• • Paul Ryan’s faith-based lesson 
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Egoism  |Syndicated  | Your budget,” a group of Jesuit scholars and other Georgetown University faculty members wrote to Ryan last week, “appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”  

• • Mexico’s middle class is becoming its majority 
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The Fountainhead  | “The middle class in this country doesn’t want to lose what it’s gained,” said Gabriel Paulin, 30, living in a mod condo in a new subdivision in Queretaro. On his coffee table: a Spanish-language copy of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” — essential reading for the striving class — alongside a boxed DVD set of the “Mad Men” television series.  

• • Greed is good? The GOP seems to be okay with that. 
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Capitalism  |Syndicated  | Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, delivering the Republican response [to the State of the Union address], offered an alternative that many voters might find cogent and unthreatening. He didn’t provide a lot of new ideas — basically, Daniels supports the same laissez-faire policies that got us into this crisis — but at least he didn’t sound like some kind of Ayn Rand acolyte who believes that economic Darwinism must always be allowed to run its course.  

• For young college graduates, the case for economics 
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Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | The caricature of economists is one of free market apologists. It’s understandable. One need only look at Alan Greenspan and others who hew too closely to Ayn Rand’s fictional characters. But this caricature is also unfortunate.  

 Resize Will the 2012 election be a contest of Whole Foods vs. Cracker Barrel shoppers? 
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Syndicated  | In August, [Whole Foods’] Co-President Walter Robb joined dozens of other corporate chiefs in signing a pledge to abstain from political contributions until lawmakers "stop the partisan gridlock in Washington." But the libertarian views of iconoclastic Whole Foods founder and chief executive John Mackey, who swears by yoga and Ayn Rand, cast a long shadow.In August 2009, Mackey picked a fight with the left on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, where he lambasted health-care reform and offered The Whole Foods Alternative to Obamacare.  

• The values debate we’re not having 
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The “compassionate conservatism” espoused by President George W. Bush and many prominent evangelical leaders has been supplanted by a Tea Party ideology that bears more resemblance to the anti-Christian philosophy of Ayn Rand than it does to the Gospel.  

• • The study that shows why Occupy Wall Street struck a nerve 
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Capitalism  |Syndicated  | It does matter that as the pie grows, the various slices do not grow in proportion. We’re not characters in one of those lumbering, interminable, nonsensical Ayn Rand novels. We believe in individual initiative and the free market, but we also believe that nationhood necessarily involves a commitment to our fellow citizens, an acknowledgment that we’re engaged in a common enterprise. We believe that opportunity should be more than just an empty word.  

• • The tea party, Occupy Wall Street and ‘BioShock Infinite’: How a video game is reflecting life 
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BioShock  |Atlas Shrugged  | Interview with Ken Levine, president and creative director at Irrational Games.
[Q:] How do you start sketching out these movements for the game? [A:] When we started [BioShock Infinite], we had this idea for these movements, and we were looking back at history. Our games are heightened versions of history — “BioShock” was kind of a hyper-realized Ayn Rand if she had made Galt’s Gulch. But instead of having her idealized characters, we put in more realistic characters. [....] Games [...] are a Rorschach, and I don’t want to be making games that are expressing a political or philosophical view. I’d rather be asking questions, rather have people question what they think. There are still people that think that the first “BioShock” is a vindication of Rand’s philosophy and some people that say it’s a character assassination of Ayn Rand.  

• • What’s in a name: What we missed 

Do icons live up to the hype? That’s what Outlook asked last week in a special package of essays on key historical figures whose names have become commonly used adjectives. [....] Ayn Rand, who historian Jennifer Burns noted was more sensitive to criticism than the protagonists of her novels, had a few strident defenders. “Ayn Rand was a novelist and philosopher, yet Burns never in her book or in her latest article analyzes the tenets of Rand’s philosophy, but merely spreads kaffee-klatsch-level gossip about her,” one reader wrote. Another suggested that we “try to incorporate some factual ideas in her writing about Ayn Rand, instead of gossip from those who hate her.”  

