Now that we're talking about the 1927 silent film "King of Kings," we must take note of Ayn Rand.

We were talking about "King of Kings," because we were talking about what Jesus wrote in the sand, because various blogs were talking about an Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to carry out a stoning. I started to wonder whether the first commenter who mentioned "King of Kings" was talking about the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille picture or the 1961 Nicholas Ray flick. So I'm over here on the King of Kings (1927 film) page at Wikipedia, and I see:

Sally Rand, before becoming notorious for her "fan dance" at the 1933 World's Fair, was an extra in the film.

Ayn Rand (no relation to Sally Rand) also was an extra in the film, and met her future husband Frank O'Connor on set.

I couldn't find a YouTube clip of Ayn Rand in "King of Kings," but I did find Sally Rand and her notorious World's Fair fan dance:



I also found this 2009 New Yorker article about Ayn Rand that covers the "King of Kings" phase:

Rand... left the U.S.S.R. for America.... Her vision of the U.S. had already been shaped by obsessive moviegoing.... Even before leaving the Soviet Union, she had published a pamphlet on the silent-film actress Pola Negri, and like a movie star herself she now refashioned “Rosenbaum” into her own new name. Heller and Burns both knock down the myth that a Remington-Rand typewriter inspired the rechristening.

There is a greater factual basis to the legend of Rand’s having met Cecil B. DeMille before she worked as an extra on his production of “The King of Kings” (1927). On the set, Rand persuaded a costume director to promote her from a crowd of beggars to a crowd of patricians, and DeMille had his story chief look at her film scenarios, which were soon judged over the top. Rand achieved steadier success working in the R.K.O. wardrobe department, and then had a writerly breakthrough with a courtroom murder drama called “Night of January 16th.” Thanks to a gimmick that allowed each night’s audience to serve as the jury and thereby choose the ending, the play made it to Broadway, where Rand railed against the producers’ subordination of its incidental messages about the beauty of unbridled individualism.

Settling in New York with her husband, Frank O’Connor (another “King of Kings” extra), Rand set seriously to work on the first of her two major novels, “The Fountainhead.”....

How do you feel about all those connections? The Soviet Union, the love of movies, immigration to the land of movies, name-changing, finding the love of your life on a movie set in Hollywood, strippers performing what is only the illusion of nakedness, and... Jesus.

Video from the "Guns Across America" rally here in Madison, Wisconsin today.

Here's some edited video showing the crowd and the signs.



In the middle there is a prayer, and at the end is the national anthem. Once you get to the national anthem, it's all national anthem from there on. I decided not to edit that part down because you get a good view of the people who attended the rally and their attitude.

The prayer is quite interesting, including some discussion of what Jesus said to Peter after he cut off a man's ear. (Jesus didn't tell Peter to surrender his sword. He told him to "put it back in the holster." My Bible says "sheath," but Jesus wasn't speaking English.)

At 2:07, you see a sign that says "Political Power Grows Out of the Barrel of a Gun. Mao," held next to a second, matching sign that says — in between 2 peace signs — "Support and Defend the Constitution."

At 2:15, I'm talking to this man about his nice-looking but hard-to-stop-and-read sign:



He asks me if I recognize the face and (despite knowing I'm wrong) I guess Michael J. Fox. He lets me know it's Ayn Rand and I say I'll read it later (knowing I've got the still). It says: "The uncontested absurdities of today are the accepted slogans of tomorrow. They come to be accepted by degrees, by dint of constant pressure on one side and constant retreat on the other - until one day when they are suddenly declared to be the country's official ideology."

At 2:35, I talk to a counter-protester with a sign that says "Ban High Capacity Magazine Clips" and ask "What's a magazine clip?" She knew there was some question about that term, but she'd researched it on the internet and decided that was the term she wanted to use. Perhaps saying "magazine clip" is a way to signal which side you're on. A shibboleth.

ADDED: Other stills from the rally here.

Going Galt means different things to different people.

Observes Roy Edroso, reading Will Spencer:

[W]e've seen folks Go Galt by leaving lousy tips, by alerting local merchants that they planned to "buy nothing – other than vacations out of the country – until the president exits," by quitting smoking, etc. Or at least talking about doing it.

