From the Archives: Charlottesville radio host Joe Thomas assesses two years of the Tea Party

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 24, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Charlottesville radio host Joe Thomas assesses two years of the Tea Party
April 24, 2011 12:34 AM MST

Since its first rally on April 15, 2009, the Jefferson Area Tea Party has sponsored two more Tax Day rallies, in addition to events on Independence Day and regular meetings for its members and supporter at various locations in and around Charlottesville.

The group’s latest Tax Day event took place on Friday, April 15, at the Free Speech Monument near Charlottesville’s City Hall. The emcee was WCHV radio talk-show host Joe Thomas, bedecked in colonial-era costume.

After the rally ended and the crowd began to disperse – or to stick around and attend the first Fridays After Five concert of 2011 – Thomas spoke to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the state of the Tea Party movement, the issues that have persisted for the past two years, and the release of Atlas Shrugged-Part One.

Tea Party rhetoric
Thomas worries that the Tea Party movement could be co-opted by professional political consultants.

"There’s been a change in the rhetoric” since the Tea Party first surfaced in early 2009, Thomas said, “but remember, politics, as we have it right now, is driven by a very, very smart group of consultants. They see the 1,500 people we had at the first Tax Day Tea Party rally [and] every Tea Party rally across the country, and they say, ‘We have to work the language of the Tea Party into the rhetoric.’”

The economy is uppermost in Thomas’ mind, as it is with many Tea Party activists.

“Something that was said here is very important: one month’s worth of interest on the debt covers seven or eight very major departments’ entire budgets,” he pointed out.

“We need to realize that the borrowing is what’s going to kill the country,” Thomas explained. “This country is strong because it was one of the great marketplaces. The citizens of this country consume goods from around the world and other countries want to sell here. If our dollar stops being valuable, as it will if they continue to print [more money], that’s when we fail.”

Core focus
Thomas believes there has been consistency in the Tea Party’s ability to focus on a few central issues and not be distracted.

“The core is still about the taxing and the spending,” he said.

“How many groups,” he asked, “have libertarians and Moral Majority crowds in the same group?”

That may engender some “friction that the Tea Party feels sometime,” Thomas suggested. “Do they go to the social right or to the libertarian right?”

Despite this source of potential conflict, he said, the Tea Party has “stayed focused on the economic ground,” echoing the advice James Carville gave to Bill Clinton: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

With regard to the possible social/fiscal split, Thomas counseled: “If we can afford to live and we can afford to pay our bills, the rest can be handled between adults.”

‘Atlas Shrugged,’ the movie
Thomas suggested that the growth and success of the Tea Party may have been partially responsible for the long-awaited release of a movie based on Ayn Rand’s novel, Atlas Shrugged.

“I know that they had been working on [the movie] for some time,” he said, noting that he had interviewed Objectivist philosopher David Kelley of the Atlas Society, who had been an advisor to the producers of the film.

Kelley told him, he said, that the project “really started to move forward when they started to see the interest in the libertarian mindset of the Tea Party.”

Seeing that, he said, the producers thought, “‘Now may be the time to get this moving.’”

Joe Thomas can be heard weekdays from 5:00 to 9:00 a.m. on WCHV radio (1260 AM and 107.5 FM). He also cohosts “The Afternoon Constitutional,” on WCHV-FM in Charlottesville and on WFJX-AM in Roanoke.

From the Archives: Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 16, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Talking about 'liberaltarianism' at the University of Virginia
April 16, 2010 11:23 PM MST

On April 15, an interdisciplinary group of scholars from two universities and a Washington think tank participated in a panel discussion at the University of Virginia on the topic, “Libertarianism: Left or Right?” The panel was organized by Jennifer Burns, an assistant professor of history at UVA, who explained how it came about to the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

“I met Brink Lindsey in the course of doing an event at [the Cato Institute] on my book, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. I had read his article about “liberaltarianism,” proposing an alliance between liberals and libertarians. I thought it was really interesting, a really creative new way to think about politics in the 21st century.”

Lindsey, vice president of research at Cato, had “brought a liberaltarianism discussion to several universities,” Burns said, including Princeton and Stanford, and he “asked if I wanted to do it down at the University of Virginia. So I put together some folks who are interested in engaging these questions.”

The eventual panel was made up of Lindsey and a colleague from Cato, Will Wilkinson, as well as Gerard Alexander and Colin Bird, both associate professors in the UVA Department of Politics; political scientist Steven Teles from Johns Hopkins; Sahar Akhtar, assistant professor of philosophy at UVA; and Burns.

There were some distinguished names in the audience, as well, including UVA English professor Paul Cantor, UVA psychology professor Jonathan Haidt, and UVA philosophy professor Loren Lomasky.

After the free-wheeling panel discussion ended, Lindsey explained the basis of his argument, which was first published in an article in The New Republic called “Liberaltarians” on December 4, 2006:

There is, he said, a “need to rethink the historical alliance between libertarians and social conservatives, that that alliance was born out of unique historical circumstances, specifically, the challenge of socialism at home and totalitarian socialism abroad. That’s gone now. There’s a lot of ideological flux on the right. It’s an appropriate time for libertarians to see the possibilities of engaging people on the left side of the political spectrum.”

Asked why there is an organized libertarian caucus within the Republican Party but no equivalent in the Democratic Party, Lindsey replied:

“Who knows? One reason is that libertarians have not made an effort to present libertarian policy ideas in a way that is calculated in any way to be congenial to the way liberals think.”

He added, “Whether they think of themselves that way or not, libertarians have been part of a right coalition. They have framed their arguments in conservative terms, in terms of preserving the heritage of American liberty and venerating the Founding Fathers and the Constitution, rather than in presenting their case in terms that might find a more receptive audience on the left.”

One of Lindsey’s respondents on the panel, Gerard Alexander of UVA, set out his own point of view of “liberaltarianism” as one that understands “that where libertarians ally themselves is a historically contingent thing. I don’t believe that conditions justify them allying more with people to their left than their right. I think the basic conditions that obtained 40 or 50 years ago still obtain.

“Therefore,” he concluded, “the most logical alliance, however imperfect, for libertarians in modern America is still with people who call themselves conservatives.”

