Today’s posting is called “One Hundred Years of Ayn Rand” – not because it takes a hundred years to plow through one of Rand’s gargantuan novels, but because 2005 is the centenary of the author’s birth.

Rand’s “jackbooted individualism” (to borrow a phrase from William F. Buckley) has always made her a controversial figure. Yet her novels are still in print, and people – young people in particular – still find them absorbing. Not long ago, Barbara Brandon’s excellent biography, “The Passion of Ayn Rand” was made into an equally excellent film starring Helen Mirren.

It was reading the Brandon biography that made me sympathetic to Ayn Rand.

Born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Russia, Rand was still a girl in the 1920s when leftist intellectuals from the West were visiting the new Soviet Union and writing home glowing reports about the “workers’ paradise” being created there. Rand, who knew from brutal experience what this “paradise” was really like, utterly rejected communism and fled to the capitalist paradise she expected to find in the United States.

She was disappointed. Not only were many American intellectuals enamored of the Soviet experiment, but the Great Depression, and the New Deal which followed, made her fear the creation of socialist state in the U.S., with all the attendant evils she thought she had left behind in Russia.

So little Alice Rosenbaum, an unknown, impoverished immigrant, fought back. Her weapons were her hard-won mastery of the English language and the Remington Rand typewriter from which she took her literary name. In string of novels, “Anthem,” “The Fountainhead,” and “Atlas Shrugged,” she argued fiercely for the virtues of capitalism and the untrammeled freedom of the individual.

In a way, all her novels sprang from a single experience in her Russian childhood. Her father, a self-made man who owned a small chemist’s shop, saw the business he had sweated to build ruthlessly expropriated by Bolshevik revolutionaries. In fury, the doughty capitalist went on strike. He refused to work for the new regime – even though he and his family nearly starved as a result.

So if Rand was strident, if she carried her philosophy of individualism to grotesque extremes, there was a reason for it. She had seen what happened when the individual was forced to live “for the common good,” and she was she was determined to sound a warning against all forms of collectivism. If she had to shout to make herself heard, very well – she would shout.

She maintained the shrill decibel level to the end of her life, but that did not prevent people from wanting to hear her.

In 1974, she was invited to address the graduating class of West Point. Her topic, “Philosophy: Who Needs It” was blunt, as was the gist of her message: Everyone needs a philosophy. Either you develop your own philosophy through a conscious, disciplined, rational process of thought or you “let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears …”

The year 1974 was the end of the Vietnam era. The nation’s military was widely held in low esteem. Returning veterans were spat upon. Once again, Rand bucked the intellectual tide by concluding her speech with a warm expression of gratitude for the young men before her who were embarking on a military career.

She said: “Since I came from a country guilty of the worst tyranny on earth, I am particularly able to appreciate the meaning, the greatness and the supreme value of that which you are defending. So, in my own name and in the name of many people who think as I do, I want to say, to all the men of West Point, past, present and future: Thank you.”

With that, she snapped a crisp military salute. The effect was electrifying. The graduates leaped to their feet as a single man and cheered her to the echo.

Say what you will about the lady, she had brains, she had integrity – and she had guts. Happy 100, Ayn.

In the mid-1950s, at the height of the Cold War, Alfred Hitchcock made a wickedly funny black comedy called, “The Trouble With Harry.” It was all about a corpse that insisted on popping up at the most inconvenient moments.

The Russian Federation has its own Harry in the form of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, whose embalmed body has been on display in Moscow’s Red Square for 80 years.

Since the fall of Communism, Lenin’s presence in the heart of Russia’s capital has become increasingly embarrassing – and controversial. As the New York Times reported Wednesday, there is a lively debate going on right now as to whether the time has finally come to bury Lenin, not to praise him.

“It is time to get rid of this horrible mummy,” one political reformer is quoted as saying. “One cannot talk about any kind of democracy or civilization in Russia while Lenin is still in the country’s main square.”

Others, older Russians who lived most of their lives under Communism, and were taught to revere Lenin, hold that burying the body would be a denial of Russia’s past.

Meanwhile, the “mummy” is said to break out periodically in nasty patches of fungi.

