His Grief, and Ours (Paul Ryan’s nasty ideal of self-reliance. )

[hue]

http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/106459/paul-ryan-nasty-philosophy-self-reliance-ayn-rand


MAL TIEMPO, BUENA CARA. Those words were attributed, in a wrenching story in The New York Times last winter, to Isabella Rivera, who is 86 years old and lives in Washington Heights. She exists on $688 a month in Social Security and $148 in Supplemental Security Income. When her apartment was destroyed in a fire, she had to continue paying her share of the maintenance fee during the long period of its repair, $153 a month, and another $150 a month for a room that some friends, also indigent, offered her in their home for the duration of her exile. Before the fire, Mrs. Rivera was attacked by a man with a knife. (“He twisted the knife inside my neck.”) After the fire, her son died of cancer. Another of her sons had died of a heart attack decades ago. And what Mrs. Rivera took away from her catastrophes was a kindly stoicism: mal tiempo, buena cara. In hard times, show a good face.
But perhaps it is inaccurate to say that her response to her tribulations, her gentle perdurability, was what Mrs. Rivera took away from them. Perhaps her particular inner preparedness, her precise manner of resilience, was what she brought to them. The notion of suffering as transfiguration is religious propaganda. People generally suffer, and respond to suffering, as themselves, as who they are. It is rare that they are transformed by devastation and loss. They are instead intensified by it, italicized by it: they become more like themselves, because their prior resources, their psychology and (for those who have one) their philosophy, are what they have when misfortune strikes, and all that they have to see them through. The remarkable fact about survival is the continuity of the self that is revealed in adversity, not the discontinuity: indeed, the preservation of the self is one of the measures of survival.

[sinkingfeeling]

1. Excellent piece. Like this part...

"But a rich man has so many things done for him, because he pays for them to be done. Is that self-reliance, or is it expensive helplessness? And why is it not a stain of shame, or a “culture of dependency,” for a rich man, or his bank, to ask for help, and to be given it?"

[Zoeisright]

2. Yeah, Ryan is nasty all right.

He's a heartless, cold-blooded prick.

[Bill USA]

3. Ayn Rand's free and independent 'super- man'

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101640222