| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"words of truth" |
| Date: |
03 Jan 2006 02:02:13 PM |
| Object: |
Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Downstairs again we somehow fell into a discussion of our religious
antecedents, and Ayn mentioned that she was Jewish by birth and that
Frank was Catholic, although they were both atheists and felt no tie to
religion of any kind. "What matters," Ayn remarked, "is what you
accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident
of your ancestry."
Nathaniel Branden
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
There's nothing like suicide to make a point. Lissa Roche could have
shot herself in the head in the living room of her house, which is
where she got the gun which eventually killed her. Instead, she left
the house by the back door and, crossing its back yard, entered the
arboretum which the Hillsdale College students had created, according
to the PR material which Lissa herself supervised, for the college's
alumni as a place of peace and meditation. It was there at the gazebo
with the scriptural passage from Paul warning about drunkenness and
fornication that she killed herself, making in the process a statement
about the college which the world could not ignore. The location was
significant. "I have performed many marriages there," said one
Hillsdale professor who is also a minister. He then added with a smirk,
"Students who want to screw go there too."
Lissa chose the location and the act of suicide as an attack on George
Roche III and the institution which was, as Emerson would have said,
his "lengthened shadow." It was also an attack on the conservative
movement which had provided the financial basis for Hillsdale's
success and which, by enabling that success, had become the instrument
of its undoing. There is historical precedent for this sort of thing.
When Harriet Shelley realized that she had lost her husband irrevocably
to the baleful intellectual influence of the Godwin family and to Mary
Godwin in particular, she killed herself as well, making sure that her
husband got the message. Mary Godwin got the message too, and
immortalized it in Frankenstein, whose monster tells his guilt-ridden
creator, "I will be with you on your wedding night." Henceforth,
all sexual pleasure will be polluted with guilt, the guilt Percy and
Mary Shelley felt over the adultery which caused the death of
Shelley's first wife.
"I will be with you on your wedding night" might have been
Lissa's message to Hillsdale College President George Roche III as
well. In August of 1998, Roche filed for divorce from June Bernard
Roche, his wife of 44 years and the mother of George IV, to whom Lissa
was married. On April 30, 1999 the divorce became finalized and once it
did, George III asked both Lissa and George IV to move into Broadlawn,
the mansion which Hillsdale College provided its president, ostensibly
to care for Roche's aged mother. At this point George IV had no idea
that there was something unseemly about the relationship between his
wife and his father. Then in September, George III announced out of the
blue that he intended to marry Mary Hagan, 56, of Louisville, Kentucky,
and a wedding was hastily arranged for September 13. Shortly after
George III announced his impending wedding, George IV and Lissa were
asked to move out of Broadlawn and at this point the cords holding back
the heavy weight of deceit which George III and Lissa had been carrying
for almost two decades began to snap under the strain and the whole
sordid affair began its inexorable slide into disaster.
Five days before the wedding, on September 8, Lissa wrote a letter in
which she announced that she was quitting her job at Hillsdale and
planning to divorce her husband. "It grieves me to tell you that I am
unable to continue as managing editor of Imprimis and the Hillsdale
college press, " Lissa Roche wrote in a memo found by police on a
laptop computer in her home. "I am seeking a divorce from George IV
for reasons I can't go into, and it seems best to get out of town
immediately," she wrote. "I'm sorry to leave you on a lurch like
this. I know that there will be a lot of talk about my sudden
departure; please tell people that, although it seems strange that I
left in such a secretive manner, it was simply to avoid a big fuss. You
know me; I hate to be the object of attention."
People who knew Lissa described her as an aggressive promoter of
Hillsdale's interests and not at all reluctant to be the object of
attention. It was Lissa who squired the prominent conservative speakers
around campus when they came there to talk. The author of this article
was given the tour of campus by Lissa in the Spring of 1990 when he was
invited to Hillsdale to speak on the fall of the Berlin wall. "I'm
the daughter-in-law of George III, the wife of George IV, and the
mother of George V," Lissa said by way of introduction, and one got
the impression that she was pleased to be part of what she perceived as
the American equivalent of a political dynasty in the Anglophile mold.
"Charlton Heston spoke here last week," she announced over dinner,
"and he gave us a $10,000 contribution." "I hope you don't
expect that from all your speakers," I said in response. "I have
been such an object in the college community for many years now," she
wrote in her September 8 resignation letter. "I just want this to be
as private as possible, and most of all, I don't want to have to
answer any questions."
After writing her letter of resignation, Lissa flew to California to be
with her twin sister and presumably to discuss the impending wedding.
Her sister must have counseled reconciliation because Lissa was back in
Hillsdale a short time later and, in fact, attended her
father-in-law's wedding. But whatever it was that prompted the first
outburst wouldn't let go of Lissa's increasingly fragile psyche.
She got drunk at the wedding and during the course of the reception
made cryptic remarks about her relationship with the groom.
The marriage which got off to such an inauspicious start seemed to be
over before it really began. On October 15, George III showed up at
Lissa and George IV's home and announced that he was planning to
separate from his wife of little over a month and asked Lissa if she
would move back into Broadlawn with George IV. Lissa eagerly agreed and
bounced back from her depression almost immediately. Then, one day
later, George IV got a call from his father's new wife informing him
that his father had gone into a diabetic related shock and had to be
taken to the hospital. Returning from the hospital at around 3:00 a.m.
on the morning of October 17, George IV announced that it looked as if
his father had reconciled with his new wife. The announcement that they
were not going to separate plunged Lissa back into the emotional
turmoil she had so recently escaped. Enraged by the announcement, Lissa
drove to the hospital and was asked by Roche's new wife to leave.
Undeterred she returned to the hospital at 11 a.m. with her husband,
who recounted later that she threatened suicide during the short drive.
When the couple reached George III's hospital room a confrontation
ensued, during which Lissa announced to her husband that she had been
having an affair with his father for the past 19 years. When George IV
turned to his father for a denial, none was forthcoming.
When Lissa and George IV returned home, Lissa gave her husband an
ultimatum. "You need to go back and see your dad and tell him we all
need to leave Hillsdale and go somewhere else and start over." When
George III rejected the idea, Lissa decided that she had had enough.
Weakened by years of vice and deception, Lissa's soul no longer had
the elasticity it needed to make the transition from the center of the
premier conservative college to a life on the periphery of a movement
she had helped promote. Rather than beginning a new life with an act of
repentance, Lissa decided to end the old life with an act of vengeance
on the man and the institution which had scorned her. Sending George IV
down the street to check on his grandmother, she took a .38 special out
of the locked gun cabinet and headed for the gazebo which symbolized
things venereal on campus. Now, when Hillsdale students contemplating
marriage think of a place to hold their wedding, they will think of the
gazebo and think of Lissa's death and then, with a shudder, think of
someplace else to hold the ceremony.
The Boat People
Lissa Jackson arrived on the Hillsdale College campus as a freshman in
the fall of 1975, four years after George III had taken over as
president, primed by her education for sexual adventure. At around the
same time that George Roche became president of Hillsdale, Lissa
Jackson began her high school education by flying to the Caribbean and
becoming a passenger on a large sailing ship that housed what was then
known as the Flint School, also known as the Boats, a floating academy
whose purpose was to instill into young minds the philosophy of Ayn
Rand.
"Ayn Rand was big on campus," said Ann, who graduated from
Hillsdale in 1978 and knew Lissa and other Flint School alumni while a
student there. She referred to them as "the boat people," conjuring
images of helpless refugees adrift in the aftermath of large
ideological conflicts. "I felt sorry for them," she continued,
"It's one of those situations where you know if they follow that
line of thinking, they're gonna go down the drain." Ann, who is one
of 14 children, remembers one of the boat people she befriended and
invited home for Thanksgiving dinner, a girl by the name of Kate, who
was from Panama, had been raised a Catholic, but now had lost contact
with just about anything one associated with roots and family.
Conservatism, in this instance the writings of Ayn Rand, filled the
vacuum that was once occupied by family, ethnicity, and religion. In
his memoir of his years with Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden described his
own sense of deracination as crucial to his involvement with
Objectivism.
"Living in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon city of Toronto, my parents
were Russian Jewish immigrants who had never really assimilated
themselves into Canadian culture. A sense of rootlessness and
disorientation was present in our home from the beginning. I had no
sense of belonging, in Toronto or anywhere else, nor was I even aware
of what a sense of belonging would mean. To me the void seemed normal."
It was only after Branden had read The Fountainhead and met Ayn Rand in
person at her Richard Neutra home in California that the feeling
started to abate. Objectivism had become a replacement for ethnicity,
family and religion. "At such moments as these," Branden wrote
describing his visits to his mentor, "my feeling of family was at its
strongest. I felt: here is my home; here is my space; here are my
roots. I was conscious of my longing for a sense of roots and welcomed
it." It was a situation that typified the Objectivist movement, whose
inner circle was composed of assimilation-hungry children of Russian
Jewish immigrants who idolized an America they saw as ruthless, WASPish
and powerful, an America that was symbolized by the dollar bill sign
which Ayn Rand wore on her black cape, a six-foot high version of which
stood beside her coffin as she lay in state.
By the time Lissa arrived at Hillsdale, Objectivism was in a sorry
state of disarray following the at the time still unexplained break
between Ayn Rand and her prot=E9g=E9 Nathaniel Branden. What Lissa
probably didn't know as she pored over the Rand's oeuvre while
sailing around the Caribbean, is that the break found its cause in
Rand's sexual jealousy. Rand had initiated a sexual affair with
Branden beginning in January 1955 when he was 25 and she was 50 years
old. Rand had insisted that their respective spouses give their
approval even though it aggravated her husband's alcoholism and his
wife's succumbing to increasing disturbing anxiety attacks.
