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Friday, December 11, 2009

Behind the Music: Atlas Shrugged

A few dozen white guys and a couple of sympathetic ladies figured out that they were the Masters of the Universe because of their sooper-genius brains and their prominent cheekbones, and they were really annoyed because nobody seemed to agree with them about how totally in charge of everything they should be. So they decided to go on Strike.

This is really clever and ironic when you think about it, because, well, you know, it is usually low life scum who go on Strike and it's wonderful people who are rich and powerful entirely because of their incredible talent and hard work who end up having to give up their fourth vacation homes to buy bread and circuses for the mob to end the Strike, but this time, you see, it's the most wonderful of the wonderful people who are going on Strike and giving the mob a taste of their own medicine.

And so, anyway, all the sooper-genius white guys and a few of their lady friends go and keep their sooper-genius abilities to themselves in an underground base in Colorado for a while in the expectation that the world will descend in a few years into a Planet of the Apes type scenario.

The world, as we know all too well, is already a cesspool of corruption and misery and ignorance and war, mostly because of Big Government meddlers.

As it happens, this meddling actually has mostly consisted of a generation of market fundamentalist deregulation and privatization demanded by moneyed elites inspired precisely by the ideas one finds in books like Atlas Shrugged, but presumably this didn't work out for us because it isn't enough just to mouth Randroidal pieties, one also has to make sure the real and for true sooper-geniuses are also really and truly in charge, like they obviously would be after this particular sooper-genius Strike was over.

So, like I was saying, since the world is already clearly going to hell in a handbasket, the Strikers figured the Strike wouldn't take all that long and then they could return to Save the World with their sooper-genius abilities in no time flat. Most of these wonderful white guys happened to be socially awkward types who stared statuesquely out of windows into the darkness with only their sooper-genius thoughts for company or spoke in stiff sentences about hardcore sooper-genius philosophical notions like how logical contradictions don't make sense and how the Constitution was fatally flawed because the Bill of Rights didn't include a Separation of State and Kick Ass Big Business and so opened the door for Marx and Keynes and Ellsworth Toohey to steal money from sooper-geniuses and wonderful white people and then give it to Welfare Queens (and we all know who They are) out of envy and spite.

You can well imagine how lively their evenings spent together were.

Most of these white guys also seemed to crave rough sex with ladies but since ladies mostly aren't sooper-geniuses like you have to be to go on the sooper-genius Strike (Larry Summers can explain all this to you if you don't, you know, instantly get it because of all the political correctness and English Department relativism and socialist indoctrination they teach in schools) only John Galt and his girlfriend Dagny Taggart really got boned to their satisfaction the whole Strike through. To be fair, I think if we read between the lines (not exactly a practice Miss Rand seems to approve of) it looks like Francisco d'Anconia and Hank Rearden also managed to find true love and some action in the Gulch, although, to pay my respects to the generic conventions of the bodice ripper that is Atlas Shrugged I suppose I should denominate them the Silver Fox and his Hott Latin Lover.

Perhaps this general dearth of sexual or otherwise sociable outlets helps account for the unfortunate Lord of the Flies situation that is said to have unfolded among the earnest isolated Strikers in a surprisingly short time... It couldn't have helped matters that none of them had ever unclogged a drain or maintained a garden to feed themselves in their lives, but within a scant few years they ran out of food and all their generators died -- including, to everybody's acute distress, the sooper-fusion circle-squared-o-meter John Galt built and sold them all early on with this glossy brochure he had printed up.

One cold gray day John Galt made a sign of the dollar in the air after which he seemed incapable of expressing himself with anything but a kind of glossolalia, "A is A is A is A is A is A is A," which kinda sorta freaked everybody out.

And so, bruised, bloody, dirty, fleabitten, starving, in rags, muttering to themselves, smelling of feces the surviving Strikers soon thereafter crawled out from their hideaway and returned to the world. State troopers on the nearby public highway found them quickly enough and phoned in a chopper from the State Hospital where doctors trained in public universities cared for most of them at taxpayer expense.

The world in which they found themselves was little changed, and not a single Striker's absence had even been noticed by anybody in the world the whole time.

Readers of this piece might also enjoy Ayn Rand: Implausible Characters, Vacuous Foundations, Dispatches from Libertopia: An Anthology of Wingnut Chestnuts, and The Ayn Raelians.

1 comment:

jimf said...

> [W]ithin a few years they ran out of food and
> all their generators died -- including, to everybody's
> distress, the sooper-fusion circle-squared-o-meter
> John Galt built. . . One cold gray day John Galt made
> a sign of the dollar in the air after which he was
> incapable of expressing himself with anything but a kind
> of glossolalia, "A is A is A is A is A is A is A,". . .
> And so, bruised, bloody, dirty, starving, in rags,
> muttering to themselves, smelling of feces the surviving
> Strikers soon thereafter crawled out from their hideaway
> and returned to the world.

Dale, I think you've confused _Atlas Shrugged_, the
seminal novel of Objectivism, with the works of a rival
philosopher, one Anna Granite, founder of Definitivism
and author of _The Bulwark_ and _The Gods Disdained_.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1SLL3UIAICRAE

;->