I had despaired they'd ever get serious about it. Spencer, though, has an impressively meticulous list of tactics...

So next time some guy at the DMV fills in his license application with scribbles, then winks at you; or sneakily takes a whole stack of change of address forms from the post office; or takes a government job and, unlike any other civil servant you've ever seen, goofs off — then you'll know the revolution is afoot. This time for sure!

It's morning in Obama's Second Term America.

How are you feeling? If you didn't get what you wanted for Electionmas, how are you dealing with your disappointment? Me, I'm an optimist, and I instinctively look for the positives.

Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony won the right to determine its own destiny, the task of perfecting our union moves forward.

It moves forward because of you. It moves forward because you reaffirmed the spirit that has triumphed over war and depression, the spirit that has lifted this country from the depths of despair to the great heights of hope, the belief that while each of us will pursue our own individual dreams, we are an American family and we rise or fall together as one nation and as one people.

I'm reading Obama's victory speech this morning, and, though I voted against him, I feel uplifted. I get a chill. Just as the writer of those words intended. Rereading them, my critical mind clicks in. A former colony won the right to determine its own destiny...? A colony? There were 13 colonies! Won the right? I read the Declaration of Independence to say that we had the right already, and we were entitled to throw off the power that oppressed us. The next phrase "perfecting our union" evokes the first sentence of the Constitution —  "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union...."— and ties it to his campaign slogan "forward" and to "you," who voted for him, propelling him forward. I've got to wonder if the idea is to move forward past the lesser perfection of the Constitution, into a system in which individuals merge into one nation, one people, one family. But you can still pursue your own individual dreams. Go ahead! Pursue them! If you can

I know some of you are thinking: If we can in this supposedly more perfect but actually terrifying system of socialism The One will move us forward into. Here are 2 expressions of that fear that went up last night on Instapundit and that struck me as excessive and over-scared. At 10:41, Sarah Hoyt wrote:

I HAVE  QUESTIONS:  We’re not a country of land or blood.  We’re a country of beliefs.  If we’ve lost that, who are we?  Who am I?  And where do I go?

And at 11:00, Glenn Reynolds put up the text of an email from a reader named Zach White:

If Obama is reelected, good hardworking people should give up and go Galt. The tipping point is the 2012 election. Will the makers finally succumb to the takers? It’s pointless to think that if America reelects the most unqualified disastrous president in recent memory, we should stand our ground and continue fighting. it’s a signal that marxist free-lunchism and free birth control for everyone trump economic well-being and prosperity in the minds of the masses. Give up. Go Galt. Protect what few assets you have left, and start to hunker down for the coming storm. America is beyond screwed, well past the fiscal insanity of a number of EU countries. Think of it this way – we sit and watch California destroy itself and wonder who could be so foolish as to remain there and dedicate himself to indentured servitude in a state headed for disaster. Why don’t those fools just leave!! Same for Venezuela. as they descend into chaos and totalitarianism, do they reject Chavez more? The answer is plainly no. The spiral down the drain is irreversible and obvious. The more the government creates misery, the more they create programs to help people cope with the misery they’ve created, and we achieve a perpetual negative feedback loop. My advice is simple – if Obama is reelected, get a lawyer and a financial advisor, cash out as much of your assets as you can, and prepare yourself for a nosedive off a cliff. anything else would be imprudent and irresponsible to yourself and your dependents. Who wants to be a Dagny Taggart dedicating themselves to a life of indentured servitude trying to correct the wrongs of a heavy handed government? i will not be volunteering. I didn’t give up on America, America gave up on me.

I read that this morning and pictured the young man in his 30s or early 40s, a man with a wife and children, reading that anything else would be imprudent and irresponsible to yourself and your dependents and actually spending money on a lawyer and a financial advisor, extracting all his cash from his retirement accounts, quickly selling the home they live in, and heading for the hinterlands to hunker down for the nose dive. The wife is distraught, the kids freak out. Dad's gone nuts. No, I'm not nuts, children. I am Galt! And I'm doing the only thing that is not imprudent!

Talk about nosedives. Get a grip, those of you who didn't get what you wanted for Electionmas. It's Obama's Second Term America, and you'll need to make the best of it. I think you've got some better ideas than cashing out and hunkering down. I know I do.

"Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up."

"Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that's a pretty narrow vision. It's not one that, I think, describes what's best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a 'you're on your own' society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party."

Said Barack Obama.

Dr. Helen wonders "if men are going Galt, staying home and collecting unemployment or no longer need jobs because they don’t get married as often?"

"Or is it that they just can’t get a job because the industries they work in are no longer hiring? Could the Obama administration also be part of the problem, focusing only on women’s jobs and not on those of men? Or a combination of these. What do you think?"

On that point about the Obama administration's focus on women's jobs, remember that Obama's original idea was to have a stimulus that would produce jobs for men — who "need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men":

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”

And then what happened? How was Obama — with his concern about manhood — swallowed up and enfolded within the Party of Women?

Interesting to see his desire to build masculine pride by giving men things to build, because men like to build... and now, in 2012, to find him bumbling and mumbling things like "You didn't build that."

Well, we — or they, the men — didn't build that if that is the infrastructure, the roads and bridges you were talking about. (Remember the big roads-and-bridges theme of September 2011?) And — I wish I had a searchable text of everything said from the stage last week — did anyone even mention roads and bridges at the Democratic Convention?

"And when Ryan riffed on the handful of jobs he briefly held, his Ayn Randian roots were clear."

Writes Joan Walsh at Salon. Here's what Paul Ryan said that Walsh thinks is "straight out of Rand, and ’50s anti-Communist paranoia":

“When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life... I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself. That’s what we do in this country. That’s the American Dream. That’s freedom, and I’ll take it any day over the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners.”

If you believe the individual can think and decide for himself and pursue happiness as he defines it... you're delusional — in Walsh's view. You see what she's saying? She's saying you didn't build that — the very phrase Obama is straining to disown. You didn't build that, you can't build that, and you're psychotic if you imagine that you can. She's deeply into the collectivism the Democrats don't want to openly embrace.

But she doesn't think she's openly embracing it. She thinks Ryan is paranoid to imply that the Democrats favor "the supervision and sanctimony of the central planners." Pressed, she might — I assume — assert that it's fine for individuals to try to come up with their own ideas about what they want to do with their lives and to set out to achieve their goals, but that it's inaccurate to portray this enterprise as solitary and in defiance of the larger efforts of government and society (which they depend on no matter what they do).

But that's not what Walsh says. She's stirring up partisan discord and not inclined to concede that our differences, in the United States, are only a matter of leaning toward individualism or collectivism as we mostly keep to the middle of the road.

Paul Ryan shirtless.

The headline "Top Ryan Google searches: 'vice president,' 'shirtless" made me skeptical. What about the other Ryan — the Ryan whose fame as the Ryan of the Moment got overshadowed and whose Ryan-fame was heavily torso-related — Ryan Lochte? But getting to the article, I see they were looking at "Paul Ryan" searches, not mixing up the Ryans.

It's really not that odd that people are searching the internet for Paul Ryan shirtless. For one thing, people are always searching the internet for named individuals naked or in some degree of nakedness. Remember all the fuss about Sarah Palin in a bikini?

But interest in the bare-chested version of Paul Ryan is not merely the usual interest in naked and semi-naked celebrities. From the day he was announced at Romney's VP pick, there have been articles about Paul's fitness routine, how rigorous it is, how wide his shoulders are, and how little body fat he has*:

"Paul Ryan's workout: Is P90X for you?" says CNN.

"I'm kind of a workout guy. I've always been into it. [Former Mich. Rep.] Bart Stupak and I lead [P90X classes] — there's about a dozen of us that do it," Ryan told Politico. "It works because it hits your body in many different ways: pull-ups, sit-ups, lots of cardio, karate, jump training, yoga. It pushes your body...and gets you out of your plateau."

"Paul Ryan’s Extreme Workout Plan" — that's the Daily Beast.

The Wisconsin congressman has been a devotee of the brutal P90X workout for about four years, and frequently leads workouts with other members of Congress. P90X is a 90-day workout plan that involves intensive cardio combined with yoga, karate and other fitness staples for 60 to 90 minutes a day, six days a week. Created in 2005 by Santa Monica, California-based fitness guru Tony Horton and sold as a $140 package of DVDs, the workout bills itself as “extreme home fitness.”...

