"Opium, of course," writes Vin Suprynowicz, "is one of God's major gifts to man."
He's right, of course. Go see why.
He'd once simply been Matt Helm of Santa Fe, New Mexico (with a few choice bits of attitude about Texas and Texans, I must add). But for Captain Matthew Helm, United States Army Reserve, World War II is about to get a whole lot more interesting. And personal.
So I can't really speak for anyone but myself, but I remember the shabby little office -- like all the subsequent shabby little offices in which I was to make my reports and receive my orders -- and the compact, grayhaired man with the cold gray eyes, and the speech he gave while I stood before him at attention. He was in civvies, and he hadn't called for any military courtesies. I didn't know his rank if he had any, but I wasn't taking any chances.Somehow, I already knew this outfit was for me if they'd have me; and I wasn't too proud to take what advantage I could get from a good stiff back and liberal use of the world "sir." I'd already been in the Army long enough to know that they'd practically give the joint to anybody who could shoot, salute, and say "sir." And anyway, when you're six feet four, even if kind of skinny and bony, the word doesn't sound humble, merely nice and respectful.
"Yes, sir," I said, "I wouldn't mind learning why I've been assigned here, sir, if it's time for me to know."
He said, "You've got a good record, Helm. Handy with weapons. Westerner, aren't you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Hunter?"
"Yes, sir."
"Upland game?"
"Yes, sir."
"Waterfowl?"
"Yes, sir."
"Big game?"
"Yes, sir."
"Deer?"
"Yes, sir."
"Elk?"
"Yes, sir."
"Bear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Dress them out yourself?"
"Yes, sir. When I can't get somebody to help me."
"That's fine," he said. "For this job we need a man who isn't scared of getting his hands bloody."
He was looking at me in that same measuring and weighing manner as he went into his talk. As he explained it, it was merely a matter of degree. I was in the Army anyway. If the enemy attacked my unit, I'd shoot back, wouldn't I? And when the orders came through for us to attack, I'd jump up and do my damnedest to kill some more. I'd be dealing with them in the mass under these conditions; but I was known to be pretty good with a rifle, so in spite of my commission it wasn't beyond the realm of possibility that one day I'd find myself squinting through a telescopic sight, waiting for some individual poor dope to expose himself four or five hundred yards away. But I'd still just be selecting my victims by blind chance. What if I was offered the opportunity to serve my country in a less haphazard way?
Mac paused here, long enough to indicate that I was supposed to say something. I said, "You mean, go over and stalk them in their native habitat, sir?"
This is not the "Matt Helm" of those silly Dean Martin movies.
I'd heard of Matt Helm before, and was vaguely aware of the books. Everyone knew about the Dean Martin movies. But then, as a suave, debonair seventeen-year-old, I read these words in the April 1977 issue of The Objectivist Calendar:
Another old favorite of mine -- Donald Hamilton -- has survived. He is still writing, though not quite as entertainingly as he used to. (His novels are adventure stories more than mysteries.)
Once again, Ayn Rand steered me right: I read a bunch of Hamilton's Matt Helm novels, which were still in print at the time. I think I read all of them. I do recommend the same for you: tightly plotted, well-characterized, they reward the reader.
The first novel in the series, Death of a Citizen from 1960, begins fifteen years after the end of World War II, with a murder on Helm's own Santa Fe property. Using one of his own weapons. Involving a party guest and a wartime colleague. Ignore the comments about Texas: Hamilton is entitled to as much poetic license as any other scribe.
One last thing: all of the novels are told in the first person voice, and Helm/Hamilton capitalizes "Martini," which is just about the way things ought to be.
UPDATE: Ayn Rand's comments on Donald Hamilton, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and other, from the April 1977 issue of The Objectivist Calendar, can be read in The Ayn Rand Column, available here.
The story opens with a troubled man walking purposefully down a Manhattan street:
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured -- and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of goods, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather.
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside -- just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it.
Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal -- the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
So New York's Fifth Avenue is a prosperous street, by contemporary standards, because "not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty." That understatement is a Depression-level comparison, friends. And things in this story get worse, economically, from there. Atlas Shrugged -- "a mystery, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder--and rebirth--of man's spirit" -- reminds me of those large detective story novels, such as Great Expectations, Les Miserables, or Crime and Punishment, novels which, ultimately, aren't really detective stories at all.
For like those large novels, with which it has much in common, Ayn Rand's masterpiece is not so much a whodunit as it as a "what the hell's going on?" I was taught as an undergraduate that all great literature dealt with the theme of appearance vs. reality. If that's so (and I think it is), then Atlas Shrugged stands with the greatest literature of all time.
Think about that rotten oak tree: by page 5 of the hardcover edition (page 13 of the mass-market paperback), we have a very effectively crafted metaphor which foreshadows what Eddie Willers -- and the readers -- are about to learn, which is that Taggart Transcontinental, the great railroad which employs him, is rotten to its very core. But that's not all: so is Associated Steel and other large industrial enterprises.
