Need some Ayn Rand help...

[progressoid]

Quick background. My teenage daughter was assigned a Rand book for English ( I know, I know :banghead: ). She got through that without a problem. Then one of her friends suggests another one. So now she's reading Atlas Shrugged and has also checked out Anthem from the library. :eyes:

What I'm looking for is an antidote. Something to cleanse her palette so to speak. She's your typical semi-nerdy, honor student teen. Watches Bones, Star Trek (the original series!), Colbert. Also just read Catch 22 and I Am America and So Can You!

We have a birthday coming up soon, any suggestions?

[Goblinmonger]

1. Vonnegut.

Slaughterhouse 5--first
Cat's Cradle--next
Then everything else.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

2. Ding!

We have a winner!

[timtom]

5. I think Sirens of Titan needs to be in the top 3.

But, Vonnegut. Definitely.

[provis99]

32. personally, I rather like Player Piano.

but if you really want to go all out, have her read stuff by Edward Bellamy.

[Nay]

70. Player Piano! My favorite Vonnegut! She should read that. Catch-22

is another good book, too. And don't forget Huxley's Brave New World.

[rampart]

92. vonnegut grades his own work in "palm sunday"

i like them all. jailbird is an excellent story. i'm drawn to "mother night."

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A-plus
Cat's Cradle: A-plus
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A-plus
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-minus
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

[ThomWV]

7. Yep, that would about do it

I might reverse the order myself, but it really won't matter.

[Goblinmonger]

21. Depends on the reader, really.

Some high school kids react oddly to Cat's Cradle if that is their first Vonnegut experience. If it is a good reader, won't matter and I think Cat's Cradle is his best work.

[progressoid]

19. Yeah,

She read Slaughterhouse 5 for the same class. I think that may have been a little too intense. Maybe a "lighter" Vonnegut would be good.

Good suggestion. Thanks.

[Goblinmonger]

27. Oh, you want lighter.

I thought you want to cleanse the palate of the philosophy of Rand.

I recommend Rule of the Bone for a lot of good high school readers. Great book.

[progressoid]

53. Well, I meant lighter than the bombing of Dresden

But I suppose there are pretty heavy themes in all of his books.

I'll check out Rule of the Bone too.

[NoSheep]

23. Yes! Yes! Oh yes.

[imnKOgnito]

76. Good One

I don't recall a book that had a bigger impact on me in my teen years.

[Forkboy]

105. Bluebeard is still the only novel to make me truly cry.

Not just tear up, but truly break down and cry. The painting he's been working on through the whole novel...it's just a heart crushing moment when it's revealed.

And fuck, I love Kurt for it!

[mitchum]

3. I think the best antidote to Rand is turning 20

her drivel seems to appeal to the adolescent mind.
I assume that's because that is where Alice Rosenbaum's development was permanently arrested.

[anonymous171]

33. Getting a job also helps. nt

[progressoid]

34. That's what I'm hoping.

But I'm still going to try to nudge her in another direction :evilgrin:

And that's a good observation about Alice and her followers.

[kestrel91316]

39. I didn't get over her until I was 22 or 23, but then I was still in college.

[poverlay]

47. Well and truly said... n/t

[Turbineguy]

4. Adam Smith

Wealth of Nations.

The Worldly Philosophers, Robert Heilbronner.

Ayn Rands books, like the Bible get a lot of bad interpretations. So you really can't tell what she'll get out of it.

[RaleighNCDUer]

13. Interpretations is not the problem with Rand's books. nt

[panader0]

6. "The Given Day" by Dennis Lehane.

[KingOfLostSouls]

8. Bill Hicks

[LoZoccolo]

9. My suggestion is that you give her a birthday present that celebrates her and not you. n/t

[anonymous171]

31. Parents have an obligation to make sure their children don't become fuck-ups later in life

I don't see a problem with this.

