New at Pychotronic Review: Everybody Loves Robot Monster.
A major theme of my book, perhaps the central one, is that a fixation on all sides with fleeting short-term events obscured the breadth and depth of the transformative change wrought by the Obama administration. Large and even revolutionary policy changes received little attention because they were not attached to whatever political drama had captured the attention of the political media, and those “game-changing” dramas, in turn, frequently had little or no ultimate importance.
That same fixation with immediacy has continued to color our perception of Obama since he departed. Donald Trump’s election is the most compelling and immediate story in American politics, and correctly so, but its drama has caused Obama’s presidency to be refracted through the lens of Trump. What does Trump tell us about Obama? What does Obama tell us about Trump? The easy assumption since November has been that Trump would rapidly erase Obama’s legacy. “Obama’s legacy is toast,” gloated conservative commentators. That conclusion, reached immediately in the wake of the election, has continued to form the entirety of right-wing thought about Obama. Trump won, ergo, everything Obama did is gone, close the books…
Obama’s measures to prevent a second Great Depression after the 2008 financial crisis — the stimulus, the stress tests of the banks, and auto bailout — are safe from Trump by definition. The Dodd-Frank financial reforms will be temporarily weakened through lax enforcement, just as labor, environmental, campaign, and other regulations conservatives disapprove of are typically weakened during Republican administrations. But Republicans do not have anywhere close to the 60 votes they need to wipe Dodd-Frank off the books. Obama’s education reforms are likely safe as well.
But, as I argued in the book, both the green-energy revolution that Obama helped set out, and the international diplomatic consensus in favor of limiting climate change he helped assemble have a life of their own. Rather than use Trump’s election as an excuse to renege on their own commitments, world leaders insisted after the election their agreement was irreversible. Trump will slow down the pace of the green-energy transformation, but he has neither the inclination nor the ability to destroy the changes of the last eight years. Over the last few weeks, two of the largest coal-fired power plants have announced plans to shut down…
The old conservative mental image of green energy as an unaffordable hippie daydream is hopelessly quaint, in a world where the cost of solar has plunged 85 percent, and wind 66 percent, since the stimulus, and these technologies now produce energy for less than coal. Since 2008, wind power has more than quadrupled, and solar-power capacity has increased 4,000 percent.
Battery-storage technology is a crucial factor to the greening of both the electric power sector and the transportation sector. Affordable batteries are the key component to making electric cars cost-competitive with the gasoline-powered kind. And battery storage is an enormous factor in allowing renewable energy to completely displace fossil fuels. Solar and wind power can already generate electricity more cheaply than coal, but battery storage is necessary for those sources to replace the need for fossil-fuel power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The price of advanced batteries has fallen by more than half in the last three years alone…
And the Republican notion that subsidizing an infant industry violates the principles of a free economy, and amounts to “crony capitalism,” has been utterly abandoned in the face of an administration where the president uses his office for self-enrichment and White House employees literally use their office to gin up customers for his family business.
And then there is Obamacare repeal, the Holy Grail of the quest to erase Obama’s legacy. My book argues that Obamacare will be difficult to repeal — by bringing 20 million previously uninsured Americans into the system, Republicans can no longer ignore them. Events since its publication have borne out that analysis. Republicans have promised to replace the law with a plan that has lower deductibles and premiums and better choices. A plan like that would require spending more money than Obamacare, and Republicans are coming face-to-face with the reality that there’s no mechanism to finance such a plan that their party could support… Financing the alternative plan is the largest obstacle facing Republicans, but hardly the only one. There are innumerable problems that must be resolved — whether to keep the Medicaid expansion, whether to defund Planned Parenthood, whether to repeal Obamacare’s taxes, and on and on. Republicans have to find near unanimity on every single one of them in order to pass a bill out of both chambers of Congress. They have resolved none of them so far.