From the Archives: UVA historian explains Ayn Rand's unusual popularity in 2010

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on April 16, 2010. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

UVA historian explains Ayn Rand's unusual popularity in 2010
April 16, 2010 5:03 PM MST

To many people, the unusually high level of interest in the works of Ayn Rand and her surge in popularity are puzzling.

In January 2009, the Wall Street Journal’s Stephen Moore published an article called “'Atlas Shrugged': From Fiction to Fact in 52 Years,” in which he wrote:

“Many of us who know Rand's work have noticed that with each passing week, and with each successive bailout plan and economic-stimulus scheme out of Washington, our current politicians are committing the very acts of economic lunacy that 'Atlas Shrugged' parodied in 1957, when this 1,000-page novel was first published and became an instant hit.”

Two months later, The Economist reported that according to “data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks best-seller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book's 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on Feb. 21, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On Jan. 13 the book's ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama's popular tome, ‘The Audacity of Hope.’”

Earlier this year, Marsha Enright and Gen LaGreca noted in The Daily Caller that Moore’s 2009 article “seemed to ignite an explosion of interest in Ayn Rand. Sales of this prescient novel tripled; two Rand biographies have been selling like hotcakes; and references to her in the media have skyrocketed.”

What explains this phenomenon: A philosopher/novelist who died in 1982 is more popular now than when she was actively writing and promoting her books?

Yesterday, the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner put this question to one of the authors of the two Rand biographies that were published last year, University of Virginia historian Jennifer Burns. Burns wrote Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right.

She replied to the question in Charlottesville on April 15, just after moderating a panel discussion on whether libertarians should seek an alliance with liberals (with the resulting combination called “liberaltarian”).

Burns said that Ayn Rand “has become a rallying point for the opposition to Obama. Definitely, she has become a really strong presence in the Tea Party. I think a lot of people are seeing her writing as prophetic, both predicting what’s happening now and warning about what can happen if the state gets too big.”

In Burns’ opinion, Rand’s “time has come, in many ways.” She cautioned, however, that “it’s probably a temporary boom. She may fade away and then she’ll probably come back the next time we see this kind of state expansion.”

Burns said that so far her book has received “a very enthusiastic reaction.” Rand, she said, “is a really important figure in American intellectual life [who] hasn’t been recognized as such [and who] hasn’t been treated as such. Most readers of Rand simply appreciate that I take her on her own terms and explain just why she matters.”

Marilyn Monroe and the Real Value of Profits

An obscure 1951 film that fell out of copyright gained some new life in the home video market simply because a then practically unknown Marilyn Monroe had a small supporting role.

DVDs of Home Town Story, written and directed by Arthur Pierson, are sold with big photos of Monroe on the cover, as though it is a “Marilyn Monroe movie.” It isn’t, but even if a few thousand people are induced to buy it for that reason, that’s a good thing, because the film has an important lesson about business and economics.

The actual marquee star of the movie (which runs a short 61 minutes, more like a TV teleplay than a feature film) is Jeffrey Lynn, who plays Blake Washburn, a small-town newspaper publisher who has just lost his seat in the state senate to the scion of a local manufacturer, John McFarland (played by veteran character actor Donald Crisp). Monroe plays a secretary at the newspaper and appears on screen for no more than five minutes.

Washburn is bitter about his campaign loss and, when he takes over the newspaper from his uncle, he embarks on an editorial crusade against big business, in particular railing against the profits made by large industrial corporations. His sometime foil in this is reporter Slim Haskins (played by Alan Hale, Jr., best known as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island), who tells his boss to tone down the rhetoric.

While I watched Home Town Story, I initially thought this would be a typical left-wing agitprop piece from the early Cold War era, where the crusading newspaper editor would be the hero and the capitalist businessman would be the villain.

I was wrong.

About halfway through the movie, the whole tone of the film changes as business owner John McFarland shows up in the newspaper’s office. He wants to talk to Washburn about his editorials and offer an alternative point of view. Here’s the dialogue from that scene (which can be watched in full on YouTube):

McFARLAND: I’m interested in profits, both for myself and the customer. My main reason for coming here was to see if I could perhaps interest you in printing something about a pet theory I have. I call it “Profits to the Customer.”

WASHBURN: What do you mean?

McFARLAND: As I say, it’s my own private little pet theory. It’s very simple, not very complicated. You see, I’m not an economist, I’m just a businessman. I have to make a profit to stay in business.

WASHBURN: Sure, we all know that.

McFARLAND: I make a profit on every electric motor I sell but the customer must make a larger profit, because if he doesn’t, he won’t buy my motors and I’m out of business.

WASHBURN (incredulous): The customer must make a profit?

McFARLAND: That’s right … Yes, the customer must make a profit. For example, you have some typesetting machines out there. The manufacturer who sold them made a profit on them. But your paper would never have bought them in the first place if they couldn’t deliver something beyond their original cost. They must continue to work for your paper to be worth more to you than you paid for them. As a customer, that’s your profit.

WASHBURN (skeptical): My profit?

McFARLAND: Yes, you sell your newspaper to a man for five cents. He gets news, advertisements, and all kinds of information for his home and business. He gets service beyond the value of his five cents. As a customer, that’s his profit. The same story for everything else: the light bulb, the refrigerator, the telephone. For this, we pay a few dollars a month. Our profits are enormous in steps alone. In case of an emergency, it’s value can’t be estimated.

SLIM HASKINS: That’s a different slant from what we’ve been printing.

WASHBURN, after a long pause: As you say, that’s just a theory. But you can’t deny that you are a big business.

McFARLAND: In your editorials, you’ve been insisting that because a thing is big, it’s bad. It takes bigness to do big things. Our industries turned out equipment for our armed forces in a remarkably short space of time. It was a big job and it was well done. It helped us to win the war and preserve our country. That’s what American industry with its bigness was able to accomplish. Was that bad, Blake?

The last fifty years, we’ve come a long way. It used to take a week to get a letter across the United States. Now we do it in one day. The difference in time alone could affect the happiness of a family. It might even mean a matter of life and death.

