Sci-Fi Slash Fiction: Joni Ernst and Ayn Rand

I am imagining a fantasy sci-fi adventure in which the newly elected and probably bat-shit Senator Joni Ernst travels through time and meets Ayn Rand. Rand, who has traveled through time herself, has discovered the secret recipe for manufacturing methamphetamines decades earlier and has begun to produce and distribute them to the lazy masses as part of her long-term plan for the dominance of laissez-faire economics and her presidency over ungoverned pharmaceutical corporations. It’s clearly love at first sight and together the two battle the forces of socialist propaganda, and have an elicit same-sex love affair, which they somehow justify in the name of conservative Libertarian causes (I haven’t worked that part out yet) and then settle down in the surreal mountainous region of WTF-dom where Rand’s main characters find themselves in the third part of Atlas Shrugged. This is perhaps the least sexy lesbian slash fiction ever written. They eventually break up because Rand won't wear bread bags on her feet.

But let me back up. On behalf of my home state of Iowa, I wish to apologize for Joni Ernst. I am not certain how the castration of pigs is actually relevant to…anything…other than the reproductive rights of swine, but there are some other issues that need clearing up. If you did not grow up in the Midwest you should know that wearing bread bags on your feet actually is really a thing that some of us did. It basically meant you were poor and your family could not afford waterproof snow boots. The bread bags went over your socks before you put your shoes on so your feet stayed dry while you were out in the snow. Rand might consider such bag-wearers deserving of their soggy plight since clearly the parents of these children were not working hard enough to buy proper boots. Ernst is simply confused about how bag wearing may or may not create conservative political ethos. (Hint: it doesn't.)

With that in mind, I don’t understand how this marker of lower socioeconomic status is actually beneficial to whatever the hell the Republicans were discussing.  Honestly, the act of wearing bread bags on your feet is indicative of how poorly Reaganomics actually worked in the 1980s. Trickle-down theories just made my toes freeze. Socialist approaches to economic inequality actually work better than “folksy” epistemology that doesn't actually have any real meaning.

 But that’s not what this is about. I actually want to talk about Atlas Shrugged. Have you read it? I wonder how many people actually have. It’s really long. I mean like, Ayn Rand really could have done some rigorous editing with the text. I read it. I did it to catch the eye of a romantic interest. That right there is grounds for involuntary commitment. But that’s my story. At any rate, once I started reading, I felt like I had to finish it. The experience of reading the entire novel of Atlas Shrugged is like participating in a food eating competition: At the start you feel pretty good and you put away a good number of hot dogs/chapters. After a while, you begin to feel a little nauseous but you keep motoring through. At some point, you really want to quit, but you’ve committed to the finish line and you just keep forcing the yeast-encased pork anus meat down your gullet as fast as you can until you finally reach the end. Then you vomit and brag to your friends that you made it through. Well, that was my experience anyway. The romance did not blossom.

In summation, bread bags on the feet are a thing, Joni Ernst is a crazy person, and we are all cleared to continue mocking Ayn Rand’s magnum opus.