Republicans in Congress have made no more progress in developing a partywide alternative in the three and a half months since the election than they made in the seven years before that. Their only options are to keep the current system, or some version thereof, or inflict cruelty upon millions and massive disruption to an industry that accounts for a fifth of the economy. “I would say it’s not that easy to repeal it,” concedes Representative Peter King. “The entire repeal is in mortal danger,” admits Representative Trent Franks.
Republican messaging heavily emphasized the notion that Obama governed largely through the issuing of executive orders, which supposedly left his agenda vulnerable to a quick reversal. Trump has illustrated how fallacious that notion was. The new president has issued a flurry of executive orders, but — with the exception of the immigration order, which was a fiasco — these orders have mostly been symbolic vehicles for communicating goals, rather than actual policy changes.
The notion that Obama’s presidency could and would be erased with a few strokes of the pen was a form of Republican propaganda that Republicans themselves came to believe. Conservatives took Trump’s grandiose rhetoric about repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something terrific, or bringing back coal jobs, at face value because they wanted to believe it. (Many despondent liberals yielded to the same conclusion out of characteristic fatalism.) But one of the lessons gained from a close study of Obama’s presidency, or any presidency, is that governing is hard. The reforms his domestic policies have wrought do not come easy. Even a highly competent Republican presidency would have difficulty unwinding them. And Trump has shown no signs so far of being even a minimally competent president. The expectation of a rapid erasure of Obama’s presidency looks like — to pick a cliché I read somewhere — hubris dashed against the sharp rocks of reality.
–Jonathan Chait
Remember How Trump Was Going to Erase Obama’s Legacy Overnight? Yeah, Not So Much.
Deep uncertainty and serious divisions within the Republican coalition about the way forward on Obamacare have surfaced in the new Congress, and they’ve put the future of repeal and replace in doubt.
It’s become evident that there is little GOP unity on how much a replacement plan should cost, how to pay for it, whether the Medicaid expansion should be rolled back, or how to fix the individual markets.
Furthermore, there is no evident agreement even on extremely broad questions such as, “What should the goals of the GOP’s replacement plan be?”
Accordingly, many Republicans in both the House and Senate are increasingly fearful about moving to roll back Obamacare too quickly when so little is settled about what comes after it. And their problems are compounded by the fact that while a reasonably comprehensive repeal bill could be rammed through with just 50 Senate votes plus Vice President Mike Pence, a serious replacement bill would need 60 Senate votes, at least eight of which would have to come from Democrats.
It is not impossible that President Trump and the Republican Party will overcome all these problems. But to do so, they will have to come up with consensus answers to these five very serious unsettled questions.
1) What is the goal here? …
2) What will they do about money? …
3) What’s to be done with Medicaid? …
4) How will they try to make the individual markets work better? …
5) Just how committed are they to this thing, anyway?
—Andrew Prokop
The 5 Biggest Disagreements Republicans Have on Obamacare
I hate “funny” business names. They are usually puns. For example, here in the Bay Area, we have Site for Sore Eyes Optical Store. Look: I get it. When I first saw there was an eye doctor named “site for sore eyes,” I thought it was amusing. And there are other ones that I’ve thought were fairly clever. There’s the sporting goods store (Guess what they specialize in!) called “The Merchant of Tennis.” Or the “Church of Cod” with a little Jesus Fish symbol. Or best of all a fish & chips place called “A Salt & Battery.” Clever names all!
And then there are names that while clever are just a bad idea. There’s the hair salon named “Cubic Hair.” And the ice cream shop called “The Sweet Dairy-Air.” And most of all, the fishing supply shop “Master Bait & Tackle.” In addition to these all being coarse, they don’t make sense. What exactly do pubic hair, derriere, and masturbate have to do with what they’re selling. (If you know, please don’t tell me.)
