Vulgar. Insipid. Grotesque.

Sure, but without question deliciously contemptuous as well. And, I thought, artfully rendered. Though I might have substituted a trash bin for the shelf that the golden commode rests on. Just to give the display a little more derogatory oomph. But that’s a minor quibble.

I have a quiet disdain for political signs of any sort that patriots erect on their front lawns. But I’m happy to call out exceptions.

I’m not sure what the dino mockup adds to the overall meaning. Maybe a leftover statement of resistance, from a time long ago. Like when King George version III demanded fealty of the American colonies to his lordship, circa 1775. Yard signs around present-day Massachusetts might have read: Not Your Servants – Piss Off You Odious Turd

There are many good reasons to like this book, which I recently finished listening to while walking The Dog this morning. Although I have a special reason for my affection for this work. Near the end of the book I found myself completing the thoughts of the main character, Meursault, before the narrator completed speaking them into my earbuds. I think this is because Meursault, given the circumstance he finds himself in, responds to the prison chaplain in the same way I expect I would, or would like to think I would. In my head I was literally completing Meursault’s sentences. And this wasn’t a case of me unconsciously reading ahead, because I wasn’t reading words on a page with my eyes, I was hearing the words with my ears. I remain quite curious and fascinated by this modality for experiencing art.

Again, this morning, I was in a dream-state walking down the middle of the street like I were a Solipsist. Unconsciously holding tight the handle of a retractable leash while Chloe flitted about, tethered at the other end. Proving that Solipsism is wrong, I snapped out of it when another apparent homo sapien and her canine appeared suddenly. Relieved I was not, in fact, a brain in a vat, I tapped my right bud to pause the narration. In this mode the buds still attenuate ambient noise, so barely was I able to hear her announce herself as Lisa, and this is Luka, I believe she said. The woman had Asian features, Luka did not. She told me she’d recently moved to the northwest from somewhere in the southwest, and, I suppose to make light conversation with a stranger, added that she’d hoped Luka would adjust to the change in weather. I instantly supposed it was Lisa who was the one feeling trepidation about the change in weather, but then projecting the concern onto her dog. Then, just as instantly, I felt a tinge of regret, that if I was wrong to attribute the concern to Lisa, then I may have maligned Lisa in my mind, so I said to Lisa, I’m sure Luka will get along just fine up here, and, welcome to the neighborhood. In a sweetly squeaky voice she said, Thank You! By now the dogs had become tangled up in their leashes so I reached down and unclipped Chloe. Lisa kept Luka leashed. The two dogs played for a while. Lisa and I were out of things to say so we watched the dogs play and said nothing more to each other. Eventually, I put Chloe back on the leash, she pirouetted and gave Luka a swooshy-tailed goodbye, and then we moved on. As we walked away, I re-tapped my right bud to resume listening to the last pages of the book, Mersault’s final lament. The sky was blue, the air was warm, we were under a mile from home.

…

We’re on the road again tomorrow, out of the country, the three of us destined for a multi-day adventure in a foreign land. HW is provisioning us as I write. Let no man put asunder.

A woman in Anchorage who owns a pet-sitting service had a bumper sticker on her Jeep that I was especially fond of: “Support the troops, not the policy.” I was talking with a close friend recently in email. He and I mainly agreed on what Memorial Day remembrance should be about, and not about. He mentioned the Vietnam war, and the [miss-attributed] harsh criticism too many people in this country at the time had for the returning troops from that “conflict overseas” (recalling John Prine).

I replied that this miss-attributed criticism heaped on returning troops was by people who didn’t understand the kernel of wisdom in that bumper sticker. Especially where their criticism targeted conscripts (~1/3 of all troops who fought in Vietnam) – I mean, how stupid and insensitive were those people. A man is forced to go to war to face possible death, or else face jail time, and he’s the target of your scold?! Talk about blaming the victim.

I proposed that maybe Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day should be collapsed into a single holiday of remembrance. If the point is to be grateful to the men and women who made a huge sacrifice to protect our freedoms, then let’s remember them all, both the fallen and the one’s fortunate enough to have returned home alive.

