“Practical Magic” 2 is coming in 2026, 28 years after the first film reached theaters
“Scary Movie 6” is in production, picking up where the fifth film left off in 2013
See a trend?
Now, “Rush Hour 4” is happening. And the press is raging against the project for its political implications. For once, reporters have a right to be concerned … but not for the reasons they claim.
“Rush Hour 3” hit theaters in 2007, but director Brett Ratner’s MeToo problem corrupted any chance for a fourth film. Several women have accused Ratner of inappropriate behavior, including one who claimed he forced himself on her sexually.
The MeToo movement snagged another scalp, and his Hollywood career came to a screeching halt.
Until now.
What changed? President Donald Trump suggested Paramount get back in the “Rush Hour” business. Ratner is apparently friendly with the Trumps. He’s the director of the upcoming Melania Trump documentary, due for an early 2026 release.
And, in some very important context, Ratner hasn’t been accused of sexual assault in a court of law, let alone been found guilty.
It’s complicated, no doubt. Ugly. Disconcerting. And Hollywood is rife with such complications, from Kevin Spacey’s semi-banishment to Woody Allen getting quietly canceled for child abuse allegations.
Yet the reaction to the “Rush Hour” announcement went into overdrive in recent days. Here’s Puck journalist and veteran Hollywood scribe Matthew Belloni capturing that sentiment.
I teased this last night in What I’m Hearing but now confirmed: Paramount WILL release Rush Hour 4 after prodding from Trump on behalf of Brett Ratner. Distribution deal. Producer Tarak Ben Ammar is lining up financing. Get ready for the dumbest possible state-controlled media.
Looks Like Trump Will Get the New Rush Hour Movie He Asked For, Because That’s Just How Things Are Now
The story itself has a less “hair-on-fire” tone, but not by much. Fellow far-Left “men’s” magazine Esquire squealed over the deal as well. Again, the “hair-on-fire” headline:
This Is Not How I Wanted to Get Rush Hour 4
The Esquire piece brings Paramount owner David Ellison, who has modest ties to Trump, into the picture.
The relationship between David Ellison, the new owner of Paramount, and President Trump was already cause for concern for many [emphasis added]. Making matters worse, Trump apparently “personally pressed” Ellison, the son of one of Trump’s biggest donors, to move forward with Rush Hour 4. Oh, there’s more: Ratner is finishing up directing his first film since the allegations against him … which is an Amazon documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. Damn, I hope the Trumps ain’t gonna be in Rush Hour 4!
It’s just one movie, and it could flop at the box office.
Why so serious?
It’s simple. The Left and the Media, but we repeat ourselves, see this as another incursion on their pop culture turf. It’s already happened a few times before.
Now this. And by “this,” we mean a major movie studio that doesn’t hate half the country, led by an owner sympathetic to both President Trump and, seemingly, right-leaning consumers.
Nick LoPiccolo with Paradigm Talent Agency said the quiet part out loud in his X post.
The Rush Hour 4 story is not about nostalgia. It is the clearest look yet at how Trump is trying to shape American culture through the Ellisons. Puck confirmed the core fact. Paramount is releasing Rush Hour 4 because Donald Trump personally pushed the Ellisons to do it. Not to… pic.twitter.com/t6I4pFHoFW
The Rush Hour 4 story is not about nostalgia. It is the clearest look yet at how Trump is trying to shape American culture through the Ellisons. Puck confirmed the core fact. Paramount is releasing Rush Hour 4 because Donald Trump personally pushed the Ellisons to do it. Not to develop it. Not to finance it. To distribute it as a favor while the Ellisons chase the biggest acquisition of their lives.
Semafor took it further. Trump wants the late 80s and 90s cultural energy that built his persona. Bloodsport. Broad comedies. Male driven action. He has been trying to revive that era through Oval Office pressure. The Ellisons are his only studio allies. Larry is one of Trump’s most important political partners. David is running Paramount while bidding for Warner Bros Discovery. That is the exact environment where Trump pressed them to revive Rush Hour.
He has a point. President Trump “gets” pop culture better than many conservatives. His “Apprentice” TV show found him hob-nobbing with Hollywood types, and he’s been a fixture on TV shows and films for years.
Isn’t a political powerhouse aligned with a studio owner a scary precedent? Maybe. But it’s what the Left has done for decades.
President Trump is just fighting pop culture fire with fire, thus the “hair-on-fire” coverage.