And so is the entire American economy.
In fact, all of America's culture, from politics to literature to music to philosophy, is rotten, and rotting away -- and America is the last surviving outpost of western civilization.
Ayn Rand's readers get all of that impact from one oak tree, from one character's memories of his childhood.
The book's theme deals brilliantly with the nature and cause of that rot, and with what is required to stop it, to reverse it, and to bring about a true Second Renaissance. It repays a close reading, and a number of close rereadings as well. I'm proud to be using, as the title of this blog, the words of one of the most popular characters in Atlas Shrugged.
So Happy Birthday, Atlas Shrugged, published on this day in 1957.
The very first issue of The Objectivist Newsletter praised a book by Ludwig von Mises:
"A central point of Planned Chaos is Professor Mises' eloquent refutation of one of the most disastrous myths of the twentieth century: the belief that capitalism and socialism are not the only alternative economic systems, that there is a "third way." This alleged "third way" is interventionism, the hampered market economy, in which the state "seeks to influence the market by the intervention of its coercive power, but it does not want to eliminate the market altogether....The issue," he writes, "is always the same: the government or the market. There is no third solution."
In a later issue of the same newsletter, Nathaniel Branden wrote of another Mises book:
In Human Action, Professor Mises offers a systematic and comprehensive analysis of the nature of production and trade. He shows why a free economy is necessarily the most productive and efficient; why coercive interference with men's free choices in the market invariably leads to a lowering of the standard of living; why slavery is incompatible with an industrial civilization.Among the many issues he discusses are: economic calculation in a market economy; the determinants of prices, wages and production policies; the gold standard; interest rates and credit expansion; the causes of depression; the impossibility of rational economic calculation in a socialist system (this demonstration is one of his most important achievements); the contradictions and destructiveness of interventionism; common misconceptions concerning the history and nature of capitalism; the economics of war; confiscatory taxation.
One of the great merits of the book is its encyclopedic character; it deals with virtually every major problem in economic theory. It contains many historical illustrations and references that provide further illumination -- such as, for instance, a discussion of the "welfare state" policies of the disintegrating Roman Empire, and the manner in which these policies made the Empire vulnerable to the barbarian invaders (an analogy that is far from academic in our present political context).
Branden concludes: "As a reference work, it belongs in the library of every advocate of capitalism."
One of my favorite stories about Mises comes from Gary North:
Mises refused to offer a moral defense of the free market. He was a utilitarian epistemologically. Harper had told me of a discussion he had with Mises. He asked Mises, "If socialism were more efficient than capitalism, would you favor it?" Mises answered, "But it isn't." After several attempts, Harper dropped it. He said he was not going to get anywhere along these lines.
I never met him, and I've never met anyone who met him, but I he's one of my heroes, and I owe him for the two books above, plus Bureaucracy and The Anti-Capitalist Mentality. Few thinkers have challenged me as much to consider the implications of what I thought I already knew.
On this day in 1973, Ludwig von Mises breathed his last.
On this day in 1940, during the aerial bombing of Liverpool, England, John Lennon was born.
I don't really care to link to anything, nor do I have much of a comment, other than to point at my record collection (now, of course, CD collection). But today would have been his 64th birthday, had some demented piece of shit not shot him in the chest and back. Damn it, the man was only forty, with a stunning success behind him and his whole life ahead of him...and a five-year-old boy who needed him, as well.
Anyway, cheers, John Lennon.
Millions of mind guerrillas, indeed.
"Diagramming sentences is one of those lost skills," writes Kitty Burns Florey,
like darning socks or playing the sackbut, that no one seems to miss. Invented, or at least codified, in an 1877 text called Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg, it swept through American public schools like a measles germ, embraced by teachers as the way to reform students who were engaged in (to take Henry Higgins slightly out of context) “the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue.” By promoting the beautifully logical rules of syntax, diagramming would root out evils like “it’s me” and “I ain’t got none,” until everyone wrote like Ralph Waldo Emerson, or at least James Fenimore Cooper.
Are her critical senses influenced by Mark Twain? One might think so, given that last bit about Cooper. But that's not my point here.
What is my point is that "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog" is an utterly charming essay on the pleasures of diagramming sentences, one I have only recently discovered for myself. Oh, I've been exposed to the technique, all right, but unlike Ms. Florey I have no fond memories of diagramming: I hated it as a kid. It never really gelled for me, partly because I was ambitious to get on with the truly serious business of life, that is, becoming another Keith Richards or John Lennon. But it was also because at the time it never made sense to me: making a diagram out of a sentence seemed pointless in itself, and was made difficult by the fact that knowing where to fit a direct object is not such a simple matter if you haven't been taught the difference between subject and object in the first place.
