Just for the record ...

[jbor]

I'm no "follower" of Ayn Rand -- I wrote an undergraduate thesis in 1981
which was completely scornful of both the literary qualities of her fiction
and of all the "philosophical" claptrap she wrote, which noted the enormous
popularity and influence, particularly in North America, of her major novels
and the insidious (well, fairly transparent, really) way in which a "greed
is good"-type ideology is transmitted through them, and which listed some of
the prominent political and cultural figures (eg. an Australian PM, the
Çanadian heavy metal band Rush) who were openly singing her virtues at the
time. Soon after completing the thesis I read Pynchon's satire of her in
Mafia Winsome in _V._, which is both funny and incisive, and which suggests
that Pynchon had read her _The Fountainhead_ at least.

Though Pynchon made no public comment about the international forces
deployed against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, or against
Saddam's regime in Iraq, I imagine he would support global initiatives to
eliminate terrorism. I seriously doubt that he supports Bush or Bush's
government (or, for that matter, the Democrats either), and I doubt that he
supported the invasion of Iraq. These do remain moot speculations, however,
because he simply hasn't said, despite having every opportunity to do so had
he wanted to. More credit to him for realising he's no expert in the field
of foreign affairs, for knowing that political polemics is a mug's game, and
for refraining from using his not inconsiderable intellectual cachet for
meanly propagandistic purposes, in my opinion.

best