Editor’s Note: It’s a brutal time to be an independent journalist, but it’s never been more necessary given the sorry state of the corporate press. If you’re enjoying Hollywood in Toto, I hope you’ll consider leaving a coin (or two) in our Tip Jar.
A short while ago, I read a review of a history of pedantry. A pedant, I take it, is a man who delights more in error than in truth. He does not want to learn, he wants to correct. I have several books in my library, some of them quite long, in which a pedantic […]
Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then. There was less pressure to be smartphone-connected all the time. Social media wasn’t yet as ubiquitous, or worrisome, as it is today. Now the stakes seem higher.
Today smartphones are as widespread as the concerns about their effects on young people’s brains. Psychologists have written best-selling books about how bad phones are for kids, and many schools have banned their use. Despite all this, no one can dispute the fact that phones and phone apps have entered every aspect of contemporary life. Even Jonathan Haidt, who aims to end the phone-based childhood, floats policies that would allow for a phone-based adolescence. The question is not whether your kid will ever get a smartphone, but rather how to manage its adoption in a way that will preserve the integrity of child, parent, school, and home life. And to that end, I believe I’ve found a good solution: Get your kid a watch.
That idea had not occurred to me until my daughter brought it up. She’d been FaceTiming with a friend who had just received an Apple Watch. Now my daughter wanted one, and it didn’t take long for me to acquiesce. After all, as a small device with fewer features, a smartwatch would have to do less damage than a standard smartphone. Maybe it would also do substantial good. The smartwatch might allow her to connect with friends and family, while keeping her away from social media.
I ordered her an Apple Watch that very day. In theory I’d been open to another sort of product—a smartwatch that is specifically designed for kids—but the competition barely registered. The market for children’s smartwatches has been flooded for years with garbage. Many products of this type are toys, and crappy ones at that: hunks of cheap plastic with poor displays and valueless software; Dick Tracy novelties for a generation that has never heard of the guy. The next tier up includes more functional devices with network connections, such as the Gizmo Watch. But that product, like many others in the category, caters to adult control. Technically, the Gizmo can be used to exchange text messages and calls, but only with a contact list that is managed by a parent. The device’s main function for a kid is passive: It allows her to be called or texted by her parents, and tracked by them via GPS. This is a house-arrest bracelet, not a smartwatch.
At the risk of devolving into “when I was a kid”–ism, when I was a kid, we learned how to use technologies through actual use. There were few phones or televisions or stereos for kids—instead, just phones, televisions, and stereos. The ownership, location, and operation of these devices was subject to the oversight of parents, who also gave their children direct and deliberate instruction on the devices’ proper use. I was taught how to dial a phone, but also what to say or not say on one, for example. And parents spent considerable thought on questions such as whether telephones should be in children’s rooms. Then, as now, their minds were on potential harms. What’s new today is the sense that nothing can be done to mitigate these harms aside from wholesale prohibition.
If I was going to do this, I wanted to get my daughter a fully operational smartwatch, and not some kiddie version that wouldn’t really help her learn how to navigate the computerized world. To some extent, I wanted her to confront the capabilities, confusions, and risks of online life, so she could learn how to manage them herself. I have owned and used smartwatches for some time, and I surmised that their many limitations compared with smartphones—and the uselessness of most of their apps—would make one a perfect candidate for this process.
We’re Apple users in my house, so the Apple Watch made sense, but similar options are available for Android, including Samsung’s Galaxy watches. The Apple Watch SE was the cheapest option, and as with any Apple Watch, you can set it up for a family member who does not own an iPhone. For that to work, you need to buy the more expensive cellular model, which permits your kid to call, text, and email from almost anywhere. It also lets you track their location. The latter function has a quirk: My kid also has an iPad, and Apple seems to treat that device, which stays home all the time, as her default location. At first I found this defect annoying, but soon I came to appreciate it. I almost never really need to know where she is, and the habitual pursuit of her geospatial data would feel like an invasion of the autonomy that the watch was meant, in part, to increase.
I’ve written in the past about the pleasures of installing a landline—a home phone that could be used by the family as a whole, rather than its individual members. For my daughter, the landline was a source of confidence that she could contact her mother or me, or a neighbor—or, God forbid, an emergency service—if she needed to. Our home phone played a similar role for me as well.
