Right-Wing Sociopath Ayn Rand Is Really, Really Awful

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AlterNet / By Brad Reed

Yes, the Latest Right-Wing Paean to Sociopath Ayn Rand Is Really, Really Awful

Take Lisa Simpson and combine her with Gordon Gekko and the obnoxious child-android from “Small Wonder,” and you get the perfect Rand hero.

April 18, 2011 |

The year is 2016. Eight years of Obammunism have transformed the former capitalist paradise known as “America” into a socialistic hellhole where the Dow Jones Industrial average has plummeted to under 4,000 and where oppressed banking CEOs have to walk around with signs reading, “Will trade credit derivatives for food.” America has gotten so desperate that its only hope for salvation lies in the creation of a (shudder) high-speed rail line.

A sane person would not find this a realistic projection of where America is heading -- after all, corporate profits are at record highs, the Dow is back comfortably in the 12,000 range and a Republican congress is insisting we shower the wealthy with still more tax cuts. But then again, the film Atlas Shrugged, Part I is not marketed toward the sane. Rather, it is being pitched to the disciples of Ayn Rand, the sociopathic champion of capitalism who penned three-billion-page novels dedicated to the proposition that selfishness was the world’s greatest virtue.

For the uninitiated, Atlas tells the story of a future oppressive liberal government that chokes off the productivity of strong-headed individualists in the name of equality and fairness. The story’s two protagonists, Dagny Taggart and Henry Reardon, are respectively heads of railroad and steel companies who find their grand ambitions thwarted by the paws of Big Gubmint. Eventually the poor rich people decide to go on strike and retreat to a small-government greedtopia headed up by a reclusive billionaire named John Galt. Without these super-productive rich people keeping the world moving, society proceeds to completely collapse.

You may be wondering what it was that Dagny and Henry were doing prior to the strike that was just so goshed-darned awful that Big Gubmint had to stop them. The answer is they were building the world’s fastest high-speed rail line. Yes, rail. The mode of transportation that has been championed by liberal commie Nazis and that has become the bane of good salt-of-the-earth conservatives everywhere. In reality, of course, a liberal government would be tossing bundles of subsidies at any entrepreneurs building high-speed rail lines in the Western United States but in Randality, these noble entrepreneurs were crushed by the rent-seeking big businesses who used their Washington ties to extinguish the flames of competitive markets.

So okay, we’ve already established that the story has a ludicrous premise, but have the film’s creators managed to make this ludicrous premise into a compelling and entertaining narrative?

In three words: “Oh, hell no.”

Indeed, the film’s major problem is that it adheres too tightly to its source material, making it impossible to create compelling characters. This is because all of Rand’s heroes and heroines are soulless greedbots whose only goals in life are to make great innovations and then profit like crazy off them. In and of itself this isn’t a bad thing since a lot of people like creating things and being rewarded for them. But in the case of Rand’s characters, their desire for money and achievement supersedes all empathy, family relationships and basic human decency. Take Lisa Simpson and combine her with Gordon Gekko and the obnoxious child-android from “Small Wonder,” and you get the perfect Rand hero.

Given this, I was initially prepared to be lenient on lead actors Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler, who respectively portray Dagny Taggart and Henry Reardon. After all, no actor can give a convincing and emotionally compelling portrayal of a Rand character anymore than they can give a convincing and emotionally compelling portrayal of a stop sign or a potted plant. You can imagine all the times director Paul Johansson had to yell “Cut!” at Schilling and Bowler because they had errantly expressed a feeling.

Even so, one of the very first things that competent directors and actors do with any material is to establish the stakes involved. In other words, when a character says a line such as “There is so much at stake, we have to make it,” it should be delivered with more urgency and intensity than the guy in stoner comedies who asks, “Dude, you got any chips?” Needless to say, the actors failed even this simple test, creating unintentionally hilarious scenes like the one where Bowler tells his lonely socialite wife that “I didn’t come here for sex” in the robotic same tone that the Terminator says “I’ll be back” to his enemies.

And speaking of sex, Taggart and Reardon’s sex scene is unusually awful because we’re watching two characters who haven’t shown any emotions for the film’s first 70 minutes suddenly try to be tender with one another. It’s the equivalent of Emperor Palpatine ambling over to Darth Vader after the two of them just finished slaughtering a room full of Jedi and asking meekly for a hug. The scene isn’t at all helped by the schmaltzy piano-and-strings soundtrack that’s meant to conjure up romantic passion but that seems wildly out of place in a Rand story. In fact, the scene could have come across as more believable if the directors had just decided to play some German industrial metal in the background to let us know that Dagny and Reardon were approaching copulation with the same level of unsentimental brutality that’s helped them succeed in the business world.

Poorly written characters can’t totally doom a film if they’re at least given something interesting to do -- after all, Star Wars fans who suffered through Jar-Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace were at least rewarded with a kick-ass light-saber fight at the end of the film. Unfortunately, the most thrilling conflicts in Atlas Shrugged revolve around disputes over ore shortages and the quality of assorted railroad metals.

And this is the most telling aspect of the film’s greatest failure: That I jumped for joy whenever one of its greedheads decided to drop out of society and head to Galt’s Gulch. Because let’s be honest, would any of us really shed a tear if Donald Trump, Lloyd Blankfein or the Koch brothers decided tomorrow to pull up their stakes and head to the Cayman Islands? If my time here on Earth has shown me anything it’s that even when some greedy assholes drop out of the game there will always be other greedy assholes eager to replace them. Any threats they make on leaving us swarthy looters to our own devices should cause us to collectively shrug.

