Quote of the Day

The Daily Banter: The CEO of AIG Is, In Fact, an A**hole/9.24.13

Quote of the Day

"Romney is an almost perfect amalgam of all the great out-of-touch douchebags of our national cinema: he's Greg Marmalard from Animal House mixed with Billy Zane's sneering, tux-wearing Cal character in Titanic to pussy-ass Prince Humperdinck to Roy Stalin to Gordon Gekko (he's literally Gordon Gekko). He's everything we've been trained to despise, the guy who had everything handed to him, doesn't fight his own battles and insists there's only room in the lifeboat for himself – and yet the Democrats, for some reason, have had terrible trouble beating him in a popularity contest."

-- Matt Taibbi, in a piece which wonders why Barack Obama, while pulling ahead in almost every poll, isn't completely obliterating Mitt Romney

A Better Off Dead reference.

For that, Taibbi has my eternal love and respect.

Quote of the Day

"If you're low-income enough to not be paying income tax, you're doing a shitty job that nobody else wants to do in this country. You're cleaning toilets. You're driving buses at the night shift. You're bussing tables. You're doing all these things that Mitt Romney is never going to do."

-- Matt Taibbi, pretty much hitting it on the head

Nowhere Man

Matt Taibbi has written a fascinating, detailed and incredibly enlightening cover story in the new Rolling Stone on Mitt Romney's financial background and what it says about him and the way he thinks. The facts and figures it dispenses, as well as the way it shows how the anti-debt Romney has spent much of his career profiting off the debt of others, is required reading. But it's the way he wraps up the extended piece that really grabbed my attention.

"Listen to Mitt Romney speak, and see if you can notice what's missing. This is a man who grew up in Michigan, went to college in California, walked door to door through the streets of southern France as a missionary and was a governor of Massachusetts, the home of perhaps the most instantly recognizable, heavily accented English this side of Edinburgh. Yet not a trace of any of these places is detectable in Romney's diction. None of the people in any of those places bled in and left a mark on the man.

Romney is a man from nowhere. In his post-regional attitude, he shares something with his campaign opponent, Barack Obama, whose background is a similarly jumbled pastiche of regionally nonspecific non-identity. But in the way he bounced around the world as a half-orphaned child, Obama was more like an involuntary passenger in the demographic revolution reshaping the planet than one of its leaders.

Romney, on the other hand, is a perfect representative of one side of the ominous cultural divide that will define the next generation, not just here in America but all over the world. Forget about the Southern strategy, blue versus red, swing states and swing voters – all of those political clichés are quaint relics of a less threatening era that is now part of our past, or soon will be. The next conflict defining us all is much more unnerving.

That conflict will be between people who live somewhere, and people who live nowhere. It will be between people who consider themselves citizens of actual countries, to which they have patriotic allegiance, and people to whom nations are meaningless, who live in a stateless global archipelago of privilege – a collection of private schools, tax havens and gated residential communities with little or no connection to the outside world.

Mitt Romney isn't blue or red. He's an archipelago man. That's a big reason that voters have been slow to warm up to him. From LBJ to Bill Clinton to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin, Americans like their politicians to sound like they're from somewhere, to be human symbols of our love affair with small towns, the girl next door, the little pink houses of Mellencamp myth. Most of those mythical American towns grew up around factories – think chocolate bars from Hershey, baseball bats from Louisville, cereals from Battle Creek. Deep down, what scares voters in both parties the most is the thought that these unique and vital places are vanishing or eroding – overrun by immigrants or the forces of globalism or both, with giant Walmarts descending like spaceships to replace the corner grocer, the family barber and the local hardware store, and 1,000 cable channels replacing the school dance and the gossip at the local diner.

Obama ran on "change" in 2008, but Mitt Romney represents a far more real and seismic shift in the American landscape. Romney is the frontman and apostle of an economic revolution, in which transactions are manufactured instead of products, wealth is generated without accompanying prosperity, and Cayman Islands partnerships are lovingly erected and nurtured while American communities fall apart. The entire purpose of the business model that Romney helped pioneer is to move money into the archipelago from the places outside it, using massive amounts of taxpayer-subsidized debt to enrich a handful of billionaires. It's a vision of society that's crazy, vicious and almost unbelievably selfish, yet it's running for president, and it has a chance of winning. Perhaps that change is coming whether we like it or not. Perhaps Mitt Romney is the best man to manage the transition. But it seems a little early to vote for that kind of wholesale surrender."

