I liked the piece, but I also thought that it was a little bit like an argument that someone else's religion is "man-made." Gee golly - which one is not? Every so-called "genius" is a creation of popular infatuation with celebrity status - which seems ingrained in many people's psyche. All it takes is some talent (which is quite common,) the skill of using that talent to deliver what people want to see or hear and do so in a crowd-pleasing manner (which again is not that uncommon,) and a privileged access to a powerful information dissemination machine (which is relatively rare.)
So criticizing one literary celebrity for being a mediocre crowd-pleaser seems to obscure the fact all celebrities are - they only difference is whether it is "our" or "their" celebrity.
BTW, AR was a rather obscure figure on the other side of the pond, and her US popularity seem to be grounded in the fact that she was an expat European intellectual acting like a sounding board for the American culture. In that, her role was similar to that of Adorno et al., or for that matter, Zizek. The main difference is that she espoused a conservative ideology (but then, it is a conservative country after all, and conservatism is what sells here.)
But as HL Mencken once observed, it does not take much to become an intellectual celebrity in the US - certainly not originality or intellectual depth (if there are such things.) As the case of Jerzy Kosinski demonstrates, all that it takes is knowing what stories please the consumers of pop-culture, which European authors to plagiarize with relative impunity to add 'literary depth" to those stories, and which society ladies to screw to get privileged access to the information dissemination industry. In that respect, AR was a genius, but then again so were many others.
Wojtek
On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 12:26 PM, <dredmond at efn.org> wrote:
> On Fri, May 21, 2010 8:45 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > My pal Corey Robin writes...
> >
> > <http://www.thenation.com/article/garbage-and-gravitas>
> >
> > Garbage and Gravitas
> > Corey Robin
>
> Great article. It's both creepy and amazing, just how deeply Rand's bubble
> gum Heideggerianism permeates US culture. One of the numerous price tags
> of Empire...
>
> -- DRR
>
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>