"We'll have our year or two together," Rand explained to her
prospective lover, "and there will be no victims, no tragedy."
The actual chain of events turned out differently than Ayn Rand
predicted. The same lady who felt that she could account for every
emotion she had ever had dissolved into a jealous rage when she
discovered Branden was having an affair with a younger woman and no
longer interested in having sex with his 63-year-old mentor.
"You have dared to reject me?" roared the lady Branden used to
refer to as "Mrs. Logic" when she found out about the affair in
1968. "If anything goes permanently wrong between us," said the
goddess of reason who saw her mission in life as the promotion of the
rugged individualism, "I'm finished; everything is finished;
you're my lifeline to the world and to any chance at happiness I'm
ever going to have." Rand's lust for a younger man had reduced her
to a groveling parody of the characters in her novel. She was now the
female equivalent of Peter Keating, the "second hander" she held in
contempt in The Fountainhead.
Ayn Rand, it turns out, needed someone after all and needed to possess
that person completely. Her image of herself as desirable was bound up
with the adulterous affair she had initiated with her student and
admirer. "The man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged," she screamed
at Branden, "would never want anything less than me! I don't care
if I'm ninety years old and in a wheelchair!" The lady whom Branden
was still calling "a goddess of reason" found herself torn to
pieces by the idea that she was no longer sexually attractive to a man
25 years her junior. The lady who dedicated her life to promoting what
she called "the virtue of selfishness," now demanded the complete
and utter devotion of her most important follower. "You have no right
to casual friendships," she told Branden, "no right to vacations,
no right to sex with some inferior woman! Did you imagine that I would
consent to be left on the scrap heap? Is that what you imagined? Is
it?"
Although many were surprised by George Roche's relationship with his
daughter-in-law, no one associated with Hillsdale seemed unaware of his
reputation as a notorious womanizer. But there was evidence enough for
the affair with Lissa as well. One faculty member who asked not to be
identified recounted the story of Lissa and George III returning to
campus from a business trip and engaging in a long passionate kiss,
something that was definitely "not a peck on the cheek."
"There were signs of impropriety all over the place," recalls
Thomas Payne, a former member of the political science department at
Hillsdale. Payne recounted what he refers to as "the swimming pool
incident," something which occurred at some point between 1983 and
87.
"George and his entourage were at this indoor swimming pool. Lissa
was entering the pool and dropped the top of her bathing suit in what
seemed like an obviously contrived manner. She was standing there with
her bare breasts, and George was helping her put her top back on. He
was helping her, but he was not helping her. His entourage was ogling
and giggling. Those guys made the most of it."
The scene is reminiscent of a Porky's movie, and perhaps not without
reason. Bob Clarke, the writer and director of the Porky's movies, is
a Hillsdale alumnus, and Payne thinks those movies are the Rosetta
stone which gives the true picture of what campus life was like.
"Hillsdale is like the Porky's movies," said Payne, "The
attitude toward learning is that it will make you a nerd. The suburban
kids go to the old Florida whorehouse to have sex. The High school
teachers are either sexually repressed or then want to join in having
sex too. The mentality of the board of trustees is that college is
valuable because of the social experience it provides. That leads to
connections which are helpful in business. Education is not valuable.
Education makes you a nerd."
In retrospect it's hard not to notice similarities between George
Roche's affair with his daughter-in-law and Ayn Rand's affair with
her intellectual heir apparent. Both involved powerful older figures
who wanted worshipping younger loves. Both affairs were initiated when
their dominant partners were at the pinnacle of their success, and both
led to crushing disaster for the people involved and the movements they
represented. Both involved an element of idolatry as well.
"Roche's affairs," according to Payne, "were not a matter of
carnal lust. Roche wanted to be treated like a god. The women he had
sex with were not good looking. Lissa was not attractive. She was
overweight and dumpy. But they worshipped him. Roche's
daughter-in-law worshipped him." Nathaniel Branden bears out
Payne's interpretation of the motivation behind their respective
affairs. "If ever a decision had multiple motivations," he wrote in
his memoir of his years with Ayn Rand, "it was the decision to become
romantically involved with Ayn. I loved her, but there was also the
matter of ego. The challenge was exhilarating. She was a stupendous
mind and an electrifying personality- and when I looked into her eyes
the image I saw reflected was that of a god."
Eventually Branden found the prospect of sex with his, by then,
63-year-old mentor so repugnant that he broke off the relationship by
admitting that he was having an affair with a younger woman, not his
wife. The revelation so wounded Rand's by then monstrous ego, that
Rand vowed to destroy Branden. She oversaw the demolition of the
Nathaniel Branden Institute, a school which had been established to
promote her thought, and she attempted to have the publication of his
books blocked. In addition to destroying the Objectivist movement,
Rand's rage over being the scorned women pointed out the
contradictions in her philosophy of selfishness. Branden was supposed
to sacrifice himself to her lust while at the same time promoting the
virtue of selfishness. Rand, who promoted people who lived only for
themselves, found that she could not live without her worshipping
prot=E9g=E9.
It is unlikely that Lissa Jackson knew any of this while she was
studying Rand's philosophy at the Flint School. The full story
didn't come out until 1987 when Barbara Branden's memoir appeared,
19 years after the break between Rand and her husband and five years
after Rand's death. What Lissa most probably did pick up on the boats
was an attitude toward sexuality and morals that would prove as
destructive toward her own life as it had in the life of her mentors.
A young woman studying Ayn Rand has essentially two fictional role
models to follow-Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead and Dagny
Taggart in Atlas Shrugged. Both women are, to use the phrase Thomas
Payne coined after seeing the effect of those novels first hand in the
life of Lissa Jackson Roche, "adoring fornicators who couple with
superior beings." "Femininity," Ayn Rand told Barbara Branden,
"is hero worship." "Man," she said at another point, "is
defined by his relationship to reality, woman by her relationship to
man." "Like Nietzsche," Branden wrote, "Ayn worshipped 'the
superior man'-by which she meant 'the man of the mind,' the
rational, purposeful, independent, courageous hero who lives by his own
effort and for his own happiness."
If she didn't know it before she arrived on campus, Lissa would learn
very quickly that there was only one hero at Hillsdale College and that
man was George Roche. Some of those familiar with the story said that
Lissa fell in love with George III when she was an undergraduate and
eventually married his son to be close to him. Whatever the truth to
that may be, Lissa was a hero-worshipper by education and George Roche
III was a man disposed to be worshipped by adoring females of the kind
which populated Ayn Rand's novels. Lissa and George were Dagny
Taggart and John Galt, just as Nathaniel Branden and Ayn Rand were the
same couple with the sexes reversed; one was the hero-worshipper and
the other was the immaculate hero, engaged in an act of idolatry which
conferred god-like qualities on both.
In his more sober moments, Nathaniel Branden would portray what he
wanted out of the relationship in more measured tones. He saw in Ayn
most probably what Lissa saw in George, namely, "someone who would
give me what my own father never had. I had wanted an older person who
would teach me things, help make life and the world understandable, be
a point of security and stability while I was forming my own identity.
I had wanted a hero to admire." (p. 415). George and Lissa Roche's
last collaboration was their officially co-written work, The Book of
Heroes.
In order to make this sort of god-like but immoral relationship
palatable to the conscience a certain amount of moral
engineering-otherwise known as rationalization-is necessary. It was
this thirst for what John Galt would call "moral sanction," among a
deracinated readership, which would make Ayn Rand a best-selling
novelist and cult figure. "Sex," Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged,
evidently drawing on her own experience, "is the most profoundly
selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but
his own enjoyment-just try to think of performing it in a spirit of
selfless charity" (p. 490).
The heart of Rand's philosophy can be found in the 62-page rant which
John Galt makes at the end of Atlas Shrugged, a piece of writing Rand
did while enmeshed in her affair with Branden. John Galt commandeers
all of the world's radios to launch into a diatribe that has the man
of average sensibilities longing for a commercial break after the first
five pages. "A moral commandment," Galt informs what he presumes is
an eagerly awaiting world, "is a contradiction. The moral is the
chosen, not the forced; the understood not the obeyed. The moral is the
rational, and reason accepts no commandments." After displaying her
abysmal ignorance of the metaphysical foundation of morals, Rand goes
on to give her parody of rational psychology. "Your body is a
machine," she tells readers who had no idea of what the patrimony of
the west had to say about the soul but were just becoming accustomed to
the newly approved interstate highway system, "but your mind is its
driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with
achievement as the goal of you mind."
With an education like this, it is not surprising that Lissa Roche's
life ended in a head-on collision with the moral reality she never
learned about while sailing the Caribbean. "It is your morality that
you have to reject," Galt rants at the end of his speech. And this is
the one lesson both George and Lissa seemed to have taken to heart.
Another was that free trade and free love go hand in hand, that the
people who hate tariffs tend to hate pontiffs as well, as the young
John Maynard Keynes once noted, and that all of the talk about freedom
leads to a kind of antinomianism no matter how much one pays lips
service to Christianity.
In describing the spread of Howard Roark's fame as an architect in
The Fountainhead, Rand wrote that "it was as if an underground spring
flowed through the country and broke out in sudden springs that shot to
the surface at random, in unpredictable places." Rand later realized
that she was predicting the spread of her own writing as well.
