The opening scene…
A Frank Lloyd Wright designed house perched on a rocky cliff overlooking the ocean where a wild storm is raging. A white middle-aged man is sitting in a recliner watching the US election results from Fox News on his 50 inch flat screen HD TV which when not on is recessed behind an original painting by Claude Monet depicting something impressionistic with lilies and a wooden bridge. On his lap is a white long haired cat with almond shaped eyes the colour of emeralds and wearing a diamond studded collar. Beside him on the coffee table is a cut glass tumbler and a bottle of Kentucky Old Rip Van Winkle Special Family Reserve bourbon and a half smoked Cohiba Esplendidos Cuban cigar.
Also on the table is a leather-bound hardback first edition of Atlas Shrugged open at the fly leaf which displays the scrawled authorial signature of the High Priestess herself. On the TV, is a man whose recent ancestors would have been slaving in cotton fields or tending to animals and whose most important item on his agenda, in a time of apocalyptic economic melt down, appears to be the choice of a non-allergenic puppy to crap on the immaculate White House lawn. There is no expression on the man’s face as the results are announced. Still without emotion, he drains the glass of fine whiskey, picks up the antique Colt 45 lying waiting next to the now empty bottle and … well, you can guess the rest. CSI to you too.
You cannot understand John McCain and why he made the decisions and choices he made during the US Presidential election, such as the choice of Sarah Palin and his actions on the economic situation, unless you have read the novels of the neo-Con High Priestess, Ayn Rand. Both McCain and Palin are archetypal Ayn Rand characters which is probably why the neo-Con ‘men in grey’, Cheney and Rove, chose them in the first place. McCain and Palin are tragic figures taken straight from the pages of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ – the defining Gospel of the objectivist neo-conservatives.
Reading Atlas Shrugged, you begin to understand the venom and contempt with which ‘socialism’ and socialist ideals are viewed by Republicans and those that follow Ayn Rand’s ideas of objectivism and ‘selfishness is good’. To call Obama Barack a socialist is one of the very worst insults that a neo-con can throw without being liable to legal proceedings. The main thesis, and a very attractive one it is to certain types of rich white American men and women (WASPs) who need to assuage vague feelings of guilt about being wealthy and being ‘masters of the Universe’, is that…’what is good for me must also be good for the rest of mankind’. A concept famously encapsulated by Michael Douglas in the movie, Wall Street by stating… “Greed is Good!”
Another defining characteristic of an Ayn Rand character is the struggle and the sacrifice (and eroticism) that must be gone through in order to live up to Rand’s ideals and which leads to the ultimate vindication of objectivism and denial of socialism. However, unfortunately for the Republicans, McCain is no John Galt and Palin is no Dagny Taggart.
The election of Barack Obama represents a change in the Zeitgeist. Even if he did absolutely nothing except walk the new puppy on the White House lawn for four years he would still be a seminal figure in history. If he was to be assassinated he would be elevated in the American consciousness to the level of a God (like JFK). His job is essentially done. The real job of managing the economic and militaristic ambitions of the US will now fall on the Democratic Congress and government.
The Republican Party and neo-conservativism appears to have suffered a fatal blow … but have they?
Fast forwarding to the end of the movie...
We see President Obama standing still as a heron looking out of the window of the newly decorated Oval Office. On the desk made from the timbers of an ancient sunken warship dating from the Civil War, lies a well thumbed paperback book – the Fountainhead.
Howard Roark lives on!