This all came up because Will told me about a routine by comedian Brian Regan. Here is the routine that someone shot off a TV:
The problem with these clever names is that they are only ever clever once. After that, at least for me, they become annoying. What’s more, it reminds me of a scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. They are all going to head to Camelot. Then there is a musical number with knights at Camelot dancing arm in arm. Finally, King Arthur says, “On second thought, let’s not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.” And that’s what I think of when I see an ad for Site for Sore Eyes. Do I really want to trust my eyes to such silly people? (Of course, I know intellectually that this isn’t the case, but gut reactions matter regardless of what many think.)
So if you come up with a really clever name for a dry cleaning business, I hope you are a comedy writer and not dry cleaner:
There are, of course, truly great names that are clever, coarse, and effective. The best example is French Connection UK, better known as FCUK. But that works especially well because it flatters their customer demographic about offending their non-demographic.
Alternately, some names work as a pun or not. A good example of this is Book Passage, a book store just down the road from me. But notice, it isn’t meant to be funny. It is just meant to be taken in a number of ways, each of which are appropriate to the business. It is also a great book store.
Most people think that President Richard Nixon was brought down by Bernstein and Woodward — those intrepid reporters at The Washington Post. They weren’t the only reporters on the story, so that’s a simplification. But the truth is that it wasn’t any group of reporters who caused Nixon to resign from the presidency. If you had to pick a man, it would be Mark Felt — better known as Deep Throat. He had real power, which he used brilliantly. And his reason for going after the president tells us a lot about the political climate that we now live in.
In 1972, Mark Felt was Associate Director of the FBI. Although his motives in All the President’s Men were claimed to be patriotic, his actual allegiance was to the FBI itself. Felt didn’t like what he saw as meddling in the agency by the Nixon administration. He was almost 60 years old when he started leaking information, so it’s hard to see him as the idealistic leaker that Chelsea Manning was. If I were Donald Trump, I’d be afraid.
Let’s remember what brought down President Nixon. It wasn’t the break-in of the DNC office at the Watergate complex. That would have been pathetic enough a thing. He was brought down because of his part in trying to cover-up this second-rate crime. We know that presidents are involved with far worse crimes all the time. Why didn’t Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush get indicted about the far worse crimes involved in the Iran-Contra affair? Because the bureaucratic infrastructure wasn’t out to get them. Indeed, both men were protected by Oliver North.
The Trump administration has gone out of its way to antagonize most of the US government’s bureaucratic infrastructure. That’s especially true of the most dangerous part of it: the intelligence community, which has show little reluctance to use its power. I wonder if Michael Flynn wouldn’t still be Trump’s National Security Advisor if it weren’t for the intelligence community’s distaste for Trump and his minions.
The truth is that I doubt one could be President of the United State without commonly breaking the law. And even if it were possible, Trump would not be the president who managed the feat. In fact, it takes no power of imagination to substitute Trump for Nixon when he said, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
So it seems certain that the Trump administration will break the law. Trump seems to think that the president is a dictator. And there are thousands — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of government officials who would be thrilled to get rid of him. Add to that the fact that the Republican Party itself would be happy to get rid of Trump — so long as the alternative would be Mike Pence. And you end up with a very dangerous situation for Donald Trump.
I’m not saying that Trump will go away any time soon. For one thing, he and his staff are so incompetent that it’s possible they won’t be able to get enough done to break any laws. It may just be four long years of embarrassing tweets and nothing more — other than signing every legislative wet dream the Republicans in Congress have ever had.
But Trump doesn’t seem much interested in wielding real power. His constant boasting show that he’s more interested in looking tough than actually being it. And his idea of looking tough is that of a third grade boy. The truth is that if you lead a country that has a military roughly the size of all the other countries combined, no one would question your toughness. Trump’s boasts seem to indicate a kind of insecurity on his own part.
Trump hasn’t made friends with old enemies. The Russians have the same relationship with us now as they ever did. But Trump has made enemies he didn’t need to. And those enemies could be his ultimate downfall.