Brad Reed is a writer living in Boston. His work has previously appeared in the American Prospect Online, and he blogs frequently at Sadly, No!.

April 17, 2011 at 09:31:27

14 Years of Hooking Patients, Hiking Premiums and Squeezing Docs: Television Drug Advertising

By Martha Rosenberg (about the author)

Can anyone remember life before Ask Your Doctor ads on TV?

All you knew about prescription drugs were creepy ads in a JAMA at the doctor's office with a lot of fine print. Even if you knew the name of a drug, you'd never ask your doctor for it because that would be self-diagnosing and cheeky for a patient.

Flash forward to the late 1990s when direct-to-consumer (DTC) drug advertising, drug Web sites and online drug sales came on board, and self-diagnosing and demanding pills has become medicine-as-usual for many doctors and patients.

I thought I was fine by Martha Rosenberg

The DTC/Web perfect storm didn't just sell drugs like Claritin, Prozac and the Purple Pill, it sold the diseases to go with them like seasonal allergies, GERD and depression. It sold risk of diseases like heart events for which you'd take a statin like Lipitor, osteoporosis for which you'd take a bone drug like Boniva and asthma attacks for which you'd use a second asthma drug like Advair. Of course, by the very definition of prevention, you didn't know if the drugs were working but you weren't paying out of pocket anyway so what the hay"

Thanks to DTC advertising, people started taking seizure drugs like Topamax and Lyrica for everyday pain or headaches and antipsychotics -- hello? -- for everyday blues or mood problems. They started taking monoclonal antibodies made from genetically engineered hamster cells like Humira that invite cancer, superinfections and TB when they didn't have to. And FDA mandated risk disclosures -- brain bleeds, sudden death, difficulty breathing, stomach bleeding, liver failure, kidney failure, muscle breakdown, fainting, hallucinations -- perversely sold the drugs more either because ad frequency itself sells or because people like the identity in having a disease, like chemically experimenting on themselves or like taking a dare.

Soon anxiety graduated to depression which graduated to bipolar disorder. Children got schizophrenia and depression like adults and adults got ADHD like kids. And it didn't stop there. If the depression you or your kid had didn't go away -- maybe because it wasn't depression in the first place but a thing called "life" -- you needed to add a drug like Abilify or Seroquel on to the original drug(s) because your depression was "treatment resistant."

Of course if people were paying for the drugs out of their pocket and you told them to add a drug that costs almost $500 a month because the first one isn't working, they would say the only thing "treatment resistant" is your s ales pitch -- go find another sucker. But if third party payers get stuck with the bill, no one seems to mind pharma's double-(and triple)-its-money plan -- or even notice it.

In fact psychiatric drug cocktails of eight, ten and twelve drugs are now common medical practice for "treatment resistant" depression and PTSD (often paid by government entitlement health plans) even though the drugs have never been tested when taken together. Unless you count the patients taking them now!

Pharma also adds an urgency pitch to the sell in case you think you can wait to take you or your child's treatment resistant drug cocktail until symptoms worsen. Depression is now a "progressive" disease say pharma-paid doctors after being known for decades as a self-limiting disease. (The one good thing you could say about depression; it would go away.)

And don't think kids will outgrow mood problems either, says pharma. That erratic behavior is no doubt early mental illness that will become Worse if you'd don't treat it in the bud. Even mothers of one-year-olds with the sniffles are told serious asthma is just around the corner if they don't treat their toddler now.

Pharma is also having a field day with sleep because everyone is in the demographic. In fact comedian Chris Rock riffs about hearing a DTC ad that asks, "Do you fall asleep at night and wake up in the morning?" and recognizing himself. "Yeah, I got THAT," he says."

Not falling asleep soon enough of course is the disease of insomnia which can have "strains" like "middle-of-the-night" and "terminal" insomnia. But it also sets you up for -- what's the pharma euphemism -- wakefulness problems the next day. And once you're using a wakefulness aid like Adderall or Nuvigil, what do you bet you'll have sleep problems?

Because of pharma-paid doctors, PR firms and industry subsidized medical journals and Web sites like WebMD, pharma is able to create new diseases (osteopenia, the "risk" of osteoporosis), perimenopause and Low T), "humanize" others by giving them nicknames (ED, RA, RLS, Hep C) and elevate others to public health problems like HPV/venereal warts. (It doesn't hurt that Julie Gerberding, MD, former CDC head resurfaced as head of Merck vaccines after she left the government.)

But a more insidious sell are pharma subsidized "patient groups" that lobby FDA and state agencies about expensive drugs, often psychiatric. While these "patients" -- often flown by pharma to testify at FDA hearings -- pretend they can't get needed drugs like terminal cancer patients, the issue is seldom availability but money : either they want a new use covered by insurers or don't want an older, cheaper drug substituted.

The same patients appear on Web site testimonials and phony grassroots PSAs (public service messages) about the epidemic of depression or childhood mental illness. How can you tell they're not real patients but pharma plants? The Web sites and PSAs look exactly like direct-to-consumer ads. END

Martha Rosenberg's first book, tentatively titled Born with a Fritos Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health, will be published by Amherst, New York-based Prometheus Books next year.

An early version of this story appeared on the online journal, State of Nature http://www.stateofnature.org/askYourDoctorAds.html

Martha Rosenberg is columnist and cartoonist based in Chicago I

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