After a couple of appearances on the interview program “Donahue,” in 1979 and 1980, the author and philosopher Ayn Rand enjoyed something of a renaissance in popular culture, including a week as a panelist on “Match Game” and a guest appearance on “Fantasy Island” as the Spirit of Capitalism. In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts.

What is wrong with committing suicide? What’s wrong with giving up on life? And why is the happiness of another person important and good, but not your own? And why do they make soda cans so difficult to open these days?

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I find it to be an offensive irony, a toxic irony, that Lyndon Baines Johnson—the founder of the so-called Great Society, which I consider to be the greatest insult to the individual man since Immanuel Kant first laid out his preposterous theory of the noumenal, that is to say, not objective reality—that I should share with this man, this evil man, the same love of the soft drink Fresca. They say it is a grapefruit soda, but I think it has a different flavor. What do you think?

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My moral philosophy is founded on the idea that there is an objective reality, and that man’s senses can perceive this objective reality. This faculty, which is man’s reason, is paramount above all else. He takes for evidence only his own experience, his own judgment, and that is why I do not hesitate to say, objectively, definitively, that “Caddyshack” is the year’s best movie.

Rodney Dangerfield plays a self-made man who is not ashamed of his ambition, who does not apologize for his success, and who gets excitement from the joyful reality that we are all going to get laid if we are willing to be productively selfish and to stop coddling the weak. In other movie news, I did not like how easily the boy escaped Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.” I have solved all the hedge mazes in the United States and Europe, and I can tell you they are not that complicated.

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Short column today. Once again, I have cut my finger trying to open a can of Fresca. What are they, made of Rearden Metal? I am joking, because I am not joyless. What is your favorite joke, readers? Write me and let me know.

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This week, you may have seen that I was interviewed by Phil Donahue, of the television program “Donahue.” Some thought fireworks would fly, and it is true that Donahue is a collectivist and an apologist for the weak. But, if you detected that I liked him, you were correct. I cannot help it. He has a good sense of humor, and his hair is so snowy and silly. During a break, I turned to him and said, “I think you should tell your wife, Marlo Thomas, to rename her long-playing record ‘Free to Be Only Me.’ ” We laughed and laughed.

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Some of you wrote in last week to express surprise that, when I appeared on the Phil Donahue program, I told him that I was a fan of “Charlie’s Angels.” This just shows how poor your critical thinking is. It should be obvious why I love “Charlie’s Angels.” The show is about three beautiful women who are not ashamed of their beauty or their ability at solving crimes. And when their talents were not appreciated by the police department and they were forced to become crossing guards, they refused! They refused to take money from the government to train American children to believe that the state will forever protect them from risk! They left their jobs and made new lives for themselves in a private capitalist enterprise. They went Galt. (This is a reference to my book “Atlas Shrugged,” which will be made into a movie in the year 1982, and the market will reward it with success. We have already cast Kris Kristofferson—my first choice!—as John Galt.)

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I saw on television the performing group known as the Village People. These are very exuberant, virile men. I have no delusions; I know that they are all lesbians. But they expressed in their dancing the kind of unapologetic enthusiasm for their masculinity that so many in our culture wish to repress in favor of Alan Alda.

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I do not approve of the so-called hippies, but I do not approve of any government control over drugs. The government does not have the right to tell any individual what to do with his or her health and life. You probably know that I received a prescription for the stimulant Benzedrine, or “speed.” I can say rationally that it increases my happiness and my productivity. For example, some time ago I went to Studio 54, because I love to dance on speed. I took fifteen speed pills, and I got into a contest with Liza Minnelli over who could roar most like a jaguar. She simply sounded like a stupid lion.

Then the inside of my head began to sound like a jet engine and so I went to the bathroom. I took maybe ten more speed pills and sat in a stall and wrote a new chapter of “Atlas Shrugged.” Perhaps twenty-five thousand words, all on toilet paper. I cannot include these words in a new edition, alas, because I did not write them so much as encode them on the toilet paper by biting it.

As I write this, I am drinking speed, and you cannot stop me. You cannot stop me, America, with your altruism and your Alan Alda and your Fresca cans biting at my skin. I shall speed across this country like a great high-speed train and the U.S. shall be forever changed in my wake.

Yes, I am both a speedboat and a speed train, and I will mix metaphors if I wish and bend language to my own reality like rails of garbage steel. Because Ronald Reagan has deposed Jimmy Carter, and I predict that by 2013 my influence will be profound, and a new generation of leaders will hallow my name, and devotion to self-interest and capitalism and the free market will not be the exception but the rule, and these leaders will naturally share my disapproval of religion, my support of abortion rights, and my love of Godiva chocolates. I have to stop writing now, because I have chewed through my typewriter.

Talk to you next week, readers of “Parade,” and remember to send me your favorite ways to spice up Hamburger Helper. I asked you that three weeks ago. ♦