In my time, I’ve seen advances in industry that have added twenty years to the average span of life. My father died in the old country at the age of forty, an old man. His work was absolute drudgery, slavery, on his own farm from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. But because I live in America, I feel like a young man, and I’ll be 65 in April.

WASHBURN, irked: Why are you telling me all this?

McFARLAND: Well, I thought perhaps you might be interested in both sides of this profit question, and print something else for a change.

WASHBURN, steaming: Mr. McFarland, I don’t tell you how to run your plant, so please don’t tell me how to run my paper. I’ll print my own conception of business profits. Good day, sir.

McFARLAND: Well, I just thought I’d come in and talk – which I have.

Remember, Blake, when this country was first discovered, there was nothing here. Now look around you, everything you see is profits. Our transportation, communication, household appliances, medical equipment. Notice them sometime, Blake. They’re the real profits.

The plot soon turns to a school field trip, where Washburn’s young sister is trapped in an abandoned mine. With the help of equipment made by McFarland’s factory, and because McFarland has a private airplane he offers to Washburn to take the girl to a hospital in Capital City, the little girl’s life is saved. As a topper, as the girl is wheeled out of surgery, McFarland notices the motor operating a respirator helping the girl breathe: “Hmm,” he says quietly. “That’s one of ours.”

As a result, Washburn’s next editorial has a different approach.

“You know, Slim, seven hours ago, John McFarland with a pet theory I didn’t think was worth printing. Theories have a funny way of becoming facts.”

Curious about the writer and director of Home Town Story, and wondering where he might have come up with the ideas that inspired the film, I did a bit of research.

Arthur Pierson only directed two other feature films. Most of his work was in television, and he ended his career as an executive at Hanna-Barbera, the animation company best known for producing The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

Something early in Pierson’s career stood out, however. It turns out before he became a director and screenwriter, he was an actor. Between 1929 and 1940, he appeared in eleven Broadway plays.

In fact, in 1935, he was in the original Broadway cast of The Night of January 16th, written by Ayn Rand.

Now, you don’t suppose that Arthur Pierson, Hollywood director, got some of his ideas about business and profits from the Goddess of the Market herself, do you?

Top Ten Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner Stories for 2011

Much of my effort in on-line reporting during 2011 has been devoted to regular contributions of articles to Examiner.com as the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner.

Last week, I decided to investigate the top ten most popular stories of 2011, based upon the preferences of the readers of the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, using statistics made available through Google Analytics.  No real patterns emerged.  Several of the favorites were about Virginia politics, others were interviews with national celebrities; the number one story was about a movie.  All of them were published during the calendar year 2011 and none were carryovers from 2010.

Surprisingly, two articles that used "porn" in the headline did not break the top ten:  "Library of Congress collects pornographic films, violent video games" (published November 4) and "Porn king Larry Flynt defends free speech in Charlottesville" (published November 6).

Apparently adult content no longer has the cachet on the Internet that it once had. Not so long ago, using words like "porn," "erotica," "panties," or "scrotum" would be a surefire path to search engine optimization (SEO). Paraphrasing a Supreme Court decision and replacing "penumbra" with "aureola" was pure traffic-enhancing gold. But, it seems, no more.

For reasons of space, I ended up publishing three "Year in Review" articles on Examiner.com, dividing the top ten into groups of three, four, and three.

What follows is just the list of the ten most popular Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner articles of 2011. To see the annotations, please visit the original year in review pieces published on December 16, December 17, and December 18.

#10 - NEH chairman Jim Leach talks about ‘civility’ in Charlottesville
[Published March 17, 2011]

#9 - Disappointment as Va. House subcommittee votes to keep pot possession a crime
[Published January 17, 2011]

#8 - Va. Gov. Bob McDonnell says GOP stands for ‘equal opportunity for all’
[Published October 26, 2011]

#7 - Libertarian writers Welch and Gillespie unveil the ‘Declaration of Independents’
[Published July 19, 2011]

#6 - Virginia’s school supplies ‘tax-free holiday’ more complicated than necessary
[Published August 4, 2011]

#5 - Attorneys Ted Olson, David Boies discuss Proposition 8 and gay marriage at Cato
[Published May 18, 2011]

#4 - Charlottesville write-ins reveal voters’ allegiance, impishness
[Published November 9, 2011]

#3 - Libertarian reactions to the killing of Osama bin Laden by U.S. forces
[Published May 2, 2011]

#2 - Gary Johnson wins RLC straw poll, places third in CPAC poll
[Published February 13, 2011]


Drum roll, please...

#1 - 'Atlas Shrugged' movie: Audience reactions mixed, box office returns respectable
[Published April 17, 2011]

Next year will bring new topics, new stories, new personalities and -- eventually -- a new year in review article.

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Gift Ideas for Cyber Monday

Black Friday is past.  It seems to have begun this year on Thursday, Thanksgiving.  Merchants are happy because their sales receipts for Black Friday 2010 have outpaced those of Black Friday 2009.

Increased sales of push-up bras and other lingerie items tend to indicate a recovery in the retail sector, and, reports Reuters,

Total retail traffic will have risen 8.7 percent to 212 million shoppers from Thanksgiving Day through Sunday, compared with the same period in 2009, according to the survey from the National Retail Federation.

Shoppers will have spent $45 billion online and in stores over the four days, according to the survey, which includes estimated spending for Sunday. That compares with $41.2 billion in 2009.

Spending per person rose to $365.34 from $343.31 a year earlier, NRF said.

Tomorrow, November 29, is the much-vaunted Cyber Monday, when workers return to their jobs from the four-day weekend and begin using their office computers to shop on line (the honorable ones only during their lunch hours), ordering gifts for themselves and loved ones.

In between came a new shoppers' holiday called "Small Business Saturday."  The idea of that one is that consumers should visit local mom-and-pop shops and buy things there.  Even government officials got into the act.  Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, according to the AP, urged Old Dominion shoppers to patronize local small businesses.

The Republican governor says small business accounts for 98% of all businesses in Virginia, and for 75% of job growth.

He said doing your holiday shopping Saturday supports what he calls the "lifeblood of Virginia."

For my part, I visited four local businesses on Saturday:  Carter Mountain Orchard, The C'ville Market, McDonald's, and Walmart.