Or, keep the days of remembrance separate, as they are now, but maybe follow up Memorial Day with a companion celebration of raucous contempt for past leaders who got us into foreign wars, frequently on false premises (looking at you McNamara* and Bush), that had nothing whatsoever to do with protecting the freedoms of individual Americans. Call it: Anti-Jingoism Day. So that future Americans should never, forget, the folly. Give all Americans Anti-Jingoism day off from work, except for employees of Faux News and other like-minded hawks – their punishment is to write on a blackboard one thousand times the words of that bumper sticker.

* Hat-tip for the confession of folly in his memoir

I spoke with a white man at the Miami airport. We were in the gate area together waiting to board a plane for Seattle. He was seated in a row of chairs opposite from where HW and I were seated. Slouched in his seat, possibly weary from travel, he had a calm demeanor. Probably in his 70s, his face was splotched with sunburn. Our eyes met. Where you been, he asked. The Galapagos Islands, I beamed. HW and I had returned to the states two days earlier, but I was still in a dream-like headspace, all pain surrendered, as one feels during the waning half lives of a narcotic. And so as a way to share my surplus of lightness of being, and to offset the ennui of airport layovers, I winked at the man, smiled, and added, you know, to confirm that Darwin was right. The man wore a t-shirt sporting an ad for a beach-side bar in Puerto Rico. His travel companion was wearing the same t-shirt but in a different color. She was a black woman, nestled in her seat and pressed against the chair arm that separated them. Her bangs didn’t move when she raised her head slightly to regard me with a kind of stern look, which, all I could think in the moment, may have been triggered by her hearing the word Darwin. Naturally, I assumed they might have been to Puerto Rico recently, and perhaps like HW and I, were on their way back home. Of course we now know he wasn’t right, the man said. His companion shot him an approving look, then looked back at me and smirked. No, I don’t know that, I said, returning his volley. I felt HW stir next to me. His companion squirmed uncomfortably in her seat and glared at me with mercurial eyes. Right away, a convenient set of assumptions about me seemed to occur to him. He looked at me pointedly, chuckled dismissively, and said, well, where did we come from do you suppose? We? You mean like me and you? Yes, Man, where did Man come from, he insisted. Oh boy, we got a live one. Just then HW piped up, shot him a glance and said, you got him going now! From a distant ancestor, something resembling but not the same as modern apes, I said. At this his companion curtly shook her head no, her eyes still fixed on me. Then, like an insatiable child… and where did the ape-like things come from, he said. Gee, I don’t remember, Lemurs maybe… you know there’s something called the evolutionary tree. You can trace life back to the first amoeba or whatever. Sure, he said, and where did the first cell come from. Ultimately, from a self-replicating molecule, I said. His companion continued to shake her head no, the immovable bangs glistening under the natural light beaming through the tall windows behind her. Yes, I said, molecules that catalyze their own reproduction, it’s called the RNA-world hypothesis. You ever hear of Lee Ross, he said. Who? Wait, he’s a crackpot, isn’t he, I said. Maybe I have. He leaned back hard in his seat, as if to retreat from his conviction. Well, I’m no scientist, he said, but Lee Ross is an astrophysicist, and he says there is no way life could have evolved from no life. You could look him up. I am a scientist, I said. It’s a straightforward lab experiment to show that certain molecules self-catalyze their own reproduction. People around us began to listen in. Couldn’t I put the same question to you, I said, where did God come from, if that’s who you suppose created life? He paused and looked at me, as if to concede I may have had a point, but I couldn’t say for sure, and with that his countenance changed, like me he appeared to acknowledge how preposterous it was that two strangers in an airport should be discussing the greatest mystery in the universe, and leaving it unanswered, in an exchange that couldn’t have taken more than sixty seconds. Then the call came for early boarding and the man stood up and helped his companion into a wheelchair. A few minutes passed and I spotted her in line, the man standing behind her with his hands on the handles of her chair awaiting the gate agent to scan their boarding passes, still staring at me, warily.

