John Galt and Me

Here’s the kind of person I am: I read Atlas Shrugged as a joke.

Political satire is one of my favourite things, and this novel from the 1950’s has been gathering a lot of snark potential. Members of the Tea Party keep name-dropping Ayn Rand, Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin requires his staffers to read the book, and now a film version is being released on – you guessed it – 15 April. (The deadline for taxes is actually 18 April this year but whatever.)

One day as I was goofing off on Twitter, I had an idea. I’d get the book from the library (the socialist library, HA!) and live-tweet my reactions as I read it – kind of a “Mystery Science Theatre 3000” thing for my liberal friends. I was so gleeful about it that I went to the library that same afternoon.

And that’s when I discovered that Atlas Shrugged is 1,168 pages long.

The joke was on me, but I’d already announced my plans to everybody – I couldn’t back out now. I took the heavy paperback home with me and got started. One month, eight days and $7.00 in library fines later, here’s what I discovered.

The story begins with a riddle that is repeated dozens of times: “Who is John Galt?” In a nutshell, John Galt is a god-like industrialist and inventor who gets fed up with the evils of taxes and government regulation. He decides to go on strike and convinces all the manly industrialists of America to join him. They abandon their businesses and hide in a remote canyon in Colorado, leaving the rest of the world to fall to pieces without them.

Galt’s last convert is Dagny Taggart, the fearless railroad executive who fights to keep her family’s once-mighty empire from collapsing. As she tries to figure out why all the competent workers are vanishing, she’s hindered at every step by government officials who want to outlaw profit and force the wealthy to support the poor.

First, what I liked about it – and despite all my complaining on Twitter, I did enjoy parts of it. Engineering and technology are fascinating, after all, and I’m a sucker for a stubborn female character in a well-tailored suit.

Atlas Shrugged is full of pride in good efficient work, people striding around with their sleeves rolled up, which struck a chord with me. Rand can be rather poetic when writing about the power of machines, and her descriptions of the high-speed train on the John Galt Line are great fun for someone who loves train travel as much as I do. It was also intriguing to watch Dagny figure out which businessman Galt would target next and try to get there first.

But those flashes of enjoyment were buried in chapter after chapter of frustration. The writing is clumsy. It goes on way too long, it repeats itself constantly and it’s full of rambling speeches – funny, coming from a writer who worshiped efficiency and self-control. And the tone made me feel like I was being personally yelled at for all the bad things that were happening.

The plot and characterisation are ridiculous. I don’t care how much of a commie bastard you are, you don’t go around yelling “You should reward me because I’m worthless!” And I had to laugh at how everything obligingly self-destructs the moment an industrialist disappears. Buildings crack, roads crumble, machines break down. As for the people left behind, within a year or two they’ve almost forgotten how to feed themselves.

I understand that it’s hard to tell a good story and push an agenda at the same time. Even Dickens couldn’t always manage it. So I might have been more forgiving if the political message was interesting.

It isn’t. There are no shades of grey in this book. You have heroes of industry one side and greedy looters and moochers on the other. Industrialists are always right, government officials and humanitarians are always corrupt, and compromise between those two extremes is impossible. Occasionally Rand mentions the valid arguments against unfettered capitalism – some things in life are more important than money, for example, or scientific research may suffer if it has to rely on profit. But rather than debating those questions seriously, she just voices them through evil and/or stupid characters who really just hate the wealthy for being better than them.

In this version of American history, privilege and exploitation are either laughed off or ignored. “Every man is free to rise as far as he’s able or willing,” John Galt declares during his epic 70-page radio address, “but it’s only the degree to which he thinks that determines the degree to which he’ll rise.” Discrimination based on race, ethnicity or gender is no excuse. Just look at Dagny, who breezed past the glass ceiling as if it never existed.

So if you are unable to rise above poverty, it is because you are a failure who has contributed nothing to the greatness of the country. End of story. No mention of Native Americans robbed of their land, or Polish immigrants toiling in the coal mines, or Chinese labourers building the railway tracks on subsistence wages. As for African-American slaves, I actually wonder if Ayn Rand forgot about them. The closest she comes to addressing social injustice is saying that if an industrialist profits by dishonourable means, he’ll only get short-term success and sometimes he’ll feel really guilty about it.

This approach is so predictable it stopped provoking me before I was two-thirds of the way through. When Dagny decides to leave the paradise of Galt’s valley because she still believes the world is worth fighting for, I should have felt intrigued or conflicted. Instead, I was bored. Galt and the other men pat her on the head and tell her they’ll be waiting for her when she comes crawling back, and Dagny knows they’re right even as she’s leaving, and so the book drags on for another few hundred pages.

Fortunately, I still had the jaw-dropping messages about women to liven things up.

I thought I was prepared – Atlas Shrugged was written in the Fifties, after all – but the level of sexism in this book is stunning. For all her brilliance and achievements, Dagny just can’t be fulfilled or happy without a man in her life. And not just any man, but one who is strong enough to make her submit to him completely.

As she’s passed from one industry titan to another and finally to John Galt himself, we are told that a real man only sleeps with women who will act as a mirror for his own greatness; and a real woman will find such a man irresistible. She’ll desire him so much that he won’t even have to ask for her consent. He can knock her to the floor and degrade her how and when he chooses and she’ll love every minute of it. But if a better man comes along, the woman will desire him instead and the inferior man will accept this without a word of complaint.

Think of that, ladies, and then imagine what an Ayn Rand fanboy would be like on a date.

Despite everything, and denying the temptation of all the nuanced 300-page books I could have been reading, I did manage to get all the way to the end. Two powerful images from the final pages stick with me. One is good-hearted Eddie Willers, the closest thing we get to an average person, abandoned in the ruins of America with no hope and no dignity. The other is a judge in Galt’s valley crossing out sections of the US Constitution with a pen. Whenever some Tea Partier mentions Atlas Shrugged, I feel like pointing to those images and asking if that’s the kind of future they want.

I also feel like asking when they’re planning to disappear to Colorado and whether they need help packing, but that’s just me.