Neanderpundit

I was about the most manually dextrous person I knew; at 40, I could still easily tie a knot in an eyelash, and sometimes i could even manage two. These days if I can tie a knot in a phone cord I consider it a good day. The pain and numbness in my hands has gotten to the point that I often end up doing delicate tasks as much by muscle memory as anything else, like a newly deaf person talking, they can still do ok, but you know it’s going to deteriorate after a while.

I haven’t discovered any possible solutions to my hand issues that don’t involve extraordinarily expensive tests or chancy surgeries, and it doesn’t look like anything is going to change in that respect anytime soon. So I keep at it, and before horribly long, I suspect, I’ll have to leave the ral delicate work for younger hands, or those couple of hours a day when they are at their peak performance.

Getting old is not for pussies. Especially not when you’ve lived a rugged life.

I read John Howard Griffin’s “Black like Me”. It’s an okay book, was then, is now. It’s an interesting insight into the differences- at least when it was written- between the races and the way they live.

Having read the book, I was all on fire to go out and fight the injustices being perpetrated on blacks by whites, and I was pretty vocal about it. My mother tried to argue me out of my newfound fervor, but dad just got me in the truck, and we went for a ride around downtown Gary.

There was gunfire, and plenty of it. There was a lot of disorder and disaster. Even as Itried to retain my righteous indignation I realized that ‘Black like me” contained a piece of a story, and there were other pieces it didn’t contain.

It dawned on me- and this was a p[retty early ages- that maybe just because someone writes a book and gets paid to do so, it doesn’t make them the expert on anything.

Quite a few years later, but still many years ago, I managed to lay my hands on an email address for Sir (Not sir at the time, btw) Arthur C Clarke. We had, over the course of two or three years, an email correspondence. One of my very early emails to him explained that I was a devoted fan, who loved literally all his work, and that even if he should turn out to have feet of clay, I would still enjoy his work.

There were allegations that Clark was a shorteye, later on, though I never saw any concrete evidence of this. My fears of the author having feet of clay were founded in some reality.
His response?

“I assure you, my feet are made of the Very Finest Clay”

I have always looked- not at the shining visage of the hero, but lifted up his pantleg and pulled down his sock. Invariably, clay. Inevitably, heroes fail, they fail themselves, they fail each other, they fail you. I have come to eschew Heroes. Perhaps it’s because I’m older and more cynical, perhaps i just came to smart on the subject sooner than many. Nobody can question my heroes because I have none- even the people I respect most, I’m often more familiar with their failures than successes.

Of couse, as I’ve found out in the last several days, God forbid you question the integrity of someone else’s heroes. Eric Hoffer, god rest his ornery soul, was spot on, on that one.

has my copy of Atlas Shrugged.

I warned him, and I tried to warn him off reading it, but he insisted.

I told him that this was my fifth copy, the first I threw out the window of a moving car, the second and third I took to the range and shot, and the fourth got run through my desk shredder, one or four pages at a time. it took me five copies before I could stand to get through it.

No, I won’t see the movie. Having that all injected into my brain once is more than enough. I’m assured that the movie is well done and honest to the book, and for acolytes of Ms Rand, that’s very nice, hopefully they’ll finish all three and do a good job of it. When they do, I might rent the DVD’s and scan through to a few parts I considered enjoyable in the book.

The world is not black and white. In the era of Randolph Scott, the good guys were always good, no matter what, and the bad guys were bad all the time, and always lost. That world of serial westerns was as realistic a portrayal of the west as you can’t get. Give me Blondie any day, or Angel eyes; the good guys sometimes act bad. Lie with cheap women. Doublecross a partner, maybe even. In the end, they do the right thing, but they are not the two dimensional cardboard cutouts from the beginning of the Wild Wild West, they have some depth and some dimension.

Atlas Shrugged is the Taurus Judge of conservatism/civil libertarianism. It’s good to have a weapon, but there are better suited weapons for the purpose. it looks nice, and on the surface it’s powerful and big, but at the core it tries to do several things, for each of which it is well unsuited.

Sure, Randolph Scott was a hoot to watch. And it’s fun to see bad guys get their comeuppance. Hell, evengun hating peace loving tree hugging Liberals flock to the theaters to see Bruce WIllis shoot the bad guys. And therin lies the problem with all of this: Not all bad guys are always all bad. Not all good guys are always all good. And there is nor has there ever been any person or group of people that can- as in Atlas Shrugged- drag the world to a halt as a result of the loss of their industry, it cannot happen, and never will. There will always be someone to step in and fill the gap, even if their gap filling is inadequate and inefficient.

Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons” is- though a much lighter piece- a much better indication of our futures; it’s easy to read the book and think “Those very few, very intelligent people- they are the kings of this planet, of this race! ” but when you look around, the obvious truth is not that the intelligent and industrious are the rulers of the race, but slaves to it. Such is it as it is, such it will always be. Oh, we’re compensated for the enslavement, and frankly, bright people have the power to wrench more enjoyment from life than the stupid, but we have chosen our enslavement by our very industry. “Want something done?” Lucille Ball once famously said, “Give it to a busy person”

There will always be busy people. The instant Atlas Shrugs, another Atlas will be right behind him, to take up the burden- maybe better, maybe worse, but the line of pretenders to the throne is as endless as the human race.

I have no love for the book, though I think Ms Rand might have been a lovely and interesting person to know in person. I share her burning desire that people be free and have a right to the fruit of their labor. Had she been a carpenter, or a chef, she might well have left the world a far better place than it was when she entered; instead, I fear, she leaves behind her a trail of acolytes as unwilling to admit her slightest fault as owners of Norinco 1911’s or people who have a Taurus Judge sitting on ther nightstand next to the false teeth in the glass and the Harlequin romance.