Goin' Back To ... D.C.

Today I filled up my gas tank for the last time in California. I paid $2.87 per gallon. My next fillup will be either in Maryland or Washington, D.C.

Next Friday is my last day at work and that evening, I fly to D.C. Saturday, Ladan and I fly to Iran for vacation. By October 19 we'll be back, I start looking for a place, she flies back to Phoenix, and on November 5, I begin my new job.

Everything has happened pretty quickly in the past few weeks, and it's hard to believe that in ten days I'll be leaving here for good. I've gotten very comfortable here - too comfortable, in fact, bordering on apathetic - and so it's been tough preparing mentally for 'the end'. In recent months I've made some good friends at work, and I'll be sad to see them go. The work environment is just ... different in D.C.; it'll be a much smaller office, very small group, more formal.

Just as happened to me at the end of 2004 when I was preparing to leave Maryland, when I really started to notice and appreciate D.C., I'm loving these last few days. I'm enjoying every minute, the weather, the food, the stores, the people. This past weekend, I took some time to go around and snap photos of some of my favorite spots out here, most of which, sadly, have no equal on the east coast.

What will it be like when I can't spend a Saturday hitting Fry's Electronics, Tower Records (R.I.P.) or Rasputin Music, Lozano's Car Wash, Annapoorna for some chole bhatura, the Sunnyvale park to soak up some sun and read a book, Santana Row to people-watch and read some more?

What will it be like to get up in the morning and be cold? Or drive to work and not have it be sunny?

These things are gonna tough. The biggies are going to be Fry's and the cold. Fry's, because these days I wouldn't even dream of setting foot in a Best Buy or Circuit City, in all their plastic-y slick-marketed trendiness. Fry's has everything you could possibly want, and cheaper than everybody else. Returns are zero hassle, no questions asked, no matter what. Their PC games section, as far as I can tell, is the last remaining healthy bastion in the entire US retail market. I can't even remember the last time I bought a game at Gamestop or Best Buy. Fry's has them earlier, and cheaper. I've been on a minimum once-a-week visit schedule there for two years now. Most of the time it's just to gawk, which is fun enough on its own.

The cold's gonna hurt because after a year of living in the south bay, and the temperature never dropping below 50 degrees, my body has thoroughly adjusted to comfort. Last winter when I went home to Albany for Christmas, it was a bitter reminder of what real cold is like. D.C. doesn't get as cold as Albany, but there's still most definitely a fall and winter, and man it's gonna be weird having to bundle all up to keep the cold and wind out. After moving out of San Francisco last July, I haven't worn anything heavier than a very light jacket even once down here.

Ah well ... sounds like I'm complaining, but I'm also excited to get back to D.C., live in the city, walk and Metro everywhere, start applying to grad schools, get involved with international organizations, etc. I'm sure I'll look happily back on this time and miss it, but I know that D.C. is where it's at for me now, and I can't wait to finally get started down that path. But I'll probably still impulsively check the Fry's ads online first thing in the morning every day.

Book Review: Atlas Shrugged

Years ago a friend recommended Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, but I never got around to reading it. A few months ago, while reading a Bioshock preview, I came across a mention by executive producer Ken Levine that Rand's Atlas Shrugged had been a clear influence on the game's backstory. This piqued my interest and a few days later I bought the book, planning to finish it coincident with the game's release on August 21.

The book is lonnng - my paperback has 1076 pages. Published in 1957, the story centers around the experiences of Dagny Taggart (I presume that the odd spelling of the author's name led her to take it out on the main character by choosing a similarly strange spelling), a railroad executive who slowly watches the government strip away all the incentive and capability of her company and others to conduct business, in the name of helping "the people". Seeking profit is deemed evil, giving handouts to others is deemed righteous, and therefore big business becomes demonized to the point that industrialists start throwing in the towel on their own, refusing to be slaves to a system that asks for everything from them but entirely takes away their ability to do so. The character of John Galt turns out to be secretly whisking away the top businessmen of the country to his hideout, where they begin their own community in which the only proper relation is business, selfishness is encouraged, and altruism is abhorred.

