Enough With One-Dimensional Novel Characters

Sometimes even liberals can overstep their bounds. Thom Hartman did this today when he talked about Ayan Rand having as her hero “protagonist” in the novel, “The Fountain Head” made into a movie by Warner Brothers in 1943, where the hero was an aspiring architect patterned after Frank Lloyd Right. But Hartman chose to rather fix on one statement made by Rand in the late 1920’s where she opted for this psychopathic murderer who killed a twelve year old girl viciously, and also committed another murder. This may be the first time in a California court where the insanity defense was tried. It didn’t work and the jury sentenced the man to death. The man was hanged on October 19^th or something 1928. Rand said she wanted an “ethical” version of this psychopath without the depraved tendencies. It would seem that Hartman regards Ayan Rand as a sociopathic personality herself because of her philosophy of Objectivism. I, too, profess to be an “objectivist” and I see nothing wrong with that. I, too, do not believe we should base our ethical values on religious dogma. Apparently in the novel "The Fountain Head" there is a prominent rape scene involving the male hero of the story. It would seems Ran's novels are not entirely one-dimensional. As to her anti-communism, I can’t fault her for that. In 1947 she testified before the Un-American Activities Committee as a “friendly witness”. Communism was indeed creeping around our door back then and our society was under threat. There were indeed a lot of far leftists in high places. Henry Wallace was a Communist and he was Vice President for four years. All Rand’s life shows is that there were indeed atheists whom I wouldn’t want to emulate morally. She was criticized for having a lot of sexual affairs. So she was a liberated woman.

But I would like to comment on this notion of the one dimensional novel. I have a friend I’ve known for over thirty years, who writes science fiction novels. None of them has succeeded, but they are well written, grammatically, and they are filled with detail. But like so many “Christians” if you will, they are one dimensional and didactic. This is why I don’t like C S Lewis novels. This on dimensionalism is carried out to outrageous extremes in so many movies by Walt Disney because he hits you over the head with one dimensional stereotypes, which leave the nothing to the imagination as far as figuring out the plot is concerned. But of course if Hartman hates one dimensional stories then he must hate the Bible, particularly the Gospels. Here you find all these one dimensional anti-semetic parables and true life stories which invariably extol the Romans and slam the Jews. If Bill Clinton was “our first Black president” then Jesus was our first Roman prophet. Of course some may point my way in saying that I have “stepped over the line” in critique of “characters” in the New Testament. Some people like Dennis Prager and Dr. Levy seem bent on “cleaning up Christianity” by doing a re-write or something. Let me ask you, if “choice” was such a paramount thing as Neil Savedra and Dr. Levy says it is, how come Jesus never told the people with regard to Roman oppression “You people in Israel have the choice to mold your future however you want”. Don’t get eye strain searching for that passage in the Bible. It isn’t there. Do you remember the NBC movie “Jesus of Nazareth”? Do you remember what was just about the first words out of Jesus’ mouth when he saw Judas? He looked at him and said rather sternly, “You shall know a tree by its fruit”. Jesus saw a world of “good people” and “bad people”. Even Neil Savedra of KFI has made the statement “People don’t change”.

