Haven’t seen too many of these this year, as the comments have mostly been us sniping at each other. However, this one is a good place to start:
On All Things Considered yesterday they gave a mini-bio for Ryan. They noted that 1) he requires all his staff to read The Fountainhead, and 2) he used to drive the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. There’s no logical relationship between those two, but there certainly is an aesthetic relationship.
I laughed. What comments have made you laugh that I need to add to the list?
Chris Martinez
That one’s hard to top!
bkny
well, nothing to laugh at; how about a smile. i didn’t see this getting much attention yesterday except at jezebel. it’s certainly some good news out of an unlikely place:
(AP) – The Arkansas Supreme Court today rejected a voter-approved initiative that barred gay couples and other unmarried people living together from serving as adoptive or foster parents. Associate Justice Robert L. Brown wrote for the court that the law would encroach on adults’ right to privacy in the bedroom. “Act 1 directly and substantially burdens the privacy rights of `opposite-sex and same-sex individuals’ who engage in private, consensual sexual conduct in the bedroom by foreclosing their eligibility to foster or adopt children,” Brown wrote.
John Luke
I believe it was Atlas Shrugged they mentioned, not The Fountainhead.
Chris Martinez
I was wondering: who here has ever tried to (or successfully) read Atlas Shrugged and/or The Fountainhead? I’ve heard that, even beyond the messages they contain, they are truly execrable works.
Dee Loralei
Yea, that one made me snort and snicker. It was deftly done.
JMN, TissueThin something or other, had an interesting and thoughtful explanatory comment in one of the late night threads about game theory and negotiations. At least it clarified things for me.
General Stuck
That is what I’d truly like to be
Dee Loralei
@Chris Martinez: I read them in my wild and misspent youth, I tell my son my young adulthood was so misspent I voted for Reagan twice! And worked for Republican politicians! <—bad, bad, bad Dee.
James E Powell
How come no one requires his entire staff to read Catch-22?
RossInDetroit
@Chris Martinez:
I read AS. I didn’t know you were supposed to just buy it and wave it at people while yelling at them to jump off a train for not having the fare.
Citizen_X
This is a grave insult to the Wienermobile.
BTW, did Rep. Wiener used to drive the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile, too? If not, why not?
Chris Martinez
By the way! Atlas Shrugged (Part I!) opens in theaters in just six days!
I can already feel the glibness rising in my soul, can’t you?
RossInDetroit
The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit has a Wienermobile in their permanent collection. Because of course they do. There’s an automated injection molding machine by it that will make you a red plastic replica right before your eyes for 2 bucks. I cherish mine.
MissKG
I think you have to be under 20 to read Ayn Rand. Oh, and Ryan looks like an extra from “Boardwalk Empire.”
stuckinred
@Chris Martinez: Neal Boortz is pushing it like mad!
Phoebe
I would like to retroactively nominate a comment from years ago, made by someone named possibly Jennifer or Kristen, at the time when the Obama campaign rolled out the “Change We Can Believe In” slogan, and everyone was analyzing it. She said something like she supposed, on further reflection, that it was probably more prudent than her first choice, “Black Is The New President, Bitch.” This still makes me laugh.
Joe Lisboa
She said something like she supposed, on further reflection, that it was probably more prudent than her first choice, “Black Is The New President, Bitch.” This still makes me laugh.
Hahahaha. Well played.
Elizabelle
Yesh, way to go loneoak.
BR
@Chris Martinez:
I got half way through The Fountainhead, then got bored. It seemed like the story should have been over by then, but there were several hundred pages to go…
Chris Martinez
@stuckinred: I think I’ll watch Atlas Shrugged (Part I!) in Georgetown when it comes out. Maybe I’ll catch a Cabernet-drunk Peggy Noonan sneaking her hand onto a Cato intern’s knee in the back row.
bookcat
@Chris Martinez: I read the Fountainhead when I was 18. And even then I thought it was poorly written. Very stiff two dimensional characters who’s development is subverted in the name of ideology and allegory. From what I’ve heard David Brook’s book does the same thing.
greenergood
I nominate this from Strange Apparatus at Rumproast, on a post today
:
“Conservatives have four natural constituencies: The Unborn, the Born-Rich, the Undead (Schiavo) and You Who Are About to Die for the Greater Glory. Forcing them to decide between any two creates an uncontrollable synaptic feedback loop that results in a form of Rhetorical Tourette’s.”
Sorry, not ‘puter literate enough to post it properly, but it’s still all good.
