Atlas Shrugged Movie

Hollywood makes a movie based on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and our author sees it as a sign of civilizational collapse.
Civilization is always a fragile accommodation at best, precariously poised between barbarism on one side and decadence on the other, and as a civilization dissolves it begins to oscillate between them, ever more spasmodically, until the final collapse comes. Call it morbid curiosity on my part, but I often wonder where the debris of our civilization will ultimately be heaped; and, if this film portends what I fear, now I may know the answer. Rand was definitely on the side of barbarism.

I really had to read the whole article twice to take in everything the author was saying. Like this one:
I suspect that charity really is the only way to avoid wasting one’s life in a desert of sterile egoism. She regarded Christian morality as a poison that had polluted the will of Western man with its ethos of parasitism and orgiastic self-oblation.

The condensed form of his letters and metaphors is very appealing and ultimately convincing. Not that I need much convincing anyways. I have made my journey from unsuspecting fan in my teens to virulent hater in late twenties to careless disregard for everything Ayn Rand in my thirties.
...what really puts both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in a class of their own is how sublimely awful they are.... the chief reason that The Fountainhead is among the most hilariously bad films ever made is that it is so slavishly faithful to the novel and to Rand’s screenplay. The result is hypnotically ghastly. Dialogue that had been merely stilted on the page became almost surreal in its lousiness when spoken aloud.

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