The sea was variably indigo blue and tourmaline green. Everywhere we went was like a phantasmagorical zoo sans cages or bars. On land, the naturalists asked that we not stray from the approved paths; in the water that we please resist the urge to touch. This never felt like a limitation. The ever present animal life was often within arm’s length, or swimming so close to our masks it wasn’t clear who came to see who. Countless species of birds were everywhere. Albatrosses with eight foot wingspans knifed through the air like stealth jets. Boobies performed acrobatic nosedives into the water to catch fish only they could spy. Black male frigate birds soared on updrafts, showing off their radiant orange gular pouches. The girls looked on, ranking their displays. We were voyeurs to two Swallow-tailed gulls copulating. Two turtles too. Yellow-crowned herons hunted ubiquitous Sally lightfoot crabs that moved crabwise among the lava rocks like rainbow toys in a dream. Fancy flamingos scoured the floor of a backwater lagoon for food, oblivious to our presence. Penguin pairs played on the rocks and slid on their bellies into the sea. An undaunted mother albatross rose and leaned back to reveal a most beautifully colored egg she was incubating. So close she was, I imagined she was inviting me to take a turn. Near sunset large groups of iguanas would arrange themselves non-randomly, and stare motionless at the setting sun like they were members of a cult. Brilliantly-colored lava lizards flourished on every island we visited. Darwin’s finches flitted among the trees, singing. At night fifteen foot sharks circled our yacht, drawn to the bait fish drawn to the boat lights. We used inflatable rafts to shuttle between the islands and the yacht. One day dozens of dolphins joined us. We ate like royalty three times a day and drank juices made from fruit I didn’t know existed. We cozied up in the lounge and devoured lectures on island geology, marveled at the art of ancient volcanoes. We were smack dab on the equator over five hundred miles from the nearest continent, yet we had WiFi. It was eighty degrees or better every day. The night sky was like living in a planetarium. Not a day passed when I didn’t want to applaud. One night we left the yacht and slept in a tree house. The next day we visited the Darwin research center and cried like children when told the story of Lonesome George. We visited a plantation and learned the proper way to taste coffee. We made friends and were rocked to sleep by shallow, long period waves. On the penultimate day of our adventure we took a long, solemn walk on Chinese Hat island where I’m pretty sure I saw HW tear up. It was all that overwhelmingly fragile and beautiful.

I am reading with my ears The Road by the late Cormac McCarthy. I imagine this is similar to a blind man experiencing art through touch. Obviously there is more than one route into the brain for the outside world to take. I wonder, though, how the story feels different, sentence for sentence, as it is interpreted by the auditory cortex versus the visual cortex. The narrator was born to read aloud this book. I mean the haunting timbre of his voice, especially as the narrative segues between its spare points of view, is just excellent. Sadly, as with McCarthy, the narrator is no longer with us.

The book feels like a tocsin for the times. There’s an ever-present sense of doom as the boy and his father make their way south through apocalyptic ruin. I read somewhere that there is a renewed enthusiasm in the country for prepping for the end of times. Especially by the monied class. Some dude built an elaborate underground bunker made of reinforced concrete in the middle of a man-made lake. The bunker is accessible only through its “roof”, the only portion above the surface of the lake, which is connected to the shore by a retractable drawbridge of sorts. Except the lake isn’t filled only with water, it can’t be, because as it encircles the roof it functions more like a moat that can be set on fire with the click of a button on a remote. Surely the intention here is to keep the cannibals at bay and the bunker inhabitants uneaten.

In 2007 The Road was announced as the next novel to read by Oprah’s book club. “Enjoy this hellscape adventure ladies!”^* Oh to have been a fly on the wall at that discussion group.

* Specific gender demographics of the Oprah book club are not available, however it is thought to be composed of predominantly women.