In 1992, I went to Hong Kong for the first time. I was sitting in the back of a little Irish pub. And I was pretty drunk. And in walks a Chinese Elvis impersonator in a white jumpsuit studded to the ridiculous extreme that we are all accustom to. Holding an acoustic guitar, he performs “Hound Dog,” collects tips and leaves. You got all that, right? Hong Kong, Irish pub, Elvis. The next day I wasn’t sure myself. I had to ask my colleagues, and they confirmed it: I did in fact see a Chinese Elvis do “Hound Dog” in an Irish pub in Hong Kong. Many people go their entire lives without ever experiencing something as magical.
I love Elvis and even more, I love Elvis Culture. In a sense, Elvis is America: a drug addict who wanted Nixon to make him an undercover DEA agent; a white guy who made millions off the work of poor blacks; and a country rube who somehow connects to a universal audience. In addition to all of this, the music is just fantastic. But it’s the Vegas act silliness that drives the culture. Although I do not particularly like watching Elvis at that stage of his career, I do like what it has spawned. I never would have gone to see one of those shows, but I’d thrill to see Elvis impersonators.
So when I noticed that the film Almost Elvis was available on Netflix, I had to watch it. It isn’t a great film, but it is fascinating. It follows a group of Elvis Impersonators as they compete for the “Images of Elvis” prize for the best Elvis impersonator in the world. It focuses on Irv Cass, a professional from Michigan. Little did I know it, but there is a network of Elvis impersonators throughout the world. If you want one, you call up EEN (Elvis Entertainment Network) and they will send one out. Cass is one them, and seems to make a decent living doing it:
Cass is very free with his opinions of the competition. Since he was one of the most established people in the field at that time, he knows them all. He’s rather good at talking about their strengths and weaknesses. In this way, he nicely systematizes what it is to be an Elvis impersonator. And this brings up probably the most interesting part of the film: race. One of the top people in the field is Robert Washington, who is a black man. Mostly everyone is very respectful of him. But they also admit that he doesn’t look like Elvis because of his race.
But here’s the thing. I don’t think that any of the impersonators looks like Elvis the man. If you take away the hair and the sideburns and the outfits, they just look like random white guys. So really, when we are talking about Elvis, we aren’t really talking about his face. Elvis isn’t a person anymore; he’s an archetype. So to me, it is all about getting up on stage with “the look” (hair, burns, suit) and moving and sounding like Elvis. What’s more, in Washington’s case, he isn’t all that black. Until people started talking about it, I just thought he was really tanned.
All the people said the same thing: I question whether Washington will ever win the title, not because I don’t like him, but because of the judges being, well, racist. This is typical: people generally think their neighbors are more racist than they actually are. At the end of the film, Washington came in second. The good news is he later won the event. Check him out; he’s great:
An academic interviewed for the film referred to the “transubstantiation of Elvis” to explain why people want more than just the music. The music is enough for me. But he’s right: these guys do become The King. And that’s pretty great.
The myth gained power during the late nineteenth century as vast individual fortunes were accumulated by men at the apex of the economic pyramid. A classic example was The Big Four, key investors in the development of America’s transcontinental railroad network: Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, Charles Crocker, and Collis Huntington. The endeavor, essential to the development of our nation, received huge goverment subsidies through the Pacific Railway Act of 1862, which gifted to the railroads ten square miles of public land for every rail mile built and guaranteed the investors needed funds through government-issued bonds. The engineering that was required to achieve this phenomenal feat was carried out by hundreds of design and construction engineers. And the years of backbreaking, pick-and-shovel labor was done largely by tens of thousands of immigrant Chinese laborers working under the harshest conditions.
But in terms of national mythology, The Big Four emerged as “self-made” men who on their own became titans in railroads, banking, shipping, and politics — instead of talented and fortunate individuals who amassed stunning fortunes through government subsidies and decades of work by tens of thousands.
That romantic and potent myth of the rugged individual — in today’s terms, the “individual entrepreneur” — has a profound impact on American public policy. It influences who among us is considered to be “production,” worthy of government subsidy, to what extent wealthy individuals and businesses are taxed, and what wages workers earn.