The smartwatch offers something more. Most communication is not done in emergencies, but in ordinary life: I’m running late or Meet me at the other door or Dinner’s ready. The ability to exchange mundane information from afar—even from across the street at a friend’s house—is part of being a whole person in the world today. Ashley James, the mother of my daughter’s friend, told me that she’s been delighted by her daughter’s usage of the smartwatch: When her daughter sees an Apple News story that she thinks might interest James, for example, she sometimes sends it in a text. James also said that her kid now texts extended-family members, developing connections that might not have materialized otherwise. Just having the device, James told me, makes her daughter feel included in the world of technology “that kids want to be a part of so badly.”
In a way, it is strange to talk about a 10-year-old this way. When I was 10, a newspaper would have been sitting on the breakfast table, and I could have shown an article to my mother at any time. But then life became digitized, and now you need a device of some kind just to see the news. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
I’d experienced my own revelation about my daughter once she started using the Apple Watch. Back when she had just her iPad, I’d concluded that she was terrible at texting. We have a family group chat, and she would either respond to messages with a single word, or not respond at all. But after she got her watch and learned to tap out texts across its tiny screen, her messages exploded into wry quips and fully formed ideas. She turned out to be a killer texter. I quickly surmised the prior problem: She mostly uses her iPad to watch streaming shows. All those texts were interrupting her! Imagine if your text messages kept popping up on your television. She was already old enough to express herself online in sophisticated ways, but until she got the smartwatch, she didn’t have the tools to do so.
I have since concluded that the smartwatch is an unalloyed good. James seems to agree. With these devices on our daughters’ wrists, our children feel a part of the world of portable, personal technology, even as the devices offer them just modest access to that world. They’re connected, but also free of the social-media posting and scrolling that is the real cause of anxiety about kids and phones.
I find it startling that Apple and other tech companies haven’t leaned even further into this obvious opportunity, to bill the watch as a sort of training tool for life online. (I did see an advertisement in one of my daughter’s magazines for a children’s-smartwatch brand called Cosmo—described, a little weirdly, as “the perfect first phone.”) What a shame that so much effort is devoted to providing parents with all manner of controls for their kids, but scarce support. The well-timed and thoughtful introduction of a smartwatch could help mitigate concerns about children’s smartphone use while also providing them with a scaffolding on which to learn basic digital-life skills.
For the moment, though, the smartwatch is too often lumped together with the smartphone, as if they were different causes of the same disease. On this logic, many schools ban both. But such prohibitionism is reliant on magical thinking: It assumes that kids of some arbitrary age can be suddenly trusted to use smartphones, so long as they’ve spent their prior years in full digital quarantine. That’s not how things work. Kids must be introduced into connected life, one step at a time.
On October 29, 1925, Soviet Russia granted Ayn Rand permission to leave. The writer escaped to America. Arriving in New York City, she settled in Chicago and began her career in Hollywood, where she struggled and then Chatsworth, where she thrived.
Ultimately writing, culminating and completing her masterpiece depicting man as a heroic being in Manhattan, city of skyscrapers, Ayn Rand had been inspired to go West by Hollywood movies and American literature, including short stories, particularly fiction by O. Henry, which often contains a twist.
By the time Ayn Rand arrived in New York City, America was steeped in altruism and collectivism and going bad. Throughout her life, Ayn Rand created works of art which could save the world, teaching her best student and heir, Leonard Peikoff, to carry on.
Front cover of author’s first book, published 29 October 2025
On October 29, 2025, the centenary of Ayn Rand being loosed from the USSR in the dictatorship’s attempt to conceal the effects of Communism, I published my first book. Mine’s a collection of stories I conceived, wrote and submitted for publication. All 16 stories were published across the world—in the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia—in books, journals and websites. They dramatize dark (even bleak) and mysterious themes in realistic tales embroidered with optimism, belonging and happiness. My fiction, too, comes with a twist. Buy, read and review Long Run: Short Stories, Volume Oneon an iPhone, iPad or computer here (or on Amazon or direct from me).
Author’s collection of various volumes of Ayn Rand’s first novel
I chose this date to publish my first book because Ayn Rand’s philosophy and writing saved my life. I’ll soon write about this fact for the first time. I chose the centenary of her being allowed to flee dictatorship as the date to publish my first book because Ayn Rand makes this possible. I created Long Run: Short Stories, Volume One to challenge the reader to go long by reason. I know I’m not in Ayn Rand’s league. My stories unfurl myths and tales of trust, love and precaution—depicting how to love oneself, one’s chosen children, friends and loved one and how to rally around the good when everything’s gone bad and I think my writing can be excellent in this sense. I’m told it’s improved by those who earn my trust. Ayn Rand’s writing tops mine, which is why on this Thanksgiving, a “typically American holiday” in her words, I’m posting my first book review of Ayn Rand’s fiction—her first novel, We the Living—on Autonomia.
