Yesterday I read a piece...

...called "Our Daughter Isn't a Selfish Brat; Your Son Just Hasn't Read Atlas Shrugged." I found it from a link on Ezra Klein's blog in the Washington Post. (If you have time to read only one blog in a day, it should be Klein's.)

I've known a few Objectivists in my time and even went through my own, albeit mild, Ayn Rand phase in my late twenties and early thirties. (I was a late bloomer.) These people can take Objectivism (and themselves) pretty seriously. (I even had a good friend who named his daughter Kira, after the heroine in We the Living.) So I think I can be excused for thinking that this piece was on the level. I was so appalled, though, that I e-mailed the author and asked if it was intended to be serious or satire. (It was intended as a dig.) I was genuinely surprised by his answer:

It is satire. McSweeneys.net is a humor website, and the pieces it runs often make extended literary references. This piece references a book called Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Here is a link to a wikipedia page about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_shrugged. The central joke of the piece is that selfishness and an unwillingness to share--traits typically deplored by good parents--are more or less exalted in Ayn Rand's novel as virtues.

Thanks for reading,

Eric Hague

You got me.