–Brian Kahn
Real Common Sense
In the margins of a couple of articles recently, I’ve mentioned that was planning to start a new website, Psychotronic Review. But you never know about these things. If I started every website I said I was going to, I would be running about 50 websites right now. But I have indeed started Psychotronic Review, and I think I will continue on with it. Let me explain why.
When I first started Frankly Curious, the idea was explicitly to be a mess: whatever came into my mind. But that idea became worse and worse the better that the site did. Starting at the beginning of 2012, I wrote more and more about politics. And in a way, it became kind of a typical political blog, because most political blogs tend to mix it up. Look at Vox, which is a professional political website (not a blog): it publishes quite a lot about pop culture and science.
But if you look at who reads Frankly Curious, it is a political website. Most of the people who read the site regularly do so because of the politics. And most of the comments are on the political posts. That’s all great. Just the same, for every seven articles I write about politics, I write an article on film, television, and theater. I’ve written a total of 487 articles in that category. And that amounts to almost 6 articles per month. And my single most popular post — Bugs Bunny: Rabbit or Hare? — belongs to that category. So if you removed everything else, Frankly Curious would be a fairly successful film blog.
Now that I know how to transfer all my Google “juice” to a different website, it just makes sense to separate my film writing off to its own website. In addition, I find that I’m more interested in writing about film than I have been. And given that my interest in film is not typical, mainstream film, such a site is likely to attract readers who are interested in it specifically.
I do come at the subject differently from most other people. There certainly are a lot of people who are interested in old low budget films. But most of them are following in the tradition of The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. These are people who like to make fun of these film — who think they are bad. It probably is not a coincidence that I’ve started Psychotronic Review only shortly after getting The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. Unlike the Medveds, Michael Weldon actually likes the films he discusses.
I’ve always felt rather lonely in terms of my interest in the typical psychotronic film.[1] Most people treat them as things that are just good to laugh at. And those who genuinely enjoy the films usually feel as though they must apologize for it. I like the idea of presenting a fulsome appreciation of them. After all, these films are generally thought of as bad not because the people involved were incompetent but rather because the producers didn’t have enough time and money to do things in a more competent manner.
(Imagine if the airplane crash from North by Northwest were in the middle of a Bert I Gordon picture. Oh, how people would mock it! Yet Gordon would have an excuse that Hitchcock did not. There is something chauvinistic about forgiving the errors of the rich and powerful while holding the poor and weak to ridiculously high standards. That is doubtless one of the reasons that I admire even the shoddy efforts by those who really “should know” their places and not be making such films.)
My intent is to make Psychotronic Review more than just a blog. I want it to be a full-featured website. In the long run, I hope it becomes popular enough to support a forum. The truth is that I’m always looking backwards. But psychotronic films are made all the time. (Don Coscarelli is probably the greatest psychotronic filmmakers working today.) And it would be great if people were talking about that while novels were being optioned and money raised.
But I know that I will get to the point of creating biographies for great psychotronic filmmakers: writers, directors, producers, actors, and whatnot. And I’d like to create a database of psychotronic films with links to where they are available on YouTube or Dailymotion or elsewhere (also Hulu and Netflix and other paid services). In fact, I was thinking of creating something like “On YouTube Now” to go on the sidebar of the blog. It would be a list of 10 films that were currently available to watch for free on YouTube. There are lots of other things I could do too.
This is, after all, the greatest time for people interested in psychotronic films. If it weren’t for YouTube, I never would have been able to see Alabama’s Ghost. Currently, it is only available for sale in VHS format for $18. After that, there’s a copy for $2,459.95. But because of YouTube, I was able to watch it as soon as I learned about it (and write about it almost as quickly). And I hope that Psychotronic Review will make this an even better time for people of this inclination.