This cashes in on the Objectivist trader principle as expression of gratitude to you as paid subscriber to my productiveness in the press. Mine is a small trade. I know it. It’s growing. I know this, too. I consider my own fiction writing a continuation of Ayn Rand’s legacy. I’m part of Ayn Rand’s role in history. The reader who discovers, reads and appreciates Long Run: Short Stories, Volume One (and my future published writings, if this is possible) can trace its origins to hers and go from there.
I chose Ayn Rand’s first novel as her first fiction book to review on this particular Thanksgiving because this novel, more than others in her fiction catalogue, uniquely dramatizes the American spirit in dire, dark times. Kira Argounova is a solitary figure. Kira strives for and pursues her values alone—even when and as she shares values with the man she adores—love which can hurt, agonize and induce unbearable pain.
I know I’ve had days and years like that. We the Living helped me endure and triumph. It’s a marvelous literary achievement and an exemplary first novel. I’m proud that my first book is a work of fiction, too, with strips of light shining through darkness in short stories. I’m writing new stories for a second volume and new books for the new year. For now—right now—I invite you to join me in your own solitude as you read this and celebrate productiveness as a virtue—your own, mine and every one like Kira who feels alone in the world trudging through the grayness of today’s confusion amid despair to seek refuge in search of somewhere she belongs.
Keep working to go where you can be happy among ones — possibly, finding or re-discovering the one — who choose to live free. This is what Autonomia aims to inculcate as well as what today’s holiday means. This can be our pact. Let today be the day you celebrate the virtue of your creativity and productiveness, whether in accounting, athletics, administration, academia or art—or practicing the art of living.
We the Living by Ayn Rand begins with the sense of smell—the scent of carbolic acid—and ends with a solemn and solitary figure in white. The epic first novel by the world’s greatest literary philosopher engages the mind and senses with motive power and emotion in every part in between. What’s startling isn’t that this story of three enmeshed young lovers involves and indulges every part of your physicality. Reading We the Living, which I’ve completed for the sixth time, challenges as it steeps and haunts you. It makes you want to cry, scream and cry out. This is why lesser men feel compelled to stop reading and put the book down.
Many never pick it up. They do not dare. It’s too close—it’s too soon to carry out what the striking young heroine of We the Living starts—and it’s easy for the bands of the West’s college graduates to crumble in the midst of feeling vulnerable, angry and raw when sensing that beautiful youths will get their Soviet deliverance. It’s one thing to know you oppose Communism and seek to read the gloriously reputed Ayn Rand. It’s another to start where she begins. Ayn Rand, born in St. Petersburg before Communists came in altruism and collectivism and conquered her country, grants no mercy in We the Living; she’ll have you check your premises.
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Foregrounding The Fountainhead, Anthem and Atlas Shrugged with themes of secondhandedness, engineering and the refusal to produce under compulsion, We the Living quickly casts its plot-theme, as Ayn Rand formulated the concept, in unforgettable characters. Besides the threesome in the novel’s famous love triangle—a fascinating and revolving romantic mystery in the making—the secondary characters, too, pack the drama of a nation in crisis and decline. Comrade Sonia—Vava—Sasha and Irina—Timoshenko—Syerov—Uncle Visili—and Victor, among others, give We the Living scope, depth and sharp, cutting lines in contrast.
This is the world of Russia’s most civilized city a hundred years ago—yet it evokes the world in the moment you’re reading this, with everyone feeling anxious. manic and frantic and overcompensating by being busy, busy, busy while staving off the dread of fixating, obsessing and waiting for the end of times; for the Ayn Rand reader, We the Living dramatizes that days are numbered and previews the looming calendar in Atlas Shrugged:
Under the banner hung a fringe of cobwebs. Under the cobwebs—a huge railway clock with black figures on a yellow face and no hands. Under the clock, a crowd of pale faces and greasy overcoats waited for the train…”
As the author captures the sense of the city of St. Petersburg—a great city in perpetual decline as it becomes the Communist Petrograd—she expresses the blankness of people as passengers sitting as “stiff and limp as dummies, [that] swayed to the clatter of the wheels, asleep in sitting postures. Some snored. Some moaned. No one spoke.”
