I'm glad he does because I sure don't. I read one of them, either The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged. That was enough. Stilted prose and a philosophy totally ignorant of the human condition is a bad combination. At least I don't find it appealing. Governor Sanford appears to be a fan and wrote her a little love letter that Newsweek, for some reason, decided to publish. Now I'm not going to run down the Governor for his transcontinental booty call. In fact, I think he's a true lover boy. A powerful, successful man with the emotional development of a smitten 13 year old. It was an epic fail, flaming out for all the world to see. Much better than the tawdry mud wrestling adventure of that Ensign guy, what with the best friend's wife and the payoff and all. Like the difference between jumping off the Empire State Building holding two lit road flares and choking to death in a pool of your own vomit.
The Governor must have had some time to hone his political philosophy during those long, lonely nights in the doghouse. He quotes from The Fountainhead:
Representing himself, Roark pleads, in characteristically Randian terms: "I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need … I recognize no obligations toward men except one: to respect their freedom and to take no part in a slave society."Right on. Spoken like a man who can fill his own teeth, change his own tires, and give himself a colonoscopy while cooking a bitching quail egg omelet on his custom made solar stove. C'mon, I know this gives all those Libertarians living in Mom and Dad's basement a little chub, but if you're going to blow up your own shed because your wife hung the wrong color curtains in it, they're going to take you away. And well they should.
The Governor goes on:
Cold though they sound, these words contain two basic truths. First, an individual can achieve great things without governmental benevolence, and second, one man has no right to another's achievement. These are lessons we should all remember today, when each week is seemingly marked by another government program designed to fix society.
The Governor is full of shit. More conservative fever dreams of an America that never was. What? No taxes? No collective societal efforts to build roads, provide water, or drain away the shit? Our hardy pioneer forefathers were always screaming for the government to bail them out of some jam or another - fight the Indians - build a railroad - the roads are too muddy - my kids are dying of Cholera. Whiners. It's only government benevolence when someone else is receiving it and if one man's "achievement" is based on child labor in a sweatshop or slave labor, well I guess that's just too bad. Sometimes society needs fixing
Perhaps the governor neglected to read any of the biographies about Rand and is unaware of the fact that she spent a good part of her adult life in profound depression and self imposed isolation. She died a bitter and alienated human being...eh, no wonder he likes her.
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