The Jailhouse

[HhH]

Here's my REAL report...

the other thing was just a silly mistake. Wrong file. That's all. Anyway...

The Fountainhead serves as an pretty good introduction to both Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and her writing. Every one of the major intellectual themes that are contained in Rand’s fiction and her philosophy are presented somewhere or another in this novel.

Rand grew up in the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union and, consequently, held impassioned beliefs in individual rights and political freedom and Smirnoff's. She wrote The Fountainhead as a paean to the creative freethinker. Its hero, Howard Roark, is an innovative architect, a man whose brilliant and radically new designs are rejected by the majority of society, obviously too dull to fully comprehend their brilliance. Roark, like many creative thinkers, must struggle mightily to win acceptance for his ideas against the foolish masses, who want nothing more than a hand-out and intellectual pablum all the time. Also, they are fearful of change and most of them are Communist-sympathizers. The theme, as Miss Rand puts it, is individualism versus collectivism, not only in the political sense, but more importantly in the souls of men. The book is about the conflict between those who think for themselves and those who allow others to dominate their lives, who are invariably Democrats.

According to Ayn Rand, her objective is the presentation of an man in the ideal state. Howard Roark is the first such figure in her novels. His independence, his commitment to his own rational thinking, his integrity, and his massive biceps mark him as a distinctive Ayn Rand hero. The author has described herself as a “man-worshiper,” one who revered man at his highest and best and most potent and most masculine and, well, using her own terminology: hunkiest. She held man’s creative mind as totally sacred, and consequently admired some other original thinkers of mankind—the artists, scientists, and inventors, such as Mapplethorpe, Schwarzenneger, and, most of all, Woody Allen. Her fiction illustrates the heroic battles such great individuals have to wage to develop their new ideas and methods and to struggle against a the morons that comprise society, most of whom are Democrats. She presents her heroes as ends in themselves, inviting her readers to simply witness and savor the sight of such glorious manhood, especially the Schwarzennegerian biceps, which as everyone knows are merely a metaphor. “My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark's end itself, not somebody else's end. Howard Roark's end simply defines hunky. Which, incidentally, is the greatest value I could ever offer a reader.” Portraying such a character is of great value, obviously, because the sight of a dauntless hero with such great buns, who can also perform notable deeds while balancing his checkbood, is an uplifting experience, one that requires no further explanation or validation. She points out that, secondarily, a reader witnessing the life of Howard Roark may be inspired to become a super-hero in his own right and may even sign up at Jenny Craig.

Roark, that freethinking individual extraordinaire, is opposed by sundry collectivists—all Democrats--who believe that a person should conform to others or maybe rebel and that are, at heart either Communists or Fascists or some other stupid thing. These collectivist-Democrat types want a society in which the individual is utterly subordinate to the will of the people. Regarding this aspect of the book, Rand sets her hero against various stupid collectivist ideas that existed at that particular point in time both outside and inside the United States.

The obvious example of collectivistic-dumbass-Democrats in The Fountainhead is the political one. Ellsworth Twohey, the novel’s villain, is a Marxist intellectual who probably votes Democrat, who goes around preaching socialism to the stupid fool masses. Twohey holds that an individual has no value in himself but exists solely to serve his lazy good-for-nothing brothers. As Ayn Rand wrote the novel, in the 1930s, such crazy concepts were rapidly engulfing the world, no doubt fomented by lazy good-for-nothings like FDR. The Communists first, taking over her native Russia, then Il Duce and the Fascists in Italy, then Hitler and the Nazis in Germany. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis and the Communists invaded Poland and from there things started to get ugly. In the early 1940s, these horrid people appeared to be on the threshold of military conquest of the world. Meanwhile, in the United States, lots of pointy-headed intellectuals, their toady politicians, corrupt labor leaders, and damn-fool businessmen thought of the Communist and Nazi systems as “noble experiments,” going so far as to actually believe they were attempts to emphasize an individual’s moral responsibilities to his "fellow man." Before the war, there was tremendous ideological support in the United States for both the Communists and the Nazis, and Congress was nearly overrun by these individuals pretending to be Democrats, except for some of the Fascists who might have been Republicans. Anyway, even after the war, support among the intellectuals continued for Communism for a long time until they were single-handedly defeated by the ultimate Rand-style hero, the one and only Ronald Reagan. Rand wrote The Fountainhead, at one level, as a fervent warning to her fellow man of the horrors of collectivism, whether of the Nazi, Fascist, Communist, or Democrat variety.