• • • Was Ayn Rand Randian? 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  |Syndicated  | Rand tried, but she couldn’t live up to Roark’s stoic disregard for the opinions of others. She retreated to the privacy of her Manhattan apartment, weeping daily and losing herself in endless games of solitaire. The philosopher of rationalism found herself swamped by emotions she could neither understand nor control. In desperation, she turned to Nathaniel Branden, the most loyal of her followers. Years before, flush with inspiration, she had taken Branden as a lover, disregarding both their marriages and the fact that she was 25 years his senior. Now Branden became her therapist, helping Rand pick through the wreckage of her ideals. Howard Roark wouldn’t feel like this, she moaned to him, nor would John Galt.  

• • ‘The Debt’ star Helen Mirren 

Image  | A look at the career of Helen Mirren, star of the film “The Debt.” [....] 1999. Helen Mirren as Ayn Rand, Eric Stoltz as Nathaniel Branden. "The Passion of Ayn Rand."


 

• Fundamentalism springs eternal for GOP 
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The Family maintained a powerful sense of paternalism, the idea of “top men,” anointed by Jesus, deciding what’s best for rest of us. The so-called “teavangelicals” are stripping some of that away as they elevate Ayn Rand to apostle status; “Atlas Hugged,” as former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, a family man and potential Tea Party favorite before his famous flame-out, put it.  

• Book review: ‘Flashback,’ by Dan Simmons 
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I enjoyed much of the novel. Simmons provides a strong narrative and well-imagined characters — the man can write — and yet I thought his dystopian vision of political reality, however deeply felt, vacillated between the improbable and the ridiculous. Give him this: With any luck, Simmons could be the Tolstoy of the tea party; at the very least, he’s more fun than Ayn Rand.  

• The GOP holds out for more on the debt standoff 
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Syndicated  | Many of the Tea Party House freshmen clearly see their role as voting for their Ayn Rand fantasies and then going home.  

• • GOP leaders must free themselves from the Tea Party’s grip 
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Atheism  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  | The tea party lives in an intellectual bubble where the answers to every problem lie in books by F.A. Hayek, Glenn Beck or Ayn Rand. Rand’s anti-government writings, regarded by her followers as modern-day scripture — Rand, an atheist, would have bridled at that comparison — are particularly instructive. When the hero of Rand’s breakthrough novel “The Fountainhead” doesn’t get what he wants, he blows up a building. Rand’s followers see that as gallant. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise us that blowing up our government doesn’t seem to be a big deal to some of the new radical individualists in our House of Representatives.  

• Longtime keeper of Hillary Clinton’s image has forged a loyal badge of his own 
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Alan Greenspan  | During a high school trip to the District, [Phillippe Reines] quizzed Alan Greenspan about Ayn Rand and engaged Orrin Hatch in a discussion about the senator’s career ambitions.  

• Where Whitey Bulger was all this time 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | On Thursday, longtime America’s Most Wanted fixture mobster James “Whitey” Bulger was apprehended by the authorities. This inspiration for Jack Nicholson’s character in “The Departed” had been on the lam for 16 years. Where was he all this time? Here are some possibilities: [....] In the opening-night audience of “Atlas Shrugged.”  

• Culture war over Catholic identity 
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There is a “cultural war” within Catholic America as several factions battle over a single question: What is “Catholic identity” and who has it? Bishops rail at universities for not promoting Catholic identity through their choice of a graduation day speaker, the head of the Catholic League considers the National Catholic Reporter a sponsor of “dissident voices” and calls laity seeking reform “rogues” and “rebels.” Other Catholics denounce cardinals they disagree with and say that Catholics who support Ayn Rand endorse “heresy.”  

• • Atheism in American politics 
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Atheism  | The great majority of nontheists are progressive liberals. However, there is a large minority, maybe a quarter to a third, that are libertarians in the mold of Ayn Rand. For example I have info that David Koch is an atheist.  

• • Secular America: Growing numbers with too little political clout 
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Atheism  | No secular group can claim special authority in trying to persuade secular Americans to support a particular position. The Ayn Randian atheists are never going to convince me that it is a social evil for government to redistribute a certain amount of wealth, and I am never going to convince them that without government social welfare programs, American society would be in a much worse mess than it is.