Every day, when I eat my simple lunch of cottage cheese, yogurt, and grapes, I sit on my bed and watch television. During the week, I usually turn on Alex Wagner on MSNBC, whom I really like, but on weekends her place is taken by Alex Witt, who is not so much a favorite of mine, so today I decided to try Turner Classic Movies. There I found the great old Gary Cooper Patricia Neal Raymond Massey version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. If you have not seen it, I can report that it is magnificently, spectacularly, uproariously, heart-poundingly awful -- a totally successful rendering of the inner geist of one of America's very worst novels. As I watched it, mesmerized, giggling and groaning and trying not to succumb to the temptation to avert my eyes or hit the mute button, the thought suddenly occurred to me: This is the secret wet dream of Paul Ryan and a host of passionate conservatives who have seized control of the rotting corpse of the Republican Party.
It would seem that it is not only Roman Catholic priests who are psychodynamically fixated at the level of nascently pubescent teen-age boys.
Since Rand was reportedly a self-styled 'Nietzschean', I can trace a possible etiology of the 'theory' behind The Fountainhead to a passage from Twilight of the Idols--#11 of the 'Expeditions of an Untimely Man' section--in which Nietzsche extols the architect. It is more likely that she did not read, later, in #33, a critique of Egoism, in which he calls some selfish types "parasites". Unlike most of many political persuasions in this society, Nietzsche joined Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Marx, in rejecting the atomistic concept of the 'Individual', the same concept that is the foundation of not only contemporary Randism, e. g. Tea Party, Libertarians, etc., but the agendas of many of their purported opponents, as well.
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