Objectivism, as a formal movement with its own institutional structure,
died when the break between Rand and Branden became public in 1968, but
the trend toward selfishness, especially in sexual and economic
relations, for which Rand had provided compelling rationalization and
exculpation, continued unabated over the course of the next generation
and often shot to the surface at what seemed at first glance like
random and unpredictable places.
Hillsdale College was one of those places, and the conservative
movement, which had internalized much of what Rand wanted to say in
things like the failed Goldwater campaign and the successful Reagan
campaign, was another. What the conservative movement was not saying
was how the various pieces of this ad hoc political ideology fit
together, and they weren't saying this because they didn't know
themselves.
When George Roche became president of Hillsdale College, he took over
an institution which had an extremely modest financial endowment and a
spiritual endowment which had ceased to exist altogether. Hillsdale was
founded in 1844 as a Freewill Baptist college. Its prime intellectual
coordinates were prohibition, abolition and the equality of the sexes,
ideas which were cutting edge for the mid-nineteenth century but had
little relevance by the second half of the twentieth when the
revolutionary agenda of the liberals had either superseded them or
adopted them as its own. George III filled that intellectual vacuum by
making Hillsdale a conservative college, but, then as now, no one knew
exactly what the term meant. No one recognized-or wanted to
recognize-that it was made up of two mutually incompatible
intellectual currents which would eventually tear it
apart-Christianity and libertarianism. In classical terms, the
conflict could be described as Principle vs. Appetite.
Principle vs. Appetite
As one of his first acts as president, Roche brought in conservative
author and icon Russell Kirk to teach at Hillsdale, but more
importantly to give the world notice that Hillsdale was serious about
being conservative. If Roche had been as serious about thinking as he
was about fund-raising and public relations, he might have noticed that
Kirk's book The Conservative Mind, specifically the chapters on
Edmund Burke and John Adams, had some significant things to say about
the relationship between reason and appetite, lessons that would have
increasing relevance to Hillsdale College under George III's
increasingly autocratic leadership. That meant that Kirk also had
something to say about the two strains within conservatism-the
libertarian and the traditional-which appetite and reason
represented.
"Men's appetites," Kirk wrote describing Burke's point of view,
"are voracious and sanguinary ...reason alone can never chain them to
duty." Neither Kirk nor John Adams, whom he admired, could be
numbered among the "Americans among whom the acquisitive instinct is
confounded with the conservative tendency," but they were, in this
regard, exceptions to the American rule, and not in the mold of George
Roche, for whom the confounding was all but complete. As a result, both
Kirk and Adams remained for their respective generations, voices crying
in the wilderness, as their contemporaries plunged toward the
gratification of passions which would ultimately destroy them.
Burke's warning about unaided reason pointed to the need for
something beyond it to curb, at the very least, the human mind's
penchant for rationalization. Both Burke and Adams were referring to
religion, but it is the recurrent tragedy of the Anglo-American
philosophical school that its traditionalist thinkers could all agree
on the necessity of religion but could never get down to specifying
which religion was necessary, so suffused were they with the baleful
effects of the Reformation.
Burke, according to Kirk, was dedicated to private property and
tradition, but both pillars were to prove fragile mixtures of iron and
clay. When Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist Jacobin, asked the
tradition-loving Burke if he believed strongly enough in tradition to
want to go back to the days when Englishmen worshipped bread, there was
no answer forthcoming. When Burke said he followed tradition, he meant
going back to the political arrangements of 1688 and no further. When
Burke defended private property, he did not inquire too closely into
the question of where the richest English families got their property,
because if he had, he would have had to admit that they got it by
looting the Catholic monasteries of the Middle Ages. Once again
tradition and property had distinct if dishonest boundaries.
Harry Vereyser, who used to teach Hillaire Belloc's book The Servile
State at Hillsdale, once did a paper on Burke's economics, something
which probably hastened his demise there. "Burke had a very developed
sense of private property," Vereyser said, "but he would never look
into how all of the great English families got their wealth by
plundering the Church. Burke knew that bringing up this subject would
mean the end of his political career and so he never brought it up.
Belloc did in The Servile State, which I used to teach. Most
Episcopalians don't want to hear this stuff."
Both Roche and the conservatism he rode to wealth and power shared this
ambivalence about religion. Russell Kirk, after spending most of his
life as an Anglophile bohemian, finally converted to Catholicism when
he married in his mid-50s. George Roche took the exact opposite
trajectory. Raised a Catholic in Denver-Roche attended the Jesuit-run
Regis Prep and Regis College-Roche abandoned the Catholic faith and
became an Episcopalian as an adult. Roche not only abandoned the faith
of his ancestors, he also would brag about how he had persuaded his
wife to give up the Catholic faith.
John Lyon, who taught at Hillsdale in the early '90s and eventually
went on to sue the college for unfair dismissal, remembers that Roche
persuaded John Cerveni to abandon the Catholic faith and become an
Episcopalian as well. Cerveni eventually married the daughter of
someone on the board of trustees as part of his rise to power at
Hillsdale. Together with now acting-President Blackstock, Cerveni, John
Wilson, Dwayne Beauchamp and George Roche formed what Lyon called
"the Episcopal Mafia" which ran the school.
The term may be misleading. When Roche and company decided that even
the decidedly Erastian brand of Christianity that the Episcopal church
has always been was too rigid for their liking, they promptly left the
extant church and started their own Episcopalian Church. It was a move
reminiscent of Henry VIII and completely consistent with someone who
referred to himself as George III. George Roche was, to use the phrase
of St. Augustine, someone who loved money and made use of God. He was
not someone who loved God and made use of money.
Given this attitude toward ethnos, morality and religion, certain
things were bound to happen. Conservatism bespoke an attitude toward
tradition which was complex to the point of neurosis at times. It led
to neurosis because it had internalized so many conflicting signals
about tradition and was hopelessly unable to unravel its own
contradictions. George Roche, to get to specifics, was a conservative
precisely because he had abandoned the religion of his ethnos and
family. He was a conservative precisely because he had abandoned
tradition. In this he was no different than every other white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant, all of whom had been Catholics at some point in
their family history. Whig devotion to tradition, it seemed, had
remarkably shallow roots. As soon as the Reagan administration swept
people like this into office in Washington, power convinced many
conservatives that they didn't need a coherent rationale for their
repudiation of the traditions they claimed to uphold.
The conservative pundit P. J. O'Rourke is a good case in point. In
his collection of essays written during the Reagan era, Republican
Party Reptile, O'Rourke mentions the fact that his grandfather
"-as you can guess from his name-"was "born a Catholic and a
Democrat." He became a "conservative," or a Republican, by
repudiating both party and church for essentially sexual reasons.
O'Rourke's grandfather wanted an annulment. When the bishop refused
to grant one, "Grandpa, according to the family story, joined the
Lutheran Church, the Republican Party, and the Freemasons all in one
day."
Conservatives-the best of them, at least: people like Burke and
Adams-understand that religion is essential to preserving morals, and
that morals are essential to preserving public order, but by making
religion a matter of choice, they created an inversion which would
prove a fatal weakness to their whole political and philosophical
edifice. The net result of this betrayal of tradition in the name of
tradition is the triumph of appetite, or, in O'Rourke's terms, the
emergence of what he calls "the Republican Party Reptile": "We
look like Republicans and think like conservatives, but we drive a lot
faster and keep vibrators and baby oil and a video camera behind the
stack of sweaters on the bedroom closet shelf."
O'Rourke's description of the conservative was a remarkably
prescient prediction of the scandal which would later consume Hillsdale
College. "We," he continues, elaborating on his profile of what a
conservative believes, "are in favor of: guns, drugs, fast cars, free
love (if our wives don't find out), a sound dollar, cleaner
environment" and the feeling that you get "when you're half a
bottle of Chivas in the bag with a gram of coke up your nose and a
teenage lovely pulling off her tube top in the next seat over while
you're going a hundred miles an hour down a suburban side street."
The lattermost characteristic is taken from O'Rourke's essay "How
to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not
Spill Your Drink" which appeared originally in National Lampoon.
"There are thousands of people in America," O'Rourke concludes,
"who feel this way, especially after three or four drinks." What no
one seems to have noticed is that the conservative mind seems to have
done what O'Rourke would call a moonshiner's turn during the
history of this country's experiment in liberty. Over the course of
two centuries, liberty became license; John Adams became P.J.
O'Rourke, and no one seemed to have noticed until Lissa Roche put a
bullet through her head to get everyone's attention. "The
passions," Adams warned, "are all unlimited. If the citizens of
this republic "surrender the guidance for any course of time to any
one passion, they may depend upon finding it, in the end, a usurping,
domineering, cruel tyrant." Anyone who indulges and continually
gratifies passion will be driven mad by it. Man has a congenital
weakness to confound liberty and license, which is why, according to
Kirk, "Adams preferred the concept of virtue to the concept of
freedom."
This is also why Kirk shared the same preference as Adams and one of
the reasons, according to some observers there, why he left Hillsdale
in 1978. George Roche's career at Hillsdale spanned the rise and fall
of the modern conservative movement. What claimed to be devotion to
tradition was really the subversion of tradition; what claimed to be
based on support of religion turned out to be the relativization of
religion as a guide to reason in life. As a result, appetite triumphed.
Given the givens, no other options were possible.
Deracination
Conservatism was also deracination in the name of roots. Its twin gods
were money and appetite, and in America, assimilation was the religious
practice in service of those gods. Conservatism demanded the same
unremitting allegiance from Jews as it did from Catholics, if on
slightly different terms. Both groups were expected to repudiate ethnos
and family to get ahead. The rite of passage for the Jew was not
becoming a Protestant, as it was for Catholics ambitious to assimilate;
it involved, instead, changing his name. Ayn Rand was born Alice
Rosenbaum and got the idea for her new American name from a machine,
her typewriter, after first rejecting the name Ayn Remington.
