Galt’s Gulch? I can live without that, but I need my own ‘Akston’s diner’

By David McElroy · December 28, 2011

Is there anybody who hasn’t felt the need at some point to get away from the insane world and escape to a place of relative sanity? I feel it a lot, and I’ve been feeling it more strongly recently. It occurred to me Tuesday that I don’t really need Galt’s Gulch right now. I need to find my own version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

If you’re a fan of “Atlas Shrugged,” you know what the two represent. Galt’s Gulch was a brand new society, cut off from the mainstream world — existing without outsiders’ knowledge. It had been founded to give the world’s productive people a place they could go to escape the “looters” who were taking their money and their ideas.

The diner that Dr. Hugh Akston ran, on the other hand, was a part of the mainstream world, in plain view of everyone. Akston had been a philosophy professor who found the world uninterested in his ideas, so he was forced to retreat from university teaching and ran a small, remote diner in Colorado. The two places represented entirely different things. Galt’s Gulch was an entirely new free world. Akston’s diner was all about living honestly within the existing world until you could get to the new world.

I want to live in Galt’s Gulch. I want that new world to exist. I believe it’s possible, and I believe we’re going to build it. In the meantime, though, I have to live in the same old world that everybody else does. And if I’m going to remain sane, that requires finding my own version of Akston’s diner.

Like Akston — and like many of you — I’m driven to share my ideas. As far as I’m concerned, the things that I think and feel are the most valuable parts of me. Unfortunately, the people of the world have shown very little interest so far in paying me to share my “great insights” with them. Yes, I’d like to think I have great insights, but, well, the reality is that they don’t have much market value yet. So what do we do in a world that doesn’t appreciate (or desire) what we have that we’d like to share?

For Akston, his move from professor to short-order cook was a retreat to a place where he could do an excellent job of offering honest service to people who were willing to pay for that service. Although his teaching skills weren’t in demand anymore — which meant he had no ready outlet with which to share the ideas that were most important to him — he could at least take satisfaction from applying his honesty, values and skills toward something people did appreciate.

It might seem odd for a philosophy professor to become a cook in a diner. Some might see it as beneath him. But is any work really beneath a person if it allows him to offer honest value and if it allows him to bring a sense of pride and artistry to it? I don’t think so. If you’re living out the ideas you say you stand for, won’t those ideas be reflected in the excellence of what you do — no matter what the work is?

The closest I’ve come in the past to my own “Akston’s diner experience” was when I used to run newspapers (and just newsrooms before that). When I was doing that work, it wasn’t just a job. It was a mission. I didn’t take the end result of producing a community newspaper to be anything world-changing, but I was passionate about being the best I could be and giving the absolute best value that I could give. The end result might have been podunk little newspapers that quickly lined trash cans, but it was my work. I cared passionately about it. I was proud of it. I was being the best I could be. And that was a rush.

I lost that for years when I worked in politics. I made a lot of money doing political work, but I frequently wasn’t proud of what I did. I was cynical about it much of the time, even though I still felt an emotional high when my clients won on election night. Despite some highs, though, it never reached the emotional levels that I experienced running newsrooms as an intense guy in my early 20s. I miss that intensity. I miss feeling that the quality of what I was doing mattered.

I want for us to find a way to establish Galt’s Gulch — or many places that can serve that role — but we’re not there yet. We won’t be for a long time, and I can’t wait for that big jump. Instead, I need my interim step along the way. I need my version of Hugh Akston’s diner.

I intend to reach the point that people are paying me for what I have to say and what I have to share and ways I intend to lead in the future. I hope that time can get here quickly. But I have to earn the right for those things. I’ve been trying to do that for the past seven and a half months with this site, by providing something to the world that I have no hope of being paid for yet. I hope the ideas I want to express will become worth money — to someone, some day.

In the meantime, I need to move to a place where I can feel a sense of mastery and a sense of giving honest value. I don’t know what it will be. But, like Hugh Akston was, I’m driven to be the best I can be — whether it’s cooking food, publishing a newspaper or sharing my thoughts through written word or film.

Anything can be meaningful if you’re doing it for the right reasons. Look for me soon to make that change — to my version of a diner. Whatever it is, I guarantee I’ll go to bed each night knowing I’ve given honest value for the money I receive. And that will make it worth it.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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