Consider Alaska’s southeast strip of land, a modern landmass including Alexander’s Archipelago so vast that if it were overlain on the eastern seaboard of the continental US would have entire states disappear beneath its footprint. My words here exist in utter obscurity. I am not well known for being well known. Consider a single stone, no larger than your thumb, existing on the margin of a short spur of sandy asphalt that leads from a parking lot to an unremarkable Delaware beach, mindlessly kicked off the path into some anonymous mound of windblown sand by a flip-flop wearing child as she recklessly bounds from the car toward the summer sea. The child is at once young, green, and uncaring. There the neglected stone will lay, undisturbed, pretty in its own right among a trillion other stones strewn to equivalent anonymity up and down the shoreline. It is not as if the stone will exist as a stone forever, though, even as its hardbound constitution has rendered it durable. The stone has seen a lot in its tens of millions of years of existence. A mere shadow of its former self you might say, sure, but whereas once it was a boulder big as a house that could squash a car whole, it was helpless when faced with a two mile thick slab of ice coming for it. Finally subsumed in a frozen cocoon, the boulder was transported over tens of thousands of years, then ignominiously abandoned on an anonymous beach in a place come to be known as Delaware. There to be further remodeled and diminished by the unthinking forces of wind, rain, and sea. Fast forward another ten thousand years or more, and it finds its belittled-self disrespected, arrogantly kicked aside by some late-comer organism. That’s what timeworn, abject anonymity feels like.

The AmericanPeople^® woke up to learn that, consistent with its zeal to make great again all things, the executive branch of the United States of America, on behalf of its hard-working taxpayers (the ones who bankroll the military industrial complex), ordered big bombs be dropped from big planes on The Hooters in Yemen.

Hooters?

Yes.

Now, don’t go taking me literally, but do take me seriously. Or I may be joking. Or I may be exaggerating (only people who don’t love me would call it lying). And even if it is “lying,” so long as you get your tRuth across the goal line it’s not like anyone with the attention span of a fruit fly is going to detect the end run, amirite? tRuth lies on a spectrum. Don’t believe me? Google it. It’s true. The tRuth is like a mental health disorder. Or it’s like pornography, you know it when you see it, so long as you don’t gawk too long and overthink it, it’s ok. Like that horror in Ohio a while back. A neighborhood dog was spotted on an outdoor barbecue, medium-well. Or was it a cat? No matter. And it doesn’t matter if wasn’t either. The tRuth is that anyone who would do such a thing is a horrible person. Sometimes the tRuth has to go in search of its own evidence. But a tRuth teller can’t always wait for that.

Naturally, this taxpayer clicked the link to learn more as to why the executive branch ordered the bombing. And here’s the craziest thing – I was redirected to a page with a report on the bombing, which included Ads for Hooters. To know me is to love me. And if you love me you know I’m being honest. Hooters! Our executive’s reasons for bombing The Hooters in Yemen were, of course, spotless and tRue. No problem there, and I’ll get to that. But those Ads, they just kept refreshing themselves and distracting me. Like you’re reading sugary drinks are bad for you while being coaxed to click an Ad for Coke. I mean it does make you wonder, right, how do they do it? You’re on a page reading about how bad X is and up pops an Ad for X!

Digression: Quite a while ago I had the temerity to apply for a job at a FAANG company. The screener I spoke with described the role the company was recruiting for. He said it would involve creating software to process a bazillion user clicks on Ads his company had hosted on a bazillion pages all over the Internet. My mission, were I to accept it (were he to offer it ;-)), would be to build a real-time system to process this continuous stream of user clicks on Ads, and then order the Ads according to their probability of popularity. And then use the result to prioritize which Ads to place on the page visited by new users. The theory being that the most popular Ads were more likely to be clicked and stuff purchased, so the company could make more money. The screener directed me to an interactive online whiteboard, then asked me to “sketch” out the program I would write to accomplish this task, as he looked on.

I failed. That’s right, thirty+ years of programming computers, two advanced STEM degrees, plus a head for math, and I failed. I failed because I am a slow-twitch builder of things. Like there are people with fast-twitch muscles and people with slow-twitch muscles. The former excel at activities that require explosive bursts of speed sustainable for a short period of time, whereas the latter tend to be slower but endurable. Think the Hare and the Tortioise. I am the Tortiose (goo-goo g’joob). FAANG companies don’t hire tortoises, they want hares. The screener was very gracious, I can tell you know what you’re doing but maybe this isn’t your particular “problem space?” That, and my heart simply wasn’t in it. We thanked each other and hung up.