Nathaniel Branden began his life as Nathan Blumenthal. "I had
disliked my name for a long time," he wrote in his memoir. "Nathan
Blumenthal didn't feel like me, and I wanted a name that did,
especially because I was going to be a writer." Among the people of
Branden's generation, writer was a code word for successful
intellectual assimilation, and Branden knew that he could not be
successful in America on the terms his Jewish family proposed to him.
"Moreover," Branden/Blumenthal continued, "I wanted a name that I
had chosen myself-not one that had been decided for me by someone
else. As in so many other issues, choice was supremely important to
me" (p. 139).
Choice is important in the American imperial system of rule because it
hides the fact that consent is so easy to manipulate and because
hegemony is so often based on the covert manipulation of disordered
passion. It was Nora Ephron who pointed out to Branden that he did not
necessarily have hegemony over his own choices, not even his choice of
name. Branden, she pointed out, contained the word "rand." Taking
the end of the word and placing it at its beginning, Ephron comes up
with the real meaning of the name change. Branden is in reality, "ben
rand," which is to say "son of Rand," which is the indication
that Branden's desire for autonomy was subverted by the very choices
he made to implement it. The only way he could become a true
Objectivist was by completely submerging his ego into that of his
tyrannical mentor, who demanded complete subservience in the name of
freedom. It was, in a way, the American story in a nutshell, and the
conservative story in a nutshell as well. Assimilation meant
abandonment of roots and principle, which meant that power and wealth,
when they arrived as rewards, were really a form of bondage, a
sophisticated version of the slavery of sin.
Like Ayn Rand, George Roche, as the prophet of freedom at Hillsdale
College, demanded complete obedience from his subjects. Faculty who
objected were unceremoniously removed-all in the name of freedom, of
course. Nathaniel Branden learned the same lesson at the feet of a
different but equally tyrannical mentor. At the height of his power as
head of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, Branden surveyed his offices,
which then occupied two floors of the Empire State Building in
Manhattan, and concluded:
This was life as it was meant to be lived, filled with danger and
ecstasy and unimagined possibilities. I felt as if I had broken free of
a whole network of constraints, had shattered the ordinary framework of
existence, and that I, Nathaniel Branden, had taken Nathan Blumenthal
by the hand and led him into a context uniquely his own, where he could
be fully himself.
"I was Nathaniel Brandon," he concluded, "and I could do
anything." Simply by the way he phrased the issue, Branden made it
clear that he could not do the things he wanted if he had remained
Nathan Blumenthal. He had to take Nathan Blumenthal by the hand and
turn him into a "conservative," which is to say, a Whig, which is
to say, a pseudo-WASP.
The rise of Ayn Rand and conservatism coincided with the rise of the
American Imperium as well. Now in the new imperial order, Jews and
Catholics could not make it in America by remaining Jews and Catholics
in their respective communities. They had to convert to something more
palatable to imperial designs. They had to repudiate their ethnic roots
and become "conservatives." Even if they did this paradoxically in
the name of adopting tradition, it usually meant the adoption of an
alien tradition like English Whiggery. Ayn Rand hated all things
Russian as hopelessly "mystical and tragic." She idolized first
England, in the figure of Daisy Gerhardi, the English girl whom she
watched play tennis in Odessa as a child, and then America as its more
virulent surrogate. Ayn Rand got her idea of America from watching
Hollywood movies. In her novel, she promoted the Russian Jew's
fantasy version of what it meant to be an American. It was, of course a
caricature, but it was a caricature which spoke to the deepest
aspirations of deracinated second-generation ethnics. The irony, of
course, was that in her desire to assimilate, Ayn Rand proposed as the
ideal American a caricature of the avaricious Jew.
Being an American did not mean espousing the ideals of John Adams. It
meant, rather, worshipping money. "With the sign of the dollar as our
symbol," John Galt announces in his diatribe at the end of Atlas
Shrugged, "-the sign of free trade and free minds-we will move to
reclaim this country, once more from the impotent savages who never
discovered its nature, its meaning, its splendor." George Roche, the
assimilated Catholic, couldn't have put it better. In fact, it is
entirely possible, given his relationship with Lissa, that he got his
real philosophy of life from the pages of Any Rand's fiction. The
similarities between Roche's actions as a fund-raiser (as opposed to
his words ) and Galt's views are too obvious to ignore. Roche's
diatribe against federal regulation in America by the Throat: The
Stranglehold of Federal Bureaucracy sounds a lot like an even longer
version of John Galt's speech. America means freedom from regulation.
America, in other words, means money. "To the glory of mankind,"
Hank Rearden says in Atlas Shrugged, "there was, for the first and
only time in history, a country of money-and I have no higher, more
reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of
reason, justice, freedom , production, achievement." Virtue, in other
words, is money. Money is virtue, or, as Hank Rearden puts it, "money
is the root of all good." Roche never put it this way, but when
you're a fund-raiser actions speak louder than words.
"George was not a hero," said one faculty member, referring
obliquely to his book A World Without Heroes. "He was a parvenu."
And it is in the parvenu that we find a country's real character most
readily and eagerly reduced to caricature. The parvenu can never say
America is what I make it because I live here and am a citizen and know
its traditions and have internalized them in a way that does no
violence to my ethnos, faith, or family. No, the parvenu internalizes
the caricature. Objectivism, it turns out, was a Russian Jew's
fantasy version of America based primarily on Hollywood movies. Asking
Ayn Rand what an American is like is like asking a feminist what a man
is like. The answer is invariably a caricature based on projection. Men
are, well, all Nazi-storm troopers. "Every woman adores a fascist,"
is how Sylvia Plath put it.
Similarly, the quintessential American male was Howard Roark, who was
in turn based on Gary Cooper, who in turn, played Howard Roark in the
movie version of The Fountainhead. Dagny Taggart, the quintessential
American female, was based, according to Ayn Rand's own admission, on
her vision of Katherine Hepburn in the '30s. She was also based on
the opposite of Ayn Rand, who remained short and dumpy and Russian.
"She never liked her body or her appearance," Barbara Branden
claimed. "She hates the fact that she doesn't resemble her
heroines." "Ayn was a genius," Nathaniel Branden wrote, "a
cosmic force so powerful that thoughts of physical beauty rarely
entered my mind in regard to her. The only exception were those
infrequent moments when I though how Russian-Jewish she looked; she
could have been a family relative, a cousin, say, of my parents; but
this was a thought I quickly dismissed because it did not fit my vision
of her." Family relatives, in other words, are not part of the
vision. Achieving the vision, in other words, means repudiating family
ties. "The boy's entrance papers," we read in The Fountainhead in
an early description of Howard Roark, "showed no record of nearest
relatives. When asked about it, Roark had said indifferently: "I
don't think I have any relatives. I may have. I don't know." Ayn
Rand abandoned her family in Russia-her parents died in the Battle of
Leningrad-and never acknowledged the crucial help her relatives in
Chicago provided in bringing her to America. She, like the characters
of her novels, pretended she did it all by herself, by dint of sheer
ability.
We see in Ayn Rand's heroes the quintessential American transaction:
exchanging ethnos (which includes family ties and religion) for the
dollar, for the family is the antithesis of the rule by the dollar. In
the family, everything is free but not everything is permitted; in the
American empire, everything is permitted, but nothing is free.
Conservatism was the blunt instrument that could never dissect the
differences. Conservative voices occasionally got raised in objection.
"The Dollar Sign is not merely provocative," Whittaker Chambers
wrote in a review of Atlas Shrugged which appeared in National Review,
"more importantly, it is meant to seal the fate that mankind is ready
to submit abjectly to an elite of technocrats and their accessories in
a new Order...It is a forthright philosophic materialism." But in the
end, voices like Whittaker Chambers' got ignored. The reason George
Roche became famous is because he raised $325 million. Period.
The reason George W. Bush is the front-running Republican candidate is
because he raised a similarly astronomical sum of money for his
campaign war chest. Money talked, and appetite triumphed and what came
to power was Ayn Rand's vision-not John Adams warning about the
dangers of appetite, but the Republican Party Reptile getting his
wing-wang squeezed while driving toward a head-on collision with moral
reality at 100 miles per hour.
The Return of the Repressed
The repressed returned in 1978. By the late 1970s, the percentage of
Hillsdale's student body which were Catholic hovered at about 50
percent. Catholic students flocked to Hillsdale, mirroring the
political shift of disaffected Catholics (known as Reagan Democrats)
into the Republican Party following the Democratic Party's adoption
of abortion and the rest of the sexual revolution as the irrevocable
core of its agenda. This demographic shift would prove troubling to
Roche because it represented the return of the repressed. The
Catholicism he had abandoned had returned to haunt him in a largely
Catholic student body, whose spiritual needs were clamoring to be met.
Catholic students had to walk to the other side of town to get to Mass
on Sunday. Confessions were not then nor would they ever be offered on
campus. Campus life was a lot like a Porky's film.
"Hillsdale was a party school," said Thomas Appel, '79. "The
drinking age at the time was 18. There was lots of premarital sex. We
took over a dying frat house in my junior year because it was a better
deal financially and the guys I was living with would have girls move
in with them over the weekend. The guy I shared a suite with had his
girlfriend, another Hillsdale student, move in with him. It called
itself a nondenominational Christian college, but it did nothing to
encourage the Christian life.
