I’ve heard a lot of media hand ringing about the influence the writing of Ayn Rand has had on the tea party movement. To me, there is a bit of a disconnect there — the tea partiers seem to veer towards conservative Christianity while Rand was a pronounced atheist.
Recently, I saw this point addressed in an interesting new Esquire profile on Republican/libertarian Ron Paul (interestingly, the piece is written by a journalist I once interviewed, John Richardson.) In a section of outtakes from the interviews, Paul comments on this topic.
Paul’s sincerity leads him to complexities that most conservatives prefer to ignore. Ayn Rand, for example. Paul was championing her ideas decades before Paul Ryan started passing them out to staffers, and he actually wrestles with the troubling implications of her ideas. “She challenged me more because she was so critical of the compassion of Christianity — or any religion, for that matter,” he told me. “It just seemed to be so cold.”
That Movie is a dud. If Paul is going to be elected he needs to pick someone whose Philosophy has resulted in a huge Box Office Smasharoo, like Tyler Perry. I want to see him on “Meet The Press” dressed up like a big fat loud black lady. Let’s get to work on that. Then he has to stomp into Obama’s next State Of The Union Address dressed up like Robocop and send Obama crashing through a plate glass window, cut to a shot of Obama falling hundreds of stories to the street below. Note – Arrange to have Obama deliver the next State Of The Union Address on the top of the Empire State Building. Ron Paul as The Terminator? Just throw him into a vat of molten metal. Don’t worry about the rest of the Movie.
Yet, it seems like “Atlas shrugged” opened well and then just tanked out. Frankly, I think a movie that admits out of the gate that it comes in three parts — and you won’t get a real satisfying ending watching part one — is doing itself a disservice. They should’ve just crammed the whole book into three and half hours and released that.