As a result of all this, you are going to see some articles disappearing from Frankly Curious. For example, I took the articles Death Bed: the Bed that Eats and Review of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats, and combined them into a single article on Psychotronic Review, Death Bed: The Bed That Eats Review and Analysis. But it doesn’t matter, because if you click on either of those Frankly Curious links, you will be taken to the Psychotronic Review article. Oh, the power of 301 redirects!
In addition to doing this, I will put most of my new film writing over on Psychotronic Review. I’m not sure if that will include things like my articles about Bugs Bunny, but it will include my writing about art films. (You’ll have to wait for my article defining “psychotronic” to get a better idea of why that is.)
But other than that, I don’t see Frankly Curious changing all that much. I might, however, add a list of the newest articles at Psychotronic Review, so you can see if anything is happening there that you want to check out. Of course, that will just list the blog. And like I said, my plan is for the site to be a lot more than just a blog. But it ought to give you some idea.
Finally, if any of you are interested in writing something for Psychotronic Review, let me know. I hope that readers will write articles highlighting some of their favorite films. I doubt anyone will be interested at first. But I hope that the site gets good enough that people will want to be part of it. That includes having Andrea fix the design of the site. I am aware that it looks like I designed it. But I figured it was best to put something up rather than wait.
Regardless, I hope it all works out and that it is as fun to work on as I expect. If it is, I’m sure people will enjoy using the site.
[1] I used the modifier “typical” because the definition of psychotronic is unclear. But I think we all know what a “typical psychotronic film” is: a relatively low budget science fiction film from the 1950s. Good examples are Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Plan 9 From Outer Space.
The average human’s attention span is… oh look, a bird!
According to scientists, the age of smartphones has left humans with such a short attention span even a goldfish can hold a thought for longer.
Researchers surveyed 2,000 participants in Canada and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms.
The results showed the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds.
Goldfish, meanwhile, are believed to have an attention span of nine seconds.
–Leon Watson
Humans Have Shorter Attention Span Than Goldfish, Thanks to Smartphones
When I was young, I was terrible at spelling. I’m still not a great speller, but I’m okay. Technology has been very good for people like me. I don’t make many meaning mistakes like mixing up “beat” and “beet.” Generally, if I make a mistake it’s a big one. One that still drives me create is “knowledgeable.” It’s only been quite recently that I’ve managed to consistently throw in that final “e.” The truth is that it still doesn’t make a lot of sense of to me. Why not knowledgable? Anyway, I tell you this only so that you won’t think too lowly of me when I admit that I was 19 years old when I learned how to spell “grateful.”
I’m pretty sure it was because I saw a poster for The Grateful Dead. But it might also have been that I noticed a sign for The Grateful Bagel. Regardless, I thought, “That’s got to be wrong.” So I did what I’ve found to be very unusual in our culture: I got out a dictionary and I looked it up. And sure enough, grateful was the right spelling: “appreciative of benefits received.” It turns out that “greatful” isn’t even in the dictionary.
But that’s as far as I took it. In those days, it didn’t occur to be to dig deeper. It didn’t even occur to me that it was odd that it was spelled that way. In those days, English spelling was a mystery. There was no sense to it, so it could have been spelled ghoti, and I wouldn’t have given it any more thought.
Today, however, the question did occur to me. And this is the first time that I really gave the word’s meaning any thought. It couldn’t be “greatful.” The “ful” suffix indicates, more or less, “filled with.” And “grateful” doesn’t mean “filled with great.” If you want to put it that way, you would say, “filled with gratitude.” And that gets us pretty close to the reason that we spell the word “grateful.”
According to the Oxford Dictionary, “grateful” from the middle of the 16th century. That was when we had long gone version of the word “grate.” It meant pleasing or thankful. And, as usual, it came from a Latin word, gratus. According to my Latin dictionary, it means “beloved, dear, acceptable, pleasing, agreeable.” It gives as an example, “O! Diva gratum quæ regis Antium.” It is by Horace (so much Latin that is quoted is by him), in his Odes, Volume 1, Poem 35. And it means, “Oh! Goddess who reigns over your own loved Antrium.” Maybe.