"I was having fun; then after the first year, I settled down. I
enjoyed the seminars but I always felt there was a dichotomy between
image and reality at Hillsdale. I was an English major. One of the guys
teaching in the English department read us some of his poetry and it
was really perverted stuff. Campus life was just drinking and partying.
Nothing was done to encourage moral or Christian behavior."
Appel attributes the moral atmosphere on campus to the "heavy
libertarian influence" there, in particular the writings of Ayn Rand.
"There was an exaltation of freedom apart from the cross. It was not
a moral place. Conservatism was a pseudo religion, and Catholics were
perceived as a fifth column on campus."
Thomas Payne would say that this was true of any religion which had
what he called "a strong ecclesiology." Roche, according to Payne,
"also had problems with the Mormons because they, like the Catholics,
had a strong ecclesiology as well as organizational resources and
means. People with ties to things outside Hillsdale were a threat to
Roche. I hired two Mormons, and we got along well on a religious level.
Roche however was displeased at them being there. He didn't care
about Mormon doctrine; he was uncomfortable because of their
connections to something off campus."
Serious Evangelicals had problems at Hillsdale too. After Chuck Colson
spoke at Hillsdale, he agreed to let his speech be published in their
newsletter Imprimis. When he got the proofs of the article, all mention
of Jesus Christ had been removed. When he called Lissa to complain, she
told him that it was not Hillsdale's policy to mention the name of
Jesus in any of the college's publications. The faculty member who
related the incident concluded that George's collapse came about
because "he tried to pump virtue without belief in God." Hillsdale,
he concluded, was highly secularized, just like dominant culture. It
was "conservative." Religion, in other words, posed a threat to
conservatism as the source of ideological hegemony and unity on campus.
The more willing the religion was to contest ideological currents in
the dominant culture, the greater the threat. In being pressured to
deal with his Catholic students, Roche was also being pressured into
dealing with their Catholicism at what had always been a traditionally
liberal Baptist college.
"Hillsdale's regnant ideology," according to Payne, "was
Know-Nothingism. America, according to this view, would be a Utopia
were it not for some alien presence. Who it was at the time changed
with the times. At first it was Catholics. Then it was immigrants. Then
it was collectivists, the people responsible for big government. If it
weren't for Left wing intellectuals, American would be a middle class
utopia. This view-America would be a Utopia if those people weren't
around-was the way they viewed themselves.
"Hillsdale came from a Congregationalist background, which, in New
England, was the heart of the Know-nothing movement. They believed that
the fellowship of a small community was sufficient for salvation as
long as they remained free from all outside scrutiny. This leads to
antinomianism. The implicit ecclesiology of the place was
Congregationalist. The fellowship of kindred souls was sufficient for
salvation as long as they maintained their independence from
bureaucratic control. Of course a place which was independent of all
norms lent itself naturally to rule by a tyrant like Roche."
If American conservatism has an ethnic and religious heritage, it is,
as Russell Kirk, makes clear, Whiggery as adopted by the
Congregationalists of New England. As such, it was implacably
incompatible with Catholicism. This situation remained stable as long
as the Catholics maintained their own school system and the mainline
Protestant denominations retained a hold, however tenuous, on moral
principle in sexual matters. However, when the Anglican Church broke
with the Christian consensus on the evil of contraception in 1930, the
stage was set for dramatic change and conflict. As Catholics became
disenchanted with the subversion of Catholic education which took place
at places like Notre Dame after Vatican II, they began to look around
for alternatives. By this point successive generations of contraceptive
use among Protestants had taken their toll, and places like Hillsdale
could no longer fill their colleges with members of their own ethnic
groups. The Catholics were looked on with ambivalence as a result. The
college needed their warm bodies and their parents' money, but they
didn't want their religious beliefs dominating the discussion on
campus.
Conservatism, as a result, became a way of stripping financial support
of religious influence. George Roche could be his own pope when it came
to conservatism, but he couldn't compete with the other pope when it
came to ideological control. Catholicism was perceived, therefore, as a
threat to his power at Hillsdale. Catholic ethnicity, however, could be
neutered by transmuting it into conservatism, an ideology which was
more concerned with government funding than it was with sexual morals.
Catholicism was also clearly something that George Roche would consider
a personal threat. It was what he had abandoned to become a
"conservative," and it was the only Christian denomination in
American of any significance which had retained the principles of
sexual morality with any integrity. As a result, every time George
Roche thought of sexual morality-which must have been often given the
state of his conscience-he thought of the Catholic Church which he
had abandoned as the necessary condition for his rise to prominence as
an American conservative.
Roche eventually decided to deal with the Catholic Problem by creating
a Christian Studies program. He delegated the job to Harry Vereyser,
his assistant at the time. Vereyser, who was a Catholic, took the job
seriously. Too seriously, it turned out. Roche was, in Vereyser's
words, "a Dr. Jekyll and a Mr. Hyde." He would tell Vereyser to do
one thing and then undermine what he told him to do behind his back.
"George led a double life," Vereyser said. "I knew the way he was
on the road. On Christian Studies, he would tell me to go out and do
this and then do everything to sabotage it. The real story is that
he's a snake oil salesman. Morality sells. He never lived it. Parents
were looking for a place to send their children. George gave them an
ideal to believe in.
A Battleground
"Hillsdale was a battleground because George Roche was a
battleground. There was a strong Libertarian streak in Roche. Roche led
a double life. He opened his own Episcopal Church. Like Henry VIII,
George got the congregation to break away from the regular church by
providing the money for a new church. His mind was rigorously schooled
in Catholic philosophy, but trying to reason with him was like talking
a deaf person. He would ride whichever horse that brings the money
in."
After failing to interest a number of Protestant ministers in his
Christian Studies program, Vereyser succeeded in getting a Catholic
priest by the name of Eugene Sweeney involved - with dramatic
effects. Sweeney was a West Point grad who served as a combat officer
in Italy during World War II. After the war, Sweeney remained in Italy
to attend a seminary there and was eventually ordained a priest. What
he brought to the job at Hillsdale was the single-mindedness of a
military operation. Sweeney started teaching Catholic students the
catechism, and since most of the Catholics had been prevented from
learning anything about their religion because of the reforms following
Vatican II, they soaked up what he said like a sponge. What is worse,
they started acting on what they learned as well. Catholic students
started to object to the sexual mores on campus- there was a
tradition of renting hotel rooms after the formal dance and spending
the night with your date-and when that happened the conflict was out
in the open. The subtext of the academic debate over the status of the
Christian Studies Program at Hillsdale was clear: The sexual message of
Catholicism was perceived as unwelcome. Catholicism was one of those
"strong ecclesiologies" which the Republican Party Reptiles found
uncongenial. It was also a direct threat to Roche as the arbiter of
conservative dogma. It was also an uncomfortable reminder of the double
life Roche was leading at the time.
The crisis came to a head at a faculty meeting Roche called in October
of 1978. Roche, according to Sweeney, began the meeting by saying that
the Christian Studies program needed to become "more ecumenical."
When Sweeney asked what that meant, it became clear from subsequent
comments that that meant less Catholic and less involved in morals. One
faculty member joined in by saying that there was too much emphasis on
character formation. Then a department chairman added that character
formation was neither intended nor desired at a place like Hillsdale
College, an assertion that would prove to be prophetic in light of
subsequent events. That chairman went on to say that character
formation should be confined to military academies and seminaries, an
obvious attack on Sweeney, since he had attended both and was involved
in character formation at Hillsdale as well. Once the dam was breached,
all of the residual anti-Catholicism began to pour out, with Sweeney as
its focus. "The trouble with you Catholics," one faculty member
said to Sweeney, "is that you worship dogma." "The faculty,"
Sweeney said later, "were adamant. They felt there was too much
emphasis on character formation in the Christian Studies Program. They
felt that if it happened, it should be accidental and incidental."
"With an attitude like that," said Sweeney, "I didn't want to
mislead parents. So I resigned."
When it became apparent that Roche wasn't going to support him,
Vereyser resigned as well. Russell Kirk resigned at the same time. Once
Vereyser, Kirk, and Sweeney had gone, there was no longer any organized
opposition to the libertarian idea of freedom as freedom from moral
restraint. As Thomas Payne predicted, congregationalism had led to
antinomianism once again. Payne remembers the battle over the Christian
Studies program with mixed emotions. He feels that Sweeney was a decent
man but not the man for the job at Hillsdale because he had never been
at a university and didn't know how they functioned, and also because
he had a military man's sense of command structure, which is not how
the university worked.
"When Vereyser tried to start the Christian studies program," Payne
said, "he made some good moves and some bad moves. The creation of
the CSP was to prevent then dean John Muller from controlling all the
appointments. Muller was the product of conventional education at a
state university. He went to Purdue, a place where education meant
technical competence. He was extremely uncomfortable when it came to
values and, as a result, deliberately avoided theological issues. When
asked about the de facto secularization that invariably produced, the
faculty members in question would invariably say, 'But I'm a
Freewill Baptist,' in an inevitable and unknowing way. They regarded
religion as not an issue of the understanding but as rather the
intensity of personal faith. Anything else was perceived as alien and
wicked."
Although Payne feels that Sweeney was ultimately unqualified for the
job, the real issue was control. "If you had a Catholic priest
there," he said, "what he was teaching was not part of
Hillsdale's doctrine." Like so many educators and innovators in
this century, Roche's interest in control varied in inverse
proportion to his own self-control. People like Sweeney were a threat
to his conscience and to his ideological hegemony over the students and
faculty.
"They were fiscal conservatives," Sweeney concluded about the
people who ousted him. "All they were concerned about was making
money. They didn't give a damn about things like abortion and dope.
