I missed that, probably because I couldn't stomach his mountain of words. Although, I have to say that Atlas Shrugged is not an easy read.
Ayn was right and smart, but Shakespeare she was not. (Hey, unrhymed iambic pentameter!)

I just got a Harvard Business Journal solicitation for subscription in the mail, with an example journal. Amazingly, every single article in the example simply dripped with whining progressive diatribe, from why women aren't supported in STEM (from bias from both sexes) to reducing "corporate culture" by not sending e-mails late at night. That either led the big O there as a fly to poop, or further instilled him with a fluency in poop. (for what it is worth, I rarely use "poop" in normal speech)

That is surprisingly similar to how I assimilated Atlas...my mind had to concretize and then abstract in layers through multiple readings.

you are exactly right.
one thing is for sure Ayn Rand is continually spoken of and quoted. rush Limbaugh claims to have known buckley fairly well having dinners at his home, however rush Limbaugh has on many occasions referred to Ayn Rand and quoted her always in glowing terms. so I guess those who think so highly of buckley as Limbaugh does never quote him.

That "mountain of words" called Atlas Shrugged a "mountain of words" in the last paragraph.
Had that machine-gunning, machine-gunning, machine-gunning hit piece been written during our current socialist-in-chief's regime, I would not be surprised by the race card being pulled..

jimjamesjames..,,,Brilliant. thanks

I have a very long time friend (currently a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge) who, I thought, idolized Buckley. In discussion, though, he said, "I just like the way his mind works, not the outcome of his thinking."

Love your second paragraph.

No, but there is a moral to it!

Thanks for the good long laugh!

ewv... And vice-versa.

jimjamesjames... George Orwell's 1984 ..truth is stranger than fiction,,,,and often more exact...

I never knew this about Buckley, but I instinctively disliked his snobby attitude and demeanor...intelligence will only carry one so far.

Unfortunately, Buckley, with whom I agreed about half of the time, slipped in to "good Catholic boy" mode too often, with all of that religion's closed mindedness. Chambers, like a reformed drunk, went from one extreme, communist, to another, religious zealot. The old red adage was that religion is the opiate of the people. I would argue that communism, fascism and all the other collectivist "isms" are in fact also opiates. They make people feel good without addressing the underlying cause of the pain. They are an easy fix as a way of avoiding dealing with real problems.

When someone uses that many words to make that thin a point, it is almost certainly written as a desperate response from a weak viewpoint.

Ayn Rand could hardly believe the religiosity of Buckley. Upon meeting her, he related to a friend,trying to imitate her accent, he said that she said to him, "You don't really believe that religious stuff?" Which not only revealed his true lack of intellectual curiosity, but his bigotry as well.

"The mischief here is that the author, dodging into fiction, nevertheless counts on your reading it as political reality."

Which it, now, is.

Atlas Shrugged isn't anything like a Bible.

Leonard Peikoff wrote a rebuttal to Chambers which Buckley refused to publish. Buckley was always a pretentious, pompous pseudo-intellectual in promotion of religious traditionalism. He couldn't admit what Atlas Shrugged was and his followers still can't. They republished the Whittakers mud sling on the centennial of Ayn Rand's birth and again on the 50th anniversary of Atlas Shrugged -- the typical Buckley obnoxious taunting anti-intellectualism. Ordinary people everywhere have continued to discover AS despite the Buckleyite smear campaign misrepresenting it.

Leonard Peikoff's devastating rebuttal to Buckley's cohort is published as "Reply to Whittaker Chambers" in Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, ed by Robert Mayhew. https://estore.aynrand.org/p/233/essa... The Chambers smear continues to remind us what Buckley and his followers are.

Buckley's flunkey hatchet man is of the same cloth as the "intellectual" slugs that pontificate on the editorial and review sections of the Washington Post. Of course Rand creates a fiction to illustrate her philosophy. Of course she uses bigger than life characters to represent her heroic ideas. Of course she creates the most vile characters to represent the underlying evils that are destroying our chance of having a rational society.

I have heard all the references to liking Atlas as a teenager but then "growing up". Rand does deal in blacks and whites but surrendering to a world of shades of gray without protest is not to have lived at all.

On my first reading of Atlas I thought it contained some interesting ideas but that the story was like a Sky King TV segment and the level of competence of heroes were impossible to emulate. The second time I realized that the characters were composites of types of people that were on the right track. That the plot was just an instrument for illustrating the ideas and that the ideas were very profound. By the third time I read Atlas, I was focused on the words of the characters in their speeches, Reardon's trial, Francisco's money speech and "This is John Galt". Additional re-readings are for pleasure and refreshment. I no longer worry about the juvenile aspects of the story nor do I get intimidated by the characters. Oh and the book never seems to be a 1100 page chore, but more like a modern day Bible.

She who laughs last ...