As one whose life spans the whole of the Cold War, I always regarded Lenin’s embalmed corpse with a certain amount of amusement. The Soviet regime was officially atheist, and yet it put Lenin’s remains on display for the masses to venerate, the way some Christians might revere the relics of a saint. The regime also encouraged a quasi-religious cult around its defunct founder.

There were many Russians at the time who were similarly amused, as the political jokes of the period testify. I remember one in particular that circulated in the mid-1950s as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was preparing for an official visit to England.

As the story went, Khrushchev had been warned by a protocol officer that he would be expected to kiss Queen Elizabeth’s hand when she received him at Buckingham Palace. The news dismayed Khrushchev, who felt it would be demeaning for the head of a workers’ state to kow-tow to the representative of a decadent bourgeoisie monarchy. Seeking guidance, Khrushchev and his advisors held a séance in the Kremlin to conjure up the ghost of Lenin.

The séance was successful. Lenin’s ghost duly appeared, and the problem was explained to him. “What should I do when I meet the Queen?” pleaded Khrushchev.

Visibly annoyed, the spectral Lenin made this scolding reply: “Nikita Sergeiivich, Nikita Sergeiivich, how dare you disturb me to ask such a silly question. You kissed Stalin’s ass for 20 years, so you can certainly kiss a lady’s hand!”

It was Khrushchev who, after denouncing Stalin in a speech before a party congress in 1956, had his predecessor’s body removed from the tomb in Red Square, where it had lain side-by-side with Lenin’s during the three years since Stalin’s death.

As I recall, Khrushchev had the remains cremated before they were buried outside the walls the Kremlin, to make sure that Stalin’s body could never be disinterred and returned to the tomb on Red Square. In the end, that may be the only way the Russian people can be sure of ridding themselves of Lenin as well. After all, Lenin himself never approved of halfway measures.

For a look at the ghastly fate that may befall speechwriters who fail to get their client’s message across, consider the current advertising gambit of a youthful entrepreneur in Seattle.

Ben Rogovy, 22 years old with a degree in economics, is the sort of young man that Ebenezer Scrooge would have traded his nephew for. Barely out of college, he’s found a way to simultaneously promote sin, exploit the poor, make a profit and achieve world-wide notoriety – all for just a few bucks and a bag of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. As far as his detractors are concerned, the only way Mr. Rogovy could sink any lower would be to apply to law school.

Mr. Rogovy is the owner of PokerFaceBook.com, a web site that that connects poker players from around the world. To promote the site, Mr. Rogovy has been paying local panhandlers a few dollars each to let him attach his neat, printed sign to their own tatty, hand-lettered appeals for handouts. He calls the practice “bumvertising” -- and has prudently trademarked the name.

When he finds what he calls “good, consistent beggars” who will stand on busy intersections from dawn till dusk, Mr. Rogovy will throw in some bottled water, a package of cookies, a sandwich or some other bonus to sweeten the deal.

The do-gooders, of course, are shocked, but Mr. Rogovy has no patience with sentimentality. Where the bleeding hearts saw only the wretched and the helpless Mr. Rogovy, with his cool, rational economist’s eye looked on the same unfortunates and saw … “so much untapped labor.”

Maybe the bums agree. Judging from the positive response he’s received from Seattle’s indigent, it would seem that more than a few of the city’s down and out see Mr. Rogovy’s campaign as their chance to break into advertising. Indeed, the first panhandler that Mr. Rogovy approached with his offer had only one question of his prospective boss: “Do you have any tape?”

With enthusiasm like that, it appears that the only thing that can harm Mr. Rogovy’s scheme is success. If the practice catches on, it’s only a matter of time before the bums start demanding more money, shorter hours and paid benefits -- and price themselves out of the market. After all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.

If you’re tired of hearing about “The Da Vinci Code,” maybe you’d like a look at the da Vinci resume. After all, we all need to hunt for a job now and then, so why not take a few pointers from a genius on how to showcase our own qualifications?

Unlike the novel, the da Vinci resume is a fact. It is a job application that Leonardo submitted to Ludovico Sforza, the ruler of Milan, in 1482. Ludovico was looking primarily for a military and civil engineer -- preferably one who could make himself useful by decorating the palace in his free time

Back then, Italy was a patchwork of warring city-states, of which Milan was one of the largest and most powerful. As a native of Florence, Leonardo was a foreigner as far as the Milanese were concerned. So, naturally, Ludovico Sforza is going to be skeptical, and even a little suspicious, of Leonardo’s application.

