The Cornea: a metaphor for liberty lovers warding off fascists

(Personal note: As a grateful recipient of two corneal transplants, I am well aware of how fickle and unique that tissue is. During the recovery phase, my physicians watched closely for blood vessels harbored in neighboring tissue, and driven by the immune system, to start advancing toward my new corneas, intent on rejecting them. The doctors regularly dropped ointments on my recovering eye to ward off attacks. It was, indeed, like defending against the aggressive rabble that regularly robs us of our liberties.)

The future Dr. (Rand) Paul, the ophthalmologist-turned-politician who rejects standard certification as an ophthalmologist in favor of self-anointment, can be glimpsed in these pages. From my Freudian vantage point, the article seems to give us a unique portrait of the libertarian as a young man.

Indeed, these dense medical pages can be seen as a metaphorical rumination on liberty.

Here is the proof: even as a whippersnapper, young Rand seemed to love the cornea. The cornea, you ask? What is possibly lovable about the cornea—or the iris or the retina for that matter?

In a word: privilege. Unlike the rest of the eye, or most of the body, the cornea is a privileged organ. “Privileged” in this usage does not refer to a life of comfort and ease (though his attraction to privilege of this sort also may bear some consideration). No, in the body “privileged” means one thing: the immune system, that hulking police state, can’t reach you. You are out there away from the fumbling white blood cells, the blustery cytokines, the vascular mishaps and miscalculations — you are free, on your own.

In this article, the first public statement of a naïve but ambitious medical student, Dr Paul suggested that the immune system is not the solution to our problems; the immune system is the problem, just like big government. And only one place in the body is truly free, untouched by the madding crowd, the busy-bodies, the nannies and their stifling concerns, the regulations and the taxes and the seatbelts. It is the cornea — the last redoubt of virility and independence.

Untouched and untouchable, not surprisingly it was the cornea that the future Dr. Paul fell in love with.