Yutsano
@BR: I tried. I honestly did. I don’t even remember what it was about honestly. Only that it wasn’t science fiction so I was disappointed.
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Dee Loralei: Thanks.
The comment is here, on the off chance anyone is interested. It isn’t the pithy sort of thing Comments of the Year are made of. I tend to specialize in long and tendentious.
Comrade Mary
@Joe Lisboa: Hey, can you get into Metafilter? I keep getting scolded with a 400 Bad Request page.
eric
“he requires all his staff to read The Fountainhead” isn’t that an example of collectivism?
JGabriel
@Chris Martinez:
I’ve read The Fountainhead. Yes, it was execrably written, even beyond it’s propaganda, but it’s not unreadable. However, it left me no desire to further pursue her work.
Rand has a snappy, mildly aphoristic style — the kind popularized by Shaw and Wilde, and which became commonplace in journalism, screwball comedies, and melodramas from the 1920’s through the 1940’s. She’s repetitive, mean, and substitutes viciousness and indifference for humor, and lacks the wit normally associated with the style, but — outside of the monologues and harangues that are treasured as “philosophy” by her acolytes — it’s largely readable.
.
TimH
@John Cole
Apologies John Cole, you didn’t blow it. (I erred in my explanation in this and another comment thread). Rand Paul’s spokeswoman unwittingly lied on the phone about unanimous consent voting in the Senate. I was also mistaken and believed this too.
Unanimous consent votes are the most common votes cast in the U.S. Senate for decades and strictly observed. Most nominations, most bills are passed by unanimous consent without any debate. Every senator is told about these votes, including all their senior staffers and legislative directors who worked for the Senators. They are called directly by their party leaders. They can take as long as they want to make up their minds.
It would have taken Rand Paul only a second to say NO.
Tellingly Rand Paul refused to go on the record on this issue.
Turns out Rand Paul isn’t explaining himself correctly and there was a really good case to be made about his flip-flop on Libya.
Oops.
Here is Lawrence O’Donnell with a really clarifying segment that aired a few days later after the first Rand Paul rant on Libya. It goes on for around 11 minutes:
http://thelastword.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/04/01/6393150-rand-pauls-lies-on-tape
Anyway i think this is a really important update. Hope you do a post on it with the video.
Villago Delenda Est
@Phoebe:
Along those lines, some friends of mine and I all agreed that the first words out of Obama’s mouth on the inaugural platform should have been “Pardon me while I whip this out.”
TimH
by the way, i tried to post that above comment in your open thread but it refused to post. wonder why.
Villago Delenda Est
@eric:
You will be assimilated into the Randite Collective. Although we don’t call it that, for obvious reasons.
People who bitch about “collectivism” should be dead set against the very concept of the corporation. Amazingly, they are not.
ppcli
@James E Powell: Yeah. Or The Grapes of Wrath.
nancydarling
@bkny: And the decision was unanimous. Yay!
FlipYrWhig
@Phoebe: “Black is the new president, bitch” is a line Tracy Morgan said on Saturday Night Live. He was taking off from a Tina Fey/Amy Poehler bit about Hillary Clinton as bitch, in which they said that bitches (like themselves) got things done. The punchline was “Bitch is the new black.” Then, later, Morgan said “Black is the new president, bitch.”
Ana Gama
@James E Powell: Or Catcher in the Rye?
FlipYrWhig
@TimH: Aha, I knew it was bullshit and said so on that thread.
quaint irene
Oy. Make those your bedtime reading, and no need for Ambien or Lunesta.
nancydarling
Here is an ACLU short video of the two women who were part of the suit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGhnDOQrq20&feature=player_embedded
Jay C
@bookcat:
Personally, while I’ll agree with this assessment 100%, I think this is one of the more positive reviews of The Fountainhead – at least nicer than I’d write….
I plowed through Rand once when I was younger (though post-college), TF I found barely readable, if dated, stale and trite: AS had all the flaws of TF, without even the minimal readability of the earlier work: I also gave up halfway through: can anyone tell me if I missed anything?
Jay C
@bkny:
@nancydarling:
Anyone want to start a book on when the recall campaign against those Justices will commence (if Arkansas has such provisions)?
Villago Delenda Est
@TimH:
Tim, this post indicates you’ve got some intellectual honesty.
A trait you do not share with Rand Paul, I might add.
