By Fred Wehner

A dying mother throws her baby from a blazing building, desperately hoping someone will catch the infant; you’re there but what do you care. Not your problem. Besides, mom should have saved her own skin instead of forfeiting her life for the child’s.

There’s no fire department because nobody wanted to pay the taxes to fund it . At the funeral, churchgoers listen to a “monstrous” sermon: faith is “the worst curse of mankind.”

This isn’t my world. It’s the awesome utopia of Ayn Rand, the mad Messiah whose works will likely once again become stocking stuffers for House Speaker Paul Ryan’s friends, family and employees.

“The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” That’s Mr. Ryan, who claims he’s a devout Catholic while spreading the teachings of the self-declared enemy of God.

Ryan says Rand’s thinking “is sorely needed, she did a fantastic job” and boasts about doling her books out to all his interns at Christmas.

Something inherently disturbing about that: celebrating the birth of Christ with the sacrilegious pap of the anti-Christ. (NB: anti-Christ, important to keep it as anti-Christ and not Antichrist) Standing at the crossroads, Republican-voting Americans face a dilemma: which to follow, the Bible or this insult to religion; Jesus or the Ayn Rand gang. Eenie or meanie…

Simple choice.

Selflessness, sacrifice, compassion, concern for others. “Even as you had not done to the least of these, you have not done it to me” [Matthew 25:37] one of Jesus’ many exhortations to help the poor. This sentiment, embodied by Mother Teresa, is shared by numerous other religions.

The other credo says loving thy neighbor is “moral corruption” and those needing help are “looters”. Let the suffering, the sick, the elderly die where they drop. “I’m all right, Jack,” is this ruthless philosophy, Jack Tar, the personification of a British sailor who, returning from the war, is shunned by a self-centered society scornful of his sacrifice. We’ve seen the same heartlessness shown here to the veterans of Vietnam and subsequent Middle East wars..

The egotists try to parse all this. “Yeah, but giving to the less fortunate will be my personal choice. Washington doesn’t have the right to force me to be kind to my fellow man.”

Anyone with this brand of mindset is unlikely to be merciful anyway. And even if the will is there, the giver forgets: charity is rarely a high priority.

We’re a civilized society, we’re Americans, we stick together: helping the least among us is a collective burden that must be administered evenly and fairly. We depend on each other. No man, said John Donne, is an island. Comedians Steven Fry and Hugh Laurie also had it right: “All your wealth is entirely propped up on the rotting hulk of my poverty.” The Rand-like retort they invoke: “Get out of my way, you degraded heap of smelliness, before I set fire to you.”

Not too many religious placards in evidence at the rallies for doomed pedophile Roy Moore in Alabama. Plenty some years ago, however, equating Obama with Hitler the racist, which is about as ludicrous as saying Ayn Rand was an angel.

Real name Alisa Rosenbaum, a Russian atheist who disdained the destitute, the weak, even the handicapped, and called Christ’s teachings “evil”.

This mephitic harridan’s smart-alecky pronouncements on Objectivism infest the internet, her essays and novels ‘Atlas Shrugged’ and ‘The Fountainhead’. She was a wanton pro-abortion adulteress and advocate of free love, although… have you seen her?

When you have a head like a robber’s dog debauchery is your best choice, I suppose. That and a callous disregard for other people. Evil is often reflected in the face.

Looks notwithstanding, it’s her devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism that enchants Republicans bent on enriching the rich and squelching the poor as we see once more in the heartless tax bill they’re about to pass. Her disciples include Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, former Freedomworks czar Dick Armey, Senator Rand Paul and his dad Ron, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. All of them rich. Filthy rich.

Remember the crash of 2008? Once he’d helped plunge the world into financial hell, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who’d remained under this witch’s spell for 50 years, sat doe-eyed before Congress. He confessed that applying her free-for-all deregulation principles that triggered the crisis had been “flawed”, now saying we should nationalize the banks. Uh, that would be “Socialism”, Mr. Greenspan.

How can you follow two opposing dogmas? You can’t. Rand herself said contradictions don’t exist: “You will find that one of them is wrong.” Anyone who espouses two opposites as Paul Ryan does is a fraud.

Incidentally, after his father died in 1986, “Ayn” Ryan collected Social Security survivor benefits. Ten years earlier Spiteful Rand and her equally selfish husband signed on for Social Security and Medicare – two government programs they’d been trashing for years.

Hypocrites all.

Christian icon and Watergate penitent Chuck Colson labeled Rand’s followers “cranks”, adding: “It’s hard to imagine a world view more antithetical to Christianity.”

In the 27 years I’ve lived in the South I’ve gotten to know many of its good people. I cannot believe that my friends and neighbors here are Christians in name only, greedy phonies bent on cutting off government help to the least among us – those without work through no fault of their own.

We have a person in the White House many call “disgusting”. We have a fawning Congress that refuses to condemn him. We have a Damoclesian tax bill that will deny millions pf families financial assistance and health care.

Look at Puerto Rico.

Now more poor and ailing Americans will be dumped onto the dole line and into the streets. But in the eyes of Ayn Rand and Paul Ryan they’re now “looters”. Heaps of smelliness.

Fred Wehner is a mainstream journalist. He was a reporter and sub-editor with the Daily Mail in London before setting up and running the New York News Agency, providing news and features to daily and weekly publications worldwide. He lives in Georgia.

Graphic: By StefanoRR – disegno opera propria, da fotografia degli anni ’40/’50, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43309399