None of this matters, right? We're talking about a phase, no different from purple hair and lip rings, right? Well, yes, it's true that in most cases, the fever breaks. That kid stands up, walks outside, and reflects on the 727 pages of Fountainhead and 1,168 of Atlas he's just wolfed down. And realizes: That was nearly 2,000 pages (more, really, given that Rand's loathing of collectivist parasites is matched only by her loathing of paragraph indents) without a single instance of irony or humor. Or subtlety. Or grace. Nearly 2,000 hectoring, brook-no-ambiguity, you're-either-a-lion-or-a-leech pages of breathtaking psychological obtuseness.

In time, he begins to understand that his ordeal consists of two phases. There is the reading itself, which is one thing. And then there is the digesting, which is quite another. Overall, the experience eerily replicates that of devouring a family-size bag of Cheetos in a single sitting.1** **During: irresistible, bracing, the thing at hand imparting vitality, fertility, potency. After: bleccchh.

Make it go away, he thinks. _The metallurgist protagonists. The operatic rapes heralded by whips and rock drills. The pirates with cat-coughing-up-hairball names like Ragnar Danneskjöld. Please, God. _

He may even feel his "recovery" marks him as a savvy and well-adjusted individual, yes?

No. He is a stupid and insolent boy. No one gets done with Ayn (rhymes with "mine") Rand. It is not in one's power to do so. That boy (or you, or I) can dismiss the books as a "phase" and attempt to busy ourselves with the kind of degenerate "stylists" Rand scorned (Faulkner, Nabokov). But none of us can escape the shadow of the lone straight shaft of the Taggart Building tumescing in the distance.

1. An association bolstered by Howard Roark's flaming orange hair.

This is because there are boys and girls among us who have never overcome the Randian infection. The Galt speech continues to ring in their ears for years like a maddening tinnitus, turning each of them into what next year's Physicians' Desk Reference will (undoubtedly) term an _Ayn Rand _Asshole (ARA). They constitute a relatively small percentage of Rand readers, these ARAs. But they make their reading count. Thanks to them, the Rand Experience is no longer limited to those who have read the books. It's metastasized. You, me, all of us, we're living it. Because it's the ARA Army of antigovernment-antiregulation puritans who have spent the past three decades gleefully pulling the cooling rods out of the American economy. For a while, it got very big and very hot. Then it popped. And now the rest of us have to spend the next decade scaling the slippery slopes of the huge suppurative crater that was left behind.

Feeling fisted by the Invisible Hand of the Market lo these past fifteen months? Lost a job lately? Or half the value of your 401(k)? Or a home? All three? Been wondering whence the too-long-ascendant political and economic ideas and forces behind Greenspanism, John Thainism, blind Wall Street plunder, bankruptcy, credit-default swaps, Bernie Madoff, and the ensuing Cannibalism in the Streets? Then you, sir, need to give thanks to Ayn Rand Assholes everywhere—as well as the steely loins from which they sprang.

does that moniker "Ayn Rand Asshole" strike you as a contrivance? Do you disbelieve the proposition that a person could read Atlas Shrugged almost purely at the level of injunction—taking the things John Galt says and does as straight as a biblical literalist takes the eye of the needle?

Then meet Michael Malice. No, really. That's his name. He's a New York City author and blogger who calls himself both a genius and an "elitist anarchist." What's that mean? It means that if a panhandler asks him for a little money or food, Malice says, "I could, but then you might live longer, so you see my dilemma."