The main thing is that the word sounds like “great” but that doesn’t mean anything. “Gateful” also sounds like “grate,” which has two modern definitions, First is: “to have an irritating effect.” And second is: “to break into small pieces by rubbing against something rough.” Both of those words come to use via Germany. It is from the word kratzen, which means “to scratch.”
But there is a possible use of the word “greatful.” Maybe this is just another example of how Trump is torturing me. But in that construction, the meaning would be “filled with great.” Now that doesn’t quite work. The –ful suffix is normally attached to a noun. But we could stretch it to mean, “filled with greatness.” So we might say, “In his mind, Trump is greatful.” Of course, in that case, it would just be a synonym for “great.” We hardly need “greatful,” much less “greatnessful.” “Great” does a perfectly good job.
I’m certain that Trump sees himself a John Galt type. He did it all on his own. (What rich father?!) Thus Trump isn’t in any true sense grateful. It would be nice to have a homophone just for him. It’s nice to think that the President of the US is grateful, even if just in spoken English.
Regardless of Trump, this does clarify why we have the word grateful and not the word greatful. Contrary to what I thought when I was younger, the English language — even its spelling — makes a lot of sense. It isn’t perfect. (What is?!) But if you learn it well enough, you will find that it is pretty accommodating to your personal sense of logic and structure. And I’m grateful for that.
The greatest and most obvious flaw with the book is how terrible the characters are. They are all one dimensional cartoons that are either perfect in every way or horrible in every way. If a character agrees with Rand’s ideology, then they are smart, beautiful, strong, noble, and rich. If a character disagrees with her ideology, Rand makes them fat, ugly, stupid, lazy, and hysterical (most of the villains of the book speak in exclamation marks). Even when villains have sex, it is made clear that they are not attracted to each other and gain no pleasure from the action. Because if you’re not a fanatical libertarian, you are wrong in literally every way.
The descriptions of the heroes are so over the top absurd it’s almost funny. Hank recalls his first day working at the age of 14 in an iron mine and how he cursed himself for being tired and feeling pain, but kept going because “he decided that pain was not a valid reason for stopping.” He then ends up running a series of steel mills and then inventing an entirely new form of steel. I don’t know how Rand thought it was credible that the CEO of a major corporation could also spend years working in a lab on research or that those skills crossed over. As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, he causally invents an entirely new way of building bridges one evening as if that were the kind of thing that happens all the time.
Francisco has to be the most ridiculous/funny. As a child he instantly becomes an expert in everything he does. He sits in a boat and automatically knows how to drive it. When he was 12 he snuck off and got a job working on the railroads, which was nothing because the year before he ran away and worked on a cargo steamer for the summer. Also while he was 12 he single-handedly discovers differential equations. When he was 16 he went to college but also worked in a copper factory. By the time he was 20, he owned the factory. How? By speculating on the stock market, because it is so easy to see which stocks will go up and down. It is weird that none of the heroes have time in their lives when they were fun-loving children; in childhood they were merely miniature adults.
All of the heroes have this absurd element to them. They don’t stop to eat or rest a single time in the book and it is casually thrown in that they haven’t slept for two or three days as though that would have no effect on them. They have no hobbies or interested outside work. Even when they are bleeding they don’t feel any pain. In other words, they are soulless robots, machines good for working and nothing else.
Atlas Shrugged bears a strong resemblance to fascist propaganda in its treatment of heroes. There is a strong emphasis on the cult of personality, of worshipping men of action in contrast to the masses who are too stupid and cowardly to achieve greatness. Democracy destroys accountability whereas dictatorship is the only system where anyone is responsible. All of the best firms in the book are named after their owner and collapse without them.