That's a necessarily curt summary of a much fuller, more detailed story, as should be expected for a novel of damn near eleven hundred pages, but that's the gist of it. Rand uses the book to develop and present her philosophy that she calls objectivism. The main tenets are probably best described in terms of what they reject: any belief in the supernatural, or any claim that individuals or groups create their own reality, mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible), determinism (the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control), altruism (the claim that morality consists in living for others or for society), collectivism, and the "mixed economy" notion that government should regulate the economy and redistribute wealth. In four phrases, she has described it as objective reality, reason, self-interest, and capitalism.

Of course, given my atheism, I found much appeal in her views on religion, although I don't entirely agree with them. While I do thoroughly reject the idea of a god watching over humanity, and that any knowledge can be claimed through faith, I definitely believe there are things we do not and cannot understand, and that there are other realities about which we are clueless. Ruling out all of these things seems to me to be a much too simplistic and narrow-minded approach.

The rest of her views, though, mostly disagreed with me. Given the context and time period - the US in the late 40's and early 50's - it seems reasonable that people could have been concerned with the growing influence of socialist and communist ideas around the world and the perceived threat they presented to the notion of a free, democratic, capitalistic society. But it's harder to keep in mind that the period of the collapse of overt Western colonialism throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin and South America that came in the 60's and 70's, and therefore much of the theory and discourse about sustainable economic systems and relations between countries that lead to many indigineous independence movements, had not yet come to the fore. Speaking of the US alone, at the time the book was published, the civil rights and feminist movements had not even begun; the focus on the disparate power relations between different groups in society, and how the economic system reinforced and solidified those relations, had not yet come about. Given the gravity of these subsequent events, it's indeed difficult to avoid discounting Rand's views.

Still, I found some merit in her idea that men (the term she used to refer to all) are naturally programmed to pursue their own interests and nothing else, and that a man must never be held back in his achievements as he engages in purposeful motion toward a goal. Implicit in the story is her view that men are indeed unequal in ability, but that hard work and persistence can overcome all adversity, and that government should not intervene to attempt to enforce equality in any way whatsoever. It's an argument that's been beaten to death by many others, certainly, and will probably forever be a point of disagreement between the free market types and the socialist types. Personally, I find it to be too idealistic and ignoring of the reality of the actual implementation of the economic system in this country. Fact is, owners and producers do not always earn their profits through hard work, potential is not unlimited for everyone, and the system has a lot of inertia that is almost impossible to overcome when attempting to move up the economic ladder, so to speak. Combine this with government that panders to corporate interests to the point of enacting legislation that provides tax and regulatory loopholes for corporations, and orienting the country's foreign policy toward guaranteeing raw materials and markets for goods around the world, and you've got an international system of relations that is indeed quite unequal and extremely difficult to change.

Undoubtedly, though, the story is a good one, and worth reading. Rand manages to develop her characters enough to truly draw the reader in and identify with them, although at times their believability suffers when she has them launch into multiple-page diatribes that are little more than thin-veiled soapbox performances by Rand herself. This phenomenon is taken to an absurd extreme by Galt in his last, and the book's climactic, speech that drags on for FIFTY-SEVEN pages. Yes, FIFTY-SEVEN.

The bottom line is, the story and Rand's philosophy serve as food for thought, even if the presentation is at times heavy-handed and overwrought. I usually shy away from books, especially novels, that take up so much time - it did in fact take me two months to get through - when I have a continually-growing stack of other books waiting to be read. But I think this one was worth it, not least because the backstory of Bioshock (with main character Andrew Ryan, a name that's hard not to mentally rearrange into Ayn Rand, as intended) makes much more sense that it would otherwise, and in fact often borrows heavily from Atlas Shrugged.