Stephen Cox teaches conservatives about Isabel Paterson.
(Though it’s a gentle introduction; Cox spares them the Paterson who attacked the corporate elite, condemned the U.S. for perverting science to “fry Japanese babies in atomic radiation,” and told Ayn Rand that garden-variety collectivist ideas came from liberals and really godawful collectivist ideas from conservatives.)
Often topics arise in the comments sections that are only tangentially related to the original post. In case you missed these:
My post on cultural literacy has generated a debate on feminism; my post on W’a L’ma R’t has generated two pages of debate on left-libertarianism (I’ll try to answer some more of the comments tomorrow); and the L & P version of my post on the Atlas Shrugged movie has provoked a whole new post there by William Marina on Rand’s awful awfulness.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Apparently popular opposition to the bailout may help to kickstart the perpetually-approaching-but-never-arriving Atlas Shrugged movie, which is now being pitched as an anti-bailout movie. (Conical hat tip to Stephan Kinsella.)
That makes a fair bit of sense; for while both its critics (recently, e.g., Stephen Colbert) and its fans (recently, e.g., the loony Objectivist anti-tipping movement) have often read the book as championing the capitalist class against the proletariat, it actually champions the productive (in both classes) against the parasitic (in both classes); several of the book’s chief villains – most notably James Taggart and Orren Boyle – are wealthy industrialists who are eager lobbyists for special government privileges; and one of Dagny’s chief battles is against regulators who are trying to do her company (well, her brother’s company) a favour by putting its rivals out of business. So it’s really an anti-corporatist novel. (That’s not to say that Atlas isn’t still open to criticism from a left-libertarian perspective; sure it is, in various ways. But that’s another story.) So the present political climate would indeed be a great time for the movie.
Another factor moving the project forward is the need to start production before the rights revert to the Rand estate. That’s a major desideratum, since these days the estate probably wouldn’t approve any film version unless Galt’s Gulch was represented as being ringed by thousands of severed Muslim heads on pikes.
Evidently casting ideas for Dagny are now extending beyond Angelina Jolie, which is probably a good thing too. Jolie’s involvement was a plus to the extent that it made the film likelier to get made, but she never struck me as the right type for the role. Others being considered include Charlize Theron (whose name was once assigned to another never-produced Rand film project, The Husband I Bought), Anne Hathaway, and Julia Roberts – none of whom seem quite right either (though I think I could be persuaded re Roberts; I’ll wait until I see Duplicity to decide).
By 2011, opines The Economist, a movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged “may feel superfluous to Rand’s most loyal fans; events unfolding around them will have been dramatisation enough.”
Yeah, that’s right; Rand’s most loyal fans would be happy to take an economic meltdown in lieu of an Atlas film. Uh-huh.
Steve Skeates once wrote a comic featuring The Question (a character created by Randian Steve Ditko), in which the hero, asked by the villain “Don’t you remember me?” replies “Now listen, my friend, you weren’t important enough for me to remember!” Ditko had no problem with the last part of the line (after all it sounds a bit like Roark’s one line to Toohey), but he sent Skeates a six-page rant – “a rather daunting and even rather scary letter,” as Skeates recalls – explaining why his hero would never call a criminal “friend” even in jest. Details here.
[cross-posted at Liberty & Power]
Stuff of mine that’s newly online:
Aristotle’s Conception of Freedom [Review of Metaphysics 49.4, June 1996]
Aristotle’s Egalitarian Utopia: The Polis kat’ eukhēn [M. H. Hansen, ed, The Imaginary Polis: Acts of the Copenhagen Polis Centre 7, 2005]
A Florentine in Baghdad: Codevilla on the War on Terror [Reason Papers 28, Spring 2006]
Review of Hilary Putnam’s Collapse of the Fact-Value Dichotomy [Reason Papers 28, Spring 2006]