So while those Ads for Hooters were insistently flashing at me, begging I click, I thought back to that interview and figured the company had eventually found its hare. Instead of an up and comer at the company I’d been diminished as its victim. The least I could do now was resist becoming another data point in the hare’s statistical model. So I didn’t click on an Ad. Take that! I did, however, continue with the article to learn the tRuth behind the bombings. Turns out the executive’s second in command had convinced the executive of the deviant nature of the business model at The Hooters in Yemen. It had gotten so out of hand in fact that twenty-something girly-girls, dressed in skimpy, skin-tight orange shorts and tank tops, had “weaponized” their breasts! They would position themselves on the shore of the Red Sea and on command lift their tank tops high over their heads to expose their naked breasts to the captains of US-flagged cargo ships! Wanting to get a closer look, naturally the captains turned to port, unfortunately at their peril, as the girly-girls did this very near a submerged offshore reef known for tearing massive holes in ships, even double-hulled ships.

On hearing of this terror, which the executive assumed was the tRuth – and even if not so what – he ordered the bomb bays filled and commanded America’s finest be dispatched from the airfields in Saudi Arabia to carry out the mission. Doubleplus, the pilots were equipped with helmet cams so the murder and carnage could be live-streamed, which it was, to a hi-res monitor placed on the executive’s desk, where his aids said he viewed the horror with a contemptuous smirk while downing his lunch of two McDonald’s quarter pounders and large Coke.

Times were good. He felt the times were good, and getting better. Russ was leading with his gut on this. When his friend group came together and challenged his optimism with their yeah buts, he countered them one by one, with the evidence of his intuition. Growing up, Russ had heard the euphonious sign-off of Paul Harvey – Good Day – as more a proverb than a friendly wish. Even the family terrier, Rusty, the alacritous wag of his copper tail awaiting his bowl of kibble was just more evidence of what Russ’ gut was telling him: Things out there were getting better. This feeling wasn’t acute, like a rush of dopamine or a cigarette after sex or some sudden woo-woo alignment of the planets. No, as Russ grew older, what he felt inside him became stronger and stronger each day, larger with each passing month, for years it blossomed. The great wars were over. The country was back to work. Opportunity was everywhere, pregnant with possibility. Russ was going to get his! Soon, even the sky would not be the limit. Genetically gifted men would construct rocket ships, launch them and take their buddies into space to float at zero-g and look out the window at the big blue marble below with all its burgeoning opportunity. It would leave them speechless. And out the other window? Mars, the edge of the galaxies, the Reionization Era, and beyond (if there was a beyond, god only knew). One day millions of satellites placed in synchronous orbit would keep all the minds of the world enmeshed. A mathematical model of language would deliver readers lyrical prose at the push of a button. Be able to discern a cat from a dog from a fish, all by itself! Build and program our computers for us. Discover our cures. Refactor and staff our most revered institutions (or deprecate them for good, the Greater Good). Vacuum our homes while we’re away. Take Rusty v3.0 for a walk, even pick up after him! In the future, all the mundanity of human life would be handed down to augmented robots. So long as they were kept inline with what matters to Us, there should be no looming worry they may someday replace Us. Russ felt sure of this too.

And then many years later, as a mature adult, when Russ was getting what was his in this world, one day at work he found himself alone inside his colleague’s office. And not merely a colleague, but his friend and professional mentor as well. Now because Russ was a hard determinist, he understood full well that the act he was about to perform had been omnisciently known since the first Planck second after the Big Bang. And likely before that, if there was a before that. As such, what he was about to do was the only thing he could do, because, of course, as it is with the birds and the bees and the rocks and the trees, no human being can act otherwise. Given this worldview, Russ, a fully determined marionette, knew he was merely fulfilling The Universal Plan. Russ didn’t think his own thoughts, in other words. Nobody did.