Horton said that former Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner used the P90X plan, and anyone who saw the accidental Twitter pictures that were his political downfall has seen the evidence firsthand. “He’s hardcore,” Horton said.

Hardcore... Anthony Weiner.... With prodding like that — if you weren't interested based on Ryan's own advertisement of his physical fitness — how can you not Google "Paul Ryan shirtless"? We're human beings and the internet is the internet and he kind of asked for it,** didn't he?

"Paul Ryan's 'Insane' Workout Routine" — at Something Awful (with a clever illustration using the familiar torso from the cover of "Atlas Shrugged." (Paul Ryan is said to like Ayn Rand, but I have not explored the extent of the devotion.)

"Not every man is strong, but every man can be strong through hard work," explains Ryan. "So long as government is not allowed to encroach on our Second Amendment liberties, you maintain the right to bare arms, legs and an insanely chiseled torso. Get your pump on and sell as many tickets as you want to the gun show."...

Begin run. Visualize shining city on the hill because it is easily defended from shiftless bloato wrecks, carb-diners, milk chuggers and gay-married pizza princes. Surrounded by the land of unwanted workers and broken pleasure robots, only our guns and our incredible lithe bodies will protect us from corrosive morality.

Humor. Deal with it.
__________________________________

* Is it healthy to have only 6 to 8% body fat? You doctors out there, what do you say to patients with such low body fat? I've read — in the New York Times — "Too Little Fat Can Be as Bad as Too Much." ("Researchers have found that life with too little fat can be as fraught with medical complications as life with too much fat and, bizarrely, the complications are often exactly the same....") [ADDED: Ryan's father and grandfather died young from heart attacks. If "the complications are often exactly the same," is Ryan's intense pursuit of fitness — perhaps motivated by fear of the same fate — dangerous?]

** Don't use that phrase in reference to a woman!

When Paul Ryan was 16.

From a New Yorker article written by Ryan Lizza:

But the summer of 1986 brought a life-changing event. One night in August, he came home from work well past midnight, and he slept late the following morning. His mother was in Colorado visiting his sister, and his brother, who had a summer job with the Janesville parks department, had left early. Paul answered a frantic phone call from his father’s secretary. “Your dad’s got clients in here,” she said. “Where is he?” Paul walked into his parents’ bedroom and thought his father was sleeping. “I went to wake him up,” he told me, “and he was dead.”

“It was just a big punch in the gut,” Ryan said. “I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life.” His mother went back to school, in Madison, and studied interior design; his grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, moved into their home, and Ryan helped care for her. “I grew up really fast,” he said.

He took both schoolwork and extracurricular activities more seriously, he told me. In his junior year, he was elected class president, which made him prom king and gave him a seat representing the high school on Janesville’s school board, his first political position. He played soccer and was on the ski team. He joined nearly every school club: Latin Club, History Club, the Letterman’s Club, for varsity athletes, and the International Geographic Society, which was open to students who received an A in geography, and which met monthly to learn about a different country. At the end of his senior year, he was elected Biggest Brown-Noser. (“At least I didn’t have a mullet,” he said.)

His father’s death also provoked the kind of existential soul-searching that most kids don’t undertake until college. “I was, like, ‘What is the meaning?’ ” he said. “I just did lots of reading, lots of introspection. I read everything I could get my hands on.” Like many conservatives, he claims to have been profoundly affected by Ayn Rand. After reading “Atlas Shrugged,” he told me, “I said, ‘Wow, I’ve got to check out this economics thing.’ What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government.” He dived into Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

Motivated by "the absurdity" of the TSA trying to see him naked via machine, John E. Brennan got real-flesh naked... and arrested... and prosecuted.

And acquitted... by an Oregon state judge:

Citing a 1985 state appeals court ruling stating that nudity laws don't apply in cases of protest, [Multnomah County judge David] Rees said, "It is the speech itself that the state is seeking to punish, and that it cannot do...."

Brennan said he knew he wasn't breaking the law when he dropped trou partly from his experience riding in Rose City's annual Naked Bike Ride, during which Portland cops traditionally look the other way....