They were just like the rest of the nation, which thinks that Clinton
is great because the stock market goes up. Anyone who opposed Roche
found that his job was at risk." Thomas Appel worked with Harry
Vereyser during his last years at Hillsdale and watched the battle over
the Christian Studies program from a front-row seat. What he saw left
him convinced that conservatism lost by winning.
"It's not enough to be politically conservative apart from the
Church," Appel concluded later. "It doesn't work. At Hillsdale
they made a conscious decision to keep conservatism apart from religion
when they defeated the Christian studies program. After Harry left we
were told that they were going to bring in some anemic guy from the
Anglican Church who was going to teach us how to be a nice guy. That
happened my senior year."
Appel graduated in 1979.
By the beginning of 1979, the Christian Studies battle was over, and
the Catholics had been defeated. What happened at Hillsdale was a
microcosm of what happened in America during the cultural revolution of
the '60s. With the Catholics defeated, there was no group with enough
intellectual coherence and political significance to defend the moral
order in its entirety, and with no one to defend morals, behavior took
a nose-dive from which it has yet to recover. The defeat of the
Catholics at Hillsdale also preceded by a matter of months the era of
major conservative victories. In 1979, Margaret Thatcher was elected
Prime Minister of England, and in 1980, one year later, Ronald Reagan
was elected president of the United States. Both Thatcher and Reagan
had spoken at Hillsdale and Hillsdale, and in particular its president,
was swept into power when the people they promoted were.
Roche was called to Washington to head the National Council on
Education Research. His time had finally arrived. Yet when the power
arrived there was nothing left at Hillsdale to guide it. The Catholics
had been expelled, and they were the only ones in a position to say
that freedom wasn't an end in itself. Now the only speech which met
with official approval was the speech extolling personal freedom of the
Ayn Rand variety, and as it had with its progenitor, it got the people
who extolled that philosophy in trouble in a very short matter of time.
Roche had already earned the reputation as a womanizer. Now, it seemed,
he was determined to take it to the next level. Like Nathaniel Branden
when he looked into the eyes of Ayn Rand, Roche wanted to be a god. And
the shortest way to gain god-like power over nature, Nietzsche had said
in The Birth of Tragedy, was some act that would violate nature, an act
like incest. Roche began his affair with his daughter-in-law in 1980.
The same year that the conservative movement reached the portals of
power was the same year that Roche embarked upon the course of action
which would bring about his undoing.
If this is a story full of literary allusions-from Ayn Rand to
Porky's-Sophocles has to figure in the equation as well. George's
aspiration to be worshipped by his daughter-in-law was an example of
hubris which invariably led to the arrival of nemesis, which is the
re-establishment of moral equilibrium.
With the opposition gone at Hillsdale there was no one left to remind
George that he wasn't a god. "Roche," said one faculty member,
"started off as a libertarian and became a pseudo-Messiah." In
this, his trajectory was virtually identical to Ayn Rand's. "When
mortal men try to live without God," wrote Malcolm Muggeridge,
"they infallibly succumb to megalomania or erotomania or both. The
raised fist or the raised phallus; Nietzsche or D. H. Lawrence."
George Roche manifested both evils during his tenure at Hillsdale
College. What is even more remarkable is that the Muggeridge quote
appeared in Roche's own book, A World Without Heroes. Roche was
either incapable of reading his own text or living it. Nothing in the
ideology of freedom was firm enough to make his behavior stick to his
ideals, and in a world like this, more success and more money means
only more occasion for moral disaster. Like the conservatism he
proclaimed, George Roche was ruined by his success.
In Praise of Control
"The George Roche administration makes the Clinton Administration
look good by comparison," said Thomas Payne. "Everything about
George was based on projecting his image. How he would use this to give
him publicity. He viewed the college as a way of projecting himself
onto the stage as a national leader. The closest he came to
articulating this personal ideology was the series of keynote and
closing speeches he would give at the Shavano Institute. For the
keynote, he would begin by saying that ideas have consequences. Who
ever controls ideas controls the world. This was not praise of the
intellectual life in any traditional senses. It was praise of control.
"Then he would go on to say that we used to have good ideas like
individual liberty, then the Deweyites or collectivists got control,
and now we have bad ideas. Now we have reached a crisis in civilization
as great as at the time of the fall of the Roman empire. But resistance
has risen. All sorts of critics are criticizing what is wrong. We
brought them here for you to hear their new and important ideas. In
other words, all of the other speakers were prophets who preceded and
proclaimed the Messiah, who was George Roche.
"On the last day, in his closing address, Roche would appear in a
white sports coat; the lights would dim, and he would deliver a sermon.
Before that happened he would be introduced by John Andrews, who would
deliver a parody of the devotional meditation, by telling the story of
Chief Shavano. Chief Shavano was a champion of freedom. All of the
speakers here were champions of freedom. George Roche is a champion of
freedom. Now let's break into small groups and decide how we can all
become champions of freedom in out own lives. Roche would then be
introduced as the greatest champion of freedom of them all.
"He would say things are really bad. Society is falling apart, but
there is hope because all of the people you just heard are champions of
freedom. It was like that at the end of the Roman Empire, that light
was Christianity. The Christian Church preserved moral substance,
continued civilization. The Christian Church preserved material basis
of the Roman Empire. The essence of Christianity is self-transcendence.
How do you transcend yourself? Don't spend all your money. Save some
of it and send your kids to college. In other words elevate ordinary
human virtues; the cult aspect was raising these things to the level of
religion. Roche is the Messiah. Hillsdale was a crypto-religion. Anyone
with a real religion would be uncomfortable there. The Protestants
couldn't spot it until I pointed it out to them."
Having sex with a god is always risky business, and by the late '80s,
the strain of the relationship was beginning to show in Lissa as well.
Thomas Fleming, editor of the paleoconservative journal Chronicles
remembers spending time with Lissa during the late '80s when
Hillsdale and conservatism were at the pinnacle of their power. The
Berlin Wall was about to come down, and when it did, the rationale for
conservatism's existence would fall as well, but no one knew it at
the time. Just as Burke had created conservatism in reaction to the
French Revolution, the specter of revolution was the only thing which
kept conservatism viable by blinding its adherents to its internal
contradictions.
Lissa and Tom would sometimes go dancing together and, during those
evenings, during which Fleming felt she was flirting with him, Lissa
would talk about George and his drinking problem.
"Lissa seemed desperately lonely and unhappy. She told me that George
was a diabetic and unless he stops drinking he will have to retire at
the end of the year. He was a secret juicer. She was worried about him.
She and George IV were married for 21 years, and she was having the
affair for just about the whole time. It was incest. A real violation
of social bonds. Morally, he was her father. The letter of resignation
mentions nothing of this. Instead of an apology, George issued another
upbeat fundraising appeal."
"Hillsdale was anti-Catholic and anti-Southern and an essentially
Reaganite, Wall Street Journal, anti-Communist operation that believed
in freedom to choose. At some point these people realized that they
couldn't build an empire on people who believed in something.
Conservatism hates anyone who stakes a claim to the truth. The Catholic
tradition claims a monopoly on truth. The troubled American conscience
can't tolerate any claim to know the truth."
According to Fleming, Roche's lasting legacy may be a cautionary tale
about the profile of a leader this culture has chosen for itself- man
as wolf to man, specifically, in the parlance of the day, the alpha
male. "The hero is a demigod; his qualities include large sexual
appetite, pursuit of excellence. A tyrant is the same thing negatively
expressed. Unbridled lust is characteristic of America's leadership
class. These heroes are oftentimes illegitimate children, raised
without socialization, people like Bill Clinton. The ruling class
recognized in George one of their own."
Like Lissa Roche, conservatism is dead. Its component
parts-Christianity and Libertarianism-continue to exist, but now
there is no charismatic leader like Ronald Reagan to hold them together
by making people forget their mutually self-contradictory nature. If
anything is to take its place, it will have be a political philosophy
that swears unabashed allegiance to either appetite or principle, not
an exercise in self-delusion that pretends there is no difference
between the two.
The real lesson to be learned here may have to do with the relationship
between liberty and power. According to Russell Kirk's reading of
John Adams, "Absolute liberty and absolute power in a central
government seemed quite compatible" to the Jacobins. The irony is
that the same situation prevailed at Hillsdale in the name of
anti-Jacobinism. In the absence of clearly articulated principle,
backed by religious sanction, liberty became the instrument of
everyone's enslavement at Hillsdale. The faculty couldn't object
because liberty had taken unchallenged hegemony over the moral law.
"The Roche Regime," said one professor, "was based on repression
within and deception without." "I don't have to tell anyone,"
George wrote with unintentional irony in his book A World Without
Heroes, "we are awash in sex."
Ultimately, the same unfettered license in the name of freedom
destroyed the man who promoted it as well. "Liberty without law,"
John Adams wrote, "endures as long as a lamb among wolves." It
turns out that Adams was prescient for both the country and the
conservative movement which saw him as it forebear. Absolute liberty
led to absolute tyranny at Hillsdale College. In the end, George Roche
had one devoted follower, and she killed herself to make the point that
he was wrong.
E=2E Michael Jones, Ph.D. is the Editor of Culture Wars magazine, as well
as author of the new book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and
Political Control (South Bend: St. Augustine's Press, 1999, available
from Fidelity Press.)
.
|
|
| User: "Ike" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
03 Jan 2006 11:24:13 PM |
|
|
"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1136318533.664704.127630@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Downstairs again we somehow fell into a discussion of our religious
antecedents, and Ayn mentioned that she was Jewish by birth and that
Frank was Catholic, although they were both atheists and felt no tie to
religion of any kind. "What matters," Ayn remarked, "is what you
accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident
of your ancestry."
