Friday, March 04, 2011

Atlas also farts


As part of my duties at the magazine, I handle a series of profiles of CIOs. I give them a survey to fill out, and they send it back.

One subject, who shall remain nameless, answered one question thus:
-- What business leader would you like to have lunch with?
A fictional lunch with Dagny Taggart, Vice President of Operations at Taggart Transcontinental Railroad ("Atlas Shrugged," by Ayn Rand)

Oh, my. How do you even begin to react to that? The cult around Rand is simply bizarre. When asked what business leader he'd like to have lunch with by a trade publication with a circulation of about 400,000-plus, this CIO of a huge company declares he'd like to have a fictional lunch with a fictional character. He actually wants his peers in the industry to know this. I am having trouble wrapping my brain around that.

I don't have a motto, but if I did, it would be: Don't trust anyone who loves "Atlas Shrugged." He will eventually reveal himself to be an asshole.

That would like nice on a cross-stitched sampler, don't you think?

Bonus yucks: Have you seen the trailer for the low-budget film of AS that's about to come out? No, it's not quite After Last Season, but it is filled with howlers.



It apparently takes place in an alternate reality in which steel is still manufactured in America and people take trains and say things like "I will destroy you!" with the same passion with which I say things like "I have to pee; do you know where the men's room is?" and where declaring "My only goal is to make money" doesn't make you pathetic but rather a paragon of virtue.

The MPAA card that reads "The following preview has been approved for appropriate audiences"? I guess that means it can only be shown to people who are already dead inside.


4 comments:

Dave said...

I have to confess that I loved, loved Ayn Rand. Then there was the day that I realized that I was young and, how shall I put this, dumb.

Jim Donahue said...

You came back from the dark side!

M. Bouffant said...

You aren't the bastard who shoved the hideous term "business leader" into the lexicon are you?

Jim Donahue said...

Ha! No, not I. (For the record, I didn't write the questionnaire. And when asked who their "favorite president" is, about half say Reagan and half Lincoln. Where's the Warren G. Harding love?)