Missile Defense.
Righties are dense.
Baucus booed.
Workers screwed.
Discuss.

At The New Republic, Jonathan Chait reviews two new books about Ayn Rand — Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns and Ayn Rand and the World She Made by Anne C. Heller. Via Burns and Heller, Chait’s review nails Randism and the Randbots who still worship at her altar. Just a snip:

When Rand condemned a piece of literature, art, or music (she favored Romantic Russian melodies from her youth and detested Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms), her followers adopted the judgment. Since Rand disliked facial hair, her admirers went clean-shaven. When she bought a new dining room table, several of them rushed to find the same model for themselves.

Chait calls Rand’s ideas “inverted Marxism.” He notes the degree to which her novels “oddly mirrored the Socialist Realist style, with two-dimensional characters serving as ideological props.” Like Marxism, Rand’s Objectivism “failed for the same reason that communism failed: it tried to make its people live by the dictates of a totalizing ideology that failed to honor the realities of human existence.”

Yes, Rand hated Marxism, and her ideas were relentlessly reactionary to Marxism. But because Rand’s life and work were shaped entirely by reaction, she was never really free from the things she opposed. Marxism still ruled and defined her, even as she imagined herself liberated from it. Hers was an utter failure to find equanimity.

Anyway, the larger point of both books is the degree to which Rand’s unbalanced ideas still haunt our political discourse. In particular, we are hobbled by the idea “that the United States is divided into two classes–the hard-working productive elite, and the indolent masses leeching off their labor by means of confiscatory taxes and transfer programs.”

(An aside: Culturally, IMO there is something profoundly un-American about Randism. Although we’ve always had our Calvinistic undercurrents, through most of American popular culture since the age of Andrew Jackson our national mythos was about the triumph of common men — yes, usually men — over the inbred, indolent elite. Americans may have admired George Washington, but we identified with Davey Crockett, Daniel Boone, and Huckleberry Finn. Our ur-myth was about the savvy, weather-beaten cowpoke who proves to be a better man than the wealthy, educated city slicker. Now our ur-myth is about winning American Idol.

But notice how the once-admired cowpoke has been replaced by the likes of Joe the Plumber, a man plucked from obscurity not because of his weather-beaten independence but for his usefulness to the elite cause. Wurzelbacher became a pet of the elite because he embodies their sterotypes of a working man while parroting their worldview. In truth, he is close to being a white Step’n Fetchit.)

Chait’s review goes on to demolish most of the assumptions on which Randism is based, particularly the myth of the “self-made man” and the belief that wealthy people are wealthy because they work harder than poor people and therefore are more deserving.

Now, the part that intrigues me is the way so many obviously ordinary, poorly educated and un-affluent Americans have somehow bought into this nonsense. Think of the people presented in the video in the previous post. There is nothing “elite” about this crew. In large part, the rank-and-file of the tea partiers are from the “indolent masses” so devalued by Randbots. IMO what we’re seeing here are two different social-political pathologies finding common ground in opposing progressivism.

The tea-partiers also are locked inside an ideology that says some people are more deserving than others. But in their world “deserving” is not defined by wealth and status, but by race and culture. This is discussed by Michael Lind in “Uninsured Like Me.” See also, Glenn Greenwald’s “Who are the undeserving “others” benefiting from expanded government actions?”

What’s beneath wingnut hysteria is not just racial hatred but a sense of racial/nativist entitlement. They are obsessed with the idea that progressivism means taking something away from them and giving it to people who are undeserving (i.e., not white, especially not native-born white).

Having come from a working-class white background myself, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met in my life who were neither wealthy nor especially industrious, and who were invested with the usual number of faults and moral weaknesses, but who saw themselves as being uncommonly hard-working and virtuous because they were white people with jobs. Such people deny their own vulnerabilities — economic catastrophe couldn’t happen to them — and somehow identify with the self-interests of people who are far more wealthy and insulated than they are. Hence, working people without health insurance somehow are persuaded to oppose health care reform.

(Sign at Saturday’s 9/12 demonstration: “I work hard so Obama voters don’t have to.”)