[JVS]

10. the jungle

[David Zephyr]

16. Yep.

[elleng]

28. DITTO! DITTO!

One of MY antidotes! I think of The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) much more often than any of Rand's. (Its OK if she reads more than one of those! Won't kill her!) A quotation from The Jungle:

'To Jurgis the packers had been equivalent to fate; Ostrinski showed him that they were the Beef Trust. They were a gigantic combination of capital, which had crushed all opposition, and overthrown the laws of the land, and was preying upon the people.'

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/jungle/quotes.html

[Cirque du So-What]

11. George Santayana

I believe naturalism may provide an effective antidote to Ayn Rand's philosophy of greed.

[happyslug]

12. Dickens, a Tale of Two Cities

It shows where radical right wing suppression of the poor goes, and how it eats both the left and right and thus the Radical Right is worse then the radical left for the results of Radical right policies are NOT seen for decades, but when the Radical Right loses control (and they will) the people harmed by the Radical Right (who by that time are the Radical Left) go wild.

[anonymous171]

30. The ending is also extremely anti-randian.

Good choice :thumbsup:

[notadmblnd]

14. The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, Animal Farm

[David Zephyr]

20. The Grapes of Wrath.

The Grapes of Wrath and The Jungle are always my top two recommendations for American teens to read.

[notadmblnd]

49. They're required where my son goes to school

[David Zephyr]

15. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

These are two books that every teen should read.

I've found over all these many years that teens struggle with the first chapter of The Jungle, so I always recommend that they skim read the first chapter and get to the second where the tale really begins.

This will root her in the realities of working class struggle.

There are no two better books for American teens to read than these.

I wouldn't panic that she's reading these books. I read all of Rand's books as a teen. I particularly enjoyed The Fountainhead. Still, there is a cultish ideology that is laced within her books and it she needs to broaden her radio reception.

There's nothing like a family all reading the same book. Some years ago, I sent my family all copies of The Grapes of Wrath and, even though most of us had read the book, we read it together over a period of a month. It was terrific having everyone on the "same page" and talking about the story together.

[wtmusic]

37. +1

[QC]

46. +2

[Toucano]

77. +3

eom

[mitchum]

17. Give her a copy of John Gardner's On Becoming A Novelist...

it will drive home just how poorly she wrote.
She was not only a miserable human being
but also a really clumsy
and untalented writer

[mudplanet]

79. Really. I have difficulty understanding why a teacher would assign

Rynd unless it would be as an example of bad writing. Unless the teacher was really trying to indoctrinate and not teach.

[mitchum]

82. I was really shocked to hear that some public high schools were assigning her tripe...

in lit classes. It has no worth as literature.
While Eliot, Pound, and Celine were also miserable human beings who held some repellent ideas, they could write well. Very well.

[formercia]

97. Ding!!

No Progressive teacher would assign that tripe without caveats.

[Edweird]

18. A tea bagger rally? "Here are people that believe that stuff".

Also South Park mocks 'atlas shrugged' in episode 203.

[progressoid]

22. Ha.

We regularly make fun of TBaggers. I'll have to remember to make that connection next time they come up in conversation.

[msanthrope]

24. A card with this quote---

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

[progressoid]

36. Ha ha ha ha!

That might just work. She's read LOTR too!

[mzteris]

81. i was just thinking of LOTR -

the willingness to sacrifice of the one(s) for the good of all...

[Warren Stupidity]

83. +1

[Warpy]

25. You can almost buy the premise in The Fountainhead

but I'd print out this little gem, a review of the movie that also serves as a review of the book: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tallulah-morehead/the-insanity-of-ayn-rand_b_211209.html

Smart kids usually get their senses of humor back halfway through "Atlas," the preposterous multi page monologues that pass for conversation, especially between supposed lovers, defeating any purpose they might have had to edify the malleable young. I finished it in silly giggles, wondering what would have happened had all that sex produced a pregnancy and child that would cling to the pencil skirt, whining to be fed or played with.

Other than these two things, the antidotes are time and maturity.

Well, an objectivist boyfriend might do it, too.

