Reading in USA Schools / A2A by that NSA-attracting author name

[Anville Azote]

On 3/27/06, Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> In her defense, Soviet Russia was a pretty harsh place to grow up
>

It seems like Vladimir Nabokov lost more than she did, and he didn't
quite turn out the same way.  See, e.g., D. Barton Johnson's article
"Strange Bedfellows: Ayn Rand and Vladimir Nabokov", which he recently
posted to nabokv-l apropos a discussion there:

http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0602&L=NABOKV-L&P=R14198&I=-3

> she (Ayn Rand) influenced also Alan Greenspan at one point, I think,
> back when he was pro-gold
>

>From The Onion's "American Voices" section, on October 27 2005,
entitled "Greenspan retiring":

"He's irreplaceable. This Bernanke guy may be an anti-inflation fiscal
conservative, but you just can't run the Fed if you've never screwed
Ayn Rand."

More seriously, the Greenspan-Rand connection is documented in Michael
Shermer's *Why People Believe Weird Things*, in Shermer's essay
describing the cultish traits of the Objectivist movement in its
late-Sixties heyday.  Shermer himself likes Rand's ideas quite a bit
(markets are "the freer the better", etc.), except the bit about a
moral standard inherent in the universe from which all judgments can
be deduced, like some mutant Euclid of ethics.

"There are more Rand critics than followers," sez Michael.

An older version of this essay can be found online, for example here:

http://www.2think.org/02_2_she.shtml