Paul Maul

The Quote of the Day is actually an entire conversation. Behold, just a small part of a larger exchange between the Huffington Post's Sam Stein and anti-federalism, anti-entitlement, Godfather of modern hardcore libertarian purity Ron Paul.

"STEIN: A bit of a personal question then, are you on Social Security? Do you get Social Security checks?

PAUL: I do.

STEIN: Well, I mean, is there -- you just told younger generations that they should ween themselves off this social contract.

PAUL: That is true.

STEIN: But you haven’t done it yourself... Don’t you think you chould have set a good example for the future generations. You’re not the wealthiest man in congress, I know that, but you have enough means to take care of yourself in retirement... Couldn’t you have set an example?

PAUL: No. I think the programs are so designed, just as I use the post office too, I use government highways, I do that too, I use the banks, the federal reserve system, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t work to remove this in the same way on Social Security."

It would be easy to just write this off as a case of "Do as I Say, Not as I Do" hypocrisy, but really there's something much deeper at work here. The fact is that libertarian ideaologues like Paul -- as with objectivist clowns like Ayn Rand before them -- secretly realize that their belief system is impossible to put into practice. It all looks great on paper, but it's unfeasible to run a unified country or a moral society without realizing that everyone within it will have to at least partially accept responsibility for his or her fellow man. What's more, Paul's cop out that the system is in place so therefore he falls back on it -- that the temptation is just too much to take and apparently robs him of his burning desire to live truly independently -- is almost impossible to listen to without laughing out loud. For the record, Rand herself, talented grifter that she was, did the same thing, only she tried to hide it; unlike Paul, who comes right out and admits he's full of shit, Rand received both Social Security and Medicare as she became old and infirm, only she collected it under her husband's last name.

This is why the modern right, bolstered by a neo-Randian philosophy of which most conservatives understand pretty much nothing other than a few bumper sticker slogans, hates the notion of, say, single-payer healthcare: they're afraid of it; afraid that the temptation will be too much and that people will want to use it; even people who normally breathe fire at the mere mention of government assistance. The difference, of course, is that some of those people -- people like Ron Paul -- can afford to not be a "parasitic burden" on the system while others actually need the help just to eke out an existence.

But I guess when you get old you earn the luxury of being able to issue loud, ex cathedra rulings declaring that no one else is entitled to federal assistance -- while sucking as much as you can get from the government teat.

(via Cesca)

Quote of the Day

"We should be like 1900. We should be like 1940, 1950, 1960. I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district. There's no magic about FEMA. They're a great contribution to deficit financing and quite frankly they don't have a penny in the bank. We should be coordinated but coordinated voluntarily with the states. A state can decide. We don't need somebody in Washington."

-- Ron Paul, speaking yesterday in New Hampshire

I swear, sometimes I actually feel bad holding Ron Paul up to ridicule or even bothering to take anything he says seriously. First of all, he's obviously suffering from dementia; secondly, while he's an entertaining diversion and one that inexplicably inspires cult-like devotion among both the tiny "intellectual" arm of the Tea Party and America's early-20-something stoner community, he doesn't stand a chance in hell of winning a thing beyond his congressional seat. The only way Paul will ever see the inside of the Oval Office is if he's invited there by whoever happens to be president. And that's partially because he can stand up in front of a group of people and honestly say, without a hint of irony, that this country needs to return to the way it was 111 years ago. I get that today's Republicans tend to fetishize the 50s, but at least everyone had electricity by that point.

On the podcast this week, Bob and I talked about the school district in Pennsylvania that's now using sheep to cut the grass at one middle-school because it says they save money that would otherwise be spent on, you know, a guy and a lawnmower. Cesca's comment about the story earlier in the week on his blog was freaking priceless: "We’re seriously a few more sheep and a Thunderdome away from becoming Bartertown."

But that's apparently what guys like Ron Paul want.

I've been over this before so I'm not going to repeat myself at length. Suffice it to say, though, that this Randian asshole, every-man-for-himself brand of libertarianism that Paul and his monkey son espouse -- and which seems to have found an audience among the craziest sliver of the electoral pie -- is exactly as advertised. I'll give Paul this, he makes it perfectly clear what he's all about and doesn't hedge one bit; he wants you to know that he doesn't give a rat's ass about you as an American or about this nation as a world leader or superpower. About to get slammed by a hurricane? Tough shit, pal -- you're on your own. It's your fault for living where the hurricanes are and it's certainly not my problem or responsibility. The rest of the world's gonna laugh at this once-mighty country if we allow ourselves to regress to the point of being, basically, a Third World feudal society peppered with frontier towns and no centralized government to speak of? So be it.

