Corey Robin, in an article written last year for The Nation, (reprinted at Alternet.org on June 7, 2010), "Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It?" stated the point almost perfectly:
"On her own, Rand is of little significance. It is only her resonance in American culture--and the unsavory associations her resonance evokes--that makes her of any interest. She's not unlike the 'second-hander' described by Roark: 'Their reality is not within them, but somewhere in that space which divides one human body from another. Not an entity, but a relation"The second-hander acts, but the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person.' For once, it seems, he knew whence he spoke.
But after all the Nietzsche is said and Aristotle is done, we're still left with a puzzle about Rand: how could such a mediocrity, not just a second-hander but a second-rater, exert such a continuing influence on the culture at large?"
http://www.alternet.org/story/147133/
Like Christian fundamentalists with the Bible, I believe that Ayn Rand "cherry picked" those parts of Aristotle and Nietzsche which supported her viewpoint, and ignored those parts that clashed with her Weltanschauung. Although she claimed a degree in "Social Pedagogy" (Social Studies) from the university in Leningrad, her knowledge of history seems to me to be very myopic, and totally lacking in either breadth or depth, and her knowledge of American History seems limited to what she learned watching movies in Hollywood.
But most of all, her lack of tolerance for other points of view, even within the Conservative movement in her day--as Jennifer Burns writes in her book Goddess of the Market --mark her now and forever as someone riding Margaret Chase Smith's Four Horsemen of Calumny to their ultimate destination, and dragging too much of our nation with her into Hell.
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