Charlie Kirk being shot by an assassin in the throat as he spoke came to mind as I pictured silent passengers on their way to gray, dull lives ruled by brute force. In this part, I noticed that Ayn Rand wrote with bookends of wood as she introduces the young woman who leads the saga of We the Living, Kira Argounova, who “faced the mob.” “Under the folds of shapeless clothes, their bodies were driven by the tense unnatural energy of a long struggle that had become habitual,” she writes. Then, she shows that Kira “stopped for one short second of hesitation, as if feeling the significance of the step,” that her foot is sunburned, that she wears a wooden sandal with leather straps.”
“For one short second, the foot was held in the air,” Ayn Rand writes. “Then the wooden sandal touched the wooden boards of the platform: Kira Argounova was in Petrograd.”
Note that, for the reader, this startup signals that the heroine has arrived while seeding that the decaying world’s made of wood. Evoking the year 2020 with narrative detachment, Petrograd in 1922 is cast in “a difficult time to be sure. A cruel time. But most fascinating, like all historical cataclysms.”
Living—what it requires, what it means, what extinguishes life—is We the Living’s theme. As if to forewarn the reader of the delusional horror to come, someone tells Kira: “It’s time to get reconciled to life.” For the character introduced as “bathed in light,” opposite today’s youths in the United States, it’s evident that such a prospect is extremely unlikely:
She had gone through school with the highest grades and the sloppiest composition books. She burned her piano etudes and never darned her stockings. She climbed to the pedestals of statues in the parks to kiss the cold lips of Greek gods—but slept at symphony concerts. She sneaked out through a window when guests were expected, and she could not cook a potato. She never went to church and seldom read a newspaper…She had played with mechanical toys, which were not intended for girls, and had built ships and bridges and towers; she had watched rising steel and bricks and steam.…And because she worshiped joy, Kira seldom laughed and did not go to see comedies in theaters. And because she felt a profound rebellion against the weighty, the tragic, the solemn, Kira had a solemn reverence for those songs of defiant gaiety.”
After encountering a handsome stranger named Leo who quotes Oscar Wilde and shows that he desires her—with a sense of purpose, specificity and decency—Kira meets a Communist who enjoys Italian opera. Kira, who goes by facts, acquiring knowledge and confidence, is undaunted, telling the Communist: “Being a bourgeois, I can’t afford a ticket.” Countering a Communist sympathizer cousin: “I have something I can’t sell and can’t lose, and it can’t be nationalized. I have a future. A living future.”
The artistry in We the Living lies in how Ayn Rand dramatizes her characters’ response to heavy gloom and impending doom. Giving up reading the novel is a cop-out, that’s true. But it is also an incalculable loss to someone who can gain incalculable value from discovering and witnessing the wonder of rationality in action. Kira’s confidence abounds. When Leo delivers his first reality check and tells her: “Kira, think what we have against us,” Kira replies: “We’ll fight it, Leo. Together. We’ll fight all of it. The country. The century. The millions. We can stand it. We can do it.”
That Leo knows better will test your own ability to think and go by reason as you’re drawn into their intimacy. “[S]he lay still,” she writes, “her teeth in a muscle of his arm, drunk on the smell of his skin.” You’ll get a little drunk, too, as you’re lured into the darkness of Russian irrationalism, in which everyone is lulled into complicity, judged by the state by “the amount of electrical power per citizen” in a nightmare in which “[e]verybody was cold and everybody wanted desperately to be gay.”
Forecasting the specter of ObamaCare and today’s reams of censorious medical, travel and academic bureaucracy, she captures the perniciousness of daily socialist life as Kira and Leo attempt a getaway in the country:
Certainly,” said the landlady. “Certainly, citizens. I can let you have a room for the night. But first, you must get a certificate from your Upravdom as to where you live in the city, and a permit from your militia department, and then you must bring me your labor books, and I must register them with our Soviet here, and our militia department, and get a permit for you as transient guests, and there’s a tax to pay, and then you can have the room.”
“They stayed in the city.”
