From Phillips Academy 1955 class notes, Andover Magazine Summer 2024
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After 86 years of ideas gestating inside a poetic sensibility a la T. S. Eliot, I’ve finally hit my stride as a latter-day Montaigne publishing wit and wisdom on my website and as a latter-day Colombo detecting the pony responsible for the pile of manure with logical precision.
Did the crackpot “objectivist” Ayn Rand realize that putting Mr. Fountainhead Howard Roark with his female prize atop a tall building was aping King Kong with his female prize atop the Empire State Building? And that both were put there by our mirror-image opposite lurking in our animal brain to lure us backward to “wildness,” a romanticized idea of “home” without choice, just so human wouldn’t choose to return Home with choice — and without animal.
Magical-willful “thinking” so effective with Rand’s zombie authoritarian cult that the Empire State Building is in danger of toppling over with so many George III-loving monarchists on top of it.
Proving that if only I’d taken Black Mac McCarthy’s philosophy course it might not have taken this long to realize that the authoritarian mindset gets it exactly wrong. Too soon old, too late smart.