Atlas for Congress

Writing it off …

There’s plenty of outrage across the blogosphere about the mainstream broadcast media’s innuendo-laced dismissal of the Tea Parties (especially at MSNBC). Their attempts to shrug off hundreds of thousands of people gathering to say in almost unison “enough!” exhibits the media elite’s absolute disengagement from Main Street America.

It’s to be expected.

The ilk on MSNBC, the vitriolic charges of insanity in the LA Times and the imputation that people “Going Galt” and quoting “Atlas Shrugged” are just doing so in an attempt to sound smart flowed through my mind while reading Chapter 4 in a chiropractor’s waiting room before heading to the local Tea Party.

In addition to an outright disgust for anything outside of their definition of mainstream, those in the media just don’t get it. Either because they’ve swallowed the ne0-socialist Kool-Aid, are too lazy to get out of their offices or just have no interest in engaging in a debate they would be bound to lose, it’s their mindset that prevents them from understanding what’s going on.

It’s that mindset that makes it so easy to write the protesters, Going Galtists and capitalist defenders off.

In Chapter 4 of “Atlas Shrugged,” Dagny Taggart returns to her apartment after the contractor of the Rio Norte line suddenly up and closed his business. She puts on a record of Richard Halley’s Fourth Concerto, sits down, closes her eyes and listens.

The passage that sparked a comparison (though not a complete one, mind you) to the media attitude of today is this:

“‘The music of Richard Halley has a quality of the heroic. Our age has outgrown that stuff,’ said one critic. ‘The music of Richard Halley is out of key with our times. It has a tone of ecstasy. Who cares for ecstasy nowadays?’ said another.”

The media critics in “Atlas Shrugged” didn’t understand Halley’s music because they lacked the desires his music brought out — those of wanting to create, build and achieve and to watch others do the same.

Perhaps Taggart placed Halley in her phonograph because earlier in the chapter she needed such inspiration, or at least to know someone else had those same desires.

“For once, she wanted to feel herself carried by the power of some else’s achievement. As men on the dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of a train going past, her achievement, the sight of power and purpose that gave them reassurance in the midst of empty miles and night—so she wanted to feel it for a moment, a brief greeting, a single glimpse, just to wave her arm and say: Someone is going somewhere . . .”

The media elites (who no longer seem to even make a veiled attempt at masking their elitism) write us off as wacky, glue-sniffing conspiracy theorists because they assume “our age has outgrown” the stuff of capitalism, individualism and self sufficiency. We’re “out of key” with these “post-partisan” times and should jump on the bandwagon already.

They’re wrong. Some (dare I say many) still care very much for ecstasy nowadays.