Art Machine
Just another former infatuation junkie

First things first: Here’s a clip from the Mark Twain ceremony for George Carlin. The whole thing is good (as is the whole show), but in particular pay attention from 4:53 on.

Then, when you’ve finished that, read what Salon dug up.

For some reason, I decided recently to subject myself to reading Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Perhaps it was Sudafed intoxication, the NyQuil, or maybe my inner masochist just didn’t feel that my head cold made my suffering complete.

Whatever the reason, I have to say that I can’t help but be amazed by the gusto and efficiency with which Ayn Rand knocks down straw men. She sets up ridiculous conditions that her sociopolitical opponents would find abhorrent, themselves, then knocks those constructs over and declares herself the victor. It’s as though the only conversations she ever had were those between herself and her other self – the one who didn’t really like playing Devil’s Advocate, but she lost the coin toss and had to, so she was going to do as ridiculously poorly as possible so that the other side would clearly win.

And as the numbered protagonist discovers his individuality and embarks on page after page of narrative self-declaration, I realize that the modern Republican party is, truly, based on a Randian (Randite? Randesque? Randbunctious?) principle of the “virtue of greed.” Although they seem to have missed that one line in the middle about “I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them.” No biggie – she only spends one sentence on the concept, so she must not have felt it was important.

And then I visit boing boing and I am immediately gobsmacked by the idiocy of neo-Randbunctious ideology.

“When (President Franklin) Roosevelt did this, he put our country into a Great Depression,” [Republican Representative Steve] Austria said. “He tried to borrow and spend, he tried to use the Keynesian approach, and our country ended up in a Great Depression. That’s just history.”

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It’s—-

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Wow. Words fail.

No, actually, it’s not “just history.” The Great Depression happened before Roosevelt took office, as anybody who had actually passed middle school-level history should know. It was the policies of the conservative Hoover who put over 80% of the country’s money into the hands of less than 20% of the population that put us into the great depression.

Seriously. I know that one of these guys is just waiting to cut loose with “The free market has been the best system ever since Jesus gave it to the ancient Romans.” The “free market” approach of the Republicans is so apparently no longer an economic theory so much as a part of their fundamentalist belief system that they might as well write it into their religion.