Cartoonist Matt Bors has another excellent comic, this time in response to the Fort Hood shootings. Click on the photo to see it full-size on his web site.
Ayn Rand: Overwrought Garbage Becomes a Worldview
“Atlas Shrugged” never offered any serious alternative to the social order; whatever Rand’s intention, the novel was not a call to arms but an invitation to escape. The book could never, in fact, have been any shorter, because it needed to feel like a whole substitute world, a full-blown reassuring place—you’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not—into which the discoverer can jump, as into a magic wardrobe, and then live, happily, airlessly, for weeks of reading and rereading.”
Thomas Mallon has an entertaining takedown of Ayn Rand’s caterwauling, tone-deaf fiction in the New Yorker. A subscription is required to read the whole thing, but it’s worth tracking down, if only for the line, “The O. Henry she describes bears more resemblance to the candy bar than to the story writer.”
A more thorough takedown of the Goddess of Greed is available in Ayn Rand: The Comic.
Pandora and Prometheus
FLYMF’s Greatest Hits contributor Glen Golightly made a film, “Pandora and Prometheus,” which screened Oct. 22, 2009 at the Hollywood’s Egyptian Theatre as part of Flicker L.A.s Attack of the 50 Foot Reels festival. The movie was shot on Super 8 film and edited in camera, meaning the sucker was shot in the sequence you see it. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
Goat Is Watching Baby
Today’s Wondermark made me laugh. (Click the image to read it.)
U.S. Rep Shares Progressive Frustration
As the New York Times reports, Oregon Representative Earl Blumenauer shares the same frustration many progressives do with stalled advocacy and a sense of being taken for granted.
Instead of forging ahead, Mr. Blumenauer, 61, finds himself fighting to retain one of the touchstones for liberals this year, a public insurance option in the health care overhaul, and is watching his hopes of curbing global warming grow cold in the Senate. Mr. Blumenauer, a seven-term congressman, is bracing for a tough vote on sending more troops to Afghanistan while he frets about the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay remaining open.
One caveat, though. If anyone thinks that there has been “an unexpected level of Republican opposition,” well, then they’re really unforgivably naive. Obama’s misstepped in attempting to sincerely partner with people whose self-interest lies in seeing him fail.