Soviet Russia’s New Woman—which means the emasculated man—deprivation of food, clothing and shelter, as characters wage a constant battle against hunger, cold and death, also drudgery, and the cat named Plutarch Kira’s father “found in a gutter”—We the Living sifts through rituals you know, live and struggle to change, ignore or solve. Cataclysm (i.e., the tunnel scene in Atlas Shrugged) in Los Angeles wildfire, Chicago gunfire and New York City rot (past, present and coming disaster) pervades in Petrograd, bracing and preparing you for what to know and choose to do:
“[A] house collapsed, early one afternoon. The front wall crashed, with a shower of bricks, in a white cloud of limey dust. Coming back from work, the inhabitants saw their bedrooms exposed to the cold light of the street, like tiers of stage settings; an upright piano, caught by a naked beam, hung precariously, high over the pavement. There were a few weary moans, but no astonishment, houses long since in need of repair collapsed without warning all over the city.”
We the Living depicts the great, fundamental conflict of life vs. death in an unfolding philosophical horror story mingled and integrated with glory, beauty and Ayn Rand’s exalted sense of life:
Kira! I want to live! I want to live!”
She fell back. Her hair jerked like snakes on the pillow and lay still. Her arm fell over the edge of the bed and lay still. The red bubble grew over her open mouth and burst in a spurt of something black and heavy, gurgling like the last drop through the clogged pipe. She did not move. Nothing moved on the bed but the black that slithered slowly down the skin of her throat.”
Who honestly can claim that the writer who created Objectivism to tell a story deserves to be dismissed as a heavy-handed, harsh, pedantic extremist after reading Ayn Rand’s exquisitely rendered drama undergirding the ideas that gave rise to today’s social media shallows, wokeism and the cult of cancel culture? Consider a paragraph of Soviet propaganda that could’ve been written by Michelle Obama or Robert Reich:
The Wall Newspaper of the ‘House of the Peasant’ was a square meter of typewritten strips pasted on a blackboard with headlines in red and blue pencil. There was a prominent editorial on “What each one of us comrades here does for the Clamping,” there was a humorous article on “who will puncture the foreign Imperialist’s belly,” there was a poem by a local poet about “the Rhythm of Toil,” there was a cartoon by a local artist, representing a fat man in a high silk hat sitting on a toilet. There were many items of constructive proletarian criticism: “Comrade Nadia Chernova is wearing silk stockings. Time to be reminded that such flaunting of luxury is unproletarian, Comrade Chernova…a certain comrade whom many will recognize neglects to turn off the light when he leaving the restroom. Electricity costs money to the Soviet state, comrade.”
Yet Ayn Rand’s Kira marches like a good soldier for Communism and always with a powerful, pervasive sense of place and penetrating insight.
As government control of life clamps down in We the Living’s second part, the youths you root for continue to demonstrate courage and conviction, mobilizing “… like a stream full of the fragrance of a future sea, a street where each step is a forecast of the country to come.” And, slowly, if you want to live, you’ll come to recognize with familiarity the comments and questions you hear at the dining table—or whispered in the corner booths of conversations in your life: “We’re living in difficult times. But things will change.Things are changing. There still are men to whom freedom is more than a word on posters.” “Do you think they have a chance…?”
Or read and ask yourself if this rings true in the folds of your everyday life:
Kira, I….I’m afraid.. I don’t know why, it’s only at times, but I’m so afraid…what’s going to happen to all of us?…We’re all trying so hard not to think…not to think beyond the next day, and sometimes even not beyond the next hour….They don’t want us to think…”
Through it all, if you’re thinking and you’re active and you’re able to be vulnerable, romantic love prevails. For example, after Leo’s reunited with Kira following his cure from a deadly illness in the Soviet state:
He was laughing softly; his fingers caressed her hair; the fingers were trembling. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the armchair, and sat down, holding her on his lap, forcing her lips to meet his. “And that’s the strong Kira who never cries. You shouldn’t be so glad to see me, Kira…Stop it, Kira…You little fool…My dearest, dearest.…”
She tried to get up: “Leo…you must take your coat off and…”
“Stay still.”
He held her, and she leaned back, and she felt suddenly that she had no strength to lift her arms. that she had no strength ever to move again; and the Kira who despised femininity, smiled, a tender, radiant, trusting smile, weaker than a woman’s, the smile of a lost, bewildered child, her lashes heavy and sparkling with tears.”
Kira’s aristocratic hero, Leo Kovalensky, is an embodiment in extreme self-awareness. He knows he can try to live and he knows he can’t hold on much longer. Kira remains unconquerable, to invoke the concept which binds We the Living to the meaning of life. She refuses to cease worshipping her hero: “Her head slid slowly to his breast, to his knees, to his feet.”
