Two stories tonight, whose common thread is authors who do non-admirable things.

First of all, First Thoughts directs us to a Salon.com article by a woman who tells “How Ayn Rand Ruined My Childhood.”

My parents split up when I was 4. My father, a lawyer, wrote the divorce papers himself and included one specific rule: My mother was forbidden to raise my brother and me religiously. She agreed, dissolving Sunday church and Bible study with one swift signature. Mom didn’t mind; she was agnostic and knew we didn’t need religion to be good people. But a disdain for faith wasn’t the only reason he wrote God out of my childhood. There was simply no room in our household for both Jesus Christ and my father’s one true love: Ayn Rand.

I was hoping for a story about how the author found her way back to faith, but she says nothing more about that. Mostly it’s the story of how her father used Objectivist principles as an excuse to neglect his children.

Then, from Instapundit, a link to a Reason article by a fellow who set about re-tracing John Steinbeck’s route in his book, Travels With Charlie (which was very big back when I was in high school). His conclusion is that most of what Steinbeck reports is impossible, or is contradicted by the record.

It’s possible Steinbeck and Charley stopped to have lunch by the Maple River on October 12 as they raced across North Dakota. But unless the author was able to be at both ends of the state at the same time—or able to push his pickup truck/camper shell “Rocinante” to supersonic speeds—Steinbeck didn’t camp overnight anywhere near Alice 50 years ago. In the real world, the nonfiction world, Steinbeck spent that night 326 miles farther west, in the Badlands, staying in a motel in the town of Beach, taking a hot bath. We know this is true because Steinbeck wrote about the motel in a letter dated October 12 that he sent from Beach to his wife, Elaine, in New York.

Two writers, one from the far right, the other from the left. Both weighed and found wanting, by at least one reader, but for very different reasons. These are the besetting sins of liberals and conservatives.

I, of course, occupy the exact Middle. I look on both sides with condescension. The extent to which some people see me as partisan is precisely the extent to which the values of our society are warped. (Ahem.)

I expect most people feel that way, wherever they sit on the political/philosophical spectrum. Do the real extremists do the same? Did Stalin ever look at anyone and say, “Boy, he’s taking this Marxist dialectic a little too far”? Did Torquemada ever look at somebody else and say, “Hey, brother, you need to apply a little grace!”?