Mike Daisey: Are You Trying to Seduce Me, Ayn Rand?

Monologuist Mike Daisey may have titled the show Fucking Fucking Fucking Ayn Rand (at Seattle Rep through May 11; tickets), but he’s not as viscerally worked up as he has been elsewhere — discussing Ayn Rand’s youth in Russia, her fascination with Hollywood, invention of Objectivism, and those wrist-breaking literary excursions of hers, Daisey often leaned way back in his chair, sounding for all the world like one of your favorite conversational-style teachers musing aloud.

Where in American Utopias he seemed egged on by that self-same utopian urge, an impatient, footsore migrant of the ideal, on opening night he often spoke directly to the audience, sprinkled with reviewers, about the role of cultural arbiters, and how Ayn Rand initially slipped past those latter-day gatekeepers. She was lucky to be on message, Daisey explained, when she hit the big time with The Fountainhead; the U.S. had finally realized that the USSR was not the workers’ playground that tourist intellectuals had been describing.

Her book, uniting American strains of modernism, individualism, and moralism — and filled with a gut loathing of collective authority — took off like a rocket. Or a “memetic weapon,” as Daisey has it, though he doesn’t spend much time unpacking this concept. Daisey monologues are sometimes built around strange attractors; there might be three or four topics he jumps between, weaving relationships between them, but as the evening goes on, you can see they all revolve around a central, invisible subject.

Here, as he mentioned in an interview, the back-and-forth is largely between the poles of Rand’s biography and his own high school experience, where a similar charismatic figure drew together a band of feral adolescents, including Daisey. Ultimately the memoirs are drawn into a duel — though especially if you’ve read a profile of Rand before, you would likely want to hear more than the précis Daisey offers, or the humorously slapdash book reports. His most vivid personal recollections are of the world around him that summer he first read Fountainhead, and the way the class argued over it for three weeks, but this off-speed, atmospheric gambit didn’t seem to pay off.

While Rand, as Daisey makes clear, envisaged herself as a meritocratic sage, she responded strongly to expressions of brute power, whether political, financial, or sexual. The emotional aspiration of her literary alter-ego, hyper-competent professional Dagny Taggart, is keeping house for a man she can look up to. Daisey looked up to his high school teacher in that way, but he looks back in chagrin at his younger self. Like Nick Carraway, he’s filled in retrospect with an acid distaste for the wealthy and privileged.

Does this keep him from inspecting his subjects as closely? Daisey’s right about Rand’s appeal specifically to “bootstrappers,” strivers like her who believe in an America where strivers comes first. And he pinpoints how seductive Rand is to the teenaged mind, so primed to see a saintly self-image and the hypocrisy in everyone else. But when he blurted out a Madame LaFarge-esque at the conclusion, it felt like he had just stumbled onto something you’d be hard-pressed not to know after any given Daisey monologue. Social class (cover your eyes, Downton fans) is a deeply wounding distinction.