Atlas Shrugged – Day 087 – pp. 932-941
I have a question. Why hasn’t JG come after Eddie Willers yet? He’s got to be a candidate for the gulch. And his disappearance would most likely hasten Dagny’s decision..
Anyway, just before Phillip leaves, he tells Hank he’s never had any concern for his feelings. Hanks asks if Phillip has ever had any concern for his. Phillip tells Hank he has no feelings.
Of course Rand would beg to disagree as she recalls ALL the suffering that Hank has been through…
Then she describes the look in Phillip’s eyes…
“I suffer, I’m twisted by suffering, I’m made of undiluted suffering, that’s my purity, that’s my virtue — and yours, you the untwisted one, you the uncomplaining, your is to relieve me of my pain,…”
Pretty much Jim’s speech to Dagny. Maybe Phil can get a job on the railroad.
Before he leaves, he drops a small threat that he could have his buddies in Washington compel Hank to hire him.
Phillip suddenly realizes what a woman he is. How afraid he is of the mills. How easily he could be made to “disappear” in an accident with all the giant iron smelting pots and molten steel swinging everywhere.
“But we’d better keep it on a friendly basis,” Phillip said.
Got that right.
Now we move to a “thought transition.” Hank thinks about “men who worship pain…” Like those in the court before him where he’s now getting his divorce from Lillian.
Lillian didn’t attend. (Wonder if she’s still doing Jimmy?)
Hank is realizing fully (I keep saying that, because I think he’s finally understanding. But he seems to keep coming back to this realization as if Rand needs to restate her premise over and over and over… It is a 1200 page book.)…
Anyway, he’s realizing fully what the cost of this divorce was.
“…he realized that it was that had been expected of him; he the victim, chained, bound, gagged and left with no recourse save to bribery, had been expected to believe that the farce he had purchased was a process of law, that the edicts enslaving him had moral validity, that he was guilty of corrupting the integrity of the guardians of justice and that the blame was his not theirs.”
On the way out, his attorney asks
“…is there something the looters are anxious to get from you right now?”
Don’t think so why? Apparently the attorney was expecting a little push back on a couple issues. Unexpectedly, they were passed over.
Later that afternoon at the mills, the Wet Nurse comes to him. The WN has become a full scale convert. Gone from post-grad looter mentality to a grad student in the Hank Rearden school of
Absolutes.
He asks Hank for a job. He’s had all he can take watching the looters operate, pillaging and plundering the likes of valuable industrialists like Hank.
Hank says he can’t. Not that he wouldn’t. Too many regs in the way now. Washington’d never let it happen.
Resigned, the WN concedes,
“I’d better go on being a deputy looter. Besides, if I left, God only knows what sort of bastard they’d saddle you with in my place. He turned. “They’re up to something Mr. Rearden. I don’t know what it is, but they’re getting ready to spring something on you.”
That’s it! First the call about California, then the visit from Phillip, then the attorney’s comment, now the Wet Nurse. I’m on pins and needles waiting to see what they’re planning. (Nice dramatic effect from Rand. Of course we expect Hank can deflect or repel any assault on their part, but this shroud of mystery here has me a little excited and nervous.)
On the afternoon of September 11, a copper wire broke in Minnesota, stopping the belts of a grain elevator at a small country station of Taggart Trans…
And now the real trouble starts. It’s grain harvest time. The last big opportunity before winter for the country generate some GDP. The farmers will sell their grain to mill houses who will sell their product to bakeries who will sell to consumers. A beautiful chain of supply.
If, they can move the grain out of MN.
Rand interrupts with a little juxtaposition of the situation.
Dagny’s phone has become “an alarm siren for the desperate appeals of disaster.” No one can get materials for anything anywhere. —
But thirty million dollars of subsidy money from Washington had been plowed into Project Soybean — and enormous acreage in Louisiana, where a harvest of soybeans was ripening, as advocated and organized by Emma Chalmers, for the purpose of reconditioning the dietary habits of the nation.
(Emma Chalmers – Kip’s Ma. The prick who blew up in the Taggart Tunnel disaster.)
The screams for any kind of copper, construction materials keep coming — While $5 million was being spent on the People’s Opera Company. A traveling band of singers giving free performances to lighten the country’s mood.
Supplies are being looted everywhere — but they’re building a 1950s version of a Jumbo-tron for tourists in People’s Park in Washington. And a super-cyclotron was being built for the SSI.
At the cyclotron (what the hell is that?) dedication, Dr Stadler (who now appears to be a full and willing member of the team) stated
“The trouble with our modern world, is that too many people think too much.”
Said the full time thinker. Leave the thinking to us… That’s another of Rand’s big points. Maybe one that get’s overshadowed. She brought it to the fore a bit when Dagny was talking to Cherryl. You’ve got to think. And you’ve got to think for yourself. Don’t automatically believe.
It’s a state we’re in today. How many times does a G spokesperson with a bunch of letters behind his name like… oh, I don’t know… Ben Bernanke, get up and say something totally ridiculous like “inflation is good” and then we’re all supposed to believe it.
On Sept 14, Dagny gets a call from “a man in Minnesota.” One of her employees in MN.
“Miss Taggart, In another day or two, the trains will stop running out of here – and you know what that means, at the height of the harvest. At the height of the biggest harvest we’ve ever had. They’ll stop, because we have no cars. The harvest freight cars have not been sent to us this year.”
Should have been 15,000 cars in MN. Instead they have about half what they need. So much for the beautiful chain of supply.
“It did not take her long to discover that the cars had not been sent to Minnesota and that the order had come from Cuffy Meigs –“
Tracking down where they were sent, she finally spoke to a public relations person in Washington,
“Well, after all, it is a matter of opinion whether wheat is essential to a nation’s welfare — there are those of more progressive views who feel that the soybean is, perhaps of far greater value”
All the MN cars were sent to Ma Chalmers in Louisiana…