Lest you object that eating at McDonald's and buying things at Walmart betray the spirit of "Small Business Saturday," keep in mind that both McDonald's and Walmart started out as small businesses, respectively six and five decades ago.  And for those of you who found this blog post through the most pervasive global business of them all, Google, it's good to remember that the search engine giant did not exist even 15 years ago.

The best lessons about how small businesses succeed and grow, I suggest the South Park episodes "Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes" (Season 8) and "Gnomes" (Season 2).

That second episode contains a speech about free enterprise that would put Howard Roark to shame.  As Robert Arp writes in his book, South Park and Philosophy:

In the spirit of libertarianism, Kyle proclaims something rarely heard on television outside of a John Stossel report:  "Big corporations are good.  Because without big corporations we wouldn't have things like cars and computers and canned soup."  And Stan comes to the defense of the dreaded Harbucks:  "Even Harbucks started off as a small, little business.  But because it made such great coffee, and because they ran their business so well, they managed to grow until they became the corporate powerhouse it is today.  And that is why we should all let Harbucks stay."

In short, today's small business -- or even a yet-unrealized business concept -- may be tomorrow's behemoth, and that's good for consumers, for workers, for entrepreneurs, and for stockholders.

Looking forward to tomorrow, however, I would like to make a few suggestions for Cyber Monday purchases, whether something self-indulgent or something that will be a stocking-stuffer for St. Nicholas Day or gift under the tree on Christmas. (You may want to order expedited delivery if you're buying Chanukah presents. The Festival of Lights begins on December 1 this year.)

Let me begin by recommending the four best books that I have read in the past year.  Three are non-fiction, one is fiction.  I regret not having written full-length reviews of these books yet, but I may get around to it eventually.

By far my favorite book of 2010 has been Daniel Okrent's Last Call:  The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.  The title is self-explanatory but completely understates the rich lode of historical matter that Okrent has gathered between the book's covers.  I thought I knew the story of Prohibition, and I was wrong.  So many rich details had slipped my notice over the years, including the seminal work of Wayne B. Wheeler, the pre-eminent lobbyist for Prohibition, who basically invented grass-roots political organizing and direct-mail fundraising years before Marvin Liebman, Richard Viguerie, or MoveOn.org.

Neither did I know how the forces of Prohibition had undermined the Constitution by preventing for a full decade the mandated reapportionment following the 1920 census, because those favoring Prohibition knew that a Congress that more accurately represented cities, suburbs, and recent immigrants would be less inclined to support stiff enforcement of the Volstead Act and would be more inclined to move toward full repeal of the 18th Amendment.  As a result of the manipulation of Wheeler and others, the Congress elected in 1930 represented the same districts as their predecessors did in 1912, a clear violation of the Constitution.

What's more, Okrent did some digging and discovered no evidence for the widely-held belief that the patriarch of the Kennedy clan, Joseph P. Kennedy, was a bootlegger.  Though Kennedy had imported liquor legally at just about the time that repeal seemed inevitable, there simply is no documentary proof that he had imported illegal liquor during Prohibition.  The rumor that the senior Kennedy had been a bootlegger, and had built his family's fortune on that, seems to have begun sometime in the 1950s and, as Okrent points out, if any evidence had existed prior to that date, Kennedy -- who had many enemies in business and politics -- would certainly have been called out on it.

Another book of history that I really enjoyed was Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market:  Ayn Rand and the American Right.  Burns, who teaches at the University of Virginia, wrote a page-turner about the Objectivist philosopher and novelist's life.

That may be hard to believe, since the outlines of Rand's career are so well-known, given previous biographies and memoirs.  Somehow, however, Burns is able to keep the reader's attention.  As I read along through the book, I kept saying to myself, "I know what happens next, but I want to find out how it happens."

Burns was the first outside scholar to be given access to Rand's personal papers and library, and the result of her research is a highly readable yet informative chronicle, not only of Rand's life but of her influence on the American conservative and libertarian movements. 

Over the course of the past eleven or twelve months, I have had at least three opportunities to see Burns speak:  once at the Miller Center, once at the Virginia Festival of the Book, and once at a forum she assembled on the idea of "liberaltarianism," or the cooperation between libertarians and liberals in the public square.  On two occasions, I was able to interview her about Ayn Rand and about her book.

In the world of entertainment, it was my pleasure last month to see TV's Craig Ferguson perform his stand-up act at the Paramount Theatre in Charlottesville.

In anticipation of that show, I read Ferguson's own autobiography, American on Purpose:  The Improbably Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot.

As the title implies, the story culminates in Ferguson's decision to become an American citizen.  I was actually a bit disappointed that, for all the detail about his life and "adventures" earlier in the book, the section on the naturalization process was thin.  It certainly was not as complete as the reports Ferguson gave about it on The Late, Late Show on CBS while he was going through it.  (That included numerous offers of "honorary citizenship" from state governors, including a then-unknown-outside-Alaska Sarah Palin, whom Ferguson described at the time as something of a "sexy librarian.")

Still, Ferguson's chronicle of his life growing up in a lower-middle-class household near Glasgow in the 1960s and '70s, his love affair with the United States that began upon his first visit here at the age of 13, his early life as a drunk and drug addict, his first attempts at performing (which began with him as the drummer for a punk rock band, leading to a stand-up act as the character "Bing Hitler") that included encounters with other beginners like U2 and Alan Cumming, through his long-term engagement as a regular on The Drew Carey Show and finally, his becoming the best of the late-night talk show hosts (in my opinion, at least).

After Ferguson's performance at the Paramount in Charlottesville, I noticed his tour bus was still parked out back and, curious, I found a cadre of fans standing outside, waiting for the star to emerge.  Sure enough, only a few minutes later, he came out of the stage door and signed a few autographs and posed for a few photographs.  Luckily for me and Steven Latimer, who was with me that night, Craig let us pose with him in the very last shot taken that night.  Naturally, I posted it on Facebook as soon as we got home.  It appears here for the first time outside a social networking context.

As the picture was being snapped, I said to Craig, "You're the smartest host on late-night TV," to which he replied:  "That's like being a tall midget."  Maybe so, but I stand by my statement.

