Becoming Human

The Simplest Thing in the World July 4, 2008

I created this blog weeks ago and haven’t posted anything until now, which is O.K. because now my blog get’s to be born on the 4th of July.  Blogging’s actually something like writing and that turns out to be hard work.  You want it to be good, a masterpiece even, especially your first post, what with all of the Internet world breathlessly awaiting the publication of yes, another blog! 

Wait a minute.  Who am I kidding?  Let’s face the grim prospects here.  Nobody reads your first blog.  Nobody knows it’s there so nobody’s going to read it.  I can write any kind of slosh I want.  Who cares?  I could write about the fact that yesterday I discovered deer had eaten the tops of my tomatoes.  Either that or we have some really tall rabbits who are smart enough to wear little boots that leave footprints like deer hooves to throw me off.  But I can’t write about stuff like that.  What if someone does read it?  After all, I’m going to read it and even I wouldn’t want to read about that.  Plus, I’m going to tell my family and friends about my blog and on the odd chance that some of them may actually look at it, they won’t want to read about rabbits disguising themselves as deer.  Anyway, what kind of fool do these rabbits think I am?  Do they really think I don’t know that anything I may do to scare away deer would scare away them too?  Those rabbits aren’t so smart after all are they?

This reminds me of a short story by Ayn Rand, “The Simplest Thing in the World,” in which one Henry Dorn sits down at his kitchen table to write a popular novel, a bestseller, but he can’t do it.  Writing the kind of shallow, meaningless trash that sells should be easy, the simplest thing in the world, he says.  Henry’s ideas keep getting in the way, ideas about plots that describe the world as it really is.  He knows that’s the wrong approach, that’s not simple, that’s hard and it won’t sell.  He knows from experience.  He wrote a great novel before.  Most critics hated it and the few who liked it were too stupid to understand it and liked it for the wrong reasons.  What’s an artist to do?  Interesting that Rand wrote this story in 1940, but it wasn’t published until 1967!  To get a little off base, the Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse movie “Bandwagon” was on TV the other night.  In the movie Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant were almost finished writing a fun, meaningless musical when the producer tells them it’s great so far, but let’s turn it into Faust.  Fabray whines: “But we don’t wanna’ write Faust.”  The truth is that the producer’s idea of Faust was just pretentious gibberish designed to please the asrtsy-fartsy investors. 

I know, we’re rambling here. Let’s get to the point – here’s where you’re asking what’s this got to do with Obama?  Isn’t it obvious?  That’s the whole problem.  It should be!  He’s the personification of the shallow but popular novel Henry Dorn wanted to write.  It should be the simplest thing in the world to see this, to see through him.  Change – Hope – Unity.  Change?  Basic 60′s socialism.  BTW he has been making good use of the 4th of July holiday to talk about patriotism.  In a speech yesterday he said his administration would require national service for high school and college students – a civilian security core, because the military, which is voluntary although he didn’t mention that, is insufficient.  Change, yes, but not new.  Again, just socialism, although it’s been done by a few famous facists before as well.  His administration gets to “direct” the service.  Clearly this relates to his background as a community organizer, which is someone who organizes other people to do things he wants to get done.  There’s nothing wrong with community service.  As studies have shown, conservatives donate more money and time to charity than liberals.  But forced service and to further his agenda, that’s a differnt story.  Hope?  Let’s hope he doesn’t get elected.  Unity?  When has he ever “crossed the isle” to work with the other party as McCain has done?  How does a community organizer exhibit unity when the whole point of it is to create division between the “community” (in his case, low-income blacks in Chicago) and some other group.  It may or may not have a worthy goal, but it’s not unity.

Happy 4th of July!