DEBATE AT LOLITA BAR, or Rather: Todd Seavey Reads an Ayn Rand Speech at Columbia

Instead of our usual monthly Debate at Lolita Bar being on a Wednesday…in a bar…and being a debate:

I, Todd Seavey, will read Ayn Rand’s speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World”

on this Saturday, the first — May Day — at 4pm at Columbia in Hamilton, Room 303

(thanks to Cooper Vaughan and the Columbia University College Republicans).

Hamilton is 1130 Amsterdam Ave., at W. 116th St. (and there’s a 1 subway stop on that street).

Expect ample Q&A — and since I’m not an Objectivist, don’t expect me to defend everything said in the speech (which Rand gave on this campus fifty years ago, in May 1960, after giving the same speech earlier that year at Yale and Brooklyn College, as I have this year).

–As long as the Q&A is over in time for me to make it to Saturday’s Echo and the Bunnymen concert (in keeping with my “conservatism for punks” slogan), all is well.  (And in other punk news, check out my farewell to Malcolm McLaren on Reason.com.)

–Let me also group-thank everyone who congratulated me on my new job.  (The first real cable episode of the show hasn’t even been on yet and MediaMatters is already warning the world about us, or at least about one past guest of the online version of the show, and let me add that my new employers are in no way responsible for my side activities like the debates and this Rand speech, nor are my prior employers, ACSH, who’ve hired my friend Derek Rose as my replacement.)

–Meanwhile, if you must patronize the competition, you might watch your local listings for PBS’s The Birth of Freedom, one of several well-done documentaries from the Acton Institute, especially suitable for those of a Catholic libertarian bent (like several of my favorite people, it seems).

–But realistically, the media figure with the biggest pro-capitalist impact in May could well be the superhero Iron Man, who can be seen in one scene of the sequel (out May 7) telling a congressional committee, “You want my property?  You can’t have it…I have successfully privatized world peace.”  Tony Stark may understand heroism even better than Rand did, but we can discuss that Saturday.