• • • Editor’s Note 
David A. Fryxell, Desert Exposure (Silver City, NM) Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | The alternative to The Hunger Games' call for resistance to an increasingly cruel plutocracy is of course Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Preaching "the virtue of selfishness," the atheist, virulently anti-Communist author produced her mammoth manifesto in 1957. It imagines a world in which the creative heroes of capitalism — "job creators," to use the GOP's current favorite term — epitomized by protagonist John Galt go on strike, leaving the "moochers" of the world to fend for themselves. As British commentator Giles Fraser recently characterized it, "Atlas Shrugged is cheap pornography for the nastiest side of capitalism."   Published: 2012-09-30