Saturday, February 12, 2011

Who is John Galt?



This may be a timely movie, but "Atlas Shrugged" was a long and very silly book.  The characters are deliberately written in no more than one dimension so that there would be no confusion about who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.  Rand's obsession in this regard took her to the extent of giving the good guys nice names and the bad guys ugly names. The last 100 or so pages of the 3,000 or so pages consists of a long, long speech by the mysterious John Galt that lays out every jot and tittle of Rand's political/social/sexual/monetary/crazy-whacko narcissism-as-greatest-good theories.

Nonetheless, if you like that kind of thing, then that's the kind of thing that will get you blood boiling and your imagination fired with ideas of "going John Galt" and moving to Patagonia with your fellow "movers of the world" as part of an intellectual boycott of the parasites.

The trailer looks good.
Posted by Peter Sean at 9:45 AM
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2 comments:

Will Duquette said...

I've not read Atlas Shrugged in years, though I read it a number of times during high school. (I always skipped most of John Galt's speech, however.) Your criticisms are fair, though I remember portions of it, and particularly the description of the decline and fall of the 20th Century Motor Company, as being spot on.

In short, I think Rand's diagnosis was pretty good--that is, the problems she saw were real problems. It's just her prescription that fails.

11:07 AM
Peter Sean said...

Thanks. I agree with you, and with Rand on an emotional level. Rand's enemies are my enemies and I liked seeing them exposed.

I'm currently reading a series by Denise Vitola that has me captivated because of the setting. Her future is set in a world where the take-over of the world by a dictator named Duvalier is history. Duvalier set up a one-party state where the only party was the Humanitarian. There are regulations and forced labor drafts based on "Humanitarianism." The world is a mess of poverty and grinding regulation and bureaucracy where corruption and "back alley" trade is the only thing that keeps the systme afloat. There is also a strange turn to silly ineffective magic, which remineded me of a story told by Richard Pipes in his book "Communism."

Change the terms slightly, and you could see the world that would exist if Obama could realize his dreams.

12:15 PM

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