[progressoid]

64. That's a great review.

When I first saw the movie, I rather liked it.

When I saw it again, I realized what I really liked about it...

Patricia Neal.

[Blue-Jay]

26. I'd suggest some Harlan Ellison books.

Although sometimes prone to personal "dickishness", Ellison is a wonderful writer. I'd suggest "Deathbird Stories" (obviously) and perhaps the short novel "All the Lies That Are My Life". If she likes ST:TOS, you might want to mention that he wrote the original treatment of "City On The Edge Of Forever". (Then again, you may not want to mention that he hated the finished product and eventually sued Paramount.)

I'd also recommend anything by "Cordwainer Smith" (Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger). His stories involving "The Instrumentality of Mankind" have always been favorites of mine.

EDIT: As mentioned above, you can never go wrong with Vonnegut.

[WillYourVoteBCounted]

29. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. Also Down and Out in Paris and London

Nothing wrong with books. I've read the Ayne Rand books. I considered them fiction.
Didn't know about Rand's obsession with a serial murderer.

Anywho, here are some great counters to Ayne Rand

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel_and_Dimed

Down and Out in Paris and London
By George Orwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_and_Out_in_Paris_and_London

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

35. Get her some Harlequin romances. The bodice-ripping comes without faux philosophy.

[Blue-Jay]

40. Only if Fabio is on the cover.

and maybe a wolf.

[anonymous171]

38. Catch-22.

She can read all about the ubermensch Milo Minderbinder's exploits as he bombs his own airbase and tries to sell poisonous cotton back to his own squadron, all in the pursuit of profit.

I credit Catch-22 with putting me off of Randian/Capitalist ideologies for good.

[Stargleamer]

41. Another Country by James Baldwin or

Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, or Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, or Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams or The Color Purple by Alice Walker

[Dappleganger]

42. None of this will help influence her more than spending time with the poor.

Living in Haiti for 3 months certainly changed me. Came home and began to do volunteer work with a local soup kitchen and became great friends with the folks there. That helped ground me into the soil of reality far better than any book.

[anonymous171]

43. True. The media puts out all sorts of lies about the poor

Most of which go hand-in-hand with Randian thought. Spending time with the poor and actually talking with them would help immensely.

[maryf]

55. yep, nt.

[progressoid]

50. Interestingly, I was just talking about the needs of our local food banks

Maybe it's time to rearrange our schedule and do a little more volunteer work.

:thumbsup:

[Dappleganger]

52. How old is she?

Our oldest is a senior and went on a trip to Costa Rica when she was 15--that really got to her. She volunteers by teaching art at a civic center downtown after school once a week, and that has helped to shape her quite a bit. I'm always convinced that teens learn best by doing, although books are good for helping to focus and explain how things came to be this way and how we can try to change the world around us.

Good luck!

[progressoid]

56. She'll be 16.

I'm afraid she may be a little self-centered (more so than the average teen). Maybe it's just a phase, but I worry that the "me first" attitude is getting re-enforced.

I'll have to try a little harder to lead by example. ;)

[Dappleganger]

59. Last time I checked in on our 3 teenagers...

they're still self-centered. ;-)

Pretty sure that's normal, although it would be nice if they slip out of it more regularly.

[Taitertots]

44. Get yourself a birthday present and tell her she gets nothing

Then ask what she thinks of Rand. If she realizes how that sort of thinking really hurts people, give her a birthday present.

[anonymous171]

45. Good idea. Show her the ethical consequences of Rand's madness. nt

[progressoid]

48. That's good

But I could never do it. I'm one of those pansy liberals ya know. :)

[Blue-Jay]

51. That's funny!

Ayn Rand helps those who help themselves.

[Toucano]

78. BEST RESPONSE EVER.

"The Virtues of Selfishness" in action!

[Enthusiast]

96. +1! nt

[Atticus]

99. Have her Google William Hickman, with whom Ms. Rand was enraptured.

This demented ghoul kidnapped and raped a 12 year old girl, raped her, murdered her, dismembered her and sent her to the police and her parents in pieces. Rand virtually ran out of superlatives to use in describing this "wonderful" person.

