Category: The Atlasphere

An article sympathetic to Ayn Rand was written by Steve Chapman in the Chicago Tribune, titled “The evolution of Ayn Rand.” It starts:

Has Ayn Rand gone mainstream? 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.

The article is short, but Chapman argues that Rand’s ideas, once so controversial, are now so mainsteam that “we have forgotten where they originated”.
Chapman mentions the 100th anniversary, gives a brief history, and quotes David Kelley of the Objectivist Center.
See the full article for further information.

An article in today’s New York Times (“‘Sixteen Acres’: Rebuilding Ground Zero“) starts with a nod to Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark, and an unsubstantiated claim about the validity of her philosophy:

AYN RAND may be long discredited as a philosopher, but her ideas about architecture are still very much alive. Howard Roark, the protagonist of her objectivist fantasia ”The Fountainhead,” is the archetypal artist-hero, rendering society’s soul in concrete and steel. Since the 1940’s, his image has shaped our appreciation of everyone from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry, defining even the competition to rebuild the World Trade Center site: the struggle between Daniel Libeskind and Larry Silverstein was seen as a veritable ”Fountainhead Redux” in which a valiant architect armed only with his dreams takes on a mega-developer.

The article contains this prediction for Ground Zero:

Flashy architecture became the smoke screen behind which the real deals were made. ”Though the process would churn on in search of a master plan,” Nobel writes, ”the only politically acceptable solution was already apparent in the summer of 2002. The site would be rebuilt as a crowded, mixed-use, shopping-intensive corporate development surrounding a large but compromised memorial. It was all over but the shouting.”

Just what Howard Roark would have recommended… Not!
The article ends with:

Still, if the selection process has so far produced a poor excuse for a monumental rebuilding, it is nonetheless a tribute to New York — messy, money-soaked, dominated by too many egos and too few level heads. ”When the politicians line up to cut their ribbons,” Nobel writes, ”whatever shades the dais that day will be at once stranger and more fitting than anything they had imagined when they set about to govern its birth. In a way it will be perfect.” Clearly, Nobel wishes things were otherwise. But he also recognizes that in New York, even Howard Roark couldn’t make it so.

See the full article for further information.