Arrested development: Some Lolo Jones thoughts

Sometimes, you wish the real world would just stop hasslin' you.

It's been that way this week for Lolo Jones, America's decorated (but not Olympic-medal-winning) hurdler. The flap started Saturday, when Jere Longman wrote a piece in The New York Times titled "For Lolo Jones, Everything is Image." This is the perfect case of a headline encapsulating the thesis of an article, but for further clarification, here's a choice quote:

Jones has received far greater publicity than any other American track and field athlete competing in the London Games. This was based not on achievement but on her exotic beauty and on a sad and cynical marketing campaign. 

Cue Tuesday's 100-meter hurdle final, in which Jones finished fourth, a full tenth of a second behind U.S. teammate Kellie Wells, who earned the bronze. She and Dawn Harper, who earned silver in the event, have bristled about the attention given Jones despite their performances.

For her part, Jones appeared on the "Today" show Wednesday morning, tearfully accusing the media of picking her out for criticism. "They should be supporting our U.S. athletes," Jones said of the American media. "And instead, they just ripped me to shreds."

This piece does not seek to add to the debate about Jones' credentials, nor critique her public persona. Plenty have stepped in to defend Jones against the media, including the Awful Announcing blog that I frequent and a piece in today's Chicago Sun-Times I read over breakfast from Richard Roeper. I'm not interested in this question, as I believe it's a point of subjective taste whether you think Jones went too far in overyhyping herself leading up to the Games, and if the media is truly culpable in her failure to medal.

What is interesting, and what makes me feel personally invested in the story, is how Jones reacted to the criticism. A tearful exchange on the "Today" show, dejected tweets and astonishment that the media might actually criticize one of its athletes, instead of simply throwing out rosy puff pieces, screams arrested development to me. It echoes the oft-juvenile behavior of LeBron James following "the Decision" backlash of several years ago. Plainly put, elite athletes live inside a cocoon during their prime, surrounded by supportive friends, coaches and fellow athletes. They are comped hotel rooms, food and endorsements and are often not subjected to the travails of the real world.

I can speak partially from experience, as having been a scholarship college athlete (in track and field, no less). You stay in hotel rooms, where everything is prepackaged. Meals are catered. Stipends are handed out. Books, classes and housing is paid for. All of these things are excellent perks that allow athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds (or the occasional white kid from the suburbs) terrific opportunities. But it also keeps you from realizing just how difficult certain things in life can be.

This is not to belittle the conditions of Jones' upbringing. Growing up with a single mom, living in a church basement is an experience I will never be able to relate to. Career-threatening injury was something I didn't have to worry about. At the same time, Jones' plea for the media to get their facts straight and her bumbling recitation of her accomplishments to the "Today" show interviewer screams, "I'm being abused! Somebody save me from the big bad world!"

Professional athletes in New York don't act this way. Scrutiny and media attention are something that seasoned veterans are able to brush aside. We expect collegiate athletes to act this way: kickers who miss the big one, pitchers who give up the game-winning home run, track stars who miss the big race due to a freak injury. We anticipate their inability to cope with these setbacks because, after all, they're learning.

Most of them do. They go on to achieve in areas other than athletics, and become successfully in the industry they choose. Elite athletes who continue to live inside this bubble do not.

Consider the checkered past of Kobe Bryant. Or the complete meltdown of Ryan Leaf. These are athletes who lived inside a world free from (or with scarcer) want.

Lolo Jones may be the most prominent example of this phenomenon yet. However you feel about her self-avowed virginity, it's another sign of arrested development. Public tweets about who to date are something you expect from 16-year-olds, not 30-year-old two-time Olympians.

The adult world has sex in it. It has strife. And it has a media that will just as happily pick you up as it will spit you out.

Lolo Jones may have just learned that on the biggest stage possible. And boy, it just might make her change her tone.

Page-turning: A review of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

If there's one thing both critics and fans of Ayn Rand can likely agree on, it's the author's ability to make a point. And then make it. And make it one more time.

At the center of Rand's masterpiece, "Atlas Shrugged," is the moral and political principle outlined in the pledge devised by the book's enigmatic protagonist, John Galt:

"I swear - by my life and my love of it - that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."

In the parlance of the philosophers, this principle has become known as rational self-interest, and it is the driving force behind every page of "Atlas Shrugged" - all 1,100 of them.

Perhaps it is unfair to judge Rand's repetition as the major downfall of an otherwise thrilling and thought-provoking narrative. It is impossible, once you have dove in headfirst, to ignore the fact that the book is trying to do two things simultaneously: tell a story, and outline a philosophical position. Rand's unwavering allegiance to the second purpose grants the book an overly weighty significance and bogs down its story with needless, carbon-copy characters whose growth and actions at best mimic each other, granting the book unneeded rhetorical girth, and at worst undermine the moral significance of Rand's writing by allowing dated suppositions to peek through the cracks of a narrative that breaks down so often one wonders if Rand is playing some kind of subtle joke mimicking a Taggart train.

Rand's tome is an important work, driven by a singularity of purpose, that drowns in its own self-importance and delivers an uninspiring, arbitrary and soap-opera ending to a tale that could have been so much more.

NARRATIVE BREAKDOWNS

This is, perhaps, the greatest fault of the text. As stated, this book is clearly meant to be more than a simple novel. However, the medium of fiction is where Rand chooses to make her impact and, because of that, it is necessary to hold her to a storytelling standard.