I've said before, on more than one occasion, that the important thing to keep in mind when you hear discussions on the right of the need for unrestricted capitalism is that the modern free-market is in fact the least patriotic entity on the planet. It exists merely in the service of itself and those who worship it with relentless abandon, forsaking all other considerations, as Taibbi says, don't really give a damn about America. That's because this new brand of flat-Earth free-market capitalism doesn't recognize nations or states and therefore the people who serve it have no allegiance to any one country nor do they revel, as they used to, in ensuring that the homeland which ostensibly provided them with so much reaps a rewarded for its cultural and legal largess. They've almost literally created their own world.

Quote(s) of the Day

Years ago, Matt Taibbi put together a bracketed, March Madness-style competition that pitted the various hacks in the world of journalism against each other in an effort to see who would emerge as the single worst offender. It was actually called "Wimblehack," though for the life of me I can't remember who ended up being the Last Hack Standing at the time, at least as Taibbi saw it.

Well, in the spirit of that, Salon's Alex Pareene is apparently making it a December tradition to count down the year's most impressive practitioners in the ever-broadening journalistic sub-genre of absolute hackdom. Do yourself a favor and keep up with his picks over the next couple of days or so. These are my favorite moments so far:

#17 John Stossel

"Stossel’s a ridiculous local-news 'consumer watchdog' reporter who discovered Milton Friedman. He’s the worst of simple-minded sensationalist television news masquerading as a maverick because he’s 'politically incorrect' (a term that when self-applied invariably means 'an asshole')."

#16 Andrea Peyser

"Peyser is the New York Post’s resident joyless puritanical scold with a particularly Murdochian obsession with sex. Week in and week out, her column — which has expanded to become an entire page in the physical paper — details precisely which women are hookers, sluts, gold diggers and tramps (hint: most women, besides some wronged wives) and which men are whore-mongers and perverts (every Democratic politician alive)."

#14 Joe Scarborough

"Nothing sums up everything hatable about cable news and politics and possibly America itself better than 'Morning Joe,' MSNBC’s daily extended advertisement for Starbucks products and Joe Scarborough’s odd belief that he is funny and charming... Every morning he and Mika Brzezinski -- who either pretends to be a weak-willed flighty moron because she thinks it’s necessary for her continued professional success as Joe’s oft-belittled second banana/screwball love interest or who is actually tragically stupid -- perform the world’s most self-satisfied kaffeeklatsch (along with Willie Geist, the former Tucker Carlson sidekick and a man born to play the guy who dies first in a war movie)."

#13 Megyn Kelly

"I imagine that perma-sneer, that disgusted look of disbelieving contempt that remains plastered on Kelly’s face during the entirety of 'America Live,' disappears the minute the red light on top of the camera goes off, because Megyn Kelly doesn’t actually give a shit about the National Day of Prayer or seriously believe the New Black Panther Party represents a threat to democracy. She’s just happy to have a job doing something she loves: being a reliable bile-delivery system for a massive political messaging organization."

Against the Wall

So chances are by now you've heard that the NYPD went in under cover of darkness last night and forcibly removed the Occupy Wall Street protesters from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. It was part of a coordinated move by law enforcement against the various protesters nationwide.

My default position is to side with the police in a lot of the incidents involving them; it probably stems from the fact that my father is an ex-cop. For the most part, even the police taking part in the crackdown on the Occupy protests are decent people forced into a tough situation by their jobs. No, they're not out to bust heads or punch hippies; they're for the most part just doing the job they were unfortunately ordered to do. That's not to say that there aren't some sadistic assholes who enjoy getting rough, but I truly believe that doesn't aptly describe most cops throughout the country.

But back to those giving the orders. That's the real problem. And when I woke up this morning and saw what had happened, the very first thing I thought of was a segment of Matt Taibbi's latest piece for Rolling Stone on Occupy Wall Street. This sums up almost perfectly my issue with what the police are doing in regard to the protests. It's not even so much that they're making life difficult for those peaceably rallying against the current condition of the global economy and the government -- it's that they're not making life the least bit difficult for those who actually collapsed the global economy and bought the government in the first place.

"I originally was very uncomfortable with the way the protesters were focusing on the NYPD as symbols of the system. After all, I thought, these are just working-class guys from the Bronx and Staten Island who have never seen the inside of a Wall Street investment firm, much less had anything to do with the corruption of our financial system.

But I was wrong. The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government 'committed' to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.