"The irony that they want to see me naked, but I don't get to take off my clothes off. You have all these machines that pretend to do it."

From a legal standpoint, I have a few questions. Is Rees saying that the state only prosecuted him because he was expressing an opinion via nakedness or that a consistently applied anti-nakedness law must have an exception for people who want to use nakedness as a way of expressing an opinion? Also, if a city allows one naked protest, does that mean — under Oregon law — that people can take their clothes off anywhere — in Oregon — as long as they're trying to say something via nakedness?

Here's some more detail about nudity in Portland, which might like a reputation as the "Naked City."

In recent years, Portland police have taken a reserved approach when they encounter residents in the nude. They receive 9-1-1 calls about naked people in public "off and on" and especially in the summer, said Sgt. Pete Simpson. Police will use nudity laws to pursue charges against people caught urinating or defecating in public, or having sex in cars, on lawns or in full view of others.

But how about those who are naked for the sheer sake of being naked? "We don't necessarily encourage people to be naked in public, but generally speaking ...being nude in public is not enough to go to jail," Simpson said. "You've got to be doing something more."

Case-in-point, each year officers look the other way when thousands fill the streets for the World Naked Bike Ride, he said, "because of the sheer number of naked people."

Pick a policy and be consistent. I remember the time last year when I was down at the Capitol Square here in Madison, checking out another anti-Scott-Walker protest, talking to a man on the street, and the naked bike riders suddenly appeared:



"That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

(That video of mine includes a racial analysis of the naked bikers and — if you watch to the end — an Ayn Rand point of view.)

Goodbye to Nora Ephron.

She was 71.

In the late 1960s Ms. Ephron turned to magazine journalism, at Esquire and New York mostly. She quickly made a name for herself by writing frank, funny personal essays — about the smallness of her breasts, for example — and tart, sharply observed profiles of people like Ayn Rand, Helen Gurley Brown and the composer and best-selling poet Rod McKuen. Some of these articles were controversial. In one, she criticized Betty Friedan for conducting a “thoroughly irrational” feud with Gloria Steinem; in another, she discharged a withering assessment of Women’s Wear Daily....

Her first screenplay, written with her friend Alice Arlen, was for “Silkwood,” a 1983 film based on the life of Karen Silkwood, who died under suspicious circumstances while investigating abuses at a plutonium plant where she had worked...



Ms. Ephron followed “Silkwood” three years later with a screenplay adaptation of her own novel “Heartburn,” which was also directed by Mr. Nichols. But it was her script for “When Harry Met Sally,” which became a hit Rob Reiner movie in 1989 starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, that established Ms. Ephron’s gift for romantic comedy...

[She wrote] “Sleepless in Seattle” (she shared the screenwriting credits), which brought Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan together so winningly that they were cast again in “You’ve Got Mail.”

A woman of our time. It's sad to lose her. I wish the obit (in the NYT) had a bunch of links to old magazine articles and to movie clips. The article about Ayn Rand is in "Wallflower at the Orgy." There's also: "Scribble Scrabble," "Crazy Salad," "I Feel Bad About My Neck," and "Heartburn," which is the one about the breakup of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, which was made into a movie with Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. Here's a little clip of the 2 greatest actors of our time enacting the scenes of Ms. Ephron's marriage:



Let's sing all of the songs we know about babies....

ADDED: I just downloaded "Wallflower at the Orgy" to get the Ayn Rand essay, which begins:

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face gaunt, his hair the color of bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed. It was probably a soundless laugh; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes laugh soundlessly, particularly while making love. It was probably a laugh with head thrown back; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes do things with their heads thrown back, particularly while dealing with the rest of mankind. It was probably a laugh that had a strange kind of simplicity; most of Ayn Rand’s heroes act with a strange kind of simplicity, particularly when what they are doing is of a complex nature.

Beautiful! Twenty-five years ago... that was was written in 1968.... 69 years ago...

"IC Solutions CEO Joe Stafford, who takes time to reread the 1,100 pages of the pro-capitalism novel Atlas Shrugged every two years..."

"... says he doesn't 'have enough time in the day to bother with' the 94 pages of Cheese."

