Tim Sandefur reminds us all about Ayn Rand. Now, I have to say that although I like many of Rand's ideas, her novels are generally speaking crap novels. They're didactic, conclusory, and filled with one dimensional caricatures. Only the heroes have any depth to them at all.

That being said, I just finished re-reading The Fountainhead (fourth time), and I'm deep into Atlas Shrugged for the fifth time. I caught a bug over the Super Bowl, and it took me all of yesterday and most of today to get over it. Rand is perfect for when you're down in the dumps, which is where being sick always puts me. Rampant triumphalism of the mind is the perfect antidote to grotesque incapacity of the body.

Rand was a Russian who came to America to be free. She detested the Orthodox state religion, and communism, and totalitarian systems in general. Like many Russians, including my family, Rand had an intuition subsequently confirmed by reason and experience that America was the future, and that freedom was its great value. She couldn't write her way out of a wet paper bag, but she knew how to plot a novel, and how to craft a hero and heroine. And I guess that makes her about a thousand times better than most of the shopworn jackasses writing today.