Sinking Ayn Rand - Lessons from the Titanic….

Since we are coming up on the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic.  I thought this would be an appropriate way to commemorate an event, that no matter how terrible, was one of the defining moments of the 20th century.

Thomas Frank - Pity the Billionaire:

First some true confessions.  I've been doing a lot of reading over the past couple of months.  A brief illness had put me off my game for a while and somehow a good read keeps the mind vital without taxing it as much as a steady diet of writing.  (In other words, I have been lazy for the past few weeks - but only for medicinal purposes.)  During that time I worked my way through Thomas Frank's  "Pity the Billionaire".

Frank has some very cogent arguments about how the far-right operates and how reality has morphed into an almost alternate universe from the rest of us.  Its a place where the grass is blue and the sky is green.  In that topsy-turvy upside-down world one of the most glaring ironies is the resurgence of Ayn Rand.   After all - corporate corruption and regulatory complacency had almost brought the entire world economy to its knees.  That should have been enough to consign copies of Atlas Shrugged to the paper shredders for the next half-century.  But no…quite the contrary.

Ayn Rand For Dummies:

Rand contends that the true heroes are the billionaires. The talented and few.  They are the masters of the universe.  They are our betters. They make ships like the Titanic possible.  But they are also the victims.  They are victims of our ingratitude.  Our inability to appreciate how they have made our lives better makes them so. They employ the people who built the ship and lifted them from homelessness and an early grave to mere poverty.  The people should be grateful to the likes of these billionaires.  They are the producers.  So they made a few mistakes and almost pushed us into a second Great Depression that would have made the 1930s seem like a cakewalk - no biggie.  After all,  they are the JOB CREATORS!  And now the job creators are on strike, refusing to hire because we, the ungrateful public have made their lives so "uncertain".

Mitt Romney - An Empty Suit with an Etch a Sketch....

Thanks to his cadre of talented campaign advisors, Mitt Romney has allowed us to see the man behind the curtain, revealing himself for what he truly is...an empty suit with an etch-a-sketch.  The substance doesn't matter and words are easily rewritten to match the sentiments of the constituency of the moment.   The opinions and needs of the electorate certainly don't matter. Just package your into an attractive or at least palatable wrapping and the content becomes irrelevant.  "I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign... it's almost like an etch-a-sketch. You can shake it up and start all over." Sadly, that pretty much sums it up.

In a perverted way, perhaps we owe the Romney campaign debt of gratitude for being honest enough to tell us the truth.   The needs and priorities of "we the people" ceased to be of any concern to Washington insiders years ago.  The Romney campaign is simply honest enough to dispense with any pretense.

At the end of the day, the etch-a-sketch with an empty suit is a pathetic metaphor for what our representative government has become.

© 2012 -   Ruthmarie G. Hicks http://the bodypoliticUSA.com - All rights reserved.