Reading and Plotting and Writing

My favorite books as a teenager included Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction by Patricia Highsmith. The canny creator of The Talented Mr. Ripley wrote a book that is equal parts inspirational, autobiographical and advisory.

I read an Effingham library copy when I was in high school and it took me decades to find a hardcover copy of my own. She made me want to be a professional writer.

Other favorites included The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. I have since escaped their dark, Neptune-like gravitational pull, but I will never forget them. Rand’s philosophy offers useful hymns to individualism — particularly for the young, when they most need to hear them. But unfortunately, despite her self-congratulatory trumpeting of reason, Rand confused her own whims and passions with facts, much to the detriment of the political economy and moral bearings of the U.S., as it turned out.

Then there was Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming. The second of the James Bond novels remains the most vivid in my mind, with its evocation of New York circa 1953, with its tough heroic action, with its vulnerable, clairvoyant heroine, with its Freudian-daddy villain’s horrifying schemes of vengeance, with its lyric Silver Meteor train ride from Manhattan to St. Petersburg and those offhanded observations of Bond’s that seemed to express the height of sophistication when you were a teenage boy.

The problem isn’t getting the caviar you want, you know. It’s getting the proper amount of buttered toast to spread it on.

Ian Fleming took an eager sensual pleasure in life that ended his life early, but that can still sweep us along with its zest. The real Bond — as real as any Bond can be — is there, in Fleming’s novels.

Cassandra and the Myth of Social Security

By Dan Hagen

The Greeks had a myth about Cassandra, a beautiful Trojan princess to whom the god Apollo gave the gift of prophecy as part of his campaign to seduce her. But when she refused him, he added a curse: that her infallibly correct predictions about the future would never be believed by anyone.

Imagine that agony of that — always to be warning people of the danger ahead, only to have them laugh at you and march right into doom.

I sometimes think of Cassandra when I recall my Eastern Illinois University economics professor, Allen Smith. Although I didn’t major in economics, I took three elective classes with Smith during the 1970s because I admired the clarity of his teaching. And for decades now, like Cassandra, he has been warning Americans about what’s being done to Social Security.

In his new book, “Ronald Reagan and the Great Social Security Heist,” Smith details how both major political parties and the corporate news media worked to disguise the fact that Social Security “trust fund,” funded by the wages of American workers for 80 years, has been looted.

The book begins with a call Smith received in 2000 in his Florida home. CNN was on the other end, and wanted him on the air at 2 p.m. that day to talk about the threat to Social Security. The rest of his book details, with his customary clarity, just what that threat was and is — from economic malpractice and illiteracy through Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s massive Social Security con job to today’s hidden agenda.

Greenspan, a disciple of the radical “free market” novelist and thinker Ayn Rand, pushed for a major increase in the payroll tax — a tax legally bound to be used solely to fund Social Security and Medicare — so that baby boomers, who represent a bulge in the U.S. population, could “prepay” their retirement security. In fact, the money was looted.

Smith noted that the national debt would be trillions lower today, and the Social Security trust fund would hold trillions more in 'good-as-gold' marketable Treasury bonds, if the Social Security surplus generated by the 1983 payroll tax increase had been used to pay down the public debt as intended.

Professor Emeritus Allen W. Smith

“The politicians betrayed the trust of the American people — especially the baby boomers who have contributed more to Social Security than any other generation,” Smith said. “In addition to paying for the retirement of the previous generation, the boomers were required to pay enough additional payroll tax to prepay the cost of their own retirement.”

 “As soon as the surpluses resulting from the 1983 payroll tax hike first began to flow into the Treasury, politicians from both political parties began using the money like a giant slush fund,” he said. “At that time, it would be at least 30 years before the funds would actually be needed for Social Security, so politicians developed the bad habit of ’temporarily borrowing’ the money and using it for non-Social Security purposes.”

“IF the government is able and willing to repay the $2.7 trillion of misused Social Security revenue, Social Security could pay full benefits for 20 more years,” Smith said. “But no provisions have been made for repaying the raided money, and I don't believe that many members of Congress have any intention of repaying the money, now, or ever.

“The government has managed to cover up the ‘theft’ of the money that was supposed to finance the baby boomers' retirement, and it is well known by most media that they might face a Dan Rather type of fate if they report the truth,” Smith said.

Intrigued? Outraged? You can learn more about the book at Smith’s web site, www.thebiglie.net.

Ayn Rand: After the Fox

I finished with Ayn Rand for good and all the day I learned that she actually admired and defended the 1920s killer William E. Hickman, who kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old girl and then tossed out her dismembered body after he got his ransom money.

She admired Hickman's superior individualism, you see. She loved the fact that Hickman was a handsome mystery man who called himself “The Fox” and pitted his wits alone against the whole world, like her subsequent literary protagonists Howard Roark and John Galt. The fact that he had to terrorize and murder children to do so was, apparently, neither here nor there to Rand.

In fact, she once planned a novel “…to be titled ‘The Little Street,’ the projected hero of which was named Danny Renahan,” wrote author Michael Prescott. “According to Rand scholar Chris Matthew Sciabarra, she deliberately modeled Renahan — intended to be her first sketch of her ideal man — after this same William Edward Hickman. Renahan, she enthuses in another journal entry, ‘is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should.’”

Another term for someone who feels that “other people do not exist” is, of course, a sociopath. This suggests that Rand's genius crossed the line at some point into the fairly sick fantasies of a sociopath.

Hickman, Rand's idea of a Nietzschean superman

“It seems to me that Ayn Rand’s uncritical admiration of a personality this twisted does not speak particularly well for her ability to judge and evaluate the heroic qualities in people,” Prescott noted. “One might go so far as to say that anyone who sees William Edward Hickman as the epitome of a ‘real man’ has some serious issues to work on, and perhaps should be less concerned with trying to convert the world to her point of view than in trying to repair her own damaged psyche.”

Rand's idealization of a vicious child murderer demonstrated that her alleged, much-advertised concern for the rights of others was a smoke screen. What she was really about was riding roughshod over anyone who stood between her and what she desired, a fact that both her novels and her biography bear out. Rand's ethics were mere rationalization, not reason.

Rand’s primary concern was to describe a world that would be ideal for the kind of ruthless, brilliant, fictional supermen she had worshipped from childhood. Sadly, that world does not intersect at any point with the real one.

By the way, her real name was Alice Rosenbaum. This socialism-scorning thinker took out Medicare and Social Security under her husband’s name to disguise her hypocrisy. She needed the Medicare because her heroic, romantic, supermanish "taming of fire at her fingertips" had given her lung cancer.

Those are the hard facts that are left after all the self-deluding romantic fantasies have died.