She was a twisted, psychotic and totally self-centered---"lady". No wonder she is the only woman who actually arrouses Limbaugh.

[salguine]

54. Let her read. You can never go wrong reading, regardless of what it is. Problems only

arise when comprehension is lacking. She sounds pretty bright. Who knows, maybe she'll finish it and say "What a load of crap that was!" It wouldn't hurt to ask her what she thought of it, and engage her in a discussion.

Be glad she's reading. We have become a post-literate society. 80% of American households did not purchase a single book last year.

[tammywammy]

60. Really? 80%?

That's horrible. :(

[salguine]

67. The article is here:

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081110_america_the_illiterate/

[Warren Stupidity]

84. we made up for that by purchasing around 200M books.

We have stacks of them everywhere. But we are going digital, which means we buy more but have trouble sharing them and lose track of them all the time.

[RaleighNCDUer]

109. Come to think of it, I'm part of that 80% -

however I did get a great many books for birthday and christmas presents, and am still working through the 200 books I bought at the country library sale 3 years ago.

[Occulus]

57. Bioshock.

Buy that for her, if your PC can handle it. It's a (violent!!) video game containing deeply disturbing imagery set against the canvas of a city built for the best and brightest of humanity so they could work without interference from "the parasite" (the little people).

It's also an incredibly good deconstruction of Randian philosophy gone horribly wrong.

edit: or, if you don't want her to actually play the game, Penny Arcade reader Helloween did a Let's Play of the game, and posted it to YouTube. Just click the link.

[Odin2005]

88. That is an AWESOME game!

[Occulus]

107. It's fantastic. One of my all-time favorites.

I would say "instant classic" but for the final boss and the endings. It's really easy to punk the last boss. edit: I would also say that the plot twist came too early. They should have saved that for later in the game, and axed the whole Big Daddy segment (which didn't really serve any useful purpose anyway).

The rest of the story and all of the setting, though, are feature-film material. Steinman and Cohen in particular were really well done as well as being very well voiced, and the whole Fort Frolic map was just full of win.

Another one I just love is "Dead Space". Creepy as hell, that one. The midgame boss is just epic.

[tammywammy]

58. The Jungle

If she likes Dickens then A Tale of Two Cities. It's a good one, but if you're not the type of person to read Dickens then it sucks ass. :)

Honestly the best thing to do is to talk to her about what she likes about Rand. I read her books and I liked them, just to read them. I wasn't into her philosophy. My SIL that got her master and doctorate from Berkley has Rand on her shelf. It's not bad to be exposed to other points of view and doesn't mean your daughter will ultimately agree with Rand either (or you even).

And in the other realm of books things I've read over the last few years that I've really enjoyed (and recommended to a few people) are Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, The Last Days of the Romanovs, and 1776 by McCullough. And for a teenage daughter, I'd highly recommend "Their Eyes We're Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston if she hasn't read it in school. It's one of my favorite books of all times, and I read it in the 9th grade many many moons ago.

[The_Commonist]

61. When she finishes Atlas Shrugged, show her this:

[patrice]

62. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.

[asdjrocky]

102. +1

[patrice]

63. Jeff Sharlet's The Family

[patrice]

65. Ayn Rand bio

http://www.slate.com/id/2233966

[progressoid]

66. THANKS EVERYBODY !!11!!

Great suggestions. I gotta go clean the ice out of my gutters now.

[Blue-Jay]

68. Ayn Rand would expect the gutters to clean themselves.

[TomClash]

69. Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist

The long novel that helped spark the British Labor Movement in the early 20th Century - written by an Irish house painter.

Steinbeck - In Dubious Battle

The novels of the Spanish Civil War - Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, Malraux's Man's Hope.

Mary Heaton Vorse's "Strike!" a novel about the plight of textile workers before WWI.

