Atlas Fugged

Jesse Walker | August 15, 2005

Free Ouray is a website devoted to fighting new development regulations in Ouray, Colorado. I mention it because Liberty ran an article many years ago arguing that Ouray was the location of Galt's Gulch, the free-market utopia in Atlas Shrugged. Methinks Mayor Galt has sold out.

I've never read Atlas Shrugged, but I have spent a fair amount of time in Ouray. It was there, 11 or 12 years ago, that a waiter spontaneously lectured my family on the death of Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge (prompting my brother afterwards to comment, "That's the first conversation I've heard in which you were the moderate"). If the new regs pass, I'm holding our interlocutor personally responsible for failing to hold the line.

[Via Charles W. Nuckolls.]

Comments

|8.15.05 @ 1:10PM|#

That's a beautiful town.

fyodor|8.15.05 @ 1:20PM|#

Was there a few weeks ago for beer & brats after hiking and camping in the immediately nearby, um, National Forest...

|8.15.05 @ 1:25PM|#

fyodor,

Dude, where you been?

fyodor|8.15.05 @ 1:37PM|#

joe,

Huh?

|8.15.05 @ 1:39PM|#

I've never been to Ouray, but Atlas Shrugged is a damn well worthwhile book.

And Galt's Gulch, in my mind, looked a little bit like the picture at the top of Free Ouray.

|8.15.05 @ 1:44PM|#

I haven't seen you comment in a while.

|8.15.05 @ 2:18PM|#

If Ouray were really a Randian town, they would have changed its name to Meay.

|8.15.05 @ 2:19PM|#

No! Make that Myay.

OK, screwed that one up.

Jeff|8.15.05 @ 2:45PM|#

On an unrelated note: some friends and I were once trying to come up with a good Atlas Shrugged parody name. In the end we went with Gaia Queefed.

|8.15.05 @ 2:49PM|#

Jeff, why are you anti-life?

|8.15.05 @ 3:22PM|#

Stevo -- To complicate things a bit, Ouray is pronounced by people in these parts as YOURay.

Jeff|8.15.05 @ 3:42PM|#

Ouray is A.

|8.15.05 @ 3:49PM|#

It would please me to no end if at some point someone posted the entire John Galt speech in one of these Randroid threads. There would be like a 10-hour pause in comments while everyone read it.

fyodor|8.15.05 @ 3:53PM|#

joe,

Oh, that!

Spent a couple weeks on the road earning my punk rock stripes by playing for mostly empty houses and bitching about it. Well, Chicago was cool...

|8.15.05 @ 4:10PM|#

John Galt also shares Rand's gold fetish, gifting Dagny with a 2,000-carat dildo in a chapter the author cut from the final version for being "too subtle." In this rarely seen 20-page scene in Atlantis, Galt describes his philosophy to Dagny while masturbating her with the solid-gold toy. Early drafts had Dagny playing with a butt plug made of Rearden metal before and after, but this errata was cut because it suggested Dagny still cared in some way for her former lover. Galt's speech was later spun into the 60-page monolouge in the end of the book.

|8.15.05 @ 4:43PM|#

I thought you played polka. ;-)

|8.15.05 @ 4:44PM|#

Stevo -- To complicate things a bit, Ouray is pronounced by people in these parts as YOURay.

B.P.: So, you're saying that "Our A" = "Your A"? That's the most collectivist, altruistic, subjectivist piece of filth I've ever heard!

|8.15.05 @ 5:14PM|#

It would please me to no end if at some point someone posted the entire John Galt speech in one of these Randroid threads. There would be like a 10-hour pause in comments while everyone read it.

No there wouldn't, because everyone would skip it.

If you haven't gotten the message by that point in the novel, reading a 60 page speech ain't gonna help any.

fyodor|8.15.05 @ 5:40PM|#

I thought you played polka.

What do you think I am, WEIRD!!!!

:-)

|8.15.05 @ 6:44PM|#

I would like to hear a fusion of punk and polka.

Poulnka.

Jesse Walker|8.15.05 @ 6:48PM|#

Ask and ye shall receive:

http://www.polkacide.com/

|8.15.05 @ 7:29PM|#

Amazing, Jesse! You're like some kind of genie.

Speaking of which: I now have another request. (If the link works.)

|8.16.05 @ 12:28AM|#

oo, thing is, Stevo, now you have to rub him three times.

|8.16.05 @ 2:31AM|#

Um ... no.