Yet one of the most searing aspects of this masterful literary work is its parenting wisdom, from finding beauty in the death of one’s mother to the bonds of the men who are fathers: “Let us drink to our children’s happiness. even though you don’t think that they will be happy, and I don’t, either.” Suicide, too, powerfully figures into the plot—as is the brilliant, thought-provoking, life-affirming pattern in Ayn Rand’s fiction—pre-configuring the incisive plot pivot of 2006’s elegiac repudiation of altruism, The Lives of Others.
But this novel dramatizes life more than it animates ideas which accelerate mass death. One of the criticisms of Ayn Rand’s writing is that her heroes are mouthpieces for her philosophy. Read this—one of the best depictions of a hero on the brink of vulnerability—and answer the criticism for yourself:
She rose slowly up the long marble stairway. There was no light, her foot searched uncertainly for every frozen, slippery step. It was colder than in the street outside, comma the dead, damp, still cold of a mausoleum. Hesitantly, her hand followed the broken marble rail.
She could see nothing ahead; it seemed as if the steps would never end.
When she came to a break in the railing, she stopped. She called helplessly, with a little note of laughter in her frightened voice: “Andrei!”
A wedge of light split the darkness above as he flung the door open. “Oh, Kira!”
He rushed down to her, laughing apologetically: “I’m so sorry! It’s those broken electric wires.”
He swung her up into his arms and carried her to his room, while she laughed, “I’m sorry, Andrei. I’m getting to be such a helpless coward!”
Or read aloud this speech by a dad to his woke, cultist, leftist—Communist—adult son:
Victor,” said Vasili, Ivanovitch, “you know what I might say. But I won’t say it.
I won’t ask questions. It’s a strange time we’re living in. Many years ago, I felt sure of what I thought. I knew when I was right and I knew when to condemn. I can’t do it now. I don’t know whether I can condemn anyone for anything. There’s so much horror and suffering around us that I don’t want to brand anyone as guilty. We’re poor, bewildered creatures—all of us—who suffer so much and know so little! I can’t blame you for anything you might have done. I don’t know your reasons. I won’t ask.
I know I won’t understand. No one understands each other these days. You’re my son, Victor. I love you. I can’t help it. as you can’t help being what you are. You see, I’ve wanted a son ever since I was younger than you are now. I’ve never trusted men. And so I wanted a man of my own, at whom I could look proudly, directly, as I’m looking at you now. When you were a little boy, Victor, you cut your finger, once, a deep cut, clear to the bone. You came in from the garden to have it bandaged. Your lips were blue, but you didn’t cry. You didn’t make a sound. Your mother was so angry at me because I laughed happily. But, you see, I was proud of you. I knew I would always be proud of you,….You know, you were so funny when your mother made you wear a velvet suit with a big lace collar. You were so angry—and so pretty! You had curly hair...Well, all that doesn’t matter. It’s only that I can’t say anything against you, Victor.
I can’t think anything against you. So I won’t question you. I’ll only ask you for one favor; you can’t save your sister, I know it; but ask your friends—I know you have friends who can do it—just ask them to have her sent to the same prison with Sasha. Just that. It won’t interfere with the sentence and it won’t compromise you. It’s one last favor to her—a death-bed favor Victor, for you know you’ll never see her again.
Just do that—and the book will be closed. I’ll never look back. I’ll never try to read some of the pages which I don’t want to see. That will settle all our accounts. I’ll still go on having a son, and even if it’s hard, sometimes, not to think, one can do it, these days, one has to, and you’ll help me. Just one favor, in exchange for…in exchange for all that’s past.”
We the Living, like Ayn Rand’s other novels, recalls, predicts, invokes, evokes and challenges the greatest danger and history of civilization, including today’s war in Ukraine. “…[B]lood is running freely, and men fight, and men kill, and men die. Well, what of it? They, those who watch, are not afraid of blood. There’s an honor in blood. But do they know that it’s not blood we’re bathed in, it’s pus?”
The scene of the raid on one’s property—a private home—made me sick, bringing to mind the American state’s historic military raid on the home of a boy named Elian Gonzalez—forced at gunpoint in 2000 to be sent back to live under dictatorship:
A soldier stuck a bayonet into a pillow, and little white flakes of down fluttered up like snowdrops. Andrei jerked the door of a cabinet open; the dishes and glasses tinkled, as he piled them swiftly, softly on the carpet.
Leo opened his gold cigarette case and extended it to Andrei. “No no, thank you,” said Andrei.