Odds are that some minority of Saturday’s 9/12 crowd have no health insurance themselves. They are, in effect, choosing to do without decent health care for themselves than to share a benefit with the Other. They are disproportionately and irrationally obsessed with the issue of illegal immigrants getting a taxpayer-funded benefit, and they would rather sacrifice cost-effectiveness than begrudge so much as an aspirin to a migrant worker. As I wrote recently, we Americans are spiting ourselves to death.

So the Randbots and the 9/12ers view the world in different ways, but they’ve come together in lunatic solidarity nonetheless.

This toxic compound is all the more dangerous because it is funded by powerful corporate and media elites. Hendrik Hertzberg writes,

This sort of lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness. Many Republican officeholders, even some reputed moderates like Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, have obediently echoed the foul nonsense.

Our national forefathers vowed to create “a more perfect Union,” but we have never really overcome the divisions of race and class that have plagued us from the beginning. I’d like to close by pointing out that Canada is at least as racially diverse as the U.S., yet Canadians seem able to govern themselves sanely. In the Washington Post, Jonathan Malloy argues that what makes the difference between the U.S. and Canada is that the two nations are operating under different national myths. “Canadians, who have a highly fragile and internationally ignored national identity, understand instinctively that health care says a lot about a country’s heart and its understanding of itself,” Malloy writes.

I fear our country’s heart is a cold one, and if it’s heart doesn’t warm up soon the U.S. is destined for a long and steep decline.

Via AllSpinZone (’cause I hardly ever read Maureen Dowd any more), today MoDo got to the roots of what’s motivating the tea partiers (emphasis added):

Surrounded by middle-aged white guys — a sepia snapshot of the days when such pols ran Washington like their own men’s club — Joe Wilson yelled “You lie!” at a president who didn’t.

But, fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!

Yesterday70,000 or so right-wingers “demonstrated” in Washington. If you believe their handlers, a segment of people who looked on complacently for eight years while the Bush Administration plundered the treasury suddenly are outraged about government spending. Some of them seemed to have other concerns, however.

Did any of yesterday’s protesters carry signs that had some connection to actual issues — “No Public Option” or “Ixnay on Exchanges” or something? Or was the entire exercise about the hobgoblins who live in their heads?

Like Dowd, I don’t forget that “Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids.” But as much as they hated Bill Clinton, the degree of frothing does seem to have been kicked up a notch.

The Story

When I meet someone who says he was in lower Manhattan on September 11, I apply a little test. Yes, I was watching from an office building on West 17th Street, I say. A high-rise. We had a clear view. Where were you, exactly?

If the answer is vague — standing on a corner or watching out a window — with no specific details offered, I figure the guy is blowing smoke. He wasn’t there. People who were there launch into The Story. The Story varies, of course, but the usual details involve the precise location, such as street name or building, where they stood to watch the towers collapse; where they had just been; where they had planned to go; the people they knew who were, or might have been, in the towers; and if they were close enough, mention of the flaming objects, and people, they saw falling from the sky.

Eight years ago The Story was told urgently. Now the telling is more mechanical, as if reciting a lesson. The details are no longer raw and jumbled, but polished and fixed into place. But The Story still comes out. We still feel a need to tell it.

The Shrines

There were details about life in New York in those days that didn’t come across on television. You had to be in New York to appreciate how the city turned into a shrine, for example. At first there were photocopied pictures of the missing ones afixed to lampposts and scaffolding everywhere. Then came the flowers, cards, notes, candles, flags. Little shrines grew like kudzu all over the city, covering sidewalks and spreading through subway stations.

The Smell

Something else you couldn’t see on television was The Smell. For weeks after, lower Manhattan and Brooklyn were permeated with a sharp, bitter smell of burned plastic, metal, fuel, and we didn’t want to think about what else.

Just a few days after September 11, people who spent large amounts of time where The Smell was strongest began to report skin and respiratory problems. A common condition was being diagnosed by doctors as “World Trade Center cough.” Some people wore surgical masks when out walking.

Still, all the news reports tols us not to be concerned about The Smell. The Environmental Protection Agency issued five press releases within ten days of the attack assuring people that the air was safe to breathe. We would learn later that the truth was being censored.

On September 12, EPA head Christine Todd Whitman issued a memo: “All statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC [National Security Council in the White House] before they are released.” Thus, facts and recommendations from EPA scientists were muzzled in favor of the cheerful, but false, news that there was nothing in the air to worry about.

