Post by maximus on Feb 3, 2012 12:01:40 GMT 10
What I Learned from
Parodying Atlas Shrugged
[Excerpt - Article by Ellis Weiner, Huffington Post - 21 April 2011 - Linked Above]
Parodying Atlas Shrugged
[Excerpt - Article by Ellis Weiner, Huffington Post - 21 April 2011 - Linked Above]
Yeah, it's cheap fun, and I expected it going in. But what took me by surprise, and what still amazes me to this very day, is this: The novel's antagonists -- the bad guys, their pernicious "values," the ideas against which Rand's demi-god heroes and heroines do verbose, tedious battle -- they do not exist in real life. Of course, neither do Sauron or Voldemort. But Atlas Shrugged is a 1,000-page, 643,000-(I counted them)-word diatribe against an imaginary enemy that, unlike Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter books, insists it's about "reality."
The government of the U.S., such as it is, has no executive, legislative, or judicial branches. There is no president, Congress, or Supreme Court. Instead, a corrupt cabal of bureaucrats issues edicts based, ostensibly, on the rationale of a whiny five-year-old ("It's not fair!") while essentially safeguarding their own power, but which go unchallenged by individuals, states, or corporations. Europe is unrecognizable, since most of its countries have become quasi-socialist "People's States." This is a world in which salvation arrives in the form of a reclusive engineer who is begged to "save the economy."
In other words, the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today's world impossible. The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.
The government of the U.S., such as it is, has no executive, legislative, or judicial branches. There is no president, Congress, or Supreme Court. Instead, a corrupt cabal of bureaucrats issues edicts based, ostensibly, on the rationale of a whiny five-year-old ("It's not fair!") while essentially safeguarding their own power, but which go unchallenged by individuals, states, or corporations. Europe is unrecognizable, since most of its countries have become quasi-socialist "People's States." This is a world in which salvation arrives in the form of a reclusive engineer who is begged to "save the economy."
In other words, the geo-political world in which Rand wants us to admire her heroes is not our own, or even (like that of 1984) a plausible, allegorical variant of our own, but a third-rate science fiction dystopian future, complete with imaginary technology, which, by definition, makes comparison to today's world impossible. The U.S. of Atlas Shrugged is about as real and realistic as Narnia, and capitalism is to Atlas Shrugged what Quidditch is to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: a fictional construct, vaguely similar to something we have in real life, used for purposes of drama and entertainment.
Oddly enough, this is exactly what seems to be happening today. Hmmm...