Where is John Galt? Rotting in hell - I hope.

I was thinking - a dangerous endeavor, I know - about "objectivism". Ayn Rand's diaphanous "philosophy". It would be a philosophical turd if it had a glimmer of merit, but it fails to have the prestige of having been something else to begin with. What it is, really, is the new communism. Failing to have any consideration for people, the mainstay of this odiousness employed hypocrisy, silliness and downright stupidity in her ascendency to a throne she professed to despise. She took it, nonetheless. Employing her arbitrary and limited intellect to castigate whomever was not in favor, she devoured adoration and welcomed the selfish to her boudoir.

When I'm told that a third of America has read her words, her many words of acquisitive and grasping wisdom - I thank any gods that happen to have passed by that only so many have fallen to her witch's spell.

Ayn Rand based her entire philosophy - except when she needed the despised commons in her later life - on what was the diametric opposite of Stalin's "communism". Which wasn't communism at all. In her limited capacity, she managed to produce an edifice of bile that sells not enough copies to be taken seriously and just enough to keep its harpies employed. Contrite and despicable, she hated human concepts and advocated something that holds the easily-swayed, the people who need a leader, who can't lead themselves and have a desperate desire to defer to a dead egotist for their professed wisdom. They are as the neutered son, who needs his Mommy. Except their Mommy is an evil that would make Count Dracula blanche.

They take. And try to persuade you they have given you a wonderful gift. They defer, they blather and they will force your children down the mine. (Is that not their choice? To make their parents happy by providing the scrip to put poisoned scraps on that meager table?)

These acolytes of Ayn Rand, celebrating in their banquets in rooms named after French monarchs, praying to their deity and applauding their imposed austerity - all things their heroine would have castigated and excommunicated them for - cry because they are mildly critiqued. Harsh words make them blubber; their Christian pastor  (they got him in the one day sale at Macy's!) atones them of their sins.

These people need assurance. As they decry evolution, science and America. What makes America, America. As they plead with their minnow'd leaders for greatness - heeding not the lesson that the man who proclaims himself exceptional, isn't - these people demand "action" and "honesty!" But not that much action. Or that much honesty. They watch the scorecards of their conservative apostles, their willingly whittled-down leaders, punishing them for being pragmatic or useful. And whining and keening when they prove to be true to their word and the demanders lose their pension or their Medicare or their handsome Federal subsidy.

These people remember their days in the military and applaud those who "tell it straight", or have seen a battlefield - but not the pain of a man trying to provide for his family in a woe-begotten town. Safe in their Federally insured pensions, these people deplore providing healthcare to those who need it and small business owners - food cart vendors, hot dog proprietors and the like, who deplore the regulations that keep people safe from those who are not as honest as them - beg to be relieved of the burden of paying a (barely) living wage. Demand that Congress remove regulations, but not the ones that lead to good fishing and hunting, but definitely the ones that prevent that company from dumping poison into the water their grandchildren drink.

Ayn Rand, the woman who was an atheist because she knew no better. I hope she's burning in some hell for the misery her acolytes inflict upon others. All in the name of her cheap austerity and simple-minded "philosophy".

Carolyn Ann