Southern Beale
Well, here’s something bizarre. My friend and writing partner has twin grandsons who have inexplicably become a YouTube phenom while still in diapers thanks to this home video which went viral. It’s the strangest fucking thing in the world and some day I’ll tell you all the full story — including the ridiculous game of hard ball a Today Show producer tried to play on the babies’ parents to entice them to appear on the show. But anyway, Saturday Night Live is featuring the video in their digital short tonight, which I imagine will be hilarious.
I can’t believe that two babies can be famous before they’re out of diapers.
Dan
BTW, John, if you like WoW and laughing, you should check out Kingdom of Loathing (kingdomofloathing.com)
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
@Jay C:
A lot of words. I don’t remember a damned one of them, though I think “the” was used several times.
Hugely
i turned off the radio when they started the puff piece. NPR: the initials stand for nothing… (h/t Le Show)
I could give a shit about this guy. They (NPR) really should be reporting on what happens to the economy and american ppl when policy from retards like Ryan gets enacted
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Chris Martinez: My dad read one of those… I think it was the Fountainhead. When I was in college, majoring in Music (Hah! should have gone to Architecture, stupid me.) and I described having a hard time playing a chord on the piano greater than a 10th or 11th because my hands are just too small, which means that a vast amount of piano compositions are unavailable to me. He dumped this non sequitur on me that the theme of whichever book it was would consider the composer to be the only person of value in the creation of music, not the conductor, not the artist playing the music, just the composer. I simply goggled at him. I think I was 25 at the time which would have made it 1975 and Dad would have been 57, and I couldn’t believe my father was so incredibly ignorant. I thought, either this book is truly terribly stupid or Dad is. I asked around and decided it was the book, from which influence Dad quickly recovered. Once I knew a little more about the author I decided I didn’t need to read the damned books, which is really stupid of me, but I’d rather spend my time reading things that enlighten or entertain; I can be depressed with Ms Rand’s assistance.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
Paul Ryan: Bastard son of Tenpole Tudor, himself known for his bold and courageous wardrobe choices.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@General Stuck: Cuz everyone would be in love with you?
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Dee Loralei: Oh heck, when I was 12 or 13 I worked on the Goldwater campaign. School was on half-day sessions and Mom wasn’t going to leave me at home to get into Cod-Knows-What kind of trouble, so I got to stuff envelopes.
One thing that was kind of cool about it was that they gave me campaign buttons for just about everyone running for office in California as a Republican, as well as some interesting Democrats for Goldwater. The one I liked best was the Kuchel one, which looked like a gold key, but Mom whispered to me that he was a liberal Republican as if it was a painful disease.
chris
my fave from last summer by JRG
“Stupid liberals. If I have a dollar, and I give it to you, then you have a dollar, and I have nothing.
However, If I have a dollar, and I don’t give you a dollar, then you have a dollar, and I have a dollar. This is basic mathematics.
You may ask where the extra dollar came from. The answer is “shut up and go smoke some reefer, hippie”. Q to the E to the motherfucking D.”
Me and my teenager boys have committed it to memory..Hilarity ensues at the dinner table..
licensed to kill time
I read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead when I was a middle teenager. I thought they were brilliant at the time…”Hey! It’s GOOD to be selfish!” …but then I grew up some more. Turgid prose, wooden characters,and That Speech….arrggghh.
eta: sorry, I seem to have had a Gassellipses attack.
opie jeanne, formerly known as Jeanne Ringland
@Chris Martinez: That’s the kind of movie that I go to for as cheap as possible, late at night, so I can talk at the movie and not bother people who are really into it, although I have intentionally disturbed people anyway when a really stupid political premise shows up in a movie and I wasn’t expecting it. In some venues I have had lots of company.
piratedan
@Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again): come on now, both “Swords of a Thousand Men” and “Wunderbar” are early 80’s classics, if you’re gonna saddle him, really saddle him, say like he’s the love child of Siouxsie Sioux and Rick Astley and that he takes after his dad.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@piratedan:
If by 80’s classic you mean as Run Joey Run is a 70’s classic, then, yeah, I’ll agree. But Tenpole Tudor was no Haircut 100.
Ryan does share that Celtic bloodhound look with ETT (who I still see show up on Masterpiece
TheatreMystery from time to time), you gotta admit.Elia Isquire
@MissKG: Haha so he does. He’s also got a “Crispin Glober in the remake of ‘Willard'” thing going on.