But grammar is crucial to communication, and I wish a mastery of the technical aspects of the English language -- and I find that diagramming helps. The formal model of diagramming is a memory aid, because it is visual, and it is also an analytical aid, because of the decisions required as a sentence is diagrammed. And it's not 1973 any more: these days, I think it's fun to diagram a sentence.
Today, diagramming is not exactly dead, but for many years it has been on a steep slide into marginality. This is probably partly because diagramming sentences doubles the task of the student, who has to learn a whole new set of rules – where does that pesky line go, and which way does it slant? – in order to illustrate a set of rules that, in fact, has already been learned pretty thoroughly simply by immersion in the language from birth. It’s only the subtleties that are difficult – who vs. whom, adjective vs. adverb, it’s I vs. it’s me – and most of those come from the mostly doomed attempt, so beloved in the early days of English grammar, to stuff the unruliness of English into the well-made boxes of Latin and Greek, which is something like forcing a struggling cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE 10 Oct 2004: A wonderful book on how to diagram sentences is Phyllis Davenport's Rex Barks, available from The Paper Tiger. As an example of how clever and memorable some of Davenport's rules can be, consider how she explains prepositions: a presposition, she informs us, is anything a squirrel can do to a tree. Think on that one!
I was notified of this one courtesy of Google News Alerts: Robert Garmong commenting on private space exploration:
It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development....
We often hear that the most ambitious projects can only be undertaken by government, but in fact the opposite is true. The more ambitious a project is, the more it demands to be broken into achievable, profit-making steps — and freed from the unavoidable politicizing of government-controlled science. If space development is to be transformed from an expensive national bauble whose central purpose is to assert national pride to a practical industry, it will only be by unleashing the creative force of free and rational minds.
Without a doubt, NASA needs to go. As I've written before:
There's no telling what economic disruptions were caused by President Kennedy's huge, coercively-financed pet projects--the Vietnam war and the race to the moon--and there's no way of telling how those dislocations are still with us today. For those among other reasons, Kennedy is no hero.
Garmong salutes the people at the SpaceShipOne project, and so do I.
Okay, so today's my birthday: I share it with Oliver North and East Germany. At least one of them is no longer around. Maybe I'll watch Top Secret! and memorize that East German "national anthem."
Cultural note: I lived and worked in Saudi Arabia for a bit, and I can tell you that they do not celebrate birthdays there. Ever. In the Wahabi strain of Sunni Islam, such a thing is considered idolatry. Fast forward a few years and I was in Egypt, where the Prophet Muhammad's birthday is a national holiday. Of such differences are cultural wars made...
Oh, and Halloween is coming soon. Believe me, you already know how the Wahabbis feel about that one.
Anyway, today I'm 45, and I can't believe how old I don't feel. I don't have another 45 years left to me, but it's more important that I do what I can with what I have.
According to this Associated Press story, Howard Stern is leaving radio for the stars, announcing a five-year agreement with Sirius Satellite Rado:
That means Stern will be leaving distributor Infinity Broadcasting, where his often sexually explicit subject matter had run afoul of federal regulators. Satellite radio is not covered by the same federal indecency regulations.In early June, radio station owner Clear Channel agreed to a record $1.75 million settlement with the FCC to resolve indecency complaints against Stern and other radio personalities.
Infinity paid a similar amount in 1995 to settle a variety of violations by Stern.
Well. Let me see if I understand this: Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, but it's okay for them to create the FCC, which claims the right to regulate both, and which fines people or organizations for speech it deems "indecent." Indecent? Fuck the FCC, and fuck 'em hard. What's indecent is that Infinity, and Stern, get harrassed by a bunch of parasites and losers whose government jobs aren't even justified by the Constitution. What's even worse is that such invertebrates and their shenanigans aren't even a big issue in a Presidential election year. We lost a lot when we gave up using the tar and feathers.
Rodney Dangerfield has died.
Dangerfield first made me laugh over twenty years ago, and, unlike many performers who decide to become pundits, he made me laugh with every routine. Now he's gone.
But as far as I'm concerned, that rates plenty of respect.
(Hat tip: Dean Esmay)
They probably won't arrive in time for the day, but tonight I ordered some birthday cheer from the Ayn Rand Bookstore: Robert Mayhew's tape set on Ayn Rand and humor, and Tara Smith's talk on the value of purpose. Maybe Diana Hsieh would be willing to compare notes on the Mayhew thing, as I think she had it and listened to it a few months ago...
This afternoon I added to my Robert Benchley collection, too.
Finally updated the blogroll: take a look at some of the new items. And I created a new section over there, too. Certain events have come about, partly through my own efforts and partly through the appreciation of others for those efforts, so some of my writing is taking a slightly different turn.
By which I mean: getting paid for it! (Cue director # 2: huge grin)
When I get the time: new sections on the strength sports and the whole area of physical culture, and on cryptic crosswords. Anglophobes beware!
Seriously, folks: you do need to be doing some heavy lifting, and the Brit variant on the crossword is just enjoyable as hell...