[bvar22]

71. A simple reminder that Ayn Rand wrote...

FICTION.
.
.
.
Anybody can create a Fantasy World where THEY are The HERO or The VICTIM, or in Ayn Rand's case, a Heroic Victim.

[ljm2002]

72. Besides "antidotes"...

...I would also point out to her that Ayn Rand admired a brutal killer. Here is the thread on DU, don't know if you want your daughter to know all the details but it certainly sheds some light on Rand's thought processes and why some of us might find them suspect:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=520658

[alfredo]

73. "On The Road" Jack Kerouac "Oryx and Crake" Margaret Atwood

The second book on the same subject, "The Year of the Flood" by Atwood is also an eye opener.

[ZombieHorde]

74. Language in Thought and Action offers good lessens concerning critical thinking. nt

[Democracyinkind]

75. It usually begins with Ayn Rand by Jerome Tuccile.

That's all she needs to read to understand that Ayn Rand was basically a cult leader peddling her very own Heilslehre by applying Stalinist modes of thinking and bullying anyone who didn't lead their lives the way she told them to.

Or just tell her that Ayn Rand thaught that not smoking is anti-life. That's her slogan, verbatim.

Or that pollution is a symbol of progress - she said anyone who gets cancer from industrial pollution should consider him/herself honoured to pay at least a small personal price for the ingenuity of the designers of those plants.

Tuccile is kind of a nut as well, but at least he's honest about it in his books (or he just doesn't hide it well). But his insider tidbits from the heydays of the Rand-Cult are worthy of reading.

[jmowreader]

80. I have the perfect antidote to Randism, but it's not a novel

First, go to http://ehsehplp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1289%2Fehp.0900949 and print the article out.

Then sit her down and have a nice mother-daughter talk: "Now honey, I understand you've started reading the works of Ayn Rand. I know learning about new ideas is an important part of your teen years, but I think it's time you learned the real effects of the "objectivist" system she talks about in her books." Then give her this article.

(It's about the melamine food-chain contamination incident in China a couple years back--the implication being that if Objectivism, which is essentially a "fend for yourself" social construct, was to run rampant, nothing would stop food producers from putting any damn thing they wanted in the products they sold and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.) Another good resource, which is ostensibly a novel, is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. Sinclair originally wrote this as a communist manifesto; the PTB wanted to denounce it until they sent inspectors to the Chicago slaughterhouses and found things exactly as Sinclair described them. Following that little revelation was the Pure Food and Drug Act, possibly the finest piece of socialist legislation any nation has ever passed and proof positive socialism, in the right circumstances, is exactly what you need. You can also give her http://www.uac.arizona.edu/VSC443/Alternmethod/Fdapap03.htm, an article about, among other things, a product called Lash-Lure--a mascara made out of industrial textile dyes that killed at least one person and maimed many more. Oh, and here's a good one: because our free market system didn't require any testing of drugs before they were sold, some really entertaining ones were created. My favorite is Elixir Sulfanilamide-Massengill, made by the S.E. Massingill Company of Bristol, Tennessee. http://www.unconfirmedsources.com/index.php?itemid=1000.> Sulfa was a miracle drug during the Spanish-American War, but because it's got sulfur in it sulfa drugs taste awful. To make them taste better the Massingill company dissolved it and raspberry flavoring in the sweet-tasting solvent diethylene glycol. And yes, at this point you are probably thinking to yourself, isn't Diethylene Glycol the most toxic chemical it's possible to make? Well, yes it is and that's the problem: this healing product killed over a hundred people before the feds finally went door-to-door collecting the stuff. Dr. Massingill claimed up and down that the sulfa rather than the antifreeze was killing all those people, but a government scientist determined the DEG would kill very effectively with no sulfa at all in it. The best part of the whole incident? The fine Massingill paid was for mislabeling their product--elixir means a product dissolved in a simple alcohol; gin, which is the essence of botanicals dissolved in an ethanol base, is an elixir--rather than what the product did once it got out of the bottle. If you can imagine the federal government charging Timothy McVeigh with double-parking his truck in front of the Murrah building, rather than blowing the building to shit and killing 168 people who were in it, you can understand the problem here.)