Nathaniel Branden
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
I got to the place where some ***** killed herself. Has anyone read the
whole thing and what the point is?
.
|
|
|
| User: "G*rd*n" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
04 Jan 2006 09:04:12 AM |
|
|
"Ike" <accordiondocxyzxyzxyz@mindspring.com>:
"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1136318533.664704.127630@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Downstairs again we somehow fell into a discussion of our religious
antecedents, and Ayn mentioned that she was Jewish by birth and that
Frank was Catholic, although they were both atheists and felt no tie to
religion of any kind. "What matters," Ayn remarked, "is what you
accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident
of your ancestry."
Nathaniel Branden
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
I got to the place where some ***** killed herself. Has anyone read the
whole thing and what the point is?
It's pretty good soap opera.
.
|
|
|
| User: "set" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 07:06:28 AM |
|
|
G*rd*n wrote:
"Ike" <accordiondocxyzxyzxyz@mindspring.com>:
"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1136318533.664704.127630@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Downstairs again we somehow fell into a discussion of our religious
antecedents, and Ayn mentioned that she was Jewish by birth and that
Frank was Catholic, although they were both atheists and felt no tie to
religion of any kind. "What matters," Ayn remarked, "is what you
accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident
of your ancestry."
Nathaniel Branden
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
I got to the place where some ***** killed herself. Has anyone read the
whole thing and what the point is?
It's pretty good soap opera.
She was an adulterous witch as well. I love these stern conservatives,
such as the embulliant radio windbag, what-is-name? Pause while I try to
remember pumkin head's name...
Y'know, the laughing shitfaced hyena... anyway the one who turned out to
be a prescription drug addict ...that puss-brained individual. He brings
out the Bolshevik in me: bang: bullet in the back of the head, Soviet style.
Nah, too quick, .. Hang him in the Palestinian crucifix style, watching
his fat white body trying to writhe as his distended maggot-filled guts
are fit to burst. And from his hyperkinetic mouth slithers an elongated
scream... yeah, that's better...
I recall when this fat ***** devoted a whole program to a requiem
"mass" for a man who committed suicide, a man who was prominant in
helping the cause of the Reagan induced mass of the homeless.
Wot a fucking disgrace to the human race this cunting fat maggot is.
He's a combination of Himmler, Goebbels and the Auschwitz angel of
death, Mengele and when he dies of drug withdrawal or the Satanic curse
I've cast I will throw a party.
Smegma-breath was on Donahue in the early 90s. "I'd like to get behind a
feminist movement," bad frat-boy grin.
Rant : off
Robert
.
|
|
|
| User: "Pies de Arcilla" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 03:11:18 PM |
|
|
set wrote:
Wot a fucking disgrace to the human race this cunting fat maggot is.
He's a combination of Himmler, Goebbels and the Auschwitz angel of
death, Mengele and when he dies of drug withdrawal or the Satanic curse
I've cast I will throw a party.
Anything to say about Sharon, on the occasion?
.
|
|
|
| User: "Dr Zen" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 05:41:31 PM |
|
|
"Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@gmail.com> gave the sermon. Those who
could keep their eyes open remember it thus:
set wrote:
Wot a fucking disgrace to the human race this cunting fat maggot is.
He's a combination of Himmler, Goebbels and the Auschwitz angel of
death, Mengele and when he dies of drug withdrawal or the Satanic curse
I've cast I will throw a party.
Anything to say about Sharon, on the occasion?
Good fucking riddance.
Dr Zen
Godless. Potless. Not Completely Hopeless.
http://gollyg.blogspot.com
.
|
|
|
| User: "Alan Hope" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 06:40:34 PM |
|
|
Dr Zen goes:
"Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@gmail.com> gave the sermon. Those who
could keep their eyes open remember it thus:
set wrote:
Wot a fucking disgrace to the human race this cunting fat maggot is.
He's a combination of Himmler, Goebbels and the Auschwitz angel of
death, Mengele and when he dies of drug withdrawal or the Satanic curse
I've cast I will throw a party.
Anything to say about Sharon, on the occasion?
Good fucking riddance.
Too bad he can only die once.
--
AH
.
|
|
|
| User: "Dr Zen" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 07:35:11 PM |
|
|
Alan Hope <not.alan.hope@mail.com> gave the sermon. Those who could
keep their eyes open remember it thus:
Dr Zen goes:
"Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@gmail.com> gave the sermon. Those who
could keep their eyes open remember it thus:
set wrote:
Wot a fucking disgrace to the human race this cunting fat maggot is.
He's a combination of Himmler, Goebbels and the Auschwitz angel of
death, Mengele and when he dies of drug withdrawal or the Satanic curse
I've cast I will throw a party.
Anything to say about Sharon, on the occasion?
Good fucking riddance.
Too bad he can only die once.
Amen.
Dr Zen
Godless. Potless. Not Completely Hopeless.
http://gollyg.blogspot.com
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "Jez" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
04 Jan 2006 06:37:31 AM |
|
|
"words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com> wrote in message
news:1136318533.664704.127630@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Yes yes, but why ?
--
Jez, MBA.,
Country Dancing and Advanced Astrology, UBS.
'Realism is seductive because once you have accepted the reasonable notion
that you should base your actions on reality, you are too often led to
accept, without much questioning, someone else's version of what that
reality is. It is a crucial act of independent thinking to be skeptical of
someone else's description of reality.'-
Howard Zinn
.
|
|
|
|
| User: "raven1" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
03 Jan 2006 08:14:25 PM |
|
|
On 3 Jan 2006 12:02:13 -0800, "words of truth" <truth760@lycos.com>
wrote:
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
It's been a long time since I've heard from Dr. Jones. Does he still
insist on referring to African-Americans as "Negroes", and does he
still publish that lunatic-fringe Catholic magazine "Fidelity" (which,
when it wasn't whitewashing Nazis, once featured a lengthy debate in
the letter column over whether the Virgin Mary's hymen was broken
during Jesus's birth)?
--
"O Sybilli, si ergo
Fortibus es in ero
O Nobili! Themis trux
Sivat sinem? Causen Dux"
.
|
|
|
| User: "Pies de Arcilla" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
03 Jan 2006 08:53:58 PM |
|
|
raven1 wrote:
It's been a long time since I've heard from Dr. Jones. Does he still
insist on referring to African-Americans as "Negroes", and does he
Thomas Sowell uses the term "Negro" in at least some of his books, and
he's black, so it must be ok.
.
|
|
|
| User: "raven1" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
04 Jan 2006 03:19:24 PM |
|
|
On 3 Jan 2006 18:53:58 -0800, "Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@gmail.com>
wrote:
raven1 wrote:
It's been a long time since I've heard from Dr. Jones. Does he still
insist on referring to African-Americans as "Negroes", and does he
Thomas Sowell uses the term "Negro" in at least some of his books, and
he's black, so it must be ok.
Fifty Cent uses the other "n-word" in every song, and he's black, does
it make that OK too?
--
"O Sybilli, si ergo
Fortibus es in ero
O Nobili! Themis trux
Sivat sinem? Causen Dux"
.
|
|
|
| User: "Pies de Arcilla" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
05 Jan 2006 09:56:54 AM |
|
|
raven1 wrote:
On 3 Jan 2006 18:53:58 -0800, "Pies de Arcilla" <dearcilla@gmail.com>
wrote:
raven1 wrote:
It's been a long time since I've heard from Dr. Jones. Does he still
insist on referring to African-Americans as "Negroes", and does he
Thomas Sowell uses the term "Negro" in at least some of his books, and
he's black, so it must be ok.
Fifty Cent uses the other "n-word" in every song, and he's black, does
it make that OK too?
People generally have _some_ reason for what they're doing. I don't
particularly like rap music, so I can't judge.
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User: "set" |
|
| Title: Re: Ayn Rand Ideology: The Suicide Of Conservatism |
03 Jan 2006 02:51:16 PM |
|
|
words of truth wrote:
Death at the Gazebo:
Conservatism In Extremis at Hillsdale College
by E. Michael Jones
This article was published in the January, 2000 issue of Culture Wars
magazine.
Downstairs again we somehow fell into a discussion of our religious
antecedents, and Ayn mentioned that she was Jewish by birth and that
Frank was Catholic, although they were both atheists and felt no tie to
religion of any kind. "What matters," Ayn remarked, "is what you
accept by choice, not what you are connected with through the accident
of your ancestry."
Nathaniel Branden
Judgment Day: My Years with Ayn Rand
There's nothing like suicide to make a point. Lissa Roche could have
shot herself in the head in the living room of her house, which is
where she got the gun which eventually killed her. Instead, she left
the house by the back door and, crossing its back yard, entered the
arboretum which the Hillsdale College students had created, according
to the PR material which Lissa herself supervised, for the college's
alumni as a place of peace and meditation. It was there at the gazebo
with the scriptural passage from Paul warning about drunkenness and
fornication that she killed herself, making in the process a statement
about the college which the world could not ignore. The location was
significant. "I have performed many marriages there," said one
Hillsdale professor who is also a minister. He then added with a smirk,
"Students who want to screw go there too."
Lissa chose the location and the act of suicide as an attack on George
Roche III and the institution which was, as Emerson would have said,
his "lengthened shadow." It was also an attack on the conservative
movement which had provided the financial basis for Hillsdale's
success and which, by enabling that success, had become the instrument
of its undoing. There is historical precedent for this sort of thing.