For what it's worth, I also purchased Ferguson's novel, Between the Bridge and the River, on that night at the Paramount.  I have not yet had a chance to read it.

I don't read much fiction, in general, but when I received a review copy of James Magruder's Sugarless, I simply could not put it down.

It has been almost a year since I read the book, but I still think about it because it resonates with my personal experience so much:  not in every aspect, but hitting a sufficient number of points on the matrix to make me believe it.

Sugarless is the story of Rick, a 15-year-old high school student in suburban Chicago during the mid-1970s who, almost purely by chance, ends up on the speech team and finds out he has a talent for dramatic interpretation (or dramatic interp, for those in the know).

Magruder's verisimilitude about high school forensics struck me more than anything else in the book, even the parts about the protaganist's struggle with coming out as gay in an era far less accepting of that than it is now.  His descriptions of the scenes at speech tournaments are amazingly accurate, and his portrayals of coaches and competitors are eerily familiar to me.

The one detail that other readers might find difficult to believe is the choice of the protaganist's speech coach to have him do an excerpt from Mart Crowley's play, The Boys in the Band.  People unfamiliar with high school forensics may think that a play about gay men would be off-limits, especially in 1976, and especially in the American Midwest.

The truth is, a cutting from The Boys in the Band was circulating at that time, and my own coach asked me to do it.  For reasons unrelated to the content of the piece, I ended up doing a different selection.  (If I recall correctly, it was the courtroom scene in A Man for All Seasons, a far more conventional choice.)  So I can testify against the doubters that an excerpt from The Boys in the Band was, indeed, being performed on the high school forensics circuit in the mid-1970s.

Having just seen the excellent documentary about Crowley and his play, Making the Boys, at the Virginia Film Festival, my memories of reading Sugarless earlier this year and my own experience in high school rushed back to me.  I recommend Sugarless to anyone who has competed in speech and debate or to anyone who was once a gay teenager.  It's an excellent book, and a compelling read -- a real achievement for a first-time novelist, even one who, like Magruder, is an accomplished playwright and translator.

I had planned to list a few novelty items here to round out this list of suggestions for Cyber Monday gifts, but these four books probably do the job.

In any event, Amazon.com has set up a whole page of links aimed at the Cyber Monday shopper.

Trends of the New Economy

The last major economic crisis to have a discernible effect on culture as well as politics was probably the one that started in the mid-1970s and reached its nadir during the Carter Administration. It is memorable for such fads as Pet Rocks (1975), leisure suits (c. 1976-77), and the "preppy look" as satirized (and, ironically, solidified) by Lisa Birnbach's illustrated guide, The Official Preppy Handbook (1980).

While the brief recession of 1991-92 might have stimulated memorable cultural trends, they don't pop easily to mind. What emerged in the '70s, however, has been embedded in popular culture through That '70s Show (the early years) and last summer's guilty pleasure, Swingtown.

Whether the current economic contraction leads to similar trends that will one day be recalled fondly (or with cries of "What were we thinking?") remains to be seen. But a few mini-trends have emerged that are worth noting.

The Economist, for instance, has discovered a spike in sales of books by Ayn Rand, the Objectivist philosopher/novelist whose major works, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, generally have continuously steady sales even though the author died in 1982.

According to the British weekly:

Reviled in some circles and mocked in others, Rand’s 1957 novel of embattled capitalism is a favourite of libertarians and college students. Lately, though, its appeal has been growing. According to data from TitleZ, a firm that tracks bestseller rankings on Amazon, an online retailer, the book’s 30-day average Amazon rank was 127 on February 21st, well above its average over the past two years of 542. On January 13th the book’s ranking was 33, briefly besting President Barack Obama’s popular tome, “The Audacity of Hope”.

Tellingly, the spikes in the novel’s sales coincide with the news (see chart). The first jump, in September 2007, followed dramatic interest-rate cuts by central banks, and the Bank of England’s bail-out of Northern Rock, a troubled mortgage lender. The October 2007 rise happened two days after the Bush Administration announced an initiative to coax banks to assist subprime borrowers. A year later, sales of the book rose after America’s Treasury said that it would use a big chunk of the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Programme to buy stakes in nine large banks. Debate over Mr Obama’s stimulus plan in January gave the book another lift. And sales leapt once again when the stimulus plan passed and Mr Obama announced a new mortgage-modification plan.

There is a chart accompanying The Economist's article that dramatically illustrates the ups (and downs, but mostly ups) of sales of Atlas Shrugged.

At CPAC last weekend, a number of speakers posed the question, "Has Atlas shrugged?" with an implied affirmative answer. The Economist notes the existence of a Facebook group with the name, "Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life," one of 111 groups dedicated to loving (or hating) the Ayn Rand novel. The group's 828 members are spread across the globe, but I note a disproportionate number from Scandinavia.

While some people are asking, "Who is John Galt?," others may be more curious about what John Galt is eating these days. The New York Times has a partial reply:

The cube steak is suddenly one of the hottest cuts of beef in the country, according to figures from the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. The amount of cube steak sold during the last quarter of 2008 was up by almost 10 percent over the same period a year earlier. The overall amount of beef sold went up only 3 percent.

It doesn’t take a wizard to figure out that the economy’s swan dive has much to do with the cube steak’s resurgence. But even before kitchen budgets became tight, the cube steak had its fan base.

No doubt some entrepreneurial cookbook writer (or publisher) is already preparing new editions of recipes our parents, grandparents (or, in terms of the Facebook generation, great-grandparents) remember from the Great Depression and World War II. There's nothing like an economic downturn to create business opportunities.

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A New Christmas Tradition in Arlington

I missed the opening night performance of The American Century Theater's new production, An American Century Christmas, but I did catch a matinee last Sunday. I wish I had seen it earlier so that I could get the word out that this is a show worth seeing. (The run ends on January 4.)

The show is a musical revue done very much in the style of a TV variety show of the 1950s or '60s. (A format that has declined and disappeared, as noted by TACT's artistic director Jack Marshall in an audience guide for the show.)

I am hoping that, despite the midweek holiday, my review will appear in this week's edition of The Metro Herald. (If not, it will certainly be in the January 2 issue.) Here is a preview:

‘American Century Christmas’ Launches New Holiday Tradition
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

Behold, we bring you tidings of great joy: This month, in the County of Arlington, a new Christmas tradition is born.