Hartman made the statement today that “I don’t think John Boehner is a sociopath, but I can’t say the same thing of Paul Ryan. He’s one of those “True Believers”. He thinks the rich pay too many taxes and wants to cut them - - further than they are already. Hartman said that democracy has its roots in evolutionary biology itself. He talks about flocks of geese signaling to each other by photo analysis of wing positions- - which way they intend to go, literally “voting” every millisecond. Hartman says that in most primitive tribes, Cooperation is a trait valued far more than competition is. And we know cultures and peoples evolve traits that maximize their continued survival. My Christian friends say they are all for open competition? Then engage with me in a debate of the merits of Christianity in the world. They’d never do that. Many of the things Glen Beck says about President Obama wanting to “crash the economy” may well be things he and his followers are guilty of desiring for America. Because people like Mark Bove and Chuck Smith believe that if things in America get bad enough then God will come back to save the day and let the others rot. Just as they send their children to private schools to get a decent education, and let the Public Schools go to hell. In one of my earliest blogs I spoke of Christianity is being rather reptilian. In fact I was going to call this blog “Leviathan – A Look at the Philosophy of Ayan Rand”. A leviathan of course is a crocodile, who hides out in the muddy water and then pounces and viciously attacks his victims. I said then how a reptile was not dependant on its mother but rather the mothers abandon their eggs, hopefully burrowing it in a safe place. When the lizard hatchling is born it’s a matter of a foot race to the water where he will be safe from preditors. I can’t help but think that a whole leviathan race is being spawned by Christians, who reproduce at rates way faster than the rest of us, and a lot of the spawn are now old enough to hold the rains of political power. These are people with no real education in the human sciences or of history other than a few highly select events. I don’t want to sound like some advocate of eugenics or anything. This is a free country and you can believe what you want to believe. I just don’t like the idea of bigoted adults passing their values on to their children. Had they not done so, by this time our history, bigotry would have been extinct by now. I do not know to what extent the world view of the Koch Brothers has seeped into Christian theology. I know that generally we here in California are not as backward as the rest of the country and that kind of “right wing shit” doesn’t sell well here. I’ll tell you this. Me at my most conservative perhaps fifteen years ago- - never would have gone along with the crap being repeatedly showed down our throats today by Ryan and the tea party crowd.

I’ve been thinking that perhaps I didn’t go far enough in my “critique” of Bill Gates in my letter to you-know-who. Thom Hartman was saying that every inventor stands on the shoulders of Giants, as Isaac Newton freely admitted. There were multiple who invented radio ad just about the same time. Ditto for harnessing electricity. There is such a thing as Zeitguist, which I first heard from a movie dramatization of Martin Luther King Jr. It’s German for “spirit of the times”. If you believe there is some kind of cosmic “collective unconscious” out there, you may like me come to believe that certain inventions were “destined” to come about. It was merely a matter of the “instrument” by which the Inventions would come. And so you had Xerox doing the first demonstration of G U I or graphic user interface, and Steve Wasmiac took the ball and ran with it. But Bill Gates can’t even claim that. All he can lay claim to inventing is the DOS command line for the original IBM P C’s. How many people use DOS now? And CP/M is similar to DOS. I’ve looked at the code. It isn’t all that different. The idea that one man was “indespensible” to forward progress is a little specious. Let me ask you one thing, you Christians. Just how “forward looking” and “encouraging of new job ventures” and “capital growth” and all those other marvelous things we associate with American ingenuity- - - were around during the Dark Ages when Christians ruled the roost, and could have fashioned a world in any manner they chose with no opposition. We had to rely on people like the Moslems of Babylon and the Chinese to help civilize us. From the point of the view of the Moslems, the Crusades might be called a cultural enrichment program. In my latest letter to Dr. Levy I left off reference to three things in my Magical Metaphysical Tour. One was the concept of Hyper-Space, where space as we know it can’t be “localized”. Another is that I am still a believer of the Ether theory – and Astronomy Café talks endlessly on how “space isn’t really empty”. But you know, Ayan Ryan can talk about adopting an old notion of the Supermen, but I have my own belief in the Super Self. As I have said in previous postings it derives from the fact that the soul as we know it may be hyper light speed and incorporating Einsteins special theory of Relativity- - the calculations double back on themselves. Therefore each and every one of us has the internal capacity to tape into knowledge of our own Future. Knowing this of course will offer little comfort because we will STILL be unable to change it. But perhaps we can gain some useful pointers from ourselves. Perhaps Exestentialists are afraid of the future. But I’m not worried about the long term future. It’s only getting through the next twenty or thirty years that is the problem. If I live long enough perhaps all these memories of the Tea Party will fade into irrelevance. Lets hope so. And let us hope for the country’s sake- - that this comes sooner rather than later.