Again, there's a point to be made that it's a waste of time and copy-space to give Paul's ramblings any more credence than those of the recently released Bellevue patient who's now staked out a soapbox in the middle of Central Park. For Christ's sake, in 1977 Jimmy Carter implored this country to make the tiny sacrifice of dropping the thermostat a few degrees and wearing a sweater -- and he was publicly castigated for it. You think Americans are gonna go for the abandonment of entire swaths of the country and its people every time a disaster like a monster hurricane hits? You're even more of a lunatic than Ron Paul -- and that's not easy.

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"When a film comes along and paints liberals as sinister cigar smoking fat cats, feasting on opulent dinners and in all ways acting like Libertarian corporatists until the revelation that their dirty backroom politics are for the good of 'the people' and 'the nation' and they won’t seemingly be getting much real gain out of it at all... I have to wonder: what the fuck were they thinking? Who seriously believes this shit? The only people who think that there really are a group of people out there who are altruistically evil are only going to see this if their meds don’t knock them out too early and the home their kids abandoned them in has a shuttle service... If you find a copy of this sitting around anywhere, do yourself a favor: set it on fire."

-- From Massawyrm's review of Atlas Shrugged at Ain't It Cool News

Incidentally, while it didn't exactly bomb, the movie did less-than-stellar numbers at the box office over the weekend. Guess its audience had "gone Galt."

Get a Grift

I'm right in the middle of Matt Taibbi's new book, his opus really, Griftopia -- and there's no adequate expression possible for how good it is, both as a read and as a benchmark for our times.

While Taibbi's brutal and often laugh-out-loud funny insights about the condition of our economic and political landscape -- and indictment of those who created this fucking mess -- provide the crux of the book, it's a minor tangent he goes off on about Ayn Rand that really had me nodding my head. I'll explain why in a minute, but here's what he had to say about Rand, whom he calls "a bloviating, arbitrary, self-important pseudo-intellectual who recalls the gibberish-spewing academic twits in Woody Allen spoofs," and whose philosophy of "Objectivism" he mercilessly derides as being "a crackpot antitheology dedicated to legitimizing relentless self-interest... a grotesquerie that hit the Upper East Side cocktail party circuit hard in the fifties and sixties."

"One of the defining characteristics of Rand's clique was its absolutist ideas about good and evil, expressed in a wildly off-putting, uncompromisingly bombastic rhetoric that almost certainly bled downward to the group ranks from its Russian emigre leader, who might've been one of the most humor-deprived people ever to walk the earth.

Rand's book Atlas Shrugged, for instance, remains a towering monument to humanity's capacity for unrestrained self-pity -- it's a bizarre and incredibly long-winded piece of aristocratic paranoia in which a group of Randian supermen decide to break off from the rest of society and form a pure free-market utopia, and naturally the parasitic lower classes immediately drown in their own laziness and ineptitude.

The book fairly gushes with the resentment these poor 'Atlases' (they are shouldering the burdens of the whole world!) feel toward those who try to use 'moral guilt' to make them share their wealth. In the climactic scene the Randian hero John Galt sounds off in defense of self-interest and attacks the notion of self-sacrifice as a worthy human ideal in a speech that lasts seventy five pages.

It goes without saying that only a person possessing a mathematically inexpressible level of humorless self-importance would subject anyone to a seventy-five page speech about anything. Hell, even Jesus Christ barely cracked two pages with the Sermon on the Mount. Rand/Galt manages it, however, and this speech lays the foundation of objectivism, a term that was probably chosen because 'greedism' isn't catchy enough."

I bring this up for personal reasons, actually, because to be honest I never really bothered reading a lot of Rand when I was young (which from what I did read always seemed to be the only period in a human life when something that ridiculous might be absorbed and regarded as anything other than pseudo-philosophical pabulum). Looking back on it, though, I'm sorry I didn't get to know Ayn Rand's beliefs a little better, because as it turned out the person I wound up falling in love with in 2002 was a fan of Rand to the point of her online screen-name being a direct reference to one of Rand's characters and what seemed at the time to be a strange, almost romantic infatuation with John Galt.

I always just figured this made her wonderfully literate. Jesus, what little I knew.

Quote of the Week (Early Contender)

"The figure Ayn Rand most resembles in American life is L. Ron Hubbard, another crazed, pitiable charlatan who used trashy potboilers to whip up a cult. Unfortunately, Rand's cult isn't confined to Tom Cruise and a rash of Hollywood dimwits. No, its ideas and its impulses have, by drilling into the basest human instincts, captured one of America's major political parties."

-- Johann Hari, in a Slate piece called "How Ayn Rand Became an American Icon"