The American Century Theater (TACT), which since 1994 has been reviving great and obscure plays of the 20th century in a black-box theatre within Gunston Middle School, now brings us a delightful compilation of song and dialogue that traces the celebration of Christmas in America.

Conceived and compiled by TACT’s artistic director Jack Marshall, musical director Tom Fuller, and assistant director Kathryn Fuller, An American Century Christmas could – if the company wills it – become a Washington-area holiday tradition that can rival A Christmas Carol at Ford’s Theatre. (That story, by the way, is reduced to 90 seconds in TACT’s telling.)

Largely a musical revue, like those that peppered Broadway in mid-century, An American Century Christmas is family-friendly and audience-interactive. (Come prepared to answer Christmas trivia questions and be rewarded with a Tootsie Pop, with even more substantial prizes for children.)

A warm and welcoming set (designed by Trena Weiss-Null) looks much like the studio sets that hosted annual Christmas specials of the 1950s and ‘60s that featured Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Andy Williams, and many other singers and comedians who often brought out their families to join in the celebration. (One irony, of course, is that many of these “Christmas” specials, with principals and ensemble bundled up in sweaters and parkas, were taped far in advance, often in August in Los Angeles. The last of the Bing Crosby Christmas specials – the one where he performed a haunting duet with David Bowie – was produced in the summer and broadcast months after Crosby’s death in 1977.) Colorful costumes – with an emphasis on shades of red and green, of course -- by Rip Claassen add flavor and a note of nostalgia to the production.

Besides a plethora of Christmas songs, both secular and religious, An American Century Christmas includes dialogue scenes from It's a Wonderful Life, Earl Hamner’s The Homecoming (precursor of The Waltons), Miracle on 34th Street, and A Charlie Brown Christmas, with readings of The Littlest Angel and a poem by Edgar Guest, a musical number from The Dick Van Dyke Show (the episode known as “An Alan Brady Christmas”) and tuneful, thematic medleys -- for example, the Santa-oriented songs released annually for more than a decade by Gene Autry, and Jule Styne’s Broadway-style songs for Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol.

The cast even recreates, on stage, the radio satire “Green Chri$tma$” by Stan Freberg. In introducing the piece, however, they repeat the factoid that, while “Green Chri$tma$” was produced and released in 1958, because it was disliked by advertisers, the skit was never played on commercial radio until 1983. I can attest that this is untrue, because I heard it on WEMP-AM in Milwaukee no later than 1972; I even quoted it in a paper I wrote for my eighth-grade English class that year. That quibble aside, it was a pleasure to see Freberg’s biting and continuingly relevant send-up of holiday advertising reproduced today.

The magic of An American Century Christmas is that it holds the potential of being re-staged every year with minor changes so that it remains fresh for each new audience.

This is because the revue is written in a modular fashion. Scenes can be rearranged, removed, and inserted almost at will without harming the flow of the piece.

For example, the Gene Autry medley – which moves from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” through “Up on the Housetop” to “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” – could be replaced with a medley of songs by Alfred Burt, who is represented later in the show with one of his “Christmas cards,” “Some Children See Him” and a brief sample of “Caroling, Caroling.”

No doubt the team of Marshall, Fuller, and Fuller hundreds of possible clips and musical manuscripts to come up with the show in its current form. No doubt many usable and entertaining items were filed away, regretfully, simply because adding them would make the show too long. (I think they gave short shrift to the Christmas songs that emerged from Broadway musicals, for instance, and could bring a few more forward in future productions.) No doubt these “leftovers” will fill a hundred nights over many Christmas seasons.

The ensemble cast does a terrific job in presenting the songs, often with a humorous twist. They relate to each other so smoothly that one might think they are members of the same family, gathered on Christmas morning to celebrate together. It would be unfair to single one out of the nine on stage (and one booming through the sound system), so here they are, as listed in the program: Ann DeMichelle, McCall Noelle Doyle, Kathryn Fuller, Bill Gordon, Adam Juran, Scott Kenison, Steve Lebens, Mick Tinder, Patricia Tinder, and Glenn L. White.

An American Century Christmas plays only through January 4 (when it will be replaced by Life with Father, whose run was interrupted for the holidays), so hurry to American Century Theater to celebrate Christmas with the cast and crew. Ticket information and showtimes can be obtained at www.americancentury.org.

Of course, if my prediction is true, you will be able to enjoy the tradition of An American Century Christmas for many, many years to come.

An American Century Christmas opened Wednesday, December 10, 2008, and runs through Sunday, January 4, 2009, at Theatre II, Gunston Arts Center, 2700 S. Lang Street, Arlington, Virginia 22206. Performances most weeks are Thursday through Saturday evenings at 8:00 p.m., with Saturday and/or Sunday matinees at 2:30 p.m., and with additional weeknight shows during the weeks of Christmas and New years. More information is available at www.AmericanCentury.org or by calling the theatre at 703-998-4555 to order tickets.

The audience guide that was compiled by Jack Marshall includes an amusing item called "The Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time," by John Scalzi, which includes such titles as "An Algonquin Round Table Christmas," "The Mercury Theater of the Air Presents the Assassination of Saint Nicholas," and "A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski." My personal favorite is this:

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

When you see the show, be sure to pick up a copy of the audience guide. It has information that adds depth and texture to the production; it is educational without being didactic, entertaining without being flip.

Ayn Rand in the Funny Papers

Objectivist philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand turns up in the most curious places -- most recently in this past Sunday's comics pages.

Somehow I think Mayor LaGuardia would have had some problems explaining this one over the radio to the kiddies, though the sentiment expressed may apply to more people than the folks at ARI would care to admit.

Subversive Hair Product

While watching Nathan Lane being interviewed by Conan O'Brien on Late Night a few minutes ago, I saw the U.S. version of this UK-originated commercial for a new VO5 hair-care product:

I find it refreshingly subversive. It's a playlet with the same theme as Ayn Rand's Anthem.

You've got to love YouTube, too, for giving me the capability of finding the video within 30 seconds of seeing it on TV. That's Web 2.0 for you.

