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I note from the article: "Ironically, Republican Jeff Atwater (Florida's CFO) is hosting a screening of Part III in Boca Raton, Florida tomorrow. It is ironic because, one of his last votes in the Florida legislature, Atwater voted in favor of a heavily government subsidized railroad system, which ..." We have this conversation here continuously and continually. Political conservatives think that _Atlas Shrugged_ is about the Marxist/Muslim Liar-in-Chief and never see Cuffy Meigs as one of their own. Mr. Thompson pleads with John Galt, "I am a liberal, enlightened man..." but he cannot protect Galt from the muscle-mystics, i.e., from the right wing of his coalition.
And for all of that, this is not about politics. _Atlas Shrugged_ is a love story. It is a novel of philosophical detection. It is a modern American instantiation of the 19th century Russian novel. It is much more - and on many levels. No film could do it complete justice, or else Ayn Rand, as a child of Hollywood, would have made a movie in the first place.
That all being as it may, I enjoyed every minute of the show.
Everyone seems to have a problem with Project F. I choose to look at it this way. The competent and capable people have all disappeared, so what else would you expect of a torture device then something that appears cobbled together, rather than something really slick looking. Still, Galt naked on the table as in the book would have been a nice touch ;).
"Galt... has been recruiting the top minds of the United States for a place known as Mulligan's Valley (a/k/a Atlantis or Galt's Gulch). It is a place unencumbered by government red tape allowing people to produce what they like based on their own ideas and abilities. In Part II, these 'producers' went on strike from an oppressive crony-based government in favor of a purely capitalistic society." Recruiting only for members in a place that is a different economic society? What happened to recruiting on behalf of the mind on strike against the traditional anti-reason ethics of looters against producers? Most of those who quit in the novel were not recruited and did not go to the valley at all. Most of those who did were there 1 month out of the year.
"As with most government programs in real life, we find the unintended consequences of otherwise well-meaning agencies, turn into fiefdoms of power, bureaucracy and wasted taxpayer money. " Unintended? Well-meaning agencies?
"The movie's theme is about getting government out of the way of the producers to benefit society..." Benefit society? What happened to the moral right of the individual to his own life? And maybe the actual theme of the role of the mind in man's existence is a little more than "getting the government out of the way"?
Has the movie contributed to these conservative rewrites of Atlas Shrugged?
Jan
Another example I know is "Shakespeare in the Bush" by Laura Bohannon. She tries to tell the story of Hamlet to some African men, but they cannot accept the unreal elements. "Everyone knows there are no such things as ghosts," they protest. "But, of course, everyone has seen a zombi, so Hamlet's father must have been a zombi."
I am fond of Wagner too, though I prefer to read the story and listen to the instrumental music (except for Tanhauser). Wagner had a knack for driving down into the archetypes of a story and making it a legend.
I like your Bush Shakespeare story. Ha.
Tolkien set out to make a corpus of legends that rivaled the Arthurian but which did not derive from the French tradition. It is amazing...but he succeeded. The power of words.
Jan
Jan
Jan