The basic story at the heart of "Atlas Shrugged" is one that would make Christopher Nolan, or any other major filmmaker, giddy with the opportunity. Set in 20th century New York, the story focuses on Dagny Taggart, the last competent executive of a railroad steeped in history and human ingenuity. The cast quickly swells to include other great industrialists, chief among them Francisco d'Anconia, the heir to a copper fortune in South America, and Hank Rearden, an American product who has invented a new type of steel that outperforms all other alloys known on Earth. These three are beset by politicians and bureaucrats who, it is apparent from the outset, are the enemy - concerned only with capping the accomplishments of the best and brightest for their own material gain.

This leeching of American ingenuity is the high point of Rand's prose. Her depiction of a withering American dream - if I may borrow from T.S. Eliot, a depiction of the world ending "not with a bang, but with a wimper" - ranks among the finest examples of dystopian literature America has. The destruction of the continent - and the minds that created it - is so shockingly plausible and complete it is often gasp-inducing. Perhaps this the major reason why the book is so long - Rand wishes to emphasize the piecemeal destruction of the world's last great nation.

But the real reason is Rand's lack of devotion to the story. It is interrupted incessantly by wordy, practiced dogmas running through the minds of her protagonists, who arrive at ht esame conclusions in much the same way throughout the text. In no other place is this apparent than in the climactic radio speech of Galt, who appears in the book's third act as the savior of humankind. All pretense of storytelling breaks down, and his speech becomes a one-on-one conversation between Rand and the reader, broken only by quotation marks appearing at the outset of every paragraph.

This would be excusable if the ideas introduced were new. They aren't. They merely put into words the ideas and precepts Rand has established through her fiction for the past 900+ pages. Imagine reading Catch-22, and then coming to a speech by Yossarian condemning war. Or Catcher in the Rye, and Holden waxing poetic to a bum about the importance of preserving childhood precociousness. This is the effect of Rand's speech - condescending to a reader for whom she clearly has little regard.

A BLOATED CAST

In addition to the trio of industrialists and Galt cited above, "Atlas Shrugged" is populated by a host of bureaucrats, clingers-on and other personalities. The purpose is to show that the faceless and nameless apparatus of the state does not require distinct individuals to carry itself. As the names of the bureaucrats change throughout the book, their message essentially remains the same.

This is not a condemnation of that practice. Instead, it is a questioning of why there needed to be so many industrialists. Indeed, the three students of Dr. Hugh Akston are so indistinguishable from each other, one begins to wonder if Rand created them simply to assure herself that more than one great industrialist mind still exists in the world.

The presence of Francisco, Rearden and Galt together also is a puzzle. Rearden seems to exist merely to buttress the conclusions of Dagny and other industrialists who have made it to Galt's Gulch. Add Ellis Wyatt's presence and the reader begins to wonder if Rand is trying purposefully to confuse them.

The trio of love interests for Dagny may be the single greatest detriment the large cast introduces in the work. Dagny comes off, not as a whore, but clearly as an object of conquest. The flowery language of "love" that Rand tries to coat the three sexual relationships does nothing to ease the tension in the text, or explain why three self-interested men would surrender the woman they so passionately cared for to another man without some type of test of honor. We're supposed to believe that Dagny is the only thing for which Rearden can find pleasure in the world, but he simply gives her up after hearing her voice on the radio station? And Francisco pined for her for 12 years, and then decided, ah, what the hell, I'll always have copper?

This is to say nothing of the violent sexual episodes in the book, where blood and physical harm intermingle with passion. The enjoyment of physical pleasure is an important part of the theory of rational self-interest, and that human beings should be allowed to enjoy the pleasures of their body. But every sexual episode in the book is strained, driven by male dominance and violence. Dagny's head is always been grabbed and pulled, and she is always submitting to the will of her male companion.

This effect is redoubled when it appears that Dagny's only moments of pure joy and bliss in the novel is when she's serving Galt in his home. She feels a simplistic pleasure in making his breakfast that is absent anywhere else in the book, save from when she's smoking Galt's brand of cigarette. She can't wait to get up in the morning and go to the market to fetch items for the day in service of Galt's house. The strong undercurrent of anti-feminism is odd, especially considering Rand goes out of her way to point out Dagny's competence in railroading and the shock it brings male members of the railroad line.

CHECK YOUR PREMISES...AND YOUR EXPECTATIONS

Following Galt's speech, the book essentially unravels into what can only be called a sentimental romance novel, filled with intrigue, melodrama and adventurism, a sad end for a text that promises spiritual and moral enlightenment on its cover.

I won't ruin the ending - even now, 50 years later - except to say that it is traditional, tidy and completely uninspiring. Rand set out to establish a new, exciting way of approaching politics, industry and society and ends with a caper and scene lifted from depths of hack serial authors. The conclusion feels more like the end of a Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys effort than one which encompasses the totality and future of Western thought.

Rand does not even grant the courtesy of the final words of the book to Eddie Willers, who opens the narrative. Instead, we return to a traditional scene of the sun rising, so that Rand can finally drive the nail in that coffin that certain people are right, and everyone else is wrong.

For her commitment to that principle, Rand is to be commended. For fleshing it out in fiction, her effort can only be given the pittance one would play a lowly track worker in the tunnels beneath the Taggart Concourse.