set the story in the present day, in a real-world timeline; given the budgetary limitations, the alternative, though preferable, wasn’t feasible. But a skillful director and screenwriter could have captured Rand’s stylised universe despite that constraint. Essentially, what I was worried about here turned out to be exactly right.
The irony is that Rand, presumably in part because of her Hollywood training, wrote very cinematically. It takes a real effort to de-cinematise her scenes; but Johansson, O’Toole, and Aglialoro have unfortunately pulled it off.
I forget whether I’ve announced this previously, but my 2000 monograph Reason and Value: Aristotle versus Rand – currently running, insanely, from between $199.99 to $1115.92 on Amazon – a) will soon be reprinted by the Atlas Society, presumably once more in the $15-20 range; and b) in the meantime is available online for free here. (The orientation of the pages makes it tough to read online, though. But there’s probably some fix for that. Or you can kill a tree and print it out. I have no idea why it says “Ashgate,” which is the publisher of my anarchism/minarchism anthology, but not of this book.)
Here’s another version, this time with the orientation correct. (CHT bile.)
I’m off to Riverside CA tomorrow; here’s what I’ll be doing Tuesday, at Gary’s university. Back on Wednesday; after that, no more trips for a month or so.
And here’s Sheldon Richman’s contribution to our FMAC panel at APEE.