Funny thing -- in the American ad, the product comes in a long red tube. In the British one, it's in a baby-blue jar. Any significance to that?

Break the mold, indeed! Vive la difference!

Ayn Rand Centenary: February 2, 1905-2005

This Wednesday marks the hundredth anniversary of the birth of philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand.

Rand -- whose birth name was Alice Rosenbaum -- arrived in this world on the eve of the first Russian Revolution, lived as a teenager through World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the civil war that followed, and escaped from Communist Russia at the age of 21, coming to the United States, where she learned English and became, in short order, a screenwriter, playwright, novelist, and essayist. She created a philosophy called Objectivism and her writings are a tour d'horizon of epistemology, aesthetics, metaphysics, economics, and politics.

One hears over and over that a 1991 survey -- sometimes attributed to the Book-of-the-Month Club, sometimes to the Library of Congress -- ranked Rand's 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, as the second-most influential book among American readers, after the Bible. (Does anyone have verification of who actually sponsored the survey? Could it have been both the Library and the Club?)

Needless to say, we are seeing a flurry of activity to celebrate Ayn Rand's birthday. The Objectivist Center is hosting a half-day conference at the Library of Congress on the actual anniversary, Wednesday, February 2, with a number of distinguished speakers, including two Members of Congress -- Edward Royce of California and Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. Other speakers include Robert Poole of the Reason Foundation, Ed Crane of the Cato Institute, and Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Information about the event can be found at the Objectivist Center's web site.

A number of pundits and cultural critics are also beginning to weigh in on Rand's legacy in the popular press. In the past few days, articles have appeared in the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and New York Sun, among other papers, and we can expect to see more as the week progresses.


What is particularly praiseworthy about these articles is that, although the writers invariably admire Rand either for her ideas or for her persistence, they are not shy about criticizing the artistic quality of her work. The fact is, Rand's novels are as popular (and as provocative and controversial) as they are not for their style, but for the substance of their ideas.

Here for instance, is the Chicago Tribune's cultural critic, Julia Keller, writing in the newspaper's Sunday edition:

Rand's fiction has been critically scorned in some quarters, her philosophy reviled, but her influence is undeniable.

Did somebody say "influence"? Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, counts himself among her devoted flock. Rand's books, vastly popular in her lifetime, continue to sell at a nifty clip: More than 5.5 million copies of "Atlas Shrugged" have been snapped up since its initial publication, and in the last few years, sales have averaged about 150,000 copies annually, reports Richard E. Ralston, publishing manager for the Ayn Rand Institute. "The Fountainhead" has sold more than 6 million copies, with annual sales currently topping 130,000, he adds.

Wooden characters

Clearly, then, Rand knew what she was doing when she created dreadfully wooden characters to represent her philosophical and economic ideas, when she put long, impossibly windy speeches in the mouths of those characters. Because for all that, for all the technical flaws that even moderately attentive readers could red-pencil in their sleep, for all the narrative rules Rand breaks -- the novel just won't leave you alone. Of how many books can that be said?

Read at the right moment in one's life -- usually in late adolescence, when the world seems like a tangled mess of hypocrisy and confusion, and you hate your parents and especially that stupid assistant principal who is seriously on your case -- "Atlas Shrugged" is a tonic, a dream, a throat-scalding draft of pure, radiant clarity. You feel as if you've been walking upside down for most of your life, seeing things the wrong way, and now -- now – suddenly you're right-side up again and everything starts to make sense. Turns out it was the world that was upside down, not you.

But here's the funny thing: Re-reading Rand as an adult in 2005 is not what you thought it would be. It's not a "Oh, wow, what a chump I was!" feeling.

In fact, the ideas from "Atlas Shrugged" you thought you had outgrown don't seem all that outlandish, after all. The themes you abandoned as hopelessly naive and almost comically operatic -- all those fist-shaking tirades about human destiny, all those "Greed is good!" screeds that predate Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" by three decades -- somehow start making a bit of sense again, in a world upended by religious fanaticism and a nation crippled by soaring government deficits.

Flaws and all, "Atlas Shrugged" still is a powerful novel, a sweeping epic that either pulls you into its sphere or scares the bejesus out of you, or maybe both.

In a review of a new biography of Ayn Rand in the New York Sun, Andrew Stuttaford of National Review Online writes:

Rand herself, alas, was no beauty; her glorious heroines, ridiculously gorgeous, impossibly named, remarkably lithe, are less the template for -- as some allege - a sinister eugenic agenda than the stuff of Ayn's randy dreams garnished with a dollop of Art Deco kitsch. The first, extraordinarily violent, coupling in "The Fountainhead" of Howard Roark with Dominique Francon is not a general prescription for the relationship between the sexes but merely Rand's own erotic fantasy ("wishful thinking," she once announced, to the cheers of a delighted crowd).

Likewise, her sometimes-overwrought style is no more than - well, judge this sentence from "Atlas Shrugged" for yourself: "She looked at the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building rising in the distance - and then she thought she understood: these people hated Jim because they envied him." Call Dr. Freud.

If sex in Rand's fiction can be savage, so is argument. Her sagas deal in moral absolutes, her protagonists are the whitest of knights or the blackest of villains, caricatures of good or evil lacking the shadings of gray that make literature, and life, so interesting. Yet "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead," at least, have a wild, lunatic verve that sweeps all before them. Like Busby Berkeley, the Chrysler Building, or a Caddy with fins, they are aesthetic disasters, very American aesthetic disasters, which somehow emerge as something rather grand.

There is plenty in Rand to make a modern reader queasy, though you would not know so from Mr. Britting's worshipful text. For example, there is something to the claim that like so many of the intellectuals, left or right, of her time she succumbed to the cruder forms of social Darwinism. For a woman who worshiped man, Rand did not always seem that fond of mankind.

But the accusation by Whittaker Chambers in National Review that there was a whiff of the gas chamber about her writings is wrong. Rand lived in an era of stark ideological choices; to argue in muted, reasonable tones was to lose the debate. As a graduate of Lenin's Russia, she knew that the stakes were high, and how effective good propaganda could be.

