(Posted September 14, 2009)
Fog engulfed the road as I drove north last Friday to set up my booth at the Harvest Moon Festival in Ely. Yes, it’s the same town I visited during the Blueberry Festival in late July; the same town that bills itself as “The End of the Road”. When the sun finally broke through the shroud that surrounded the highway, sunlight reflected off delicate lacy spiderwebs in the tall grass and brush, making me understand the likely origins of the Native American dream catcher. Some of the arachnid-created artwork stood horizontal. Some, vertical. But all caught the brilliant briefness of a sun bent on teasing the day. A bald eagle, scruffy and non-resplendent, its white diminished by a hard life lived in the north woods, caught a draft and swept gently past my Pacifica as I listened to hard rock on the disk changer. It’s a long and lonely road to Ely and I drove it there and back three times this past weekend.
In my booth, I settled into a canvas camp chair and waited for customers, a battered paperback copy of Ayn Rand’s masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, resting in my lap so I could hold tight to my travel mug of much needed coffee as I resumed my reading. I’ve been plowing through Ms. Rand’s 1,000 plus pages of Objectivist fiction since the first craft festival of the year in Detroit Lakes back in early June. I’m not intending a full review of Ms. Rand’s work here, only to say that, after months of my opinion bouncing between, “gee, this is some good writing” to, “God no, not another speech”, when I finally came to the infamous sixty pages in the book where the hero, John Galt, commandeers the radio waves to make his point, I skipped the last thirty pages of Galt’s speech to get back to the story. I mean, a writer of fiction (and that is what Ms. Rand purports to be) can only ask so much of his or her readers when imparting philosophy. Ursula LeGuin, one of my favorite authors, knows this. Ms. Rand apparently did not, or if she knew the limited tolerances of fiction readers for speechifying, she didn’t care. In any event, after reading half of Galt’s oration, I understand A is A, that A can never be B. I understand that, according to Ms. Rand’s view of mankind, the best government can do for us is to get out of the way and let man’s inner insatiable drive to survive have free rein. In the end, Ms. Rand argues, man’s innate selfishness will provide all that is needed. Mankind’s greatest drive, its greatest attribute, is not love of others, but love of self. Mmmm. So Jesus, the Buddha, Mohamed, and all the rest had it wrong. Only Aristotle (and with him too, Ms. Rand has issues) had anything intelligent to say about man’s motivations, the ultimate appropriate philosophy for man’s well-being.
After the climatic battle scene, where closure comes to the characters in the book, I sat in my little booth in Ely and pondered Ms. Rand’s worldview. There is a grain of truth that government can be too intrusive in our lives. There is a grain of truth that sometimes, philanthropic altruism is misplaced (sending boat loads of wool hats to Africa, for example). But in the end, I think that Ms. Rand would have done the world a greater service by writing a good page-turner of a novel than by serving up 1,000 pages of lecture disguised as marginal prose.
I stashed the novel in my booth and waited for customers, confident in my belief that mankind’s self-interest cannot compete with the handicraft of small spiders and the soaring of eagles.
Peace.
Mark Munger
