Way back in 1967, my family moved across town, and that fall I started 3rd grade classes at a new school. Our very first assignment was to do a report on any book we'd read over summer vacation.
I'd read a bunch of books over the summer. I'd virtually devoured an entire box of old SF&F pulps of my dad's. And I'd run across a book in the very bottom of that box, that had found its way into the same box as the others, purely because it too was a work of science fiction. But beyond that, it was wholly unlike the other books in my dad's collection of sci-fi pulps and paperbacks.
And because it was different, it stood out in my mind. Whereas all the other stories kind of ran together in my memory, this one I remembered as a distinct and separate whole. To do my report on it any of those other books would require me to skim over the material once more to refresh my memory of the details. But this book still stood out in my mind so well that I could easily do my report wholly from memory alone.
And thus began the shitstorm of my book report on Ayn Rand's novella "Anthem".
It became a shitstorm, because at first none of my teachers believed that I'd actually read the book. I was, after all, only 9 or so, and Rand was considered college level reading. They didn't buy that I'd actually read it, which lead to accusations of cheating and the like, which in turn lead to counter-threats of lawsuits and the like. And so forth, and so on.
The point is this: My exposure to Rand goes way back; back to my early childhood. Back so far that her ideas had a significant impact on my formative development. Moreover, I enjoyed her books. And her essays. I'm probably the youngest subscriber ever to The Objectivist, and was most certainly the youngest member of the audience during her 1971 appearance at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which I'd somehow managed to pester my father into taking me to.
By the time I was 13 or 14, I'd read every word the woman had published to date.
Thing is... if you're at all familiar with me, you know I'm about as liberal as they come, and that there are few political movements I find more ridiculous than Libertarianism. I'm just about as unlike a typical Randroid as you can get.
So what the frack happened?
Well, when I was a sophomore in High School, and decided to re-read some of Rand's heftier tomes, I finally realized what a crappy writer she was. It wasn't just that her dialogue was terrible, or that her stories were full of plot holes and absurd leaps of logic, but that the philosophy that made her stories stand out so much in my mind, was pure unadulterated horseshit. It was so naive I could scarcely believe it.
I came to the conclusion that the only real virtue of selfishness inherent in her philosophy was the virtual guarantee that it's practitioners would be among the first against the wall when the Revolution finally came. Moreover, it seemed obvious to me that her philosophy, if put into widespread practice virtually guaranteed that such a Revolution would inevitably occur. In fact, it would make such a Revolution necessary.
