"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugs. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world.
The other, of course involves Orcs."
Ayn Rand's misogynistic prattle of a book is right up there with the Old Testament as philosophical underpinning to contemporary Conservative thought in the US today. No less personage than Paul Ryan, author of the recent vicious "Road Map" budget requires his staff to read the thing and Randisms permeate the speech of many right wing political leaders. Worse, other self-promoting public figures with lamentably large, credulous audiences champion Rand's worldview. A good example of this a bizarre blog written by an intellectually challenged, emotionally stunted woman named Pam Geller. The blog bears the name "Atlas Shrugs". I suggest that you put on a haz-mat suit and pay a visit (www.atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com). The lovely Ms. Geller, whose only visible talent is growing hair rants like a sixteen-year-old mall rat and describes everything not to her liking as, "...Hamas-linked, Muslim Brotherhood-related plots to inflict Sharia law on America". (Did I mention that she hates Muslims?)
This little peek into the cesspool of right wing politics in the US can be taken as fair warning. Have noticed that nearly every social, political and economic shift in the affairs of our kissing cousins has a way of seeping across the border and ultimately infecting the Canadian polity? Bear this in mind as our federal election swings into high gear. There has already been some worrisome seepage.
My MIL calls those types The I'm-Alright-Jacks. I'd read somewhere that Rand was drawing a government pension in her later years.
ReplyDeleteFor all their complaining about the government, those types are very quiet when they need to draw on the services they seem to detest so much.