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SNEERFEST

                                                       September 2, 2010     
                                                                             
  Corey Robin, (in The Nation, May 20, 2010)                                
  has a lot of good clean fun viciously            [ref]
  kicking Ayn Rand around.

  Myself, I think he should be ashamed of
  himself.  Getting in cheapshots at Ayn               RAND
  Rand is like beating up on a cripple.

  And there's also an awful lot of tribal
  bias going on here...

  If it weren't clear to the Nation's
  audience that Rand is fair game (and
  obviously not taken seriously by Our
  Sort of People), he wouldn't quite
  take the same tone.

    Yes, Ayn Rand goes beserk with the phrase
    "A is A" trying to make it do an extreme
    amount of work-- but if it was a piece of
    schtick from "Being and Nothingness",          (Sartre makes the list of
    wouldn't we be required to give it credit      contemporaries of Rand that
    for poetic insight?                            were obviously smarter than
                                                   her.)

                                                         POLAR_SARTRE

Consider another work from the Nation, some
commentary on Tolstoy published in the
previous month:

     "Not a body of work the contemporary reader is
     apt to find congenial. Leave aside the
     religiosity. We have learned to distrust the
     story with a message, any message. We disdain
     the writer who comes to us bearing ideas or
     ideologies. We don't like a moralizer, don't
     want to be preached at, don't believe in
     answers, in endings. We put our faith in
     ambiguity, complexity, irresolution,
     doubt. Life isn't that simple, we think. It
     doesn't happen that way. But that is exactly
     what Tolstoy believes. There is an answer, and
     while it certainly isn't easy, it is simple,
     and it does happen, it should happen."

            William Deresiewicz, "The Renunciation Artist: On Leo Tolstoy"
            The Nation, February 11, 2010    [ref]



Who *is* this "we" that Deresiewicz refers to?
I think it's clear that he means "my fellow
intellectuals".

   One of the reason for Rand's
   popularity is simply because she
   was one of the few who disagreed               DIDACTICS
   with the attitudes here
   attributed to this "we":

   She had no reluctance to dig-in
   and do "message" (and she certainly
   wasn't afraid to be "too simple").

   Rand was phenomenally influential
   as a novelist of ideas, because            Though actually, one
   nearly everyone else had ceeded            notable exception was
   the field.                                 Sartre.

          PRAISE_RAND


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