De Imperio Ridicularum Ridiculorumque

Paul Ryan requires that his staffers read Atlas Shrugged. I mean, I [Paul Krugman] was inspired by Isaac Asimov, but I don’t think I’m Hari Seldon — whereas Ryan, it seems, really does think he’s John Galt. (...) Future historians will giggle at our expense.

After that improbable and thoroughly ‘unprofessional’ giggle fit, though, the court historians to Princess Posterity scrambled right back up on their stilts and pointed out how this, too, is only what one should have expected all along:

"The Party of Grant and Hoover and Goldwater and Atwater was never a genuinely political Party, never an inferior facsimile of the good ship ’Andrew Jackson,’ though it was compelled all its life to simulate that paradigm in order to gather votes. Krugman wrote as if Neocomrade Fedguv Representative P. D. Ryan, Jr., (as he then was) were an Ajax or Achilles, a protagonist of the forces of selfservatism, a prime mover in the path of Party an’ AEIdeology. The professor only fell to giggling when he started to exaggerate his mistake, fancying the Intellectual Archpontiff of Janesville to be so *extremely* protagonistic as to resemble the fictional Freelord of Galt. More exactly, to fancy that His Eminence fancied himself in some such rôle.

"Perhaps His Eminence did indeed do so, self-criticism and self-knowledge being about the only self-entities frowned on in U.S. Republicanian circles of 1854-2090. Nevertheless H. E. will not have required his coadjutors and sacristans and altar boys to pour over the Evangel of Ayn in hopes that they would confuse their boss with a comic-book action figure -- an’ then His Eminence would enjoy the exquisite self-pleasure of shruggin’ "Aw, shucks!" &c. &c.

"Not at all. ’Tis a pretty scenario, Dr. Krugman, but you must not call it Ronpaul Ryan I.

"In practice, though possibly not in consciousness, Neocom. Fedrep. Ryan knew his own place in the Hire-archy well enough, understood that he was but a lowly merc in the eyes of his Party Paymasters, the alone prime movers and protagonists of Selfservatism. Accordingly, the true original intent of havin’ his subhirelin’s read Atlas Shrugged was that they should, hopefully, become imbued with Miss Rand of Petersburg’s inimitable romantic swoon for the Titans of Commerce & Industry, whereupon they would, hopefully, confuse John, Freelord of Galt, -- not with their immediate boss, ¡G*re forbid! -- but rather with their boss’s crucial contacts amongst the Campaign Contributin’ Classes. Or at least divine that the boss wished they would treat CCC nobility an’ gentry with Randian awe an’ reverence, whether real or undetectably simulated."

But Clio knows best.

Happy days.

(( I omit a footnote to the 2nd edition of 2317 that rather frivolously pointed out that "to cast Tex, Freelord of Exxonmobil (say), or Rupert of Murdoch, or Neohengist Lloyd of the Goldman-Saxon hordes, as ’John Galt’ might be worth a giggle or two in its own right."

(( Besides being frivolous, the remark was out of place: it is for the specifically literary historian to point out that Miss Rand, like her coæval Master Ernest Hemingway, has always been quite unreadable by anybody over the cultural age of fourteen in the absence of a firm antecedent resolution, perpetually renewed, not to laugh. ))