Bmaccnm
It’s true confession time. I went to high school with Frank Miller- yeah,that one. AS ( I so want to add the other s) was required reading to join the cool kids in Frank’s cool club. I was a geeky high school senior, and I wanted to be cool, so don’t judge, okay? It was a long fukkin time ago. Anyway, I just couldn’t read it. I’d been an exchange student in Bolivia the year before, and even then “Selfishness is holy” sounded like the express bus to third world status. Funny how that worked out. I went on to nursing school and back to the 3rd world, Frank went on to cartoon millions. I imagine he doesn’t remember me at all. But I still think the philosophy is adolescent shit.
soonergrunt
@licensed to kill time: From the great John Rogers:
licensed to kill time
@soonergrunt: love that quote.
Loneoak
Yay, I done got frontpaged! Second time in BJ history.
soonergrunt
@licensed to kill time: Behold, Bob the Angry Flower’s sequel to Atlas Shrugged.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
A certain very attractive someone once claimed it was the best book and I HAD to read it and since I wanted to see the CVAS nekkid, I took the book.
Two painfully D-U-L-L pages later I decided there were other wienermobiles in the parking lot and many were not attached to someone who could read that shit, much less praise it.
It remains the only book I never finished reading.
RossInDetroit
Tenpole Tudor reminds me of nothing but Absolute Beginners, the best and longest music video ever made. I think Bowie was an architect in that, neatly tying things up.
licensed to kill time
@soonergrunt: also most excellent.
Bob the Angry Flower is such a great name, too.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
greenergood @ 21: http://www.rumproast.com/index.php/site/comments/the_non-shutdown_is_driving_miss_daisy_slap_crazy/#80689
Dan
I know comments at other sites don’t count, but one containing the line “Google ‘rabbit starvation'” should be up for some kind of honorable mention, especially considering the service it is in.
srv
@Chris Martinez: I read the Fountainhead in HS because I was interested in Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s not really an biography, but book spends a lot of time eviscerating architectural styles like he did, and the life of a ‘visionary’ who finds himself in and out of fashion and largely misunderstood. Queue teenage angst and projection.
Sorta lost me once he starts blowing up buildings. I do encourage the younger folk who have glibertarian bents to read Atlas Shrugged. None of them have ever gotten more than a 100 pages in.
I’d say 90% of Rand’s fans have never finished AS. You’d just have to be insane.
Hal
I heard that profile, and they did mention he was an “extreme” exercise buff, and proposed to his wife at his favorite fishing hole.
I expect the obligatory President Ryan speculation any day now.
asiangrrlMN
@Chris Martinez: I read The Fountainhead and was thoroughly disgusted by it. I don’t remember any of it except the takeaway message was, “Being selfish is the most noble thing you can do.” I haven’t read anything else from her since.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Dee Loralei:
hell, i can beat that, i shook rick santorum’s hand before he was crazy..
i know its hard to believe now, but there was a time when, santorum would have been content to be a rising star in a right-centerish gop. one that would probably ultimately be a bit too corporate,and still socially conservative for my taste, but doesn’t pander to “real america”.
the funny thing is, he sounds so awful doing it, because he is really trying too hard.
but yes i read atlas(t) shr
uggedded. 14 year old girls seemed to like it, and some of em had boobies.ppcli
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal: In the early 90s, when Santorum was running for the House, I was living in Pittsburgh. I had a weekly watching date with a TV show called “His Place” on the local Christian channel. It was a kind of homey talk show that doubled as a Christian soap opera: the “staff” of the restaurant would talk about their lives and face various edifying struggles. (Pimplefaced Busboy regularly wondering if he should date a girl who wasn’t Christian, etc.) Then people would drop in to the “restaurant” and the “chief waitress” would interview them. It was an unassumingly charming show, but the brand of Christianity on display was undiluted lunacy. (One of the interview guests I remember was a woman who was urging everyone not to allow their children to dress up on Halloween.)
Santorum was a regular guest on the show, and believe me, even then he was a loon. He realized that to climb up the ladder, and to have a shot at the Senate, he’d have to keep quiet about a lot of things. But when he thought that only the true believers were watching, he was as far gone then as he is now. Make no mistake about that. There was no “journey from reasonable to the dark side” with this guy. From the very beginning, he was out to impose his vision of Christianity on everyone within arms reach. He just dropped the mask once he had reached the level where he didn’t need it anymore.
