Posted by
Catmman on Saturday, May 23, 2009 9:21:38 AM
As much as I disagree with Ayn Rand's perspective on religion and faith, I love how prescient she was in matters of the degradation of society. In the following paragraph, an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, she describes the Media as it is today. What makes this prescient? The fact she wrote this prior to 1957:
The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as the audience for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific.
A more damning description could not be written today about the sycophantic media. Was Ayn Rand really "prescient" in the sense she had some omnipotent insight into the future, or did she simply understand the nature of humanity and culture, especially when individualism begins to give way to collectivism? Perhaps the media have always been what they constantly profess not to be - biased automatons purely driven by agenda?
When a Keith Olberman can get away with actually blaming the former vice-president for 9/11, indeed accusing the former vice-president of culpability in the 9/11 deaths; when Mr. Olberman can spout every type of the most insane and irrational invective at anyone other than those truly responsible and use his "position" in the media as cover for his inanity, simply vindicates Mrs. Rands contempt for the "media" and makes her words written over half a century ago more true today than ever.