So there alone in the office he pulled open the middle of three drawers of his friend’s (soon to be former friend) standalone wooden desk, and glanced at the contents therein – sundry office supplies and a few manila folders stuffed with petty documents. Yes, that will do just fine as a landing pad Russ thought. He turned around and undid his belt, lowered his khakis and underpants, and then while bent slightly at the knees he squatted precariously over the drawer and took a dump in it. What happened! Well, the most immediate cause of this vulgarity was, of course, Jill’s (Russ’ wife) full stack of banana pancakes. She’d lovingly prepared them for Russ that morning, in seeing him off to work. He rarely ate breakfast anymore, not since the advent of their working years, when he and Jill had gorged on all that opportunity out there, getting what was theirs. Except the future had arrived earlier than anticipated, earlier, that is, than Russ had anticipated. Because shortly after Jill had crammed and networked her brains out for years to go to work for one of the Five Great Companies, to develop and train an AI, she was, to her shock and dismay, laid off by one. Didn’t see that coming! Good thing was, it freed up her mornings to make breakfast for Russ, who was still employed, getting what was his. There was no world in which Jill did not work for and get laid off by the same Titanic Tech company. No world where the daily dishware she served Russ’ breakfast on was not purchased by her parents off the wedding registry, a list she’d created, having married Russ, who it seemed to her she had freely chosen to be her soulmate and husband. But when she centered herself and freed herself of the fantasy of free will, she knew, scientifically speaking, it could never have been otherwise. Jill had no role in choosing the future in making Russ her lawfully wedded husband, their love collision had already been determined. People who say Russ and Jill were always meant to be don’t understand how right they are! Objects collide. It was Physics 101.

Some days existence felt to Russ less like living the dream and more like being in a dream. The broader cause of his indiscretion on that fateful day was the deception his (former) friend had played out, fooling Russ into believing he was a man of character, a friend and colleague Russ could trust to do the right thing to save Russ’ job, and his friend Dale’s job, too, as both were threatened by a looming company-wide layoff. Instead, Russ felt betrayed to learn that this “friend” had instead all but signed Dale’s termination letter in exchange for adulterous sex with a hottie in HR. No contempt is too much in response to that kind of treachery. So Russ experienced only satisfaction and joy during that final peristaltic push of poop. On Russ’ office wall hung a portion of a torn sheet of yellow paper on which he’d scratched a lyric from a song that had always resonated with him: “And all this science, I don’t understand, it’s just my job five days a week.” Company managers who saw that were none amused. Some felt betrayed. After all, Russ had been recommended to company recruiters by a revered university professor known for mentoring eventual top performers in industry. And here he is now, mocking his own incompetency?

After pulling up his pants he rushed back to his own office, collected his personal effects in a small box then hurried to the elevators, took an empty one to the first floor, hurried through the atrium and out to the parking lot where he got into his car and drove a leisurely route back home. Jill was away when he arrived, and it was nearly dark. He poured himself a large bulb of Cabernet and stepped outside onto the patio and sat in a favorite Adirondack chair. He swirled the wine in the glass as he gazed at the night sky, wondering where the evidence was for all this meaning philosophers go on about. He waited for the phone to ring.

My application was accepted. My membership is official. I was assigned an alphanumeric ID and instructed not to lose it. I may commit it as a tattoo. I’ll need it for the rest of my life. I’ve been ensnared in the Safety Net. Made party to the Social Contract. It’s the feeling of being annexed, like Greenland. I also feel a bit like an apostate. I will explain.