Recommendations that people with asthma or other breathing problems should take precaution were stricken. Warnings that the dust outside and inside office and apartment buildings was laced with toxins and should be cleaned by professionals never made it to the public.

A few days after 9/11, Congressman Jerrold Nadler set up the Ground Zero Elected Officials task force. The task force decided to conduct its own air quality tests. One September night city council candidate Alan Gerson and Councilwoman Kathryn Freed snuck some scientists with air testing equipment past the barricades. These scientists made the first independent measurements of both air quality in lower Manhattan and asbestos debris within residential apartments. The scientists found levels of asbestos that were more than double what government guidelines say are “safe.”

On September 30, Mayor Rudy Giuliani said,

“There is a lot of questions about the air quality because there are at times in downtown Manhattan and then sometimes even further beyond that, a very strong odor. The odor is really just from the fire and the smoke that continues to go on. It is monitored constantly and is not in any way dangerous. It is well below any level of problems and any number of ways in which you test it.”

On October 26, the New York Daily News published a report by Juan Gonzalez, “A Toxic Nightmare at a Disaster Site.” Gonzalez reported that the EPA had found levels of benzene and dioxin in the air that were several times above the danger zone. Gonzalez wrote more stories revealing that the city’s asbestos-cleanup instructions were dangerously lax.

What I know is that I made my way to the Financial District in mid-October, and after only an hour of walking around my eyes and throat were burning. This didn’t feel “safe.”

The Scandal

Meanwhile, the dedicated firefighters, policemen, and others who worked daily at Ground Zero — the heroes of the hour — breathed toxins all day long without proper safety equipment and instruction. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) refused to enforce worker safety standards even after months had passed and the work was no longer an “emergency.”

A recent study revealed that the a quarter of Ground Zero workers still have persistent lung problems. There doesn’t seem to be an official tally of 9/11 responders who have since died of diseases caused by exposure to toxins, although some news stories put the number at around 100. Keep in mind that some kinds of cancers related to toxin exposure can take decades to develop.

Juan Gonzalez has a recent story in the Daily News about Joe Picurro, an ironworker who volunteered at Ground Zero. Today Picurro is dying, painfully. “The list of ailments ravaging his body is stunning,” Gonzalez writes.

Officially, about 3,017 people died in the terrorist attacks of September 11. Because no one bothered to protect the health of Ground Zero workers, more will die in the years ahead.

The Meaning

There were some things one didn’t see much in New York City. For example, it would be months before I saw the T-shirts with the flaming towers and weeping bald eagle, and I had to go home to Missouri to see them. The imagery seemed as crass as photographing one’s mother’s last moments of life and putting that image on a T-shirt. Or maybe you could celebrate that special moment when a loved one’s vital signs monitor flatlined.

The ideologues pushing the obscene “9/12 Project” want to take us all back “to the place we were on September 12, 2001.” Anyone who really wants to go back there wasn’t in New York. Clearly, the 9/12ers have internalized their own Story, and that Story has very little to do with anything that happened in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon on 9/11.

To me, there’s the Meaning of the day and the Meaning of the Meaning. The first is personal; the second is pathological. The second, to me, illustrates all the ways humans separate themselves from anything real.

It’s much more satisfying to “remember” 9/11 with brash, jingoistic rah rah than to fully acknowledge that day, that moment, with all its heartbreak. It’s more satisfying to enshrine the image of firefighters raising a flag than to see to it they got proper breathing equipment or medical care. It feels better to use 9/11 as a club to bash your enemies with than to fully acknowledge what happened, mistakes and corruption included.

Note the inverse proportion: The further away people were from the events of that day, the more they want to glorify it.

There was glory that day, but not of the sort Glenn Beck wants to fabricate. To me, there was glory in the fact that thousands of people evacuated the towers, walking orderly and calmly down endless flights of stairs. There was no panic or trampling. The infirm were helped by friends and strangers alike.

There was glory in the way New Yorkers reached forward to do what they could. On that day I saw lines of New Yorkers, sometimes several blocks long, winding around hospitals. Sorrowing, they stood in line for hours to give blood, to give whatever they could give. It turns out there was no need for the blood, but the giving was beautiful nonetheless.

This is what I choose to remember, part of my Story. I still feel a need to tell it.