From a 2002 USA Today article about the popularity of the book "Who Moved My Cheese?" I stumbled across that article as a result of reading the "Who Moved My Cheese?" article in Wikipedia, which I did because I said "Who Moved My Cheese?" — in a conversation with Meade about the troubles he (like others) was having with the new comments format on this blog — and I then realized that I'd long assumed I knew what "Who Moved My Cheese?" meant and, moreover, that Wikipedia would probably summarize the book, which it did. I learned that I was kind of wrong about what "Who Moved My Cheese?" was about. I thought it was about the way fussy people are disconcerted by small changes in their environment.

Some managers are known to mass-distribute copies of the book to employees, some of whom see this as an insult, or an attempt to characterize dissent as not "moving with the cheese". In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural re-organization," or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. 

So that's why it was a big bestseller for 5 years. People were buying it for other people.

4 Questions:

1. Have you ever been insulted by a book someone gave you to read? Have you ever — be honest — insulted anyone with a gift book?

2. What 2 things in your life are equivalent to Joe Stafford's "Atlas Shrugged" and "Who Moved My Cheese?"? (That is: You have time for something that take a lot of time, but you don't have time for something else in the same category that takes very little time.)

3. What catchphrase have you discovered yourself to be using incorrectly because you never bothered to partake of the source material?

4. If you had to think of a parable off the top of your head, do you think you could come up with something better than "Who Moved My Cheese?" and if so, does it irritate you that Dr. Spencer Johnson had that big-ass best seller? (Next time write a parable that will be useful propaganda for people with money and the motivation to make a lot of insult-gifts.)

The Silent Majority Walk and the Naked Bike Ride.

Today at the Capitol Square. Video shot and edited by me. Small glimpses of genitalia from 6:03 to 6:30. Breast alert.

The event I came to see was the Silent Majority Walk, an event planned to show appreciation for Scott Walker and the Republican legislature that passed the Budget Repair Bill this week.



0:00 — The pro-Walker walkers congregate a block away from the square and receive instructions to walk completely silently, confident in the rightness of their position, without response to "any of the mud that going to be slung at us today."

0:28 — The group walks by a sidewalk café (Graze) and an old man on a bench who says "Boo from me. Boo from me. You get a boo from me. You get a boo from me. Hold that flag up straight."

0:57 — More walking, past various street musicians and people enjoying the lovely day. Zero heckling.

2:40 — A young man — wearing capris over leggings — registers some objections.

3:02 — An older couple on bikes call out, naming some accomplishments of the labor movement —"Let's hear it for minimum wage" — then switch to a fairly polite "shame, shame, shame." The woman smiles. I suggest they catch up with the group since they are on bikes. The man says, "No, we're not going to harass them any more." I say, "People haven't really been heckling them at all. I'm surprised how civil people are being." The man says, "For some reason, we just got turned on." I laugh and say, "You're the only ones."

4:28 — A bagpiper gives them the thumbs down.

4:38 — "That's brand new. I'm shocked as shit," says a black man, laughing. I ask him some questions about why he's shocked and try to find out if he might perhaps actually be a Walker supporter himself.

5:54 — We hear a hubbub and I realize "These are the naked bike riders!" They ride by chanting "Less gas, more ass." I continue my discussion with the shocked-as-shit guy, who declares "That's America! That's America! That's the freedom!"

7:48 — An old guy in a protest contraption with pinwheels and palm trees.

8:04 — I talk to a young man who is tending a table marked "Madison Objectivists." "Is there much interest in Ayn Rand here?" I ask.

The individual mandate "may violate the constitution of Ayn Rand, but they do not violate the Constitution of the United States."

Said Acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said today, in oral arguments before the Eleventh Circuit, as reported by Sasha Volokh, who quips "Mr. Herbert Spencer, call your office."

***

The quip refers to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. dissent in Lochner v. New York:

The liberty of the citizen to do as he likes so long as he does not interfere with the liberty of others to do the same, which has been a shibboleth for some well known writers, is interfered with by school laws, by the Post Office, by every state or municipal institution which takes his money for purposes thought desirable, whether he likes it or not. The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics.

Lochner is a much-deprecated case from 1905.

Finally, a way to get liberals to abandon their romantic obsession with high-speed trains.

