Dear Anne,
I hope you don’t mind if I call you Anne instead of Ayn,
which I’m pretty sure isn’t a real name.
I know you’re dead and all, but I didn’t want that to stop me from
letting you know how much I enjoyed The
Fountainhead--not the philosophy espoused therein, which I found utterly
impractical--but I found the story rather compelling. I may even read Atlas Shrugged someday even though the premise strikes me as downright
stupid.
Hey, do you remember that nerdy guy, Allen, who used to hang
around your place, studying your philosophy and hitting on all the girls? Funny story, he grew up to become the
chairman of the Federal Reserve and one of the most influential people in the
world. He actually managed to put many
of your ideas into practice, including de-regulating the banking system, and
you’ll never guess what happened. It
sank the world economy! I bet you didn’t
see that coming! It turns out your
philosophy of Objectivism was as
flawed as Karl Marx’s vision of communism. So, you’re in good company, right? I wonder if you two are up in Heaven together
right now, shooting a game of pool up and talking about where you went
wrong. Oh wait, neither of you believed
in Heaven. Hell then. Anyway, I think the moral of this story is
you should have stuck with writing fiction.
This brings me to the reason I’m writing you this
letter. You’ll be happy to know that I’ve
come up with my own objective philosophy to replace your failed one. It’s called Insectivism. The central
tenet of Insectivism is that man
cannot exist independently of insects, and that the central purpose of life is
to strive toward the happiness, not of the individual, but of the individual
insect. In fact, as soon as I finish writing
this letter, I’m going to fix a thimble full of hot tea for my pet cockroach,
Ryan. (You don’t want to know what I’m going
to fix for my dung beetle.) You can’t
imagine how much better I feel now that everything does not have to be about
me, me, me, and I feel great comfort in the knowledge that there is something
out there greater than myself--like a swarm of locusts! I wanted you to know that even though your
philosophy was a complete failure, you still managed to inspire something
great. And for that, you are very
welcome.
Your pal,
Purvis McGrew
See also: Review: A
Bug Story
More Open Letters: An
Open Letter to Jack Kerouac, An
Open Letter to Tom Wolfe, An
Open Letter to Dave Eggers, An
Open Letter to JK Rowling, An
Open Letter to Cormac McCarthy, A
Recent Interview with Jack Kerouac, An
Open Letter to Gabriel Garcia Marquez
An
Open Letter to Stephanie Meyer An
Open Letter to Philip Roth An
Open Letter to Thomas Pynchon
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