* Male pioneers are inspired by women all the time, just in a different way. They drive themselves to succeed by thinking of all the women who would be attracted to them if they do.
* So way wait. Gay Talese wasn’t inspired by new journalist Barbara Ehrenreich? Really, seriously? I mean, who isn’t inspired by Barbara Ehrenreich? I mean, come on now.
* How many women journalists were even around 10-20 yrs before his 1960s journalism (so, we’re talking 1940s, 50s) to inspire/influence him? And out of that minute group, how many of them were widely enough known/famous to be inspirational to another US journalist?
It’s like asking Buzz Aldrin which female astronauts inspired him to become an astronaut.
* I’ve noticed too, after the PC line changes, how rapidly liberal transgressions get flushed down the memory hole. I watched a couple of movies from 2009 this weekend, and gays were still a common punchline. Yet the liberal actors, liberal Hollywood directors, etc. who put out movie after movie ridiculing gays and trannies, even those made only a short time ago, seem to be completely off the hook.
Yet, Paula Deen says a single comment 40 years ago about a black man who put a gun to her face in a robbery, and she was paraded around for a public two minute hate.
What’s even more messed up is that if gays and liberals do bring up media depictions, it gets twisted around so that at the end of it, they blame the straight white man.
* An interesting take on the Ayn Rand cult that flourished in the ’60s:
The all-encompassing nature of the Randian line may be illustrated by an incident that occurred to a friend of mine who once asked a leading Randian if he disagreed with the movement’s position on any conceivable subject. After several minutes of hard thought, the Randian replied: “Well, I can’t quite understand their position on smoking.” Astonished that the Rand cult had any position on smoking, my friend pressed on: “They have a position on smoking? What is it?” The Randian replied that smoking, according to the cult, was a moral obligation. In my own experience, a top Randian once asked me rather sharply, “How is it that you don’t smoke?” When I replied that I had discovered early that I was allergic to smoke, the Randian was mollified: “Oh, that’s OK, then.” The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.) One suspects that the actual reason, as in so many other parts of Randian theory, from Rachmaninoff to Victor Hugo to tap dancing, was that Rand simply liked smoking and had the need to cast about for a philosophical system that would make her personal whims not only moral but also a moral obligation incumbent upon everyone who desires to be rational.
One incident of suppressed doubt of Randian tenets is revealing of the psychology of even the leading cult members. One top young Randian, a veteran of the movement in New York City, admitted privately one day that he had grave doubts on a key Randian philosophic tenet: I believe it was the fact of his own existence. He was deathly afraid to ask the question, it being so basic that he knew he would be excommunicated on the spot for simply raising the point; but he had complete faith that if Rand should be asked the question, she would answer it satisfactorily and resolve his doubts. And so he waited, year after year, hoping against hope that someone would ask the question, be expelled, but that his own doubts would then be resolved in the process.
