The Fountainhead

It took me a whole friggin month to "read" this book, but boy was it worth it. It's the story of <span style="font-weight:bold">immensely archetypal</span> characters battling an intellectual war. Although it's a battle between good and evil, it takes Rand almost half of the book to even begin explaining the difference between good and evil. I found the characters to be so pure and extreme that you can't help but appreciate how a really complicated character can be described as single-minded. Between gloriously intelligent heroes and villains (worthy of Batman and The Joker) and use of the media as a <a href="http://outfoxed.org/|img=none">weapon of evil</a> it just really hits home, in some weird way. Sure the message is a little extreme, but I would have to say that fact that her message would seem so shocking to so many people means that the pendulum of society has swung so far away from Howard Roark's ideals, that it probably wouldn't hurt for everyone to think about the message. I also can't help relating Roark's type of thinking to something as absract as the open source movement...and of course relating some of Toohey's thinking to post 9/11 political tactics.

---