Atlas Shrugged is less of a novel and more of an excuse for Rand to promote her ideology. The characters are prone to burst out in long-winded speeches at the drop of the hat. The climax of the book is a 60 page speech in which remarkably little is said. However, I noticed that Rand completely avoided debates. The moochers give speeches in isolation as do the heroes; at no point do their paths cross…
–Robert Nielsen
Atlas Shrugged Is A Ridiculous Book
During last year’s primary, my father told me that he wasn’t too concerned about Trump, because like all other presidents, he would surround himself with smart, knowledgeable people. I assume that Charles Krauthammer was saying this. Whenever my father has what seems like a thought-out political opinion, it usually means he is just channeling Krauthammer. (To get an idea of what I think of the hypocrite man, read, Republicans Are in the Majority Again — So Krauthammer Is Against the Filibuster Again.) It was a hard argument to counter at the time. I did, but I doubt that it meant much. Today, it is impossible to deny: the Trump administration is as incompetent as he is.
Perhaps if Trump had any experience in the government at all, he might have surrounded himself with nominally competent people. But the truth is that Trump ran a campaign that everyone who knew anything about politics told him should have resulted in his resounding loss. Instead, he’s now President of the United States. As I like to remind people: the only real job of a politician is to get elected and to win re-election. Trump has won election, despite being a total nightmare in every way imaginable. Why should he run the country in any other way?
That, in fact, was the argument I made at the time: why should he change what worked for him so well in the primary once he became president? There was a comeback to that, which my father used: presidents always have. Of course, that’s not even true. It’s just that people in the United States have developed what I call casual cynicism. They’ve come to accept the unqualified as a give.
So when Obama, for example, made Eric Holder attorney general, it was no big deal. Holder had spent his entire career defending the very people who brought us the Great Recession. No problem! The same thing was true when Obama made Mary Jo White head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). But at least you could count on Obama to nominate lawyers to do work involving the law. Going back to Reagan, Alan Greenspan may have been a wacky pick for Fed chair, but at least he was nominally an economist.
Trump doesn’t care about any of that. And can we blame him? If Mary Jo White can head the SEC, why can’t Betsy DeVos be the Secretary of Education? Just because White had the superficial credentials to head the SEC didn’t mean she would actually do the job. How is it a big deal that DeVos wants to destroy public education when it wasn’t a big deal that Obama put a woman in charge of policing the securities industry that the securities industry itself would have picked?
The only thing that is different is that Trump has surrounded himself with people who are so incompetent that they won’t even be good at doing the evil things that they want to do. That doesn’t mean that they won’t do terrible damage. They will! But there isn’t anything categorically different in what Trump is doing compared to what Obama did. In fact, the administrations of the two men are totally in keeping with who they are.
Obama surrounded himself with smart, nominally competent people who didn’t see anything fundamentally wrong with the nation. Given that they were both fully vested in the status quo, their competence didn’t matter that much. After all, they headed institutions that were filled with competent people who knew how the job used to be done.
Trump has surrounded himself with dull, incompetent people who see fundamental problems with the country. Of course, the fundamental problems they see are mostly pure fantasy. But they do want to do something about these problems. Mostly, however, the courts and Congress will stop them from doing anything important unless it involves giving more money to the rich.
In this way, we should be grateful to Donald Trump. A regular Republican would have surrounded himself with people who would have been better at furthering their evil plans. Trump isn’t getting that, as we have already seen with the Muslim travel ban. If Trump had an Obama-level crew, the ban might have been finessed to the point where it was legal. In this case, at least, incompetence trumps villainy.
The place where this will all matter will be in the event of a catastrophe. And this will be the case. There will be lots of “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” moments under Trump — both big and small. And the villainy of Trump’s (and the entire Republican Party’s) plan will cause untold damage to the people of America and the world.
But there was never any question but that Trump would surround himself with people as dull and incompetent as he is. How could it have been otherwise? How could a man of Trump’s towering incompetence tell the difference between the competent and the incompetent?