The right wing has a fantasy that the world we're living in is resembling, every more closely, the fictional world of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged."
Turns out we're actually looking more and more like the most popular and vicious parody of "Atlas Shrugged" ever created. Meet Paul Ryan's close relative, Andrew Ryan.
More after the orange synchronous-swimmers-paths mark.
First things first: Ayn Rand is the most terrible writer I have ever read, period, hands down, punkt aus, end of discussion.
And that's not for lack of reading on the part of this one-time English lit grad student. In the grimy and grim winter of 1983, where things had gotten so terrible in my life that not even an Ayn Rand novel could make it any worse, I read "The Fountainhead." Every last goddamned suck-ass page of it. Every freakin' word. About halfway through I realized that I had to do whatever it takes to get to the end, so that I could with a clear conscience say:
I've read a Rand novel from cover to cover, and for half a hundred reasons I can say with perfect assurance it is far and away the worst book I've ever read.
So far, nobody has come up to me with the thousand dollar check necessary to get me to read "Atlas Shrugged," but my son — who majors in XBox — has shown me a beautiful parody of Randian "objectivism" and the ancillary cult worship in a video game called Bioshock.
The basic idea of "Atlas Shrugged" is that All The Good Selfish People go off and live in an enclave, and All The Bad Socialist People left can't run a society are left to watch their cities burn. (Of course, in order for this to work, chief Good Guy John Galt has to invent a perpetual motion machine, but to Randians this is not a serious defect to their scheme.) This stuff all plays out at about the density and verisimilitude of a Star Trek episode, except stretched over a Geneva-Convention-defying thirteen or fourteen thousand pages.
So what is life in "Galt's Gulch" really like, not on the first week when everyone is gung ho and hunki dori, but when reality starts to set in? The designers of the video game "Bioshock" took a look at that idea; the character you play investigates the ruins of an underwater "gulch" called Rapture. Turns out that, despite the posters warning of the dangers of altruism, things very quickly devolved into a nasty cult of personality. And that personality, who turns into a pure murderous despot? Well, he's given a name that's pretty clearly intended to recall Ayn Rand's:
Andrew Ryan.
Now, I wonder if Andrew Ryan has any relatives in Wisconsin.