This is a profound statement about who law enforcement works for in this country. What happened on Wall Street over the past decade was an unparalleled crime wave. Yet at most, maybe 1,500 federal agents were policing that beat – and that little group of financial cops barely made any cases at all. Yet when thousands of ordinary people hit the streets with the express purpose of obeying the law and demonstrating their patriotism through peaceful protest, the police response is immediate and massive. There have already been hundreds of arrests, which is hundreds more than we ever saw during the years when Wall Street bankers were stealing billions of dollars from retirees and mutual-fund holders and carpenters unions through the mass sales of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

It's not that the cops outside the protests are doing wrong, per se, by patrolling the parks and sidewalks. It's that they should be somewhere else. They should be heading up into those skyscrapers and going through the file cabinets to figure out who stole what, and from whom. They should be helping people get their money back. Instead, they're out on the street, helping the Blankfeins of the world avoid having to answer to the people they ripped off."

By the way, a judge has apparently already ordered that the Occupy Wall Street protesters -- minus their encampments -- be allowed back into Zuccotti Park. So in the end all last night's raid did was strengthen the movement and its resolve. It served no other purpose.

Adding: If you're not bothered by the treatment of the OWS protesters in Zuccotti Park, the way the raid went down -- not simply under cover of darkness but with reporters cordoned off and air-space over the park restricted to prevent news chopper coverage -- is not only questionable but fucking unconscionable.

Not-So-Deep in the Heart of Texas

Matt Taibbi takes apart the ingratiating Sears mannequin that is Rick Perry in his new piece for Rolling Stone:

"But this is America, remember, where one should never underestimate shallow. And Rick Perry brings shallow to a new level. He is very gifted in that regard. He could be the Adolf Hitler of shallow.

Perry's campaign is still struggling to recover from the kind of spectacular, submarine-at-crush-depth collapse seldom seen before in the history of presidential politics. The governor went from presumptive front-runner to stammering talk-show punch line seemingly in the speed of a single tweet, rightly blasted for being too incompetent even to hold his own in televised debates with a half-bright pizza salesman like Herman Cain and a goggle-eyed megachurch Joan of Arc like Michele Bachmann. But such superficial criticisms of his weirdly erratic campaign demeanor don't even begin to get at the root of why we should all be terrified of Perry and what he represents. After all, you have to go pretty far to stand out as a whore and a sellout when you come from a state that has produced such luminaries in the history of political corruption as LBJ, Karl Rove and George W. Bush. But Rick Perry has managed to set a scary new low in the annals of opportunism, turning Texas into a swamp of political incest and backroom dealing on a scale not often seen this side of the Congo or Sierra Leone.

In an era when there's exponentially more money in politics than we've ever seen before, Perry is the candidate who is exponentially more willing than we've ever seen before to whore himself out for that money. On the human level he is a nonpersonality, an almost perfect cipher – a man whose only discernible passion is his extreme willingness to be whatever someone will pay him to be, or vote for him to be. Even scarier, the religious community around which he has chosen to pull his human chameleon act features some of the most extreme end-is-nigh nutcases in America, the last people you want influencing the man with the nuclear football. Perry is a human price tag – 'Being There' meets 'Left Behind.' And sometimes there's nothing more dangerous than nothing at all."

I think Taibbi may be the only guy in the world who can mention Hitler in an argument without technically violating Godwin's Law -- and the only guy who can actually outdo a Hitler reference by bringing up Hannibal Lecter in the same piece.

Assistant Quote of the Day

"Cantor has demonstrated a remarkable ability to combine complete ignorance of practically every major issue with the unctuous personality of a third-string maitre d’ at a fourth-string steakhouse."

-- Charles Pierce in a hilariously brilliant must-read post for Esquire

For his part, Taibbi is going to town on the fact that the usual far-right blowhards like Rush Limbaugh are losing their shit over both how troublesome the Occupy Wall Street movement has been to contain and destroy -- and how it's now forcing even the Eric Cantors of the world to kiss its collective ass. Limbaugh and his ilk are doing everything in their power to demonize this movement -- and the reality is that it's not working one bit.

Rolling Stone: Taibblog: Why Rush Limbaugh Is Freaking Out About Occupy Wall Street/10.18.11

Moneyball

Matt Taibbi rightfully lambastes the hypocrisy inherent in the University of Miami football "scandal":

"Objectively speaking, there’s no logical reason why it should be wrong to pay a star football player who’s helping the University of Miami secure a multimillion-dollar TV deal. But the NCAA says it’s wrong, and its officials even wrote a complex series of rules to back themselves up – and, unbelievably, the entire sportswriting community buys the myth.

