Sometimes a Jackhammer Pounding the Walls of a Quarry Is Just a Jackhammer Pounding the Walls of a Quarry

My old Lingua Franca piece about Ayn Rand from 1999 remains the single biggest draw to my website. In 2006, that page got more than 3600 hits. With this year only at the halfway point, it has already reached 2500. My only regret is not titling it "Atlas Shagged."

A friend has mentioned watching The Fountainhead not long ago -- a movie so over-the-top as to be almost transcendent. And not just the long speech in the courtroom scene, either, though it's certainly a corker.

As I recall, it was Whittaker Chambers who said most people read Rand, not from interest in the ideological harangues, but "for the fornicating bits." You couldn't really put that on screen in 1949. But in the right hands, cinematic language is a subtle instrument:

By coincidence, I'm reading about Harold Laski, who is said to be one of the models for Rand's epicine collectivist villain Ellsworth Toohey -- the other being Lewis Mumford.