What's Up With Ayn Rand

I found Ayn Rand disturbing from the moment I first read one of her novels. A post on the First Things blog does a pretty good job of explaining the feeling:

Rand’s Ideal Man could never be a schoolteacher, say, or a physical therapist, or a claims clerk in the Social Security Administration. He must not be short-winded or fat. He must be perfection in action—gifted and brave, uniquely talented, and utterly free of irrationality and fear. He must, like Roark, defend the premise that no man should ever compromise his individual will or submit to pathetic notions of “sacrifice”; he must recognize that men of genius like himself will forever fight the lazy, inferior parasites who seek to take what superior minds have made. He must, in short, look like Gary Cooper and think exactly like Ayn Rand.

. . .

What made Rand’s works controversial, then and now, was their unashamed elitism and atheism—their contept for the values and attitudes held by most human beings who must make their way through the real world with the usual sets of weaknesses and strengths.

Rand hated religion as much as she hated communism; for her Christianity was, of course, the religion of fools and slaves. Rand’s “marginalia,” culled from the books in her library and published in 1998, are particularly revealing: . . . [C.S.] Lewis, Rand averred, was a “driveling non-entity,” a “mediocrity,” and “scum.”. . .

The book’s big event—a national strike involving disgruntled industrialists and tycoons—might have made a good Preston Sturges comedy. But Rand turns it into an earnest melodrama touched up with nobody-can-stop-me arias, paperback sex scenes, and attacks on jack-booted Washington bureaucrats: It’s Tony Robbins meets Harold Robbins meets the Cato Institute.