The Fountainhead, obviously, is not fundamentally about politics, however. The book warns against more subtle manifestations of collectivism, one that underlies the political danger and makes that danger possible. Although all human beings have minds, most people, mainly Democrats, choose not to use theirs, looking instead to others for guidance. These individuals prefer to be led in their personal lives by an authority figure—be it parents, teachers, clergymen, or Bill Clinton. Those who prefer to be led by authority figures are conformists and stupid fools, refusing the responsibility of thought and self-directed motivation, taking the path of least resistance in life, looking for handouts all the time and going on welfare and using food stamps, etc., etc., etc. In the character of Peter Keating, a conventional architect who pays attention to the damn-fool masses, Miss Rand provides an incisive glimpse into the soul of such a craven loser (and likely Democrat). The picture is, indeed, a frightening one. Keating, in many ways an average American status seeker, mainly desires public acclaim. In exchange for social approval, he is willing to sacrifice any and all of his personal convictions. In pursuit of this acclaim, he becomes a blind follower of the power broker, Ellsworth Twohey, and in so doing reveals the mentality of the millions of “true believers” who blindly follow a Jim Jones, a Sun Myung Moon, or Adolf Hitler. Ayn Rand shows that conformity is really naughty.

In The Fountainhead, in an amazing plot twist, Rand also shows that nonconformity is equally naughty. Rather than being the opposite of blind obedience, it is merely a variation on the same theme. In a variety of minor characters (Lois Lane, Smart Ike, Jack Webb), all devotees of Twohey, Rand demonstrates the essence of nonconformity: an unthinking rebellion against the values and convictions of others. The nonconformist, too, places the beliefs of others first, before his own thinking; he merely reacts against them, instead of following them. It is no accident that Ayn Rand shows these rebels as followers of Twohey, because nonconformists, usually Democrats, tend to cluster in private enclaves that inevitably demand rigid obedience to their own set of rules. Nonconformists, value freethinking no more than does the herd of conformists, it seems! These nonconformist fools are fictional examples of historical movements of the early twentieth century. Mainly writers and artists and taxidermists who rebel against grammar, coherent sentences, representational art, and conventional ferret-mounting in the same way that the surrealists, expressionists, Dadaists, and Horshakists did in actual fact. This band of real-life rebels, not surprisingly, centered in Weimar, Germany, in the 1920s where they could party a great deal in the cabarets of the time. Outwardly, some opposed Hitler. But at a deeper level, in their innermost hearts, in the place that only Rand can clearly see, their blind rebelliousness against others and their slavish conformity to their own little subgroups fostered another style of herd mentality, but a herd mentality nonetheless. The nonconformists, despite their open opposition to Hitler, were part of the culture that spawned the Nazis. This is why, in The Fountainhead, when Twohey is chided for cultivating a circle of “rabid individualists,” he merely laughs and responds: “You are all fools and I loathe you.” He knows that a hunky guy like Roark is a true individualist and all around swell guy; posturing nonconformists like Lois Lane are mere rebels against the crowd.

The issue of conformity in the story relates to another real-life movement of the time--the onset of the Modernist School of Taxidermic Thought which, of course featured the previously unthinkable juxtapositon of weasel nostrils vis a vis ferret lips. Rand was a leading taxidermist practicing in Brooklyn at that time and had passionate beliefs about the artistic merit of such posturings. It is believed she attempted suicide on one occasion following a viewing of Dietrich's famous exhibition Rabbits On Ice. She failed, obviously, but fell into a severe depression that caused her to lose a considerable amount of weight and, some think, prompted her to adopt her signature hairstyle as a protest. Also contributing to her depression was the fact that she had gone eleven years without a date.

Fountainhead was a challenging book and if you want to find out how it ends, you will have to read it for yourself. One hopes to be able to do so in a place other than prison.