After she gets done reading all this stuff and swears off Ayn Rand forever, take her on a fun shopping spree to celebrate--I recommend going to the stores where they sell the cool old clothes and used books, then shopping for sparkly eyeshadow and go out for big lattes.

[Odin2005]

85. You need to give that English teacher a lecture for assigning anything by that sociopath.

Because any English teacher who assigns it is a moron and should not be teaching anyone.

[Cleita]

87. Not really. Kids need to be assigned all kinds of different reading so it

can be discussed in class. Sometimes the assigned reading is stuff we like but many conservatives don't, so should we ban them too? When I was in school I couldn't read "The Three Musketeers" because it was on the Vatican's banned book list (Catholic school).

[Odin2005]

90. She's a horrible writter, the ideological content not-withstanding.

Were it not for her ideological notoriety she would have been just a forgotten C-grade hack writer. Her books have no literary merit.

[Cleita]

106. So is Dan Brown, but I'll bet "The DaVinci Code" and his writing will be

assigned in the future. Sometimes with bad writers, who managed to get published, I think it's a good exercise just to go in and edit their crap.

[Cleita]

86. Anything written my Thom Hartmann. He pretty much shoots holes into

any of the Libertarian ideas that come from Ayn Rand. His books are listed on his website.

[Happy Friend]

89. Absurd Choice

No credible Literary critic holds Rand in high esteem. It is ridiculous that she would be assigned reading for a high school English class. That teacher is either a wingnut or has a misguided sense of the necessity of "balance" (as oppossed to objectivity).

Tell her that Rand and Colbert are basically mutually exclusive. The Rand worldview is entirely at odds with Colbert's ironically expressed humanism.

Also, The Vonnegut book that most directly serves as a counter point to that Randian crackpot shit is God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, although Breakfast of Champions is the book that most resonates with young people due its hilarious and irreverent existentialism.

BoC can maybe be summarized thusly: We humans are big meat machines piloted by a crocodile brain surrounded by a more advanced but still enormously flawed supermonkey brain. We are furthermore forced to navigate a complex society whilst saddled with cultural and historical baggage that we can never grasp in its entirety. Hence the tragicomedy of life on Earth.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

91. What English class would assign an Ayn Rand book....

From a strictly literary perspective, Rand's novels are complete dreck. She has no literary reputation to speak of, and the fact that her teacher assigned one of Rand's novels tells me a LOT about her teacher.

If we're talking social/political novels, I'd recommend anything from Sinclair Lewis. The politics is good and the stories are quite accessible for a high school studentl.

[HarveyDarkey]

93. just show her this, although Vonnegut is the best antidote

[Viking12]

94. Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil

[rampart]

95. the tallula morehead review of fountainhead should work

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tallulah-morehead/the-insanity-of-ayn-rand_b_211209.html

[bemildred]

101. Yup, very accurate.

The combination of sexual rococo with political dogmatism and pseudo-intellectual content is hard to match anywhere.

[Fire_Medic_Dave]

98. Get her the Bones or Star Trek boxed set.

Turning her birthday into a rebuttal of Rand is unwise at best.

[DeltaLitProf]

100. Zinn's A People's History of American Empire

It's the foreign policy portions of People's History of the United States in the form of a long comic book. I'd also recommend the graphic novel Watchmen as a rebuttal to Ayn Rand, since one character is the embodiment of everything Rand would support, and carries her philosophy to its inevitable point: mass murder.

[asdjrocky]

103. Jack London - The Iron Heal

Plus everything by Zinn, of course.

[soleiri]

104. Luckily, my son was given the option to read Atlas Shrugged

in his 9th grade honors English class.
He opted to read Dracula instead.
Something about soul-less blood-sucking character
being preferable to a soul-less blood-sucking author, I'm sure.

Right now he's reading Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy.
He loves it.

[warm regards]

108. Manifest der Kommunistischen