Leo lighted a cigarette. The match quivered in his fingers for an instant, then grew steady. He sat on the edge of the table, swinging one leg, smoke rising slowly in a thin, blue column.
“The survival,” said Leo, “of the fittest. However, not all philosophers are right. I’ve always wanted to ask him one question: the fittest—for what…You should be able to answer it, Comrade Taganov. What are your philosophical convictions? We’ve never had a chance to discuss that—and this would be appropriate time.”
By the time Ayn Rand writes “Leo shrugged…” the reader can start to imagine, suppose and appreciate the meaning of what will happen to the living in We the Living. For the rational, motivated and strong, this will stir and stimulate the mind, body and soul. Her characters, words, scenes and plot points hover and pierce and We the Living breaks your heart as it dares you to read, know and understand. And it puts you smack in the same scene with the characters you’ve come to recognize, know and love and everything this implies.
Motive power comes full circle in a straight, clear line—of a train. “Kira Argounova sat on a wooden bench by the window,” Ayn Rand writes. “She had her suitcase on her lap and held it with both hands, her fingers spread wide apart. Her head leaned back against the wooden seat and trembled in a thin, little shudder, like the dusty glass pane. Her lids drooped heavily over her eyes fixed on the window. She did not close her eyes. She sat for hours without moving, and her muscles did not feel the immobility, or she did not feel her muscles any longer.”
On the next page, the author writes with beauty in her prose:
She had no thoughts left. She felt empty, clear, and quiet, as if her body were only an image of her will, and her will—only an arrow, tense and hard, pointing at a border that had to be crossed. The only living thing she felt was the suitcase on her lap. Her will was knocking with the wheels of the train. Her heart beat there, under the floor.
She noticed dimly, once, on the bench before her, a woman pressed a cold, white breast into a child’s lips. There still were people, and there still were lives. She was not dead. She was only waiting to be born.”
Escaping Communism climaxes the story, as you may have known or supposed, again evoking the child refugee Elian and the mother, Elizabeth Brotons, who died at sea so that her son could live free:
She knew she had been walking for hours, that which she had once called hours…and there were only steps, only legs rising and falling into the deep into the snow. and a snow that had no end. Or had it an end? That, really, did not matter. She did not have to think of that. She had to think only that she had to walk. She had to walk west. That was the only problem, that was the total of all the problems. Had she any problems? Had she any questions to be answered?
If she had—they would be answered—there.. She did not have to think. She had to get out. She would think—then—if there were thoughts to be faced. Only she had to get out. Only to get out…she had nothing left behind. She was walking out of a void, a void white and unreal as that earth around her. She could not give up. She still had them—those two legs that could move—and something lost somewhere within her, that told them to move. She would not give up. She was alive, alive and alone in a desert which was not a living earth. She had to walk, because she was still alive. She had to get out…She looked up at the sky. She looked, her head and shoulders thrown back. Those twinkling splinters above—they were endless worlds, people said.
Wasn’t there room for her in the world? Who was moving her feet off the small space they held in that vast universe? Who were they and why were they doing it?
They had forgotten. She had to get out.”
The emphasis in We the Living is on the ascent of man. This is why the rational man ought to read the book. The forewarning enlightens and emboldens the soul, of course. The point of the haunting is that you know you’re alive. On the last page of the novel, Ayn Rand, who died in 1982, wrote: “A lonely, little tree stood far away in the plain. It had no leaves. Its slim, rare twigs had gathered no snow. It stretched, tense with the life of a future spring, thin black branches, like arms, into the dawn, rising over an endless earth where so much had been possible.”
Re-reading We the Living now is a richer experience; knowing what’s coming, what became of the first Bush’s “peace dividend,” and the end of history and jubilation over the fall of the USSR. Reading as an older man yields deeper, wider perspective. We the Living tests your commitment to truth and the means of achieving it. It girds whatever trace of rationality you’ve got—like a silent scream for reason across 100 years—a pluming ghost story as a prelude to what’s likely to become of the living.
“Do we know it yet, even this late?” Leonard Peikoff, whom I invited to Miami in 2000 to intervene and plead on behalf of the child refugee from Communism—and he, alone, did—asks in the afterword. “Do we know the nature of a dictatorship as it grows ever more visible in the land of the free? If we do at all, it is thanks in large part to the works of Ayn Rand.” Dr. Peikoff is right. Giving thanks begins—supposing you choose to be alive—with reading the bright, shining, darkened We the Living.
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