Rand's nonfiction may have a greater claim to intellectual respectability, but it was the lurid, occasionally harsh, simplicities of her novels that would deliver her message to the mass audience she believed was out there. She was right. Her key insight was to realize that there was an appetite among Americans for a moral case for capitalism. In a restless age that believed in the Big Answer, neither historical tradition nor utilitarian notions of efficiency would suffice. Ayn Rand gave Americans that case, perhaps not the best case, but a case, and she knew how to sell it.

The establishment always disapproved. Critics sneered. Academics jeered. The publishers Macmillan turned down "Anthem" (1938), saying that Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union, "did not understand socialism." Oh, but she did, and so did those millions of Americans who bought her books, books that played their part in ensuring that the dull orthodoxies of collectivism never prevailed here.

Imagine the audacity of telling a refugee from the Soviet Union that she does "not understand socialism"! Of course, this was more than a decade before The God That Failed and Witness. (Not that those books had much effect on the Left's squishy views of Stalin, Mao, and Fidel.)

The executive director of the Objectivist Center, Ed Hudgins, explained the central facets of Ayn Rand's philosophy in the Boston Globe last weekend:

Rand's plots taught economic lessons better than do most college textbooks, showing exactly how one government regulation after another can punish productive individuals and destroy a country. Even more important, in her novels and her nonfiction works she developed a philosophy -- Objectivism – that provided a moral defense of free markets.

Rand began with the observation that since the ultimate alternative for human beings is life or death, the ultimate moral goal for each individual is survival. That might not seem so radical, but Rand went on to observe that because we are humans, the goal is not just physical survival; it is a happy, joyous, and flourishing life. Further, the means by which we discover how to achieve this goal is our unique rational capacity, not instincts, feelings or faith. Thinking allows us to produce food, clothing, shelter, medicine, printing presses, computers, rockets, and theories to explain everything from atoms to galaxies.

Rand developed an ethos of rational self-interest, but this ''virtue of selfishness" was not an antisocial creed for predators. Instead, it led Rand to her great insight that there is no conflict of interest between honest, rational individuals.

Since individuals are ends in themselves, no one in society should initiate the use of force or fraud against others. All relationships should be based on mutual consent. This became the credo of the modern libertarian movement, found today in think tanks, publications, and public policy proposals.

True individualists would not debase themselves by living the life of a thief, whether robbing a store with a gun or their fellow citizens with a government mandate or wealth-redistribution scheme. Rather, they would take pride in taking responsibility for their own lives, actions and moral character. Rand wrote, ''As man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul."

Thus an ethos of rational self-interest justifies and supports individual liberty; a free market -- not a communist, socialist, fascist, or welfare-state system -- is the only one that protects the rights of each individual. Entrepreneurs, workers, professionals, and all others need not justify their quest for the highest wages or profits or to seek permission from ''society" or their neighbors; they are free to live their lives as they please as long as they respect the similar freedom of others.

The result of such self-interest is a peaceful, prosperous society of achievers. Such a society would be a joy to live. Not only would we each benefit materially from the goods and services we purchase from others, we would obtain spiritual fuel from their inspiring examples. As one of Rand's characters states, "Don't work for my happiness, my brothers -- show me yours . . . show me your achievement -- and the knowledge will give me courage for mind."

Meanwhile, syndicated columnist Steve Chapman asks, "Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream?" His partial answer begins:

The radical champion of individualism and capitalism, who died in 1982, is no longer an exotic taste. Her image has adorned a U.S. postage stamp. Her ideas have been detected in a new mass-market animated comedy film, "The Incredibles." And Wednesday, on the 100th anniversary of her birth, there will be a Rand commemoration at the Library of Congress--an odd site for a ceremony honoring a fierce anti-statist.

In her day, Rand was at odds with almost every prevailing attitude in American society. She infuriated liberals by preaching economic laissez-faire and lionizing titans of business. She appalled conservatives by rejecting religion in any form while celebrating, in her words, "sexual enjoyment as an end in itself."

But her novels found countless readers. "The Fountainhead," published in 1943, and "Atlas Shrugged," which followed in 1957, are still in print. In 1991, when the Book-of-the-Month Club polled Americans asking what book had most influenced their lives, "Atlas Shrugged" finished second only to the Bible. In all, Rand's books have sold about 22 million copies and continue to sell at the rate of more than half a million a year.

Rand emerged in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the New Deal and World War II--which were taken as proof that the free market was obsolete, that prosperity required an all-intrusive government, and that national success demanded the subordination of the individual to collective purposes. After the traumas of the 1930s and '40s, America was intent on building a well-ordered welfare state based on compromise and consensus.

In that setting, Rand resembled the female athlete in Apple Computer's 1984 Super Bowl commercial, who sprinted into a mass assembly of oppressed drones to hurl a sledgehammer at the Big Brother orating from a giant TV screen--smashing it and bathing the audience in a dazzling light.

* * *

Looking back, it's hard to recapture how jarring that phrase was a generation ago, when altruism and self-sacrifice were seen as the central elements of an exemplary life. Today, Americans take it for granted that they are entitled to live for their own happiness, without apology.

It may seem curious to honor a writer who merely defended free markets, preached the superiority of reason over blind faith and extolled the American ideal of the pursuit of happiness. David Kelley, head of the Rand-oriented Objectivist Center, jokes that he's reminded of the theatergoer who complained that "Hamlet' was full of cliches. Rand's beliefs have been so widely disseminated and absorbed that we have forgotten where they originated.

The truth is that for all she did, they are no longer her ideas. To a large extent, they are ours.

There is a book called It Usually Starts with Ayn Rand, which tries to explain how young people, in particular, come to accept and act on libertarian philosophy. In my own case, I was already a diehard libertarian before I read any of Rand's novels. I began with We the Living (cheating a bit, I saw the movie first), then moved on to The Fountainhead and Anthem, and ended -- after considerable effort -- with Atlas Shrugged. During this time I was delighted to discover that a play I had worked on in college, The Night of January 16th, had also been written by Ayn Rand. Back then, I was unaware of Rand's reputation as a philosopher and had no idea that the play were were doing was anything more than a run-of-the-mill courtroom drama with the twist of letting the audience act as the jury. The things one learns when one grows older.