Downcastmysoul

Today I just made a discovery:  in two places where I’ve lived:  the apartment where I live now and the apartment I rented in the 1990s are almost right next door to fancy lodging.  In my old efficiency apartment the hotel was right next door, now, in my current apartment I have an understated but elegant B and B a block away.  Since my “neighbors” on this block rarely move, the need to move “fresh” personnel and equipment arises.  Also I do not notice where my “neighbors” shack up these parasites to freedom.  They must be staying at the hotel.  My “neighbors” are still perps that watch me and I recognize their voices on my V2k sometimes, but, I’m thinking some of the operation is carried on at the hotel.

I followed a giant “perp white” truck to the B and B.  I was watching the truck anyway because it lingered too long at an intersection and did that weird indescribable driving that only perps do (like they are spies in a movie?) so I decided to see if the truck’s occupants were hanging around to break into my apartment when I left.  I followed the truck to the B and B where they were parked at the entrance checking in? for a long time.  Then, they drove s-l-o-w-l-y off and turned away from the hotel and the apt.  I didn’t see them parked around the B and B anywhere later so I assume they went out to tuck in an expensive dinner or rent some porn or something until the mind reading olympics begin later on.  The woman in the passenger seat looked like my estranged sister.  Do you think she came to “visit” me????  OMFG!!!  The bitch.  Doubtful.

Back to the topic, I think a study on another facet of Atlas Shrugged would be good.  I might include a small fragment of the “Morality of Death” at the end, but, I think Galt’s Speech, paragraph by paragraph is pretty dry.  I need to jazz it up and make it exciting.  I could create “characters” that Galt speaks to as if in a personal conversation but over the airwaves, or, we could pretend Galt had them in a room by themselves…The Morality of Life could be Howard Henry Hughes after 3 of the main heroes from Fountainhead/Atlas Shrugged:  Howard Roark, Henry Rearden and Hugh Akston.  We’ll call him H³.  I could call the Morality of Death Lucius Leon Lilly after the devil, a little perp I have had to put up with, and the company that makes Prozac® and that horrible concoction Cymbalta® that introduces antidepressant users to antipsychotic drugs…ewwww.  He’ll be called the Third or III.  The compromiser in the middle could be called Jake Liberman after Jacob in the Bible who struggled with sin against God and hatred for his brother, and Joe Lieberman after the biggest pussy and excuse for a former Democrat (behind Ben Nighthorse Campbell) there ever was.  (Maybe he even contributed to Kerry’s 2004 loss, along with Ralph Nader, maybe.  Of course, all “elections” are planned in advance by the World Powers anyway).

Today, I’d like to look at the three sacrificial lambs of Atlas Shrugged.  Eddie Willers, Tony the “wet nurse”, and Cheryl, Jim Taggart’s wife.  Each of these characters suffer greatly in this world for their moral principles.  They are not the major heroes but each one sacrifices his very life for morality and individuality.

Eddie suffers for love, Tony suffers when he wakes up from being brain dead and can no longer serve the looters, and Cheryl suffers for her innocence and purity concerning her husband Jim and the world at large.  I see Cheryl being most like a ti who first realizes what is happening to them and cannot handle it and has no tools to fight it nor the perseverance to “just stick around” and see what happens.  She forgets that she has forged a new relationship with Dagny who could help her, and ends up in a blow-out scene of self-destruction.  Let us examine each character individually.

In the beginning of Atlas Shrugged, Eddie has a portent for the future.  He remembers a tree being struck by lightning when he was a child and later notices it is rotten to the core and only the outer bark/wood had held it up.  It is a profoundly traumatic experience for him and he never speaks of it.  He passes the tree again at the start of the book. The tree represents the USA on the brink of death:  rotten to the core with rings of rot spreading  outwards until the whole trunk is eaten by its cancer.

“It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel.  The trunk was only an empty shell:  its heart had rotted away long ago;  there was nothing inside–just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind.  the living power was gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it…his shock came when he stood very quietly looking inot the black hole of the trunk.  It was an immense betrayal–the more terrible because he could not grasp what had been betrayed…He never spoke about it to anyone then or since.”

Eddie is madly yet patiently in love with Dagny since early childhood:  his love for her weathers her 3 loves and never dies.  He dies with it.  He is the person who talks to Galt (who poses as a common worker) in the cafeteria when Galt, lovesick over Dagny himself, goes to check up on her covertly.

In the beginning of the book he is 33 years old and 45 at the end.  He works for Dagny and is one of the last if not the last moral person to work for Taggart Transcontinental.  He has to take crap from his childhood nemesis, Jim Taggart, who is also his boss, and watch his childhood friend Francisco D’Anconia, take Dagny as a lover before Galt does later on after her affair with Henry Rearden.  He keeps getting kicked but never gives up until the end when all is lost (unless Galt comes and rescues him) and he collapses sobbing on the train tracks waiting for the desert to kill him since his train has broken and all the other passengers have left in a COVERED WAGON train, a final indignity for modern Eddie.  He is like many other fighters of evil:  he goes until he can’t anymore and just dies on the spot hoping his service will earn him his Reward (from an imaginary God?  Let’s hope not).

