At best, I tend to regard Ayn Rand as a sociopath, and yet I’ve read her ball-boiling pot-buster (and seemingly interminable) novel Atlas Shrugged.
Why I did so is a story worth a brief retelling.
Rest assured that I didn’t choose the novel for leisurely beachfront reading, or because of a fondness for its mentally unbalanced author, her bizarre message or the self-indulgent cult politics it spawned.
The plot is odd, too: Woman meets married man, falls for the metal he invented, and they don’t live happily ever after because her real spirit animal is another guy who is stopping the engine of the world to lead a rich dude’s revolution so that millions will be exploited in their second-rate inferiority, and in the process, somehow prove his narcissistic point via their degradation.
Rather, the reason I read Atlas Shrugged is that the late, great Bob Youngblood (he died in 2016), my English and literature teacher as a senior in high school, commanded me to read it in two weeks flat or risk failing his course, this edict coming after I’d devoured the class assignment (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations) in a single weekend, then openly taunted Bob on Monday about the book not being sufficiently challenging.
And I quote: “Fine, you little shit.”
The next day, having slept on potential sanctions to be sure they were sufficiently onerous, Bob kept me after class to mete one out: if I was so incredibly bright and advanced — and if I wasn’t willing to help my classmates understand Dickens — then a book like Atlas Shrugged should be the ideal alternative, the advanced challenge I so evidently craved, to be followed by a one-on-one exam for my grade.
Scoffing, eyes rolling, I defiantly agreed … and promptly got my butt handed to me, slogging through leaden prose that was too polemical to be skimmed, and getting Bob’s message loud and clear long before the infamous section in the novel when John Galt commandeers the planet’s radio frequencies and delivers the single best 100-plus-page cure for insomnia ever conceived by a speech maker, including Leonid Brezhnev and DonOLD Trump.
Galt’s unmitigated horse hockey asphyxiates me even now, 47 years later.
Atlas Shrugged was in fact duly completed, the exam and course passed, and Bob’s typically letter-perfect point very much taken … and retained to the present day. I hope I never have to read that book, ever again. Trump sure as hell hasn’t, although J.D. Vance may have lightly perused the CliffsNotes while atop the Ottoman.