When stories like this Shapiro thing come out, about teenagers who are caught making the mistake of actually accepting pay for their labor, every pompous, finger-wagging dimwit asshole in the sportscasting world –- and there are a lot of those -- naturally has to sound the moral alarm."

I went to U.M., and even at the time, when the words "Hurricanes" and "football" were never uttered in the same sentence without the word "dynasty" -- and rarely without the word "assholes" -- I couldn't have really cared less about college football. Not saying I don't love football; I do, actually. NCAA football is just one of those things I've never really allowed myself to become a slave to fretting over one way or the other. That said, is the U.M. scandal honestly all that big a deal? Great, so some criminal gave a bunch of kids a leg-up in the grotesque lifestyle our entire culture has programmed them to strive for and which they were almost sure to become the next arbiters of anyway. Are we really gonna pretend that the greed that drives today's college sports is somehow of a higher moral caliber than the greed that drives professional sports? Jesus, that's a laughable conceit. Talk about misplaced righteous indignation.

Although, I really love Taibbi's take on ESPN blabber-putz Colin Cowherd:

"Cowherd, for whom a jewel-encrusted throne thirty feet high is undoubtedly already being constructed in raging sportscaster blowhard Valhalla, went one further – saying these kids should have been more like Jesus, who after all didn’t mind being poor."

Disgust Among Yourselves

A few of the better comments about the dismal debt deal from the past 24 hours:

"Today, the markets are breathing a sigh of relief because Washington managed to agree before it sparked an unnecessary financial crisis. But we could be celebrating an agreement that actually did what was necessary to speed the recovery now and reduce the deficits that matter. Congress may be patting itself on the back because it didn't needlessly wreck the global financial system, but that's not evidence of success. It's evidence of how terribly they have failed us. And the fact that so many are celebrating this deal only goes to show how used to their failures we have become."

-- Ezra Klein in the Washington Post

"In the long run... Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy?"

-- Paul Krugman in the New York Times

"The right wing should ditch the tricorn hats and replace them with mirrored sunglasses. They truly are Banana Republicans."

-- Paul Begala in the Daily Beast

"The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn't fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time -- as fixed fights go, you don't see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did -- but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive. We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening."

-- Matt Taibbi on his Rolling Stone blog

"In the August recess, the heat legislators encounter back home won’t come from the weather alone. The Tea Party captured the populist anger in 2010, representing a small fraction of the population. In 2012, legislators in both parties may just encounter a populist uprising that represents an American majority."

-- Katrina vanden Heuvel in the Washington Post



"What the fuck?!"

-- Jon Stewart

Are You Not Entertained?

Matt Taibbi nails the bigger implications of not simply the News Corp scandal but of the company's rise to power in the first place:

"Once the media business made the collective decision to always put money above editorial judgment, I think scandals like the News of the World affair became inevitable. Because once media companies abandoned the notion that their business was somehow different from other money-making businesses, that there were no longer places they wouldn’t go to generate product, it became inevitable that the corporate media game would become nothing more than an all-out, relentless quest for sensational, titillating material... When information equals money, and everybody in the business is all about money, pretty soon lines are going to be crossed to get information."

It's nothing short of staggering how often this connection can be brought up in any discussion of the modern media, but the 1976 film Network was so frighteningly dead-on that it can legitimately be wondered whether Paddy Chayefsky was some kind of honest-to-God prophet. Network imagined a world in which news and entertainment were one and the same and where the engine that powered each was the relentless pursuit of cash for the conglomerates that owned the media outlets and controlled the product they disseminated. As Taibbi says, what we're witnessing now is the corporate media-for-money stranglehold taken to its logical, and sickening, conclusion.

Quote of the Day

"Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children's show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing 'launch' instead of 'lunch' inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office."

-- Matt Taibbi in a piece in Rolling Stone called "Michele Bachmann's Holy War"

Quote of the Day

"Defenders of Goldman have been quick to insist that while the bank may have had a few ethical slips here and there, its only real offense was being too good at making money. We now know, unequivocally, that this is bullshit. Goldman isn't a pudgy housewife who broke her diet with a few Nilla Wafers between meals — it's an advanced-stage, 1,100-pound medical emergency who hasn't left his apartment in six years, and is found by paramedics buried up to his eyes in cupcake wrappers and pizza boxes. If the evidence in the Levin report is ignored, then Goldman will have achieved a kind of corrupt-enterprise nirvana. Caught, but still free: above the law."