Tony is a common figure on the American landscape then and now:  he is a bright, liberal “college boy” who decides to spend a life working for the government, or some sort of human service charity.  In Atlas Shrugged he materializes as the government’s representative at Rearden’s factory to see that Rearden follows all the government’s endless regulations regarding the production of his Steel.  Something starts happening to Tony “the wet nurse”, however.  He observes Rearden and becomes a believer!  He has an intellectual/moral awakening and acts at the last minute to try and defend the factory from looter-hired thugs taking part in violence concerning a pay raise.  He loses his life in a tear wrenching scene cradled in Rearden’s arms.

His death is doubly tragic because as he is dying in agony he realizes he wants to live.  Rearden had become a father to him and Tony was there with him at the factory every day as Rearden himself had an awakening to what was going on around him and how he was being taken advantage of by his family and the government.  Two on a journey:  one does not make it, the other triumphs in the end displaying his role as hero in the rescue of John Galt.  Henry becomes what Tony cannot.

 Rearden is a calm patient man who kept his anger to himself but the rage and grief he felt at Tony’s death shows how his thought process develops him into the man he becomes.

“He walked, as if this were his form of last tribute and funeral procession for the young life that had ended in his arms.  He felt an anger too intense to identify except as a pressure within him:  it was a desire to kill.

The desire was not directed at the unknon thug who had sent a bullet through the boy’s body, or at the looting bureaucrats who had hired the thug to dit it, but at the boy’s teachers, who had delivered him disarmed, to the thug’s gun–at the soft safe assassins of college classrooms who, incompetent to answer the queries of a quest for reason, took pleasure in crippling the young minds entrustued to their care.  REMEMBER, REARDEN HAS NO SCHOOLING AND STARTS IN A COAL MINE.  HE IS ESPECIALLY HORRIFIED AT THE STATE OF “EDUCATION”.

 Somewhere, he thought, there was this boy’s mother, who had trembled with protective concern over his groping steps, while teaching him to walk, who had measured his baby formulas with a jeweler’s caution, who had obeyed with a zealot’s fervor the latest words of science on his diet and hygiene, protecting his unhardened body from germs–then had sent him to be turned into a tortured neurotic by the men who taught him that he had no mind and must never attempt to think.  Hd she fed him tainted refuse, he though, had she mixed poison into his food, it would have been more kind and less fatal.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident efforts on teaching their fledglings to fly–yet man, whose tool of survival is the MIND, does not merely fial to teach a child to think, but devotes the child’s education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

From the first catch-phrases flung at a child to the last, it is like a series of shocks to freeze his motor, to undercut the power of his consciousness.  ‘Don’t ask too many questions, children should be seen and not heard!’ OR, YOU HAVE 2 EARS AND ONLY ONE MOUTH REMEMBER THAT.  ‘Who are you to think?  It’s so because I said so!’ (MAY FAVORITE) ‘Don’t try to understand, believe.’  ‘Don’t rebel, adjust,’ ‘Don’t stand out, belong,’ ‘Don’t struggle, compromise,’ ‘Your heart is more important than your mind,’ ‘Who are you to know?  Your parents know best,’ ‘Who are you to know, society knows best,’–’Who are you to know?  The bureaucrats know best!’–’Who are you to object?  All values are relative!’–’Who are you to want to escape a thug’s bullet?  That’s only personal prejudice!’

Men would shudder, he thought, if they saw a mother bird plucking the feathers from the wings of her young, then pushing himout of the nest to struggle for survival–yet that was what they did to their children.

Armed with nothing but meaningless phrases, this boy had been thrown to fight for existence, he had hobbled and groped thorugh a brief, doomed effrt, he had screamed his indignant, bewildered protest–and had perished in his first attempt to soar on his mangled wings.

But a different breed of teachers had once existed, he thought, and had reared the men who created this country;  he thought that mothers should set out on their knees to look for men like Hugh Akston, to find them and beg them to return.”

The third sacrificial lamb is Cheryl Taggart.  Cheryl is a nice girl from a poor family.  She flees to the city for a better life.  She is also very intelligent yet very naive and innocent of the ways of the world.  She falls for Jim Taggart as he visits the shop where she works.  He sees her as a “pity date”, and, later, as his “waif wife” who will remain quiet and innocent for him–while Cheryl sees Jim as her Hero until she marries and lives with him for awhile.  As she settles in with him she sees his “feelings” for the poor are just projections of his “poor” self.  She sees his cowardice and is beginning to rethink her anger towards Dagny.

Here I will stop for a second to save.  Don’t want to lose this to perp magic.  shazzaam. poof.  Just like a post I had awhile back.