SUBJECT: Atlas Shrugged

Here's an excerpt from a recent e-mail I sent to a fellow blogger and conservative teenager regarding Ayn Rand and her brilliant, eye-opening book, Atlas Shrugged. I should note that it has been slightly edited.

I see you're reading Atlas Shrugged. That's neat, so am I.

Right now I'm at the part where Dagny arrives at... well, never mind; I don't want to spoil the plot for you.

Let me say this: Ayn Rand is a genius. A total f***ing genius. Whenever I tell my ultra-liberal, quasi-Marxist teachers that I'm reading one of her books, they invariably groan and sneer and a few call her a "fascist" -- at which point I have to restrain myself from ramming a pencil into their eye, before carefully explaining that Rand couldn't possibly be a fascist since she believed strenuously in the ideals of liberty and individual freedom, while the fascists believed in the exact opposite: namely, the nationalization of industry and the enslavement of the individual to the collective being, in the forms of the State and the Race. In fact, I tell them, fascism shares far more in common with communism than it does with capitalism.

At which point my teachers -- who probably have lurid sexual fantasies involving Karl Marx and Josef Stalin -- usually fall silent, then grumble something about Nazis and/or repeat the word "fascist".

Actually, I think I'm going to post that little blurb on my blog.