Xantar
I just watched the trailer for Atlas Shrugged Part 1. What a weird experience. I suspect it was totally incomprehensible to anyone who had never heard of the book. And what’s more, it’s all about an individual genius yearning to be free so that…he can run his railroad. Right now, I as a liberal wouldn’t mind terribly if some genius overlord came along and managed to wink a super advanced railroad system into existence in the USA all by himself.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@ppcli:
i am talking late 80s here, not to try to get all hipster over rick santorum.
essentially my point is, whatever direction the gop went in, santorum was going to run like hell to be in front of the pack. it so happens they went all jesus all the time.
Sean
If you can’t bring yourself to actually read Ayn Rand, the good folks at The Read It and Weep Podcast have got you covered with a review of Atlas Shrugged.
Very funny.
-S
andynotadam
If anyone is enamored of Frank Lloyd Wright for any reason, I suggest tracking down Brendan Gill’s Many Masks: A Life of Frank Lloyd Wright. That’ll fix your Wright infatuation almost as well as reading Eric Clapton’s autobiography will make you refuse to listen to anything he did after Blind Faith. Insufferable assholes are just that.
hitchhiker
True Confession!
1969, I am 17 years old, junior in high school, sitting in my required US gov’t class. Teacher tells a story about a friend of hers who just read this BOOK and ended up in an asylum, b/c THAT’S just how intense and powerful it was. A book so true and real that it actually made someone crazy. Wow.
Two of my working-class brothers are in Vietnam, and a third has just joined the army so he doesn’t get drafted and sent there, too.
Of course, I NEED to read this monumental book, b/c I am dying to have a Serious Adult Experience. It was AS.
Ahem.
At 17, I learned the truth!
It took awhile to understand that Ayn Rand was a crappy writer with a single string on her violin, and that people who take her seriously after adolescence are emotional cripples with limited grounding in reality, just like the teenager I once was, but happily am no more.
Embarrassing self-revelation over. Thank you very much.
Joey Maloney
Here’s my true confession: I came to Rand through Rush. Not Limbaugh, of course. I liked Rush before Rush was cool, before they fired their first speed-freak drummer who went on to become a hair stylist, you can look it up. (I still think “Working Man” is a minor classic of the genre.)
By early high school I was totally hooked on 2112 and totally down with the themes of misunderstood genius sneered at and ridiculed
and shoved into lockersby his ignorant peers. Anyway, Neil Peart’s lyrical stylings led me to Anthem which led me to The Fountainhead which led me to Atlas Shrugged which led me to skimming the last two or three hundred pages before putting it down and never giving much of a thought to her or her “philosophy” again. And while I didn’t have anything resembling a coherent political philosophy until well into my thirties, within 5 years of finishing with my Rand flirtation I was working for Citizen Action and fanboi-ing over Alexander Cockburn. So I don’t think it did me any lasting damage.Tehanu
When I was in junior high in 1961-2 it was damn near impossible to find any book in the library that had sex scenes. So when I picked up AS and discovered that about every hundred pages or so, some impossibly handsome and accomplished manly man had his way with Dagny Taggart, which she submitted to because whichever one it was at that point in the story was so superior, I became quite fond of the book. It fit right in with my crush on Troy Donahue. However, I thought even then that the whole geniuses-vs-parasites thing was ridiculous, and I can honestly say that I never read more than the first two paragraphs of John Galt’s insufferable, dreary, endless, boring speech.
Bruce S
I have skimmed through these comments and I have to say that Balloon Juice folk have demonstrated a level of restraint that I guess I must find admirable…but puzzling.
Two items – Ryan’s”Atlas Shrugged”fetish (not the Fountainhead, but what the hey…) and Ryan at the helm of “The Oscar Meyer Weinermobile,” and the comments all zero in on Atlas Shrugged with, so far as I can tell, not a single dick joke. to be honest I don’t know whether to salute or be terribly disappointed.
Ash Can
@Bruce S: When Ryan himself is the biggest dick joke of all, it’s a real challenge to bring anything new to the table.
Donna
@greenergood: Yes — loved that comment too!
debbie
@ Chris Martinez:
Matt Taibbi has a pretty entertaining recap of Fountainhead in his book Griptopia. It’s worth looking up. I’m hoping he’ll do a movie review too.
Phoebe
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, I know, that’s what made her comment so funny.
Bruce S
Ash Can – I have to admit that I find Atlas Shrugged a lot funnier than the Weinermobile…
The Other Chuck
@Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN):
About nineteen more uses of “angular planes”. Another creepy sex scene unencumbered by actual romance where Rand lays out yet more of her submission fantasies.
Some big speech. Then stuff happens. Then this.