Atlas Stole Your Lunch

It took me a month and a damn half but I've finally finished reading Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." I used to think the only people who liked Rand's work were batshit crazy libertarians and douche bags who think they shouldn't have to pay taxes. Although those two demographics are definitely her core audience, there's a lot of good stuff in this book that's very relevant to today's world. I probably missed some of it because I started skipping entire paragraphs toward the end just to get the damn thing over with, but whatever, we Interweb journalists are held to much lower standards than our print brethren so it doesn't matter. Given some of the words you'll find later in this entry you really should be amazed that I was able to read and comprehend that book.

One of the lesser things Rand's protagonists rail against is people who either can't or won't get to the damn point during a discussion or when answering a question. They dance around obvious answers with half-truths and responses that have absolutely fucking nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's a testament to the quality of Rand's writing, specifically her dialogue, that I legitimately wanted to drop the Five Knuckle Shuffle on those people and then lock in the STF to make them tap out. In my own dealings with people, this used to annoy the shit out of me. Now that a well-regarded author has expressed an opinion backing me up, it flat out pisses me off to the point that my inner monologue replies to these shitheads with "Fuck you, Jim Taggart." Granted, this is a small point in the book that's really just a symptom of the larger overall problem, but it's the one that really stuck with me for some reason.

So now, because I'm tired of taking the effort to write coherent paragraphs, I present to you a list of people who need to be less like the weaselly, perpetually evasive Jim Taggart and more like the dashing, to-the-point John Galt:

• Professional athletes. Is there anything more useless than the postgame press conference? Why do the reporters even bother asking questions when they can safely pick one of the usual canned responses and attribute it to a professional athlete on any given day without any worry whatsoever of being sued for libel. "We played hard, but they played harder." "We've just got to take care of our own business." "No, I shouldn't have taken my gun to the night club."
  
• Mr. Weiner. Really, you claimed that you weren't sure if that was yours? There isn't a man on the planet that doesn't recognize his own bulge. Fucking stop it. On a side note: Twitter, is it too much to ask that you add a penis filter? Facial recognition technology has come a long way recently. Surely that science can be applied to the trouser snake.
  
• Mitt Romney. You championed the Massachusetts health care reform. Don't pretend you didn't. If you feel differently about it now, just say so. But don't pretend like you had nothing to do with it. Your perfect hair isn't fooling anyone.
• People who bought the Wii. Just admit that it spends most of its time holding up your XBox 360 games. And don't delude yourself about the Wii U being any better.
• The NFL's owners. We've been over this one before, but I reiterate: if you need to adjust the distribution of revenue because you're losing money, FUCKING PROVE IT. The NBA's owners recently did just that, and it kind of makes me want to try watching basketball again.
  
• Michele Bachmann. Between claiming that there are Nobel Laureates who champion intelligent design (I refuse to capitalize that), calling for a McCarthy-style witch hunt to track down "anti-Americans," and forfeiting a debate on the Constitution against a child, Michele Bachmann could easily be the inspiration for a villain in the book's sequel, "Atlas Queefed." She is a gust of feminine flatulence. No, I don't know how a man like Atlas is going to queef. It's fiction. Suspend your disbelief already.
  

There's also stuff in there about consuming without producing, living your life based on feeling rather than logic, and being dumb enough to think that your enemies are going to speak on your behalf on the radio. It's all interesting stuff, but none of it would've made a good blog entry. Or even a half-assed blog entry like this one that I'm ending because I'm bored and I know no joke I write will ever top "Atlas Queefed."