It's the "Atlas Shrugged" movie! Roger Ebert haaaaates it and mocks the obsession with trains:

Yes, although airplanes exist in this future, trains are where it’s at. When I was 6, my Aunt Martha brought me to Chicago to attend the great Railroad Fair of 1948, at which the nation’s rail companies celebrated the wonders that were on the way. They didn’t quite foresee mass air transportation. "Atlas Shrugged" seems to buy into the fair’s glowing vision of the future of trains. Rarely, perhaps never, has television news covered the laying of new railroad track with the breathless urgency of the news channels shown in this movie.

Thank you, Roger Ebert! I agree. We have planes now. To be enthusiastic about trains is to be like your Aunt Martha, really fossilized.

So I watched the "Atlas Shrugged" movie trailer...

... over at Instapundit. And when I got to the end, I said "Part One"?! People are supposed to put up with more than one movie full of that stuff?! It was all I could do to look at 2 and a half minutes of that sloshy melodrama.

Is that opus really the rich repository of conservative values it purports to be? Quite aside from the flabby aesthetics, we're supposed to get all righteous about — of all things — building railroads?

And, no, I haven't read the book. I don't read long, badly written novels. A simple summary of the idea Rand strains to propound is quite enough for me. As a general rule, I stay away from novels that were written to make some big political or philosophical point. Writing that last sentence, I realized I needed to quote something Vladimir Nabokov said about art. Googling, I came to this old article by Allen Barra in Salon — "Reading 'Lolita' in Alabama" — and I'm delighted to see that Barra brings up Ayn Rand in the first paragraph:

I knew of only one other writer who inspired such an odd cult among high schoolers, Ayn Rand, who, like Nabokov, was a Russian émigré with an intense hatred of communism. Aside from that, the two could not have been more different. Rand's novels were the kind of transparent philosophical tracts that Nabokov loathed as much as he loathed Marxism. The similarities between the Nabokov and Rand cults was creepy; even more creepy was that I almost never came across anyone who read both of them.

Put me on the Nabokov side of that dichotomy. Anyway, here's what I was looking for from Nabokov:

"Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions."... "I don't give a damn for the group... the community, the masses, and so forth ... there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." And: "I have neither the intent nor the temperament to be a moralist or satirist." Mediocrity, he thought, "thrives on ideas"... "general ideas, the big, sincere ideas which permeate a so-called great novel, and which, in the inevitable long run, amount to bloated topicalities stranded like dead whales."

"Find ways to be unemployed, doing nothing, finding enough time on your hands, after you've met your basic needs, to wander into unknown realms of thought and imagination."

"You can't do it when you're busy working like everyone else, collecting a paycheck, keeping regular hours, depending on the goodwill and collegiality of customers, coworkers, bosses — if you choose employment in academia, it's no different, you still have clients and bosses to please. Avoid this gentle poison by figuring out ways you can mock the system by taking from it what it needs to give you to maintain your writing, and give it nothing back in return."

From Anis Shivani's "New Rules for Writers," specifically, Rule #4: "Seek Unemployment."

ADDED: I had a link to a book of Shivani's before. The link is corrected. There's a whole, very interesting article to read!

AND: Thanks to Instapundit for linking — "ADVICE TO WRITERS: Go John Galt?" — and getting me to notice my bad link. Perhaps the trend of the comments will change with the whole context of the quote and the cue from Glenn to think in Randian terms.

"... Ron Johnson, a plastics manufacturer and one of those rich political virgins who have been popping up in races across the country, waving a checkbook and a copy of 'Atlas Shrugged.'"

A NYT description of the Wisconsin senatorial candidate.

ADDED: What's the opposite of a "political virgin"? Also, why aren't we worried about politicians who are private-enterprise virgins?

"The United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world."

The Ayn Rand table at the Farmers Market — on the Capitol Square in Madison, Wisconsin today:


(Enlarge.)

"We start analyzing these things rationally or logically or logically, it's not going to make any sense."

I was going to analyze that assertion rationally but I was afraid it wasn't going to make any sense.

The quote is from Rush Limbaugh, who proceeds to complain that everything's gotten too politicized.

AND: Speaking of internally inconsistent assertions....