Vacation 2008: Day 5 - Objectivist hygiene

I've been slowly working my way through Blake Bell's Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko, a very well-written examination of the legendary comics creator's life and body of work. Bell does an outstanding job of addressing not only Ditko's unique sense of aesthetics, but also the man's fiercely Objectivist philosophy and personal eccentricities, and their effect on his artistic style and professional career.

Nowhere is Ditko's evangelism for the Ayn Rand school of petty selfishness "enlightened self-interest" so fervent and unrestrained as in 1973's The Avenging World. Not so much a work of sequential art as a bizarre illustrated primer espousing Rand's political theories in the most lurid, brute-force method imaginable, The Avenging World reads like a Chick tract adaptation of Atlas Shrugged set in the Dread Dormammu's Dark Dimension -- entertainingly bat-shit in the way only an embarrassingly sincere and personal project by a talented eccentric can be.

That doesn't mean that reading The Avenging World is anything other than a tough slog through repetitive dissertations -- in comic strip, illustrated text, and infographic format -- on the primacy of "rational self-interest" over collective obligation. I trend toward the left-libertarian/anarcho-communist side of things myself, but I temper my views with liberal doses of cynical pragmatism. The uncompromising rightist Objectivism in The Avenging World refuses to partition the "is" from the "ought," which is why the ideology tends to be in practice more justification than aspiration. "A = A" is an abstraction, and as such, is a hollow mantra in a world where the messy and inconclusive are commonplace.

Swap out the abstract for the concrete, and the philosophical scenarios presented in The Avenging World would go something like this...

Ideological purity is no substitute for a can of Ajax and some elbow grease.

New Order - Age of Consent (from Power, Corruption, & Lies, 1983) - A musical selection whose sublime and fragile beauty I trust we can all agree upon.