But Leonardo knows how to get a foot in the door. He writes:

“Most Illustrious Lord:

“Having now sufficiently seen and considered the proofs of all those who count themselves masters and inventors in the instruments of war, and finding that their invention and use does not differ in any respect from those in common practice, I am emboldened … to put myself in communication with your Excellency, in order to acquaint you with my secrets.”

Leonardo is shrewdly dangling his “secrets” in front of Ludovico as bait. If you were Ludovico, would you keep reading?

Then the applicant gets down to business:

“I can,” writes Leonardo, “construct bridges which are very light and strong and very portable with which to pursue and defeat an enemy … I can also make a kind of cannon, which is light and easy of transport, with which to hurl small stones like hail … I can noiselessly construct to any prescribed point subterranean passages - either straight or winding - passing if necessary under trenches or a river … I can make armored wagons carrying artillery, which can break through the most serried ranks of the enemy …”

But of course, even in Renaissance Italy, rulers are not always at war.

So Leonardo continues: “In time of peace, I believe I can give you as complete satisfaction as anyone else in the construction of buildings, both public and private, and in conducting water from one place to another.”

Hmmmm. Does this man have anything else to offer that sets his application apart from those of other job seekers?

He does indeed. Leonardo knows that Ludovico wants to erect a gigantic statute of a horse as a monument to his family. So he adds: “I can execute sculpture in bronze, marble or clay. Also, in painting, I can do as much as anyone, whoever he may be.”

So far, so good. But talk is cheap. So Leonardo clinches his application by offering to demonstrate his talents:

“If any of the aforesaid things should seem impossible or impractical to anyone, I offer myself as ready to make a trial of them in your park or in whatever place shall please your Excellency, to whom I commend myself with all possible humility."

Needless to say, Leonardo - with his hard-headed, results-oriented approach and his focus on his potential employer’s needs - got the job. If we can learn from his example, we can give our own employment prospects a very big boost.

Why Business People Speak Like Idiots – A Bullfighter’s Guide. By Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway and John Warshawsky. Free Press. 176 pages. $22.00.

As I rule, I’m a great believer in the old adage that a camel is a horse made by a committee. But this delightful little volume is the work of three authors, and yet it is as useful and instructive as it is wickedly entertaining.

Our three author-matadors maintain that business people resort to bull-slinging for three reasons: First, sheer vanity. They are out to intimidate others by using buzzwords and jargon instead of trying to communicate in any meaningful way.

Second, they have something to hide, or else they want to avoid committing themselves. In either case, the more obscure they sound, the higher their comfort level. As Oscar Wilde observed, “Nowadays to be intelligible is to be found out.”

Third, they are out to make the dull appear romantic. They want to pretend that they are not corporate drones, but the stars of a new hit TV series called “Miami Receivables” or something equally inane. (I once wrote speeches for an otherwise very intelligent CEO who insisted that there ought to be a TV series called, “L.A. Engineers.”)

Whatever the cause, the result is the literary equivalent of stumbling into the Great Dismal Swamp. Consider the language used by Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling in their last letter to Enron’s hapless shareholders: “We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to deliver widespread logistical solutions … We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company to a marketing and logistics company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and its innovative people.”

After reading a weasel-worded paragraph like that, how could anyone doubt that the federal marshals were already on their way to arrest the perpetrators?

At the other extreme, the authors offer a stark but reassuring contrast. They cite the advice of one Gerald F. Merna. Mr. Merna served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a CNO, or Casualty Notification Officer. It is the duty of the CNO to track down and notify the next of kin when a loved one has died in service.

Naturally, this is an excruciatingly difficult and painful task, and, naturally, the Department of Defense has an elaborate set of scripts and guidelines for CNOs to follow.

Mr. Merna’s advice? “Read the pamphlet … and then forget it, and rely on good common sense and human instinct. Speak from the heart.”

Wise counsel for anyone in the business of communication.

Representative Tom Delay's response to being indicted on campaign financing charges was to accuse the prosecutor and the presiding judge of political bias. Currently, he's enjoying a brief respite until a separate hearing determines whether or not the judge may hear the case.

