Who has read Ayn Rand?

[Warpy]

55. "The Fountainhead" was her most accessible novel

and she wrote persuasively enough you could almost buy the premise if you didn't think anything through. Oh, the heroine was a complete screwball and it was impossible to build up any sympathy for any of the characters, especially for the hero who built ugly eyesores that happened to have good interiors. Just the vaguest questioning of the plot would turn the novel into farce, and that's what happened to me.

I slogged through "Atlas Shrugged," but I admit I only scanned the multipage polemics parading as conversation in that ponderous pile of horseshit. I got through that one trying to imagine a hungry and whiny toddler clinging to Taggart's pencil skirt, so much for the death of altruism.

I realized even at 16 that it was a badly written pile of crap. I also realized that men who had lived golden lives, born into rich families and starting on third base, would likely take it as the purest form of moral rectitude, and it seems I was right on that account.

People who don't live such charmed lives recognize what a pile of crap it is by the time they hit 30, if not long before.

My greatest hope is that the resurgence of interest in her novels will produce people who start asking the right questions. It's certain that only people born to considerable wealth and who do nothing are successful in these post Reagan days. It's equally certain that hard work and an abstemious lifestyle only net you a retirement lived in dismal poverty.

There is nothing innately superior about people who inherit money. There is nothing innately inferior in people who don't. This is what Rand missed completely, that and the fact that inherited money produces nothing but right wing idiots who laud her books without having read most of them.