When Harriet Shelley realized that she had lost her husband irrevocably
to the baleful intellectual influence of the Godwin family and to Mary
Godwin in particular, she killed herself as well, making sure that her
husband got the message. Mary Godwin got the message too, and
immortalized it in Frankenstein, whose monster tells his guilt-ridden
creator, "I will be with you on your wedding night." Henceforth,
all sexual pleasure will be polluted with guilt, the guilt Percy and
Mary Shelley felt over the adultery which caused the death of
Shelley's first wife.
"I will be with you on your wedding night" might have been
Lissa's message to Hillsdale College President George Roche III as
well. In August of 1998, Roche filed for divorce from June Bernard
Roche, his wife of 44 years and the mother of George IV, to whom Lissa
was married. On April 30, 1999 the divorce became finalized and once it
did, George III asked both Lissa and George IV to move into Broadlawn,
the mansion which Hillsdale College provided its president, ostensibly
to care for Roche's aged mother. At this point George IV had no idea
that there was something unseemly about the relationship between his
wife and his father. Then in September, George III announced out of the
blue that he intended to marry Mary Hagan, 56, of Louisville, Kentucky,
and a wedding was hastily arranged for September 13. Shortly after
George III announced his impending wedding, George IV and Lissa were
asked to move out of Broadlawn and at this point the cords holding back
the heavy weight of deceit which George III and Lissa had been carrying
for almost two decades began to snap under the strain and the whole
sordid affair began its inexorable slide into disaster.
Five days before the wedding, on September 8, Lissa wrote a letter in
which she announced that she was quitting her job at Hillsdale and
planning to divorce her husband. "It grieves me to tell you that I am
unable to continue as managing editor of Imprimis and the Hillsdale
college press, " Lissa Roche wrote in a memo found by police on a
laptop computer in her home. "I am seeking a divorce from George IV
for reasons I can't go into, and it seems best to get out of town
immediately," she wrote. "I'm sorry to leave you on a lurch like
this. I know that there will be a lot of talk about my sudden
departure; please tell people that, although it seems strange that I
left in such a secretive manner, it was simply to avoid a big fuss. You
know me; I hate to be the object of attention."
People who knew Lissa described her as an aggressive promoter of
Hillsdale's interests and not at all reluctant to be the object of
attention. It was Lissa who squired the prominent conservative speakers
around campus when they came there to talk. The author of this article
was given the tour of campus by Lissa in the Spring of 1990 when he was
invited to Hillsdale to speak on the fall of the Berlin wall. "I'm
the daughter-in-law of George III, the wife of George IV, and the
mother of George V," Lissa said by way of introduction, and one got
the impression that she was pleased to be part of what she perceived as
the American equivalent of a political dynasty in the Anglophile mold.
"Charlton Heston spoke here last week," she announced over dinner,
"and he gave us a $10,000 contribution." "I hope you don't
expect that from all your speakers," I said in response. "I have
been such an object in the college community for many years now," she
wrote in her September 8 resignation letter. "I just want this to be
as private as possible, and most of all, I don't want to have to
answer any questions."
After writing her letter of resignation, Lissa flew to California to be
with her twin sister and presumably to discuss the impending wedding.
Her sister must have counseled reconciliation because Lissa was back in
Hillsdale a short time later and, in fact, attended her
father-in-law's wedding. But whatever it was that prompted the first
outburst wouldn't let go of Lissa's increasingly fragile psyche.
She got drunk at the wedding and during the course of the reception
made cryptic remarks about her relationship with the groom.
The marriage which got off to such an inauspicious start seemed to be
over before it really began. On October 15, George III showed up at
Lissa and George IV's home and announced that he was planning to
separate from his wife of little over a month and asked Lissa if she
would move back into Broadlawn with George IV. Lissa eagerly agreed and
bounced back from her depression almost immediately. Then, one day
later, George IV got a call from his father's new wife informing him
that his father had gone into a diabetic related shock and had to be
taken to the hospital. Returning from the hospital at around 3:00 a.m.
on the morning of October 17, George IV announced that it looked as if
his father had reconciled with his new wife. The announcement that they
were not going to separate plunged Lissa back into the emotional
turmoil she had so recently escaped. Enraged by the announcement, Lissa
drove to the hospital and was asked by Roche's new wife to leave.
Undeterred she returned to the hospital at 11 a.m. with her husband,
who recounted later that she threatened suicide during the short drive.
When the couple reached George III's hospital room a confrontation
ensued, during which Lissa announced to her husband that she had been
having an affair with his father for the past 19 years. When George IV
turned to his father for a denial, none was forthcoming.
When Lissa and George IV returned home, Lissa gave her husband an
ultimatum. "You need to go back and see your dad and tell him we all
need to leave Hillsdale and go somewhere else and start over." When
George III rejected the idea, Lissa decided that she had had enough.
Weakened by years of vice and deception, Lissa's soul no longer had
the elasticity it needed to make the transition from the center of the
premier conservative college to a life on the periphery of a movement
she had helped promote. Rather than beginning a new life with an act of
repentance, Lissa decided to end the old life with an act of vengeance
on the man and the institution which had scorned her. Sending George IV
down the street to check on his grandmother, she took a .38 special out
of the locked gun cabinet and headed for the gazebo which symbolized
things venereal on campus. Now, when Hillsdale students contemplating
marriage think of a place to hold their wedding, they will think of the
gazebo and think of Lissa's death and then, with a shudder, think of
someplace else to hold the ceremony.
The Boat People
Lissa Jackson arrived on the Hillsdale College campus as a freshman in
the fall of 1975, four years after George III had taken over as
president, primed by her education for sexual adventure. At around the
same time that George Roche became president of Hillsdale, Lissa
Jackson began her high school education by flying to the Caribbean and
becoming a passenger on a large sailing ship that housed what was then
known as the Flint School, also known as the Boats, a floating academy
whose purpose was to instill into young minds the philosophy of Ayn
Rand.
"Ayn Rand was big on campus," said Ann, who graduated from
Hillsdale in 1978 and knew Lissa and other Flint School alumni while a
student there. She referred to them as "the boat people," conjuring
images of helpless refugees adrift in the aftermath of large
ideological conflicts. "I felt sorry for them," she continued,
"It's one of those situations where you know if they follow that
line of thinking, they're gonna go down the drain." Ann, who is one
of 14 children, remembers one of the boat people she befriended and
invited home for Thanksgiving dinner, a girl by the name of Kate, who
was from Panama, had been raised a Catholic, but now had lost contact
with just about anything one associated with roots and family.
Conservatism, in this instance the writings of Ayn Rand, filled the
vacuum that was once occupied by family, ethnicity, and religion. In
his memoir of his years with Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden described his
own sense of deracination as crucial to his involvement with
Objectivism.
"Living in the predominantly Anglo-Saxon city of Toronto, my parents
were Russian Jewish immigrants who had never really assimilated
themselves into Canadian culture. A sense of rootlessness and
disorientation was present in our home from the beginning. I had no
sense of belonging, in Toronto or anywhere else, nor was I even aware
of what a sense of belonging would mean. To me the void seemed normal."
It was only after Branden had read The Fountainhead and met Ayn Rand in
person at her Richard Neutra home in California that the feeling
started to abate. Objectivism had become a replacement for ethnicity,
family and religion. "At such moments as these," Branden wrote
describing his visits to his mentor, "my feeling of family was at its
strongest. I felt: here is my home; here is my space; here are my
roots. I was conscious of my longing for a sense of roots and welcomed
it." It was a situation that typified the Objectivist movement, whose
inner circle was composed of assimilation-hungry children of Russian
Jewish immigrants who idolized an America they saw as ruthless, WASPish
and powerful, an America that was symbolized by the dollar bill sign
which Ayn Rand wore on her black cape, a six-foot high version of which
stood beside her coffin as she lay in state.
By the time Lissa arrived at Hillsdale, Objectivism was in a sorry
state of disarray following the at the time still unexplained break
between Ayn Rand and her protégé Nathaniel Branden. What Lissa
probably didn't know as she pored over the Rand's oeuvre while
sailing around the Caribbean, is that the break found its cause in
Rand's sexual jealousy. Rand had initiated a sexual affair with
Branden beginning in January 1955 when he was 25 and she was 50 years
old. Rand had insisted that their respective spouses give their
approval even though it aggravated her husband's alcoholism and his
wife's succumbing to increasing disturbing anxiety attacks.
"We'll have our year or two together," Rand explained to her
prospective lover, "and there will be no victims, no tragedy."
The actual chain of events turned out differently than Ayn Rand
predicted. The same lady who felt that she could account for every
emotion she had ever had dissolved into a jealous rage when she
discovered Branden was having an affair with a younger woman and no
longer interested in having sex with his 63-year-old mentor.
"You have dared to reject me?" roared the lady Branden used to
refer to as "Mrs. Logic" when she found out about the affair in
1968. "If anything goes permanently wrong between us," said the
goddess of reason who saw her mission in life as the promotion of the
rugged individualism, "I'm finished; everything is finished;
you're my lifeline to the world and to any chance at happiness I'm
ever going to have." Rand's lust for a younger man had reduced her
to a groveling parody of the characters in her novel. She was now the
female equivalent of Peter Keating, the "second hander" she held in
contempt in The Fountainhead.
Ayn Rand, it turns out, needed someone after all and needed to possess
that person completely. Her image of herself as desirable was bound up
with the adulterous affair she had initiated with her student and
admirer. "The man to whom I dedicated Atlas Shrugged," she screamed
at Branden, "would never want anything less than me! I don't care
if I'm ninety years old and in a wheelchair!" The lady whom Branden
was still cal | |