I have no opinion as to whether Mr. DeLay is guilty or not. I do believe, however, that this country's campaign financing laws have grown so numerous, so minute and so complex as to recall the tart comment of an English legal scholar on the late Robinson-Patman Act: "No piece of legislation better illustrates the folly of attempting to prohibit sin in detail."

The reformers are always trying to remove "the corrupting influence of money" from politics. They might just as well try to remove the corrupting influence of politics from politics.

Legislate all you want, donors will always find a way around restrictions on campaign contributions, and politicians -- regardless of party -- will always facilitate the process by operating on the fringes of the law.

Humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935) anticipated the DeLay case by over three-quarters of a century: "Democrats are having a lot of fun exposing the Republican campaign corruptions, but they would have a lot more fun if they knew where they could lay their hands on some of it themselves for next November."

The evening of October 30, 1938 will be forever remembered as the night that terrified America. On that long-ago Halloween Eve, the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind of the wireless, Orson Welles, and his Mercury Theatre on the Air, broadcast a radio adaptation of H.G. Wells’ novel, The War of the Worlds.

Welles, with all the arrogance and impetuosity of a youthful genius, had panned the script as “corny.” To avoiding putting his audience to sleep, he demanded spine-chilling sound effects and increasingly impassioned performances from his actors. He was aiming for realism; he got more than he bargained for.

Because of a lull in the program on a competing channel, impatient listeners began twisting their radio dials in search of something more interesting. They found it. At about 8:12 p.m., a small but significant portion of the nation’s radio audience tuned in to the Mercury Theatre just in time to hear a chilling “news announcement” that a flying saucer from Mars had landed at Grover’s Mill, New Jersey. Hideous death-dealing aliens had emerged to destroy the human race.

What followed was one of the most extraordinary cases of mass hysteria ever recorded. Some listeners dropped to their knees in prayer; some reached for their shotguns. Others grabbed their families and fled. Massive traffic jams choked the motorways. Churches were crammed with distraught worshippers convinced that the world was coming to an end. At least one woman gave birth prematurely, and others were injured in the inevitable accidents that occurred.

Listeners with relatives living anywhere near the placid village of Grover’s Mill tried desperately to telephone them, only to find that all circuits were jammed. One man finally managed to get through to a cousin of his who lived in the town of Freehold, N.J. “Are the Martians there?” he gasped. “No,” came the cool reply, “but the Tuttles are, and we’re about to sit down to dinner.”

Even before the broadcast was over, news of the widening panic reached the control room at CBS. The prospect that he might be held legally accountable for the havoc wrought by his innocent radio play shook even Welles’ colossal self-assurance. Attempting damage control, he made a bantering curtain speech:

“This is Orson Welles, ladies and gentlemen, out of character to assure you that The War of the Worlds has no further significance than the holiday offering it was intended to be: the Mercury Theatre’s own radio version of dressing up in a sheet and jumping out of a bush and saying, ‘Boo!’ Starting now, we couldn’t soap all your windows and steal all your garden gates by tomorrow night, so we did the next best thing. We annihilated the world before your very ears, and utterly destroyed the Columbia Broadcasting System. You will be relieved, I hope, to learn that we didn’t mean it, and that both institutions are still open for business. So good-bye everybody, and remember, please, for the next day or so the terrible lesson you have learned tonight: That grinning, glowing, globular invader of your living room is an inhabitant of the pumpkin patch, and if your doorbell rings and nobody’s there, that was no Martian – it’s Halloween.”

For some still-jittery listeners, Welles’ attempt to laugh off the whole affair as a Halloween prank merely added insult to injury. There were those who would hold the broadcast against him for years.

Though I had not yet been born, I can verify that last statement from personal experience. When I was in college, I became fascinated by Welles and his work. As my admiration grew, I innocently confessed my new-found enthusiasm in a conversation with my mother.

To my astonishment, my mother winced at the very mention of Welles’ name. Thus did I learn that she had been one of the thousands who, all unawares, had tuned in late to the Mercury Theatre that fateful night. Even thirty years had not dulled the edge of the terror she had felt then. For her, Orson Welles would always remain the terrible man who had scared her half to death.

Happy Halloween.