Over thirty years ago I was dogearing the pages of von Mises’ Socialism. Highlighting whole paragraphs of Road To Serfdom. Reading and re-reading Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I gorged on all of it, and a lot more. More than I now can recall, short of taking inventory of the many books archived on my shelves, sagging beneath their weight. It felt to me at the time I couldn’t read enough. I would stand inside bookstores and experience anxiety, flummoxed by all those titles staring back at me, overwhelmed to the point of not knowing where to begin. I was wide-eyed and young. Someone online – and here I’m talking early 90s online, when going online was preceded by that burst of blinking lights and carnival sounds, a prescient alert to the user that you are about to enter a realm where not everything you read is necessarily true – got me jump-started to reading Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical. Most people first discover Rand in high school. I’d never heard of her. Not surprising, I suppose, given I’d attended a religious high school where the assignment to write a report on a book written by an atheist would have been anathema to the Christian curriculum. I was probably thirty-five when I devoured The Virtues of Selfishness on a beach in Kona. Finally, I thought, someone gets me! I don’t recall it as a religious-adjacent experience or anything like that, it was more an ah-ha moment for me, an epiphany without the supernatural baggage. As if I had just learned something true about the real world I had never known before, never been exposed to before. I subsequently slogged my way through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (AS). Hard to explain, but the books humbled me in a way. True, I thought, I was no Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart, but then again who was? And Who is John Galt? For anyone who’s read AS, that was the one true mystery in the novel, posited in the very first sentence, revealed at the end of the novel by way of a prolix soliloquy by The Mystery himself. For starters, John was no Republican, certainly not a Democrat. Because it is of course impossible to read Rand and not intuit the political implications of her ethical prescription for an individual to lead a virtuous life, which is really what those two books are about. AS and Fountainhead are not economic treatises pandering to capitalism, even as Rand left no doubt in the reader’s mind that she despises socialism and communism. To get to the United States, she had to sneak out of Russia in the dark of night by bribing a Lithuanian border guard. When she eventually arrived in New York (ninety-nine years ago now), a beacon in the west, it must of felt to her like she’d just entered a candy store. The answer to the mystery then, Who is John Galt?, is not, He was a Capitalist. No, John Galt was Rand’s ethical avatar, the apotheosis of the virtuous man. As was the more down-to-earth architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. At least that was my take, and in that way, as I had tirelessly argued in those 90’s online forums devoted to Rand’s philosophy (Objectivisim), AS is an allegory. Just as Animal Farm was an allegory, except John Galt was human (a gifted engineer). Allegory or not, though, it all made sense to me, the message got through: Man good, Government bad. Although to be fair, Rand would concede in her non-fiction that a proper Government was an inescapable necessity to protect even rational and virtuous men when and where their better angels failed them. Rand was no Utopian; she was also not an Anarchist. But just to be sure, at some point I read Nozick’s tome: Anarchy, State and Utopia. It must have left a mark on me because sometime later a close friend remarked to me during a night of carousing, “You are too much of an anarchist to get married again.” All these books I’d read, they were published decades earlier. Why weren’t people convinced by them as I was? Was I getting sucked into a cult of crackpot beliefs? I concluded I wasn’t. I wasn’t in need of an intervention. This wasn’t philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo I was reading. It wasn’t new age woo-woo either, certainly not a self-help handbook. I wasn’t in need of psychological help, I certainly didn’t need to be fixed in any sense. Rand’s arguments for Rational Egoism were unassailable – an ethical prescription for a real person living in the real world. A kind of over-the-counter medicine for anyone who wanted to live a virtuous and happy life, period. Plus her arguments had the feature of parsimony, in that they were derived from just a few self-evident truths about our nature as human beings. One or two genetic determinists I argued with way back then claimed Rand didn’t understand biology, therefore her premise that a man’s ultimate purpose in life is survival, was wrong. As any biologist knows, they claimed, reproductive success, not survival, is Man’s ultimate purpose in life. Just as it is for every other living organism on earth. And so all her arguments downstream of that premise were flawed as well, they claimed. So much for their counterfactual, we now know DNA influences but does not determine human behavior. Rand’s premise is safe. Here. A man’s purpose in life is not to be found in the genome. In any case, ever since Rand, the negative connotations of selfishness (all there were at the time) would need to step aside and make room for virtue. And, without a great deal of arm-waving involved, the advocacy to lead a rationally selfish individual life could scale nicely to a society of millions of individuals, with the addition of one simple maxim: Your natural rights end where my virtuous nose begins. What more to it was there than that?

Quite a lot it turns out. The messiness of the real world has a way of defeating the idealized notions of how its inhabitants ought to behave. In all that time that I was reading, my pay-stubs showed a deduction that went to the government to pay for the Social Safety Net. What a positively unselfish program! And coercive to boot. I have a very dim memory of placing a call to the payroll department where I worked at the time, demanding they stop this larceny at once. Uh huh. Thank for your concern, employee. Now move along.

Years passed. Attitudes softened. The safety net extended. Acquiescence happened. Nowadays, when I go online I no longer care to debate or argue with people over the virtue of selfishness. It almost seems like a quaint notion to me now. What’s the point in shaking your fist at the rain? Maybe it Ought not be raining, but it Is raining; suck it up, Boomer. Living selfishly may be a virtue, but it sure ain’t practical, not in the real world we live in. C’est la vie.

Why, even The Russian Radical herself was eventually enrolled in medicare. Talk about your apostasy!