Ayn Rand’s resurgence is really baffling to me. She’s like J.D. Salinger. Sure, we all read Catcher in the Rye when we were younger, but who over thirty who isn’t an English teacher actually re-reads it? It won’t hold up, because it’s a book for people of a certain age.

If Catcher in the Rye is for adolescents, Ayn Rand is probably meant for people from age 19-24.

My Aunt Anna told me about Rand, specifically The Fountainhead. She explained that it had really affected her when she first read it. Naturally, I expressed an interest in reading it, too. Then she started hemming and hawing. I couldn’t understand why, but now I realize she was trying to express the fact that once you get a little bit older, you realize that, well, her thoughts and writing style are more than a little adolescent and you quickly get embarrassed to be seen reading her books.

So, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Then I turned 25 and never looked back.

In a weird way, this makes sense. Congressman Paul Ryan gets credit for being a big and bold thinker when he releases a genuinely stupid and heartless plan (you want to see what a real “death panel” looks like? check out his healthcare policy). Though I guess it is big and bold, but so is my next door neighbor’s fourth grade daughter’s plan to solve with the world’s ills with some combination of tropical fruits and a really fast, sporty looking car.

But anyway, why is Represenative Paul Ryan creating a budget based on Ayn Rand’s “philosophy?” He’s in his forties, but he kinda of looks like teenager on camera. Clearly, his mind is also trapped in his freshman year in college. Your freshman year is when would-be intellectuals are at their most insufferable. They are discovering all these thinkers for the first time and proceed to explain them to us in great (and frequently) inaccurate detail as if we’re both stupid and didn’t read these same thinkers ourselves back when we were in college?

Maybe Ryan’s mind also got stuck at age 20, along with his appearance. If you look at this eager beaver, you sort of expect him to start explaining to you about these cool new thinkers he just discovered that you should totally read and quote you some aphorism by Nietzsche (invariably taken from Beyond Good and Evil) or part of Mersault’s outburst at the trial in Camu’s The Stranger.

To me, this would explain why Ryan thinks Ayn Rand’s books will help fix our government.

But why are other people paying attention? Alan Greenspan was a self-described Objectivist (Rand’s ridiculous and poorly reasoned “philosophy”) and he didn’t just help to drive our economy into a ditch, he drove into a ditch filled with raw sewage piped in from a dysentery clinic.

If our government is going to continue to be influenced by people who are caught in some sort of time loop and are repeating the same ridiculous, faux-intellectual discussion held over instant coffee at the student lounge, what hope do we have? It’s time to grow up, guys. Time to drop the Ayn Rand and pick up Tony Judt. Time to learn that there are other Bob Marley albums besides whatever greatest hits compilation you picked up in the discount bin at Tower Records in 1991. Time to stop thinking people are impressed when you spout pompous, poorly reasoned nonsense based on a half-understood lecture in an introduction to philosophy class.

Ugh.

Check this awesome cartoon about Ayn Rand in the 21st Century.