-- Matt Taibbi in a predictably infuriating piece in the latest issue of Rolling Stone

Quote of the Day

"Good news on Osama bin Laden, and a good day for the families of 9/11 victims. Speaking personally, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been held up in a long line at an airport, and dreamed of the day OBL would be made to pay for every shoe and belt and hat he’s forced us all to remove over the years. Asshole."

-- Matt Taibbi

Assistants To the Quote of the Day

"A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist. Trump is no joke... (he is) the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success."

-- David Brooks on Donald Trump

"Brooks is like a stalker who isn’t ashamed to be caught wearing just a t-shirt and stroking his dong outside some starlet’s window, only the starlet in this case is the whole class of rich Wall Street douchebags he’s spent his whole life worshipping."

-- Matt Taibbi on David Brooks

Quote of the Day

"As America girds itself for another round of lunatic political infighting over which barely-respirating social program or urgently necessary federal agency must have their budgets permanently sacrificed to the cause of billionaires being able to keep their third boats in the water, it's important to point out just how scarce money isn't in certain corners of the public-spending universe. In the coming months, when you watch Republican congressional stooges play out the desperate comedy of solving America's deficit problems by making fewer photocopies of proposed bills, or by taking an ax to budgetary shrubberies like NPR or the SEC, remember Christy Mack and her fancy new carriage house. There is no belt-tightening on the other side of the tracks. Just a free lunch that never ends."

-- Matt Taibbi, in a new Rolling Stone piece called "The Real Housewives of Wall Street"

Quote of the Day Last Week

"Is it ever right to just wind up and let someone have it with all you've got? That's a question that I think has to be asked. It's certainly possible that we've all become too used to unrestrained rhetoric as a form of entertainment, and people like me live right in the middle of the guilt parabola there. Most all of us are grownups and can handle extreme argument, but clearly some people are not, and obviously I'm not just talking about Jared Loughner. To see that, all you have to do is attend almost any family gathering, where once-loving relationships have been completely lost because of the overheated right-left culture war. If real family relationships are being lost to this kind of political debate, if someone on TV can reach into your living room and break up your family without knowing anything about you or even knowing that you exist, that tells us that this mechanized mass-media rhetoric has been almost unimaginably successful at dehumanizing whole classes of people."

-- Matt Taibbi, posted over at his Rolling Stone blog not long after the Tucson shooting

Yeah, I'm late to the party with everything these days. Good news on the horizon, though, folks -- really good news. I'll be getting into it a little more over the next couple of days; suffice it to say, output here is likely to finally get back to respectable levels by this time next week.

Assistant To the Quote of the Day

"By the way, to that letter-writer from Tulsa who just teed off on me for blasting (ESPN's) Colin Cowherd over his comments on unions -- it's just come to my attention that Cowherd once called Mrs. Doubtfire the funniest movie of all time. So that's my answer to the question, "What makes you think you're any more qualified to talk about unions than Colin Cowherd?" Cowherd thinks Mrs. Doubtfire is the funniest movie ever -- that makes me more qualified than him to talk about anything at all. I mean anything -- physics, dessert recipes, the Carolingian dynasty, lesbian relationships, anything."

-- Matt Taibbi, via his Rolling Stone blog

Quote of the Day

"This is an abuse of power. It's a miscarriage of justice, and I still maintain that I am innocent. The criminalization of politics undermines our very system and I'm very disappointed in the outcome."

-- Convicted money launderer Tom DeLay

Translation: "How dare you convict me. I was a politician, therefore what qualifies as criminal behavior for everybody else is basically just, you know, the way the world works for guys like me."

Suck it, DeLay -- hope the Sisters treat you extra special in the laundry room.

By the way, my favorite description of Tom DeLay comes courtesy of Matt Taibbi, in his book Smells Like Dead Elephants:

"What made Tom DeLay different is that Tom DeLay was a little guy. He had more in common with Bill Clinton (whom not surprisingly he despised, probably precisely for this reason) than with Gingrich or Norquist or Bush. He came from the dirt of the South, with a drunken reprobate for a father and nothing but white trash in his family tree. Unlike Clinton, however, DeLay was not blessed with personal gifts -- looks, brains, charm. Instead of Oxford and Yale, DeLay dropped out of Baylor after being inveighed in a childish campus-vandalism scandal. His pre-politics career as a rat and bug killer was marked by a continual failure that has to be considered shocking in a state so teeming with vermin. An exterminator failing in southeast Texas is like a pimp failing in Bangkok during tourist season."

So, yeah, a little something to be thankful for today.

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.